from Flaubert

Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là ; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres ; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exact mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

Madame Bovary, Part 2, Chapter XII.

Although it sounds foolish to say, Flaubert really is amazing. I admit to stopping part way through L’education sentimental, though I was enjoying it. But just now I’ve read Un cœur simple straight through in one sitting, and am now a little over half through Bovary.

I can only imagine that this chunk of text—at least from “la parole humaine...”—is often quoted. I especially like that Flaubert is telling us this apropos of Emma. It is not clear to me that Flaubert himself would endorse such a view of language, and I wonder if he is often taken to do so.

Also, from Bouvard et Pécuchet, “Les ouvrage dont les titres étaient pour eux inintelligibles leur semblaient contenir un mystère.” No wonder so many books are written about Flaubert.

Homo Sacer

I looked at my (temporarily much reduced) bookshelf while I was finishing Ellen Wood’s book, and decided that the best thing to read next was Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. I have resisted reading Agamben. In a question and answer period after a lecture early last year, a grad student asked the professor, who was in the English department, something about what he was reading and thinking with these days. He said something like, “I’m reading, really seriously, Agamben.” A room full of heads bobbed up and down reverentially. At that moment I decided not to read Agamben. But I keep running across him, and have now accumulated enough context that he has come to seem interesting.

The category of the political is certainly mentioned often enough in Homo Sacer, as, in connection with the idea of sovereignty, it can hardly fail to be. Agamben’s basically ontological point of view, however, means that I have very little to grasp onto when thinking about what he means by it. Certainly he is miles from Wood, who is happy to regard politics as a space of civic equality. Similarly, echoes of Rancière’s distinction between politics and police appear at certain moments, though it seems to me likely that Agamben would, in Rancière’s terms, find only police and no politics in the modern world.

Agamben presents himself as bringing together, so to speak, Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism, and Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics (it seems to me that what is happening here is really adding the latter to the former, rather than combining). Although I am not now in a position to say firmly what politics is for Agamben, it is unsurprising, given this description of his project, that analyses of power and sovereignty would occlude or explode the political as a category.

I will not say very much about this book now. I read it quickly, though with pleasure. It does seem to me that Agamben consistently ignores the meaning of half of his central formulation. Homo sacer is one who can be killed, but not sacrificed. In the ancient context, it seems that the most important part of this formula is sacrificial—homo sacer is not buried with funeral rites. In the modern period, more important is that homo sacer may be killed, but not murdered. Are we to understand that the juridical order has simply replaced the religious one in an unproblematic way? Agamben objects to the Victorian doctrine of the ambiguity of the sacred, which he says arose at just the moment when sacredness no longer made sense to Europeans (that is, when the decisively became secular—but can this claim really be accepted?), and that it consequently infected much thinking on the subject, especially Bataille. I confess that on first reading I do not quite understand how it is that this objection—which seems to me valid—hooks into the rest of the argument, and in particular what kind of sacredness is supposed to have replaced it? Is Agamben arguing that the State (and, therefore, everyone within it, inasmuch as they are understood to partake in bare life) has indeed, in the figure of the sovereign, claimed the title of sacred? This seems to me to be dismissing anthropological investigation into the idea of the sacred very quickly. Moreover, the biopolitical imperative, and its articulation into juridical orders, does not, it seems to me, ‘cover’ the sacred in the contemporary world.

These comments are inadequate. To finish, I will make again the objection that I usually make to this kind of Heideggerianism. Agamben does not seem to need very much evidence about “today” in order to construct an ontology for it different from some supposed and unitary past (under which, none the less, today’s ontology flowed “like a river” (121)). Although I can read and enjoy this kind of talk, it seems to me that in order to render it useful, not to say meaningful, it must be handled carefully.

Citizens to Lords

Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Citizens to Lords [Verso 2007], is intended in part as a demonstration of “the social history of political theory.” Although Wood does not, for the most part, concern herself explicitly with the historiographical context of her wide subject, we do find a methodological orientation in the introduction. She ranges her manner of proceeding against Straussian textualism and Skinnerean historicism. It is not unreasonable to put Straussians on the right, Skinnerians in the middle, and Wood on the left. Citizens to Lords sets itself the task of understanding the classic texts of political theory through, or along side, the dynamics and meanings of social conflicts underway when these texts were written. Wood agrees, this is to say, up to a point with Skinner’s attention to locutionary force. For her, however, Skinner and those who share his method tend to build their contexts entirely out of other texts. Wood focuses rather on social structure and conflict.

