Geuss' realism

Raymond Geuss’ Philosophy and Real Politics [2008] is a highly polemical book. Its position is basically anti-Rawlsian, against bringing the ‘is/ought’ distinction into political philosophy, and articulates itself as beginning with “assumptions that are opposite of the ‘ethics-first’ view.” The position is identified with a Hobbesian tradition. Geuss’ vision of political philosophy is sketched out in the first half of the book, and clarified in fierce opposition of Rawls in particular, but also Nozik, in the second half. Here, I’m going to give the first, programmatic, part of the book in summary form.

Geuss’s four “interrelated theses that…ought to structure a more fruitful approach to politics” (9) are, as slogans, realism, the study of contextualized action, emphasis on the historical location of politics, and finally, the “assumption that…politics is more like the exercise of a craft or art,” than the application of a theory to reality (15). It seems to me that it is the first and last of these four that are potentially problematic. There is nothing remarkable in history and context—the rub always comes in arguing about what constitutes correct or sufficient history and context. Even the emphasis on action, it seems to me, is not unreasonable or immediately problematic.

For Geuss, it seems that realism really means a non-normative opposition to the analysis of ideal reconstructions or models. This is not simply a materialism of interests, although this is important to Geuss, but also, “tautologically,” that “ideals and aspirations influence…behavior and hence are politically relevant, only to the extent to which they do actually influence behavior in some way” (9). Further on, Geuss says that his Hobbesian, realist approach “is centered on the study of historically instantiated forms of collective human action with special attention to the variety of ways in which people can structure and organise their action so as to limit and control forms of disorder that they might find excessive or intolerable for other reasons” (22). I am suspicious of the rhetoric of ‘hard’ realism as opposed to flabby idealism. Yet I am tempted to read all this, especially given the last half of the book, as a polemical move that can safely be treated as more or less internal to political theory as an academic discipline. This is against Rawls; or put differently, it is Skinner against the rarified history of ideas. Now, the notion of politics, or political action, as basically a skill or craft, seems to me to be close to mystification. Geuss says,

a skill is an ability to act in a flexible way that is responsive to features of the given environment with the result that action or interaction is enhanced…One of the signs that I have acquired a skill, rather than that I have been simply mechanically repeating things I have seen others do…is that I can attain interesting and positively valued results in a variety of different and unexpected circumstances. (15-16)

To say that such and such a political actor is successful because they are politically skilled seems to me to have advanced matters no further than the famous old saw about how it is the dormative quality of opium that makes you sleepy. Maybe Geuss wants us to understand that establishing criteria for success, even local ones, is simply not the task of political philosophy? Whose task is it? Is it a pointless, hopeless task? If so, it seems no more pointless than asking why one person is good at playing the piano and another is not, which is after all a question with answers.

Geuss does give us a clear picture of what he thinks the tasks of political philosophy ought to be, but before that, he presents us with a somewhat oddly mixed together set of questions under three basic headings, with which he thinks political philosophical investigation should start and that “map out the realm of politics” (30). He groups these questions under three proper names: Lenin, Nietzsche, and Max Weber (23). Lenin is made to stand for the contextually complex ‘who [does what to] whom [to whose benefit]?’ Further, and tangentially related to this, is the question of the partisanship of political philosophy itself. Essentially Geuss’ position here seems to be that all theory is somehow political, but that this does not require every ‘theorization’ to commence with a political declaration of faith, or even that isometry must exist between a given clutch of interdependent theoretical positions and the political positions to which they correspond (29). The second set of questions, grouped quite loosely under ‘Nietzsche,’ are basically those thrown up around “priorities, preference, timing,” by the assertion (observation?) that “politics as we know it is a matter of differential choice: opting for A rather than B. Thus politics is not about doing what is good or rational or beneficial simpliciter…but about the pursuit of what is good in a particular concrete case by agents with limited powers and resources, where choice of one thing to pursue means failure to choose and pursue another” (30-31). Finally, ‘Weber’ indicates all that is implied by a notion of ‘legitimacy.’ It seems that Geuss wants to step back from Weber’s interest in the ‘legitimate monopoly on violence’ and take legitimacy more generally. Without a sense of how, in a given society at a given moment, legitimation takes place, one cannot “attain a moderately realistic understanding of why a society behaves politically in a certain way” (36).

There are, says Geuss, five basic tasks of political philosophy. The first three are discussed together, and the last two are given a more extended treatment. Political philosophy is to strive for understanding, evaluation, and orientation. It may also play a role in conceptual innovation, and in grappling with ideology. Although Geuss has various interesting things to say about the first three, their interrelation is summed up nicely in a description of the modern condition, “Humans in modern societies are driven by a perhaps desperate hope that they might find some way of mobilising their theoretical and empirical knowledge and their evaluative systems so as both to locate themselves and their projects in some larger imaginative structure that makes sense to them, and to guide their actions to bring about what they would find to be satisfactory…outcomes or to improve in some other way the life they live” (42). Political philosophy may also have a real effect in the world by changing how we think about it. Geuss’ example is the rise of the modern concept of the state, which, he says, had the power it did because it smuggled in alongside its conceptual clarity and explanatory power, certain normative assumptions. We can see historically how, in the aftermath of Hobbes’ invention of the concept of the state, “the ‘tool’ develops a life of its own, and can become an inextricable part of the fabric of life itself” (49). In a nice Hegelian ending, “often you can’t see the original problem clearly until you have the conceptual instrument, but having the instrument can then change the ‘real’ situation with which one is confronted so that other, unforeseen problems emerge” (50). There is, finally, the question of ideology. This is controversial, but Geuss proceeds with clarity, giving us the following definition of ideology, “An ideology…is a set of beliefs, attitudes, preferences, that are distorted as a result of the operation of specific relations of power; the distortion will characteristically take the form of presenting these beliefs, desires, etc., as inherently connected with some universal interest, when in fact they are subservient to particular interests” (52). For Geuss, political philosophy can have different orientations toward a given ideology. Ideology might well enlist in various ways the support of political philosophy—but the latter may also take up the “reputable” task of “analyzing and criticizing” it (55).

