Zizek's Violence

Zizek’s short book Violence (2008) begins with a series of distinctions and delimitations in order to bring into view his proper object.  He distinguishes first between subjective and objective violence.  Subjective violence is the immediate physical, physiological, experience of “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1).  In contradistinction to this is objective violence, which is distinguished into symbolic and systemic varieties.  Symbolic violence includes hate speech, the various hierarchies inscribed into our daily language (of gender, for instance), but also the “more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such” (2).  Systemic violence is the apparently straightforward designation for “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (2).  The whole point of the book, we are told, is to get away from the “inherently mystifying…direct confrontation” (3-4) with specific acts of subjective violence.  The crude political point is that acts of violence, be they bombings on American soil or genocides committed in a far away African country, are mediatized in such a way as to demand an immediate, and therefore partial, subjective, response.   Zizek’s goal, then, is to examine the background against which the ‘subjective’ violence is rendered just that, subjective rather than objective.  The point is not (only or centrally) to show, once again, that capitalism is built on the violence of expropriation, or that certain categories of individuals are systemically excluded from equal access to certain resources.  As Zizek elaborated at length in his Parallax View, it is the inescapable gap between the objective and subjective that is the space of the subject.  So the point here is to examine the mutual positioning of objective and subjective violence in order to understand what kind of a subject is situated there, and how a different one might arise. 

Put differently, Zizek is interested in sites of resistance.  For instance, in his discussion of tolerance, and the critique of it that sometimes emerges from postcolonial studies, his view of cultural difference is ruled by the consideration of political possibility.  He says,

The self-reflexive sensitivity to one’s own limitation can only emerge against the background of the notions of autonomy and rationality promoted by liberalism.  One can, of course, argue that, in a way, the Western situation is even worse because in it oppression itself is obliterated and masked as free choice…Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation.  However, Hegel’s lesson that form matters is important here; form has an autonomy and efficacy of its own.  So when we compare a Third World woman, forced to undergo clitoridectomy or promised in marriage as a small child, with the First World woman ‘free to choose’ painful cosmetic surgery, the form of freedom matters—it opens up a space for critical reflection (147-8).

The point that Zizek wants to make, it seems to me, goes beyond the notion that a rhetoric can become a reality, that an appearance to be maintained can become a positive force for change.  He remains, I think, attached to the level of the subject.  He means something more like, without formal freedom, there will be no concrete freedom—but entirely in relation to the individual, not the society. 

This allows us to enter into the terrain that is generally upsetting for readers of Zizek.  For Zizek, the subject becomes free only in the moment of terror.  This moment is the juncture between subjective and objective.  The position here is in some sense a Hegelian one, of course, and a Lacanian one.  But it is more interesting to point out that it is Zizek’s way of suturing ethics into politics.

The key text examined in Violence is Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”  The notion Zizek wants to explore is that of divine violence.  Although Zizek isn’t quite willing to say it, it seems to me that he identifies divine violence ultimately with the abyss of human freedom, or we might say more in his own terms, with the terror of the radical emptiness of the subject.  This is where he follows Lacan against Kant, “What is truly traumatic for the subject is not the fact that a pure ethical act is (perhaps) impossible, that freedom is (perhaps) an appearance, based on our ignorance of the true motivations of our acts; what is truly traumatic is freedom itself, the fact that freedom IS possible, and we desperately search for some ‘pathological’ determinations in order to avoid this fact” (196).  Divine violence is Zizek’s way of discussing this same fact of freedom and possibility on the objective level.  Zizek cites a long passage from Benjamin’s “Critique,” and then asserts that divine violence is to be understood as the “domain of sovereignty” (198).  Divine violence is not law-making, but beyond law.  It is, one is tempted to say, immanent and therefore outside the realm of law.  Without law, no crime.  Hence, Zizek says, “It is mythical violence that demands sacrifice, and holds power over bare life; whereas divine violence is non-sacrificial and expiatory.  One should therefore not be afraid to assert the formal parallel between the state annihilation of homini sacer, for example the Nazi killing of the Jews, and the revolutionary terror, where one can also kill without committing a crime and without sacrifice” (199).  This passage has alarmed certain people.  Not without reason.  Zizek then goes on, quoting Benjamin, “Less possible and also less urgent [the implication is, than revolutionary/divine/pure violence itself] for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases…”  He concludes from Benjamin’s warnings that the instance of divine violence (now fully transformed into revolutionary violence) is not really of the order of Being—and then, I think oddly, he goes on to say that it is rather of the order of Event.  This is odd because the identification, or rather the assertion, of the Event is absolutely crucial in Badiou’s scheme of things.  Zizek compares the event to the miracle that, although it might have empirically verifiable causes, remains for the believer a miracle.  Fine, but a sort of identification none the less plays a crucial role here. 

In the end, though, divine or revolutionary violence comes to have a fairly banal meaning for Zizek.  We might in Rancièrian language say that it is violence erupting from the part of no part, or in Badiou’s terms, from beside the void.  Of course these are not the same thing, and I think that Zizek does not want to exactly endorse either of them.  Rather, for him, divine violence is that which comes from those who are the constitutive outside of the capitalist system.  And here is where the split within the field of objective violence returns.  Divine violence is that which takes place when a subject has risen from subjective freedom into the simultaneous necessities of the symbolic and the structural.  The agent of divine violence is both existentially free (inside the imperious terror of baseless, necessary action), and objectively free (pinioned to the outside of the inflexible wheel of capital).  He says,

Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will,’ but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision.  It is a decision (to kill, to risk or loose one’s own life) made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other.  If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral,’ it does not give the agent license just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence.  When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, this is divine violence.  Recall, a decade or so ago, the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets.  This was indeed divine violence…They were like biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men’s sinful ways (202).

This last sentence is a bit over the top, forced on Zizek by the example, and not entirely in keeping with the theoretical frame.  Or perhaps it suggests that underneath it all, the content inherited from Marx is in fact just an approach to the moral content of the global economy?

The very last move of Zizek’s book is remarkable, and I think suggests a serious and perhaps significant convergence between him and the authors of Commonwealth.  Zizek goes to Robespierre and Che Guevara, and the notion of revolutionary love.  Commenting on Robespierre, “divine violence belongs to the order of the Event: as such, its status is radically subjective, it is the subject’s work of love” (203), and then further at the end of the chapter, “the notion of love should be given here all its Paulinian weight; the domain of pure violence, the domain outside law (legal power), the domain of the violence which is neither law-founding nor law-sustaining, is the domain of love” (205).  Here is the subjective, I think we must say ethical, side to the more familiar and comprehensive, the more apparently provocative but in fact conventional, claim of Zizek’s that Hitler was not violent enough.  The subject is asked to embrace their own radical brokenness, to assume the gap constitutive of others in an act of terribly violent love.  If this ethical act is accompanied by a genuinely radical politico-economic reconfiguration—if, to emphasize, the twin terrors of both symbolic and systemic objectivity can be assumed in the freedom of the subject—then we will have made revolution.

