Does Literature Think?: Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era 9781503617193

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DOES LITERATURE THINK?

Does Literature Think? LITERATURE AS THEORY FOR AN ANTIMYTHICAL ERA

Stathis Gourgouris

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

200}

To Neni,

for life

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gourgouris, Stathis, 1958Does literature think?: literature as theory for an antimythical era I Stathis Gourgouris. p. em. Includes index. ISBN o-8047-3213-2 (cloth: alk. paper)-ISBN o-8047-3214-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Literature-History and criticism-Theory, etc. 2. Literature and myth. 3· Modernism (Literature) I. Title. PN56.M94G64 2003 809'.9112-DC21 2003001373 Original printing 2003 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 12 11 10 09 o8 07 o6 05 04 03 Typeset by Tim Roberts in 10 I 14 Palatino

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Abbreviations

XXV

1.

Does Literature Think?

PART I

1

FromLawtoMyth

2.

Enlightenment and Paranomia

3·

The Concept of the Mythical

49 90

4·

Philosophy's Need for Antigone

116

PART I 1

Theatrical Matters

5·

The Gesture of the Sirens

6.

The Dream Reality of the Ruin

PART I I I

Eluding the Name

7·

Research, Essay, Failure

231

8.

A Lucid Drunkenness

249

9·

DeLillo in Greece

292

10.

Beyond the Damaged Life

323

Notes Index

Patience, seekers, the secret will come clear of itself! -Karl Kraus

PREFACE

Modernity is one of Kleist's marionettes. To make sense of it, as modernity's sentient subjects and objects alike, we might best stand alongside Herr C., Kleist's invented dancer, who claims that the art of dance reaches its most profound expression if pursued from the standpoint of a marionette. This standpoint is made possible by the curious complicity of two antagonistic desires: the defiance of earth's gravity and the submission to the whims of the puppeteer. The mastery of dance hinges on the defiance of "the inertia of matter, the property most resistant to dance"-in other words, mastery over gravity-which is itself predicated on the willingness to submit to the mastery of one who pulls the strings, all in order to gain "the advantage of being practically weightless." Yet mastery is bound to elude the puppet master as well, Herr C. argues. For he is drawn into "the path taken by the dancer's soul," as the text emphatically puts it, which cannot take place unless "the operator transposes himself into the marionette's center of gravity" and thus becomes himself the dancer. In effect, this operation implies at once both the confirmation and the abdication of mastery. Though, quite visibly, the master-fingers manipulate the strings of an inanimate form, an idol, they are invisibly entranced by a movement that flows back from the idol's tenuous joints-a soul that animates the image of dance; an image of dance that animates the dance experience. This is a curiously idolatrous exchange. Body and soul here cannot be separated, ordered by hierarchy or sequence. At best, they are conjoined by a prosthetic principle. Herr C. extrapolates from the expert capacity of human crafting of artificial limbs to the crafting of a marionette that would be literally an extension of one's fingers. Much of his

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argument belies a reliance on technology that seems endemic to human capacity even when it applies itself to the immaterial. The puppeteer is literally a Maschinist, though in effect he only engineers his own transubstantiation. Still, even in this technological equation of body and soul, we can hardly claim to know the order of principle: the animate fingers and the inanimate limbs come together in a coexistence that can only make sense as a suspended order, an order of gravity that knows no ground. It is an asymptotic coexistence, as Herr C. puts it, configuring thus the utmost image of suspension according to which the human body hangs mysteriously in the balance of weightlessness and mastery. Weightlessness is gained by surrendering the burden of one's weight, by giving up on pulling one's weight, as it were, in order to be pulled into the object of dance. Kleist's gesture is built on a curious poetics of suspension that links the defiance of gravity to an unwillingness for self-mastery. The text from which I have just departed on this journey-Heinrich von Kleist's famous parable "On the Marionette Theater" (1810)-is a fundamental text of Romantic aesthetics that covers a great deal more epistemic ground than the mere antagonism between art and nature, which is its most acknowledged contribution. A dazzling performance of the dialectics of autonomy (and thus of the dialectic of Enlightenment itself, in like spirit to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's famous thesis), this parable encapsulates the problematic experience of modernity-indeed, more precisely, the problematic gravity of modernity. I cannot think of a better way to locate the requisite jumping-off point for an orientation to the arguments of this book, as evidently partial as such efforts tend to be. And though this book does not explicitly invoke modernity as the problem to be solved, nonetheless it is written in full cognizance that it moves within modernity's gravitational pull, even if it prefers to embrace the poetics of suspension espoused by Kleist's marionettes. For all the brazen and sometimes remarkably inventive attempts to discredit its relevance or even abolish its existence, the problematic gravity of modernity is still with us. In fact, one can argue persuasively that modernity is now more problematic and more grave than ever, if

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for no other reason than that it is in the nature of modernity to embody the urgency of its disavowal. When I say "in its nature" I mean it is an essential aspect of its social formation: whatever happens to be the historical content of modernity (assuming potentially innumerable projections), its formative tendency to double upon itself, to turn itself over to whatever brushes it against the grain, cannot be evaded. Modernity emerges internally divided, conflicted, antagonistic, or dialecticalhowever we choose to phrase it-split between two projects: the project of autonomy and the project of mastery. The first consists in the unprecedented desire to break open the epistemic closure that characterizes other social formations: namely, to call into question all "idols of the tribe" without exception and beyond all prohibition. This radical desire for interrogation is indeed limitless and noninstrumental; it is not presided over by any sort of higher principle. Its only principle, if it may even be called that, is that no principle shall remain uninterrogated, that there is indeed nothing sacred. The second project may be identified as the desire for the limitless expansion of rational and technical mastery, for the instrumentalization of the world, for the submission of all things, animate and inanimate, to the power of pure and practical knowledge. To the first we owe the emergence of all emancipatory movements in the modern world, of the very idea that human life instrumentalized by the law of an Other is not worth living. To the second we owe unspeakable instances of dehumanization and now the entirely realistic possibility of the total destruction of the planet. Though essentially contrary, these two elements emerge together and oftentimes work in tandem-hence the problematic historical co-incidence of democracy and capitalism, to take an obvious pair. Yet it would be a serious error to reduce each element to the other or to confound the two into some sort of (even polymorphous) singularity. To do so would mean to lose sight of the vital necessity of the forces of interrogation, an act whose perilous dimensions are too terrifying to contemplate. From my standpoint, confronting the irreducible contradiction of this tandem means conceiving it in either of two ways: as the "dialectic of Enlightenment"(according to Horkheimer and Adorno's claim, though fully prepared to submit their conceptualization and ter-

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minology to question), or as the "dialectic of autonomy," which is how I choose to reconfigure a complex of arguments and positions that belong principally to the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (here, again, submitting his own terms and concepts to the radical interrogation he himself demands of us). Whichever way, elucidating the problems that menace our contemporary world-regardless, I argue, of our episternageographical location on this planet (the fine points of difference among such locations are utterly crucial for any real historical understanding but secondary to the terms I seek here)-requires coming to terms with modernity's internal tendency to take itself apart, to go against the grain of each and every real dimension of its existence. This internal tendency toward self-interrogation must be carefully mined both for elements that may tend toward self-destruction and for elements that may prove resistant and even counteractive to self-destruction. It is neither particularly thoughtful nor attentive to current history's urgent demands to assume the posture that modernity has run its course, has extinguished its potential, or worse yet, has been outrun by some sort of external developments as yet unknown and unnamed. The hesitant signification "postmodernity" suggests precisely this shortcoming. Modernity is "unfinished" by definition, and one chooses to ignore this problematic condition (or revel in modernity's alleged demise) at one's peril. Whether engaged with matters of social and political culture or of philosophy and cultural theory, we fail to respond to the perplexing challenges of contemporary history if we rely on the claim to possess the means of escaping the gravity of modernity. Yet casting suspicion on such defiant claims hardly means that one is bound to the orbit of modernity like an old satellite. The gravity of modernity works dialectically, alternately both as centripetal and centrifugal force. We are in it-and aware that we are in it-because weremain suspended. My passion for this project owes a great deal to the sense of being suspended in a world at once familiar, proximate, and loved, but also enigmatic, distant, foreign, uncanny. Understanding in what sense this world has a history does not alleviate my suspension. It is remarkable to discover how even profound understanding of the history of your

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condition does not provide you with adequate response to your bewilderment before the question "What am I to do?" The question of praxis-for this is the first question posed by modernity's conditions of suspension-becomes a quandary in part because it involves elements that exceed historical justification, because it thrusts itself into an outmaneuverable present tense of decision. Its response to history is precisely to forge a suspended sense of historical time. Yet, though our decision to act in the real world may constitute an incision in the historical flux we inhabit, no decision can signify in itself a point outside the historical range. What one does may interrupt the historical flux, perhaps even open a new horizon of possibility and a new space for new decisions to be made, but it constitutes neither arche nor telos. Thus, to be alert to the interruptive significance of our actions is, at the very least, to remain astonished about how such incisions actually make up the historical fold. Hence, the question "What am I to do?" remains a quandary all around; the conditions of suspension are not alleviated even for those who may claim mastery over the art of decision. I cannot speak here of the merit of numerous philosophical attempts to resolve this paradoxical condition, whereby the interruption of decision is but another stitch in the historical fabric. I will certainly not speak of theological attempts to resolve it. Resolving this paradox seems fraudulent to me, or at least disrespectful to the profound reality of the question. The question "What am I to do?" cannot be exhausted by contemplating what would make the world proximate, even responsive, to my doing. Rather, the question itself, insofar as it pertains to me, to the one who is to act, is more important than its possible resolution. For the one who is to act is first and foremost the one who asks the question. The question is the first act, and as such, in it inheres no guarantee of response, resolution, or elucidation. As radical interrogative mode, it is self-sufficient and irreducible to its parts; it indicates the horizon of praxis to be primarily one of interrogation, or precisely, of self-interrogation. "What am I to do?" may thus arise out of the enigmatic conditions of the surrounding world, but it pertains to the enigmatic position of an "1": the "I" is itself in question, it has become a question. Becoming a question before the world, while continuing to

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dare not make the world a matter of transcendence, registers the full force of suspension in the problematic gravity of modernity. Let us say, for the sake of convention, that this quandary is the essential historical characteristic of the "post-Enlightenment subject." We can speak then of a constitutive historical problem, whose inaugural instance I conceive as the condition of an inquiring subjectivity or, more precisely, a subjectivity formed by virtue of and in regard to the interrogation of its own position. Knowledge of the object of inquirystrictly speaking, knowledge of one's world-is thus implicated in self-interrogation. Since Hegel at least, we understand this paradoxical co-implication as a dialectical entwinement: the self-inquiring (selfreflexive) subject enacts a certain objectification of itself as a condition for being subjected to the objective elements of its world in an experience of historical mutability. In this dialectical gesture the mode of knowledge is the key question, the unknown variable in the equation. My choice to stage the problem of self-interrogation and praxis in the world by conducting a peculiar investigation of literature, as I do in this book, is my response to this variable. Not content to follow the analytical model by which a subject learns of its existence through the disintegration of the forces that constitute it, the dialectics of self-interrogation requires a praxis that senses the subject-object relation, beyond its constituent parts, as the endemic enigma of its own existence: endemic because the externality of the object (world) is the constitutive necessity of subjectification; enigmatic because this necessity is not determined by rule but registers contingently and figuratively, as part of the performative making of the subject, and thus remains perpetually open to revision, reiteration, interpretation. In other words, self-interrogation, as I conceive it, is not propelled by the imperative to achieve some sort of clear sense of Self once and for all, but is itself an instance of alteration, of poiesis: a performative indication of how encountering the world is a creative/ destructive intervention, an alteration of the framework of every such encounter. In this respect, I came to this project out of a sense of both suspension and self-interrogation, each providing the groundless propulsion for the other. So it may be fitting that this book, although complete in its

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own terms, remains suspended between the historical exfoliation of a philosophical form I performed in Dream Nation (in an attempt to show history's dreamlike elements to be the nation's formal attributes) and the psycho-political investigation of social poiesis I have currently undertaken in a work in progress on sublimation and the secular imagination. All three projects reflect, in the broadest possible terms, my unremitting insistence on the question of how societies imagine themselves and their others and, contiguously, of how societies form and transform themselves and their others (including an evidently irrepressible drive to occlude such radical self-formative potential). The field of inquiry in each case may be different (the production of national history, the politics of sublimation, or, presently, the intrinsic theoretical capacity of literature), but in all cases the enigmatic object at hand is humanity's mythographic way of forging an existence in the world-a notion or image that, as common denominator for all three projects, cannot elude a tendency toward generality or abstraction. By the same token, in all three cases, there is a common historical ground, constituted around the epistemic horizon we identify in shorthand as the "Enlightenment universe." Thus, alongside the broader question of society's formative and transformative force, another domain of interrogation emerges: whatever pertains to subjective authority, be it construed traditionally as agency or, more suggestively, as the performative power of the imagination, as the source of society's figurative or fictionalizing power. This book's peculiar focus on "literature as theory for an antimythical era" rises out of this epistemic horizon. The discursive idiosyncrasy of this phrase will unfold in the essays that follow. Unpacking it here, before the work is done, runs the danger of preconditioning and formalizing a multitudinous path of thought in a way that would occlude its essayistic character, the fact that each meditation on a set of recognizable objects of inquiry is a trial run, an experiment. Nonetheless, granting that the terms literature and myth are the protagonists of the essays that follow, a preliminary description of the attitude they are made to bear is warranted. Literature and myth are already linked together in a variety of "traditional" discourses in literary history, the most obvious

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being literature's so-called mythopoetic character. Likewise, as various discourses focused on the fictionality of historical action evoke, mythical aspects of a social realm often lead one to consider the literary process whereby societies produce images of themselves and their world, even if they don't quite manage to conceptualize this process within the boundaries of literature as such. I take such established affinities between literature and myth for granted, as groundwork. Certainly, the historical consequences of society's self-fictionalization is of great interest to me, and this does press me to consider the question of literariness in a much broader framework than what we conventionally identify as the domain of literature proper. Yet, this project is built on the paradox that literature already exceeds its proper boundaries by virtue of providing something unique, something that pertains to what it is, even though talking about both "it" and "is" can never be entirely reliable. And the argument takes on further risk by claiming that myth may be the language that elucidates this paradox, that makes more tangible whatever condition accounts for literature providing a unique access to knowledge-indeed, theoretical knowledge, as this is identified by both philosophy and science-entirely within and by virtue of what constitutes it as literature. Using myth is a risk because it requires battling against accumulated layers of suspicion toward the notion, at least since the second half of the twentieth century. One of my aspirations in this book is to dismantle the prejudicial presuppositions of such suspicion and to imbue the signification of myth with a perspective that jettisons the constraints of the truth/ falsity framework, underlining instead myth's undeconstructible performativity. My sense of myth, as I reiterate throughout the book, is not narrative, symbolic, and archaic, but theatrical, allegorical, and contemporary. It is historical through and through and, to my mind, the most corrosive antimatter to the transcendental, the mystical, the religious. One often finds the argument that myth tends to submit to-or even facilitate-a sort of sacralization of identity (as in fascism, for example). It would be more precise to say that certain social-historical attitudes dress their desire for the sacred in the language of myth. This is surely the case with fascism. With this in mind, understanding in what

Prcfi1cc

xvn

sense the performativity unleashed by myth ultimately undercuts the reliance on transcendental authority, which we encounter time and again in the forging of collective identification, is one of the primary dimensions of this project. The meditation on myth emerged out of the original impulse to articulate the elusive character of what I perceived to be literature's unique provision for theoretical thinking. But soon it became apparent that the two perspectives ("literature as theory" and "myth as performance") inhabited a peculiar co-incidence: as two elements of different but not ordered temporalities, occupying a mutual "space" in what may be called, following Castoriadis, a "magma of time." Throughout the book, I often turn to the sort of relation I call co-incidence as methodological ground, particularly when I insist on a dialectical apprehension. (A magmatic sense of temporality liberates dialectics from its presumed lock on units of time.) In these terms, there is indeed a dialectical tension between the idea that literature achieves a unique theoretical sense of the world and the idea that myth is a performative mode of worldly knowledge. Yet this dialectical relation cannot be resolved simply by pronouncing literature mythopoetic. As I stage it here, literature and myth can never turn into attributes of each other, nor are they ever to be each other's property. They are neither interchangeable nor do they collapse into one composite singularity. In a post-Enlightenment universe, literature and myth may be said rather to strike a co-incidence in their work-their work on knowledge, their work to knowledge. This work fosters an experience that, at the very least, disrupts the tacit reliance on transcendental reason that underlies the framework of Enlightenment knowledge (be it ethical, aesthetic, or ontological). Hence, the range of the question "Does literature think?" must be extended beyond the inherited question "What is literature?" to a domain that addresses core attributes of the history and politics of knowledge in the post-Enlightenment world. Articulating what sort of theoretical knowledge literature achieves in its own terms touches on a range of "nonliterary" questions, conventionally speaking, which pertain ultimately to what determines one's orientation in the world as the maker

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(and oftentimes destroyer) of the world. Therefore, within the socialhistorical framework I recognize as my point of departure, the question of "literature as theory" is posed in a variety of ways: specifically, as a problem of law and constitutive lawlessness (arche or anarchy) in the formative imagination; as a problem of theatricality and performativity in social poiesis; as a problem of translation, quotation, and the violence of naming; or as a problem of finitude in history-in other words, as a politics of worldliness and a critique of transcendence. The first three ways listed above correspond roughly to the three parts of the book (titled "From Law to Myth," "Theatrical Matters," and "Eluding the Name"). The fourth may be considered to be an element that permeates the text throughout, receiving most focused elaboration in the opening and closing essays, which act as bookends to the three parts. Attention to what I call "an antimythical era" may be traced in various places throughout the text, albeit articulated differently according to the particular object/text under review. Basically, I consider "antimythical" whatever element cultivates the allure of a transcendental signifier-in essence, whatever element occludes humanity's intransigent desire to seek or create meaning in the finite world. Though the most obviously antimythical element, according to this formulation, would be the theological (particularly the sort of theological practice that privileges the abstract and otherworldly over the concrete cultural ritual), my understanding of what is antimythical encompasses the sort of transcendentalist obsession associated with the most typical of Enlightenment tendencies: the "rational-secular" instrumentalist abstraction, which is as otherworldly as can be imagined. The fact that the current global condition has configured these two elements as quintessentially antagonistic (hence the ridiculous pronouncements of an "emancipated rational West" against a "fanatically religious Islam") is indicative of the characteristic self-occultation that enables modern societies to suppress or renounce their otherwise irrepressible capacity to think in mythical terms. My contention here is that the apparent relegation of the significance of literature as self-fictionalizing social force in contemporary history-hence, as vital mythical presence-corresponds to an increasingly antimythical tendency in society's psychical

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universe. In this respect, the notion of "literature as theory" may indeed pertain to an intrinsic condition-to what literature does as literaturebut it also signifies the claim that literature is theory for "an antimythical era," in other words, the specific theoretical provision for exploring and exposing in what sense a certain historical condition has fashioned a crypto-metaphysics that claims to have effectively de-mythified the world. From this standpoint, to ask the question "Does literature think?" also means to reanimate the mythical power of signification from within an Enlightenment framework against both theological and rationalist transcendentalism. Understanding literature's intrinsic capacity to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges is thus consubstantial with myth's gaining new meaning, with myth's disengagement both from the burden of antique presuppositions and from various late-twentieth-century attempts to relegate it to a blind mechanism of identity reproduction. Insofar as my argument for literature's unique relation to knowledge also constitutes an interrogation of contemporary society's covert or underhanded drive for resacralization, this is essentially a political book: a book configured on the understanding that to seek whatever is intrinsically literary pertains to whatever is social, historical, worldlywhatever disputes, by its mere existence, the ahistorical pretensions of the sacred. By the same token, seeking to understand what constitutes the poetic element in a text signifies an act of reading the conditions of social poiesis itself. In precisely this sense, the question of whether and how literature thinks cannot be undertaken as an enterprise of aesthetic theory. Nor can this project be conducted in the strict ways of literary criticism, even when it involves the necessity of close-reading techniques. The textual instances figured here as moments of reading, whether cursory or in depth, ultimately belong to a broader desire to read crucial performative moments in the social imagination of postEnlightenment societies, with an eye toward the interrogation of the politics of emergent images, idols, or forms that respond to the Enlightenment's alleged disenchantment of the world. In the sense that this act of reading literature and the world is framed within a confrontation of the Enlightenment as mythical foundation of

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modernity-whereby disenchantment does not entail a spiritual desert and (re)enchantment does not necessitate a theology-this project signifies a response to the epistemological rubric proposed by Horkheimer and Adorno as the dialectic of Enlightenment. No doubt a personal and idiosyncratic gesture toward a book that more than twenty years ago inaugurated a certain path of thought to which I remain committed, this response does not merely seek to reconfigure Horkheimer and Adorno's singular understanding of the relation between Enlightenment and myth, but also attempts to rethink the ways and means of the dialectical method itself. As the reader will recognize in numerous instances, the performance of literature's intrinsically theoretical aptitude-or, in another language, the performativity of mythic thought itself-becomes a testing ground for the sort of dialectical thinking that shatters any logic of identity and recognizes neither arche nor telos. A dialectical mode of thinking that shatters identity principles and has no use for strict temporal order minimizes the possibility of coming to rest at a plateau (Lichtung) of ideas where propositional language assumes the authority of naming. However we might evaluate the philosophical status of such a mode, the fact remains that writing about literature-or, more precisely, writing about the thinking capacities of poiesis-cannot pretend to overcome the primacy of writing: the most concrete trace of the materiality of thought. I have come to understand that writing a book is a long, arduous, persistent, but hardly calculable process of shading over an area that nonetheless does not cease to resist being covered. This process is always peculiar. The most precise preview of what is to be covered turns out to owe its precision to a hunch, to an intuitive apprehension, which lies much closer to the psychic terrain of the wish than the certainty of intellectual projection. No matter how well trained we might be in the imaginative cartography of problems to be resolved, we fail to experience the pleasure of real discovery if we remain fearful of our hunches, if we extract our intuition from our method, if we dismiss the exactitude of our fantasy. Worse yet, we thus fail to recognize the resistance that every object of inquiry presents to the enquiring method-if indeed objects entail bona fide problems to be resolved, if indeed method consists in a bona fide commitment to resolve problems.