Although Geuss makes several interesting moves in the next part of the text, I do not want to enter into it. He essentially sweeps to the side the entire project of a normative, ‘kantian,’ political theory. I will only pull out the following, itself a rather ‘normative’ statement.

Historical arguments…are not in the first instance intended to support or refute a thesis; rather, they aim to change the structure of argument by directing attention to a new set of relevant questions that need to be asked. They are contributions not to finding out whether this or that argument is invalid or poorly supported, but to trying to change the questions people ask about concepts and arguments (68).

Jean-Paul Sartre, antisemite

The argument of Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive is straightforward. Antisemitism is a specific and recognizable psychological posture in the world. It is a reaction against the fundamental human condition of freedom and contingency, and it takes the shape of a synthesizing manichean antirationalism. Antisemitism is, it goes without saying, an inauthentic way of being. Not, for all that, powerless. The most famous phase of Sartre’s argument is that it is ultimately the antisemite who makes the Jew (first clearly state p 83, but see also 112, 123-4, 167, 170, 176). The word and the condition are fixed onto certain human beings, who are thus forced to confront Jewishness as their situation. Many respond inauthentically to their condition, and Sartre, in what is probably the part of the book to which people most object, describes in great detail the various well-known traits of ‘the Jew’ (relation to money, social climbing, and so on) as attempts to disavow and escape their situation. For instance, money is important to (inauthentic) Jews because it is related to abstraction (pp 156-60) and thus to an escape from the particularity thrust upon them. Although there is some typically daring and penetrating psychological analysis here (particularly, I think, around the notion of flesh), this is all very close to the edge of having simply accepted that ‘Jews are that way,’ that is, to have given up a great deal too much already. Although Sartre claims to pass no moral judgment on those unable to live authentically, of course the goal, and the only real way to escape psychological distortion, is to authentically assume both one’s freedom and one’s situation. This is the task of Jews themselves—but, and here Sartre quotes Richard Wright—there isn’t a Jewish problem, there’s an antisemitic problem. Ultimately Sartre feels that only the revolution will genuinely put an end to this—and here is yet another of the series of comparisons between the worker-bourgeois and the jew-antisemite dyads. This was also although I’m not sure Sartre would have known this, Marx’s answer. Until the revolution comes, though, there are many ways to act against antisemitism, but essentially through collective propaganda. Form leagues against antisemitism, make it illegal to say antisemitic things, use the school systems. Make everyone understand that, in a word, antisemitism hurts us all.

In the end, this is a remarkably French-republican response. Of course Sartre is clear that he is speaking specifically about France, the situation of French Jews and French antisemites. Although it would be useful to place this book in Sartre’s broader development, I think it would also be interesting to be precise about the tensions in it between republican-coded universalism (the famous last lines: “Pas de Français ne sera libre tant que les Juifs ne jouiront pas de la plénitude de leurs droits. Pas un Français ne sera en sécurité tant qu’un Juif, en France et dans le monde entier, pourra craindre pour sa vie” p 189) and the drive to the concrete implicit in Sartre’s whole philosophy (here represented by his peculiar notion of “libéralisme concret” p 181). I wonder if this book, written in the immediate aftermath of the war, isn’t really best regarded as a document of Popular Front era non-communist left republicanism.

Since it would be so easy to show in a facile way how Sartre reproduces the antisemitism he sets out to criticize (it would be less easy, but still possible, to do so seriously), I want finally to give a chunk of text from the end of Sartre’s psychological sketch of the inauthentic Jew.

Tel est donc cet homme traqué, condamné à se choisir sur la base de faux problèmes et dans une situation fausse, privé du sens métaphysique par l’hostilité menaçante de la société qui l’entour, acculé à un rationalisme de désespoir. Sa vie n’est qu’une longue fute decant les autres et devant lui-même. On lui a aliéné jusqu’à son propre corps, on a coupé en deux sa vie affective, on l’a réduit à poursuivre dans un monde qui le rejette, le rêve impossible d’une fraternité universelle. A qui la faute ? Ce sont nos yeux qui lui renvoient l’image inacceptable qu’il veut se dissimuler. Ce sont nos paroles et nos gestes – toutes nos paroles et nos gestes, notre antisémitisme mais aussi bien notre libéralisme condescendant – qui l’ont empoisonné jusqu’aux moelles ; c’est nous qui le contraignons à se choisir juif, soit qu’il se fuie, soit qu’il se revendique, c’est nous qui l’avons acculé au dilemme de l’inauthenticité ou de l’authenticité juive. Nous avons créé cette espèce d’hommes qui n’a de sens que comme produit artificiel d’une société capitaliste (ou féodale), qui n’a pour raison d’être que de servir de bouc émissaire à une collectivité encore prélogique. Cette espèce d’hommes qui témoigne de l’homme plus que toutes les autres parce qu’elle est née de réactions secondaires à l’intérieur de l’humanité, cette quintessence d’homme, disgrâciée, déracinée, originellement vouée à l’inauthenticité ou au martyre. Il n’est pas un de nous qui ne soit, en cette circonstance, totalement coupable et même criminel ; le sang juif que les nazis ont versé retombe sur toutes nos têtes. (pp 167-8)

Strong words. This is a species of radical responsibility that, I think, today is entirely without moral force. Certainly the left has been unable to use it to their advantage. ‘Collective responsibility’ has, in general, been kept out of political discourse. It would be good to think about why and how this took place.