The second, 2009, edition of In Defense of Lost Causes contains an afterword entitled “What is Divine about Divine Violence?”  It is essentially a clarification and restatement of the ideas presented in Violence—indeed certain sections are simply word-for-word copies (it is also, incidentally, a venue for the continuation of Zizek’s polemic with Simon Critchley).  Although a few examples are operative here, a central one is Haiti.  Zizek follows Susan Buck-Morss in her Hegelian reading of the Revolution a certain distance, but stops at what he calls her “liberal limit” (471).  Her liberalism—and this is not a wrong definition of liberalism—amounts to a rejection of (most) revolutionary activity on the grounds that it will simply make things worse than they already are.  Revolution is thus to be avoided, to be treated as a fearful last resort.  Zizek firmly rejects this.  He suggests that we must, “distinguish as clearly as possible between two types of violence; radical emancipatory violence against the ex-oppressors and the violence which serves the continuation and/or establishment of hierarchical relations of exploitation and domination” (471).  A familiar move.  From this perspective, “we should thus condemn the elimination of all whites in Haiti not out of humanitarian compassion for the innocent among them, but based on the insight that the true strategic goal of this process was to establish a new hierarchical order among the remaining blacks, justified by the ethnic ideology of blackness” (472). Zizek has here the great virtue of stating his position in a clear and unambiguous manner. 

He is simply drawing necessary conclusions from his premises when he says that it is entirely possible and necessary to distinguish between the acts of violence committed by the Tonton Macoutes (Duvalier) and the chimères (Lavalas).  Precisely the same acts, the same mode of inflicting painful death on a human being, has objectively different meanings.  When a murder is committed by the chimères, for Zizek, “these desperate acts of violent popular self-defense are again examples of divine violence: they are to be located ‘beyond good and evil,’ in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical.  Although we are dealing with what, to an ordinary moral consciousness, cannot but appear as ‘immoral’ acts of killing, one has no right to condemn them, since they are the reply to years, centuries even, of systematic state violence and economic exploitation” (478).  He thus arrives at a “minimal definition of divine violence,” that is, “the counter-violence to the excess of violence that pertains to state power” (483).  Then, framing a distinction that is significantly different from the earlier one between emancipator/repressive violence, he says, “if mythic violence serves the state, divine violence doesn’t serve another, better, purpose (such as life) – it doesn’t serve anything, which is why it is divine” (484-5).  It is not too clear how this divine, purposeless violence, lines up with a revolutionary violence that is anti-repressive.  Perhaps the relationship is one of inclusion.  A struggle for freedom is not positive, but rather anti-repressive.  It is therefore not really to any positive purpose.  In this sense it is divine, even though Zizek also sees Nazi genocidal violence as basically divine, but not therefore revolutionary.  So some objective element must enter into the evaluation of purposeless, pure, violence, to distinguish that which is revolutionary from that which is not.  And here again, Zizek is at least very clear.  I think we can assume that the objective element that intervenes to assign violence into the mythic or the divine is the same as that which distinguishes divine-revolutionary from simply divine-sovereign violence.  This is the ethical commitment.  He says, returning to the Haitian example, “chimères and Tonton Macoutes may perform exactly the same act—lynching an enemy—but where the first act is divine, the second is only the ‘mythic’ obscene and illegal support of power.  The risk involved in reading or assuming an act as divine is fully the subject’s own” (485). 

That, I believe, is a fair presentation of what Zizek says about violence in these two recent texts.  My summary has of course had an element of evaluation and criticism, but an adequate contextualization of the arguments in the history of such arguments and in the contemporary political and theoretical contexts would be required to mount a proper critique of the corner into which Zizek has painted himself.  The major issue, it seems to me, is how to reconcile the above justification—or story about how to distinguish justifiable and non-justifiable acts of violence from one another—with what I take to be Zizek’s ‘positive’ political project of subtraction.  Is the analytic here worked out simply a way to think about that violence which is acceptable in pursuing and defending specific instances of subtraction?  Violence ceases to be revolutionary, divine, the moment that it becomes something the revolutionary government wields ‘so that the people do not do it themselves’?  This certainly is the case, but as a criterion it doesn’t go very far.  A fuller account of what Zizek means by subtractive, Bartleby-inspired, politics is required before one could move forward here.  And that’s for another day.   

Old Criticism

Feuerbach, Ludwig. “Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy” (from Stepelevich ed, The Young Hegelians)

The essay is basically a critique of Hegel. Feuerbach say, “the method of the reformatory critique of speculative philosophy in general does not differ from the critique already applied in the philosophy of religion. We need always make the predicate into the subject and thus, as the subject, into the object and principle. Hence we need only invert speculative philosophy and then have the unmasked, pure, bare truth” (157). I wonder, idly, if anyone has ever presented a ‘queered’ Feuerbach. Seems like it wouldn’t be that hard to do.

The major critique of Hegel, after it is established that he hasn’t, formally, moved at all from theology, is that he rejects in every case things in themselves as they are (to import a phrase), or in Feuerbach’s words, the exoteric, for the esoteric. Meaning is always far away from what is. The meaning of the world is found in the posited negation of the world, which itself is in fact only ever what we as human beings bring to it. That is, “the night which it [philosophy] supposes in God in order to produce from it the light of consciousness is nothing but its own dark, instinctive feeling for the reality and indispensability of matter” (161). The result of this critique, which follows from defining theology as the study of God imagined as the unimaginable, and Hegelianism as a re-iteration of theology, is basically the injunction to take what is, what is least philosophical, as the basis for philosophy. Put philosophically, “Being is subject and thinking a predicate but a predicate such as contains the essence of its subject. Thinking comes from being but being does not come from thinking. Being comes from itself and through itself” (167). Or, in a poetical language, “Look upon nature, look upon the human being! Here right before your eyes you have the mysteries of philosophy” (168).

Now, the ‘gesture’ of this philosophy is depressingly familiar. The new philosophy will be the negation of academic philosophy. It will be of ‘our time.’ It will begin with being as it is. (Of course one must be careful not to, as I want to do, project a future phenomenology and its consequences onto this: ‘the world as it presents itself’ or the already mentioned ‘things in themselves as they are.’) Having tried to ‘go into’ Hegel first through the Phenomenology, it does seem to me that this is startlingly naïve, that as much as one would like to reject and dismantle Hegel’s system, one must deal, as he did, with the always-mediated nature of reality. We do not have ‘being.’ We just have some kinds of mediated representations of it. A strong phenomenological position would meet the objection, but isn't presented here. Art, I suppose, is marshaled as evidence that such a theory isn't necessary--the inadequacy of that evidence from my point of view is no doubt an index of the historical distance between 2010 and 1840.

A similar objection would meet Feuerbach’s assertion at the end of the text that “All speculation about right, willing, freedom, personality without the human being, i.e., outside of or even beyond the human being, is speculation without unity, without necessity, without substance, without foundation, and without reality. The human being is the existence of freedom, the existence of personality, and the existence of right” (170). It seems that he really means the physical, empirical (as it were) human individual. I’m not unsympathetic to this position, but it does seem inadequate.

This text is full of interesting aperçus that might or might not be significant, that can’t really be evaluated without reading more. I get the sense that they are generated often enough by the stated method of predicate-subject reversal. I’ll end with one, “whatever the human being names and articulates, it always articulates its own essence. Language is thus the criterion of how high or low humanity’s degree of cultivation is” (169). Which is a fine argument for not allowing Microsoft Word to tell you what is grammatical and what is not.

Aristotle's Politics

The ancients are seductive. Although Aristotle is very clearly the product of significant cultural accumulation, there remains a sense, a feeling, that in order to understand this, I don’t really have to go further back. Aristotle is not to be explained, but rather explains; of course an illusion, but a sort of pleasant one. I have begun, perhaps wrongly, with The Politics. I’m using the translation by Jonathan Barnes, in the Cambridge edition edited by Stephen Everson.

