My Brilliant Friend

“My return to Naples was like having a defective umbrella that suddenly closes over your head in a gust of wind.” (chapter 116)

This wonderful, arresting metaphor comes at the beginning of a short chapter near the end of Story of a New Name, the second volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. So far I have only read these first two. I’ll pick up the third soon, and perhaps even finish it in time to be impatient about the arrival of the translation of the fourth. Here I’ll make no attempt at plot summary (and won’t be shy about spoilers). I’ve read very little of the material which has appeared about these books so far. Rothman’s piece asking "Ferrante or Knausgaard?", which I read after I was already well into the first volume, left me with absolutely no desire to read the latter, but unsatisfied of course with the description of the former.

The umbrella metaphor is effective, and in several ways. The umbrella—a banal shelter—turns against the one holding it. This marks it at once as “defective,” but of course it is in the nature of umbrellas to open and close. Like this object, the narrator Lenù, if not the narrative, is defined by oscillation. She is now transcendentally happy, now plunged into depression. Open and closed. In part this is an effect of the childhood and adolescence that is the subject of the first two volumes of the novel, but the oscillation is nearly oppressive, and I cannot imagine that it will do more than stretch out a little as Lenù ages. I also stumble over the mix of temporal orders. Ferrante plays with this: “now that we were seventeen the substance of time no longer seemed fluid but had assumed a gluelike consistency and churned around us like a yellow cream in a confectioner’s machine.” The return to Naples is discrete, a punctual moment. But the comparison is not. The punctual return is not compared to another simple punctual event, but to the having of an umbrella like that. And this temporal structure is not without parallel in the book itself—the just-mentioned oscillation, of course, but also the various slowly-changing backdrops against which the events of the novel take place. This means, most immediately, “the neighborhood” in Naples, the menacing backdrop of poverty and the camorra.

Of course this background is not unchanging. Indeed the most obvious themes of the novel are woven into the larger story of the Italian postwar. Lenù and Lila grow up literally in the wreckage of fascist Italy, which is always present, if poorly understood and rarely discussed by the adults. There is ambient violence--unexploded wartime ordinance both real and metaphorical. As the characters grow up, Italy is going through the postwar boom, the years of modernization. Parents who grew up without running water will see their children demand televisions. Lenù, Lila, and practically all their acquaintances are poor, provincial—their parents aren’t illiterate, for the most part, but their parents were. Lenù will get out, go to university, other characters will educate themselves and be educated in various ways.

Writing and language therefore hold a special place here. Do you speak in dialect? Do you speak Italian? Lenù’s return to Naples, described in the quote above, is marked by the famous linguistic in-between-ness of one who has escaped, or is trying to escape, her origins through education. She never entirely lost her Neapolitan accent at school in Pisa, but she no longer sounds right to her friends and family either. From the very beginning the two friends read and were enchanted not just by words, not just by writing, but by the cultural object that is a printed book. It seemed important, magical, a marker of success and power. The novel begins, of course, with Lenu’s decision to write, to record as much as she can about the existence of Lila—a sort of counter to Lila’s willful disappearance. This is a sort of violence inflicted through words. And we see many examples throughout the narrative. In writing, Lila hurts Lenù, makes her feel small and a failure. Characters are constantly mixing their words together. Of course, most important are the acts of co-creation between Lenù and Lila. But there is also Lenù and Nino, Lila and Nino. Not that this is constrained to verbal reproduction. Lila’s creativity is manifest constantly, is an active force in the world of the novel, she designs shoes, and the conflict over Lila’s photograph is an important plot point, as is her her desecration/creation in reworking it, its eventual destruction. Lenù, it seems, is always struggling with the possibility, the feeling, that indeed she is nothing more than another creation of Lila’s, even if we as readers see clearly that this isn’t so.

