Before the Law

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.

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 . . . .

Rorty and Romanticism

About to set off for a conference on political and other varieties of messianism (and procrastinating writing my paper, for a change), I've been thinking more about Richard Rorty, the least messianic of  our contemporary philosophers.   For reasons that I may get to in another post (and hope to at least suggest in this one), it seems to me that his thinking and the chord it strikes with our cultural moment (despite, and in part because of, its controversy) are important symptoms of the zeitgeist and one its most significant pathologies (a pathology that is dominant, at least, in the United States).  Despite the frequent op-eds and other political commentary of his latter career, it seems to me that Rorty (or I should say, his philosophical position) is ultimately the enemy of the political, at least the political that we need today, which is not any particular political program, doctrine or set of norms, but the ethical drive to act politically that is the prerequisite of all these specific forms of politics.

I've been mulling over some recent posts by Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization (marginally relevant to my topic here, but I especially recommend this one, which bitterly rejects patriotism and, beyond that, calls for the downfall of the political state -- not something you see everyday coming from a law professor).  The one that got me thinking about Rorty and his significance to contemporary culture is titled " Legal Theory as Myth Construction"  (I should note that Tamanaha wrote one about Rorty too).   In it, Tamanaha floats the idea (which he recognizes is not original) that theory-making in general and legal theorizing in particular constitutes, at least sometimes, myth-making as well.  His notion of myth is modest and attractive and in fact resembles in some ways (although he is less radical) Rorty's neo-pragmatic notions about truth being no different than the stories we successfully manage to tell ourselves and so on.  In any event, it is striking to hear legal theory identified with myth even as cautiously as Tamanaha does it (and again, particularly striking to hear that coming from the mouth of a law professor!), and it reminded me of that most radical of all claims of this type, the call for a new "mythology of reason."  That fabulously paradoxical notion comes from the so-called "Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism," an anonymous fragment from 1797 the authorship of which has been attributed variously to Hegel, Schelling and/or Hölderlin.  (An on-line version, which has a couple of typos, is available here.) 

The "Oldest Systematic Program" packs more intellectual ambition -- or rather, ambition for the intellect -- into one page of text than one would have thought possible, and for that reason alone it constitutes a virtual anti-Rorty screed.  Beginning with the notion that, after Kant, the idea of moral freedom must be the foundation of metaphysics, it moves on to endorse a radical politics ("We must therefore go beyond the state!-- Because every state must treat free human beings like mechanical works; and it should not do that; therefore it should cease.") and the unity of truth, the good, and beauty ("I am convinced that the highest act of reason, which, in that it comprises all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness are united like sisters only in beauty-- The philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet.").   On every point, the radically romantic idealism of this text seems to be opposed to Rorty's chastened notion of a reason that must constantly be on guard against exceeding its boundaries, and not just the boundary between finite Verstand and infinite Vernunft a la Kant, but between private (aesthetic) critical irony and public, political (and non-critical) reason (see my earlier Rorty post on this self-limitation).  On the other hand, there's a pragmatic element to the "Oldest Systematic Program" as well -- the notion that the aestheticization of philosophy and politics is necessary to reach "the people."  All of these elements combine in the final call for the new "mythology of reason":

First I will speak about an idea here, which as far as I know, has never occurred to anyone's mind-- we must have a new mythology; this mythology must, however, stand in the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason.

Until we make ideas aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they hold no interest for the people, and conversely, before mythology is reasonable, the philosopher must be ashamed of it. Thus finally the enlightened and unenlightened must shake hands; mythology must become philosophical, and the people reasonable, and philosophy must become mythological in order to make philosophy sensual. Then external unity will reign among us. Never again the contemptuous glance, never the blind trembling of the people before its wise men and priests. Only then does equal development of all powers await us, of the individual as well as if all individuals. No power will be suppressed any longer, then general freedom and equality of spirits will reign-- A higher spirit sent from heaven must establish this religion among us, it will be the last work of the human race.

There you  have it -- a proto-Hegelian "external unity" of philosophy, politics, art and religion (although I would highlight the fact that in this passage, religion, unlike the other fields, is not derived from the idea of reason but arrives from an outside -- a "heaven" -- even though this arrival is also described as a human achievement, "the last work of the human race").  Could any "program" be less Rorty-esque?  And yet we should recall Rorty's statement, early in his career, that "the time may have come to try to recapture John Dewey's 'naturalized' version of Hegelian historicism"  (from "The World Well Lost").  What began as an impulse to free reason from its philosophical (more accurately, metaphysical) presuppositions by taking its status as language ("vocabulary," narrative, story, myth) seriously ended, in works like Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, with reason itself crumbling into tiny component parts (private ironies, public values, etc.) so feeble that they could not even justify themselves, much less join together in any kind of unity, even a non-metaphysical one, that would justify use of the general term "reason" at all.   Having rejected the idealist glue that held the language of "reason" together (the best name for which, as in this fragment, still remains today "religion"), Rorty could not -- and the rest of us haven't been able to, either -- find a way to keep it from falling apart completely.  All that remains of "reason" after this collapse (which, again, is our collapse, it's cultural) is the positivistic vocabulary of the natural sciences, which has recently gone on the attack against the rear-guard actions being fought by the anti-rationalist forms of religion represented by fundamentalism (which are of course themselves symptoms of this collapse).  (See, for example, the recent books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens denouncing the whole idea of religion, analyzed with typical flair by Stanley Fish in his New York Time blog (alas you need a TimesSelect subscription to read them .  . . .). 

I hope it's clear that I'm not advocating that we can or should save "reason" in its Romantic form, especially to the extent that it rested ultimately on religious notions that were themselves metaphysical (the Christian substrate of the "Oldest Systematic Program," for example, is apparent in the distinction between the "spirit" and the "letter" that it rests on and the incarnationist solution that it proposes).  But the (apparent) disappearance of even the possibility of a rational religion -- of a new "mythology of reason," if you like -- does seem to me to characterize the cultural dilemma we now find ourselves facing, in the realm of politics -- where the chief problem, in the United States, at least, is not figuring out what needs to be done (we all have opinions about that) but convincing ourselves to get off  our self-satisfied, materialistic asses and doing it -- as well as in other spheres.  The various contemporary attempts to articulate a (non-Romantic, non-metaphysical) notion of  "political messianism" (which are the impetus for next week's conference) represent one way that some philosophers are attempting to resolve this cultural lack; I'm looking forward to what the participants have to say. 