The physicality of Aristotle’s analysis is striking. There are definitions and distinctions, but the project itself never gets very far away from the practical being-together of human beings. One reason I turned, finally, to Aristotle is Hannah Arendt. Yet her notion of ‘the political’ is infinitely more abstracted than his. I saw recently an article, I think in JHI, pointing out that the polis is always implicit behind Arendt’s discussion of the political. Reading On Revolution, I myself wanted to ask about place in the sense of geography. If I had more energy, I would dig back through the book, and submit this notion of the place of politics to a critique with the resources suggested in David Harvey’s Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. It becomes a problem for Arendt’s whole way of thinking that politics only really happens when humans are face to face, talking with one another. This seems totally inadequate to the modern world, a sort of deep utopianism. In a sort of reverse move, Claude Lefort’s formalism (for lack of a better word), seems equally utopian, so abstracted from the essential problem of getting human beings to do one thing rather than another, as to be, well, philosophically rather than politically useful.

Aristotle, on the other hand, is never far not only from humans facing one another, but from their bodies themselves. The Politics begins with a consideration of the practical necessities for the sustenance of human life. It ends with what seems today to be an over-long consideration on the proper place of music in education—what effect do certain rhythmic structures and music modes have on the development of body and mind? Aristotle often compares the state to a body, in order to argue that proper proportion is crucial for excellence. Yet more physical, bodily, evidence runs throughout the work. For instance in book V, which treats revolutions and is, interesting, the most empirical chapter, we get the following example, “In the conspiracy against Archelaus, Decamnichus stimulated the fury of the assassins and led the attack; he was enraged because Archelaus had delivered him to Euripides to be scourges; for the poet had been irritated at some remark made by Decamnichus on the foulness of his breath” (1311b.30). The passions of individuals are always an important consideration in politics—sex, therefore, is never far away. Also in book V, in the Machiavellian second half (on preventing revolutions), he advises, “neither he [the tyrant] nor any of his associates should ever assault the young of either sex who are his subjects, and the women of his family should observe a like self-control towards other women; the insolence of women has ruined many tyrannies” (1314b.25). I don’t remember Machiavelli talking particularly about sex; I do remember, however, that he says it is better to kill a man’s relative than strip him of his property, because he will forget the former faster than the latter. I doubt Aristotle—despite several times repeating the parable about cutting down the tallest corn-stalks—could bring himself to think such a thing.

Related to this, and one of the moments of estrangement for me in the text, were all the discussions of the common meal. It was evidently a widespread custom in the polis for all the citizens to eat meals in common, not always in one place, since their numbers were too great, but in common eating-rooms. Aristotle at several points discusses the best way of organizing this custom, its benefits, the problems that can arise. More than that, though, the example and metaphor of the public feast is nearly as important for him as is that of the body. This is to say that the physiognomy of the feast is well enough known that it can serve as evidence for other things. For instance, “Now any member of the assembly, taken separately, is certainly inferior to the wise man. But the state is made up of many individuals. And as a feast to which all the guests contribute I better than a banquet furnished by a single man, so a multitude is a better judge of many things than an individual” (1286a.28). Perhaps the importance of the meal in common should not surprise me (there is, after all, the Symposium, or Banquet). Still, it is a reminder of a very different mental world underneath what sometimes seems like quite a familiar one. Although, the familiarity and strangeness of this, “children should have something to do, and the rattle of Archytas, which people give to their children in order to amuse them and prevent them from breaking anything in the house, was a capital invention, for a young thing cannot be quiet” (1340b.26), with loud children everyone is familiar, but the idea that you might be able to cite the name of the person who invented the rattle…well, here is just another reason for the seductive (which is to say, to be resisted) feeling that Aristotle is in some profound way an origin, a beginning.

I have read elsewhere references to, discussions of, Aristotle’s treatment of the economy in The Politics. More interesting was what I can only call a sociology of political forms that emerges from its pages. For instance,

The first governments were kingships, probably for this reason because of old, when cities were small, men of eminent excellence were few. Further, they were made kings because they were benefactors, and benefits can only be bestowed by good men. But when many persons equal in merit arose, no longer enduring the pre-eminence of one, they desired to have a commonwealth, and set up a constitution. The ruling class soon deteriorated and enriched themselves out of the public treasury; riches became the path to honour, and so oligarchies naturally grew up. These passes into tyrannies and tyrannies into democracies; for love of gain in the ruling classes was always tending to diminish their number, and so to strengthen the masses who in the end set upon their masters and established democracies. Since cities have increased in size, no other form of government appears to be any longer even easy to establish. (1286b.10-20)

This is not so very far away from certain pages in, say, Durkheim’s Division du travail social, on the extent and density of society. Although I’m wary of the term ‘middle-class’ as it appears in this translation, we must surely also see a sort of political sociology behind such statements as, “a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government” (1302a.14). It is hard not to find some kind of Tocquevillian ‘proleptic shadow’ in an analysis of the present such as this, “Royalties do not now come into existence; where such forms of government arise, they are rather monarchies or tyrannies. For the rule of a king is over voluntary subjects, and his is supreme in all important matters; but in our own day men are more and more upon an equality, and no one is so immeasurably superior to others as to represent adequately the greatness and dignity of the office” (1313a.4-9). Aristotle comes to the conclusion that “the best material of democracy is an agricultural population” (1318b.10) through a consideration of the economic necessities of agriculture, and the (few) possibilities it leaves open for political activity. The examples of this sort of thing could be multiplied.

The point for me is that this sort of analysis—linking political forms to quite concrete social realities—no longer seems to make any sense. Why is that? An obvious answer would be that Aristotle’s world was the polis, most of which contained similar institutions, and most of which were small enough that their leadership could not be too separate from their day-to-day life. A person such as Aristotle might well come to know a great deal about all parts of life in such a society. Today, this is simply no longer possible. Even a reasonably small polity is massively more diverse than a Greek polis. But of course this line of reasoning, although it abolishes itself at the end, is just the same as Aristotle’s—it basis political theory on practical reality, although it begins by claiming that the practical reality is unknowable. I think the key here really is the space of politics. For Aristotle and Arendt, it was contained, limited, knowable. Today it is endlessly multiple. The question would be, is it fractal, and therefore in a sense knowable? or is it chaotic and basically available only in fragments? The Marxist answer is fractal, the ‘liberal’ one chaotic. That’s one way of thinking about things, at any rate.

Although I’ve said almost nothing about the ‘political theory’ elaborated in The Politics (what is democracy? What is a polity? What is the nature of a good constitution?), I will finish by remarking on the adjectival nature of most of Aristotle’s analyses. (I am tempted to grammatically summarize Greek philosophy: Heraclitus, verbs; Plato, nouns; Aristotle, adjectives—have I read that somewhere before?) Although Aristotle does, of course, describe ‘an oligarchy’ or ‘a tyranny,’ the bulk of his theoretical elaboration, it seems to me, goes into establishing the ends, therefore the natures, of these forms and then pointing to certain institutions as democratic, oligarchical, and so forth. I had often in the past heard of Aristotle’s ‘teleological’ method, but I had not realized that this might be what it meant. How rigorously must this be distinguished from a Weberian notion of ‘ideal types’? It bears some thinking about.

Arendt and Truth and Politics

Because of Martin Jay’s The Virtues of Mendacity, I sat down today to read Hannah Arendt’s “Truth and Politics.” I am very glad that I did, but I do wish that I'd started with the Arendt. Much of what Jay was doing, and why he was interested in certain questions and not others, would have then been clearer.

