Before the Law

You heard it here first

Someday, sooner rather than later I hope, I will get back to real blog-writing; in the meantime another thought on the run . . . .   I  predict that very soon, Hillary Clinton will start "speaking truth to the American people" -- that is, start telling us something that we already know (because every thoughtful person knows it) but that doesn't get acknowledged publicly very much because of its political sensitivity.  It will probably, although not necessarily, be about gender relations -- "post-feminism" or something like that -- and it might not take the form of a particular speech (that might be too blatant even for her).   It won't be the substance that's important, but the tone -- "I am a real enough person to speak the truth without fear or favor," etc.  You heard it here first.   

The legitimate element of Clinton's campaign has consisted in attempting to draw a contrast between herself and Obama along the lines of:  sure he's eloquent,  but politics takes more than words, it takes monkey-grease, late nights on the job, and know-how.  The dark side has been her attempts, on one hand, to steal the things that have worked for Obama -- the "change" theme, and so on -- while, on the other, to smear him in ways that John McCain would probably not to sink to himself, but which will certainly benefit him handsomely in November if Obama ends up as the Democratic nominee (for a catalog of the more recent slime by Clinton and her proxies, see this Bob Herbert column from the NY Times).   The legitimate campaign theme hasn't worked too well -- after Bush it's certainly true that most Americans demand competence in their preferred candidate, but that's a necessary and not sufficient condition (we'd like a little inspiration, too), and despite her efforts to compare Obama to George Bush, she hasn't convinced anyone that Obama fails on that count.   And so, following Obama's much- and rightly admired speech on race yesterday, I expect that we will see the light go on over Clinton's head -- "ahh, being real, being thoughtful -- not being completely and utterly political! -- is working for him; hell, I can do that, too!"  And so I expect we'll soon be seeing the logical end-point of Clintonism: the greatness bestowed by rising above political calculation imitated in the service of sheer political calculation (along with, no doubt, the attempt to drag that genuine greatness back down into the  mud). 

A new role model for McCain

From today's New York Times:

Addressing a packed ballroom in Columbus, Ohio, Mr. McCain said to cheers that he would urge the nation not to be “deceived by an eloquent but empty call for change that promises no more than a holiday from history” and warned against risking “the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate.”

"Eloquent but empty"?  "Holiday from history"?  Apparently at least one of McCain's speech writers thinks that channeling the ghost of Spiro Agnew will help him compete with Obama's oratorical flair . . . .

More on Simon Critchley

UPDATE:  The full version of the review is now downloadable from SSRN here.

Having finally finished reading Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding, I am in a somewhat better position to opine than in my previous post on this topic, and have put my two bits in the form of a short review (forthcoming in the journal Law, Culture & the Humanities).  Here are the first two paragraphs, which more or less contain my bottom line:

      For the past fifteen years, Simon Critchley has been one of the foremost explicators of contemporary Continental philosophy for the English-speaking audience.  During the same period, he has been developing his own philosophical positions on ethics, politics and art in a series of books and articles that both draw on and re-work these Continental sources.  In his new book, Infinitely Demanding, he condenses this body of work into a succinct programmatic summa of his own ethical-political philosophy, one whose practical-political aim is a defense of a revised concept of political anarchism.
    If, as I will suggest below, his analysis provokes some questions that leave the ultimate success of his project in doubt, that does not diminish the value of this ambitious book, which raises all of the right questions at our current philosophico-historical juncture, questions that Anglo-American moral and political philosophy has for the most part swept under the rug.  Above all, Critchley should be applauded for recognizing that the problem of political motivation – the impetus to act politically as opposed to other motives for and forms of action – is not simply an empirical question of individual or group interest, but also a philosophical problem, perhaps the most pressing political-philosophical problem of our time.  The disenchanting powers of modernity have provided fodder for philosophical reflection at least since the Romantic era.  If these powers have now undermined our most basic sense of ourselves as zoon politikon – and there is plenty of evidence that they have, from voter-turnout statistics to the denatured, scientistic “policy analysis” that today substitutes for political reflection and deliberation – then it is high time for political philosophy to address the possibility of a cure as well as diagnosing the disease.  Critchley recognizes this situation and calls it by name, and his book deserves attention and response for this reason alone.