Richard Rorty

I left this comment over at Balkinization last night while avoiding grading, but thought I would reprint it here by way of slipping back into the business.   Much  more to be said, of course, but I think I stand by this as a first pass at my feelings about him:

For me the sad thing about Rorty (and it's interesting to hear others' in-person perceptions of him; when I heard him lecture he sounded depressed) was that the value of his pragmatic critiques of the scientism, irrelevance, etc., of contemporary analytic philosophy ultimately got lost in something very much like neo-positivism -- a stubborn insistence on a strictly behaviorist theory of meaning (which he himself recognized was "reminiscent of the positivists’ verificationism") combined with an (equally stubborn) insistence on a kind of discourse nominalism, the notion that one can blithely live out one's life in incommensurable discourses (or "vocabularies") with out ever experiencing a conflict or need to reconcile them ("We should confine ourselves to making sure that we are not burdened with obsolete ways of speaking, and then insuring that those vocabularies that are still useful stay out of each other’s way"). (The quotes are from a 2005 talk, "Naturalism and Quietism," available on-line.) The net result was the kind of theses that drove me (and others as well) crazy in CIS, to the effect that we can ironize -- by which he meant, question critically -- the liberal values handed down to us by tradition in private, but we had better stand by them in public regardless of the results of that (private) critical inquiry. That is, Rorty's pragmatism seemed to end not just in a rejection of pointless philosophizing, but in exhortations to avoid critical thought more generally. The problem is that at least for some people (many of whom are religious but not all), meaning means something more than patterns of behavior, and, I think, for virtually everyone, it's essentially impossible to keep vocabularies from "getting in each other's way" -- at least, vocabularies that one actually lives in or through. Critical thought thus isn't just a life-choice or language game that can be passed up in favor of something else; it's forced on (at least some of) us by an existential condition. Rorty started out telling us that philosophy shouldn't scratch where it doesn't itch but ended up with a philosophy that amounts to urging us to stop itching, which isn't nearly as useful advice.

"It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill"

This post continues a conversation that most recentlyhas been carried on at I cite under the post titled "Kill!  Kill!"  The topic is solidarity; Jodi takes issue, via two quotes from Zizek, with my attempt to formulate a notion of solidarity in Derridian/Levinasian terms (earlier posts here and here).  Leaving the Zizek quotes aside for the moment (I'll return to them below), here is Jodi's account of the difference between her Zizekian notion of solidarity and mine:

One of the first major differences concerns the Levinasian injunction 'thou shalt not kill,' an injunction at the 'level of ethical debt to the Other' (Adam's words). Zizek's position is strictly opposed to this; in fact, he inverts the prohibition entirely: 'it is not permitted to us not to kill.' For Adam, the Levinasian injunction is one of accountability to a Third, an accountability that prevents one from treating killing perversely, that is, by making excuses for killing. In Zizek's version, the Levinasian injunction does not escape obscenity of the superego, however, precisely because of the inability to satisfy or even grasp the injunction under which we come under. To this extent, far from escaping the murderous dimension of Stalinism, the injunction not to kill devolves into kill, kill!

Additional differences appear, I think, when we consider the way that Adam's Levinasian position oscillates primarily between All and One: my accountability to all, becomes, ultimately, MY accountability. What is missing--the mediation of a collective, of a militant, solidarity group. Thus, Adam's examples involve the individual having to deal with getting up in the morning, contributing to charity, deciding whether or not to strike. These are already political, in Adam's view. To my mind, these are personal and ethical matters. They can be politicized. In fact, I don't think that the acts on their own are even ethical; they are meaningless until mediated, interpreted, made part of a collective political practice, or, until interpreted, reflected upon.

Thus, Adam wants to eliminate the partisan divide from his notion of solidarity; to my mind, this takes the notion away from class struggle, from the fundamental antagonism constitutive of the social. The only struggle discernible in Adam's account is that of the individual toward all (or, toward all humans, because division is unavoidable, Adam encounters the opposite of the human and the impulse toward dehumanization). There simply isn't the conceptual space for a partisan, solidary association of those engaged in political struggle. In fact, the Levinasian framework seems to foreclose the very possibility of such a politics insofar as it limits the political field in advance, precluding the possibility that these limitations have been and remain matters of political struggle and determination.

(There's also a very interesting exchange between Jodi and Alain, who holds down the Levinasian end of the discussion, in the comments as well. )

Jodi's objections and her reliance on Zizek (and on his characteristically inflammatory interpretation of the first commandment as, in effect if not intention, "Kill!  Kill!") would be a great stepping off point for a discussion of the relationship between the Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of the relation to the Other and the Levinasian-ethical one, but I don't feel up to that at the moment (in large part because my knowledge of Lacan is so schematic that I'm not the person to attempt it).  But, leaving that general question aside, what interests me is that it's pretty clear to me that Jodi and I don't actually disagree on much.  Thus, Jodi seems to have misunderstood me, or, perhaps -- although for obvious reasons I hesitate to suggest this -- misunderstood Zizek on this point.

The key moment of this misunderstanding is encapsulated in Jodi's citation of the quote from Brecht's "Die Massnahme" that Zizek relies on in articulating his understanding of "thou shalt not kill":  "It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill."  To be clear (I hope):  I agree with this sentiment entirely, precisely as stated.  Which is to say, I agree that it is not, in fact, given to us not to kill, at least not yet ("still"), and that the infinitely long wait for that still-undelivered gift is a matter of melancholic regret (a tonality that (I think) is palpable even in this English rendition of Brecht's original German). 

The full passage from which Zizek (and then Jodi) draws this quotation is as follows, and it seems to me to confirm this reading:

"It is a terrible thing to kill.
But not only others would we kill, but ourselves too if need be
Since only force can alter this
Murderous world, as
Every living creature knows.
It is still, we said
Not given to us not to kill."

It is in fact a terrible thing to kill -- that is all that "thou shalt not kill" means and can mean -- but it's nevertheless, sometimes, a necessary thing.  There is  no inconsistency in those two positions if one accepts that "thou shalt not kill" is an ethical injunction rather than a principle of truth in the philosophical (read: ontological) sense.  Politics, in the essentially Derridian reading of Levinas that I've been defending, is a matter of actuality, the art of the possible, the (always contingent) formation of alliances that are ultimately strategic (in the Schmittian friend-enemy sense) no matter how based they may be in deep-seated structural interests.  And politics is essential, "since only force can alter this murderous world," as Brecht so beautifully puts it.  As such, politics is (as Jodi insists) distinct from ethical responsibility, which however rooted in the singularity of the face-to-face is by that very token owed to all, as well as being subject to the (again, ethical) edict to do no violence to the Other.  Derrida's point, however, is that ethical responsibility itself demands that we strategize, calculate, engage in politics -- in a word, that we kill -- just to the extent that the Other is not an abstraction but an actuality, a singular being that exists in fact in "this murderous world" of ours.  (And the flip side of this demand is that politics cannot be avoided -- the point of my examples of getting up in the morning, deciding to contribute to Oxfam or to let those children starve, to cross the picket line or not, and so on, is that not that they are ethical (they may or may not be), but that they are necessarily political just insofar as they all involve, directly or indirectly, an act of killing.  To put it another way, that this world is "murderous" is not a politically contingent fact but itself an existential-ontological condition.) 

Thus, while it may be true that I want to "eliminate the partisan divide from [my] notion of solidarity" -- and in fact I do, because I think that's the only way to preserve the sense of  solidarity as event per my earlier post -- I certainly do not want to "eliminate the partisan divide" itself; in fact, the point of the Derridian-Levinasian position is that one has to take sides, decide which side that you're on, precisely by virtue of one's ethical  responsibility.  But I do think that it matters that the source of this partisan side-taking is ethical (in the Levinasian sense) rather than something else.  I'm not at all sure that Jodi agrees with this, however (in fact some of the things she says in the comments strongly suggest  otherwise), and it's here that I think she may misinterpret Zizek, at least on this narrow point (Jodi, please correct me on this if, as I expect, you disagree). 