Perhaps it is simply so radical and so obviously true that it becomes meaningless. The sharpest formulation: we are all responsible for the system of global exploitation and misery for which the word ‘capitalism’ usually stands. This easily comes to seem like a morally impossible situation. It sounds a great deal like the anarchist justifications for random violence of the 1890s. This would be the beginning of a long discussion of the various life-style leftisms that exist today, and how the very massiveness of the situation makes an essentially aesthetic (not even ethical) response the most apparently sensible one. Although, if I am interested in the difficulty of fusing an ethic of personal freedom and responsibility with a Marxist historical and economic perspective, then I am in danger of sitting down to read The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Magic table

From Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958]:

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible. (pp 52-3)

Cognition, on the other hand, belongs to all, and not only to intellectual or artistic work processes; like fabrication itself, it is a process with a beginning and end, whose usefulness can be tested, and which, if it produces no results, has failed, like a carpenter’s workmanship has failed when he fabricates a two-legged table. (p 171)

At first I thought that these two examples, both employing a table, as she often does, were in contradiction with one another. Now it seems to me rather that while action is not work, work is none the less required to erect the space of action (the disappearing table). It would be worth going back to On Revolution to see if she discusses the actual practical activity of ‘making revolution’ as work. Work, then, could found new politics in a way that labor never could. Makes sense.

Karl Marx, Antisemite

Around the turn of 1843 and 1844, Marx wrote two essays, which it seems to me articulate in contrasting ways themes, or attack problems, to which he would return throughout his life. I have in mind “On the Jewish Question” and “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Introduction.” In both ‘critique’ is mobilized in the service of ‘emancipation,’ although especially the latter is very much up for definition. Obviously, generations of very smart and well read people have looked at these texts and thought about what they mean for Marxism in general. After I’ve had my look, I’m going to be very interested in what other people have to say. But for the moment, here is my own naïve reading.

“On the Jewish Question” is a disagreement with Bruno Bauer. Bauer, says Marx, argues that Jewish emancipation will come only when the Jews have ceased to be Jewish, so that they can participate in the universal project of political emancipation. Marx begins by criticizing Bauer’s notion of political emancipation. He does some very interesting things here, ultimately arguing that what is really at stake is human emancipation, which is quite a different project. In the colorful second part of the essay, we get his full answer: since the essence of Jewishness is the essence of modern egotistical material relations, that is the economy, and the economy is that against which human emancipation must struggle, what must really happen is that society must be liberated from the Jews (or at least Jewishness).

“A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” on the other hand, is about Germany. It contains the famous assertions of Germany’s backwardness, of how the German contribution to politics is in its philosophy. At issue here is German emancipation. Whereas in France, every group feels that it is universal, in Germany, no class is able to do so properly. What is needed, then, is a class the suffering of which is universal, so that when it comes to power, even if it acts only for itself, it acts for all. This is the proletariat.

Much about these essays is surprising. What surprises me most is the specificities that they suggest lie at the origin of Marx’s categories. Could it really be that it was only after encountering the French utopians themselves later in the 1840s that Marx came to think of a genuinely total system? The distance between the German need for the proletariat in 1844 and its world historical role in the Manifesto of 1847—this is striking. Perhaps although Marx is dealing with Germany, really he means the whole world, although it seems as though France is for him a very different situation—or perhaps the point is just that France will approach the proletarian revolution in decorous and beautifully balanced stages, while Germany must have only it or nothing at all? And then, of course, there is the Jew. Now, on one level, I recognize that Marx is standing here with a long tradition in European historiography and social thought that saw (and for some, still sees) ‘the Jews’ as a modernizing force. Jewish ideals, or Jewish economic practices, Jewish social reality—somehow, Jews were a force for political and economic development, the development of individual freedoms and rights. Especially toward the end of the 19^th century, this was a major philosemitic argument. Yet, it is not hard to see how ‘force for political liberalism and modernization’ could be goose-stepped into ‘rootless cosmopolitan agitator.’ So there is Marx (and there is also Nietzsche, you might say). Marx does not yet use the word ‘capital,’ he does not yet seem to have the concept. How seriously are we to take his identification of the acquisitive haggling egoism of the marketplace—and therefore economic modernity—with, as he says, the everyday reality of Jewish life?

In another context, it would be worth walking with some care through Marx’s arguments in “On the Jewish Question,” but for the moment, I only want to cite the last sentences of the first part, what comes just after Marx cites Rousseau on how the founding of a new ‘people’s institution’ is really to change human nature,

All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself.

Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.

On when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.