The novel is of course actuated by a vanishing act, but it is also full of acts of wanton destruction, importantly of written words. The narrator writes, ostensibly, to prevent Lila from really disappearing, and begins the narrative proper with the primordial act of violence in which the two girls throw away one another’s most prized possessions, their dolls. The second volume is given its whole emotional tenor, is haunted, by Lenù’s shocking destruction of Lila’s private journals. Then of course that volume ends with the appearance of Lenù’s novel, the reappearance of its ur-text, the novel Lila wrote as a child, and Lila’s own destruction, in the hellish meat-packing plant, of that object. All of these texts are defined and given agency, in the novel, as much by their audience, the moral authority of culture, as by their authors. For instance Lenù’s first article so freighted with emotion and given, to no obvious response, to Nino. Lila’s childhood production had deeply moved Lenù, but for whatever reason vanished for years, unremarked upon, not encouraged, by their teacher. Lila’s text, the production of which is treated by the narrative in a cursory way, like the treatment for an illness, is apparently impulsively given to a man in response to his proposal of marriage. It, too, vanishes for a little while, only to be taken up, accepted, published, by cultural authority.

Some bonds cannot be dissolved. Some situations, some people, cannot be escaped. It seems wrong, insufficient, to say that the relationship between Lenù and Lila is at the heart of the novel. Who is the brilliant friend? This is not a relationship, the word is too vapid. On every page, we have the force-field of Lila shaping Lenù’s life—and, for the reader, for the narrator, if not for Lenù in the narrative, we can see how the lines of force run in both directions. This novel is not, I think, going to be about how, ultimately, we learn not to be cruel. It is not a liberal novel, not a Bildungsroman, not a novel about making one’s self on one’s own, not about learning to be free. 

Paul Lapie. "La justice pénale"

A colleague recently pointed me to a short essay, “La justice pénale,” by Paul Lapie in the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. It’s from the March 1898 issue of the journal and this colleague came across it because the Union pour l’action morale reprinted and distributed it. Lapie, and the Rmm, have figured in my work before. So I read with interest and finally could no resist writing a little bit about it.

The essay, only about 12 pages long, might at first look like a book review, although it appears in the “Questions pratiques” rubric. At its head we find a book listing: Jean Cruppi, La cour d’assises, but also “La collection des journaux française, depuis six mois.” Many of Céléstin Bouglé’s essays from this period had similar notices, but I’m not sure how common the practice was. Especially in Bouglé’s case, the notices are clearly intended for the curious reader, but also as sign of scholarship, a bibliography even in the field of what was never really admitted to be polemic. In other words: I may be writing about contemporary political matters, but I’m a scholar not just some scribbler. It’s hard, though, not to smile at Lapie’s breezy ‘the papers in the last six months...’

In any case, the essay is divided into two parts—institutions et croyances—and the first draws directly (or so it appears) on Cruppi to present practical issues in this particular part of the French legal system, arguing that the vices of the civilian courts are magnified in the military ones. I’m not prepared to adjudicate in any useful way these claims. But a few points. First of all, the judges are not really impartial, because they are associated so closely with the prosecutors. We needn’t be thought simply to be copying the English system, Lapie says, if we simply want to bring a bit more independence and institutional separation to the judge (265). Judges also simply do not have the time to think about cases in a meaningful way. Lapie quotes Cruppi telling us that some judges are obliged to rule on as many as a hundred cases a day (262). Absurd. To judge, after all, is complex. “Les faits établis, ils [les juges] sauront appliquer les lois. Mais comment les faits sont-ils établis?” (261).  Even the question of what happened is not so straightforward, “l’accusé est-il l’auteur du fait incriminé?” is one question, another is “l’accusé est-il responsable de son acte?” (262) Finally is correct application of the law. Thus there are three questions, the first is essentially historical, the second moral, and the third juridical. One needs both time and method—science—even and perhaps especially for moral problems.

And here is Lapie’s great theme. Given the current state of affairs, judges and juries have no choice but to fall back on “la conscience.” Since in this format I can, here is a large block quote:

(263)

Among the things I wish I understood a bit better is the claim here about the yes-or-no nature of the judgment. Is this really the case? And I am a little amazed at the link between the historian and the judge. How common was this comparison at the time? (It’s history, not historiography that is supposed to be the Weltgericht). But it’s really the necessity of falling back on ‘intimate conviction’ that Lapie finds objectionable. He admits that judges have no choice: “la méthode qu’on les contraint de suivre les supent [sic?] dans le vide.” They are obliged to fall back on experience guided by intuition to make rapid decisions. This is not acceptable. Lapie raises the practice of indicating doubt as to true guilt with lighter sentences as an especially outrageous byproduct of the situation.   