After the methodological introduction, the book is divided into three long chapters: ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages. Her argument embraces many of the classic works of political theory, and is sensitive enough to contingency and multiplicity summary does not do it justice. We may, however, set out the basic social conditions that, for her, underlie the political theory of each period. Political Theory, she says, was born in the special conditions of the Greek polis, in which the disciplinary apparatus of the state was dislodged from the exclusive control of the wealthy. In most pre-modern situations, Woods argues, the wealthy classes control the means of coercion and protection, and use them to expropriate wealth from the laboring and productive classes. In Greece, for contingent reasons, the productive classes were sufficiently strong that at a certain point it was not possible for the wealthy to remain wealthy without, so to speak, a modicum of consent. The polis is thus a state in which the numerous and poor have access to a political space of equality with the wealthy. Political theory (Plato and Aristotle in particular) is an intellectual response and as attempt to control the situation on the part of the elites. The writings of Plato and Aristotle are then read very much in terms of the political problems each one faced, and the side that they were on. Neither of these thinkers is pro-democracy, but they can also not ignore its existence and power. They are conditioned by it. For Wood, then, the rhetoric of equality began, almost immediately, to be used to justify inequality. This is to saw that where the classical political philosophers (as opposed to classical political praxis) allow a realm of equality, it is strictly circumscribed.

Wood does not go into very much detail about the transition of political philosophy from Greece to Rome. Indeed, this may be the moment to point out that if her materialist method sounds radical, it at no point and in no sense questions the existence or utility of the canon of political theory. It does not even seem to be the case, at least in this book, that this different method ranks the thinkers in a new way, or forces a re-evaluation of who is in and who is out of the canon. The book-list is fixed, only some of the questions and many of the answers change.

So we make the fairly radical leap from Greece to Rome, from Aristotle to Cicero (this isn’t entirely fair—there are other Greeks). The important thing about Rome, for Wood, is the relationship of property and government—dominium and imperium. Imperial power existed in large measure to allow the growth of personal and family wealth. It enabled massive profiteering and created great disparities. Wood, however, insists on the distinction between Rome, in which the state was one way to make money, but also depended to a great deal on the support of those with money, and China, in which the state was, she says, the only secure path to wealth. The point here is that if in Greece political theory had to deal with the space of politics as a contest between the wealthy and the poor on a field of equality, in Rome the difficulty is rather to adjudicate between different forms of possession.

The title of the book suggests what the next step will be. Feudalism in Europe did not grow from the still-warm embers of Rome, it did not ride in on the backs of the Teutons. Rather, as the central imperial authority of Rome itself waned, more and more responsibility was taken up by the local wealthy people on whom the Empire had always, anyway, depended for administration. These local rulers became feudal lords, and the tangled webs of property and obligation that bound them together as individuals and corporations are indeed the very definition of feudalism. Of course, things happened differently in different places. Parcellized sovereignty (the phrase is Perry Anderson’s, but heartily endorsed by Wood), was the rule in what would be France and Italy, but in the later the Roman municipal system had remained strong, and the city-state was a primary (but everywhere internally riven) unit. In England, on the other hand, the Roman system collapsed quickly and totally—central authority, if on a feudal model, was rapidly established there and never seriously questioned. This, for Wood, is what made England special. Before anywhere else, individuals were understood to be in direct relation with a distant central authority. This opened the way for a commercial and entrepreneurial property regime not yet possible in the same way in France or even Italy (here, I think it is clear that trade and banking work according to different principles than industrial or agro-industrial activity, and are consonant with feudal property obligations in ways that the later are not).

Since I am very unfamiliar with this material, I have few substantive objections to make. Methodologically I am sympathetic with Wood, but it does seem to me that the value-judgments that she assumes may validly be made about the canon of political theory are not so easily reconciled with the mode in which she analyzes the texts. “Productive” is a word she uses often in order to say “valuable”—but this is only a displacement. Why valuable? Her level of analysis is too sophisticated, in my opinion, to accept ‘productive’ in its usual and banal academic sense. On another level, and this is no doubt something that she has dealt with elsewhere, it does make me wince a bit to hear such confident assertions about the unique value of Europe and the Greek philosophical heritage without any kind of comparative perspective. I think, ultimately, that this is related to her unwillingness to challenge the content of the canon of political theory.