In the meantime

I have had the blog-itch for months now with no time to scratch, and still don't, unfortunately.  Maybe next month, after I figure out where I live and what I'm going to do when I grow up.  Anyway, in lieu of something more interesting, some self-promotion:  I've posted a paper I just finished here, titled "On Continental Philosophy in American Jurisprudence."  It's a Hegelian reading of the Legal Realist Karl Llewellyn's short essay "On Philosophy in American Law," coming out in an anthology of contemporary responses to that essay.  I also recently posted a new and improved version of "Specters and Scholars: Derrida and the Tragedy of Political Thought" here.  Some other older papers are available here.   More, sooner rather than later, I hope . . . .

I just love a good allusion

Here's one from two of my favorite social commentators, Paul Krugman and Talking Heads:  Same Old Party.  It's some kind of index of some kind of generational change when T. Heads can be referenced in an NYT op-ed piece without the need for citation.  Or something.  In any event, there is, in fact, water at the bottom of the ocean . . . .

"The Christ-figure of cultural studies" and the twilight of "theory"

Jeremy Harding has an excellent review in the LRB of (yet another) personal memoir of Benjamin's final hours at the Spanish border as he attempted to flee France in 1940, an attempt that culminated in his death (most probably by suicide but with enough threads left dangling to feed various conspiracy theories of skulduggery by the Nazis or the Stalinists).  I recommend both that article and the source that directed me to it, a recent post at Long Sunday by Roger Whitson, who uses Harding's review as a springboard to reflect on his own work and what he sees as the belated and melancholy state of cultural studies and "theory" more generally.   Benjamin, he says, is the "Christ-figure of cultural studies"; "American cultural studies is founded, in a large sense, in the haunting shadow of Benjamin's death," and, more personally, he "wonder[s] if [his] own work is not a mourning ritual for figures like Benjamin."  Indeed, he suggest that in the wake of the recent deaths of so many of the greatest generation of theorists -- he mentions Baudrillard, Said, and Derrida -- melancholy is now theory's defining zeitgeist:  "'[T]heory' as it has been conceived and practiced over the past thirty years might be slowly approaching the dusk of its proverbial day."  And he concludes by speculating that this melancholic mood might explain the recent spate of documentaries about "theory celebrities" (he mentions films about Derrida, Zizek and Judith Butler in addition to Benjamin).  These films "all contribute to this odd mourning ritual for theory that show me just how unwilling many people are to give up the theoretical ghost."

I feel profoundly identified with Roger's intense personal involvement with Benjamin's story -- who indeed can feel that they "get" Benjamin, or are even beginning to get a glimmer, without finding themselves becoming addicted to both the thought and the man?  (As Benjamin said (roughly quoting here from memory), "thought can be as intoxicating as any narcotic, not to mention that drug we take in solitude, ourselves."  And I have my own mystical Benjamin-and-film experience -- standing in front of the "new theory" shelves downstairs in the old St. Mark's Bookstore sometime in the early 1980's, as was my frequent wont at the time, I noticed that I seemed to be in view behind a woman with frizzy hair talking earnestly into a camera and stepped out of the picture, too late, it turned out a couple of years later when I attended a screening of a film on Benjamin narrated by Susan Buck-Morss, to avoid appearing in the background, hunched over in my sad brown leather bomber jacket . . . .)   And I think Roger's description of the "theory" zeitgeist is probably accurate as well.  But my own view of the situation is more jaded.  Roger says of this situation, "All that remains, for so-called 'theory culture' is to consume the dead," and I think he's right, but not in the sense that he apparently intends -- rather, in the sense in which "theory" had previously "consumed" the living, by turning them into intellectual commodities to be examined, compared, picked over or bought wholesale in the marketplace of ideas of the (mostly American, I think) academy.  And there remain plenty of brand names to take to market if one is so inclined -- Agamben, Badiou and Zizek are still going strong, to name only the three that come immediately to mind.  If "theory" is "approaching the dusk of its proverbial day," it may be more because of an exhaustion of or with "theory" itself than with the death of (some) of its objects.  And (to press perhaps a little too hard on the "dusk" metaphor), by that same token it might be time to again start calling it "philosophy," which Hegel tells us only flies at fall of dusk, and treating it as an intellectual tradition in its own right -- with all the difficulties and self-contradictions that that admittedly entails -- and not as an eclectic, interdisciplinary congeries of thinkers-of-the-moment.  "Philosophy" is a more old-fashioned name, of course, but Benjamin, for one, preferred old-fashioned names to neologisms.  And he put his trust for salvation (or as much as he had of that) in the outmoded and the old-fashioned, not in the fashionable and new.   