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Writing this book has been such an experience of tension between object and method, compounded by the fact that both object and method were selected for their defiance of instrumental and propositional knowledge. How does one think of literature's thinking? How does one stand outside a terrain that blurs all"outside" positions? How does one stand outside a terrain whose "inside" is the only means of orientation, both map and compass, both image and ground? One doesn't. This is the first response. One doesn't because to do so is to produce annihilating magic, to make self and image vanish at once. At the limit, to do so is to externalize this inside, to turn literature inside out-a dreadful prospect. One doesn't, because to do it presupposes that what literature does is determined once and for all, even if not readily available to evident determination. Yet the whole wager in this book is to discover what literature determines as a way of thinking in the world: to care less for what might determine literature and explore instead what might account for literature's capacity to keep its work intact despite the onslaught of multiple determinations from every aspect of the human domain. One does owe literature this much-to recognize literature's command over what enables it to be transmitted, across cultures and times, across historical terrains and languages, even in defiance of its ultimate untranslatability. Literature's enigmatic transmittability against the grain of its ultimate untranslatability might be considered the most concise figure of its theoretical idiom. As readers, we stand before literature in the light of Kleist's marionette logic. We submit to an idiomatic order, as the marionette submits to whatever power produces its weightlessness. At the same time, we transmit our reading (our historical awareness) back to the work, released from the compulsion to translate, as the puppet master must release himself from mastery and transpose himself to the puppet's center of gravity. The force of reading literature-increasingly undermined by our media-bound and technologically induced patterns of thought- resides in this suspended interplay between submission to literature's idiom and readiness to take command of the alertness to history that this idiom imposes upon us.

*

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This book came out of a project that was a long time in the making and lived through various incarnations, private and public. I am deeply grateful to the editors and publishers who took a chance at making public the ideas in this work, even when not entirely worked through. Early versions of this material were published as follows: "Research, Essay, Failure (Flaubert's Itinerary)," in New Literary History 26 (1995): 345-59; "Enlightenment and Paranomia," in Violence, Identity, and SelfDetermination, edited by Samuel Weber and Hent de Vries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 119-49; "A Lucid Drunkenness (Genet's Poetics of Revolution)," in South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 413-56; "Beyond the Damaged Life," in Emergences 9, no. 2 (November 1999): 229-43; "The Concept of the Mythical (Schmitt with Sorel)'' in Cardozo Law Review 21 (May 2ooo): 1487-512. The research and the writing of this book have benefited from various instances of academic hospitality, chief among them visiting professorships and fellowships at: the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, National Technical University in Athens (Spring 1995); International Institute and Program in Comparative Literature, University of Michigan (Spring 1998); Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture, Rutgers University (2000-2001); Yale Center for International and Area Studies and Department of Comparative Literature, Yale University (Fall 2001). I believe teaching to be the most valuable path to research, so I am profoundly indebted to the students and project collaborators in the above institutions (as well as my students at Princeton and Columbia) for the wealth of insight into the material of this book that I gained from such encounters. Halfway into this project I realized that its heart and soul was nourished by my commitment to what Edward Said has exemplified in his work as the project of secular criticism. Nothing I say will do justice to my sense of indebtedness and appreciation for Edward Said's wealth of mind and bravery of spirit, for his unwavering loyalty to whatever may enrich real lives in the real world, for his uncompromising love of literature. Beyond his insightful critique and his support of my vision over the years, I thank him for the inspiration to keep this book engaged with the reality of my life. Without the wisdom of Aristeidis Baltas this book would not have

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existed at all. In the first incandescent vestiges of the idea, carelessly spun during our many memorable conversations, he saw much further and sharper than I, raising the stakes of the argument in a way that only a bona fide epistemologist can. The depth of our friendship reaches beyond gestures of thanks for his generosity, but it cannot keep me from acknowledging that, during the most dire of times, this book has lived by virtue of borrowing his thoughts and sometimes his actual words. During the ten-year trajectory of this project and my struggle to negotiate with its many incarnations, I had the good fortune to find interlocutors with formidable minds and a passion for real thinking. Many of them helped me by creating the circumstances for this work to find a public; others intervened in crucial instances and changed its course in ways they may not recognize. For the fortune of such gifts, I am deeply grateful to Gil Anidjar, Jonathan Arac, Andrew Benjamin, Akeel Bilgrami, Judith Butler, Hamid Dabashi, Nicholas Dirks, Costas Douzinas, Samira Haj, Beatrice Hanssen, Martin Harries, Marcia Ian, Virginia Jackson, Andreas Kalyvas, Dimitris Kargiotis, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Joseph Massad, John McClure, Robert Miklitsch, Rosalind Morris, Aamir Mufti, Jan Muller, Marc Nichanian, Andrew Parker, Yopie Prins, Bruce Robbins, Gayatri Spivak, Constantine Tsoukalas, Hent de Vries, Candice Ward, Michael Warner, Samuel Weber, Joel Whitebook. To those select Princeton University colleagues (April Alliston, James Boon, Stanley Corngold, Cyan Prakash, Anson Rabinbach, Michael Wood) who, in times of impoverished judgment, showed me so gracefully how to continue to believe in this work, my appreciation knows no bounds. To Eduardo Cadava, Carlos Forment, Edward Mitchell, David Scott, and Jim Wiltgen, I offer this book in gratitude for their inimitable and relentless intellect, for the graciousness with which they show me how my mind works, for the extraordinary discussions late into the night that wrote and rewrote the world anew, for the sheer joy of our friendship. Helen Tartar, my editor at Stanford University Press, deserves the most credit for this book's actual existence; her intelligence and daring, her love of original thinking, her patience and critical persistence with my peculiar ways of writing are present all over in this text. In the midst of this journey, I lost my father, Thymios Gourgouris, altogether suddenly one fine August morning. He was hardly an intellec-

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tual, but he had a brilliant sense of the performative and an uncanny skill at subversive irony. A great many pages in this book were written under the shadow of responding to what remains with his absence. But the presence of mind and soul for undertaking this adventure springs from the two people who are my life: my son Petros, who came to this world eight years ago to teach me more than I could ever imagine, and Neni Panourgia, my heart's companion, whose myriad talents converge in her passionate and graceful way of loving life and living love in every single moment of our mortal existence.

New York and Athens June 2002

ABBREVIATIONS

eM

Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).

Corr.

Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance, ed. Louis Conard (Paris, 1926-34).

CP

Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); Die geistesgeschicht/iche Lage des heutigen Parliamentarismus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1996; orig. pub. 1923).

cv

Walter Benjamin, "Critique of Violence," trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Benjamin, Reflections (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 277-300; "Zur Kritik der Gewalt," in Gesammelte Schriften II-I (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1991), 179-203.

D

Franz Kafka, Diaries (1914-1923), trans. Martin Greenberg, with Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1949).

DE

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Dialectik der Aufklrung (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1984).

DL

Jacques Derrida, "Devant la loi," trans. Avital Ronnel, in Kafka and

the Contemporary Critical Performance, ed. Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 128-49. HH

Carl Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Dusseldorf: Eugen Diederichs, 1956).

xxvi HH

Abbreviations Martin Heidegger, Holderlin's Hymn "The Ister," trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).

IM

Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).

K

Walter Benjamin, "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death," trans. Harry Zohn, in Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 111-40.

PL

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1992); Un Captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).

s

Franz Kafka, "The Silence of the Sirens," in The Complete Stories, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971); "Das Schweigen der Sirenen," in Ein Landarzt und andere Prosa, ed. Michael Muller (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1995).

TN

Don DeLillo, The Names (New York: Vintage, 1982).

UB

Walter Benjamin, "Conversations with Brecht," in Understanding

Brecht (London: Verso, 1983). v

Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1969).

DOES LITERATURE THINK?

1

Does Literature Think?

My title resonates with that of a book by Pierre Macherey, which asks, perhaps more prudently, A quai pense la litterature? Macherey takes for granted that literature thinks and prefers to pose the question of literature's cognitive object (hence the English translation of the book as The Object of Literature). 1 No doubt this is an essential question-of what does literature think? or, from another point of view, on what account does literature think?-and I will try to engage such questions, as well. But the less instrumentally defined question I pose here as my point of departure is meant to open further the field of negotiation. Although my implied answer might nominally share Macherey's assumptionnamely, yes, literature does think-the process by which one comes to hold such a position is at stake and deserves urgent interrogation. To put it bluntly, the way that literature thinks casts into all sorts of turbulence the status of the act of thinking, if not the actual notion of thought itself-not to mention the ways we have, since the eighteenth century, categorized modes of knowledge and our access to them. The more challenging point is not to determine what literature thinks (what is its cognitive object), but how literature thinks-what is the process by which literature might provide us with access to knowledge and what 1

2

Does Literature Think?

sort of knowledge this might be. My emphasis is less on determining the object of knowledge and more on ascertaining the mode of knowledge (the nature, the framework, the process)-which may indeed involve various different objects-with the overall impetus of questioning the entire equation, the actual categories attributed traditionally to the process of thought and the way we tend to measure their consequences. The question is not simply whether literature thinks but whether literature thinks theoretically-whether it has a capacity to theorize the conditions of the world from which it emerges and to which it addresses itself. Moreover, underlying these premises is the question of literature's capacity to theorize intrinsically, without external tutelage (to invoke, for a moment, Kant's well-known assertion about the work of Enlightenment)-that is, to theorize without the aid of the analytical methods we have come to consider essential to theory, as dictated by the contemporary tradition of Western philosophy and, of course, the methods of science, in the way that both terms (philosophy and science) have come to be understood since the Enlightenment. The idea that literature might harbor its own mode of knowledge is ancient, at least as old as the so-called quarrel between poetry and philosophy and Plato's notorious expulsion of the poets from the city in the Republic. It is fair to say that since Plato's famous decision there has been an implicit but consistent association of the poetic act with apeculiar, mysterious, and even dangerous sort of knowledge. By contrast, any serious study of the intersection between the Romantics and the Kant/ Hegel configuration in German philosophy and aesthetics would recognize the invention of theory as indigenous to the literary domain, and for certain of the Romantics (particularly in the Jena circle), as properly philosophical. In Romantic aesthetics, the singular access to knowledge that literature is supposed to provide (its mystery and danger dutifully celebrated) became the basis for an "autonomous" discipline of literature, born alongside the discipline of criticism and literary theory. It is thus conventional to recognize in this Romantic conjuncture the sources of literary modernity. In contemporary terms, what might be said to shadow this inquiry is the turn that, since the late-196os, theory has taken toward an explicitly literary mode of expression, where

Does Literature Think?

3

writing itself has been granted primary value, based on the argument that philosophical discourse (and metaphysics in particular) is founded on a command of metaphor. (This was, in part, the contribution of Derrida's early work.) This turn led eventually to the institutional establishment of literary theory (in a new sense that extended the Romantic prototype beyond its own conceived limits) as the activity that can absorb practically every kind of speculative thought about culture and society in addition to the expressive mode of literature itself-occasionally, one must admit, to the detriment of literature. It may thus seem old-fashioned to affirm the intrinsic cognitive properties of literature, may perhaps even betray residual traces of New Criticism or Russian Formalism, or still more troubling, a ghostly resurgence of the claims of Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye, or Rene Wellek, which once served as institutional foundations for the relationship between literature and theory in the Anglo-American academy. Moreover, arguing for literature's theoretical"autonomy" nowadays must carry an additional burden: the likely charge of simple antiquarianism, given the increasing tendency to conceptualize knowledge in terms of technological hardware and the dire predictions that the future of the book as object has become precarious. Yet it is precisely literature's capacity to resist calculation, to defy the exigencies of the market, and to continue to harbor the key to society's imagination in this particularly uncertain and unstable time that invites us to reconsider its cognitive and theoretical nature. One might discern in this last sentence an Adornian response to contemporary reality, namely the dialectical tension between literary endeavor (or, as I will argue, poietic thinking in general) and the capitalist administration of culture (always potentially and now actually globalized), whereby the "literary" /poietic relation to the world simultaneously embodies social antinomies and simultaneously reveals them to us, aggravated, by negating them. So much would be in a large sense accurate; the presence of Adorno, refracted via a dialectical confrontation with Brecht and Benjamin and the peculiar strand of "modernist Marxism" that they all weave together, permeates this argument throughout. Yet though I am hardly interested in providing a definition of "literature as theory"-an untenable task, apart from the unavoid-

4

Does Literature Think?

able trouble of having always to historicize the relation of praxis to the world from which it emerges-! am also not content to retain the domain of literature as a purely negative ground, which is why I do not incorporate into my reflections Maurice Blanchet's extraordinary L'Espace litteraire (The Space of Literature, 1955), though its impact as a salient point of departure point remains. If my inquiry takes shape against the grain of the "autonomous" configuration of theory-a charge I consider, at the very least, arguable-it does recognize that a "primacy of literature" cannot be affirmed in the absence of theory, if for no other reason than the imperative investment in the limitless interrogation of theory beyond its triumphant institutionalization, which casts into doubt both its totalizing analytic aspirations and its self-ascribed autonomy as thinking-work, precisely in order to expand its horizon. Speaking in blunt institutional terms, to consider the question of whether literature thinks theoretically is hardly an "antitheory" proposition, except for those who are incurably threatened by theory and fetishize literature or, conversely, those who fetishize theory and are threatened by its self-interrogation. I am, of course, aware of the affinity between my argument and Heidegger's well-known formulation Dichten ist Denken, particularly in the way he put it into practice in his discussions of Holderlin. However, my objections to Heidegger's actual readings (of Holderlin, but also invariably of the Greeks) disrupt this affinity in fundamental ways. The complex details of this disruption can only be unraveled in focused elaborations.2 Let me say, as a kind of preliminary remark, that although Heidegger's turn to Holderlin's poetry as the philosophical (or theoretical) idiom in its purest form might provide an interesting point of departure, his foundational conceptualization of thought as a matter of language (in which Holder lin would be the epitome of the language of Being, "since Being speaks German," as it were) is far from what I am trying to explore. Heidegger's enormous labor of taming Holderlin's project led to a body of philosophical work that claims to repeal poetry's concealment (in another language, to reveal poetry's unconscious) by documenting in expert analytic gestures, how Holderlin's poetry is nothing other than the unacknowledged content of philosophy. Insofar as Heidegger's desire for the autonomy of poetry is genuine, his work becomes embroiled in a deadly paradox that does notre-

Does Literature Think?

5

sult in the proclaimed "end of philosophy" but in the displacement of poetry-as human creative/ destructive action, as the force of poiein-to the work of Dasein as an already determined form. In retrospect, Heidegger's tireless work on Holderlin and his elevation of poetry to the highest activities of thought might be said to extend the Athenaeum project, especially insofar as it overlaps with another Romantic obsession: to explore in practice the real possibilities of the Classical in the Modern, in a kind of sublation of the conditions of "unfinished modernity" that the Ancient Greeks left behind, an obsession that resides at the core of the German national imaginary. For the Romantics, this project entails the production of absolute literature, or of Literature as an absolute category that encompasses the autopoetic entirety of human thinking activity-the total potentia of the imagination as praxis-taken, in retrospect, to be the initial conceptualization of literature's theoretical prowess. 3 In their influential treatment of German Romanticism, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe explicitly propose researching what they call "theoretical romanticism" outside of any periodizing notions of Romanticism (as school, movement, literary tendency, etc.), in order to disentangle what they identify as literature's first theoretical instance. Their argument leads ultimately to the claim that the Romantics-who invent such a name for themselves in order to cover up their inability to name what they were engaged in-were involved in a social project: the redefinition of the significance and function of the poet in the world. They describe the Athenaeum group as a sort of political cell-" the first avant-garde group in history"-whose constitutive necessity was to establish an interrogative, self-reflexive, theoretical practice. The group aspired to a network that would serve as model for a new kind of life, and it is important to emphasize that this avant-gardism resides in the psycho-sexual dimensions of a "communal" atmosphere that explicitly defies the socio-cultural norms of the period. Its most trenchant significance, however, is the self-conceptualization of a collective theoretical practice that does not necessarily produce an obvious result, but is structurally fragmentary and oriented toward process. With the Athenaeum group, we confront not only the production of literature as autonomous category, but the genres of criticism or literary theory as autonomous social practices.

6

Does Literature Think?

A dialectical intertwining of categories takes place here: namely, theory is perceived as being in itself a literary endeavor at the same time as literature is said to produce itself in the very gesture of producing its own theory. Responding to the political stakes of this historical conjuncture, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe claim that they attempt to avoid endlessly reinventing this effort. Though one could hardly argue with the principle, the historical fact remains that avant-gardism is predicated precisely on an act of self-fashioning reinvention, of autopoiesis. To disregard the radical nature of such self-fashioning is to underestimate the power of disavowing reinvention, which lies at the heart of all modem appropriations of tradition. This invention of literature as absolute theoretical practice, which has been traditionally identified as a Romantic enterprise, is inconceivable outside an Enlightenment problematic, not only in the simple sense that the category "literature" assumes its modem meaning in the eighteenth century, but also, more substantially, in the sense that this modem meaning is none other than the mythopoetic articulation of the anthropocentric, worldly social imagination that we recognize as historically characteristic of this period. Indeed, there is considerable merit in the discussion of the co-emergence of literature and law as foundational imaginary institutions and significations at this historical juncture-with law taking over as supreme social arche and literature establishing itself as supreme cultural arche within the same imaginary institutional framework. 4 This coarticulation becomes fully comprehensible once we understand Romanticism to be an extension of the Enlightenment project, conceived in its classic sense, in spite of Romanticism's explicit counter-Enlightenment aspirations. Certainly in the German case, Kant's grand claim to perceive in moral philosophy a poietic power-that is, formative power par excellence, or more precisely for Germans, the power of Bildung, the power that forms the social subject-provides the Jena Romantics with the justification for their project. The fact that the Romantic response to Kant sought to free the subject from the structural moral constraints of reason does not constitute a rupture in the social-imaginary horizon. It constitutes rather areconfiguration, whereby the subject aspires to a different (but not other) ideal: instead of deferring to a categorical moral order, the Romantic

Does Literature Think?

7

subject identifies itself as the immanent agent of creative/ destructive power, so that the power of thought (in Kant, ethical philosophy) is manifested as art work. The other strain in this trajectory is Hegel's radicalization of the problem of knowledge in Kant (which becomes, if one adopts Hegelian terms, its abolition), a notion that is itself further radicalized/ abolished by Marx, who opens the horizon for a theory of knowledge that is as such a theory of society. As will become evident, this particular horizon opened by Marx orients the very conceptualization of "literature as theory" and, in the last instance, the entire meditation on the problem. 5 The historical pressure to revisit the Romantic project as constitutive arche of literary self-reflection (or in a larger sense, as the origin of literary modernity itself) is enormous. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's treatise follows a long trajectory of such gestures, whether self-acknowledged or not, from Nietzsche and Heidegger to Benjamin and Derrida. While one cannot entirely avoid such pressures, I have a hunch that the challenge of elucidating literature's intrinsic theoretical capacity becomes greater if we take the question outside the bounds of its Romantic affinities. My inquiry therefore forges another trajectory, one that seeks to privilege a materialist configuration of the most intangible modes of understanding, indeed of social-imaginary significations themselves. To pose the question of whether literature thinks, even more, of whether literature thinks theoretically, requires a social-imaginary universe that posits knowledge as a self-consciously worldly enterprise without transcendental safeguard. This is precisely to diverge from the worldliness of both Kantian philosophy (with its rationalist transcendentalism, arguably an extension of the Lutheran imaginary) and the worldliness of Romantic idealism, which even in its most radical moments constitutes itself around the transcendentalist figures of genius, the sublime, the Spirit, the Absolute, and so on. 6 In this respect, a project that understands literature as theory is not, strictly speaking, a project of aesthetics, whether in post-Kantian or post-Romantic terms. At least that is my aspiration. What concerns me is not what might make the literary object good, beautiful, truthful, or sublime, but what enables the literary object to stake out a domain of cognition-that is to say, what makes the literary object a theoretical subject, a material ground

8

Does Literature Think?

from which one can think and produce knowledge (which, to my mind at least, is ultimately inseparable from what makes the literary object literary). Staking out this domain of cognition involves a performative gesture. It is a matter of staging an event at a specific point in time, not a territorializing act, an act of occupation of a specific topos, which is why it cannot be retrieved but must be staged anew each time. As with any performance, one cannot outmaneuver the contingent nature of the act. One of the insurmountable differences between literary cognition and analytical processes is literature's explicitly constitutive performativity/ which was already articulated as foundation by Plato at the very moment of his discovery that mimesis is reprehensible. It is important to remember that the most terrifying element of mimesis for Plato is impersonation, the act of speaking as another: resin hos tis allos on (Republic, 393c). This act is, in an elemental sense, the core significance of acting: hypokrisis. The whole argument against the poets in the Republic is predicated on an acknowledged hostility to the theater and to theatricality specifically, a hostility that, though espoused by only a minority of Athenians, did have a tradition that went back to Solon. This argument is implicitly propelled by an anti-Dionysian impulse or, more precisely, a critique of the Bacchic imaginary out of which Athenian theater emerged as an institution and whose ritual interplay between reality and illusion it confirmed through performative praxis (drama). This impulse is underlined by an explicit admission of the pleasures associated with theatricality, pleasures derived from what Plato considers "alien passions" (allotria pathe, Republic, 6o6b), which poetry allegedly incites. These pleasures threaten to turn the performative experience into an experience of nature (Republica95d), indeed, more precisely, into an experience of nature that alters the very essence of nature. 8 After having laid out the logic for the necessity of philosophy as the safeguard of the polis, Plato will argue in Book X, with a shrewd dialectical gesture, that in order to guard against poetry one must know its nature. He argues explicitly that if poetry is a dangerous pharmakon (poison), one must possess another pharmakon (cure, antidote) that would render poetry apparent for what it is (Republic, 595b). But to know poetry's nature, even more, to make it apparent, is literally to produce it-

Does Literature Think?