I say this because Zizek himself articulates quite beautifully the significance of the ethical to  the political in the very essay from which Jodi takes that wonderful Brecht quote (a signficance that, as I've tried to suggest, is already nascent in the melancholic tone of the quote itself).  (The essay, on the director Heinrich Mueller, is available on-line here.)  In this passage, which concludes the essay, Zizek distinguishes between the "must" -- the sphere of the Real of "this murderous world," where killing is a political necessity -- and the "ought," the level of the Symbolic order and the obscene splitting of the moral injunction by the superego (which, by the way, operates at a different level of subject-constitution than Levinasian ethical responsibility, something that I think isn't clear in Jodi's post).  He draws from this distinction the need for a politics that  abides by a principle of "Justice with Love," that is, of "killing with pieta," "killing without dehumanizing the enemy," or as I would put it, a politics ("killing") suffused with ethical responsibility:

"Must" and "Ought" thus relate as the Real and the Symbolic: the Real of a drive whose injunction cannot be avoided (which is why Lacan says that the status of a drive is ethical); the Ought as a symbolic ideal caught in the dialectic of desire (if you ought not do something, this very prohibition generates the desire to do it). When you "must" do something, it means you have no choice but to do it, even if is terrible: in Wagner's Die Walkuere, Wotan is cornered by Fricka and he "must" ("cannot but") allow the murder of Siegmund, although his heart bleeds for him; he "must" ("cannot but") punish Brunhilde, his dearest child, the embodiment of his own innermost striving. And, incidentally, the same goes for Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the Bayreuth staging of which was Mueller's last great theatrical achievement: they MUST, they CANNOT BUT, indulge in their passion, even if this goes against their Sollen, their social obligations.

In Wotan's forced exercise of punishment, Wagner encounters here the paradox of the "killing with pieta" at work from the Talmud (which calls us to dispense Justice with Love) to Brecht's two key Lehrstuecke, Der Jasager and Die Massnahme, in which the young comrade is killed by his companions with loving tenderness. And although Mueller disagreed with Die Massnahme, proposing, in his Mauser, a critique of its political logic, his critique is strictly internal: his reproach to Brecht is precisely that he did not draw all the consequences from the stance of "killing with pieta," of killing without dehumanizing the enemy. And this is what today, in our time in which the abstract humanitarian rejection of violence is accompanied by its obscene double, the anonymous killing WITHOUT pieta, we need more than ever.

Beautifully put, and entirely consistent, I think, with the Derridian-Levinasian take on the ethical status of the political.  Nothing could be more foreign to the singularity of Levinasian ethics than an "abstract humanitarian rejection of violence"; and nothing, sorrowfully, more consistent with Derrida's political interpretation of Levinas than a (Talmudic) notion of killing "with loving tenderness."  "It is still, we said, not given to us not to kill."  Yes, exactly, alas. 

 

On solidarity (II) -- response to a comment

Nate posted a comment at I cite that I want to respond to here.  Nate says, inter alia:

As much as I like the formulation of solidarity as an event between those who don't (or don't need to? that seems an important difference, somehow, and I'm not clear on which you mean) have anything in common... there's also the matter that there are points and places where solidarity should not be extended, or should be only in the most limited of senses (such that extension or full extension of solidarity would be something of a mockery of the word). At a basic level, I mean solidarity with bosses. Class struggle involves hurting people at least emotionally (and more so if we look at a number of historical examples - I hope I don't sound like I'm romanticizing violence against people, I think that's actually quite ill advised). Picket lines hurt bosses profits, and some frontline managers almost always get fired in a successful union drive, in retaliation for not busting the union and because managers don't have (m)any protect labor rights so they make good sacrifices to appease upper management's anger. Of course, you could say that no schema of solidarity (certainly not one I can indicate) contains a decision procedure for who solidarity happens to/between and who it doesn't happen to/between, and I'd have to agree. But solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of.

I disagree -- let me see if I can articulate this.  "Solidarity" in the fundamental sense that I'm trying to develop is in fact inherently unstable, that is, lacking in the kind of limits that Nate (and many others) think are necessary for political action.  That's because although solidarity qua event is a response to singularity -- and therefore "limited" in the extreme -- Nate is correct that there are no theoretical (or ethical) limits on  the singularities (the "faces") to whom one turns one's own face.   But that doesn't render politics impossible (something that I think is a concern of Jodi's as well), it simply humanizes it, if I can use that word.  Again, there's a level-of-analysis elision that seems virtually impossible to avoid with Levinas (a sign, I think, of the genuine novelty and brilliance of his thought) that creates this confusion.  Let me put it this way, using a Levinasian example.  Levinas says, "Thou shalt not kill" is an unbreakable injunction; that is, one quite literally cannot "kill" the Other whom one encounters in the face-to-face.  Yeeesh, you say, how  am I supposed to go about my day-to-day political activities without "killing" at least some Others, if not literally then at least figuratively or indirectly (by causing a front-line manager to get fired, lose her health insurance, fail to get needed medical attention, and die, to use Nate's example)?  The answer is that the unbreakable injunction "thou shalt not kill" is for Levinas an injunction at the (ontologically constitutive, albeit) level of the ethical debt to the Other.   That is, the thing that one cannot kill is one's pre-existing debt (or responsibility) to that Other.  What does this mean in terms of Nate's example?  It does not mean that you should refuse to join the strike because the event of your solidarity with the striking Other will have lethal consequences for some Third (the front-line manager).  In fact every act of solidarity with an Other has quite literally lethal consequences for some Third, in fact a multitude of Thirds (Derrida has some really beautiful and passionate lines on this in The Gift of Death).  What it means is that your act of solidarity with the striking Other cannot and does not relieve you from your ethical responsibility for all those other Thirds, including the  front-line manager.  It precludes you from relying on the political calculation -- "the achievement of the greater good for the union members justifies the sacrifice of certain lackeys of the bosses" -- as a mode of dismissal of that responsibility. 

Does this induce political paralysis?  It does not and cannot, it is never a matter of "choice," of "choosing" to act politically or not.  Every day in every way, everything you do (and every single thing you don't do), is a political action in this sense that, again, to put it hyperbolically but not unrealistically, sacrifices a multitude of Thirds to the (fundamentally political, whether one is conscious of this or not) calculation of the moment.  I get out of bed.  Should I immediately go to my check book and contribute to Oxfam to save the life of three malnourished children?  No, I need to eat breakfast and get to work . . . .  There is no escape from this, and so "political paralysis" is no more an option than eliminating one's ethical responsibility for all those Thirds that you've just killed by deciding to eat breakfast.  That's finitude; politics is not a choice, and what Levinas tells us, I think importantly, is that ethical responsibility isn't a choice either.

So what then?  Given that politics is inevitable and responsibility for that politics is inevitable, where does that go?  What difference do those inevitabilities matter at the level of the political decision?  Two not entirely consistent responses to this:  Initially, this (let's call it) politico-ethical condition of existence determines nothing, at least in terms of normative guidance to the content of the political act (this is the point of Derrida's discussion of the unbridgable split between the ethical injunction to act politically and the indeterminate content of the responsive political act in Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas).  But secondarily, it seems to me, this ethical origin of the political (to give it another name) has at least two consequences.  The first is at the level of discourse about and justifications for the political act.  It seems to me that the underogable responsibilty for the Third puts significant limits on how one talks about one's political opponents -- de-humanization, it seems to me, is right out, inconsistent with that responsibility.  That, I think, is very important in its own right.  But I also think that that limitation will have implications -- indeterminate ones, but implications nonetheless -- for the content of the political calculation itself.  The underogable fact of this responsibility for the Third can -- in fact, arguably must -- itself become a factor to be weighed in the political calculation, and that will -- usually, maybe not always (I don't think you can rule out in advance the possibility that war will sometimes be necessary even from an ethical perspective) -- eliminate certain political options (to take an easy example, the mass slaughter of one's political opponents).  So even at the level of the content of the political decision, "Levinasian solidarity" affects one's political decision.   (This, by the way, is an example of what I mean by the ethical "suffusing" the political calculation in earlier posts here and here.)