These passages are from the Penguin Early Writings (p 234). I’m not sure that the translation is perfect (compare). For instance, the word ‘reduction’ is used to render both, in the first sentence, the German ‘Zurückführung’ and in the second sentence the German ‘Reduktion.’ One might also question rendering ‘Kraft’ as ‘force.’ Then, although I don’t want to make too much of this, in the third sentence the English ‘recognized’—a word sure to make one’s ears prick up in these contexts—is used for ‘erkannt.’ The Hegelian word, I think, is ‘anerkennen.’ Enough with the pedantic stuff. The main point is that for Marx, at this moment, emancipation is the end of the political. Or, what is not perhaps the same thing, emancipation is complete when man no longer apprehends social forces in ‘der Gestalt der politischen Kraft.’ Politics is a form of alienation just like religion, and emancipation is its destruction.

Back to the Jews. Marx finally poses the question thus: “what specific social element must be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the capacity of the present-day Jew for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the present-day world. This relation flows inevitably from the special position of Judaism in the enslaved world of today.” The question should not be taken theologically, but practically, “the secular basis of Judaism” is “Practical need, self-interest.” Thus the “secular cult of the Jew” becomes “Haggling. What is his secular God? Money” (236). Giving the best possible reading to this, and perhaps being overgenerous, one might read this as saying that ‘the Jew’ is a collective identity forced on a group of people who have been historically made dependent upon exclusively economic capacities—that is, in the feudal world, they were excluded from the politico-social relations that gave structure to society, relations which, incidentally, Marx analyzes in criticist terms in “Contribution…” The point here is that Marx

Recognize[ses] in Judaism the presence of a universal and contemporary anti-social element whose historical evolution – eagerly nurtured by the Jews in its harmful aspects – has arrived at its present peak, a peak at which it will inevitably disintegrate.

The emancipation of the Jews is, in the last analysis, the emancipation of mankind from Judaism. (237)

…

The contradiction between the practical political power of the Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and financial power in general. Ideally speaking the former is superior to the latter, but in actual fact it is in thrall to it. (238)

Which is to say that although the Jews are nominally at a disadvantage, discriminated against by political power in various ways, in possession of fewer rights—in fact, their power through money is enormous. Reading all of this just after Nietzsche is enlightening. I do not believe that, for instance, historically, the idea of France or ‘frenchness’ has anything like this kind of relation to the idea of ‘the Jew.’ I will look later at Sartre’s essay. One can almost give a good reading (although, to bring in an important rhetorical device of Marx’s, the stench is too great to be mistaken) to the following, “Civil society ceaselessly begets the Jew from its own entrails” (238). And then,

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money debases all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore deprived the entire world – both the world of man and of nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence; this alien essence dominates him and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has been secularized and become the god of the world. Exchange is the true god of the Jew. His god is nothing more than illusory exchange (239).

Marx reads the history of theological Judaism as the Jesuitical (!) justification of self-interest. So we get what, in another context, might be an interesting idea, “the religion of practical need could not by its very nature find its completion in theory but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice” (240). And so it follows that the Judaism would never really fall out of practice, “since the real essence of the Jew is universally realized and secularized in civil society, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious essence, which is nothing more than the ideal expression of practical need” (241). All of which is why, in the end, in what I take to be a radicalization of Bauer’s thesis, the social (as opposed to political) emancipation of the Jews is equal to “the emancipation of society from Judaism” (241).

Germany, in its actually existing state, is beneath criticism. Marx’s language is very powerful here. In trying to think about what ‘critique’ might mean in general, and specifically now, it seems to me reasonable to compare the situation today to the relation in which Marx claimed that it stood to the actual political reality of Germany in 1844, “But war on conditions in Germany! By all means! They are below the level of history, they are beneath all criticism, but they remain an object of criticism, in the same way as the criminal who is beneath the level of humanity remains an object for the executioner…Criticism is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means. The essential force that moves it is indignation and its essential task is denunciation” (246). Critique, it seems to me, finding that denunciation and indignation got boring, has moved back to suggesting that it can generate change by being its own end. That is, critique wants to make revolution and posits itself as the empty destroying revolutionary force—that which, when it takes power, is fully universal because purely negative. If there are those who feel that this is basically a capitulation to capital…The reversal, or stopping-up, of the practice of enlightenment is also of interest: “the important thing is not to permit the German a single moment of self-deception or resignation. The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public” (247).

At this point, Marx’s discussion of revolution is remarkably voluntaristic. He says, “if one class is to be the class of liberation per excellence, then another class must be the class of overt oppression” (254). In France, it was and to some extent remains the nobility and the clergy who stood as oppressors. No class in Germany has the moral energy to fill this role; also lacking is a class with the “breadth of spirit… [the] genius which can raise material force to the level of political power, that revolutionary boldness,” that would allow it to claim the universal for itself. Rather, in a striking phrase that must excite literary critics to no end, and perhaps made Lukacs feel that his preparations had all been worth it, “the relationship of the different spheres of German society is therefore epic rather than dramatic” (255).

The comparison is to France. There, “it is enough to be something for one to want to be everything.” Here, Marx sees France going through, modeling, a series of political revolutions and partial emancipations, whereas, for Germany, there can be only one. He says,

In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of any partial emancipation [what about the Jews?]. In France it is the reality, in Germany the impossibility, of emancipation in stages that must give birth to complete freedom. In France each class of the people is a political idealist and experiences itself first and foremost not as a particular class but as the representative of social needs in general. The role of emancipator therefore passes in a dramatic movement from one class of the French people to the next, until it finally reaches that class which no longer realizes social freedom by assuming certain conditions external to man and yet created by human society, but rather by organizing all the [pgbrk] conditions of human existence on the basis of social freedom. In Germany, however, where practical life is as devoid of intellect as intellectual life is of practical activity, no class of civil society has the need and the capacity for universal emancipation unless under the compulsion of its immediate situation, of material necessity and of its chains themselves.