9

to bring it to theasis, to engage in a theatrical gesture. This is entirely consistent, since the essential nature of poetry, according to Plato, is myth animated by mimesis (i.e., impersonation, performativity, theatricality). The logic of the pharmakon is in this respect relentless; it is both literal and paradoxical, creating out of poetry and philosophy two antagonistic but wholly intertwined entities. As the proper pharmakon, philosophy is the only way to obliterate the danger of poetry, which is mimesis, by taking up the knowledge of mimesis and indeed (re)producing the mythic nature of mimesis-notably, by 'imitating mimesis,' which is for Plato poetry's most reprehensible aspect. This is exactly what happens in the Republic itself, as in most of Plato's writings, whereby philosophy is staged as myth precisely when it tries most to conquer poetic mimesis. Plato thus inaugurates an extraordinary and paradoxical demand for philosophy that philosophy has yet to dissolve: to engage its other (poetry) by means of a reciprocal diffusion into each other's terrain. In the last instance, the aim of the Republic is not merely to resolve the quarrel between poetry and philosophy by exiling the poets from the polis, but to substantiate this gesture with the demonstration that the (self-)knowledge of poetry belongs to philosophy. In this sense, sublated into form (the Platonic dialogue), the quarrel is never actually resolved but is incorporated inextricably into the performance of philosophy. Of course, as Stanley Rosen has demonstrated in brilliant fashion, this quarrel is constituted so as never to be resolved, on the one hand, because philosophy and poetry are dialectically intertwined as each other's lack, and, on the other hand, because the preoccupation with the quarrel between them serves to dissimulate the core political problems the Republic attempts to address: "Philosophy without poetry, exactly like poetry without philosophy, is immoderate or unmeasured. In the last analysis, there is no quarrel between philosophy and poetry. But the last analysis is not the first. Even within the limits of the Book X of the Republic, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that Socrates begins with the quarrel but ends with the myth of Er. The pedagogical function of the Republic is that of a pharmakon or noble lie, which is designed to inoculate us against the vitiating consequences of the recognition that justice is impossible."9 Rosen adds another component to the

1o

Does Literature Think?

picture, to which we must remain alert throughout this inquiry: namely, the entire equation that sets poetry against philosophy and thus, as I will argue at length, sets society's mythographic imagination against its rational-analytical propensity (what Cornelius Castoriadis has termed "identitarian-ensemblist logic") involves a political confrontation at its core. Whichever way we decide the matter, whether by privileging one side or interweaving them in some form or another, we are engaged in a political decision that cannot be bracketed or overcome. In the specific terms of this book, the question of "literature as theory for an antimythical era" goes beyond the terms of the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy (and certainly beyond the contemporary antagonism between literature and theory) to the radical significance of the political itself-indeed, more precisely, to how we understand, evaluate, and perform the relation of the political to the poietic in our own social-historical moment.

Not Analysis With this task in mind, instead of arguing for a conception of literature in competition or in coarticulation with philosophy, whereby the two terms come to have a spatial integrity and autonomy that affirms both their difference and their complicity-which would be precisely to assume Plato's argumentative framework-let us lay philosophy momentarily aside. This also means laying aside the issue of language as foundational vehicle for cognition, an issue that holds equally (though differently) for both Plato's and Heidegger's projects, not to mention the general premises of a tradition that has come to be known as analytic philosophy. I suggest this tentative disjunction because I want to emphasize that the problem of literature's cognitive capacity is a literary problem (or what I will henceforth explore, throughout this book, as a problem of mythographic thought and of knowledge as performance), not a philosophical problem in the strict sense. Let us then consider literature's staging of thought to be the means that renders thought a matter of poetic language, instead of the reverse, as it is traditionally conceived, so that poetic language itself is said to bear the exclusive elements of literariness. In other words, let us consider the claim of

Does Literature Think?

11

literature's intrinsic theoretical capacity to be a performative matter, a matter of (re)framing the conditions of action and perception within a shifting social-historical terrain, which renders one's relation to the object of knowledge a process (praxis) of restlessness and transformation. In this respect, literature's theoretical praxis makes the classic dichotomy between vita activa and vita contemplativa no longer applicable. From this standpoint, just as language as communicative vehicle ceases to be the fundamental basis for literature's unique access to knowledge, so literature's aim to knowledge cannot be reduced to an object that could be externally determined and circumscribed. Literature has no a priori cognitive object. Each text posits its own object of knowledge, each time anew, by means of its form, its horizon of possibility (the explicit or implicit positions it takes up within its social-historical range), and the conditions under which it is read. These aspects make up what we could call the text's conditions of production, which include elements traditionally identified as historical context, linguistic idiom, cultural tradition, biographical parameters, and so on, except that these are to be considered, not external to the text, but internal to the overall process of writing. What permeates and diffuses the apparent self-enclosure of the literary text is the extent to which reading can be considered part of its conditions of production. Note that I am not thinking in terms of what has been called "reception theory," because the issue here is not to establish retrospectively the text's historical boundaries (I consider those to be inherent in the very moment of writing), but to understand how the text's internal existence (its singularity) comprises the various moments and contexts of its performance, in which reading is, of course, fundamental. If we were, for a moment, to focus on the reader's location in the general vicinity of the text's stage, indeed as part of its staging, we could speak of a correspondence that involves a gnostic experience between the subject created by the literary text (the entire world manifested in the text's fictionality, which is nonetheless undeconstructibly real as imaginary creation) and the subject enacted by the reader. A gnostic experience, in my terms, does not imply a mystical adherence between two wholly constituted entities, because it takes place as a skewed correspondence between two open-ended entities that fashion

12

Does Literature Think?

themselves in a sort of performative tandem. Thus, insofar as the text

speaks (has something to say, in ordinary language), it enables the reader-subject to have a sense of his/her position or to have a sense of his/her effect in a wider historical domain: the particular subject effect that creates the differential experience of individual location in a specific social-historical frame. We can talk then of a cognitive encounter tantamount to an internal ideological distancing: the subject sensing itself as effect and, even more, the subject reading (in the sense of decoding or discovering) itself as a specific location of thought within the social-historical frame. To avoid misunderstanding, I should reiterate what I mentioned in the preface, namely, that the historical details of this scene pertain to what we call, for lack of precision, a "post-Enlightenment subject": simply put, a subject cognizant of its subjectivity, even if not necessarily cognizant of the social-imaginary institution of its subjectivity. This shouldn't be restricted to what, in a gross oversimplification of the Enlightenment legacy, has been presumed to be an "autonomous subject"-which is, in any case, the subject of a historical project that has yet to manifest itself beyond a future vision of itself. What I call a "postEnlightenment subject" involves the entire terrain of significationmultiple, mutable, and ultimately impossible to map-that pertains to the sort of self-cognition I am describing and the tension this cognition produces relative to the consequences of realizing one's own subject effect. To call this the condition of the "Western subject" is, at the very least, to demean the foundations of all who have historically resisted the imperialist project of the "West." A reader of literature in China, Uganda, or Palestine does not deserve to be robbed of his/her self-cognizant encounter with the real of fictionality-in the terms I am describing it-in the name of some ultimately nativist fetishism of oral or mythic tradition, just as his/her resistance to the hegemonic rationalism of the "West" is not ultimately some exotic matter, a property inherent to "Otherness." So, how does this internal dislocation within subjectification take place? When most fascinated and absorbed by a literary text, the reader-subject projects an often unquestioned reality onto it. Even readers trained in recognizing and decoding literariness project this literari-

Does Literature Think?

13

ness as the text's "unquestioned reality"-or might one say, without any trace of cynicism, that the reality of literariness is the abyssal mirror of the real in the text, produced by the specific internal distancing that pertains to the "trained" reader-subject? This implicit and nonverbal projection of reality is the free passage of the reader into his own imaginary world I reality: the imaginary that makes the reader a subject, that constructs and allows for a subject position, which in turn makes the act of reading possible. Surely, what enables us even to articulate this correspondence is the sense that, in its full-fledged fictionality, literature resides at the core of the real, even more so because it takes no care to occlude its articulation of the social-imaginary. This is why the memorable characters of literature command an indisputable reality. Likewise, what produces for the subject the sense that s/he is real (a real person in a real world) is an imaginary that is as "fictional"-in the sense of being "constructed" or "instituted" by irreducible socialhistorical parameters-and thus as real as the world of the literary text. We only make sense of this relation if we come to terms with the radical reality of social-imaginary significations, significations that give fictional figures their substantive reality (be they figures of the self or the world, of the"'fictional" or the thinkable). We may thus speak of this projection/passage as a transversal dimension, in the sense that the subjective imaginary traverses the socialimaginary terrain with which it tentatively enters into skewed correspondence (not identification). Insofar as it relativizes (so as not to say outright "disrupts") the subject's constituted sense of itself and its world, this transversal produces a tentative and ephemeral opening that allows a sort of "cognitive appropriation" of the social-imaginary dimension, presumably "translatable" into subjective terms, so that it simultaneously creates a new self-recognition and enacts a self-alteration. One gains a sense of knowing something other than the knowledge that comes from the words one has read, a knowledge that alters not only one's relation to those words but also the relation to one's sense of self as a "knowing subject." Here, I take as my point of departure the fact that the "knowing subject" and the "object of knowledge" are already linked in a dialectical relation, whereby the subject is both the same as and other to the object it encounters-this is elementary, at

14

Does Literature Think?

least since Hegel (if not, arguably, since Aristotle). A singular, undialectical dimension of the cognitive encounter is inadequate, whatever the mode of cognition; it leads either to the obliteration of the intellectual faculty in the subject or to the total unintelligibility of the object. The passage of this peculiar "cognitive appropriation" is hardly discernible, much as the knowledge to which one gains access exceeds (in the sense of being other than) the relevant knowledge achieved by analytic comprehension of the same domain. Thus, one can have a sense that in reading, say, Crime and Punishment, one gains insight into all the secrets governing the conditions that eventually led to the Russian Revolution, without needing to absorb innumerable analyses on the subject, because the novel, without duplicating such analyses, includes them and yet exceeds their boundaries. To avoid misunderstanding, I am not talking here of achieving historical expertise; I am talking of "having a sense of the secrets" -and I shall reflect momentarily on the inevitability of this allusive and even secretive language. This is precisely what Walter Benjamin does with Baudelaire: the lyric poet in the era of high capitalism. This is what we do with Shakespeare all the time (the poet of the Elizabethan era), or with Sophocles (the guilty conscience of democracy), Euripides (Athenian decline), or, more contentiously, with Virginia Woolf's work as modernism's androgynous internal deconstruction. 10 From her initial essay "Modern Fiction" (1919), which has been considered a manifesto of English modernism, to A Room of One's Own (1928), which is recognized as a manifesto of modern feminism, Woolf self-consciously sought to subvert the consolidation of identities, be they a matter of sexuality, or of politics or aesthetics in a general sense. Her critique extended to literature itself-particularly to the degree that by the late 1920s it was instituted as a modernist disarticulation of tradition. Her mode of subversion consisted in what she understood eventually to be androgynous writing, a writing first and foremost committed to a differential literary articulation. Contrary to certain traditional feminist critiques, which see in Woolf's position a psychological and political retreat-" a flight into androgyny" is Elaine Showalter's oftenquoted phrase-Woolf's actual practice exhibits a double nature, explicit formal innovation interwoven with androgynous subjectivity, a

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double praxis that undoes the universalist consolidation of both sexuality and literature as instituted essences. In terms of sexuality, in particular, this move is a radical feminist gesture because it unmasks an implicit universalist aspiration in the pure category of "woman," an aspiration whose strict logic of identity places it squarely in the realm of dominant masculinist discourse. "It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple," Woolf famously claims, and we cannot but take seriously the notion that the logic of identity is deadly at its core. In a fashion profoundly against the grain, for a thinker avowedly committed to meditation on female subjectivity, Woolf recognizes the trap of taking sexual singularity as an epistemic source for the act of writing. Instead, she affirms the singularity of writing-its radical social-historical contingency-by making internal to the textual process an undeconstructibly ambiguous subjectivity. The gracefully ironic entrance into the narrative of Orlando (1928) is memorable: "He-for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it-was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters." The narrative begins by introducing its most contentious ground: the gendering of pronouns. Though "he" bears the certainty of grammar, the text "he" is to constitute-after all, it is "his" story about to be told, beginning with a theatrical gesture that attests to the symbolic properties of "his" gender-plunges this certainty into a performative flux, which is precisely the force of historical fashioning. And while, on the one hand, Orlando is a masterly treatise on the transformative power of "the fashion of the time" in the most literal sense-identities are engendered by their clothing at the same time that their clothing invests them with a specific gender (in the most profoundly performative sense of the dialectical process)-on the other hand, Orlando is in many ways a theoretical treatise directly concerned with the fashioning of history on a grand scale. This history will be recounted in a bold mythographic gesture-it will encompass the four-hundred-year social history of modern England, which is to say, considering the novel's actual emergence into the apogee of imperialism, the social history of Western expansion and ap-

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propriation. This recounting takes place symptomatically: not directly, analytically, as "proper" history would, but as the outcome of a meditation on the perils of disguising the fashioning of identity and presenting it as nature. If "imperialism is the export of identity," in Edward Said's disarmingly succinct phrase, the theoretical innovation of Orlando-which raises significant political stakes-consists in disrupting the singular grammar of identity: "We have no choice left but confesshe was a woman." This grammatical deformation quickly gives way to the plurality that underlies identity when its artifice (its social-historical nature) is made evident. The conventional meaning of languageits analytical stability predicated on the reliability of distinction-simply breaks down. The text goes on: "Orlando had become a womanthere is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity" (138). The proclaimed non-alteration of identity has just become grammatically plural. Identity has fallen into travesty. I don't want to belabor the point in this cursory example, but the details of the specific circumstances that generated this novelistic experiment are sufficiently well known for us to realize that Virginia Woolf brought to the tropos of the novel the gestures of cross-dressing. This is how the novel's style is indeed a travesty, not in terms of the commonly analyzed sense of satire. Most significantly, upon this foundationally ambivalent trope-neither one, nor quite the other-Woolf dares to build, layer by layer, a social history of identity formation in both sexual and broadly political terms. Certainly, one of the theoretical points raised by Orlando is the travesty of domination inherent in the West's great project of civilization, a project which, it turns out, proved to be Civilization's travesty. Androgyny thus becomes more than just a trope of ambiguous subjectivity, which may or may not threaten the impermeability of sexual boundaries; it becomes a method of conducting social history. Orlando operates as the active principle of history across the span of four hundred years, a history of empire, of course, perceived from the standpoint of an essential transhistorical site of occupation (in the sense of Freud's Besetzung, meaning also "investment"): the sexualized body. This method of social history is wholly internal to

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the modus operandi of the literary text; it is foundational to its very constitution, from Woolf's initial conceptualization of a personal joke to its finalized form in the fictional biography of a man, which turns out to be the autobiography of a woman who is attempting to perform a different (and indeed differential) social grammar. The radical particularity of the literary text (usually taken for granted as self-evident nature) is precisely what enables the literary text to transform itself into a theoretical vehicle beyond its apparent boundaries. Such particularity is necessary to every theory that acknowledges its historicity, but is almost always sublated in the name of a desired universal application, which every theory needs in order to legitimize itself philosophically. Literature as theory, to the degree that it bypasses the hegemonic episteme of philosophy, needs neither to occlude its radical particularity nor to sublate it into a zone of universal legitimacy. The particularity of the literary text embodies its theoretical work as it grips the senses of different readers in time and space, producing an indefinite plurality of responses while retaining its own social-imaginary intact. From this standpoint, the feared obstacles to translation are overcome, precisely because this grip-what makes, for example, Virginia Woolf's texts retain their fascination beyond the English language-can never be reduced to the components of the original linguistic idiom. It is reduced to that by readers who seek it as such, whose subject positions rely on the inviolability of the specific linguistic idiom. At the same time, the sense that literature affords is not imprisoned in the singularity of each literary work, but seems to exceed the text's boundaries so as to encompass both a sense of the tradition informing the work and the ground opened up by its potentially infinite encounters with readers across cultures and times. When we recognize that the "classic texts" overcome obstacles to translation (despite the evident impossibility of an ideally accurate translation), we acknowledge an inner core that can be transferred across languages, historical contexts, and cultural sensibilities. This inner core is a "matrix" that carries, if I may risk the metaphor, each literary text's genetic code. The code is only potentially analyzable to its full extent, for its command over the complexities of the text's particularity is so total that the process of apprehending it (which is never to say entirely comprehending it) gives

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one the sense of being let in on a secret whose actual nature ultimately cannot be deciphered. Thus, reading literature often produces a sense that our knowledge exceeds our articulation of it, in a way that may remind us of Karl Polanyi's theorization concerning a "tacit dimension" of understanding. I have insisted on using the word sense and not knowledge, even though I am concerned with a cognitive process. As Stanley Rosen has aptly put it: "A sense is a sense to an understanding. This is the condition for our ability to distinguish between the meaning of a concept or the truth of a proposition and the circumstances under which we as individuals come to understand the concept or the proposition." 11 Literature challenges our usual definitions of knowledge in strict conceptual terms. Instead, it demands that we account for the implicit, the nonpalpable, the ineffable, the perfectly contingent. It demands a nonalgorithmic, nonpropositional, "noncognitive," but nonetheless expert knowledge: once you possess it, you do not need to calculate or analyze your way to the cognitive object. You just have, in a deep-structural sense, a feel for the path-you have a sense of both the object and its context or its horizon. This process-as well as the attempt to describe it in sensible terms-stretches the limits of propositional, communicative language. Macherey provides a concise explanation: Literary texts have as their object the non-adhesion of language to language, the gap that constantly divides what we say from what we say about it and what we think about it. They reveal the void, the basic lacuna on which all speculation is based and which relativizes individual manifestations of speculation. This ironic relationship with truth, which demands above all else a disabused interpretation, means that literary philosophy is an essentially problematic intellectual experience: it consists in revealing philosophical problems, expounding them and "staging" them in the theatrical sense of the term, and eschewing any definitive, or supposedly definitive, attempt to resolve them, put an end to them and suppress them with arguments." 12

Thus far, a seemingly untenable complex of elements has emerged: literature's inviolable particularity dictates the terms of theoretical speculation, whose utility, by definition (qua theory), must accede to something generally demonstrable, or at least demonstrable in histori-

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cal contingencies other than those generating it. In other words, one must be able to point to certain elements in the working of literature that go beyond the workings of a particular literary text and to do so, moreover, without obliterating the historical parameters of these working particulars. I consider this doubleness to be a dialectical contradiction, which becomes untenable only if one's method insists on a singular logic. The practical dimensions of a project that argues for literature as theory must involve the double work of both speculative invention of categories of understanding (much as philosophy or science does, but not in the terms of philosophy or science), as well as empirical excavation of literary textures, which remains the unavoidable interpretive encounter with the materiality of literary writing. To argue for literature's "non-scientificity" in this sense is precisely to speak of literature's scientia. This isn't to disavow the extraordinary poetic force of science (nowadays most evident in theoretical physics and mathematics); it is, rather, to acknowledge that the poiesis of science is "disciplined" in specifically scientific fashion much as literature's scientia is "disciplined" in literary terms. 13 In my terms, this double work takes place within two specific but wide-ranging frames of reference, which also serve to rearticulate certain problems in both the history of philosophy and literary history: (1) "intuitive knowledge," which has a long and circuitous existence in the history of modern philosophy; (2) what I call"mythographic thought," which I employ within the performative context I have already described. I shall now address these specifically as a way of rounding out (but also grounding historically) the problematic at hand.

Intuition The domain of intuition at once plunges us back into the discourse of philosophy-inevitably, because philosophy, being the self-ascribed mode of contemplating truth (of language, of spirit, of life), has a long history of confronting the very terms of knowledge that seem to defy it. The category of intuition becomes a philosophical problem when we separate it from the common usage of the term to mean inference or hunch and consider it a claim to "immediate knowledge" or "non-

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propositional knowledge." The mediation apparently absent in the notion "immediate knowledge" would refer to heterogeneous faculties that enable us to define the concept whose knowledge we acquire. In this instance, intuitive knowledge enables knowledge of the undefined, without even the necessity of a secondary process of definition, a definition after apprehension. It is thus close to "sense" or indeed parallel to it, as Rosen argues: "Our 'sense that ... 'is as heterogeneous as 'our intuition that ... ' because to a considerable extent the two terms are synonymous, and when they are not synonymous, they run in parallel paths. More specifically, either a sense is an intuition, or else the sense (say of a scientific analysis) is accessible to the intelligence via intuition."14 Intuition has an immanent theoretical nature, Rosen goes on to argue, precisely in "making sense" of an object beyond an inference about what is sensible in this object-in other words, without necessarily translating the "properties" of this object into propositional terms. Making sense of the nonpropositional suggests the possibility of achieving knowledge of an object without consideration for the various propositions that pertain to the object's truth. Let us consider a quotidian example: A person complains about experiencing a pain that can nowhere be traced by empirical, physiological methods. We have no way of establishing the truth of this pain, but we also have no ground, philosophically, to dispute the truth of the person's claim. In fact, the common term for such occasions-"psychosomatic"-illustrates perfectly this double dimension of signification: though of no demonstrable somatic origin such a condition is nonetheless, at the level of the symptom, demonstrably somatic. Note that, unlike the fashionable position regarding literature ("everything is subject to interpretation"), there is no room for relativism here. What restricts and determines this paradox is solely the fact that it pertains to an experience of the body. This is especially relevant, since the trajectory of "intuitive knowledge" in the history of cognitive philosophy (arguably from Kant to Husserl to Frege) is tied up with the notion of sense perception and, generally, with a sensuous horizon in the realm of thinking. The key problem regarding intuition in the history of philosophy (common to phenomenology and to analytic philosophy) has been the passage of understanding from intuition to conceptualization and even more, to discur-

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sive articulation. In an attempt to maneuver around the sort of discussion that would embroil us in the antagonism between semantics and epistemology, which is how this issue is "resolved" in analytic philosophy, I shall risk the idiosyncratic path of examining intuition not merely as a sensuous category but as a category that disavows the mind/body split and approaches the passage from intuition to conceptualization through, if I may be permitted a linguistic paradox, an essentially "nonconceptual" sense of conception. 15 In this regard, my interest in intuition is inseparable from my commitment to the sort of worldliness and materiality that takes the bodyand its intimate relation to finite and unstable matter-as the ground point of radical human creativity. This is exemplified in Spinoza, whose thought, inimitably complicated and yet at the same time supple and resilient, is animated at its core by a radical critique of the mind/body split and an uncompromising drive to consider things of the mind (that is to say, both thought and desire-the "unthought") from the standpoint of encounters between bodies. Spinoza's privilege of intuition is directly related to his astute sense of the materiality of human thought, and this has often been identified as the secret of his allure, particularly in light of the notorious difficulty of his thinking process. 16 Spinoza holds that scientia intuitiva (otherwise known as the "third mode of knowledge") is the most elevated form of knowledge-in a cognitive sequence that goes from revelation to reason to intuition (Ethics V. Prop. 25-32). This is only nominally a sequence, for there can be no passage from the first to the second-from revelation to reason-and although one can only attain the third by extensive apprenticeship in the second, the passage is in no way predetermined. Scientia intuitiva involves the passage from understanding the universal relations of common ideas to the direct apprehension of particular essences. It is the intuitive apprehension of the singularity of things, which isn't at all to say their individuated isolation, but, in a dialectical sense (pre-Hegelian, but dialectical nonetheless), their unique, irreducible, and unreproducible traversal of universality. To get a better sense of this complex arrangement and the terms Spinoza uses to elaborate the relation between the three modes, I shall risk schematizing an unschematizable argument. The "first mode of