In the case of military justice, the situation is even worse. Without impugning the honor or rectitude of the officers concerned, it is still necessary to point out, Lapie says, that here there is hardly any of the juridical learning that, at least, civilian judges have. “Nous retrouvons donc dans la justice militaire, aggravés par l’incompétence, les vices de notre justice pénale.” Conscience is invoked especially often within the military.

(265)

Especially that last line! And this is in March of 1898. Zola had been convicted for libel only the month before—not, of course, that the name “Dreyfus” appears anywhere in this piece. Indeed the above is one of the more direct references to what Lapie also refers to later on as “the present crisis,” with no modifiers.

Since any citizen might be obliged to sit on a jury, why not bring some measure of juridical education into the curriculum? This is not, Lapie hastens to add, to say that we should teach everyone law, only “tous devraient avoir acquis le goût et l’habitude de la recherche méthodique” (266). Here, again, the historian is the model. We demand more evidence of “esprit critique” in the historian reconstructing “les faits et gestes de Clovis” than of judges, and this is wrong. This plea for education makes Lapie transition to the second part of the essay, which looks at the underlying cause for the institutional problems, which Lapie sees in “croyances...la survivance d’anciens préjugés” (266). I’ll point out, given this straightforward refusal of sociology, that the first article in the very next issue of the Rmm is Durkheim’s “Représentations individuelles et représentations collectives.”

Two contrasting pairs of terms dominate the second half of the essay: justice and order, as a pair of governing principles, and then conscience and science. We claim today, following the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, says Lapie, to prioritize justice. But it is easy to see that most people—a legacy of empire?—prefer order. The appeal to conscience is simply another form of the religious mindset. Yet it remains widespread in “une sorte de kantisme instinctif d’après lequel il suffit d’obéir à sa conscience pour faire le bien” (268). And we should vigorously refuse the idea that balance must be struck between order and justice. Of course, the government is charged with maintaining order. But we must not be hypnotized by the old regime: “la justice n’était jadis qu’un moyen de maintenir l’ordre; l’ordre ne doit être maintenant qu’un moyen de garantir la justice” (268). For we inhabitants of the 21^st century, this remains an attractive formulation. But Lapie’s counter-intuitive move is to firmly reject the appeal to conscience in just this context. To have the “intimate conviction” that you have done your duty is almost completely worthless. Some lines from one extraordinary paragraph: “La conscience n’est souveraine que si elle est éclairée...Un jugement n’a de valeur morale que s’il a de la valeur logique: s’il ne’st pas appuyé à des preuves, il est presque nécessairement la cause d’une injustice...Il n’y a donc pas de probité morale distincte de la probité scientifique: toute action reposant sur un jugement, la méthode qui sert à établir des jugements exacts peut déterminer les actions bonnes...la morale n’est pas seulement affaire de conscience, mais affaire de science...une conscience dénuée d’esprit scientifique peut devenir criminelle” (269). With that last line, especially, Lapie offers the precise opposite of the more typically 20^th century judgment that science without conscience easily (inevitably) becomes criminal.

Lapie wants to retain the idea of collective action and morality—that is, political choice and commitment—but without the pernicious form of collective responsibility that holds an individual responsible for the supposed crimes of, say, the race, family, nation, and so forth. In a curious turn of phrase, Lapie writes “Toute notre étude est destinée à montrer que nous sommes tous responsables de la crise qui vient d’éclater” (270). I take this to mean that the study he is now winding up shows that the present crisis has roots in collective conscience, in various collective and institutional failures for which we are all, in a certain way, responsible. Because, he goes on to say, we aren’t all equally responsible. Those who have simply failed to conquer their outmoded prejudices, who have failed to reform institutions as justice demands, that is the vast majority, are partly to blame, “mais quelques hommes, qui ont joué un rôle important dans l’affaire, encourent une responsabilité plus directe” (270).   

In sum, for Lapie, the current crisis—the affair, not yet capitalized—has to do with our failure to fully assume the moral consequences of the scientific revolution. Systematic doubt is difficult, and so we prefer not to practice it. But if justice is to be our ordering principle, then we must prefer truth to opinion or mere conscience. Lapie wraps things up neatly, invoking in his closing paragraph the difference between authorship of an act and the various grades of responsibility and social consequence, as well as closing with the same mot from Tostoy (or, Tolstoï)—“il est très bon qu’un cas de conscience se pose pour la France”—good indeed, Lapie says, if we meet the challenge not with simple reaction, but with measured self-criticism and improvement of “nos institutions et de nos esprits” (271).