September 27 is the 67th anniversary of Benjamin's death (probably -- the precise date is a subject of dispute).  Don't forget to light a candle.

Derrida on love

Compliments of Continental Philosophy and MySpaceTV, here's a clip of Derrida trying not to talk about love, but eventually giving in.  No time to expand on this, alas, but I think the distinction he makes between loving "someone" and loving "something" is critical to the question of political motivation that is  Simon Critchley's concern in his recent Infinitely Demanding (see recent posts here and at Long Sunday), as well as, e.g., to the possibility of expanding Levinas's conception of ethics beyond the humanism that people complain about . . . .  On that cryptic note, here's the video, if I can figure out how to get it into this post:

Derrida parle pour l’amour

Levinas and death, part I

What follows is an excerpt from a draft paper on Levinas's interpretation of death I presented at a conference this past fall.  I'm posting it here to respond to and continue an exchange I've been having with John C. Halasz over at Long Sunday, to which exchange I refer you for the background . . . .  More to follow later, I hope and expect.

The first fragment is, I think, more cryptic.  "The death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already, and weighs upon me like an obsession with death."€  The ethical Other is, for Blanchot, death already; death stands in place of the Other and thus, one can infer that our relationship to the Other is like, indeed is the same as, our relationship to death.  What can this possibly mean? 
    Before trying to suggest a Blanchotian answer to that question, it is worth noting that although Levinas in various places compares the relationship to the Other to the relationship to death -- death confronts the ego as a trauma, absolute and unknowable exteriority irreducible to thematization, and so on -- he never, to my knowledge (please correct me if I'm wrong!) identifies the Other with death.  By way of single example, in Otherwise than Being, in his discussion of substitution and the self as hostage, he says that in the infinite responsibility for the Other, the self "is in a deathlike passivity!" (124; my emphasis). 
    But if he does not take the step of identifying death with the Other, that does not mean he can avoid the problem of death at the heart of the aporia between the ethical face-to-face and justice for the third.  Indeed, in its most general form, the problem I'™m addressing here in the medium of death--€“ how to locate an ethical exigency within and prior to the conatus of ontology, how to find the Other within the Same --“ constituted his entire project in Otherwise than Being and much of his late work.  While he addressed the specific question of death at greatest length (at least, to my knowledge, in the work that'™s been translated into English) in the seminar series titled Death and Time, references to death and the problem of finding an ethical interpretation of it to contest Heidegger'€™s ontological interpretation are scattered throughout his work. 
    One strategy he employs to negotiate this problem, upon which the discussion of ethical subjectivity in Otherwise than Being apparently rests, is to suggest that the constitution of the self and Ego in subjection to the ethical Other simply bypasses the Heideggerian foundation of egoity or jemeinigkeit on death.  Thus, he says that the ethical constitution of the subject as hostage has a "œmeaning despite death"€ and that "€œ[c]ontrary to the ontology of death this self opens an order in which death can be not recognized."  (115).  Even more clearly, at the end of the chapter on "œSubstitution," where he specifically takes up the problem of the third in relation to the ethical constitution of subjectivity, acknowledging that it rests on different, "œunethical" (in his sense) grounds, he claims that the ethical self'™s passivity "œis not only the possibility of death in being, the possibility of impossibility."  Rather, this ethical constitution gives birth a meaning of death as "'being able to die' subject to sacrifice," that is, a meaning for death that -- aside from or next to the meaning of death as Dasein'™s ownmost possibility -- makes the sacrifice of the one-for-another equally fundamental.