“Truth and Politics” is, as Jay points out, very much Arendt struggling with herself, raising issues that she is unable to contain in any definitive way. One point that Arendt touches, and that one might ask Jay to have dealt with in more detail, is, “the question of numbers” (pg 235 – I’m using the text as reprinted in Between Past and Future). This is salient in terms of the distinction between fact and opinion. Arendt contrasts the repressive capacities of the totalitarian states with the troubling tendencies of free countries,

to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions—as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record by a matter of opinion. Since such factual truths concern issues of immediate political relevance, there is more at stake here than the perhaps inevitable tension between two ways of life within the framework of a common and commonly recognized reality. What is at stake here is this common and factual reality itself, and this is indeed a political problem of the first order. (236-7)

From this it follows that, “factual truth...is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstance in which many are involved...it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about...It is political by nature” (238). These are the kind of sensible observations about which one doesn’t quite know what to do. Certainly not, it seems to me, follow Enrique Dussel’s advice and institute a ministry of truth(-telling in the media). Most interesting in this connection is the historical distance that separates Arendt and Dussel, which we might shorthand as the difference between the experience of totalitarianism and authoritarianism.

As I say, Arendt raises but never really grapples with the special problem that collectivity poses for truth. She of course points to the well attested fact that reasonable ethical principles for an individual cannot be followed by a polity—the relevant one here being Socrates’ ‘it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.’ If it seems clear than a politician, whose task is to act in the best interests of a polity, cannot abide by this principle, it is less clear to me that the polity itself is obliged to disregard it. Indeed, it seems to me that the eminently political problem of the establishment of collective norms and ideals is crucial to the question of truth—although perhaps it is a rational rather than a factual truth—and is not something Arendt approaches. It seems that for her, collective norms are simply aggregates of individual ones: “that all men are created equal is not self-evident nor can it be proved. We hold this opinion because freedom is possible only among equals, and we believe that the joys and gratifications of free company are to be preferred to the doubtful pleasures of holding domination” (247). Ethical ideals may become collective, for Arendt, only by undergoing a process of what we might call de-philosophication. This might be the gap between the philosophical and the literary. Ethical principles exist, but ethics is learned through example. Examples need not be physical, although they often are—they can be literary (Young Werther!)

For Arendt, truth-telling is not an action. It is purely reflective. In this it is like political thought, which is representative, and therefore not active. Lying, on the other hand, is an action. Ordinary language philosophy would no doubt have something to say here: truth is simply constative, while a lie is inherently performative—it assumes a whole range of things not assumed by the simple recitation of truth. That’s the story. I’m not sure that truth-telling as a specific kind of action is really any less freighted down with implied context than lying. (Doesn’t Doing Things with Words begin with the admission that, in fact, all language is performative? Or is this a willful miss-remembering on my part?) According to Arendt, though, truth-telling only takes on political meaning in specific circumstances: “Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle, and not only with respect to particulars, can truthfulness as such...become a political factor of the first order” (251). This is the image of totalitarianism. It points to my major question about this essay, one that is very often asked and less often satisfactorily answered: do not contemporary forms of information distribution radical change the situation?

An important foil, in Jay’s book, to the Arendtian perspective, is the ‘aesthetic’ mode of political thought represented in this case by Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Rancière. I think it may be significant, in this comparison, that Arendt’s metaphorical construction of truth and the political are tactile, physical, whereas the ‘aesthetic’ (the quotation marks are there because the usage is a little out of the ordinary) is dominated by metaphors of visuality or of discourse.

I should defend my claims. Arendt describes facts and events early in the essay as “the very texture of the political realm” (231). Later, discussing the possibility of ‘the big lie,’ Arendt again uses the word ‘texture,’ this time comparing a lie to “a hole in the fabric of factuality” (253). The wonderful last lines of the essay are, “conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us” (264). Truth, that is, is that which can be touched and felt; we use it to cloth the nakedness of our existential condition, and when we engage in political struggle, it is the rocky ground on which we plant our feet.

Rancière’s perspective on the political is quite different. His ‘aesthetics’ is the partition of the visible, the making-visible of new subjects, the making-audible of new voices—in order to disagree, we must already consider one another speaking beings. This is a radically different way of conceiving politics. Rancière is not, I think, very interested in the issue of ‘truth.’ Rosanvallon, who is different from Rancière in many ways, is also not very interested in truth as such, but he does use little factual truths to build up a notion of politics as a discursively constructed field of possibilities that is not unlike the one that Rancière approaches from, shall we say, the direction of rational truth.

What both of these notions of politics share is a sort of placeless-ness, an abstract ‘public’ that is perhaps more substantial for Arendt than for, say, Rancière, but is none the less singular for both. I wonder if the real challenge that we face today in the apparent unification and massification of communication is not really the abolition of this abstract and singular place of the public. This is an argument I heard made long ago by Cass Sunstein, and although I know he has been much abused, his lecture made an impression on me, and seems to me still an important point. There is no public sphere, because there is no one place into which everyone must enter in order to hold an opinion. Mass democracy does not just mean, as Arendt and so many of her generation worried, that techniques of psychological control by a central government would become powerful means of political self-deception. Today, to the degree that the production and partition of ‘factual knowledge’ is autonomous and radically democratic, the process of generating and evaluating such knowledge becomes political to an absolute degree. In fact, today in a way never before possible, it seems to me that our political allegiances are broadly identical with the screens we use to evaluate incoming fact-claims. Certainly identity and political position are bound up in surprising (dare I say, early-modern) ways, it seems to me that this is closely related to the situation that one’s politics always precedes one’s ‘decision to believe.’

The simple fact that the above description of ‘our’ condition seems plausible to me at all is why I find that the final pages of Arendt’s essay sound as though she is attempting to convince herself of what she knows not to be true. Speaking of the independent judiciary and, above all, the academy, Arendt says, “it can hardly be denied that, at least in constitutionally rules countries, the political realm has recognized, even in the event of conflict, that it has a stake in the existence of men and institutions over which it has no power” (261). It is gratifying, although not perhaps practically convincing except in an ideal sense, to read Arendt say that, although the technical achievements of the academic technical sciences are enormous, “the historical sciences and the humanities, which are supposed to find out, stand guard over, and interpret factual truth and human documents, are politically of greater relevance” (261).

Rather than saying that Arendt is attempting to convince herself of what is clearly not the case, perhaps it is better to say that she has here driven her own line of thinking to its contradictory conclusion. The academic ward of truth has a crucial political function, but is not itself political. In what must be a pointed dig at Wittgenstein, Arendt says, “reality is different from, and more than, the totality of facts and events, which, anyhow, is unascertainable” (261). Facts and events (interesting distinction, given that the invasion of Belgium by German in 1914, surely an event, is one of her examples of fact) make up the texture of the political. The historian—and the novelist’s—task is “the transformation of the given raw material of sheer happenstance,” that is, to fuse these facts and events into narratives. Arendt glosses this herself as, perhaps, with Aristotle, the cathartic function of the poet—to cleanse men of emotions so that they may act, but also, “the political function of the storyteller...is to teach acceptance of things as they are” (262)—this acceptance is preparatory to judgment and then action; but does that make any sense? Can politics really require that one stops and judges objectively? Can that be what Arendt means? That the answer is at least a little complicated is suggested by who she identifies as the origin of objectivity: Homer. In the equal portrayal of Greek and Trojan—“Homeric impartiality” (263)—,she says, is the origin of the objective historical account. If, to push her a little, it is really Homer who made the earth and the sky, then perhaps there still exists in the power of fictionality some residual spark of the great poet’s capacity to manufacture the conditions of action?

The French Commonwealth

The excellent website La Vie des Idées has just posted a review of Hardt and Negri’s Commonwealth written by Stéphane Haber. The review is positive, but brief and aware of the difficulty of reviewing such a book briefly. It makes none the less some interesting points that I want to summarize here yet more briefly.