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knowledge" pertains to the domain of opinion and imagination, involving what Spinoza terms "inadequate ideas" (the necessarily "partial" image representations of our thinking) and "passive affections" (the images inscribed, as corporeal traces, from all our modes of existence). This is knowledge achieved through vague experience, based on the random character of encounters with things. Such encounters include not only the realm of Nature but also the realm of the "civil state" (wherein knowledge is achieved by means of errant signs, tantamount to knowledge by hearsay). In one of his many radical gestures, Spinoza includes in this mode of knowledge the religious state: the experience of God through revelation. Spinoza considers the religious state of prophets-in other words, religion through imagination/revelationto belong to the realm of inadequate ideas. His radical anti-individualism and his interrogation of the mind's rule over the body in traditional philosophy leads Spinoza to proclaim that the God of prophecy and revelation is but mere projection, a mental illusion. By the same token, it is worth noting that Spinoza's use of the imagination is contiguous with the modern notion of ideology. Were we to play in contemporary (post-Romantic) terms, we would recognize the modern meaning of imagination (as creative/ constitutive force) in Spinoza's notion of intuitionP In the first mode of knowledge, no knowledge is in effect possible, insofar as the mind is unable to disentangle itself from its immersion in its own fantasy or perception of its sovereignty. The "second mode of knowledge" in the Ethics corresponds to the domain of reason. Spinoza is explicit about a break between the first and the other two modes. This second mode is the domain of understanding or of reaching constitutive order, working through what Spinoza calls "common notions" (notions that pertain to the general attributes of all bodies), which constitute the primary "adequate ideas" (ideas which are nonrepresentative in the sense that they embody the very form that connects things and their attributes). In this domain, the religious impulse emerges, not from the imagination, but from (rational) understanding. (Thus, Spinoza distinguishes explicitly the religion of prophets from the religion of Solomon or the Apostles.) The second mode of knowledge provides access to universality. If we were to concede, for instance, that the prophets were transmitting the Laws of Na-

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ture, we would have to say that they were doing so without adequate understanding of them. That is to say, common notions do find their conditions of formation in the imagination, but it is their application, through the action of reason, that enables them to become adequate ideas. Rational understanding enables us to understand the necessity of things, their universal potential and power (potentia). It diminishes the passions but thus succeeds in holding onto the energy of the object. The second mode of knowledge enables an adequate affirmation of the idea of God, precisely in the sense that God is the (inferred) object of intellectual understanding, not a prophetic imagining or a leap of faith. Indeed, God cannot be imagined. Gilles Deleuze argues convincingly that almost all of the Ethics (until V. Prop. 21) is written from the standpoint of the second mode of knowledge. 18 This may explain why Spinoza's relative reticence about the third mode of knowledge has been such a chimera for his interpreters. Admittedly, the discussion of the third mode is the shortest and most elusive section on the subject of knowledge in the Ethics. Insofar as the third mode of knowledge is accessible only through the second, it may be deemed the passage from understanding the universal relations of common ideas to envisioning "directly" particular essences. It is thus the intuitive "sense" of the singularity of things from the viewpoint of eternity, with the crucial understanding, however, that the form of eternity is the essence of the body (Ethics V. Prop. 27-29). Spinoza's anti-Cartesianism is, in this respect, radical and profound. Spinoza speaks of "mental acquiescence"-not an active labor of thinking through the relations between things, but an embodied apprehension of their singular existence. This is hardly mystical knowledge, precisely because mysticism involves conscious application and indeed rigorous training (askesis), an ascetic existence. 19 On this point, at least, Spinoza's notion of intuitive knowledge is clearly different from Schelling's elaborate notion that intuition is a mystical apprehension of an ultimate kind-as he puts it, of "the Absolute itself." Spinoza never considers the intuitive mode of knowledge to be something devoted to the Absolute, for even God who is, after all, the fundamental object of cognition becomes, in scientia intuitiva, a matter of "intellectual love" (Ethics V. Prop. 32-34)-a paradoxical notion based on a sensual and

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corporeal understanding of the mind that has nothing to do with faith or even intellect as such. Pursuing thls particular mode of thinking, Etienne Balibar argues for two types of conscientia (consciousness/ conscience) in Spinoza: first, an aspect of the imagination that belongs to the first mode of knowledge and is essentially moral conscience, a value-laden view of the world; second, the immanent consequence of "intuitive science" (the third mode of knowledge), which may be explained as the adequate expression of one's own body (singularity) as it refers to the idea of God from the viewpoint of eternity. This viewpoint is elusive since, Spinoza argues, eternity is usually confused with duration and a kind of postmortem memory (Ethics V. Prop. 34), suppressing entirely the paradox that the eternal is the most singular mode (the body), out of which thought emerges in the encounter with other bodies. It goes without saying that between these two modes of conscience/ consciousness there is no continuity. They are, rather, separated and linked by a long detour through reason, the second mode of knowledge: the knowledge (scientia) of causes founded upon common notions. Balibar conceives of this as a dialectical process: conscience passes through nonconsciousness, which is, strictly speaking, "a process of consciousness without a subject" (yet another instance of anti-Cartesianism). 20 Balibar goes on to argue that the consciousness that emerges from intuitive knowledge is not based on a fixed idea, but takes place as "a process equating all the terms in the chain [the elements of relation] by continuously passing from the one to the others." 21 Intuitive knowledge is the power of thinking that circulates among singularities, achieving thus a sense of relation (and thus presumably a sense of the whole), without the faculty that enables the breakdown of the whole to its parts, which is the essence of the analytical process. This is a crucial element in the methodology of literature as theory, demonstrating the actual possibility of achieving knowledge of an object without making necessary its position a priori, making, rather, the world of the object (as an ensemble of sensuous and material-indeed, historical-relations) internal to the cognitive process. If the theory of intuitive knowledge is not quite elaborated in Spinoza, this is hardly the case with Henri Bergson, arguably the most pas-

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sionate advocate of intuitive knowledge in the history of modern philosophy.22 Bergson is all the more relevant in the present discussion because of his enormous influence in modernist literary circles, given that the Wyndham Lewis group and, of course, Marcel Proust were avowed pupils and practitioners of Bergsonian attitudes. For Bergson, intuitive knowledge exists in the conjunction of two elements: (1) knowledge and perception in general are enabled by an overall system of forces whose material grounding is the body itself; (2) knowledge can be achieved beyond the realm of language, precisely because language is antithetical to the experience of duration, which it cannot grasp because words are designed to freeze and stabilize the flux of experience. Thus, Bergson chooses to understand intuitive knowledge as a pre-linguistic (or, certainly, extralinguistic) process, which could ostensibly link his inquiry to certain Freudian categories, not merely the dissimulating techniques of dreaming but chiefly the process of sublimation. He speaks characteristically of "the cinematographic method of the intellect," whereas language acts like a camera that reduces motion to a series of frames, against which he posits intuition's consubstantial relation with what he calls "internal duration," which is to be understood not in terms of the succession, contiguity, or juxtaposition of different states or psychic images, but rather as a continuous flux of affective, intrapsychic self-presentations (perhaps not unlike Freud's notion of the psyche's primary Vorstellung). 23 Bergson's methodological foundation is the claim that the work of philosophy emerges from the incommensurability between the moment of intuitive knowledge and the agonizing process of elucidating this moment in conceptual language, an antagonism that is never resolved. His own conscious imperative is "to raise intuition to the level of a philosophical method," a project he conceived from the outset, contrary to Schelling's or Schopenhauer's usage of intuition as the immediate search for the eternal, as "a question of finding true duration" (CM, 30). Bergson's persistent meditation on temporality, in both physics and psychology (the first in direct dialogue with Einstein; the second, mindful of William James and, of course, Freud), was arguably the fundamental dimension of his entire conceptual framework. 24 Like his other beloved obsession-memory-Bergson's philosophical artie-

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ulation of intuition (unlike Spinoza, in this respect) is implicated in his peculiar conception of time (hence, his insistence on the precision of intuition) and, symptomatically, in the sensual experience of the temporal, whether as finite or infinite, mobile or immobile, tangible or intangible, repetitive or radically new. This last pair is especially important for us. When Bergson says outright that "to think intuitively is to think in duration" (CM, 34)-to think, as he says elsewhere, in mobile terms-it is because for him "the living being has duration as essence precisely because it is continually elaborating what is new" (CM, 93). In other words, humanity's relation to reality is constitutively poietic, in the sense that its unlimited capacity for creation is the very core of the real, even though humanity consistently occludes it: "As reality is created as something unforeseeable and new, its image is reflected behind it into the indefinite past," thus creating itself as possibility (as if having been always already possible), even though nothing in the past determines the precise possibility of any thing. There is nothing possible in reality that isn't made possible, precisely out of humanity's capacity to inhabit duration and generate new spatia-temporal dimensions in "the continuous creation of unforeseeable novelty" (CM, 101-4). Precisely because reality is ceaseless motion, it remains open for us to traverse it, unlike a fixed object, which, by blocking out a definite spatia-temporal moment bounded by gaps all around, not only "remains impermeable but confers a sense of fixity even to the knowing subject" who encounters it. This second model has prevailed in traditional philosophy, as the rendering of space-time into conceptual frames immobilizes the flux of the real into specified moments of apprehension, reproducible and communicable, whose otherwise practical utility (precisely in terms of communication) is taken to be the actuality of experience, and worse yet, to be the mode in which reality is constituted. Our problems arise, Bergson warns, when "we place ourselves in the immobile to watch for the moving reality as it passes, instead of putting ourselves back into the moving reality to traverse with it the immobile positions .... It is thus understood that fixed concepts can be extracted by our thought from the mobile reality, but there is no means whatever of reconstituting with the fixity of concepts the mobility of the real"

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(CM, 189). Herein lies Bergson's direct critique of Kantian rationalism (in which Betgson correctly identifies a residual Platonism), which configures the idea in relation, not to the concreteness of a thing, but to a disembodied law, thus conceiving knowledge as the pouring of experience into preexisting abstract models. Instead, Bergson calls for philosophical retraining, a reversal of the conceptual habitus: "To philosophize means to reverse the normal direction of the workings of thought" (CM, 189). This reversal concerns both the actuality of intuition, which involves, as Bergson says, the act of "inhabiting concrete duration," and the more familiarly difficult task of expressing intuition in conceptual language. Deleuze pursues this peculiar temporalization of the spatial in Bergson to an insight that is apt to my overall argument. He recognizes that "duration is always the location and environment of differences in kind," as opposed to space, which denotes the "location of differences in degree"; this opens up the temporal as the dimension of real alterity-indeed, in our terms, self-alteration-as opposed to the spatial, which characterizes simply the domain of augmentation or diminution. 25 More specifically, Bergson speaks of duration as a dialectical relation between a multiplicity of moments and a unity that runs through them like a thread. These moments are essentially unlimited in number and certainly immeasurable, in the sense that the proximity of moment to moment is infinite: moments can be as close together as can possibly be imagined, but they can never collapse into a single point. If we assume the standpoint of multiplicity, "duration will disappear in a dust of moments, not one of which has duration, each one being instantaneous." If, on the other hand, we assume the standpoint of the unifying thread, no duration is perceptible. "This unity, as I examine its essence, will then appear to me as an immobile substratum of the moving reality, like some intemporal essence of time: that is what I call eternity-the eternity of death, since it is nothing else than movement emptied of the mobility which made up its life." Duration is entirely dialectical; the error of traditional metaphysics, Bergson argues, is to privilege singularly one or the other standpoint: "In the first hypothesis, one has a world suspended in mid-air which would have to end and begin again by itself each instant. In the second, one has an infinitely abstract eternity of

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which one can say that it is especially difficult to understand why it does not remain enveloped in itself and how it allows things to coexist with it" (CM, 184-86). Intuition is the mode of inhabiting this dialectic. It is to place oneself in the concrete flow between the two standpoints at their extreme limits, between pure homogeneous repetition and eternity. Bergson insists that inhabiting this dialectical tension animates each end toward an ever more profound experience of the materiality of the temporal. As embodiment of the movement between the dialectical extremes of this relation, intuition is never a single act but an indefinite series of actions, obviously of the same general makeup but each particular in itself and in its own space-time dimension. Intuition is thus always action within the social-historical, as the paradoxical figure of the interruption of the historical flux which never loses sight of itself as part of this flux. To be fair, my reading here extracts from Bergson's conception both a dialectic as such and a social-historical intervention, more specifically. Bergson himself would probably disavow dialectics altogether, but that would be a stubborn anti-Hegelian gesture, more than anything else. Incidentally, my taking some liberties with Bergson's text owes an enormous benefit to what might be the most serious critique of Bergson by another exemplary poetic epistemologist, namely, Gaston Bachelard and his La Dialectique de la duree (Dialectics of Duration, 1950). Bachelard correctly identifies Bergson's weakness to reside in his compulsion toward continuous temporality and his persistent ignoring of the epistemological significance of pause, rest, interruption, suspension, or more generally, the zero point of thought as action before the void. Bachelard argues that the "fragmentation of time is due less to the behavior of things in space than to the shattering of our decisions in the course of time," a condition that our intuitive apprehension cannot afford to ignore.26 In other words, our intuition inheres a temporal interruptiveness, which is precisely how it is renewed, how it remains 'true' to its performative singularity, its unique impersonation of an object in time. Bachelard's dialectics is in this respect close to Walter Benjamin's call for a "dialectics at a standstill" as the necessary mode by which dialectical thought will disengage itself from the exigencies of abstract rationality (Hegelian or otherwise) and be grasped in the-poetic, I would say-language of image.

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To return to Bergson then, intuition differs substantially from analysis precisely in terms of relation to the cognitive object. While intuition describes an act "by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what is unique and consequently inexpressible about it ... , analysis, on the contrary, is the operation which reduces the object to elements already known, common to it and toothers" (CM, 161-62). 27 In terms of my argument, this interiorization suggests a certain impersonation of the object, a kind of performative transcription of the object's location into a contextual co-incidence of subject positions. This is neither a matter of sympathetic collapse into identity with the object nor a matter of imitation, of aesthetic mimesis. If nothing else, it implies an imaginary dislocation of one's subject position, which is potentially driven by the desire to adopt an Archimedean (i.e., objective) point of knowledge. From this angle, intuition may be seen as one of the elements in literature's performative capacity to disrupt the traditional philosophical desire for cognition, the mastery of the world through conceptual privilege. Still, the question of how intuition is to be articulated, if not with analytical or conceptual armory, remains a problem. Bergson concedes that oftentimes, certainly in philosophical writing, this is unavoidable. But this is exactly why philosophical language tends, at the limit, to obliterate the force of the intuitive apprehension of materiality, especially as it tends toward the self-occultation and fetishism of its own conceptual framework. Bergson suggests that, as an alternative to conceptualization, we try to think imagistically. In an explicitly anti-Platonic gesture, he reverses the traditional properties of concrete images and abstract concepts, arguing that the image is the expressive mode of direct apprehension of worldly things, while abstract conceptualization involves a figurative process of apprehension. Thus, the philosopher of intuition never ceases being essentially a poet-in the full-fledged meaning of poiesis-inhabiting the spatia-temporal materiality of things and thinking/ creating/ transforming from "within" the world of the object. When it becomes necessary to adopt analytic or conceptual language, the philosopher of intuition performs accordingly, while never repressing the sense of inhabiting concrete mobility, knowing that in the last instance "one can pass from intuition on to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition" (CM, 180).

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Myth Let us return to our methodological arche: to recognize in the particularity of a text those elements that enable literature to pose its own theoretical terms and objectives. Bergson understood this as the fundamental power of humanity's creative mind, as he called it, a power he later linked directly to society's propensity for mythological rendering of reality. 28 I would reiterate this with different emphasis. As an instance of the creative imagination, the literary act lies at the heart of what we may call society's mythographic capacity: the ability of societies to generate and sustain an assemblage of images, thoughts, histories, etc., sprung from a specific historical imagination and always played out in an arena of social contention, whereby they may serve as instances of a community's self-representation as well as fieldwork for potential self-alteration, should that historical exigency emerge. Literature's mythographic potential becomes crucial in our post-Enlightenment world, whose explicitly ideological aspiration is a general demythification of culture by means of rational and secular practices, as well as by the revival of religious exclusivity and a peculiar obsession for the mystical. When one traditionally thinks of literature as mythological or mythopoetic, one usually minds the traces of ancient myths recast in contemporary light. Attention usually falls on the content of literary texts or on the new framing that a retelling of classic content requires. However, I am less interested in addressing the genre of retold and transformed mythical tales, as I am less interested, for example, in "philosophical" novels, whereby literature is merely placed in the service of the battle of ideas, its mythical propensity restrained in favor of a disguised exposition of conceptual agonistics. Instead, this inquiry presupposes that myth is a particular mode of social thought, and, indeed, that mythic thought produces a particular mode of knowledge. The kind of sense experience characterizing the implicit and intangible but nonetheless "expert" cognition that literature affords is of the same order as the experience of the mythical. To say that literature's theoretical capacity is linked to myth does not mean to explore myth as content (the recirculation of narratives of particular myths or the allegedly

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archetypal Gestalt of mythical tales). Rather, it takes myth to be a matter of performative action: literally, according to what takes place in the theater, but also, metaphorically, according to the tireless capacity of humankind to create fables, legends, and stories in order to dramatize the otherwise incommensurable puzzle of human existence. The primary metaphoric terrain for this sort of performative process remains the space of the ancient Athenian theater, particularly in its esoteric (that is, constitutive, immanent) relation to the being of the polis-to the essence of politics. Insofar as myth is performatively articulated (and, in the Greek tradition, this goes as far back as the Homeric epics)/9 it deploys a constitutive poetic element, a creative (thus also destructive) force that alters identificatory terms. As self-altering agent, the performance of myth in the polis becomes a specific form of social thought whose politics is signified essentially as a poetic enterprise. My own understanding of mythic thought is built on this particular socialhistorical occasion, according to which the performativity of myth undoes its originary or archetypal authority by staging its interrogation, pluralization, and in effect, historization. Refiguring mythic thought in this way departs substantially from Ernst Cassirer's widely recognized and reproduced terminology and lies closer to Hans Blumenberg's critical elaboration, as we shall see shortly. Cassirer's shortcomings, in what is otherwise a formidable and innovative edifice, reside in his ultimate conviction that mythic thought is an archaic mode of social expression, whose presence in the post-Enlightenment world is either a matter of infantile cultural residue (the relic of myth in Freud's account of the unconscious) or a matter of aesthetic neoprimitivism, which he identifies chiefly with the enterprise of modern literature. His unwillingness to confront mythic thought as contemporary force, as being as vital to the post-Enlightenment imaginary as the imaginary of any "archaic" culture, left him profoundly unprepared to confront Nazism's uniquely perverse technologies of myth. 30 To speak of mythic thought, in my terms, is to disrupt the antagonistic coarticulation of myth with logos, as it has been fashioned in modern philosophy's various invocations of residual Platonism. Mythic thought must be envisioned counter to mythology, counter to any logic that would consume the mythical in spinning tales of identity and self-affir-

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mation. This is not usually how myth is presented, least of all in contemporary literary theory, which draws on a philosophical tradition which, since Plato, condemned myth to exile from the city (to an apolitical nonexistence) under charges ranging from the falsehood of the mimetic faculty itself to myth's unabashed irrationalist appropriation of truth. It should be pointed out that the long history of equating myth with falsehood, falsity, or at best, fiction is shared equally by rationalist philosophy and secular mentality, on the one hand, and by apocalyptic metaphysics and religious mysticism, on the other. Against this history, I propose that we reevaluate the notion and its complex potential by interrogating three domains: (1) myth as falsehood; (2) myth as logic of identity; (3) myth as poetic/theoretical force. To my mind, all three domains are of dire political significance, and I will address this specifically. The notion of myth as falsehood is of modern conceptual fashioning: the outcome of the relentless quest for the truth by rationalist philosophy and apocalyptic religion alike. As Paul Veyne has demonstrated in his bold treatise Did the Greeks Believe in their Myths?, the dilemma of truth or falsehood was irrelevant-indeed, conceptually alien-to the ancient understanding of myth. 31 Veyne argues for a historical imagination that is not slave to the compulsion for truth-in another language, not slave to philosophy. He recognizes that the exigencies acting upon history as archival and archeological practice-whose object, having vanished into temporal nonexistence, demands to be reconstituted as the very test of truth's validity-are foreign to ancient historians, who conceive their task to be the documentary inscription of the present for the sake of the future. For those historians, the world of myth is incorporated in this task as evidence of the imaginary horizon of the world they describe. "For the Greeks, a mythic tradition is true despite the marvelous" (6o) in the sense that the truth of myth is its very figurativeness, its fictionality, the allegorical way in which it fashions the world. The fictional/ allegorical character of myth was not unknown to the ancients, as Plato's vehement resistance to it demonstrates. In fact, Plato's dire response demonstrates the truth status of myth; myth produces an altogether real sense of political danger and must be counteracted. 32 Veyne points out that the Greeks both believed and did not believe in their myths. This is neither a contradiction nor a paradox in a Greek

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conception of life, in which belief is never devoid of interest. Myths are subjected to the interest of belief (or nonbelief) according to social-historical demands, always negotiated within a worldly domain, regardless of their otherworldly content. Thus, "criticizing myths did not mean proving they were false but rediscovering their truthful basis" (59). The fact that the tragic poets, for example, staged myths in the theater while being entirely aware of their marvelous or magical status does not mean they rejected the notion that legends have a true basis. The concern with the true/false origin of myth is a modern concern, springing out of the imaginary that proclaims the tasks of both history and philosophy (but not literature or politics) to be devoid of interest. Yet myth ensures that both truth and falsehood will not be an absolute matter by placing truth in the domain of literature and politics and by rescuing falsehood from the domination of morality. Likewise, no absolute definition of myth is possible, perhaps because the signification of myth relativizes the antinomy truth/ falsehood. The fact that myth eludes absolute definition is arguably the most palpable evidence of its performative relation to the social-historical, which can never be subsumed in whatever identificatory processes myth might mobilize in a given social-historical moment. The value of archaic myth in the contemporary world is hardly its identificatory ancestral imposition (the canonical recirculation of undying mythical tales), but its performative position as "the watchdog of thought," in Veyne's phrase-which becomes urgent and more difficult in our time, since the cognitive ground, burdened by both scientificity and the sacred, has become increasingly antimythical. In its forcefully untranscendental significance for the societies that created it and communicated with it, Greek myth in particular continues to remind us of the materiality and plasticity of mythic thought, bearing the sort of performativity and theatricality so crucial to modern literature's theoretical flair. I should clarify that when I speak of Greek myth I am not concerned with the myth of the Greeks, despite its overwhelming and catalytic presence in modernity, or the poetic imagination of post-Enlightenment societies in general. I invoke Greek myth if only to acknowledge the fact that, though myth is a mode of human creativity in various social-historical registers, the language of myth, like the language of philosophy,