    I do not think this strategy works, at least to the extent that Levinas'™s ambition is to ground ontology on ethics, and not simply give ethics an equal share of philosophical profundity.  To recognize another meaning for death --“ an ethical one in addition to the ontological one -- is not the same as making the ethical relationship fundamental.  Nor do I think that Levinas'™s other solution, which he elaborated in Totality and Infinity, works, either.  In the section on "The Will and Death," Levinas takes up the phenomenology of death and attempts to articulate a meaning for death that avoids the ontological interpretations of a passage to nothingness or passage to a higher existence in favor of one that rests on the social relationship.  How does he give death, which for Heidegger is what was most unshareably one'™s own, a social meaning?  By associating it with murder.  Death, he says, "threatens me from beyond," and refers to a "malevolence, . . . the residue of a bad will which surprises and stalks."  (234)  Thus death, "€œthe unknown that frightens," appears to consciousness as if it "€œcomes from the other, and this alterity, precisely as absolute, strikes me in an evil design or in a judgment of justice."  In short, "[i]n the being for death of fear I am not faced with nothingness, but faced with what is against me, as though murder, rather than being one of the occasions for dying, were inseparable from the essence of death."  (234, original emphasis).   And thus, Levinas claims, death'™s meaning is social before it is ontological, referring first of all to the threat of an Other and the possibility of being murdered.
    I mentioned Jesse Sims's article before, in which he argues that Schmitt's concept of politics as war necessarily rests on Levinas's concept of peace.  I think this argument is correct, as far as it goes.  But it seems to me that in the passages I have just quoted Levinas concedes everything to Schmitt -- even granting the sociality still implied in the relation of friend to enemy, the notion at the heart of Sims'™s argument --“ at least to the extent that Schmitt’s conception of killing ultimately rests on a conception of death.  For here, hasn'™t Levinas privileged, absolutely, at least insofar as the question is death, the Other as enemy, as murderer?  Of course the Other is the unknown and always may arrive to kill instead of welcome (we know this from Levinas himself as well as Derrida), but here Levinas goes beyond that possibility and gives an absolute priority to, or so it seems to me, the murderous Other.  Moreover, he says that the meaning of death appears as the Other's "evil design or . . . judgment of justice."  By attributing death's meaning as a "judgment of justice," hasn't Levinas here conceded to the relationship to third, with its necessary return to the ontological exigency, the primary role in the meaning of death?  And, more fundamentally, doesn't the exigency of death-as-murder refer, before it suggests the possibility of an appeal to the murderous Other for mercy, to the conatus of the self fearful first of all for its own life? 
    Levinas insists that he does not intend to insert death into "a primitive (or developed) religious system that would explain it" -- that is, an animistic notion of natural forces as taking on human malevolence.  Yet it appears to me that that is exactly what he does in this argument.  Apart from that, it also seems to me that his phenomenological analysis of death is faulty here as well -- whether or not we anticipate death as something that will befall us, I don't think people relate this thought to murderous intent, but, absent special cases, to impersonal and inhuman forces.  Be that as it may, Levinas at least purported to retain this analysis of death as late as the 1975 lecture course on Death and Time that I mentioned above, and while I do not believe that it appears as such in Otherwise than Being, it may provide one explanation for the -- to my mind unnecessary for his philosophical purposes -- hyperbolic rhetoric of "persecution" and "accusation" that Levinas employs in the course of analyzing subjectivity as substitution and hostage, to the extent that this rhetoric can be read as a sublimation of the murderous approach of the Other.

On Simon Critchley, opining without reading, political motivation, etc.

There's a great comment stream at Long Sunday right now, following a post by Jodi Dean on Simon Critchley's new book, Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance.  I'm finding it thoroughly enjoyable in part because it's turned into a discussion of Levinas's positioning vis a vis the ethical and the political (a topic I can't stay away from), but mostly because it's such a pristine example of one of my very favorite pastimes, shooting from the hip with definitive opinions about books that I haven't actually read.   Jodi begins by admitting that she's only skimmed the book before skewering it in her post, and the discussion that follows is full of admissions of not having read it, but . . ., haven't read the book but have seen him lecture recently and . . ., and so on.  You gotta love (and recognize and, in my case at least, identify with) it . . . .