How to interpret this text, and the appeal it had for the Union? It is, most obviously, a text in favor of revision of the verdict against Dreyfus. Lapie argues powerfully against the injustice built into military courts, and is clear that truth, pursued in a scientific way—and here is an argument for a certain style of republican professor—must be the overriding value. That truth and justice are coincident he feels he may simply assert. The ‘instinctive kantism’ remark is interesting in light of the neo-Kantianism that pervaded the Rmm, but Lapie himself—as many others—was as much a Platonist as anything else (although what that means is a difficult question). Much that Lapie says appears today almost laughably naive, and surely one must quickly ask after who, exactly, is in a position to enunciate the truth of which he speaks. And yet.

The desire for a public that is institutionally committed to methodical doubt, to the pursuit of justice through that of truth—this is appealing. And further there is something appealing about the round rejection of conscience-claims. This sounds, on its face, flatly antiliberal. Freedom of conscience is a fundamental freedom. But I don’t think this is quite what he means. He means, rather, that because you feel something deeply does not mean you have any kind of right to assert it as true. We can go one further and say that since truth is intersubjective, this can be extended to mean that you do not have a right to oblige others to accept what you feel deeply just because you are “intimately convinced” of it. This is, as Lapie would doubtless be happy to further explain, an Enlightenment point of view. There is no truth, and so no justice, without ruthless critique. It would be easy to object to this sort of position, for instance in its characterization of conscience, in the necessary connection of truth and justice, or in how Lapie relates the individual to the institutional. Indeed people Lapie knew well made such objections to him at various points. He has, nonetheless, the merit—more rare than one might think—of writing with great conviction about the need to temper conviction with evidence and doubt.

What was liberalism?

Duncan Bell. “What is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42(6), 682-715, 2014.

It is tempting to regard liberalism as a ‘sick signifier,’ a term that may now have polemical value in certain situations, but the meaning of which is so poorly determined as to make use counter-productive. A temptation, I think, worth resisting. Bell’s useful article attempts an answer to its titular question, although the author believes that his material “calls into question the general utility of “liberalism” as a category of political analysis” (705). Bell restricts his investigation mostly to the British, and (almost—more on that below) entirely to the Anglophone, political fields. He begins with the observation, drawing on David Scott, that today we are all “conscripts of liberalism,” meaning that “the scope of the [liberal] tradition has expanded to encompass the vast majority of political positions regarded as legitimate” (689). How to respond to this over-inflation of the concept?

Acknowledging that one’s definition of a concept (especially a political one) will depend on what one is trying to do, Bell writes, “I propose the following definition (for comprehensive purposes): the liberal tradition is constituted by the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, across time and space” (689-690). This technique accomplishes several things. It restricts us, first, to the 19^th century. Second, it is a way of accounting at least partially for the polemical uses of the term. Third, it is important that history, in the sense of conceptual continuity and change, is built into this approach. Traditions can only be, as Bell writes, “constituted by the accumulation of arguments over time” (691). Bell has sensible things to say about the difficulties of adjudicating at the edges of this, as well as about the importance of differentiating between liberal speakers and liberal arguments.  

The historical content of Bell’s argument—although the article is rich and many of its notes are ones I should follow up—is easily summed up. In the 19^th century, liberalism was not among the most important of political terms. Together with socialism and conservatism, it was taken to be a product of the ‘era of revolutions’—the French especially—and to be broadly synonymous with democracy. So, Bell gives us James Fitzjames Stephen in 1862: “As generally used . . . “liberal” and “liberalism” . . . denote in politics, and to some extent in literature and philosophy, the party which wishes to alter existing institutions with the view of increasing popular power. In short, they are not greatly remote in meaning from the words “democracy” and “democratic.”” (694). John Locke appeared essentially nowhere in these discussions. Herbert Spencer, the enormously popular social scientist and surely a liberal, mentions Locke hardly at all.