First, Haber notes the strong engagement with, or return to, what might be called the technical vocabulary of Marxism. Hardt and Negri find themselves in a moment somewhat different from that of Empire or Multitude, in which, “apparemment, il ne faut plus craindre le reproche traditionnel d’économicisme.” Their critique of capitalism is a communist critique. Haber’s summation of Hardt and Negri’s basic economic diagnosis of the contemporary world gets, I think, only half the picture. It is rightly pointed out that, somewhat problematically, Hardt and Negri put ‘immaterial production’ at the center of the contemporary economy. It seems to me that their analysis of the turn to rent, as opposed to surplus value, as a source of capitalist profit, is also of enormous importance. For them, the contemporary world is typified by capital’s tendency to capture the product of the common—the new enclosure. This is important not least because it suggests that we are, perhaps, on the way to (rather than in the midst of) a revolution in the mode of production.

Haber’s comments are organized into three fundamental thematics: production, the critique of capitalism, and the philosophy of poverty.

The essential objection in the realm of production is that, it seems, it tends to include potentially everything. What Haber calls Spinozist, and what I myself would call a Bergsonian, monism includes everything. This seems to bother Haber—I can’t say that it bothers me:

Le schème du travail, relayant le monisme spinoziste, permet ainsi de couper court aux tergiversations : le monde (y compris dans celles de ses composantes que nous sommes tentés de qualifier de « naturelles »), tout comme nous-mêmes, sommes toujours déjà pris dans le cercle de la production inventive et collective dont « nature » et « société » ne forment que des moments isolés par abstraction. Tout cela ne manque pas d’allure, philosophiquement parlant. Mais la question reste posée de savoir si un écologisme quelque peu articulé (ne serait-ce que sous la forme d’une préoccupation minimale pour le « développement durable »), en tant qu’inévitablement orienté en direction de la préservation d’un environnement existant, peut trouver son compte dans une telle élaboration. Il lui faudra bien, ouvertement ou en catimini, une ontologie qui ménage une place à ce qui vient avant le travail humain. Voilà qui symbolise sans doute la difficulté du parti-pris néoproductiviste, si immatérialisé soit-il.

If I understand Haber correctly—and things are compressed here, I am writing on the fly, so perhaps I do not—then it seems to me that he misses the whole force of refusing to partition ‘the natural’ from ‘the human.’ Radical ecology is not the recognition that we must protect mother nature, but rather the recognition that there is no mother nature, that we must regulate ourselves for ourselves—in fact, radical ecology is clearly a critique of capital or, better put, a critique of capital is radical ecology. The point is that nothing comes before human labor—this is precisely why it is so important to understand the limits internal to this labor and its social formations. David Harvey makes a similar point about the inclusion of ecology within the critique of capital in the new preface to his big book. This brings us to Haber’s next point.

Hardt and Negri conduct a rigorously immanent critique of capitalism. Haber finds it unusual: “Ce qu’il y a sans doute de plus étonnant dans leur livre, c’est le sérieux avec lequel Hardt et Negri prennent au pied de la lettre le mot d’ordre de la « critique immanente ».” So immanent is the critique, in fact, that it turns out not to be sufficiently critical for Haber of life as it is lived ‘under capitalism.’ What is wanted and not supplied is a treatment of alienation (as we would find in the Frankfurt school, or on the contemporary French left in so many places—the comité invisible, say).

Ainsi, le passage au communisme suppose non pas la réinvention de régulations (dans le style d’ATTAC) ou la promotion d’institutions économiques nouvelles (une position actuellement défendue par la social-démocratie associationniste), mais la libération des forces productives existantes qui, d’elles-mêmes, s’assumant elles-mêmes, se soustrayant au pseudo-soutien que leur offre le capital tel qu’il existe aujourd’hui (en fait une force de contrainte et de parasitage) sont censées pouvoir favoriser l’avènement de la société désirable.

...

Hardt et Negri critiquent non pas l’autonomie aliénante du capitalisme comme « système » (inhumain, anonyme, poussé à l’autoreproduction élargie constante, délié de la volonté et de l’intelligence etc.), mais cet aspect bien particulier du capitalisme qu’est la privatisation, c’est-à-dire en fait la sous-utilisation, des richesses produites en commun, un « vol » qui est d’ailleurs aussi censé expliquer la misère des exclus.

Haber is put off by this lack. It seems to me to be one of the signal virtues of the book. Capitalism is productive, and not only of misery (which Hardt and Negri hardly ignore), but also of possibility and innovation (although that word has been co-opted by CAppleitism). Haber recognizes that this perspective connects Hardt and Negri to the Proudhonian tradition—this is a tradition that seems to me, in parts, salvageable.

Lastly, Haber recognizes that Commonwealth takes the human suffering inflicted by capital as its starting point. How is this done, how might it be done? After discussing several possibilities, Haber describes the one in which Hardt and Negri can be located:

Un intersubjectivisme participationniste. Ici, les conditions de vie décentes, non-misérables, sont considérées comme faisant partie des supports empiriques d’une délibération digne de ce nom. Présupposé dans ces approches, l’argument trivial selon lequel on n’est pas prêt à bien délibérer lorsque l’on est dans le besoin suffit à la fois à emporter la conviction et à orienter la discussion. L’idéal d’une participation démocratique inclusive et authentique y forme donc le point de vue à partir duquel les situations socioéconomiques concrètes se trouvent évaluées. Dans le champ contemporain, Habermas a fourni une légitimation influente de ce genre d’approches d’aspect plus républicaniste.

Republican is right. One might also describe this, nodding to Petit: ‘freedom as (collective?) non-domination.’ But, for Haber, problems arise because the authors of Commonwealth link this collective participation not necessarily to fundamental bare-life issues such as drinking water or rule of law, but rather to participation in bio-political production. This is indeed difficult. It seems to me here that, on the one hand, Hardt and Negri are being faithful to a certain relativism in Marx, one that might be shorthanded as ‘time socially necessary.’ On the other hand, it is unjust to first admit that the authors begin with the problem of human misery, and then object when they subtract misery as such from the solution to the problem. This may be related to Haber’s relative discounting of the shift from a regime in which profit is based on the extraction of surplus value to one in which it rests on rent. It is not, it seems to me, empirically unrealistic to say—with many ‘official economists’—that poverty is the result of not-enough globalization. This ‘not-enough’ is required by capital. Remove it, and you allow the fruits of production to be distributed in a more egalitarian way.

Haber’s review, I think, hits many of the right points. Its incompleteness should be ascribed to its length rather than anything else. The final word of the review is positive and, it seems to me, rightly points out that the most appealing aspect of Hardt and Negri’s work is the attempt to grapple with the empirical reality of new economic formations in a critical and even revolutionary philosophical mode. The clear (although unnamed) foil here is Badiou. I’ll reproduce the last lines:

Les difficultés de la position défendue par Hardt et Negri forment la contrepartie de leur façon nette et décidée de répondre à cette exigence, et c’est pour cela que, sûrement, elle jouera à juste titre un rôle important dans la discussion contemporaine. Ne serait-ce que parce que, en ce qu’elle a de plus intéressante pour nous, l’impulsion marxienne a plus de chance de survivre dans une tentative sincère pour concevoir les transformations du travail et de l’exploitation que dans une quelconque spéculation déliée sur l’essence du Communisme comme Exigence pure.