One final point and then I'll stop.  Nate says, "solidarity with some minimal limits of belonging does provide at least a very rudimentary compass for that, which the sort of infinite/limitless solidarity with those whom one has nothing in common with doesn't seem to offer or even really to allow the existence of."  Maybe, but hasn't that "infinite/limitless solidarity with those with whom one has nothing in common" in fact always determined the teleology of the great "solidarity-based" political movements, from salvationist religious discourses to Marxism?  Doesn't the Internationale (I think these are words; I ought to know this . . .) look forward to the day when the "working class becomes the human race"?  It seems to me that one of the great advantages of the Levinasian (especially in this regard I should say "Derridian/Levinasian") notion of solidarity is that it provides a way of articulating that traditional teleology with political action in a way that avoids the rather historically disastrous consequences of standing by that teleology as such.  And since this thread is partly about Agamben, too, I should say that one of the most admirable things about  Agamben's onto-linguistic utopian politics of "life itself" is the way it tries to preserve the utopian element of the traditional political teleologies while ridding them of the elements that have led to their demise in premature declarations of their achievement (and the resultant slaughter of those who don't agree or whose existence provides evidence to the contrary).  While I think that Agamben's effort to save the form of the political embodied in these traditional teleologies ultimately fails as a basis for politics, I think he comes closer to succeeding at this level -- that is, at eliminating those lingering elements that allow for the perversions of Stalinism, the Crusades, and so on -- better than anyone else.

On solidarity (I) -- phenomenology of the picket line

(This discussion has already been updated/elaborated somewhat via an exchange of comments at Jodi's most recent I cite solidarity post.  And here.)

I want to try to systematize my thoughts about the recent solidarity thread (or should I say, "meme"?  -- I don't want to, I'm an old-word person like Benjamin rather than a new-word person like Derrida . . . ) wending its way around my blogospheric neighborhood, but this post probably won't be it, so I'm giving it a Roman numeral "(I)" as a commitment of sorts to return . . . .  What I'll try to do here instead, which will end up addressing "solidarity" anyway, is respond to some excellent questions put to me in comments to an earlier post on Agamben and Derrida by Jodi Dean and squibb.  This post is thus really an extended comment-response elevated into post-dom.

Jodi asks: 

Would your Derridean solidarity then be something like the infusion of the Other into a political calculation? If it is, I don't see how that is solidarity in any political sense; it seems to come after, to supplement, the calculation; and, it is hard to tell apart from a general ethical regard. Solidarity should be something stronger, no?

That's the right question, and I'm not entirely sure how to answer it.  This is also the issue that opens up into the more systematic thinking about solidarity that I'd like to come back to later.    Nevertheless . . .  I wrote a paper a couple of years ago that, among other things, attempts to sketch in a very preliminary way something like this Derridean/Levinasian solidarity through a merger of sorts of Levinas with Kantian social-contractarian political theory (abstract and cite here).  The notion that I was trying to articulate was something like (these are not terms I used in the paper but they're accurate enough) Derridean/Levinasian political solidarity as an aufhebung of the (very "strong") solidarity of the classical polis and the extremely abstract, denatured and "weak" solidarity of the modern, Kantian political subject with its fellow rational beings.  In any event, I'll leave that level of response for later (if ever).  For now I just want to think about Jodi's notion of "strong" solidarity on one hand -- behind which seems to be some kind of substantive, shared commitment, whether it's common class interest or some other characteristic or life-situation shared by the party members -- and "weak" solidarity on the other, based (Jodi suggests) on some (abstract, denatured, etc.) "general ethical regard" for the Otherness of the Other in general.  Should solidarity be something stronger than this?

Yes and no, I think.  Yes, "solidarity" does seem to imply, at first blush at least, some kind of substantive bond that ties party or group members together, something more concrete than their shared status as rational willing beings entitled to respect, or what have you.  But it seems to me that the situation is more complex when you look at it more closely.  Think about a union picket line.  Which of these is the more genuine exemplar of "solidarity" in the sense that (I think) we really mean it when we use it in everyday speech:  (1) the bond between the union members walking the line; or (2) the decision by a non-union member, confronted by a picket line on her way to work, not to cross the line?  It seems to me that the second situation exemplifies solidarity in its highest best sense, and more importantly, in the sense that ultimately underlies all the other senses in which we use it -- including, that is, the solidarity among the union picketers themselves.  That is, it seems to me that true solidarity takes place (and one of the points I'd stress is that it ought to be a "taking place" and not a characteristic of certain groups) when the I encounters another who, prior to the event of solidarity, did not share substantive commitments of the subject, and who (ideally) need not have shared any characteristics or elements of her life-situation, either.  That is, solidarity takes place when the I encounters an Other and is drawn into her stance to the point of being willing to substitute herself for that Other (here, by literally or figuratively joining the union members on the picket-line and on strike, by honoring the line and refusing to work).  Even if the Levinasian terminology is a little strained I trust the point is clear enough.  Solidarity as event in this sense seems closer to Levinas to me than to any analysis in terms of underlying or pre-existing political interest or commitment. 

And in answer to Jodi I guess I would say that the ethical moment does "suffuse" the political calculation (or better, decision, which as Derrida tells us (correctly in my view) is never finally calculable at all); not as an after-the-fact "supplement," however, but as (prior) quasi-transcendental motivation and pre-condition of possibility.  And as I've already suggested, I would also want to argue (but won't here) that "solidarity as event" in this (Levinasian) sense is the presupposition of the more immediately intuitive sense of solidarity as non-event or "thing," as particular shared commitment among members of a party or group. 

Jodi's other question is about the other side of my initial post, Agamben's linguistified ontology and its relation to politics ("it isn't clear to me how he can have a properly destitute subject and still have politics"), as are squibb's questions (e.g., "What is the nature of the relationship between ‘sayability,’ posited by Agamben, and politics? . . . . .  [I]s he saying ‘sayability’ accounts for the possibility of politics? Or for the possibility of a certain kind of politics?").  Given how long this has already turned out and how late it's gotten here, I'll leave that for another time. 

Agamben and Derrida on language and the political

Clark at Mormon Metaphysics has a post on Being in Heidegger and Pierce that triggered a thought on something that's interested me for a while, the different relationships of language to the political posited by Derrida on one hand and Agamben on the other.  Ultimately, I think, this connects up with Jodi Dean's recent post on "solidarity" at I cite (cross-posted at Long Sunday).  If that sounds a like a rather free free association, I guess it is, but . . . . .   

Clark says, interpreting Heidegger:

I'd suggest that perhaps a useful, if not completely accurate, way of thinking Being as beings in totality to consider it as what, in the final outcome, the community of people would understand of beings. That would include not just our feeling of beings as we encounter them, but the discourses about these beings, the relationships the beings enter into and so forth. It would be beings as intelligible in their fulness.