So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?

This is our answer. In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere which has a universal character because of its universal suffering and which lays claim to no particular right because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general; a sphere of society which can no longer lay claim to a historical title, but merely to a human one, which does not stand in one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-sided opposition to the premises of the German political system; and finally a sphere which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from – and therefore emancipating – all the other spheres of society, which is, in a word, the total loss of humanity and which can therefore redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat. (255-6)

To sum up what it seems to me has so far happened. The vision of Marxist revolution as we have come to recognize it—inevitable, catastrophic, redemptive, carried by a universal class forced into action by their own radical dispossession—as it would be articulated in the Manifesto and elsewhere, originally applied to Germany in contrast to France. The revolution was to take place in Germany. The universal condition that, ultimately, strips the proletariat of its humanity and therefore renders it capable of redeeming humanity in general through revolution—is the spirit of Jewishness. Is it not the case, then, that the entire movement of Marx’s thought begins with the drama of German and Jew? And further, that for him the drama concludes when the German eliminates the Jew?

Foucault on Nietzsche (with or without Hegel)

For some time now I have wanted to sit down and read Nietzsche with an eye to forming an opinion about his work for myself. To do this properly is clearly a long term project. I have recently got a start on it. It comes on the heels of reading Hegel, and it has been suggested to me that Nietzsche should be read as reacting deeply against Hegel and Hegelianism generally. Further, that his long-term reception has been as an arch anti-Hegelian, an anti-dialectical war machine. Foucault, I have been told, is crucial here.

So what I want to do here is think through what I am prepared to say about The Genealogy of Morals, thinking of Nietzsche as at least a surface anti-Hegelian (whatever that may mean), but also contextually, in as much as I am able. Then I want to look at how Foucault presents Nietzsche in “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” an essay that I had not read in some years. Foucault himself is generally regarded as antithetical to Marx, Marxism, and all the more so to Hegel. I have long been skeptical of this view. Calling Marx a ‘minor Ricardian’ in Paris in, I think, 1966, is it seems to me to protest too much. Given that I have been encouraged to think of Nietzsche, and in particular Foucault’s Nietzsche as anti-Hegelian, I was all the more surprised to see that Foucault’s essay was first published in a collective volume, Hommage à Jean Hyppolite. Hyppolite, after all, is the individual most responsible for re-introducing Hegel into France in the 1940s and 50s. Which is enough on its own to suggest that we’re dealing here with two distinct Hegels. There is the Kojevian, ‘existentialist’ Hegel, drawn from the Phenomenology, which had to be painfully excavated again in the early, and perhaps later Marx in the second half of the 20^th century. Then there is the Hegel of the Philosophy of Right, a philosopher of history, of world history, and of modernity as a collective condition. Not that the two don’t fit together in various ways, but it is not hard to see that different lessons, different readings of Marx, fit together with different approaches to Hegel.

From the beginning, I am hesitant to say what Nietzsche is ‘up to’ in the Genealogy. To dive right in: Nietzsche wants to consider the way in which morals, moral evaluation, changes, and the consequences of this instability. I want to focus on Hegelian resonances and conflicts here, but it seems to me clear that Nietzsche’s 19^th century was at least as post-Kantian as post-Hegelian. Morality is a major contender in this world for a stable point around which to orient human life. Over and against the idealist impulse (variously debased) is materialism (also, of course, variously debased). In a sense, this materialism is simply the continuation of 18^th century materialism: there is only matter in motion. It has become more sophisticated, and has been applied more aggressively to biology and thence to society (a transformation that Foucault, as a student of Canguilhem, certainly spent a long time thinking about, by the by). 19^th century racism, of the sort that at least seems to be everywhere rearing its head in Nietzsche, fits in here. The most intellectually interesting thing to happen here, however, is the renewal of attempts to draw philosophical lessons from the undeniable practical success of science. This is the tradition from which, ultimately, Foucault himself will come.

Nietzsche was by training a philologist. It has been pointed out that Renan makes a very interesting comparison to Nietzsche, and I think this is so. Philology was one of the great intellectual projects, whose massive promises (on plain display in Renan’s youthful confession, L’Avenir de la science) turned out to be nothing other than dust glued together with the blood of others. Philology as practical science has its origin in the search for textual originals. Its method is to compare languages across time and space. Language slides into society, society into the material being of the human—which is to say into race. This could only happen because science moved forward on the biological front as well. Objects had to be defined, slow changes and also continuities accounted for, physical inheritance presented itself as an obviously true hypothesis. Languages evolve together with the peoples to which they are attached. The two are tied together by a sort of essence, and this is what the philologist is ultimately after. Nietzsche reacted to this, and I think the slow-motion decomposition of Renan’s ‘faith in science’ is instructive here.

Given all this, I want to say that Nietzsche is manifestly arguing, in The Genealogy of Morals, that moral evaluations can be traced, through that great archive language itself, to social conflict. His argument is schematic and so simplified that its precise status and objective should be considered carefully. He is not, I think, exactly making an historical argument. But he does say that, historically, at one time the word ‘good,’ for instance, applied not to acts, but to people ($4-6). The conquering race, as individuals but also as a group, simply was the good, and those conquered the bad. The ‘revolt of the slaves’ was responsible for ‘transvaluing’ this situation, shifting first the ‘good’ not to the individuals who suffered domination themselves, but to their state, and therefore their actions ($10). Good became to turn the other cheek, as an abstract quality. What matters is what to do with this historico-philosophical observation. Nietzsche is always saying that he “has much to be silent about.” Indeed, ‘wovon Nietzsche nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.’