Today, we are all sure that Locke is, perhaps not the very beginning of liberalism, but its defining thinker. Bell argues that “Locke became a liberal during the twentieth century” (698). Beginning at the end of the 19^th century, but especially during the “crisis of liberalism” and its utter failure in the 1930s, scholars pushed the origins of liberalism back into the early modern period. Bell makes this “retrojection” the first chronological and discursive element constituting the new, hegemonic, idea of liberalism. The second and more important, beginning during the 1930s and accelerating through the war, was “the emergence and proliferation of the idea of “liberal democracy.” As representative forms of political order came under sustained fire, intellectuals propagated an all-encompassing narrative that simultaneously pushed the

historical origins of liberalism back in time while vastly expanding its spatial reach. For the first time, it was widely presented as either the most authentic ideological tradition of the West (a pre-1945 storyline) or its constitutive ideology (a view popular after 1945)” (699). In this new postwar dispensation, liberalism was “centered on individual freedom in the context of constitutional government” (699). And this was really a postwar understanding, one which Bell signals as defined by complex disciplinary histories in “the context of a transfer of scholarly authority from Britain to the United States” (701). “As a global conflict over the proper meaning of democracy raged, the modifier “liberal” simultaneously encompassed diverse representative parliamentary systems while differentiating them from others claiming the democratic title, above all Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union” (703). In short, Lockean liberalism, which is the historical story underpinning the combat concept of ‘liberal democracy,’ are Cold War anti-totalitarian relics still exerting unreasonable influence particularly in political theory departments.

Bell’s article is, as I’ve said, rich and valuable. I wish I’d read it some time ago. The story is not a surprising one for me, although I am not especially familiar with the British context on which he focuses. I’ve already cited his point that the transformation he describes is defined by a transfer of scholarly ‘weight’ from Britain to the US. He also mentions the importance of émigré scholars in building the history of ideas as a discipline in the US. (As an aside, I hadn’t realized that the Journal of the History of Ideas took CIA money), as well as the translation from Italian of Guido De Ruggiero’s fascist-era History of European Liberalism. Now, I have sympathy with the need to make linguistic and even national restrictions for practical reasons, and even for certain methodological ones. But it seems to m pretty clear—and of course Bell wouldn’t deny this—that the larger story here is a European or larger one.

This moves in two directions. The first is that, it seems to me, we would get very different responses depending on which national or linguistic tradition we started with. For instance in Germany, I think the postwar would find us looking not back to Locke, but perhaps back to Protestant theology of one kind or another. This would not be a liberalism of property, but one of personality (although equally anticommunist). In France we would see a very different sequence. We would not find the consolidation of ‘liberal democracy’ in the 1930s-50s. We would see a ‘liberal republicanism’ well before the First World War, which might look back to 1789, although also further back, and which would balance democratic claims with claims to fundamental individual rights (as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen) in a way not so different from ‘liberal democracy.’ The second is that, as I continue to think, the international sphere is more than the sum of its parts. (I would hate to have to say precisely how). All of this, moreover, leaves aside arguments about the essentially imperial origins of modern liberalism (for instance, at least as I understand it, in Andrew Sartori’s most recent book, which I haven’t yet read).

SFHS 2015. Part Two of Two.

Here is the promised second post on the SFHS. I’ve delayed long enough that these papers aren’t really fresh in my mind any longer, but I want to get this off my plate. Apologies for any misrepresentations! I’ll say only that these papers deserve a more thoroughgoing treatment than I’m able to give them here.   

Saturday morning, at a little after 8:30, the panel “Beyond Determinism: Rethinking the Philosophy of History and Political Economy in Postwar France” got underway. Presenters included, in order, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Alexander Arnold, and Aner Barzilay, with comment from Michael Behrent. All three papers were excellent and, at least for me, educational. Behrent’s comment was exemplary—at least what I heard of it. Since I had to leave part way through I won’t have anything to say about it here.   

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins (hereafter: DSJ) delivered a paper on Raymond Aron entitled (I think) “Liberal Dictatorship, Aron’s Critique of Hayek’s Concept of Liberty,” drawn from his dissertation in progress on Aron. DSJ framed his project broadly as rescuing Aron from the historiographical box of ‘lonely liberal critic of Marxism.’ Aron was more than just a critic of Marxism, and engaged in a fruitful way with many different intellectuals (as it happens I posted some notes on one of DSJ’s earlier papers about Aron and Schmitt here). In particular, Aron leveled his critical fire at various forms of ideology that found material support in the United States—development theory, realist IR, etc—that made universalizing claims something like Marxism. DSJ’s goal in this particular paper is to argue against the understanding of Aron as a neo-liberal, as someone who walked the now-famous road to Mont Pelerin, who was influenced by Hayek especially after a wartime stay in London. It isn’t so, DSJ says.