Based on what I know of Heidegger (which is less than I should), I would agree with Clark that this is not a "completely accurate" account of his conception of Being.  (Nor does it sound to me, as Clark seems to be saying, that this is the equivalent of Pierce's identification of Being with the absolute sign -- Being as "the very fact, that is, the ideal sign which should be quite perfect, and so identical, - in such identity as a sign may have, - with the very matter denoted united with the very form signified by it," in Clark's quotation from Pierce.) 

That said, Clark's suggestion that Being amounts to "the discourses about . . . beings, . . . beings as intelligible in their fullness" is reminiscent of (although not identical to) Agamben's understanding of Being, which is another interpretation (I think) of the later Heidegger's turn to language as a, if not the, privileged mode of access to Being.  For Agamben, the Being of beings is their "sayability" in language, the fact that beings only are what they are, as such, insofar as they enter language and thus become subject to the predication of their infinity of uniquely identifying qualities.  (This is not linguistic idealism, by the way -- not the assertion that linguistic concepts or predicates are the real, but that the real is only real-ized in the medium of language, which is something else again.) 

Furthermore, picking up on something I was saying elsewhere, this necessarily shared "sayability" of all beings ("shared" insofar as each "is" what it "is" by virtue of that sayability -- the scare-quotes necessary because it's the Being of Being that's at stake here) is simultaneously the model and condition for the coming community of identity-free "whatever singularities," which is to say, people who exist solely and as such, without categorization -- without being "Italian," "communist," "red," etc.  (These are Agamben's examples in The Coming Community (if I'm remembering correctly), an overarching theme of which is the free political existence of these linguistically liberated beings).  This freedom from identity is simultaneously political freedom for Agamben as well -- in fact, absolute political freedom, insofar as he says (something like; this isn't a real quote but I think captures the sense of the original), "The State can handle anything except someone [i.e., a "whatever singularity"] that exists without relation to any category."  The notion here is something along lines that the State can control anything  through the medium of judgment -- which is to say, law -- as long as the act of judgment is capable of addressing its object (that is, that the object can be categorized, placed on one side of a line or another); but that the act of judgment is necessarily stymied by a singularity that exists beyond (or rather, before) the possibility of linguistic predication, insofar as its only characteristic is to participate in the condition of possibility of linguistic predication in general.   

This then is the main point of contact between Agamben's first-philosophical work and his later, political philosophical work.   On one hand, insofar as it precedes and thereby remains immune from categorization and judgment, such "whatever singularities" exemplify the "form-of-life" -- the life whose form is simply life itself, the pure gesture, habit, the "life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living" as he variously puts it -- that Agamben in Homo Sacer opposes to the pure sovereign function of separating "bare life" from its form.   On the other hand (and  this is what begins to draw the Agambenian paradigm closer to the question of "solidarity" that Jodi Dean raises), by transposing it into the realm of human experience, Agamben also interprets the being's pure being-in-language as the model of the "commonality" that seals the solidarity of the ideal political community.   We are, or can be, members of one big community, Agamben suggests, just insofar as we all share the "pure experience of language" (or as he also calls it, experimentum linguae).  This is an experience which is simultaneously  empty-and-universal -- insofar as it consists of nothing but the originary experience of our existence as individuals in and through the medium of our exposition in language -- yet singular-izing as well -- insofar as it is precisely this bare, empty act of linguistic exposure which is the precondition of singularity as such.  In this sense, I think Agamben provides us with linguistically-turned (and considerably more radical) version of the "subjective destitution" that Jodi Dean suggests is at the basis of political solidarity in her recent post (and at Long Sunday).

Agamben emphasizes that this "pure experience of language" or experimentum linguae is, of necessity, an experience of "language as such," the pure "linguistic-ality" of beings prior to their being spoken in any particular language, or rather, precisely as they are spoken in every particular language, insofar as "sayability" is a condition of beings qua "sayable" at all, in any language.  And thus Agamben writes repeatedly of "language as such" and "the Idea of Language," and argues (in the new preface to Infancy and History, written around the time of The Coming Community) that political salvation can only come after humanity stops its "wandering through traditions" -- which is to say, releases itself from the hold of the particular linguistic traditions which bind our identities and create the political divisions that lead to war, in favor of the pure "being-in-language" that we all share. 

Following on all this, Agamben would also have to say, I believe, that the Schmittian conception of solidarity that Jodi attempts to draw out of Zizek is imperfect precisely to the extent that it retains the "friend/enemy distinction," because this distinction leaves the political subject insufficiently "destitute,"  still burdened by a substantive predicate or quality ("friend" or "enemy") that stands in the way of the experience of oneself in the opening of language as such (to use the Heideggerian idiom).  At the same time, Agamben would have to reject Zizek's belief (in Jodi's summary) "that violence as such liberates, that it draws a line of separation, that it establishes a difference, discards . . .  that this freedom is necessary for the cut of universality proper," because precisely what Agamben is after is a freedom that requires neither universality (in the conventional sense of abstract universality that Zizek apparently intends) nor a "cut" or division of any kind.   And finally, one should consider what this all implies about the political validity of "the party" (which by minimal definition is determined by the "friend/enemy" distinction), and therefore for practical politics in general.  Can politics in the mundane and everyday sense survive this paradigm?   What would it look like?  Something like Hart and Negri's multitude, perhaps, or anarchism in some more traditional form?

In any event, to return to the notion of experimentum linguae, pure experience of language as such, which provides the onto-linguistic support for this notion of politics:  What is most striking to me about this notion is its contrast to a line of Derrida's, who says in passing (in Demeure, I think), something like, "of course there is no such thing as 'language as such,' no one has ever experienced 'language,' only particular languages" (I don't have the text in front of me).  This is really a throw-away line in the context of Demeure (I'm pretty sure that's where it appears), but nevertheless, there is something entirely consistent with Derrida's whole program about it -- the impossibility of the pure Idea, the at-best "quasi-transcendental" (i.e, marked by its historico-empirical context) nature of his governing concepts (and there have to be concepts, and not a concept, for this very reason), and so on.  Moreover, because it articulates so perfectly (albeit negatively) with Agamben's linguistified and then politicized idea of Being, it also seems to me to mark a very important point at which Derrida's own concept of the political intersects with and then diverges from Agamben's.  It corresponds, for example, to why Derrida can say in a footnote in Politics of Friendship, "I have never been able to utter the word 'community,' at least in my own name" (something like that -- again, don't have the book here), whereas for Agamben, "community" is ultimately nothing other than "utterability" itself, as such.  More importantly, I think it casts light on why Agamben's concept of the political, including the more recent onto-biopolitical analysis of Homo Sacer, is set against the background of the "real possibility" (the quotes here are meant to allude to Derrida's analysis of this phrase of Schmitt's in PoF) of a "coming community," a messianic political community that exists at least (this is the "realness" of its possibility) as an eschaton if not a normative ideal of political life, while for Derrida, the political can only begin and concern itself with the messianic call and possibility of the singular here-and-now, which always "exists" within the particularity of a particular tradition or history.  For Agamben, because there is available to us an experience of "language as such" (if we just heed its Call?  this part of his program is hazy to me), there is also available to us -- qua philosophers -- the notion of an ideal political community that language-as-such implies as its end.  For Derrida, by contrast, there is no escape from our "wandering through traditions" and thus no point at which the philosopher can dictate to the politician her true goals.  That's why it seems to me that Derrida's concept of the political is truer to finitude than is Agamben's (and it's also why I think -- although this would take much more to establish -- that Derrida is the true heir to Benjamin's philosophy of the political, and not Agamben). 