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is-thus far in history, anyway-unavoidably Greek. Thinking at the limit of this position, cognizant of its radical consequences, means precisely not losing track of the signification of Greek myth outside its social-historical situation, outside its dynamic role in the social-imaginary institution of the ancient polis. By extension, to invoke the social-imaginary of Greek myth in the context of our post-Enlightenment world is to problematize both the unexamined rendering of Greek myths in contemporary garb and the claim that "our" modernity is characterized by the successful demythification of the world. From this standpoint, it is equally misguided to consider Greek myth immortalized or transcended. It is more fruitful to reexamine myth's own performative moment and mode in the context of its own social-imaginary, as well as to recast it, in differential and always self-interrogative ways, as a performative mode in the social-imaginary terms of the present. My aspiration throughout this inquiry is to trace this recasting in certain aspects of modern literature because, to restate the obvious, I consider it essential to the articulation of literature as theory for the antimythical era we inhabit. Contrary to this performative and contingent understanding of myth is the tendency to define myth generally in terms of either originary or identitarian fictions. Such fictions exist, but they are hardly immanent to myth. Rather, I see them as a specific social-historical content of myth that tends toward the self-referential, the monomaniacal, the totalitarian: demonstrably myth's most destructive manifestation. The historical culmination of such content is what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe call "the Nazi myth," in an extraordinary essay with the same title. 33 Despite the brilliance of this essay, I believe its argument is profoundly misguided and demands closer critical attention as a succinct way into our second point of interrogation: myth as identity. Unlike what one might infer from its title, the essay on "the Nazi myth" is not an interrogation of the myth of Nazism, but an explication of the nature of Myth, to which, presumably, Nazi ideology provides an exemplary decipherment. Technically speaking, this is tantamount to elevating Nazi discourse into something worthy of philosophical inquiry, while denigrating the status of myth to a totalizing, identificatory process. The authors construe as fact and take as point of departure the

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notion that myth enables the total merging of Subject and State into a tautological association, which is the essence of fascism. 34 Their basic reasoning is that German history is built on an exclusive problematic of identity, whose twentieth-century manifestation is a uniquely German configuration of a racist ideology (Nazism): "we could perfectly describe the emergence of German nationalism as the long history of appropriation of the means of identification" (NM, 299 I 39). At once, one pauses at the logic of exclusivity at work. In what way is German history more identitarian than any other national history? This is a big question that remains surprisingly unaddressed, although it has considerable historical and philosophical merit. Though obviously no national history can ever be instituted outside an identificatory lidentitarian logic, it is proper to Germany to say that its problematic of identity concurs with the rise of modern national history as a genre (whose great authorial incarnations were arguably Michelet, Ranke, and Macauley), in contradistinction to England or France, for example, whose traumatic national-identitary imaginaries are consolidated around "pre-modern" events (the Battle of Hastings and the Night of St. Bartholomew Massacre, respectively). 35 This distinction, should it hold under rigorous historical scrutiny, could actually be of service to the authors' presumption, yet it remains curiously absent. Instead, an even more unjustified departure point is proclaimed: the definition of myth as "an identificatory mechanism" (a definition cleverly presented here as an option which becomes, as the argument unfolds, a one-way street). This unexamined co-incidence of assertions leads to an a priori conclusion that, no more and no less, predetermines the trajectory of the entire argument: "it is in the German tradition and nowhere else that the most rigorous reflection on the encounter of myth with the question of identification is elaborated" (NM, 297 I 32, my emphasis). Given the option for this one-way argument, even if we assume that Germany's uniqueness is indeed historically the case, Germany becomes the paradigmatic element, not of what myth does (under certain social-historical conditions), but of what myth is (now and forever), so that, right away, instead of speaking of the "Nazi myth," the authors are speaking of "myth as Nazi."

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This ghastly slippage is occluded by an impassioned and precise discussion of the implications of Germany's inheritance of the Platonic fear of mimesis that inaugurates the mythos versus logos antagonism in Western philosophy. Plato's exclusion of poetry-which, the authors remind us, is the quintessential mimetic activity: the plastic forming or deforming of images, the mastery of idols-from the ranks of philosophical pedagogy is cleverly and correctly called "an orthopedic task" (NM, 297 I 33). I would add, not merely with simple playfulness, that it is also an orthopaidic task, insofar as Plato recognized, despite his profound anti-democratic prejudices, that the question of the proper paideia remained the body and soul of the polis. But the gist of his task was to exile poetics from the sphere of the radical imagination, thus barring access to mythic thought by reducing it to sheer mimetic activity. LacoueLabarthe and Nancy adopt this Platonic figuration of mimesis without question and proceed to argue-again, not without historical meritthat the history of radical thought in Germany, from the Romantics onward (obviously Kant is exempted, and this is a major issue that makes sense but deserves elaboration), is involved basically in an anti-Platonic project: that is, in the formidable attempt to reverse the conquest of mythos by logos. This attempt is conducted within a historical context of mimesis that starts with the gradual defeat of Christianity in Europe and the advent of Classicism. Germany came belatedly into this context, and its identificatory problems then became further complicated by the difficulty of having to imitate the Greeks in a different way-very specifically, in a way that surpasses the imitation of the Greeks by the French (exemplified, from the Prussian point of view, by the consequences of Napoleonic culture). This becomes, then, Germany's double bind: to be like the Greeks and yet not to be like the Greeks because the others are (NM, 298-300 I 34-42). According to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, this bind is "solved" (with schizophrenic aftereffects) in two ways. In the first instance, both Greece and the other imitators of Greece will be sublated (aufgehoben) in a process that will yield a "healthy Germany": Germany's bona fide entrance into both history and essence. One might add to the authors' primarily Hegelian references the fact that, in this specific configuration, next to Hegel stands Wilhelm von Humboldt as

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author of the institutionalization of Bildung. In the second instance, another Greece must be found as autoscopic object: therein lies, simply speaking, the crux of the Jena project, of which Hegel was also part. While the first "resolution" is properly philosophical, the second is properly philological (although the two obviously overlap in the longue duree, following the different philosophical grammar of Nietzsche and then Heidegger)-keeping, in fact, Germany's "schizophrenia" intact (NM, 301 I 44). Thus, the argument goes, "the construction of myth will be necessarily both theoretical and philosophical, conscious if you will, even if it is carried out in the element of poetry" (NM, 302 I 45). This consciousness will enable the dialectical interweaving of the prelogical (unconscious) "richness of mythic production" with the abstract universality of the logos. In the history of Germany, the authors conclude, this dialectical production of myth, since the Jena Romantics and particularly since Wagner and Nietzsche, renders aesthetics and philosophy inseparable. The conceptual epitome of this dialectical interweaving will be arguably Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the invention of music-drama as a form, without which several crucial events in the course of German culture would not have been possible.36 One ought to be careful, however, not to remain simply at the ground point of Wagner, reading there merely the proto-language of the Nazi political invocation of the musicdrama form. It would be more fruitful instead to unfold the dialectical strands of Wagner himself, by reading him against the grain of the Nazi myth, perhaps from the standpoint of Brecht's epic theater (which is precisely what animated Hans-Jiirgen Syberberg's unprecedented sevenhour opus Hitler: A Film from Germany). In any case, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are correct in concluding that "myth is not, therefore, the mythological. Properly speaking, myth is a power more than it is a thing, an object, or a representation." But taking the next step to define this power, the authors assert that "myth is the power to gather the fundamental forces and directions of an individual or a people, the power of a subterranean, invisible, nonempirical identity" (MN, 305 I 53). In other words, again they opt for an identitarian idiom of definition: gathering up the tribes through an untraceable process of identity formation, whereby identity suddenly achieves

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invisible and transcendental status. This curious coexistence of insightful assessments with obsessive assumptions persists throughout. Hence, the next statement is, strictly speaking, illogical: "mythical power is the power of the dream,"-yes-"of the projection of an image with which one identifies" -no. Frankly, there is no logical, predetermined passage between the dream and an identificatory projection, as Freud has tirelessly warned us. The reader is consistently baffled by an absolutist understanding of myth that persists within an astute deconstruction of the contextual determinations of myth-nominally in Germany, but in "Western" culture in general. The obsession falls into line with the general tendency to demonize the category of myth since fascist usage, and it is mere eventuality that the authors will go on to attribute to myth religious significations, indeed monotheistic significations in the form of total belief and typological singularity. This is not the proper venue to elaborate on the historical (if not in fact epistemic) divergence between myth and monotheism. 37 The glaring disjunction is missed because the constitutive monomaniacal principle of this essay is to show that only the Nazis succeeded in creating "the myth of Myth." In this regard, a standard principle of nationalist logic that potentially pertains to all modern historical situations is graced with an inviolable singularity that elevates it to paradigmatic, transhistorical status. The deconstructed object becomes a demon. The mythical is once again confounded with the mystical. And given that the historical substance of the Nazi myth in its various stagings was indisputably founded on mass mystery, on neo-primitive ritual constituted around the primal Blut und Boden, a monadistic (indeed monomythical) desire is thus metonymically reconstrued here as the essence of the entire category of myth. 38 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy take the Nazi claim concerning "the clarity of the mythic experience" for granted, thus losing sight of the fact that the alleged clarity of myth is a specific ideological instance in specific social-historical conditions. Nothing precludes nor guarantees clarity in myth, as Athenian tragedy demonstrates time and again. Evading this historical horizon, the profound tradition of collective selfinterrogation staged by the polis in the form of Athenian theater, one cannot but arrive at the hapless conclusion that "the logic of myth is

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nothing but the logic of its total self-fulfillment [auto-effectuation]" (NM, 310 I 67). By the end of the essay, myth has become a tautological and totalizing concept upon which the Nazi imaginary retroactively exercises a monopoly of signification. Although I certainly share the authors' investment in the notion that Nazism should not be encountered simply as a moment of historical aberration but instead as an outgrowth (yet, in the form of mutation, neither predetermined nor insurmountable) of the "Western" tradition, history does not permit us to bend the two components of Nazi symbolic logic ("mimetic will to identity and self-fulfillment of form") into the content of myth tout court. I would argue instead that it is precisely in the service of "a general deconstruction of the history in which our own provenance lies"-Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy's concluding evocation-that an understanding of myth as a performative element that stages communal selfimages and representations for collective self-interrogation becomes urgent. In order to disjoin the traditional coarticulation of myth with logos, we must envision a mythic thought counter to mythology. 39 Nationalist myths are mytho-logical insofar as they are justly modes of nationalist logic. But no nationalist logic can achieve society's absolute closure. Our task is to discern those instances of mythic thought within society that run counter to nationalist logic and perform other sorts of imaginings, reiterating perhaps in new and multiple ways Thomas Mann's explicit call, delivered in a comment on his novel Joseph and His Brothers, to take myth out of Fascist hands. 40 Which brings me to the final point of interrogation: myth as poetic/theoretical force. I have been essentially arguing that mythic thought flourishes in a literary universe: in a universe where neither an analytic (historical-scientific) nor an apocalyptic (religious-metaphysical) imaginary holds sway. In this universe, mythic thought would be seen as constitutively poietic, manifesting society's capacity to (re)imagine itself radically in terms of creating oneself as an other. The idea of myth as the social-imaginary domain of self-alteration is wholly opposed to both traditional notions of myth as origin and myth as identity, and I evoke it here not as a natural condition but as a specific socialhistorical option, traceable to the most revolutionary poetic documents

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of human history, as well as to the fewer such instances of revolutionary action. In this respect, I reiterate the importance of Hans Blumenberg's relentless critique of all theories of myth that relegate it to elements of the remote past and its "reincarnations"-primitive or premodern social organization, relics of the unconscious, "childhood of man," fetishism of the archaic, aesthetic nostalgia-arguing instead for myth as presentday "logic" in the sense of scientia, with no obligation whatsoever to the logic of science. Indeed, Blumenberg explicitly determines myth to be a mode of knowledge, which is, moreover, graced with an autonomous (from science, reason, analysis, etc.) domain of generating symbolic forms. Blumenberg's central anthropological assumption is that myth exists as a response to the encounter with "the absolutism of reality," and the terror it incurs for a "species without a clearly defined biological niche." 41 In other words, the absence of an exclusive natural environment that compensates for species-weakness and thus makes the presence of reality terrifyingly and absolutely Other provokes the constitutively human response: the mobilization of a radical imagination that possesses the power to transform reality into a fantasy object, a poetic entity. In this framework, cave drawings are not read as mimetic interpretations of reality but as activities of fashioning reality, projecting upon reality the images it fails to provide concretely and instinctively. "The absolutism of reality is thus opposed by the absolutism of images and wishes" (8), so that "significance arises as a result of the representation of the relation between the resistance that reality opposes to life and the summoning up of energy that enables one to measure up to it" (75). Such significance is embodied in sedimented form in the multitude of mythological figures that still wander in our midst across cultures and times. Blumenberg's work helps us understand in what sense myth operates beyond the spatia-temporal, in what sense it is neither localizable nor chronologically determined, which may explain why, for example, it flourished in modernist literature, where the dismantling of strict space-time boundaries had become a self-conscious theoretical pursuit. Yet, by the same token, mythic narratives are characterized by a con-

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stancy at the core that enables limitless variation. They thus survive (trans)historically without having to submit to the dogmatic struggle that faces, say, sacred texts, whose word is given once and for all and whose survival thus hinges on the (often violent) conquest of the socialimaginary. The fascist appropriation of myth can in these terms be seen as an overt sacralization of myth, whose psychological component would be a fetishization of a disembodied, singular, exclusionary truth-holy in the most formal profound sense though scandalously profane at the same time. That this perverse development is often misread is indicative of an inadequate theorization of society's mythographic propensity. One need not go back to Nancy and LacoueLabarthe but remember, rather, the late work of Ernst Cassirer, otherwise one of the most intriguing students of mythic thought, who conjures in the case of Nazi myth an explicit authorization of myth by "skillful and cunning artisans," conducted by an overt fictionalization of language that is presented here as a willful political reanimation of myth outside the bounds of society's poetic imagination-one might say, outside the "harmless" domain of literature.42 This position assumes that myth can actually be authorized outside the "literary" domain, broadly speaking. In response, I would insist on myth's "authorless" constitution and go on to consider literature neither harmless nor harmful in its nature but consubstantial with the social-imaginary domain-hence, not a domain of human activity that can be closed off, neutralized, or outmaneuvered. To say this is hardly to turn social praxis into an aesthetic matter, but it does mean to make literature (or, psychologically speaking, the domain of fantasy) a political matter. If social action or politics is not aesthetics and fantasy (fictionality) is political, then myth's destiny within the Nazi imaginary is not a matter of nature but of history. The Nazi myth is anaesthetization of politics in a specific social-historical juncture, just as the subsequent demonization of myth in various quarters (as a reaction to the Nazi case) itself reveals a certain interest. The task is to reverse this demonization by theorizing myth's historicity, which is to account, simultaneously, for both its historical singularity and its transhistorical modernity. In other words, deconstructing the Nazi myth requires that we con-

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front it both as expression of a certain historical-cultural trajectory and as singular mutation with a mode of signification all its own. The two instances are not the same; this would be tantamount to assuming that "Western" culture metaphysically culminates in Nazism. No society, not even the most totalitarian, is ever constituted on an absolute, selffulfilled imaginary. Images are always produced between the cracksindeed, images produce the cracks-which themselves emerge from the same magma of signification as does the presumably solid socialimaginary foundation. Though tradition always works to perpetuate itself, it does so by incorporating emerging contrary elements. This is an ongoing process, circuitous, retrogressive, and certainly unpredictable-a process in whose terms we might best understand the work of culture in the making of history, in which literature will remain irreplaceable. While retaining more archaic notions of culture as cultivation, as Bildung or whatever might link it to the "civilizing process," we must also extend the work of culture to historical elements that document humanity's radical capacity for limitless (re)invention, those elements that challenge presumed cultural norms and often subvert them, for good or for ill. In this respect, we might reconceptualize the work of culture as a performative terrain, where society not only ritualizes its hopes and fears, its values and beliefs, its fantasies about itself and its others, but also stages other images of itself, other self-representations that may, under certain historical conditions, lead to self-interrogation and indeed self-alteration. The performative elements of mythographic thought and its theoretical potential, as I understand it, belong precisely in this terrain. Interrogating myth from this standpoint alerts us to the concrete and unavoidable political stakes in articulating how a theoretical capacity might inhere within literature. Put otherwise: the mythic domain grants us a unique apprehension of how the poetic is interwoven with the political. By virtue of its performative nature, society's mythographic imagination can never be exhausted in the fact/ event of its historical realization. Myths can also exercise a historical force as imagined alterities of society without instrumental regard. The poetics of self-alteration (a self-propelled othering that must underlie the possibility of

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radical shift in any society) is not reducible to its words, indeed to its

word (of promise, of definition, etc.). Poiesis, as altering force, does not work by putting forward a definite project to be organized and instituted in some specified future; it works indefinitely and infinitely both because it is irreducible to its parts (that is, singular) but also because it is interminably reproducible each time anew. Society's mythographic capacity resides at the core of what Cornelius Castoriadis names "social-imaginary institution," a process concerning the way societies constitute and negotiate their identities out of an expressly creative/ destructive force, animated in humanity's deepest psychic reservoir, which, under certain conditions of encountering the social-historical, opens up the possibility of self-alteration. In the last instance, one may say that societies control their destinies to the extent that they recognize the effects of their own mythopoetic production. Myth is, in this respect, always co-incident with history, unlike what is usually argued-namely that a mythical world is prehistorical, which means that invoking myth in contemporary terms is tantamount to dehistoricizing contemporary society. I argue-and I feel that the experience of literature provides the best idiom-for a mythistorical sense of the world. Mythistorema is the Greek word for novel or fiction, more generally. And I would like to extend the term, on the basis of its literal meaning, to account for the intersection between the myths societies create (and recreate incessantly) to represent themselves plus their others and the historical contingencies of myth's generation, which are themselves incessant and irreducible to pattern. Myth is always contemporary, though given readily to transhistorical narratives. To speak thus of society's mythistorical foundations is to speak of a continuously shifting ground, whose path is riverlike, explicable and yet unpredictable, because history and the social imagination are both limited by their event and yet limitless in their project. This is perhaps the limit in the handling of myth (indeed the dialectic of myth and Enlightenment) in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal book, which is imbedded deep in the foundations of my entire project. The radical element of that book arguably resides in putting forth a notion of the transhistorical as a standpoint from which to understand the

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dialectical play of history. The authors famously achieve this by placing the transhistorical in a dialectical relation to the historical. This relation is a sort of chiasmus, which can be seen from two angles. If the transhistorical is a matter of diachrony, it is the horizontal axis that intersects the vertical axis of the historically contingent, the temporal singularity of the event, history in its most immediate, irreducible sense. If, on the other hand, the historical is the narrative of human/ social action through time, then the transhistorical is the vertical intersection, the synchronous interruption (in Benjamin's sense of Jetztzeit) constituted by the formal characteristic of the human/ social imagination that permits radical alteration. Myth can variably occupy either position or bear the multiplicity of signification that attests to all four reference points of the chiasmus. 43 Horkheimer and Adorno often forget the radical potential of myth, either because they are afraid that the rational, emancipatory faculties of the Enlightenment will be forever abolished (as in fascism)-though they are equally afraid of Enlightenment's own self-destructive potential (death camps, the hydrogen bomb )-or because they relegate myth, somewhat nostalgically, to the primordial powers of nature, thus falling prey to the intricacies of the dialectic itself. The task is to understand myth as a thing-of-the-world, not as part of the netherworld. Hence the emphasis on myth in performance, myth staged. This would have to be articulated contra, let us say, Wagner's "invisible theater," but closer to Brecht or Beckett stripping the process of production and reception to the bare bone. In Horkheimer and Adorno's terms, this means that myth is the world of disenchantment, where the process of disenchantment is laid bare (which is to say that the source of enchantment is also laid bare), without this being translated into another enchantment, in turn, like the self-mythology of a "rational" Enlightenment. This self-mythology serves as the classic formula for the transition from mythos to logos and, of course, for the triumph of philosophy over literature. My suggestion is to entertain, again, literature's fancy in order to come to terms with its relation to knowledge, a relation that cannot be appropriated by philosophical logos because it does not take place singularly in the domain of logos, but also partakes of the domain of mythos. And it cannot take place singu-

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larly in the domain of logos because one of the characteristics of logos is to efface the contours of its domain, to appear disembodied. Literature saves us from that because it draws our attention to the performative necessity of mythos, reminding us in what ways pleasure and knowledge-in the most profound sense of both words-were at one time intertwined with political life in the ancient theater.