Agamben on Democracy

The more recent issue of Theory & Event begins with an “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy” by Giorgio Agamben. It is a nice illustration of why it is that I find his work so frustrating. It has a disarming conceptual clarity that eventually reveals itself to be at once politically useless and even counter-productive. The short note begins by asserting that there is an obvious distinction in use of the word ‘democracy,’ so that it refers “to the conceptuality of public law and to that of administrative practice: it designates power's form of legitimation as well as the modalities of its exercise.” This in turn reflects a fundamental distinction between what Agamben eventually consents to call constituent power and constituted power. This he arrives at through first Aristotle’s politeiai (constitution) and politeuma (government), and then Rousseau’s general will or legislative power and government or executive power. The problem, of course, is the articulation of the two sides together, or, rather, keeping then just the right distance apart. This is the task of the kyrion, or the sovereign. Then we have the following paragraphs:

If today we witness the overwhelming domination of the government and the economy over a popular sovereignty that has been progressively emptied of any sense, it may be that Western democracies are paying the price for a philosophical legacy they have assumed without reservations. The misunderstanding that consists in conceiving of government as a simple executive power is one of the errors most fraught with consequences in the history of Western politics. It succeeded in ensuring that the political reflection of modernity got lost behind empty abstractions like the Law, the general will and popular sovereignty, while leaving without response the problem which is from every point of view decisive: that of government and its articulation with the sovereign…

The Western political system results from the knotting together of two heterogeneous elements, which legitimate one another and which give one another mutual consistency: a politico-juridical rationality and an economico-governmental rationality, a "form of constitution" and a "form of government." Why is the politeia caught in this ambiguity? What grants the sovereign (the kyrion) the power to ensure and to guarantee their legitimate union? Is it not a question of a fiction designed to conceal the fact that the centre of the machine is empty, that between the two elements and the two rationalities there is no possible articulation? And that it is from their disarticulation that it is a question of making that ungovernable emerge, which is at once the source and the vanishing point of every politics?

Ereignis

Early this evening, I went to a lecture given by Martin Jay. I won't say much about the lecture here, except that it was called "Historicism and the Event," and was primarily a recounting of the views of a sequence of French philosophers, particularly but not exclusively in the wake of 1968, on the meaning of the notion of the event.

Heidegger came up as an important resource for Derrida and Badiou's thinking here. Wittgenstein was not mentioned during the lecture, but I have been reading him for other reasons. He uses the word that Jay highlighted as being particularly important for Heidegger, 'Ereignis.'

There is the striking formulation from 6.4311: "Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens."

More interesting, though, it seems to me, especially in the context of the lecture, is the longer 6.422 on ethics and consequences, the relevant bit of which is, "Zum Mindesten duerfen diese Folgen nicht Ereignisse sein."

A definition

Theory begins when we put these historically-grounded categories to work to forge new interpretations. We cannot, by this means, hope to explain everything there is, nor even procure a full understanding of singular events. These are not the tasks which theory should address. The aim is, rather, to create frameworks for understanding, an elaborated conceptual apparatus, with which to grasp the most significant relationships at work within the intricate dynamics of social transformation. We can explain as general propositions why technological and organizational change and geographical reorganizations within the spatial division of labour are socially necessary to the survival of capitalism. We can understand the contradictions embedded in such processes and show how the contradictions are manifest within the crisis-prone historical geography of capitalist development. We can understand how new class configurations and alliances form, how they can be expressed as territorial configurations and degenerate into inter-imperialist rivalries. These are the kinds of insights that theory can yield.

...

The mutual development of theory and of historical and geographical reconstruction, all projected into the fires of political practice, forms the intellectual crucible out of which new strategies for the sane reconstruction of society can emerge. The urgency of that task, in a world beset by all manner of insane dangers - including the threat of all-out nuclear war (an inglorious form of devaluation, that) - surely needs no demonstration. If capitalism has reached such limits, then it is for us to find ways to transcend the limits to capital itself.

From the closing pages (450-1) of David Harvey's The Limits to Capital (1982).

Oh bondage...

Harper’s this month has an excellent little piece about Haiti, its history, and the meaning and causes of its poverty in the 21st century. Perhaps for this reason, I picked up a book I’ve been meaning to read for a little while now, that talks about Haiti in quite a different way.

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) is a republication of Susan Buck-Morss’ essay “Hegel and Haiti,” originally published in 2000, together with another substantial piece and some introductory material. The original essay has at its core the empirical argument, put most conservatively, that Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave was written with the Haitian Revolution in mind. The more radical formation of the claim is that the Haitian Revolution was—and remains—at the very center of modernity as such; Hegel, as a profound and originary thinker of modernity, recognized this and therefore built his philosophical system around the ‘work’ already done by this Revolution. The essay’s goal is to rescue, or recast, universal history as a project of human emancipation. This can be done, according to Buck-Morss, only by reading modernity from what are nominally its edges, by recognizing its porous nature, and by accepting universal history as essentially momentary. Hegel is a sort of failed hero of the story—the particularity at the origin of his work must be used to destroy the bad universality into which his philosophy of history eventually turned.

Buck-Morss in several places objects to disciplinary specialization. She is proud that her narrative doesn’t have a place in an academic discipline. Yet, it seems to me, it certainly does. Her text is easily recognized as Theory; it and her certainly have a well established institutional place in the US Academy. This is an issue about which much could be said.

I should say that on a certain level I am convinced by the evidence Buck-Morss is able to marshal for her central claims about Hegel and Haiti. I was simply unaware, for instance, of the textual antecedents to the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s lectures at Jena before he wrote the Phenomenology. I had been suspicious of the desire to read Hegel’s Knecht as ‘slave,’ and then yet more suspicious of what I took to be the rather quick connection of slave to black. Yet apparently in earlier versions of the dialectic, Hegel uses Sklav, which is a clearer reference. This, together with Buck-Morss’ discussion of the coverage of Haiti in this period in Minerva, a political journal Hegel read, is the kind of evidence that I hadn’t realized existed. Together with the great deal that I’ve learned about Haiti since I last thought at all about the probability of a Haitian reading of Hegel, it simply convinces me—although I remain skeptical, for empirical and political reasons, of attempts to read, for instance, Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, in terms of the master-slave dialectic.

For broad historical reasons, it makes sense to take Haiti, and the constellation of the Atlantic slave economy, as a central to the historical development of Europe and the so-called West. The empirical existence of the ‘New World’ was crucial to Enlightenment thought—see Michèle Duchet’s foundational work on this. I have recently heard it argued that the commercial exploitation of the Spanish domains in Mexico was a crucial force behind the development of scientific modes of description and thought in the 16th century. (It would be interesting to ask David Israel what he thinks about these suggestions). Buck-Morss argues that the Haitian Revolution, in the center of all this, was the moment of radical emancipation. It was only in Haiti—and even there only briefly—that the principles of radical political equality were not only asserted, but actually written into law and even practiced.

My question is about the relevance to all this of the dialectic of master and slave. It seems to me, in fact, to be positively counter-productive as a guide for thinking about human emancipation. Taken on a subjective, psychological level, it seems to me that it leads nowhere good—not only bondage but psychic dissolution and the real acceptance of death become necessary moments in the path to the genuinely human. Buck-Morss herself rejects the pseudo-Marxist ‘stagist’ interpretation of the dialectic, whereby the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie, thus entering the historical realm of freedom. Without being simply Marxist, though, Buck-Morss does want to argue that the dialectic treats collective subjects (54).