Anyway, having put in my two bits on the Levinas issues in the comments there, I will join the fray of uninformed opiners over here.  Jodi begins by noting that Critchley's argument begins with the question of political motivation ("The basic argument builds from Critchley's particular version of Levinasian ethics as a motivation for a political response to the present"), but then leaves that aside (she says she'll have more to say about it later, which I look forward to) in favor of a critique of Critchley's (substantive) anarchist political stance.  I can't argue with Jodi's critique -- since I haven't read that far in Critchley's book yet -- but, having gotten as far as the introduction (really -- I even finished it!), I want to defend Critchley insofar as he begins with the question of political motivation.  In particular, I agree with him that "modernity itself has had the effect of generating a motivational deficit in morality that undermines the possibility of ethical secularism," that "[w]hat is required . . . is a conception of ethics that begins by accepting the motivational deficit in the institutions of liberal democracy, but without embracing either [what Critchley calls] passive or active nihilism," and that "[w]hat is lacking at the present time of massive political disappointment is a motivating, empowering conception of ethics that can face and face down the drift of the present."  Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the substantive political stance that he grows from this beginning, I applaud him for framing the fundamental problem in terms of motivation. 

What does "motivation" mean in this context?  Well, I don't know what Critchley means exactly, since, uh, I haven't actually read the book (he does say the fundamental question is "How does a self bind itself to whatever it determines as its good?" in the introduction, at least).  But that won't stop me from speculating that he means something like the "ethical injunction" that Derrida posits in Adieu to Levinas which enjoins a political decision without, however, in any way determining the content of that political decision.  "Political motivation" would thus be the quasi-transcendental, ethical condition not only of possibility but of necessity for the political decision.  I would also read into this notion of "political motivation" Derrida's discussion of the ethical relation to alterity as the moment of disjunction that rends the present and demands, in every moment, (inevitably violent, from the perspective of ethics) political action as redemption of past violence (in Specters of Marx, the section about Heidegger's "Anaximander Fragment").  In that sense, the notion of "political motivation" that I have in mind (and who knows, maybe Critchley does, too!) is also the transcendental condition of possibility/necessity of temporality and history as well.  I'm sorely tempted to continue speculating in this vein -- I have some ideas about where, why and how Critchley goes wrong, if he goes wrong, in the substantive political stance draws from all this -- but perhaps I'll read a few more pages first . . . .

Agamben fails to rise from the dead (or in my estimation)

Sitting in my hotel room in London, on my way home from attending "The Messianic Now: Politics, Religion, Philosophy" in Lancaster, England -- a great conference, with kudos to the organizers, Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher -- I feel compelled to testify to what I saw and what I failed to see today.  The conference  title is pretty much self-explanatory; lots of talk about Benjamin, Scholem, Derrida, etc., and, of course, Agamben, who was probably mentioned more than anyone else, and who was billed as the keynote speaker for the concluding session this afternoon.  Based on things I had heard and my own, limited (failure of) communication with him, I had had my doubts all along that he was actually going to show, but was repeatedly told by the conference organizers that he was on board.  Chatting with one of the organizers after I arrived, I learned that he had something of a personal relationship with Agamben -- had spent some time with him at an event in Germany -- and that Agamben had repeatedly assured him that he was going to come, and that he wanted to do a session with graduate students and an open public lecture on Friday in addition to today's conference lecture (all of which, I assume, had been arranged).  In any event, yesterday I was told that Agamben had e-mailed as recently as Tuesday that he was coming (although, interestingly, he failed to respond to the specific request that he tell the organizers what flight he wanted to take from Venice).  Needless to say, come today, the moment of truth, the ho nyn kairos, and, behold, oh ye of too much  faith, he fails to show.

It's sorely tempting to turn this into an allegory of the competing virtues of a Levinasian ethics of responsibility and a Heideggerian ethos of dwelling contentedly in one's ownmost (one's ownmost, mind you, and no one else's!) possibilities, but that might make me sound resentful . . . .  In fact, the much-discussed question of Agamben's heralded parousia -- will he or won't he? -- provided the perfect background music to this conference on messianism, and his ultimate failure to come may have spoken more eloquently to the contemporary relevance of messianism -- or academic messianism, anyway -- than anything he could have actually  said . . . .