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The focus of this essay, in relation to the overall project, is both succinct and deceptive. On the one hand, it does not address directly the question of "literature as theory," except for an important passage concerning Kafka, though it does address the complexities of what I have called "an antimythical era." On the other hand, it engages core elements of the overall equation: most of all, the necessity of confronting the Enlightenment as mythical foundation of modern society, which pertains both to how we understand the social imagination for which (and through which) literature might perform its theoretical work and how literature itself, as a specific social-imaginary institution of modernity, might provide the means of a certain tension, refraction, resistance, or perhaps even subversion of modernity's ruling imagination. That the socialimaginary institution of literature, as I argue, emerges in co-incidence with the social-imaginary institution of law is key to understanding how the Enlightenment acts as mythical foundation. It is important, however, not to forget that "foundation" in this case hardly suggests solidity or even, in temporal terms, a permanent point of departure. This is because, on the one hand, myth is a performative horizon and therefore entirely permeable by the social-historical; and, on the other hand, because the Enlightenment founds a new mode of ruling predicated on revolutionary violence, on the self-alteration of foundation. The essay takes this violence-and the curious omnipresence of almost naturalized violence in the daily conduct of post-Enlightenment societies-as the entry point to a wider interrogation of the relation between the Enlightenment imagination and law as its central social-imaginary signification. In his famous "Message to the Grassroots," Malcolm X, with his 49

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inimitable, in-house caustic humor, gives a bare-bones definition of revolutionary action. The authenticity of revolution, he argues, is traceable to an unrestricted investment in violence: "in a revolution you don't do any singing; you're too busy swinging." 1 Whatever shock such statements may have produced in the context of American racial politics at the time, they were propelled by a traditionally accepted notion. Revolution is consubstantial with violence, at least since the foundations of the French republic were laid on a veritable river of blood. The so-called Age of Revolution established, among other things, the necessity and sanctity of violence as the inevitable mode of radical social action. This coarticulation was not put into question until the last three decades of the twentieth century. Already discredited after the demise of the spirit of the 1g6os, the Marxist model of revolutionary violence was dismantled before the Berlin Wall via a barrage of social skepticism about the legitimacy of any sort of transformative action that bypasses society's legal boundaries. What remains curious, however, is that, while violence as means of social change is now widely disavowed, social violence as a mode of daily contention (which is to say, as a means of daily life) is enjoying uncontested prominence. This particular contradiction-a disavowal of transformative violence in the midst of a widespread institution of violence-is at the core of my argument. This contradiction sums up the fundamental and duly occluded duplicity that drives the history of "modern Western societies": the fact that a regime of legally constituted rights of liberty and equality was instituted on the basis of unrestricted, illegitimate, andessentially indiscriminate social violence. The present conditions of most modern societies bear witness to an intricate weaving of violence at the core of societal institution. This is why the American mass media can launch an apparent investigation of a phenomenon with the disarmingly blunt title "Violence, a National Pastime," as I remember a major television program having done a few years ago. Even when they voice concern, the general nonchalance of both the American ruling elite and the public at large is striking. No doubt, violence in the United States is perfectly self-evident, but what does this mean, exactly? Where does this evidence reside? Where is it directed-meaning, how does it become perceptible, and for whom? Is the matter domestic or geopolitical,

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and what is the difference, if any, where American society is concerned? And what might lie behind this self-evidence? a permanence? an immanence? a history? Simply said, there is a general historical marking to this condition. It marks our culture as modern, which isn't a matter of pinpointing its precise origin in history and in geography but of distinguishing the moment when historical praxis lends itself to the demands of a different process of social symbolization. Tracing the genealogy of violence in modern society is insufficient; what matters most is to interrogate what lends the relation between violence and our contemporary world analmost natural quality. To examine a social phenomenon that has achieved the status of nature means to face the work of society's imaginary. Which is to say, we must be prepared to address society's mythic domain, the interminable flux of self-representations out of which and by which society alters itself. For this reason, my interrogation is directed toward the significance and function of the institution of law as the organizing matrix of modern society's production of meaning, which is, in another sense, the performance of its foundational fantasy. Incidentally, to say "our" culture is to risk attributing a restrictive pronoun to a substantive whose historical "substance" cannot be clearly determined, a risk that becomes necessary if one is not to eschew one's complicity as a historical being in the making of culture, indeed, in the making of historical time itself. Assuming this risk, I shall focus on what is often called "Western culture" (with all the catachrestic aspects of the term) and the contemporary instance in the course of this cultural tradition, whose idiomatic condition is that it recognizes no geographical core, that it enjoys a continuous geographical mutation. This geographical mutability, characteristic of a tradition that believes itself to be founded on an exclusive sense of modernity, is linked to the shift in social symbolization I mentioned above, a shift in the parameters of historical praxis. Broadly speaking, I would place this shift at the point when law was instituted as the primary agent of social organization, as an almost "autonomous" agency, perhaps the representation of arche itself (in the Greek sense: both as point of departure and as point of governance). In historical terms, this concerns the advent of Enlightenment thought as a new signifying framework in which the question of society

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is posited as a worldly affair, as a secular sphere that casts doubt on the impermeable boundaries of the divine. Two sorts of objections could be raised to this claim. First, if we take as a reference point Harold Berman's monumental work Law and Revolution, the split within the Western legal tradition that gave rise to a body of law outside the Church was due neither to the great revolutions of the eighteenth century, nor to the English Revolution before them, nor even to the Reformation or Renaissance humanism that preceded it all; it was due, rather, to what Berman calls the Papal Revolution of 1075 to 1122. In a series of radical decisions by the leadership of the Catholic Church, Berman sees the first institution of legal pluralism, "the differentiation of the ecclesiastical polity from secular politics." For Berman, this moment signifies the Ursprung of Western legal history (despite the long tradition that goes back to Justinian and the Romans): a revolutionary event that institutes Western history as a characteristic trajectory of revolutionary practices within the domain of the law. The American and French revolutions, in this respect, are predicated on an already revolutionary legal imagination that subscribes to a notion of law which "contains within itself a legal science, a meta-law, by which it can be both analyzed and evaluated." 2 Though I do not doubt the basic framework of Berman's argument (whose eccentricity and erudition I particularly value), something in the era we call the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Revolution sets it apart from previous incarnations of the revolutionary imaginary in the history of the Western legal tradition. Simply put, this is the conceptualization of autonomy as a social and political project: the notion that legislation is potentially within the capacity of every rational individual. The articulation of this project-from the epistemological tenets of Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment (and their influence on Thomas Jefferson) to the moral metaphysics of Kant-hinges on analtogether different conceptualization of subjective agency. In fact, anticipating the argument below, I would say that the project of autonomy inaugurates the modern subject as we now understand it, that is, as a primarily legal entity whose external (social) boundaries are sanctioned by a set of "inalienable" rights and whose internal imagination adheres to the belief that these rights are indeed inalienable (that they represent

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one's irrevocable independence before the law, the safeguard of self-determination). Even if we grant the historical origins of secular law to the High Middle Ages, we cannot speak of a secularization of one's relation to the law until the eighteenth century, in other words, until society institutes an internalized conviction of one's right to determine what is right. This conviction is internalized at the level of the individual imaginary-indeed, seen from the reverse angle, it is tantamount to the imaginary institution of the individuaP But this is not to say-and here we come to the second possible objection to my genealogy-that the advent of Enlightenment law managed to clear the board of religious conceptions, not even at the level of social and political institutions. Quite the contrary, in fact-which is where the problem begins and why the problem begins there. 4 Still, the Enlightenment did reconfigure the meaning of law on a radically different foundation (by altering the terms of one's relation to the law), despite the persistence of the monotheistic imaginary that permeates the history of the Western legal tradition. To put it bluntly, the American and French Constitutions overwrote the social-imaginary network of the Holy Scriptures, even though, for example, the dollar bill still banks its symbolic credibility in the motto "In God we trust." The fact of this overwriting cannot be disputed, though it must be encountered as a foundational contradiction. To speak of the Enlightenment, of course, is always to speak tentatively, both because the Enlightenment involves a fundamental duplicity (a secular metaphysics, an ethnocentric universality, a mythological rationality, etc.) and because the idiom of the Enlightenment is profoundly plural (the French les Lumieres is hardly an inaccurate designation). The scholarship on this matter, starting with Horkheimer and Adorno's groundbreaking attempt to delineate its dialectic, is enormous and cannot occupy us here. The focus of this argument is the genealogy of violence within the domain of the law in modern societies in order to elucidate the foundational antinomies of its social imagination, a matter that involves a discussion of the Enlightenment, if nothing else, on the ground that the Enlightenment's understanding of law as the project of autonomy was instituted through acts of inordinate social violence.

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The argument's progression is somewhat circuitous, a journey that starts with the examination of Enlightenment as rule (meaning both the institution of a set of rules of social behavior as well as the invention of rule-of power-as an exclusive domain of the law), extends to a discussion of law's monopoly of violence I force and law's intrinsic outlaw nature, its paranomia, and concludes with a discussion of the imaginary co-incidence of law and literature in relation to the performance of Enlightenment myth. Several figures serve as the journey's guides, always partial and mutually contentious. They remain intertwined because they make each other possible, because together they point to the complicity between law and violence and to the mythic parameters that preserve such complicity to this day. If the traditional perception of what has already been accomplished historically before this journey begins can be summed up in the notion of "progress from mythos to logos," then my impetus here is to unravel instead the transition from nomos to mythos, the transition from law to myth. 5 We can consider this passage from law to myth to be a particular trajectory of thinking about form, in which law is modernity's form and myth is the specific mode of performative thinking about form that disrupts any notion of form as a transcendental principle. The passage from law to myth is not retrospective, a case of history looking over its shoulder-unless it is the history personified by Walter Benjamin's angel who, were he to dare look over his shoulder as he is being blown backward into the future, would face myth in its moment of self-alteration out of the void. Myth is not the exclusive privilege of archaic societies. It is always contemporary, for it is linked to society's imaginary, its capacity to make and to alter history. In this respect, myth is what presides over the Enlightenment's socalled disenchantment of the world. 6

Enlightenment as Rule In response to the question Was ist Aufkliirung?, Kant proposes that Enlightenment hinges on the unfettered exercise of thought in the public sphere. Although he is quick to pay deference to the State's instrumental authority that sanctions this public sphere, the proposition inaugurates a rupture in the way that both thought and rule shall be exercised

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henceforth: "Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage [selbstversclzuldeten Unmiindigkeit]. Tutelage is man's inability to use his understanding without direction from another." 7 The gist of Kant's argument points to Enlightenment as the exercise of free thought conducted against a self-incurred unfreedom, a self-limitation in the private sphere that I would translate as self-generated heteronomy. 8 The significance of this heteronomy, this "enchanting" paradox, is often blurred because what is accentuated is the recognition that it is "self-incurred." Thus, even when Kant proposes Enlightenment as a sort of ethical self-interdiction (presumed to be the primary gesture of self-determination), he is taken to affirm the Enlightenment as the realization of the human will, as society's awakening to the capacity of human will. In formal terms at least, Enlightenment thought is figured literally as a project of autonomy. Human freedom becomes possible because the fetters of humanity are self-made and thus can be unmade. Putting aside for a moment this debilitating contradiction in Kant's Enlightenment horizon, we might find it difficult to dispute the unraveling in the domain of self-conception and constitution of European societies generated by this mode of thought. If the Enlightenment project is at all useful as a social I cultural entity, it is useful insofar as it establishes-or claims the attributes of-a new set of rules or, even more, a new mode of ruling. What lies at the foundation of Enlightenment thought as social rule is the tacit institution of law as the cauldron of society's imaginary significations. Henceforth, the argument goes, society will no longer be linked by allegory to a divine universe but will become exclusively a worldly affair, guaranteed by a series of sentences that hand society the gift of acting as a subject. This is the source and purpose of such documents as the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and so on. Etienne Balibar identifies this rupture as the transition from subjechts-the medieval sense of being a subject, being subjected (to a lord, a king, etc.)-to subjectum: the individual agent and political subject, the citizen. 9 In other words, he recognizes in "the citizen" an extraordinary double subjectification. In a radical process of self-altering institution, a given community considers itself the arche of the law: the limit of law's

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justification (what lends law its claims to governance) as well as law's limitless beginning. This becomes possible because each member of this community-each and every one who imagines this community his I hers, who imagines himself or herself as an entity of this communityassumes the burden of the law. What enables this paradoxical simultaneity, where the singular and plural are retained untainted, is the coarticulation of two incompatible projects, as they are put forth in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen: equality and liberty. Balibar employs an avowedly baroque phrase ("the proposition of equaliberty") to open up the contemplation of the fundamentally contradictory terms of the Enlightenment's revolutionary idiom. 10 As he goes on to argue, the task of determining within which limits equality and liberty become identical is the paradoxical task of this idiom, whose modality constitutes a rupture because it is determined to unify opposites and whose resistance to resolution testifies to its intrinsically differential and contested character. Balibar argues convincingly that revolutionary law breaks with the long history of natural law, including those proponents of natural law (Locke, Rousseau) who facilitated the emergence of revolution. He is particularly successful in dispelling traditional hangups concerning the exclusivity of class rule (or class ideology) that allegedly permeated the new constitutional statutes. His whole argument serves to unveil this document as ideologically heterogeneous and antagonistic-indeed, as a site of class struggle. He underplays, however, the extent to which haunting shadows of the past are animated precisely by the fundamental contradictions that drive this new relation to law (implementation of equal recognition or equal distribution of wealth versus indiscriminate freedom of assertion; universal aspiration versus diversity of social relations; permanent revolution versus permanent institution of power). Because the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen is de facto an institution of the national imaginary, the task of assuming the burden of the law becomes abstracted into an invocation of the "national will" ("the will of the people"), which assumes in turn a transcendental authority of enormous, enchanting powers. 11 There is no reason to believe that the American case is any different. The famous opening of the American Constitution establishes the pea-

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pleas the undisputed subject of the law of the land: the utterance "We, the people" enacts a supreme subjectification of power behind which there is no backdrop, no justification. The law entails an irreducible subject whose plurality is deceiving. The heterogeneity and even relative autonomy of the thirteen states, gained and affirmed by the revolutionary schism from royal singularity, is subsumed in the new imaginary singularity created and legally bound by the Constitutional utterance. Constitutional law is always an act of nationalization, no matter what might be its claim to the universality of rights. But the American case is particularly intriguing because this nationalizing utterance was performed twice. The Declaration of Independence should not be seen as the historical and philosophical precedent of the Constitution, but part of the same multifocal flash at the origin of the national imaginary institution, whose time frame is a sort of simultaneity in suspension. (This is why it is irrelevant, for our purposes, that the Declaration of Independence is not, strictly speaking, a legal document.) Garry Wills has given us a persuasive narration of the multiple (re)generative moments of American national foundation between 1776 and 1789, despite his insistent focus on the resistance to union by the signateur states. 12 The most elementary claim of the Declaration of Independence is the demand for self-rule posed against the singularity of a ruler who is thereby displaced to an unbridgeable elsewhere: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." In other words, despite the strong social and cultural affinity of the states with the community of British society, the Declaration of Independence begins with an announcement of the necessity of a new imagined community. Only if British society was prepared to adopt the framework and principles of this new imagined community could we consider this cultural affinity stronger than the imagination that rose against it. What we have in this opening paragraph, enclosed in the boundaries of a highly refined and grammatically precise single sentence, is an epi-

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grammatic totality of the conceptual universe that enables and justifies this revolutionary act of writing. It is here, in this introductory phrase, more than in the declarative part that follows (or the declarative parts of Constitutional texts that must spell out the nature of rights), that the decisive power of Enlightenment as rule registers unchallenged. What comes across is the calm certainty of a scientific treatise which, in pure Enlightenment form, recognizes the force of natural necessity, the duty of demonstrable causality, and the imperative of justifying historical action before the court of worldly law. In other words, we are dealing with an act of political dissolution, an erasure of historical boundaries, which is simultaneously an act of radical institution, an assumption of new epistemological boundaries. How else are we to account for the extraordinary statement that follows: "We hold these truths to be self-evident"? Wills argues that the traditional interpretation that wants Jefferson to have copied Locke's maxims on self-evidence is misguided. Rather, the influence at work here is Thomas Reid, one of the major figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, whose notion of self-evidence is much closer to the cognitive qualities of so-called common sense. While for Locke, selfevident truth is a matter of uncontestable and irreducible identity ("the same is the same"), from which it is impossible to deduce anything, for Reid (and, according to Wills, for Jefferson), self-evident truth is a kind of direct apprehension of reality, a proto-cognitive level upon which a complexity of ideas can be built. Reid's humble empiricism suits Jefferson's philosophical designs behind the formulation of the Declaration of Independence. But Wills underestimates the fact that this allegedly empiricist grounding does nothing to dispel the transcendental overtones of this phrase, which in the context of a revolutionary act assumes almost magical qualities. "We hold these truths to be self-evident" in itself casts a spell. It is a double gesture. On the one hand, it cements the supreme authority of the subject we: we, the undersigned, the ones who exercise our "understanding without direction from another" (to remember Kant), the ones who come together because we recognize and share (or have a share in) the power of self-evident truth. On the other hand, "we" are also "all"-insofar as the reiteration of this phrase is "We, the people" -all

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who declare our independence, which is all those whom the Declaration finds as addressees, all who will be henceforth, by virtue of our act, the subject of the law (but also subject to the law). The self-evidence of truth allows us to subjectify the general will, which is to unify the plurality of particular desires toward a shared object. This object is the law, literally the constitutional element, the utterance that instantly appears as the focal point from which emanates all meaning, the source from which collective identity is conferred (and in which it is also confirmed). The law, therefore, comes to name its subject(s) by an act of writing in which the subject that makes the law ("We, the people") occludes itself. It is a disappearing act, an act of magic, in which the legislative will of a community (indeed, the nation) simulates the divine authority to name, to found the law, and then lays itself as the recipient, the addressee before this authority, before the law. 13 But in the last instance this is a substantive act: a subject acts by writing itself into the position of the Subject. More than a simulation, this is a replacement of the divine decree; it is essentially a matter of taking the place of divine naming and therefore a reiteration of its power. By the time of the French National Assembly's official Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, this reiteration is explicit ("in the presence of the Supreme Being and with the hope of his blessing and favor") and the law is literally pronounced "sacred."14 The people thus institutes itself as a sort of ventriloquist divine power, certain about its worldly domain but also desiring transcendental authority. 15 The unfathomable assertion "we hold these truths to be self-evident" is therefore simultaneously a confession and a call to faith-in the transparency of Reason that makes all myth, as social force, obsolete. This failed demystification is in practice concealed by being presented as a theory of demythification (hence the disastrous conflation of the two notions still prevalent today). But since this imposture of divine knowledge is inevitably a "conscious" imposture (to the degree that this text's explicit desire is to supplant divine authority), then it is a socially psychotic posture, a social contract with the void. Herein lies the seduction and violence of Enlightenment rule: its fascination with the abyss as generative trope and its uncompromising selfoccultation of this abyss in the guise of a textualized rationality. 16

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Trying to come to terms with the conditions of real violence that made it possible, the new scripture of the law sought therefore to institute and safeguard a rationality of violence-literally, to rationalize violence. It did so by representing the terms of society's rationality, by holding a monopoly over the means of definition (of what is rational and what is not). Incidentally, this is why the interpretation of the law (and the vast armies it commands at its service) is so crucial to its foundation. From this standpoint, it is not odd to say that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen found its legendary expression in the Reign of Terror, while the American Declaration of Independence served as the totemic alibi for the extermination of the Plains Indians. But we need not go so far back. As we shall see, this particular mythology of rational violence defines the contemporary action of the law, a contradictory condition that finally orchestrates the Enlightenment's own remythification of society. What needs to be explored, then, is in what sense the contradictory terms of this remythification both make possible an insight into the foundational co-incidence of law and violence and perhaps afford us the capacity to envision its undoing.

Law and the Monopoly of Violence In making law the primary social institution, the Enlightenment brought forth a fundamental contradiction. It exposed what had always been implicit in the very makeup of law but had never been acted upon, since the ultimate referent of medieval law lay in the distant realm of "divine justice." The Enlightenment made it possible to see that law is always authorized force, that law cannot be dissociated from the matter of its applicability (and thus enforcement)Y This means two things: first, that force is immanent to law, since the notion of law without its application and enforcement becomes nonsensical; second, that the question of justice in relation to the law can no longer be avoided. It must be posed, and what allows it to be posed is the inevitability of law enforcement. If the law could exist as an institution without ever having to face the possibility of its enforcement, then the question of its being just or unjust would be irrelevant. Force thus becomes primary to the whole discussion; it is what accounts for the law's authority, what grants it authorization.