The particularity of the Haitian Revolution itself is supposed to be a moment that indicates the universality of the emancipatory struggle for recognition. She says, “If we understand the experience of historical rupture as a moment of clarity, temporary by definition, we will not be in danger of losing the world-historical contribution of the Sant-Domingue slaves, the idea of an ends to relations of slavery that went far beyond existing European Enlightenment thought” (147). More generally, modernity as a universal condition is understood to have its origin in the particular configuration of the Atlantic slave economy. All of this is fine, but I don’t quite understand what this way of conceiving of politics, even of emancipatory politics, has to do with the dialectic of recognition. The final pages of the essay slide off into the messianic language of critical theory. Here is the second to last paragraph:

Between uniformity and indeterminacy of historical meaning, there is a dialectical encounter with the past. In extending the boundaries of our moral imagining, we need to see a historical space before we can explore it. The mutual recognition between past and present that can liberate us from the recurring cycle of victim and aggressor can occur only if the past to be recognized is on the historical map. It is in the picture, even if it is not in place. Its liberation is a task of excavation that takes place not across national boundaries, but without them. Its richest finds are at the edge of culture. Universal humanity is visible at the edges. (150-151)

Much of this makes good sense, but not the idea of a genuine dialectic of mutual recognition with ‘the past.’ This is to be distinguished from, for instance, Dominic Lacapra’s notion of dialogic encounters with texts. The dialogic is defensible both practically and philosophically in a way that mutual recognition of past and present is not. I would argue, in fact, that human collectivities also cannot recognize one another in the sense in which the word is being used here. Buck-Morss’ broader political goal is clearly to recover some kind of universal political project. It is self-defeating to say that such a project will come from ‘the edges.’ The point, it seems to me, is to grasp the world anew in such a way that what had seemed like the edge no longer is.

Left of Enlightenment

Israel, Jonathan. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton, 2010.

First, a proposition: take the ruthless historical categorizations of Jonathan Israel, add to them the apocalyptic perspective on recent world history taken by Mike Davis (in Planet of Slums), spice with a productivist reading of Marx—you will have the politico-intellectual framework of Hardt and Negri.

A Revolution of the Mind is ultimately an argument about the nature of the French Revolution and political modernity, drawn as a consequence of Israel’s massive multivolume history of the Enlightenment. Israel’s argument about the Enlightenment is refreshingly straightforward and world-historical (it also infuriates many scholars of the period—I won’t really go into these debates, see La Vopa’s review in Modern Intellectual History). There are not a multiplicity of regional or local Enlightenments, there are not ‘occult’ Enlightenments, there are not women’s and men’s Enlightenments. There are, says Israel, just two Enlightenments, one radical, and one moderate. They are divided on many issues, but it all comes down to a fundamental metaphysical disagreement that maps cleanly onto the profusion of political ones. On one side is Spinoza and monism, which means democracy and egalitarianism, on the other there are the many attempts to rescue dualism, which always becomes a defense of authority and hierarchy. Israel says, “The only thinker who seriously tried to bridge this antithesis conceptually, though even he does not really manage it, was Kant...the later post-1789 Kant, abandoning his earlier more conservative stance, stood firm with a foot in both camps, unfurling the banner of a pervasive liberalism” (12-13). The Revolution of the Mind to which Israel refers is the intellectual triumph of radical Enlightenment in the 1770s and 1780s that, in a word, caused the French Revolution. Israel takes a strong stance here,

The prevailing view about the French Revolution not being causes by books and ideas in the first place may be very widely influential but it is also, on the basis of the detailed evidence, totally indefensible. Indeed, without referring to Radical Enlightenment nothing about the French Revolution makes the slightest sense or can even begin to be provisionally explained. (224)

Radical Enlightenment ideas about democracy and equality officially organize our political world. They have never been more than very partially applied. Their surge before and during the Revolution was followed by a long struggle. In his preface, Israel stages it thus,

Not only scholars but also the general reading debating, and voting public need some awareness of the tremendous difficulty, struggle, and cost involved in propagating out core ideas in the face of the long-dominant monarchical, aristocratic, and religious ideologies, privileged oligarchies and elites, and in the face also of the various Counter-Enlightenment popular movements that so resolutely and vehemently combated egalitarian and democratic values from the mid-seventeenth century down to the crushing of Nazism, the supreme Counter-Enlightenment, in 1945. (x-xi)

Names are good shorthand for understanding how Israel divides up the Enlightenment, and will suggest some of the problems he has got to deal with. In the beginning was Spinoza, followed by Bayle, and then in the later period, Helvetius, Priestly, Diderot, d’Holbach, and others. Indeed, Diderot is the real hero of A Revolution of the Mind. Voltaire is the great representative of the moderate Enlightenment, together with Locke, Smith, and many others. The most importantly problematic figure for Israel is Rousseau. In fact, Israel’s narrative (very brief) of the Revolution itself is very much an exercise in la faute à Rousseau. Rousseau is seen as a sort of fallen radical, who with his turn toward sentiment and the metaphysics of the general will is indeed responsible for Robespierre and the Terror.

The very moral and intellectual clarity of Israel’s narrative renders it suspect. Perhaps this is a function of how short these lectures are, of their status as something like a ‘report and conclusion’ about research previously conducted. Still, the apparent ease with which Israel finds the political program most preferred by universalist progressive liberals today in the 18^th century is unsettling. Over the space of a few pages, for instance, we learn that for the “radical enlighteners...only Enlightenment to enlighten others generates freedom,” that “liberty of thought and expression...benefits society,” that “only equity, reason, and freedom can ground just constitutional principles, rational laws, and upright government,” and that, “the consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy in politics” (80-3). Israel even points out—and I imagine that during the lecture he was smiling as he said this—that his radicals argued that the best parts of Greek philosophy derived from Egyptian sources (204).

In short, everything that ‘we’ hold dear today flows from Spinoza, and has its metaphysical foundation in his monism. This is the source of modern notions of democracy, equality, liberty, justice, universalism, and revolution.

Again, it seems to me that Israel’s connection of Spinoza’s metaphysics to democratic egalitarianism, to the modern impulse toward justice and equality, would fit well into the genealogy that Hardt and Negri work out for themselves of ‘immanent-materialist’ philosophy (if memory serves) in Empire. Israel himself is for obvious reasons dismissive of Marxist historiography of the French Revolution, but he does not venture very far into the 19^th century—only suggesting that Spinoza’s influence lived on, which indeed it did. I add Mike Davis to this contingently (I just the other day read Planet of Slums), but I do think the world he tells us about puts special pressure on Israel’s story of Enlightenment—particularly if we take it to be essentially a present political project rather than a historical one. Massive poverty has always been an effective tool of anti-democratic propaganda. Manifest material inequality makes it both more difficult and more necessary to assert equality as a political principle, while also exerting pressure to ‘transcendentalize’ it. I don’t know what Israel’s academic-political views are, and I imagine he would scorn without seriously engaging the contemporary universalist current of academic leftism (H&N, but also many others). But it isn’t a coincidence that they all take Spinoza as an intellectual hero. The parallels suggest that it might be worth asking what, exactly, constitutes radicalism, good and bad, today. Would Israel accuse the authors of Empire of repeating Rousseau’s mistakes? It seems likely.

Brown v Agamben

V. Brown, 'Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery', The American Historical Review, 114, (2009), pp 1231-1249.

This essay is most straightforwardly a corrective to what Brown sees as the misuse (overuse) of Orlando Patterson’s categorical definition of slavery as social death. According to Brown, historians have often taken what Patterson meant as an ideal type definition to be a description of reality itself. Historians have long rejected, however, the basic result of such a definition: that it would strip slaves of agency. Manifestly, historians have pointed out, slaves had agency. One need look no further than the continuous rebellions and occasional revolutions to emerge from new world slavery to see this.

Brown’s real goal, though, is deeper than this. In step with his historical work in The Reaper’s Garden, Brown wants to retell the story of slavery from the perspective of what we might call the micro-politics, or cultural politics, of everyday life. Brown argues that what he calls mortuary politics, conflict and negotiation over death, burial, and associated rituals, are of the greatest importance. One might make this argument in many contexts, but Caribbean slavery is a privileged field. Increasingly, it the worldview forged in the 18th century experience of slavery and revolution has come to be recognized as central to modernity as such (European, Atlantic, or even if you like, Capitalist). Mortuary politics is found to be central to the world of slavery, to the movement of the Haitian Revolution, and thus to modernity.