DSJ develops his critique of the neo-liberal Aron first by criticizing or “mitigating” the moment of sociability, the networks, that have been pointed to in linking Aron to neo-liberalism. The heart of the paper, though, is an archival record of a talk Aron gave in 1955 at a conference in Milan (sponsored by the CCF, and in their archive). The context of this talk was Aron’s new prominence as the author of The Opium of the Intellectuals and especially the “end of ideology” thesis found in its last chapter. This is great material, and  DSJ contextualizes the debate in an exemplary way—this, really, is the paper. The point for DSJ’s larger argument is that Aron describes Hayekian liberalism as ideological in the same way as Marxism—indeed he apparently said there that “at the end of the day, what the liberalism of Hayek constitutes is inverted Marxism.” Economic inevitability ruled both vision of the future, although they pointed in different directions. Hayek would require, as in the title of the talk, a “liberal dictator” to get his system off the ground. Well, Rousseau needed his legislator, so perhaps this isn’t so unreasonable. I’d be interested, in light of this discussion, to go back and re-read Aron’s “États democratiques et états totalitaires” (June 1939).

As is sometimes the case with this sort of argument, by the end I wondered how anyone could possibly have ever thought of Aron as a neoliberal. Perhaps this was clarified in the Q&A. My guess would be that this label is as much an artifact of the polemical theater of French intellectual politics as anything else. DSJ did not spend very much time establishing the definition of neoliberalism according to which Aron would be one, and it seems to me that in fact Aron was a liberal, not a neoliberal. DSJ makes the case (I think convincingly) that a key difference between him and Hayek was that the latter never really accepted the legitimacy of democracy, while Aron did. Having spent some time reading Élie Halévy, Aron now sounds to me more and more like his student, or, conversely, as though Halévy really was Aron’s maître-penseur. The talk mentioned above was, after all, delivered on the heels of an extremely pessimistic survey of the field by Halévy. Perhaps we can say that Aron’s liberalism was, at first, anti-totalitarian, but that he learned to shed this fear as Hayek did not? In any case, a great presentation from DSJ.

Next up was Alexander Arnold, whose dissertation concerns postwar (up to 80s) French political economy, and who spoke about Rosanvallon and economic determinism. This paper was also great, the product of lots of reading of Rosanvallon. I myself make use of Rosanvallon’s work, but I read him first as a historian (the book on Guizot, for instance)—so this paper was particularly interesting for me. Essentially, Arnold reconstructs Rosanvallon’s political economy as he developed it over the course of the 1970s, in his writings as an autogestionnaire. An important climax is the critique of Marx offered in Le capitalisme utopique. I’m not certain that I’m reconstructing Arnold’s reading correctly here, but the idea seems to be that Rosanvallon believes we should read classical political economy as philosophy, not really as a description of economic reality. At its base is an utopique description of the subject, for instance. Nonetheless, Adam Smith—and here, can this really be what Rosanvallon thinks? It’s been some time since I looked at that book—allows us for the first time to philosophically grasp both the institution and the continuity of society. But this is not a description of the world. Marx, however, took the writings of liberal political economy for such a description, and his critique is principally a critique of that economic (in fact philosophical) writing, not of the real economy. “There is enormous distance between concrete society and the discourse of political economy.” Capitalism, in reality, should be understood in a minimal way, which allows for the construction of democratic—autogestionnaire—alternatives, or really reforms.  

This account of political economy, Arnold argues, or really this inattention to it, left Rosanvallon and the deuxième gauche more generally unprepared to meet the challenges of austerity that emerged in the Mitterand years. My central question here is not so much about the reconstruction of Rosanvallon—although I would be interested to see this story extended into his much deeper engagement with the French liberal tradition as the 80s wore on—but about this ‘response.’ Who has been able to meet these challenges? As far as I can tell no one really offers a really compelling account of what is to be done (at least no one who isn’t on the side of austerity). The best Marxisant analyses I’ve seen are rather grim. So what does Arnold want Rosanvallon to have done? To have occupied a more intransigent oppositional position? I’m not sure. In any case, to have avoided advocating “d’apprentissage collectif d’austérité...”