It has been suggested that Nietzsche’s ‘slave morality’ in its historical victory over nobility is somehow a refiguring of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Although I suppose this is possible, it doesn’t seem likely to me. First, this is for all the same reasons that it is unlikely any particular person in the late 19^th century would have been drawn to this particular ‘moment’ of the Hegelian dialectic when there are so many from which to choose. It simply didn’t occur to most people as the most important part of Hegel (although perhaps it seemed important to some: Royce? Et alia?) Further, Hegel’s pair is Herr and Knecht, while Nietzsche’s is Vornehmen and Sklave. The bundles of associations are quite different, and the shift from singular to plural should not be overlooked. Now, perhaps all this should just be taken as evidence that Nietzsche meant to radically re-stage Hegel’s drama. I am not so sure. Anyway, this would assimilate Nietzsche still more closely to the ‘existentialist’ Hegel(ian tradition) and so retain him as a terrible critic of the Marxist/world-historical tradition.

The fundamental objection to Nietzsche, it seems to me, is that he is basically a racist and elitist aesthete. Certainly he is an elitist. At many places, in particularly in the way he talks so scornfully about democratic leveling, he echoes what I take to be a capacious 19^th century tradition of aristocratic liberalism associated most famously with Tocqueville, but also, it is my ill-informed understanding, with Jacob Burkhardt, a not-unimportant figure for Nietzsche. Although perhaps it would be better to assert that this sort of liberalism was a very broad and generalized orientation at this dawning moment of mass democracy—in the air, as it were, rather than passed from hand to hand.

Race is a major sticking point in any attempt to ‘revive’ Nietzsche or even to read him productively. Just as one must ask with Hegel how much of his system would unravel and collapse if one insisted that the nation-state—keystone of the archway to the world spirit—be removed from it, or if we prefer to keep it intact but properly interpreted, so we must ask with Nietzsche how much of his work implies or depends upon a notion of the self tied intimately to a collective biological destiny always articulate at the level of the individual, but essentially of a historical nature but. That is, is race essential to Nietzsche’s notion of the individual, and if so, can we accept, or find an acceptable version of, his notion of race?

It should be said clearly that ‘no’ seems like a plausible, although not a necessary, answer. Nietzsche, I understand, like many in the 19^th century, was Lamarkian rather than Darwinian. The terms of the debate are confused by an ambiguous vitalism that penetrates 19^th century thought at every level. No doubt much has been said about Nietzsche and vitalism, but from my own perspective it is obvious that he is negotiating between a Spencerian ‘struggle for life’ notion of vitalism and a subtly different and more idealist vitalism of the sort represented by Jean-Marie Guyau—that which is life is good, and therefore that which increases life is good. This is the principle of Esquisse d’une morale sans sanction ni obligation, published in1884, which I mention because Nietzsche read it and knew it. Henri Bergson fits, in a sense, into this line, which goes back to Ravaisson. The story is complicated because it involves a series of borrowings (perhaps mutual) between quite different French and German philosophical lines of thought. My sense is that it should be possible to tell a single story as a sort of oblique dialog that would include Cousin and Ravaisson, the German Idealists after Kant, and would run up through the Heideggerian exchange of the pre and post 1945 years—but this is the kind of nationalizing historiography that, even when practiced in its most deconstructive mode (Ethan Kleinberg) is, I think, always telling the same story again and again—in that way, maybe, we can say that history in a deconstructive mode is very like history in a Hegelian mode, the movement and the answer is always the same, but it seems always to take a long time to figure it out.

Nietzsche, it seems to me, is really pursuing a very different project than Bergson. Bergson is absolutely interested in the natural sciences, in the physiology of the human, but it seems to me that his whole way of proceeding through the physical, as much as it deposits there, is quite abstracted. One could talk a great deal about the way Bergson dealt with the issue, of which he was acutely aware, that he understands language to be conceptual, and the durée to non-conceptual and therefore non-linguistic (although it would be wrong, I think, to say that it is what escapes language), but that Bergson could only discuss durée in language. Nietzsche, on the other hand, I think is attempting in his discussion of ‘morals’ to work the ideal directly out of physical, tactile, reality. This is why race matters to him, but also why he brings up the ancients’ practice of reading out loud, the ideal determination of the sentence by the breath and so the body. The latter seems clear enough, and not too problematic. But race? The point, I think, is that there are bundles of characteristics, wills, that cannot be dissociated from their material foundation. This is race. It is exactly an incarnated concept, a Hegelian idea. To the degree that the European ‘nations’ are young and undefined, they are not yet races (I’m thinking of $251 in Beyond Good and Evil). There is no hint, so far as I can see, of the Hegelian teleology of freedom in Nietzsche. True, Nietzsche, like Hegel, like Spinoza, and many others, finds a way to identify freedom and necessity. This is not, however, transformed into an historical principle as it arguably is in Hegel. The reason is, it seems to me, that Nietzsche’s attitude to history is, for all his biologism, enormously voluntaristic.