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This new co-incidence between force and justice in a context that allegedly grounds social autonomy also accounts for the characteristic complicity between law and violence in modern societies. Here, Benjamin's insight into the intertwined nature of a "law-making force" (die rechtsetzende Gewalt) and a "law-preserving force" (die rechtserhaltende Gewalt)-a nature supposed to ensure that the two moments of the same do not collapse into each other-is paramount. 18 Note that the word Gewalt carries not only the co-incident meanings of force and violence, but also the notion of sovereign rule, legitimate power (which is precisely what Derrida seizes upon to underline that law is authorized force). In this respect, Benjamin's text is just as much an attempt toestablish the criteria for approaching the nature of power, for moving toward a critique of what lends legitimacy I sovereignty to power. The evident answer is violence, but the real question is what sort of violence (whose implicit extension would be what sort of legitimacy). Therefore, the issue posited is what constitutes the rule of law "behind" power, which is also to say, what is the position of law in the very constitution of rule, particularly Enlightenment rule. In post-Enlightenment societies law-preserving agents (the agents of law enforcement, the police force) participate in the legitimation of power by actually assuming a law-making role. Of course, the converse is also true, and Benjamin knows it well, although he does not address it here: law-making bodies (parliaments, legislators) often introduce or modify laws, and sometimes in summary fashion-as "states of exception"-for the singular purpose of preserving order. The blurring of limits is hardly surprising. Law is by necessity involved in a discourse of limits, of boundaries. Its nominal purpose, if nothing else, is to set limits and discipline society to respect those limits. But we know that the discourse of limits is by definition ambiguous. Whatever force draws the limit also opens itself to contamination from what is being (de)limited. Thus, the means of law's social discipline can be said to exist in a constant see-saw struggle with the power exerted by the notion of limits. Violence may be perhaps the most dramatic expression of law's encounter with its limit. Violence is what makes the performance of this encounter visible, what makes the blurring of the limit visible (keeping in mind that the blur is the proper condition of the limit). Consider, for a moment, a much discussed example from recent

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memory that brought about a dissolution of the social fabric, even if just for a few days: the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles police and its ramifications. This beating was not an isolated incident, but in fact an example of the habitual relationship between the Los Angeles police department and the city's black population. My contention is that in this relationship police action is hardly engaged in simple law enforcement. On the contrary, the police is meant to lay down the law in the streets, to impose the parameters of proper behavior for both "law-enforcing" and "law-abiding" subjects, for both itself (subject of the law) and those irrevocably other to it (subject to the law). What becomes painfully visible here is that the didactic method of the law, the means of enlightenment, is unabashed violence. Yet when the violence of law becomes visible is precisely when differences are registered: the difference between the law's institution and preservation, but also the difference between those who speak the law and those addressed by the law. Curiously, when the police express the violence of the law (which is, at the limit, the foundation of their legitimacy I sovereignty) their status as the law's addressees (since, as citizens, in principle they can never evade the law) seems to drop out of sight. That the police are above the law-or, more precisely, that they are with the law and not necessarily within the law-was aptly demonstrated in this case by the elaborate orchestration of the accused policemen's trial and the triumphant (if frantic) style with which the legal apparatus (which included the city's entire governing mechanism) arrived at their initial acquittal. The way that the policemen's first trial was conducted revealed, with no ambiguity whatsoever, that such hard evidence of "law-making violence" is something that the liberal social institution must repress at all cost (considering that a possible outbreak of violence by the enraged black community was a matter that the city's officials had discussed openly and had even weighed in as a cost). If the experience of social upheaval in the 196os taught us anything about the limits of liberalism's alleged capacity for self-regulation, it would be that when police violence reaches uncontrolled heights in "democratic" societies, the institution is undergoing a crisis. What causes the crisis is not merely that society's law-making has been turned over to the police, but that it registers as an event on a mass

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scale. This does not mean mere extension of witness testimony beyond the particularity of an event's circumstances, beyond the present tense of all those implicated in the scene of violence. In a media age, the scene of violence already includes not merely those individuals who literally give and take the beating, but the entire mechanism of spectatorship that surrounds them. Official media coverage succeeds in generalizing the event's singularity by virtue of suspending its actual time frame and reconstructing it on the basis of mass dissemination of the image. This sort of mass visibility leads to a certain streamlining of the field of vision, a condition where history becomes a blur. Although we must not underestimate the historical importance of social violence being brought into everyone's living room in the 1960s (the effects were quite real and verifiable), we also cannot discount the fact that this orchestrated visibility of violence did much more for the launching of televisual culture than for the actual problems in the social arena. In the Rodney King case, however, the mass dissemination of witness testimony had a stunning impact. The answer as to why should be rather obvious: it was random video taping, a chance witness, an amateur, unscheduled act. The fact that it was immediately absorbed into the mass media apparatus did not compromise its impact because the event of its random witnessing could not be effaced. It was structurally guaranteed to be unerasable precisely because it was not orchestrated, precisely because it registered, at its core, a locus outside the scene, thereby making an indelible print of its historical singularity. Suddenly, the fact that police violence against black men was habitual practice (and rather widely known in the hearts and minds of the American urban population, even if extensively repressed) came through in its totality, in the brutal totality of its randomness, condensed like so much gravitational matter on the surface of a single, random, black body. The full force of the law making its mark on the body, blow by blow, was visually described in a way that rivals Kafka's descriptions of the Apparatus in the Penal Colony-which is to say, that the violence of the law was suddenly seen in its bare mythical state. Benjamin recognizes that police violence in such moments is emancipated from the instrumental promise that links the legal decree to its proposed results. It breaks the promise by eliminating the distance be-

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tween instrument and purpose, means and ends: "the 'law' of the police really marks the point at which the state, whether from impotence or because of the immanent connection within any legal order [Rechtsordnung], can no longer guarantee through the legal order the empirical ends that it desires at any price to attain" (CV, 287 I 189). In other words, police violence is literally the conjunction of law and order as an end in itself. It is also the conjunction between law's contemplation of violence and the violent deed, to use Robert Cover's terms, and therefore the elimination of the chasm that keeps the two phases distinct. Under "ordinary" circumstances distinction is made between the psychological violence that ensures obedience to the law and the experience of socialization that makes physical violence unnecessary. This distinction is subjected to a ceaseless negotiation that tends toward its abolition, which is what characterizes the limit-space of law's existence: "Were the inhibition perfect, law would be unnecessary; were it not capable of being overcome through social signals law would not be possible."19 We return then to the originary co-incidence of law and violence, a co-incidence that is structurally essential and unavoidable. In fact, Cover argues with considerable authority that violence, as a general principle in Constitutional law, is not explicitly stated because it is understood in the very idea of government. Violence exists at the core of Constitutional power, in the sense that the Constitution grants power to the State (in the name of the People) to practice violence over the people, while the office of the judge includes a fully sanctioned and absolved "homicidal quality." 20 Yet it seems in the nature of law and order to occlude its origins in violence, to occlude the fact that law and force are intertwined, in plain view of the historical legacy of modern Constitutional law, which testifies to its violent generation. This condition of self-concealment is so widely (though not categorically) practiced in the history of human societies that one is tempted to engage it in psychological terms. Society's self-occultation seems paradigmatic of its desire for heteronomy. Or rather, the heteronomy of society is merely the effect of self-occultation, an effect, however, that has taken on the attributes of a cause.21 Onerepresses precisely what is constitutively traumatic: the originary event that encumbers one with the burden of self-determination. This event is

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constitutive because it continuously exercises an enchanting allure, a dominating desire, and simultaneously (by virtue of this domination) a catastrophic threat. A condition of unalloyed self-determination both serves as the foundation of subjectivity and poses the threat of annihilating it under its unbearable weight of responsibility. In this sense, every system of law and order is not only predicated on but also maintained by a violence that at any time could dissolve it. This is precisely why law has an "interest in a monopoly of violence"; it knows at some deep structural level that the violence it unleashes as its foundation will eventually lead to its demise. This notion, which Benjamin liberally uses, is known primarily through its Weberian variant, "the monopoly of legitimate violence"itself possibly a legalistic modification of a notion championed by Friedrich Engels. But the insertion of legitimacy into the phrase makes for a superfluous distinction because law's monopoly of violence consists precisely in its delimiting I dictating what is legitimate. The very act of naming and representing the legitimate is a monopoly act, a monopoly of authorizing (and thus enforcing) the boundaries or limits of the law. Whatever exists outside these boundaries is always, potentially, under elimination. This object of law's annihilating violence is simultaneously declared, in the eyes of the law, to be the personification of violence: the outlaw-whatever dares exist outside the economy of the law, outside the borders of the legitimate. Therefore, because bourgeois law and order is always on the brink of (self)destruction, it becomes imperative to build a society that remains in control of its selfgenerated violence, a task that requires ever greater violence and so on ad absurdum. On this untenable condition Benjamin rests his critique of bourgeois order, his critique of violence, which is in effect a critique of Enlightenment law. He also reads this paradox, however, as the source that makes violence in a revolutionary situation credible, for it provides the conditions of possibility for the foundation of some new law in some indeterminate future, which can be envisioned only once the projected imagethe facade-of its foundation is launched: a kind of justice that occurs in a future anterior. This absurd and utopian moment is the constitutive, temporal condition of law in general as a social-imaginary institu-

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tion. Consider Robert Cover's explicit statement: "Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality." Cover frames his argument by an analysis of the phenomenon of martyrdom, an extreme case of resistance to established law in the name of an envisioned other source of law. Martyrs are literally (in the Greek sense of the term) witnesses to this imaginary kernel of the law. For although every society's law aspires to an organization of social reality, it simultaneously provides a window on its imaginary reality: not what society (or reality) is but what it ought to be. Martyrdom partakes of the same revolutionary defiance that Benjamin mentions, as certain members of society willingly sacrifice themselves for a different (not yet instituted) ought, just as some others might be willing to kill for a different (not yet instituted)

ought. 22 Transformative Violence before the Law Cover's understanding of the excess of law shades into a certain politics of self-alteration that links violent action to society's transformative (creative I destructive) desire. Contrary to bourgeois liberal history, the history of Marxism had taken this association for granted until it was "forced" into a radical reassessment in the face of its failure. But we must reopen the question of this failure not in tactical I strategic terms, but with an eye to its problematic relation to the democratic imaginary, which continues to generate a discourse on justice while preserving intact (and, of course, hidden behind the notion of justice itself) the profound violence of its institution. Even if one is drawn to a theoretical abolition of violence from one's revolutionary horizon, the increasing violence of daily order-the kind of violence that overturns the boundaries between the legal and the criminal, the boundaries between nomarchy and anarchy-does not allow the privilege or, in another language, does not permit the theoretical bliss of nonviolent transformative action. Hannah Arendt has arguably provided the most articulate critique of revolutionary violence in her account of the turbulent events in 1968-69 in both Europe and the United States. The argument's impetus is the assessment of late-sixties student radicalism and call for outright violence

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in a worldly arena where technology has reached such destructive potential-a world where "peace is the continuation of war by other means"-that violence has been rendered a meaningless concept. 23 Her glance reveals a rather sanguine but melancholy view of a generation of youth that knows exclusively an existence of imminent and total catastrophe-the generation of "those who hear the ticking" (V, 18), those who are so alert to the tangible potential of time ending that they have no sense of time past or time future. Those who hear the ticking have no time left to hear history. Thus, they approach the matter of social transformation entirely unaware of (and indeed uninterested in) the legacy of social transformation. They are revolutionaries who do not know revolution, and Arendt goes to extensive length to show how such apologists for violence-who range from student leaders to Sartre's exotic deification of Fanon-have no sense of Marx's own understanding of the significance of violence in revolutionary action. Surely, the radical conditions under which Arendt was thinking seem distant today-and I refer not merely to radical conditions of insurrection throughout the world during the 1950s and 196os but, just as significantly, to the current downplaying of nuclear annihilation by those in power (who speak shamelessly of "tactical nuclear weapons"), replacing the main fear they had once fostered ("duck and cover") with a thoughtless and ultimately paralyzing illusion of control. This new management of reality constitutes a shift at the level of both conception and affect in society today that we cannot afford to ignore, should we open seriously the question of violence and transformation in presentday terms. All the same, Arendt's critique is illuminating and always present, insofar as it proposes and meditates on a fundamental distinction between violence and power, the revolutionary predicament par excellence. Basically, she follows Engels in attributing to violence the necessity of implements, of instruments, while she conceives of power as a social condition; it is to be found in numbers, in collective action. "Power, strength, force, authority, violence-these are but words to indicate the means by which man rules over man; they are held to be synonymous because they have the same function" (V, 43). Arendt writes in English here, but the statement suggests her thinking in the multiple

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registers of Gewalt. To understand her notion of power within this multiple signification, we need to keep in mind that she does not subscribe to a definition based on a command-obedience equation, an equation that she sees according to the Judea-Christian tradition of an "imperative conception of law" and as being essentially absent from Enlightenment law. For Arendt, Enlightenment notions of government use "obedience" in regard to the law (and not another man or God, according to the idiom of ruler or master) in terms of consent to support the laws created by the majority of the citizenry. This is ostensibly a different kind of obedience-hence the legacy of civil disobedience, which may elicit violence (the State's) or be deemed criminal, but is conducted paradoxically with respect toward the institution of law in whose name a particular undesirable law is called into question. Civil disobedience, ideally, decries the law as criminal-the law as perpetrator of a crime against the citizen-and demands that a particular law be abolished in order for the institution of law to be saved. It is nonsensical to consider civil disobedience in a context where law is personalized in the figure of a singular ruler. In Arendt's words, then: "Power is the essence of all government, but violence is not. Violence is by nature instrumental; like all means, it always stands in need of guidance and justification through the end it pursues. And what needs justification by something else cannot be the essence of anything ... [power is an end-in-itself], the very condition enabling a group of people to think and act in terms of the means-end category.... Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy.... Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable but it will never be legitimate" (V, 51-52). In this schema, violence need not and does not pay regards to history; if not quite ahistorical, it is a counter-historical entity, which is precisely why the aggravation of an experience of time's ending (of an imminent end to history) manifests itself with such indiscriminate violence. (She is speaking in terms of '68 radicalism, but the point could be made just as well for the French National Assembly's dismantling of Christian calendar time, as much as it could be made of Christian millenarians, etc.). In terms of the

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argument that engages us here, this contra-historical condition extends to the problematic action of the law itself: the violence of law means at once both the dehistorization and the delegitimization of law. Like Cover, Arendt understands law's violence as quintessentially lawless, but even more, she suggests that the condition of law's violence is tantamount to the designation of its loss of power. This path of thinking leads her to dispute the extension of any legitimacy whatsoever to violence, and therefore to situate violence in an antinomian relation to power: where violence can have the upper hand, it may destroy power-in the sense that "out of a barrel of a gun grows the most effective command" (V, 53)-but it must always remain substantively handicapped with regard to power, insofar as violence can never generate power. In this respect, Arendt does recognize a revolutionary situation in the events of May '68, for example, but she explains the failure of revolutionary realization as residing in the absence of collective readiness to assume the responsibility of power. She argues that mere violence against injustice, proceeding out of rage, becomes "irrational"-hence impotent-the moment it is "rationalized," the moment it becomes strategy (V, 66). At best, violence against injustice is "more a weapon of reform than of revolution" (V, 79), meaning that violence may be catalytic for a fundamental reinstitution of society, but can never itself be creative of such reinstitution. It is a formidable argument, even if, not unlike Adorno in the same period, it is an argument that disregards the legitimacy of revolutionary desire, the daring of a generation to alter its own historical boundaries, even at the cost of debilitating failure. The fact that in retrospect history's failure can justify both Arendt and Adorno detracts nothing from either the ultimate insight of their argument or the abusive shortsightedness of its execution. 24 In short, Arendt's critique of violence consists in positing an antinomian relation between violence and power: "Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely the other is absent. ... This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as non-violence; to speak of non-violent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it" (V, 56). For all its insight, however, this argument does not resolve the issue of transformative force (so as not to call it "violence," for her argument's sake),

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particularly insofar as transformative force encounters the domain of the law-and, indeed, the domain of law's violence. It seems that, despite her insightful invocation of Marx as corrective to the ahistorical activism of student radicals, Arendt forgets Marx's profound understanding of the interwoven condition of violence and law throughout the political history of capital, a condition that shadows in advance the revolutionary imaginary itself. As Etienne Balibar, precise and luminous as always, reminds us: the dialectic between violence and law (in a bourgeois order we would say, more precisely, the dialectic between violence and rights) goes hand in hand with the dialectic between class exploitation and class struggle, in a sort of recurring passage through history's Scylla and Charybdis (Balibar's image). What takes place in the trenches of class warfare takes place in the imaginary of the bourgeois state, though in different terms: "excess of 'physical' violence over the law [droit], without which the law would not exist; but also, excess of the law over 'bare' violence, which thus codifies it and legitimizes it." 25 Balibar's essay demonstrates, contra Arendt (though he doesn't address her), that violence may be inextricable from the history of social-historical transformation since the bourgeois era, precisely because it is already embedded in the social-imaginary of bourgeois law and order. This isn't to say violence is an inevitable path; Balibar suggests that we pursue the path of conceptualizing an "anti-violence" (which he distinguishes from nonviolence, a course of action, in his argument, that still exists within the dialectical imagination of law I violence). My interest here, however, is the condition of law's violence specifically, as a way of elucidating the tricks of the Enlightenment imaginary, so we shall proceed in this direction.

The Lawlessness of Law The police, as the vanguard of the entire court apparatus, exemplifies the contradictions of law as a social institution. Embodying both lawenforcing and law-making capacities, the police becomes the spirit of the law: in Benjamin's terms, its Geist, which, of course, also means its ghost. The police thus embodies law's phantasm, what constantly haunts the imaginary institution of the law by animating, by offering a

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body to law's phantom condition. The police force, as the ghost of the law that must return to enforce (and, by dialectical extension, undermine) the law, must do so explicitly: it must be made visible in its uniform(ity)-its formlessness, its blue I black gunslinging phantom nature-in order to exist and, more importantly, in order to make law exist. This radical uniformity, the categorical nature of the uniform, lends the police a singularity that effaces the reality of each individual policeman, in the same way that police violence temporarily exempts the policeman from his position of citizen before the law. The uniform is how the police acquires a proper name, a name that effaces the plurality of citizen names and yet, paradoxically, assigns the police a ubiquitous nature. Like Balzac's image of the peasantry as the one-headed beast with twenty million arms (Les Paysans, 1844), the police is both radically singular and ubiquitous, uniform and formless, full-fledged body and fullfledged ghost. In this categorical formlessness, which is also foundation, the police exemplifies law's pure aesthetics of violence. 26 Note the gravity of this contradiction: a pure aesthetics of violence in a social condition resting on the institution of an ethics of freedom sanctioned by law. Benjamin rightly points out that the police is a radical disruption of democratic logic-indeed, that in a democracy the police cannot but act illegitimately, for it must exercise an order of despotic violence which a truly democratic polity ought to have dissolved: "[Police] power is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly apparition [Erscheinung] in the life of civilized states. And though the police may, in particulars, everywhere appear the same, it cannot finally be denied that their spirit is less devastating where they represent, in absolute monarchy, the power of a ruler in which legislative and executive power are united in a totality [Machtvollkommenheit vereinigt], than in democracies where their constitution [Bestehen], elevated by no such relation, bears witness to the greatest conceivable degeneration of violence" (CV, 287 I 189-90). In other words, police violence in a monarchical (or theocratic) order is perfectly "legitimate" regardless of its excesses (or rather, its excesses are perfectly legitimate), since the nondemocratic state has no need to render invisible its predication on (divine) violence. In a democracy, the police violates society's foundational principles by definition, for a democratic society is predicated on law and

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order being every citizen's domain as part of his I her political prattein, not the task of an other, a designated specialist. In occupying this position of the designated enforcer, the police also bears out the equally foundational fact of democracy's voluntary oblivion of the violence at its origins, the violence of law itself. 27 Thus, police violence both exposes modern society's self-occultation and safeguards it. It is both society's repressive mechanism and its mechanism of memory, both society's ego and its bad dream. All this contributes to the general mystification of law and order that we observe particularly in American society: the American Revolution's radical and violent mystification of the nation as the quintessential form of legality founded on the radical demystification of monarchical law. This foundational mystification of law and order-of law as order (and indeed, as rational order)-increasingly deepens as American society becomes increasingly violent. Hence, the specialization of American mass culture in the production of cop shows, a genre that has refined and finally become independent of the crime mystery that prevails in popular nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature. This fascination with the business of law and order, which is also a celebration of violence, cannot be disentangled from the fascination with law and order's underside: the violence of criminality. It, too, has a long tradition in post-Enlightenment fiction, particularly in the nineteenth century. From William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, to Balzac's ultimate master-criminal, Vautrin, to Sherlock Holmes's great Other, Moriarty, nineteenth-century literature is rife with such instances. But in the American imaginary the great criminal, the outlaw, is a figure of great distinction, so much so as to embody American society's general cultural distinctions. If American society is paradigmatically founded on the primacy of law (the Bill of Rights), it is also co-incidentally founded on the phantasmatic allure of the outlaw-the Wild West, the frontier, and so on: the errant loner who forges his own rights, in some improvisational fashion, as he goes along. Obviously, this co-incidence is only recognized retrospectively. From the standpoint of ongoing American history, the time lag between the Puritan ethos whose Enlightenment variation led to the Bill of Rights and the frontier ethos that commanded the great territorial expansion in the name of such rights is

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retroactively erased. The inevitable and nonnegotiable conflict between law and outlaw exercises intense fascination in the popular imagination (from John Ford's Westerns to Blade Runner, from the Civil War to Taxi Driver). Interestingly enough, in the classic popular narratives, the notoriety of the name-what makes this conflict memorable-seems to lie on the side of the outlaw. The outlaws have names: Jesse James, AI Capone, Charles Manson. The law is ultimately nameless, uniform. Or, to put it from the reverse point of view (but in essence the same), the law has come to occupy (besetzen) the territory of the Name in its fullfledged metaphysical void. The law remains nameless but also commands the very territory of naming. Let us not forget that, although outlaws may achieve legendary status by virtue of their lawless actions, it is the act of being declared outlaws that seals the notoriety of their name. There is nothing gratuitous or folkloric about the Wanted! sign in the history of the Western. What is wanted is the name (much as the wanted man is officially named an outlaw as a result). The fanatical obsession of law and order with what is other to it goes beyond mere dialectical antagonism. By its constitutive nature, law enforcement imagines criminals everywhere; the J. Edgar Hoover character is merely a symptom. To interpret this symptom as paranoid would be a mistake. On the contrary, it testifies to an obsessive-compulsive condition that demonstrates the law's own entrapment in the allure of the criminal. In this respect, the law is not exempt from the popular fascination with the great outlaw. Derrida is right to point out that "the people's shudder of admiration before the 'the great criminal' is addressed to the individual who takes upon himself, as in primitive times, the stigma of the lawmaker or the prophet." 2H No doubt, there is something primitive about outlaw behavior, especially at levels of great excess. Within the domain of an Enlightenment imagination, particularly, the outlaw returns us to a prerational condition, a condition that refuses to recognize the new covenant of rights and in so doing unveils the covenant's foundational void, the fact that its truth is neither arguable nor demonstrable but self-evident. In other words, the sublime allure of, say, the Bonnie and Clyde figures springs from the fact that their outlaw excess reaches deep into the mythical power of the law, the violence of its foundation. This power registers itself at the level of flesh

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and blood, which is why the great criminal also seems to exercise enormous sexual power. In the legendary film about Bonnie and Clyde, sexual explosiveness should be engaged beyond its obvious dimension of Hollywood fashion, and it was Arthur Penn's scenographic brilliance to stage the last scene, where the now mythical outlaws meet their death at the hands of the law, in such a self-consciously sexualized crescendo. The law thus desires the outlaw's death with a drive that is itself a life-and-death matter. But this is because there is something in the outlaw endemic to the law. Paranomos is the one who is simultaneously beside the law and on the other side of the law-one who is, in this respect, against the law but also with the law, proximate to the law's domain. There is, in other words, a similar functioning of the Greek preposition para as in the cornerstone notion of metaphysics: par(a)ousia, a presence with(in) the essence, the essence as presence. Lawmaking violence in "primitive times" showed no mechanism for veiling its lawless foundation, because the presence of the law in the majority of cases belonged to an irretrievable Outside: the presence of the divine. The Enlightenment imaginary sought to eliminate the violent memory of this lawless lawmaking figure by textualizing a constitutional law whose origin was its own rationality, which was, moreover, thought to be inalienable and self-evidently true. Anyone who did not accede to this self-evidence was necessarily either insane or self-consciously alien. But precisely because the outlaw (paranomos) makes the paradoxical remainder of the violent arche of the law emerge in its repressed plenitude, he produces an uncanny mirroring effect. Risking a generalization, I would argue that mirroring is always a heteronomous activity, if only because an alien and ultimately unreachable other presides over one's constitution of identity. If this is true, then the identity of Enlightenment law hinges necessarily on the law of an other. And if this other is no longer God-because this is no longer historically possible, given that the Citizen has taken over the rights of God-then the other of the law cannot but be literally the other side of the law: lawlessness. The outlaw figure in modern society exercises enchanting fascination and yet produces the desire for its just elimination because it stands witness, not only to the originary violence of the law, but to law's constitutively

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lawless nature. At the same time, the police (which, as we saw, shares the same imaginary configuration) completes the mirroring by being the outlaw of the law, the exemplary expression of the law's own paranomia. This perfect co-incidence of mutually reflective images might help illustrate better the paradoxes of the institution of law in modern society and the violence it seems increasingly to incur instead of abating. The master lesson, however, is to be found in Franz Kafka's representations of the legal apparatus in his mythical renditions of modern society, which may explain why we continue to refer to our social experience as "kafkaesque."