One effect of Brown’s argument, or rather one consequence of the argument that he wants to make, is a firm and empirically-oriented rejection of Giorgio Agamben. Brown deals with this in a few paragraphs explaining the limits of an Agambenian perspective such as that taken in Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic. Agamben’s notion of bare life, for Brown, is piggybacked into the historical study of slavery as a sort of compliment to and intensification of Pattersonian social death. Brown doesn’t exactly want to re-open old debates about agency (vs structure!), but he does want to argue that it is plainly wrong to see Caribbean slaves as without culture, in the sense of without resources or community. He cites William Sewell’s recent definition of culture, commenting, “practices of meaning are better seen as tools to be used than as possessions to be lost.”

There are several somewhat separable issues here. First, there is the methodological question of how one should think about culture and agency. In this, I simply agree with Brown. I prefer to treat culture (or, qua intellectual historian, unit ideas) as a bundle of tools to be manipulated—tools that empower, but also limit, channel, and react upon, those that wield them. Then there is the more empirical question of the admissibility and utility of the notion of ‘social death’ in the study of slave systems, say specifically in the Caribbean. Not having read all the relevant texts, I defer with enthusiasm to Brown. What I have read leads me to believe that he is entirely correct. Finally, there is the added question of Agamben. I again agree, but would like to ask how far Brown’s critique can be extended. I have read Homo Sacer, and various political-theory mobilizations of Agamben, and find the whole thing, to say the least, confused, distasteful, and not a useful way to think about politics. There are issues of disciplinary division of labor here—Brown correctly points to the differing imperatives and skill-sets of literary scholars and historians approaching this material—and perhaps one answer is that Agamben is useful for what literary scholars do, and not for what historians do. This is never a very satisfying conclusion, and all the less so in a world of perfectly transparent (but still foreboding) disciplinary fortifications. I had thought that Agamben was increasingly becoming a reference-point among historians and theorists—perhaps I can interpret Brown’s intervention as a sign that I was mistaken? I suppose there is a deep divide here, between, we might say, those who think that we humans speak language, and those who think that it speaks us. Maybe this is too much a 1975-vintage way of seeing things, or at least of expressing them, but it does seem to me that the fundamental difference between Brown and Baucom, for instance, is there. They look at the same thing, and the one sees the struggle for communities, fragile and fleeting, but real; the other sees the de-realizing force of commodity fetishism and in a tone of high moralism allows a-historical discourse to disintegrate human being.

The Cold War and Political Philosophy

A few years ago, for a class, I read Michael Burleigh’s Earthly Powers (2005), which is a history of the conflict between and commingling of religion and politics in 19th century Europe. The fundamental argument of the book is that 20th century totalitarianisms are really ‘secular religions,’ or ‘political religions,’ or simply fundamentalisms. Whatever one’s terminological preference, the argument is that revolutionary politics of the left and right—1793, 1917, but also 1933—must be understood in terms also used for religious fundamentalism. Burleigh’s book is a popularizing history, and I don’t judge it harshly. Still, I found and continue to find this interpretive framework rather shallow. Burleigh invokes in his introduction a number of the early interpreters of the totalitarianisms of the 1930s—many with direct experience of these forms of politics. The most philosophical among the writers he cites is Eric Voegelin. Recently, hoping to break a sort of intellectual circle I’d fallen into expressing certain things in my dissertation writing, I read Voegelin’s short essay Science, Politics & Gnosticism (1959, 1968). I have just finished an earlier, slightly longer essay, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (1952).

I read the second text because I found the first one enormously frustrating. In Science, Politics & Gnosticism, Voegelin spends a great deal of time castigating various thinkers, but most especially Marx, for conducting an enormous, elaborate, “intellectual swindle.” Marx’s whole body of work, Voegelin, argues (or perhaps simply asserts) is one long denial of reality. Many of Voegelin’s specific analyses are elegant, and great erudition is evident in places. Yet at no point in this text is it explained how Voegelin himself has such clear access to truth that he can say with confidence, outside of dubious textual evidence that Marx isn’t interested in ‘reality,’ that Marx is entirely wrong? The whole text is negative—an attack on gnosticism.

The New Science of Politics (and we should certainly note the definitive article) is not nearly so negative. Indeed, I wish I had started there. Voegelin’s argument is much more subtle and thought-out than it would seem to be, based on the anti-Marx screeds of the later text. Essentially, Voegelin believes that science and truth originate in personal, individual, experience. He is, we might say, a methodological individualist—although I get the sense that he would reject these terms. History cannot be the bearer of truth in a Hegelian or Comtean sense because it is outside of experience. On the other hand, crucially, individual experience is certainly in history, and has a history. This is important because while it is typically gnostic to build one’s politics upon a philosophy of history (the Christian apocalypse, the Communist paradise, the advent of the Superman), all political philosophy implies a vision of history. The relevant truth of personal experience here is the experience of transcendence. Certain historical events—most importantly Greek philosophy and Christian theology—opened the soul to transcendence. Another way of saying this is that until Greek philosophy, truth and the socio-political structure and tradition were inextricable. Philosophy ‘arrived’ after the real unity of the Athenian polis was broken because with the dissolution of the social structure, it seemed necessary to find a new source of truth. Philosophy, then, and especially political philosophy, is a truth that stands in opposition to the established order of society. Of course, Greek philosophy was relatively limited in its psychic impact. Christianity, on the other hand, eventually penetrated quite deeply into the population of the areas under its political control. This penetration is, for Voegelin, the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. It is also, crucially, the rise of a new kind of truth. Experience becomes more complex because the dimension of the transcendent has been opened. Voegelin is willing to say that this constitutes a kind of individuality that had not, previously, existed. This new form of experience brings with it new sorts of problems. In particular gnosticism, which he understands as a psychological response to the uncertainty generated by the opening to the transcendent. Gnosticism in the Middle Ages took the form of Christian chiliasm, arrived at something like a high point with the total dominance of vulgar positivism around 1900, and exists in the middle 20th century as, on the one hand, liberal progressivism, and on the other, Communism.

I do not expect to be durably interested in Voegelin. However, I think it would be interesting to approach his work as I understand it by trying to specify and contextualize three of his basic concepts: experience, the individual, and truth. Obviously, these three concepts are closely related. We can even express their relation in a restrictive sentence: truth is established only in individual experience. I would suggest, in an offhand way, that Foucault’s perspective on the generation of subjects and truths would be useful. Martin Jay’s Songs of Experience would, I think, be at least the beginning of a useful contextualization of Voegelin in terms of 20th century European ideas of truth. Similarly, Jerrold Seigel’s Idea of the Self might do the same for Voegelin’s fairly aggressive individualism. There is, I know, a certain amount of historiography on interwar writing on gnosticism. It would also be interesting to know more about Voegelin compared to Leo Strauss—for instance, to put Strauss’ book on natural right next to The New Science of Politics. If Strauss provides a contextually similar comparison, it seems to me that the most interesting recent comparison might be with Jacques Rancière’s work on politics as the partition of visibility. The New Science is, at least nominally, about the idea of political representation. Certainly, Rancière’s distinctions between the archi, meta, and para-political could all interfere in interesting ways with Voegelin’s analysis of pre- and post-philosophical political thought.

For the moment, I will file Voegelin away with my notes on him as a figure with whom I disagree deeply, but who does manage to have a perspective much at odds with my usual way of thinking. This is no doubt because I am myself totally compromised by gnosticism.