This is where Foucault comes in. The vulgar version of Nietzsche, or racial thinking, is a sort of biologized Marxism. Indeed, the argument has explicitly been made that the intellectual roots of Nazism are to be found in a revisionist Marxism that, essentially, transformed classes into races (I’m getting this argument from James Gregor, but not endorsing it). Marxist historiography has often handled superstructural elements like morals through reference, with varying degrees of sophistication, to structural facts, including structural conflict. The Hegelian heritage in Marxism is supposed to mean that this conflict, the many generations of superstructural chaff, all fit into a total picture. The unfolding logic of productive forces in conflict with social relations comes to an impasse, there is not just a revolution, but the Revolution. Nietzsche may retain teleology, but it is not a pre-given teleology as in the vulgar version of Marx. Life, in its breadth and depth, is the teleological goal, but can itself be understood only genealogically, which is to say retroactively (how far from Hegel are we here, really?)

And this is the Nietzsche that Foucault gives us. He is above all an anti-Platonist. The ‘origin’ in which he is interested is in no way a philological essence, but rather a contingent and tainted thing recognized. Genealogy is a way of doing history against history, which is taken to be obsessed with origins in the Platonist sense of essence. Foucault says that the genealogists does not look for the Ursprung,

Parce que d’abord on s’efforce d’y recueillir l’essence de la chose, sa possibilité la plus pure, son identité soigneusement repliée sur elle-même, sa forme immobile et antérieure à tout ce qui est externe, accidentel et successif. Rechercher une telle origine, c’est essayer de retrouver ‘ce qui était déjà’, le ‘cela même’ d’une image exactement adéquate à soi…Si le généalogiste prend soin d’écouter l’histoire plutôt que d’ajouter foi à la métaphysique, qu’apprend-il ? Que derrière les choses il y a ‘tout autre chose’ …le secret qu’elles sont sans essence, ou que leur essence fut construit pièce à pièce à partir de figures qui lui étaient étrangères (148).

Genealogy is thus against both philology and Hegelian or other idealist ways of writing history. What emerges is a frankly materialist conception of history. For Nietszche, channels Foucault,

« La vérité et son règne originaire ont eu leur histoire dans l’histoire…L’histoire, avec ses intensités, ses défaillances, ses fureurs secrètes, ses grandes agitations fiévreuses comme ses syncopes, c’est le corps même du devenir.» (150-151). Rather than Ursprung, the genealogist is interested in Herkunf and Entstehung. The former Foucault renders as ‘provenance’ and the latter as ‘emergence.’ Of the first, he says, “La généalogie, comme analyse de la provenance, est doc à l’articulation du corps et de l’histoire. Elle doit montrer le corps tout imprimé d’histoire, et l’histoire ruinant le corps. » (154). This, I think, is how Foucault would want to say Nietzsche deals with race—race is history marking the body. Of the second,

L’émergence, c’est donc l’entrée en scène des forces; c’est leur irruption, le bond par lequel sautent de la coulisse sur le théâtre, chacune avec sa vigueur, la juvénilité qui est la sienne. Ce que Nietzsche appelle l’Entstehungsherd du concept de bon, ce n’est exactement ni l’énergie des forts, ni la réaction des faibles ; mais bien cette scène où ils se distribuent les uns en face des autres. (156)

This begins to sound to my ears a great deal like Badiou. Take for instance this, “Nul n’est doc responsable d’une émergence, nul ne peut s’en faire gloire ; elle se produit toujours dans l’interstice.” (156) Of course Badiou has an explicitly worked-out metaphysics to go with his notion of the event, while Foucault certainly does not—but still I would be surprised if it wasn’t, on investigation, very clear that Badiou is working on Foucault’s notion of history and historical change. Or perhaps Althusser and Spinozan Marxism are really the important things here? (The answer seems increasingly often to be ‘Althusser’ when the question is about the French 1960s and 70s).

Although I would resist the notion that we should read Foucault’s Nietzsche as simply endorsed by Foucault, there is clearly overlap. For instance, “L’humanité ne progresse pas lentement de combat en combat jusqu’à une réciprocité universelle, où les règles se substitueront, pour toujours, à la guerre; elle installe chacune de ces violences dans un système de règles, et va ainsi de domination en domination” (157). That is, as they say, a strong reading. Yet stronger and more clearly self-referential is the discussion of ‘interpretation,’

Si interpréter, c’était mettre lentement en lumière une signification enfouie dans l’origine seule la métaphysique pourrait interpréter le devenir de l’humanité. Mais si interpréter, c’est s’emparer, par violence ou subreption, d’un système de règles qui n’a pas en soi de signification essentielle, et lui imposer une direction, le ployer à une volonté nouvelle, le faire entrer dans un autre jeu et le soumettre à des règles secondes, alors le devenir de l‘humanité est une série d’interprétations. Et la généalogie doit en être l’histoire : histoire des morales, des idéaux, des concepts métaphysiques, histoire du concept de liberté ou de la vie ascétique, comme émergences d’interprétations différentes. Il s’agit de les faire apparaître comme des événements au théâtre des procédures. (158)

The broader point of Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche is that the past does not give us meaning in the form of history, but rather just the other way around, we put meaning into the past ourselves. We believe in general that " notre présent prend appui sur des intentions profondes, des nécessités stables; nous demandons aux historiens de nous en convaincre. Mais le vrai sens historique reconnaît que nous vivons, sans repères ni coordonnée originaires, dans des myriades d’événements perdus” (162). Foucault walks the reader through a genealogy of history itself and concludes that Nietzsche’s ‘true historical sense’ is a point by point rejection of Plato’s concept of history. In a nicely surrealist phrase, Foucault says, « La généalogie, c’est l’histoire comme carnaval concerté. » (168). All of this comes down to an analysis of the Will to Truth, closely related to the Will to Power. Historical analysis shows that, “il n’y a pas de connaissance qui ne repose sur l’injustice (qu’il n’y a donc pas, dans la connaissance même, un droit à la vérité ou un fondement du vrai) et que l’instinct de connaissance est mauvais…” (170). Truth, this is to say, does not set you free, it simply enslaves you yet the tighter. This is the anti-enlightenment turn everyone is always talking about in Foucault. There is no truth, because truth is slavery, there are only strong interpretations, which is to say autonomous self-creation. That is Foucault’s Nietzsche.