Does this mean that there's no notion of political solidarity implicit in Derrida's more chastened version of political messianism?  I think it is possible to draw out such a notion, along the Levinasian lines that dominated his later political thought.  I'm thinking of statements by Levinas like, "[m]y relationship with the other as neighbor gives meaning to my relations with all the others," as well some suggestions in Derrida's writings that, despite the basic structure of his (Levinasian) political thought -- that is, that the ethical relationship to the Other demands political calculation but cannot determine the content of this calculation, which remains singularly tied to the singularity of the here-and-now that it addresses -- the ethical relationship can infuse the (necessarily) calculative political relationships to all the other others (there's a line to this effect in The Gift of Death but it's not coming to me now).  Thus, pace Zizek, and paraphrasing Karl Rufo's excellent comment to Jodi Dean's post (which is also the source of the above Levinas quote), I think that Levinas's "conception of ethics can[] ground an ethical politics" (although, "ground" being a little strong for the relationship between the two, I would prefer the term "infuse" or "suffuse").  Something along those lines would be my candidate for the Derridian/Levinasian stand-in for "solidarity," although it's too late at night for me really to defend that now . . . . .

Richard Wolin in The Nation on Heidegger and Levinas

Richard Wolin has a review of two books (on Heidegger's legacy in France and Levinas) in The Nation (hat tip enowning), with the remarkably stupid title "Heidegger Made Kosher."  It's very disappointing to see The Nation farming its reviews out to people with views like Wolin's, but not really surprising.  This kind of hostility toward non-Marxist strains of Continental philosophy (and especially toward anyone associated with "deconstruction") goes way back; The Nation published one of the first and worst of the "deconstruction = National Socialism" libels in the wake of the de Man affair, too, if I remember correctly.  I attribute this tendency to a certain, characteristically (but by no means universally) leftist confusion about the relationship of politics to philosophy in general and philosophical ethics in particular (a confusion that's evident throughout Wolin's review) -- that is, the belief that any political philosophy that that doesn't take as its major premise a politically committed (left) social-political stance and/or fails to issue in a left political-social agenda is necessarily ideological and obscurantist.  It's doubly disappointing that The Nation suffers from this disease, since its cultural sections are often its best.  Wouldn't it be great if we could get our intelligent left political commentary and intelligent left philosophical commentary in the same magazine? 

In any event, Wolin's review is bizarre as well as inaccurate and biased.  He believes that all of post-war French philosophy has been an Oedipal response to Sartre, including Levinas's:  "Although the two men were born within a year of each other, Levinas's anti-Sartrism bore a distinctively Oedipal character."  As if this rejection of the immortal  père Sartre weren't bad enough (the review is more paean to Sartre than anything else), in Wolin's psychologistic fantasy Levinas's philosophical development ultimately takes a turn for the even-worse:  "Thus did a Jewish academic from Kovno become the improbable savior of a tradition founded by a former Nazi."  Enough said, really.  (And I'm leaving out Wolin's discussion of Heidegger, which concludes that Heidegger's thought is "latently authoritarian" and "a warrant for human bondage.")

Wolin does, however, distill the confusion that I mentioned above, which is worthwhile in its own way I suppose.  Towards the end of the review, after extolling in typically Habermasian fashion the virtues of Enlightenment reason and its inherently "utopian aspirations" -- "[i]t promises a rectification of social injustice, a righting of wrongs" -- Wolin goes on to contrast the error of Levinas's ways:

Moral reasoning provides us with a strong incentive to act in the world and to remedy oppression. Levinas's quasi-mystical veneration of Otherness, conversely, resembles an "epiphany." But it is nearly impossible to translate an epiphany into meaningful political action. As an experience of transcendence, an epiphany cannot be made into an object of legislation. Moreover, with Levinas, indebtedness to the Other becomes a relationship of exclusivity to the extent that it becomes physically and emotionally impossible to assume loyalty to multiple others. For these reasons, it is next to impossible to derive a meaningful politics from his ethical doctrines.

Leaving aside his ignorance of the fact that Levinas himself addressed the problem of "the third" (i.e., the "multiple others" outside the ethcial relationship with the Other), Wolin is certainly correct that it's "nearly" (although not totally) impossible to "translate an epiphany into meaningful political action," and likewise that an epiphany "cannot be made into an object of legislation" (which is not the same thing as translation into political action, one hopes that Wolin recognizes).  And although "epiphany" is a little precious and (in this context) denigrating, I even think it's not entirely inaccurate as a description of what Levinas means by the ethical relationship to the Other.  And I'll even grant Wolin that "moral reasoning," depending on what he means by that, can (by contrast) determine the object of political action and legislation, at least given the proper conditions and inputs.  What it can't do, however, at least today, is "provide us with a strong incentive to  act in the world and to remedy oppression," which is an entirely different thing than "translation into political action" or determining the "object of legislation."  The day when reason was substantive and could pull itself up by its own bootstraps, if that day was ever more than an optimistic illusion, has long passed (Habermas himself acknowledges something like this at the end of his essay on Benjamin  in Philosophical Profiles).  What Levinas's "epiphany" -- the philosophical recognition of the existential priority of the Other to one's own existence, and in that sense of the priority of ethics to ontology -- provides is precisely the philosophical "incentive to act in the world and to remedy oppression" that reason in Wolin's sense can't provide, at least to the extent that that "reason" remains under the sign of fundamental ontology or of metaphysics (where, pace Wolin's misunderstanding of Heidegger, it still remains, either as metaphysical thought or in the form of Heidegger's own fundamental ontology).  So Levinas's contribution indeed can't -- and doesn't want to -- provide the kind of normative guides to action and law that Wolin complains it lacks.  What it provides instead is a meaning -- which is also to say, a motivation -- for political action that goes beyond the egoistic meanings (self-interest, rational choice, etc.) which are the only ones that reason is currently capable of endowing.  Were Wolin and the other self-righteous reason-mongers of the left able to grasp this distinction, they might begin to get a grip on the real practical-political problem of the day in the Western democracies, which is how to get people motivated by any political program -- of whatever type -- on the basis of a fundamental concern for others rather than simply themselves.   (And when and if they do get a grip on this question, by the way, they will no longer be disturbed or frightened by the fact that some types of theological, quasi-theological (as in Derrida's phrase, "religion without religion"), or "crypto-theological" (a term that Wolin borrows from one of the books under review) thinking can serve as one resource for this fundamental shift, as Wolin clearly is disturbed and frightened by this prospect ("Moyn's well-placed suspicion that Levinas never abandoned his original theological habitudes and longings raises some troubling questions about the uncritical veneration that has characterized the reception of his work").)   

Enowning also has a further post with comments on Wolin's review here.