I’m leaving out here a number of things: especially Arnold’s nuanced discussion of the merits of Rosanvallon’s self-description of autogestion as ‘realist,’ and Daniel Lindberg’s criticisms of this; and then the larger framing of the paper in the history of liberalism, and adjudication between the political and the economic aspects of this. I look forward to reading more.

Finally, there was Aner Barzilay, whose talk was “Foucault and Deleuze’s Hidden Debate about Nietzsche” [paraphrase!], and whose dissertation is on Foucault’s Nietzsche. The larger project is to emphasize the continuities on the level of philosophy in Foucault’s oeuvre. This is in reaction to an over-emphasis on the late lectures and on Foucault as a theorist of something called ‘neoliberalism.’ The larger context is above all the question of the transcendental and the subject—trying to keep the two apart. Nietzsche is the most important reference for Foucault, the actuator of the whole project. Barsilay’s talk here is a reconstruction of a (largely implied) dialogue between Foucault and Deleuze, and it is built around Barzilay’s archival discovery of a 1977 note from Deleuze to Foucault discussing just these issues. The exchange and the moment are fascinating. This period, and the political break between the two philosophers, has now received a certain amount of attention. So it is remarkable and much to be appreciated that Barzilay can still bring something new to that table.

I cannot do justice to Barzilay’s talk, so I won’t try to report its details. Delicate questions regarding the nature of the transcendental, the plaisir/desire distinction, and power as Kantian schematization of the subject, were all dissected. Neither Deleuze nor Foucault is to be taken lightly, and Barzilay approaches at a level of textual involvement but also abstraction that makes summary difficult. Again, I’d like to read. 

I agree broadly that we should take Foucault’s earlier work more seriously when thinking about the later lectures. The problem of the subject—historical, transcendental, prison, etc—is indeed clearly a central one for Foucault (and the career-long circling around Kant is unsurprising). I’m less convinced by the centrality of Nietzsche for Foucault generally, but I think this is mostly because I’m skeptical that there’s much of a ‘there’—what did Nietzsche mean, really? To what extent did Foucault take what he needed to take from this corpus? The reference seems constantly to be to the Genealogy, which isn’t the same thing as Nietzsche. But, after all, the point of the larger project is presumably to argue this point. My larger concern with the paper is, I’m sure, not really justified, but here it goes. This paper is, almost, saying: ‘hey, I know you think that the late Foucault is about investigating the actual conditions in which living human beings are made to suffer, but no, in fact it’s about the far more important question of avoiding the transcendental subject!’ I suppose what I want from Barzilay is an account of how the political thought of this newly continuous philosopher-Foucault looks different, or should be appreciated differently, from the less-continuous version of Foucault against which Barzilay is arguing.

I think this is a legitimate question (despite everything) because all three of these papers were about attempts to grapple with the nature of the State. [I'd have liked, also, to hear more explicitly about the question of determinism--although perhaps the originally-planned fourth paper would have helped with this focus]. This common problem was of course clear. Barzilay mentioned, at the end of his talk—and I’ve lost track of in precisely what register, and would like to know—that to refer to the state is to bring a knife to the gunfight of modern politics. There is also Foucault’s famous remark from the lectures about cutting off the head of the State, as well as that of the King. But at issue between Aron and Hayek was interpretation of the nature of the State; and Rosanvallon’s political economy seems also to have turned on the capacity of a subject—a State? A syndicat?—to intervene in the economy. Now, this was self-consciously a panel of intellectual historians, so it is a little pedantic to call on them to be more contextual. And probably Michael Behrent did (some version of) that in his comment. Certainly his work on Foucault and the Foucaultians makes me think him likely to have done so. But how to create this context? Here the panel turns back on itself—intellectual history often does—because, I think, the central question is how we, here today, understand the changing nature of state power in the face of economic imperatives in the postwar world. This is after all the problem all the subjects discussed by the panel were interested in.

That closing is not too coherent, and not too clear, but perhaps I’ll manage to follow it up with an eventual post on essays from the no-longer-so-new Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (2014).