All of this is possible only in a world in which historical meaning is generated subjectively, in the moment. The material reality of the world must be scratched clean of the accretions of valuation that are history in order to make a different meaning. Meaning is not intersubjective. Nor is it present but unavailable as a sort of transcendentally necessary object. Essence has fled history, and given way entirely to existence. Sound familiar? It seems to me that Foucault is here basically getting from Nietzsche the propositions of Sartrean existentialism while avoiding Sartre, and the requisite encounter with Hegel’s Phenomenology. It was surely not as a matter of convenience that Foucault published the Nietzsche essay in a volume for the translator of the Phenomenology.

It would be wrong, I think, to assume that Foucault’s Nietzsche is the same as Foucault. Here there is a complication, a significant complication. Foucault’s fundamental rhetorical mode is that of world history. It is deeply marked by Marx and conceptual tools forged in the Marxist tradition. Althusser is obviously unavoidable here. How does this kind of ghostly Marxism (borrowing, perhaps unwisely, the idea) fit with the thrown, existentialist-Heideggerian Hegelianism I am arguing we see Foucault find (and that he must, in some sense, in some context, endorse) in Nietzsche? Without pushing the point too much, this is exactly Sartre’s problem in Search for a Method and then The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Perhaps the conclusion here is that we might take Foucault’s essay on Nietzsche as evidence, or a starting point for arguing, that Foucault in particular and his generation in general were deeply engaged in playing out and refiguring the wars of their older brothers. It has been said that when Foucault and Barthes ceremoniously removed the head of the Author, they really were decapitating Sartre. The argument has again drifted into a kind of schematism that I don’t think can be sustained.

Freudo-Marxism mark 3 (or higher)

Le capitalisme, au XXè siècle, a fait de la libido sa principale énergie : l'énergie qui, canalisée sur les objets de la consommation, permet d'absorber les excédents de la production industrielle, en suscitant, par des moyens de captation de la libido, des désirs entièrement façonnés selon les besoins de la rentabilité des investissements. Or, aujourd'hui, cette captation de la libido a fini par la détruire, et ce fait majeur constitue une immense menace pour la civilisation industrielle : elle conduit inévitablement, à terme, à une crise économique mondiale sans précédent.

The work of Bernard Stiegler was recommended to me the other day. I was told that I could start with the writing available on the website of the Ars Industrialis, the organization he co-founded in 2003. Their manifesto is remarkable. The above is a chunk from its 3rd proposition that gives an idea of how they are updating Marx.

Codgers and Hair

Very occasionally, I regret not knowing more about contemporary fiction. I know nothing, for instance, about Padgett Powell except the pages that I have just read in the June issue of Harper’s.

Here, with only an approximate typography, are the first few lines, which appear under the subtitle ‘manifesto,’

I will miss looking at the little creek, pointing out as I must that there is not a famous cathedral within five thousand miles of us, or ten.

What is it about the little creek?

Its forlornness, its slightly iridescent stagnation, its unsupport of anything alive that one can see, its dubious mission, its helplessness, its pity, its bravery, the miracle of it withal in even remaining wet—

Which sometimes it does not—

—Exactly.

You see in the creek us.

Yes I think I do.

It is our mirror.

It is.

Well let us not be so vain.

All right. We shall cease going to the creek.

Our hair is also not good but I do not see that we can stop it. In our hair is us bet we must have it. We are not good and we must admit it.

I think we do a fair job of that. As good a job as might be asked of anyone.

Tell that to the codgers.

It would stop them for a moment in that calm stream of strong silent knowingness they so gallantly ride.

Those codgers get you worked up.

I had intended to copy out less, but it’s hard to find a place to stop. I hope this much isn’t some kind of infringement. The unmarked dialog of two lightly differentiated voices is surprisingly effective at providing a motive force to what would, I think, be unreadable in monolog form. The juxtapositions in this first chunk of text, its variously considered objects—the creek, the absent famous cathedral, wet, us, hair, codgers—the mutual positioning and interweaving of these is quite attractively done. Other elements that I would expect to fail also came off, for instance the balance of what I want to call ‘surrealisant’ imagery with not just real places and celebrities, but even with sociologically marked slang (an early example is “Everestage”). This is prose that works, but is also formally interesting. My obligatory academic comment, perhaps over-determined by the word dialog, would be to Bahktin, but with an emphasis on his interest in sociologically anchoring the various competing voices. Here is it objects that are so ‘anchored’ in a knowing but also estranged way. When I first read through, I registered the title as ‘Afraid to be Mean.’ In fact, in reference to a different part of text than I had thought, the title is ‘Afraid to be Men,’ which is less interesting. Maybe all of this works on me because I’m reading it in an airport? Anyway, it’s another reason that I’m glad to be subscribed to a print magazine.