Law and Literature and the Right to Death

I just sent a paper, "Law and Literature and the Right to Death," off to the editor.   Since it's appearing in a bi-lingual German anthology, which I suspect will not get a lot of play in the Anglophone world where I live; and since I'm hoping to expand it in the near future and could really use some feedback from people who know more about Blanchot than I do (at least some of whom I have reason to believe occasionally look at this blog); and since I'm already advertising it on the Legal Research Network (a database for law professors' scholarly self-promotion where it is all but certain to sink without a trace into a sea of incomprehension and indifference), so that it's too late to pretend innocence of self-promotionary impulses anyway; and prompted, in part, by this post at Charlotte Street; and since I haven't had the time to post anything else recently, here's the first paragraph (the abstract is here):

     Whatever its intellectual frisson, I take it that most would agree that “Law & Literature” as a subdiscipline is at best secondary within the general study of law. The reasons for that marginal status are familiar and I will not belabor them here, although I will come back to what I take to be the most essential of these reasons shortly. My goal is rather to indicate a theoretical road less taken that suggests the possibility that the question of “literature” belongs instead at the heart of law and jurisprudence. That road will eventually take me through a reading of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot’s 1948 essay “Literature and the Right to Death.” This is a “road less taken” not only in the sense that Blanchot has had almost no presence as a figure in the Anglo-American study of Law & Literature, but also because most attempts to de-marginalize the study of Law & Literature have begun with what is indisputably common to the law and to literature – their shared status as linguistic or cultural constructs, repositories of humanistic values, and so on. What I would like to try to do here, by contrast, is to begin at the very center of the concept of law itself (or at least its Western concept) – with law qua expression of political sovereignty. That is to say, I will begin with what is generally held to distinguish law most fundamentally from other linguistic, cultural or social norms or constructs, including particularly those of the institution of literature. My goal is thus to locate “the literary” – in a sense that remains to be determined – within the very essence of law itself, beyond the kind of general cultural resemblances that have previously been identified.

And this is the (absurdly ambitious) statement of the hoped-for pay-off :

In what follows, I hope to show that that point of contact with literature constitutes the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of law as sovereignty, its motivating essence and its most implacable and insurmountable obstacle, precisely insofar as law is understood as the sovereign power over death. And that because, as Blanchot argues, literature itself is nothing more than the simultaneous demand for death inscribed in every act of linguistic meaning and the exposure of its impossibility – the impossible condition of possibility at the limit of literature, of linguistic meaning, of death itself; and (I will argue) of law as well. But at the same time, and by the same token, the possibility of politics, also.

More on Agamben (and Benjamin)

Thanks to Matt Christie at pas au-delà (cross-posted at Long Sunday) for a link to an Agamben lecture from 2002 titled "What is a Paradigm?"   The lecture, which is primarily on the epistemological and ontological status of the example, is interesting in its own right (and exceptionally straightforward for those used to Agamben's often deliberately fragmentary and oblique prose), but also interesting (to me, at least) for collateral reasons as well.  For one, I'm struck, as I always am, by the remarkably consistent, in fact repetitive (a word I intend nonpejoratively no matter what it sounds like), quality of Agamben's underlying obsessions over the course of his writing career.  The notes he hits in this 2002 lecture include elements that not only go back to 1995's Homo Sacer (the discussion of the example as an "exclusive inclusion" complementary to the exception's "inclusive exclusion," e.g.), but to the essays from the early 1980s on Plato, Aristotle, and philosophy as the exposure of the  "unpresupposed principle" as well.  (Yet more evidence for the point I tried to make here.)  The core of Agamben's thought is composed of a relatively small number of conceptual insights supported by a larger (but still surprisingly limited) number of repeated (often virtually verbatim) textual references that recur again and again throughout his writings since the late 1970s.  That is not a criticism; to a certain extent anyone who writes does the same thing, but it does seem significantly more pronounced in Agamben's case.  One of the interesting things about this lecture is that it provides an oblique explanation for this procedure -- the example, for Agamben, is the singular phenomenon which, when placed next to other singular phenomena, exposes their "intelligibility," and thus simultaneously reveals and establishes the set of which the example is an example.  In any event, Agamben's exemplary insights are profound and extremely broad in their implications and his genius has been to assemble these conceptual building blocks in different configurations (I should say, constellations) across an astonishing range of subject matter and textual exegesis. 

The lecture actually begins with (and is clearly at least in part motivated by) his desire to defend himself from criticism on an issue related to this.  Agamben's reliance on historical exemplars -- the Roman law figure of homo sacer and the Musselman of Remnants of Auschwitz are probably the best known -- have led to the very common accusation that he is an inveterate abuser of historical argument.  His explanation in the lecture is that these historical references "were treated as paradigms whose function was to establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems" rather than as an attempt to do history per se.  I think that that defense is legitimate; I've long told friends of mine who've been outraged by his (allegedly -- I'm in no position to judge) one-sided and un-nuanced treatment of equivocal historical sources that they're missing the point.  Agamben's use of historical figures isn't intended as "history" at all; these figures are rather emblems of his (strictly-speaking) pure philosophical arguments, in something like the allegorical sense that Benjamin attributes to Renaissance emblem books. 

As noted above, Agamben himself explains these figures as "paradigms" or "examples" employed for their power of "making intelligible" the other historical phenomena which concerned him.  There are other notions, however, that may have even more explanatory power for his method than do "the example" and "the paradigm."  In particular, at the end of the lecture, there is (I think) an unmistakable allusion to Benjamin's notion of the "origin" (Ursprung)  developed in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" of the Trauerspiel book, an allusion that seems to me highly instructive about his use of history, butwhich also may point to a certain fault-line in his thinking:

The fallacy which remains unseen in the common usage of hypothesis is that what appears as a given is in reality only a presupposition of the hypothesis which would explain it. Thus the origin, the unpresupposed principle, remains hidden. On the contrary, to show a phenomenon in its original paradigmatic character means to exhibit it in the medium of its knowability. You have no presupposed principle, it is the phenomenon itself which is original. No more origin, but an original phenomenon.

"An original phenomenon" -- this is the same phrase that Benjamin uses in explaining the meaning of "Ursprung" in the title of his book on the German baroque mourning play, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels:

There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history.   (p. 45-6 (Osborne translation)).

I cannot get into a full discussion of Benjamin's (rather obscure) notion of "origin" that Agamben is trading on here, except to say that -- as I hope this one sentence already suggests -- it does seem to shed even more light on Agamben's use of historical figures than does his own concept of "the example," which (in contrast to Benjamin's "origin") is strictly speaking a purely logical concept that has no intrinsic relationship to history or historical manifestation.   (Nor is it a surprise that Agamben would use Benjamin's notion here in an allusive and unattributed way; his work is stuffed with similar examples of such unattributed allusions to Benjamin, sometimes in the form of virtual paraphrases of Benjamin's original texts.  Again, I don't mean this as a criticism (in fact I enjoy and admire this aspect of his work); I think Benjamin is simply the air he breathes). 

What really (and finally, since it's getting absurdly late here) interests me about this Benjamin allusion is how it how it helps illuminate a subtle but important discontinuity between his fundamental approach to philosophy and Benjamin's, apart from all of the obvious continuities.  As Agamben explains in the above-quoted passage, "to show a phenomenon in its original paradigmatic character means to exhibit it in the medium of its knowability."   Without getting into the (quite fascinating and important) details of the relationship of exemplarity to knowability, what this passage (and the others that precede it in the lecture) clearly indicate is that the fundamental significance that Agamben places on exemplarity stems from its relationship to knowability -- intelligibility -- per se.  More authentically than either deduction or induction, he suggests (and this, by the way, also tracks perfectly Benjamin's discussion in the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue"), the example opens the world, it makes things intelligible in their singularity.  Benjamin's "origin" seemingly serves the same function with respect to historical phenomena, allowing what he calls their "redemption" in the Platonic idea.  Again, Agamben seems to say virtually the same thing in this lecture, noting that "[f]or Plato in dialectics the paradigm shows the very relationship between the sensible and the intelligible."  But I believe that there remains a subtle but crucial difference, a difference that at the Trauerspiel book's early, less political phase of Benjamin's thinking remains in nuce, but which becomes much more signficant -- if still subtle -- in his later work, despite Agamben's apparent adherence to Benjamin's every word. 

For Agamben in this lecture (and elsewhere), the notion of "redemption" remains tied to the notion of intelligibility, knowability, the "opening" of the world of beings (to use the Heideggerian terminology which I think is always appropriate for describing Agamben's thinking -- one way of characterizing my problem with it).  For Benjamin, however, even in this early, pre-Brechtian and pre-Marxian phase of his thinking, "knowability" is not the point, "truth" is, and the purpose of philosophy is not the acquisition of knowledge but an activity directed toward the truth, that is, its representation:  "If philosophy is to remain true to the law of its own form, as the representation of truth and not as a guide to the acquisition of knowledge, then the exercise of this form . . . must be accorded due importance" (28).  Later, of course, this incipiently constructive and active function of philosophy was to blossom into the expressly constructive and political philosophical principles of "On the Concept of History," in which the truth of  history was only accessible through a method -- the creation of dialectical images -- that was already a political act.  Even at this early stage, however, Benjamin insisted that the Ursprung was the product of a constructive principle -- thought's distribution of phenomena in a "constellation" that embodied an the Platonic idea 's historical "origin."   Agamben's example, by contrast, as I have already mentioned remains a strictly logical category of thought that exposes (i.e., opens to "knowability," knowledge) the truth of what is, one which has no intrinsic relationship to history, action, or politics. 

In any event, I find this interesting because one of my current projects is an attempt to pry Benjamin's thought away from the bear hug that Agamben has thrown around it.  As this probably suggests, the larger stakes relate to a political-philosophical critique of Agamben's work, which is extremely, and even legitimately, seductive from the perspective of philosophy as such, but which I find suspect from the perspective of politics (or "the political").  I think that Benjamin on the other hand gets it right, and Agamben's apparently full-throttle embrace of him obscures that difference which seems to me makes a political-philosophical difference. 

 

Giorgio Agamben: politics and first philosophy

The surge of interest in Giorgio Agamben's work  has been disappointingly one-sided.  (One sure sign that it's in fact a surge is the appearance of citations to this post-Heideggerian Continentalist in mainstream American law journals, e.g. here (at note 34)).  On one hand, it's the political philosophy --  Homo Sacer, State of Exception, Means Without Ends -- that's gotten the lion's share of the attention, which is a bit of a shame in a thinker of such incredible range.  That's hardly surprising, however, especially given the compelling examples of sovereignty run amok provided by George Bush and his merry band of Executive Branch supremacists, which dovetail so nicely with his analyses in these books.  The problem is rather that the work that's gotten short shrift -- the first-philosophical pieces like the (inexcusably out-of-print) Language and Death and the essays collected in Potentialities -- is ultimately what makes the Foucauldian-biopolitical-Schmittian theses of Homo Sacer intelligible.  Or more precisely, it's the earlier work that provides these theses with their raison d'etre -- the affirmative side of Agamben's onto-political program for which Homo Sacer, et al., provide the necessary-but-not-sufficient critical prolegomenon.

That affirmative side hasn't been hidden, either -- Agamben wrote about it in The Coming Community even before he started down the biopolitical road of Homo Sacer and it's sequels.  Aviva Shemesh makes this point in a review of Agamben's recent The Time That Remains over at the (heavily Agambenian) Form of Life:

The ambivalence of Agamben’s philosophy, which can be read as both a curse and a cure, may be attributed to the double strategy behind his publications in recent years. On the one hand, we have the celebrated Homo Sacer series, which, up to now, is comprised of three books: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, State of Exception, and Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive. These books analyze the darkness of our time, which Agamben calls “biopolitics,” the political power over our naked life. However, in each of these three critiques, the attentive reader can also discern a certain light that shines in the darkness, which flashes up at the closing sections of each one of those “pessimistic” books. Because of the difficulty to recognize this light, Agamben offers a second set of investigations, those other books, which elaborate on his glad tidings: The Coming Community, The Open: Man and Animal, and the book that concerns us here, The Time That Remains. (Profanations, his last publication, forthcoming in English from Zone Books, is another, beautiful, example to this aspect of his thought.)

Up to now, it is mainly the first, critical, or “pessimistic” aspect of Agamben’s philosophy that has created a powerful whirlpool in the stream of our thinking. But when we disregard the other, “redemptive,” aspect, we end up in a complete misunderstanding of his project. One might assume, for example, that what Homo Sacer asks us to do is simply to pay close attention to the minute details of our biopolitical twists and turns. But let us remember the motto of the same book: “And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.” Paul’s formulation encapsulates the radical message of Agamben’s project: Modern politics, which was supposed to give us life, is propelling us unto death. As a result, the fulfillment of the situation depicted in Homo Sacer is its transgression. It is far from being enough to continue to dwell on the nature of the state, the law, sovereignty, human rights, and so on. To use a Wittgensteinian metaphor, we could say that if you understand what Agamben says in Homo Sacer, then you need to recognize that the propositions of his book, in their erudite description of our current condition, are senseless – like a ladder, you need to climb through these propositions, on them, over them. You need to throw the biopolitical ladder away. Then you will see the Agambenian world rightly.

I essentially agree with this reading (although Shemesh's prose is a little adulatory for my taste). 

Why then has this affirmative, "redemptive" side received so little attention from the political types?  One answer is that in a sense it has been hidden, in plain sight.  Again as Shemesh puts it, "what, then, do you see [in the "Agambenian world"]? The answer, I believe, is far from being metaphysical. It is, simply put, life itself."   "Life itself" -- nothing could be simpler, nothing could be more obscure, especially when framed as the end of a political philosophy (or rather as its "pure means," as Agamben, following Benjamin, would undoubtely prefer to have it).   The opacity of this notion of pure "life," at once so simple and so difficult to say, is what accounts for the fragmentary form of The Coming Community and his other attempts to articulate directly his affirmative political vision.  But it's also what generates the most difficult stumbling blocks to interpreting the biopolitical work, just because there ultimately cannot be any pure separation between the two sides. 

Thus, in his recent review of State of Exception over at The Weblog, it's precisely at this point that John Emerson finds the book "unintelligible":

[H]is conclusion seems close to Benjamin’s, and is to me unintelligible:

“To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without relation to any end. And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.” (p. 88)

"[A]n action as pure means, which shows only itself, without relation to any end" -- it's of such actions that "life itself," a "life for which living itself would be at stake in its own living" (as Agamben also puts it), is composed.  My thesis is that one cannot really understand these notions except by reference to the earlier work: the essay on Max Kommerell and gesture in Potentialities, the discussion of "habit" at the end of Language and Death, and the notions of "being-thus" and the "irreparable" in The Coming Community, to name a few relevant passages.  Similarly, the "word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits, but says only itself" is incomprehensible unless one puts it in relationship with the first two essays in Potentialities on the "idea of language" and its "thing itself" and the discussions of "language as such" (as well as of "as-such-ness" itself, as such, in The Coming Community).  In fact, as I've tried to show elsewhere in much more technical detail, Agamben's affirmative political ideal is ultimately inseparable from his ontologized philosophy of language (or linguistically-turned