The Lawlessness of Literature Kafka, a brilliant ethnographer of modern society, wrote unhesitantly about the body as the terrain of history, as the most palpable location of society's otherwise imaginary and intangible investment I occupation (Besetzung) of the law. Kafka's mythographic imagination exposes the underside of the capitalist social-imaginary-an imaginary that explicitly posits the values of free choice in the market place, the sanctioned right to act freely in a free market of rights (to action, to opinion). What this positing effectively silences in its infinite desire for expansion is the fact that it exists as mechanism, as a self-engendering machine of significations and identity formations in brutal repetition. 29 Everything in Kafka's world points to an undeconstructible aspiration for a disembodied "autonomy," a paradoxical notion whose cost (depicted with stunning fidelity to its intrinsic violence) is the inscription of the law on one's actual body. What Kafka invites us to contend with is the interminable capacity of self-engendering Jaw to veil its radical disengagement from the realm of human action and to reign by means of the delusion, the self-occultation, that it is in fact proximate and engageable. In Kafka, all depictions of autonomy are heteronomously derived, and any real, autonomous desire is dragged through the most insufferable process of degradation. Certainly, the predicament of being "before the law" (vor dem Gesetz) is a perfect illustration of the heteronomous mirroring that feeds the violence of the law. The citizen lies powerless before the law-in that dev-

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astating phrase, "there he sits for days and years" -because he seeks (and constructs) his identity in relation to the invisible, even inconceivable, alien entity that he imagines to represent society's justice: his own rights. But in doing so, he abdicates his rights, he consents to live without rights-without even gaining access to his rights-and thus he dies. He constructs his identity by choosing as a mirror the void; he tries to mirror himself on the abyss behind the gate, the abyss upon which the law institutes its mystique. The monstrous realization upon his death that the gate to the law was his and his only-his inalienable right-demonstrates the fundamental duplicity that lies at the abyssal origin of the law: the fact that the law must act in order to preserve itself. Hence, the violation of the citizen-intimidation by violence-and the law's lawlessness: "in Kafka's universe, law is lawless in a formal sense." 30 But Kafka's universe is merely a mythified expression of our own historical condition, and I would go so far as to say that by virtue of Kafka's mythification the historical registers more dramatically, the pain of history is actually made palpable. The preposition's stunning ambivalence in the famous parable "Before the Law" announces, at the very instance of the title (before a narrative takes place, before the story of the law is posited), the disembodied autonomy of the law. The two notions of "before" (in advance of and in the presence of) cancel each other out. The law is a radical boundary, a chasm that separates and unites simultaneously, which means that nothing can enter its space; it contains everything and is self-contained. Thus, neither the man nor the doorkeeper is ever in the presence of the law, and neither, of course, precedes the law, for there is no arche (no beginning but also no authority) outside the domain of the law. Jacques Derrida's well-known theorization of this paradoxical topography is one of his most skillful moments and rivals the theoretical richness of Kafka's original. His conclusion that both the man and the doorkeeper stand before the law without being capable of facing the law (because the law demands that they stand in opposition to each other, that they stand before each other) is essential to understanding that the law operates by means of self-interdiction, which leads to the paradoxical condition that law fosters a self-generated interdiction in all those named as subjects of/ to the law: "The law is forbidden. But

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this contradictory self-prohibiting leaves man 'free' in the matter of selfdetermination, although his freedom lapses in that, through self-interdiction, he cannot enter." 31 This description is striking in its accuracy; it might well serve as the ultimate precis of the parable. The crucial notion here is that the law is not forbidding but forbidden-meaning, it is forbidding to itself. There lies the possibility of humanity's self-determination, Derrida argues, a possibility that ends, however, the moment one comes in contact with the law, when self-determination becomes in fact self-interdiction. Yet, I would add, as defense against the inadvertent emergence of negative metaphysics, that one's contact with the law, as Kafka depicts it throughout his work, is always enforced as contact with the law of an Other, which is, strictly speaking, an impossible contact or, more precisely, possible only insofar as it is contact with the experience of force (Gewalt). What Kafka's characters come to "realize" always at the point of self-destruction is the void upon which their action (including their destruction) is founded, a void affirmed precisely because the self-alteration of the law (or even, more important, self-alteration before the law)-which is, after all, the quintessential gesture of real self-determination-is unaccountably occluded, disfigured into a heteronomous authorization. In other words, this law is forbidden precisely because contact with its arche (origin and authority) is (self-)made to be forbidden, which is why Kafka's depiction of the law infinitely postpones-postpones by means of containing infinity, of embodying asymptosis-one's entrance to its domain. Derrida recognizes here that the problematic of the law in Kafka is the problematic of literature itself: "the play of framing and the paradoxical logic of boundaries, which somehow upsets the 'normal' system of reference, while revealing an essential structure of referentiality" (DL, 146). Literature becomes an event the moment the particular intersects with the general, hence it is an event inconceivable outside the arche of Enlightenment. The co-incidence of law and literature occurs as a result of the institution of the right of the particular (right of property, of the individual, of the signature, etc.) intertwined with the sovereignty of the general (the Rights of Man). Thus, Derrida argues, in modern society literature legislates-" 'literature' has something to do with the drama of naming, the law of the name and the name of the law"

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(DL, 131)-but it legislates subversively, against the law that protects it and preserves it. Though Derrida doesn't quite elaborate, he does recognize the dramatic nature of the action: literature's subversion resides in its performative element, the theatricality of the mythistorical, where performativity entails the takeover of logos by mythos, the dramatizing of myth on the stage for it to be theorized. Derrida's essay goes to the heart of the entire problematic of "literature as theory" engaged here, even if not quite in the same terms. Surely, the main question, whether Kafka's literature is literary or philosophical (which immediately poses the contiguous question of whether the philosophical is also literary), emerges at center stage: "it is difficult to say whether Kafka's n?cit proposes a powerful, philosophical ellipsis or whether pure, practical reason retains an element of the fantastic or of narrative fiction. One of the questions might have been put forth as such a pronouncement: What if the law, without being transfixed by literature, were possible only under the same conditions as literary works?" (DL, 133). I shall delay here the significance of Derrida framing this concern through Kant's "as if" imperative, to which we shall return below, and consider rather his focus on the "literary" conditions of the law. One of the many radical aspects of Kafka's vision-indeed, what makes Kafka's work paradigmatic of literahue's intrinsic theoretical capacity-is the recognition and depiction of law's mythographic condition. Such condition is not a matter of nature, but of history-meaning, though law in the history of societies seems always implicated in a mythical foundation (whose form and content vary according to the social-imaginary horizon at work), to say that Kafka's law is mythographic, perhaps even "literary" as a rule, is precisely to place it in an Enlightenment universe, insofar as the Enlightenment imaginary consists in this peculiar performance of myth through the "disembodied" textual authorization (constitutionality) of the law. It goes without saying that the mythistorical texture of The Trial is possible only within the framework of a bourgeois State of rights, despite the novel's residual imperial scenography, which is derived from Kafka's social environment. If Joseph K. existed within a medieval tale, his predicament would hardly register an impression; it is his belief that he has rights before the law-indeed, the right to be before the lawthat makes the total violation of his rights nightmarish.

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To refine, therefore, the argument for the co-incidence or, as Derrida says, the "shared conditions of possibility" between the imaginaries of law and literature would require looking at the core historical conditions that Derrida aptly underlines in his essay: the interwoven nature of the particular and the universal right, as an imaginary institution, that pertains to both literature and the law as textual entities. There, we would re-encounter the fact that this textuality is itself the unavoidable phenomenal nature of the Enlightenment imagination whose force law and literature share at their origin. The configuration of law in societies derived from the Enlightenment is literary because it is mythographic, one might say, because the Enlightenment's own "mythical foundation" rests on the inalienable prominence of writing, whereby the law achieves its authority insofar as it is textualized. Yet, as we saw above, this promimence of writing, this textualization, assumes a ghostly presence in the very moment of the Constitutional utterance "We, the people," occluding thus both the origin and authority (arche) of the law, so that its truth shall become self-evident and law shall be instituted as a disembodied experience. Literature works subversively against the law precisely in that it brings this sense of disembodied arche back onto the textual stage-in that it remythifies it, we might say-and thus opens the instituted "self-evidence" of the law to judgment, to critical performance. In this respect, the criminality of literature is not merely traceable back to the metaphoric instance of Plato's expulsion of the poets from the polis as prerequisite of philosophical rule. Or rather, the archaic metaphor is instantiated every time the philosophical logos posits itself as political arche, as the law of the land. This is, of course, what characterizes the Enlightenment imagination, for better or worse-this ambivalence, the dialectic of Enlightenment, is perfectly real and remains so far unresolved. Thus, even if the distinction between literature and philosophy (which Derrida interrogates in this essay as a way of delineating the subversive legislation of literature) is a categorical given by law, a sui generis law of distinction which echoes the archaic quarrel between poetry and philosophy rather directly, literature's distinction (which isn't to say its definition) rests precisely on its performative defiance of the law. Along these lines of thinking, one might say that literature's capacity for theory is intrinsic because it is indeed autonomous, because

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literature posits its own law by interrogating both Law ("the law of the land") and itself as categorical law. Literature's autonomy emerges thus out of its paranomia in regard to the disembodied rule of the philosophical logos, out of the criminal body that exposes philosophy's haunts. While I agree with Derrida's point that it is impossible to answer the question of what/who judges a text to be literary, I would nonetheless suggest that whatever critical response to this question may exist (as literature's own "juridical performative" in Derrida's terms), it would have to be itself "literary." Just as literature has no a priori cognitive object but must pose its object each time anew-to instantiate it performatively-so it cannot be judged in terms other to it, but must posit, in its very instantiation as 'literary' performance, the critical terms of its recognition and interrogation. This self-determination, this paranomic autonomy, hardly suggests insularity or uniformity at the core. On the contrary, in not submitting to the external law of an Other (say, in 'traditional' terms, philosophy), it enables an encryption of the other in the very process (in Kafka's terms, the performative trial, der Prozess) of constituting its literariness. This encryption, however, is a symptom of resistance to the heteronomous command. It is thus readable only from the standpoint of a language commanded by the demands of logos, by the demands of philosophy, and to read it as anything other than a symptom would entail an uninterrogated subscription to such demands. In an eloquent response to Derrida's reading of Kafka, Rodolphe Gasche points out this same condition: "It is from that encrypted possibility of the philosophical that the literarity of 'Before the Law' is engendered, or becomes intelligible. Kafka's text is thus a literary text on condition that it does not entirely belong to literature, but that it also refers, by means of the virtual'presence' within it of the possibility of a philosophy of the moral law, to an Other (of it)." 32 Without disputing Gasche's (and Derrida's) commitment to a nondefinitional relationality of literature (to philosophy, but also to science), I would dispute the impulse within this remark to continue to locate the literary by means of the philosophical, even if by the negative gesture of identifying philosophy as literature's encryption. 1 am not convinced that this direction is the right one for pulling us out of the mire of the archaic quarrel. We

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miss the profound radicalism of Kafka's gesture if we opt to trace and identify his literariness in an allegedly encrypted moral law. On the contrary, I would argue, Kafka's "literariness"-which is tantamount to saying, his superior theoretical aptitude-resides in the autonomy of his utterance from the constraints of logos, in his uncanny and inimitable gesture of entwining myth and history. Bluntly speaking, Kafka's writing is an affront to all moral law, if for no other reason than that it demonstrates, in concrete somatic language, the despotic authority of moral law: the fact that moral law forbids even the slightest inkling of self-interrogation. Kafka's mythistorical writing thus works against the grain of society's self-occultation, against society's need to turn the mythical into the mystical. His mythification of the law might be the critique that Benjamin so urgently seeks. For Benjamin reads the mythical through the divine-or, perhaps more accurately, by inserting the divine in the middle, in between the mythical and the legal. A contradiction arises here between Benjamin's gesture and the language it evokes, a contradiction that resonates with the characteristic ambivalence that distinguishes Benjamin's entire oeuvre and resides at the core of his desire: the antagonism between revolution and redemption (and the constant failure to turn one into another). In locating the divine at (or as) the middle, Benjamin seeks to outperform the archie, to render the divine disruptive or anarchic. Yet, in occupying the middle, the divine cannot but also become a medium, a means (mittel, meson) that mediates the discrepancy between the mythic and the legal (nomic) by sublating this discrepancy to an always already unsignifiable location of future redemption. In this sense, middle/mittel/meson is messianic. It is a middle that contains the beginning, not simply as divine arche, as the origin of the law, but as the means to the law's promise. The promise of redemption is certainly the significance of Benjamin's famous phrase near the conclusion of his essay: "Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The first demands sacrifice, the second accepts it" (CV, 297 I 200). The statement follows the assertion that divine violence is bloodless expiation ("lethal without spilling blood"), while mythic violence (which Benjamin equates with "lawmaking violence") is a

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bloody affair, where "blood is the symbol of mere life." I would argue that this syllogism is made possible by a monotheistic conception of myth, which will always fail to grasp the abyssal-and thus tragicperformativity of myth. When Benjamin speaks of divine violence occurring "for the sake of the living," he evokes an embodiment of the logos and its salvational hold predicated on the annihilation of elemental life. Salvation (of the living) becomes possible precisely because and insofar as their life is not their own to begin with (kat' archen, meaning also "as a rule"). Only if we assume pure unmitigated autonomy of the divine-which is the paradigmatic monotheistic conception of law over mere life-could we talk about an act "for the sake of the living that bears the authority of the Other." 33 In a particularly deft reading of Benjamin's essay, Tom McCall contends that Benjamin never quite succeeds in "purifying" violence as he wishes, both because "the mythic shades imperceptibly into the messianic" and because divine violence itself partakes of the mythic the moment it is articulated: "it performs as a mythical text Benjamin's own philosopheme of the pure." 3• What enables this blurring is the constitutively ambiguous [zweideutig] nature of violence, which in Benjamin's description does not differ from the limit-logic of law itself in Kafka's parable. One cannot help but pose the question in brutal literalness: what is violence without blood? From the standpoint of the instituting imagination (humanity's psychic abyss), there is only one answer: guilt. In this respect, a divine violence-but also the sovereignty of the divine [gottliche Gewalt]-becomes traceable in the human realm only as the resignation of sovereignty, which is to say, a heteronomous bliss sustained by guilt, where to resign is also to re-sign, to abdicate one's authorization by subscribing to an other. This becomes clearer if we consider that arguably the greatest shadow over Benjamin's conception of the mythic in this text is cast by Georges Sorel's inimitable Reflections on Violence (1908). Sorel's figure deserves a separate interrogation and will occupy us in the next chapter, in conjunction with Benjamin's other great shadow, Carl Schmitt. Let me add, however, as a kind of prescient remark for this deferred interrogation, but also to the extent that it pertains directly to the reading of Benjamin pursued here, that although Benjamin encounters Sorel's

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argument on its own terms, he transforms it in the very moment of his response. He thus performs a double gesture: he appropriates the significational force of Sorel's argument while renaming the terms of signification. Benjamin was one of the few who understood philosophically in what sense the exemplary instance of violence signified by Sorel's anarchist theorization of the general strike undoes the violent logic of the State precisely because it is propelled by the catalytic power of the mythic imagination. Yet Sorel's revolutionary figuration of the mythical, which is both catalytic and constitutive in the radical projection of an undecidable future, is transformed in Benjamin's essay into the pure redemptive violence of the divine against the mythical. I would argue that on this striking (re)naming, where the terms of the One come to bear the content of its Other, hinges the wager of whether the lawlessness of law can in fact become deconstructive or must remain foundational of a self-occluded metaphysics of order.

Kant after Kafka The wager over Benjamin's ambivalence toward the mythic dramatizes the impossible proximity to the law in a way that facilitates the (re)staging of Kafka's lawless universe at the core of Kant's categorical ethical universal. By reading Kafka's performance of myth back into Benjamin's ambivalence, we might be able to recast the Critique of Violence as the means that exposes the occluded performativity of Kantian Enlightenment. To be more specific: whereas in Kafka the law exists in a suspended mythical present, in Kant the law is always elsewhere, either to be remembered or to be imagined. It is placeless (utopic) by design, because one cannot encounter the law other than by pretending to be it, to act as if one's personal ethics is universal law. Kant's example is famous: the legitimacy of unbinding oneself from an intentionally deceitful promise made under duress collapses the moment it is imagined as universallaw. 35 No ethical decision, no matter how warranted on a personal level, can achieve the status of ethics, if it does not submit to the regime of figurative pretense (hypokrisis) of being universal law. The as if universal is, of course, another sort of promise, a performative promise (for after all, to pretend is always to act on a self-made stage).

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Kant's law occurs in a time of precedent (pro-mis): a future set before us by an act in the present, but also a present that follows a universal that has been set before us in time. Obeying the same ambiguous logic, to find ourselves in Kant's staged moment of the law is to find ourselves before the gate of the law like the poor man from the country in Kafka's parable. Yet, in a perfect reversal of Kafka's parable, which allows us a glimpse of tragic self-determination (autonomy) at the heart of heteronomous law, there is an occluded heteronomy imbedded at the heart of Kant's prescription of autonomy, indeed a perverse identification between the two. The formal law of personhood-the ethical positing that makes one a subject, a political subject in Enlightenment terms-turns out to be alien, unknowable, to our being. 36 It exists because it will have come to bear-the verb tense of promise-a universal validity. For Kant, this impossible passage from the personal to the universal is to be achieved by the mysterious ways of practical reason, the reason that is ultimately bound by faith in the other's reason, which in effect neutralizes any sort of self-interrogation of both Reason and the Other. The "mysterious ways of practical reason" involve none other than the performative moment of an "as if" narrative-in terms of our reading of the Enlightenment imaginary, the co-incident narrative of law and literature.37 The moment of narrating the "as if" universal is a moment of the subject fictionalizing itself as a legal entity in the full Enlightenment sense: as both lawgiver and citizen of the law, both subject of and subject to the law. This is a moment of fiction indeed-a story, a legend, a narrative that mediates the utopia of the law, a guaranteed passage to utopia that veils utopia, that acts "as if" there is a tapas of fulfillment: the universe of rights. J. Hillis Miller recognizes that Kant's rule, his force of law, involves a performative teleology that is tantamount to a self-occultation of the abyssal realm of decision. But unlike Miller's attribution of necessity to this self-occultation, based on the inherent failure of language itself to perform the promise (true of the legislator as much as the prophet), I would insist on the historical dimension of this self-occultation, particular to Kant as an exemplary instance of the Enlightenment legal imaginary. As the promise of reason is ultimately based on faith in the other's reason, it fails to exercise critical reflection over the abyssal, nonrational terrain of law's violence.

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Our relationship to this violence is always singular, much as our relation to the law is singular. But this hardly means individual-autonomous in Kant's sense of the term. Any notion of individual autonomy is not only the epitome of identitary logic but for all practical purposes impossible. Autonomy means freedom only as a social entity I act, always differential and antagonistic, plural and polemical. It is always social autonomy: society-as the aggregate of political subjects, as koinonia politon-giving itself the law. This aggregate is never achieved by a pluralization of the personal ("as if" universal) that a notion of straight narrative implies. What takes place is rather an "allegorical transference of a non-sequitur," which, since it is allegorical, keeps the non sequitur intact. 38 Although modern society's imaginary relation to the law is, as a rule, occluded, Enlightenment law institutes a plurality at the legislative arche ("We, the people"), whose real power hinges on its existing in a radical present that keeps the law perpetually in a state of being made and unmade. The quintessentially duplicitous nature of this law and its violent rule (Gewalt) conceals law's mythic ambiguity at the same time that it also forbids the moment of decisive pure violence. To fall prey to such duplicity is to close once and for all the gate of the law. The law remains open only insofar it can be made and unmade, which is to say that it keeps open, unconcealed, its historical being. To know that the law can be made and unmade is to know that being subject of I to the law is a historical matter; it is to bare our complicity with the violence of the law, a violence which is never redemptive and never pure. This knowledge requires an uncategorizable sense of self-limitation at the core of political subjectivity, a self-limitation that recognizes no categorical principle because it has to do neither with an a priori principle of (moral) action that disguises the necessity of obedience, nor with an a priori taming of desire that begs repression. Self-limitation does not mean self-interdiction, a sort of Odyssean mastery of the Sirens by self-binding. It is a historical condition peculiar to the democratic imagination, based on the paradoxical desire not to desire absolute power, whose supplementary side is the desire not to desire the transcendental security of absolute law. 39 This desire is paradoxical because it goes against the primal monadistic desire of the psyche for omnipotence; it is thus an instance of desire as a historical matter, the de-

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sire produced by a certain historical imagination self-cognizant of its being limitless as imagination and limited as historical praxis. In other words, we are talking of self-limitation without limit, which is also to say, obeying the paradoxical notion of the limit, self-limitation that occupies [besetzen] the limit, the domain that both interrupts and diffuses: self-limitation as exercise at the ethical limit that orchestrates in tum the limitless act of politics. From this standpoint, self-limitation is the mediating process involved in autonomy, not merely in that to give oneself the law requires locating oneself at the limit (and indeed as the limit) of the law, but even further, in that autonomy presupposes a self-generated process of othering, a self-alteration possible only when one's limits are one's own and not imposed externally by an other. In this respect, self-limitation is a poetic act-properly speaking, an askesis that knows no fear before the other, which is why it can hardly be called ascetic. It goes without saying that whatever social-imaginary limit is figured as the property of an other, whether this other is termed Reason, Liberty, the iron laws of history, or radical Otherness, it defines a heteronomous politics which, strictly speaking, is no politics at all. Kant himself exemplifies an ascetic perversion of autonomy in the face of the limitless capacity of the human imagination, whose autonomous command of the limit looms before him like a terrifying chimerical object. His understanding of self-limitation is actually one of self-interdiction, so that his own fundamental insight-"understanding without direction from another"is subsumed into the ground of something that will always precede it: the internalization of disembodied uninterrogated law. 40 This is actually the Enlightenment's state of madness, a mode of being that suffers from experiencing itself as the refraction of divine will-neither its agent, nor its flock. Lost and abandoned before the terror of autonomy, the terror of facing society as one's own creation/ destruction, Kant's practical reason offers the guarantee, the legal cover, for society's automatism. Kant symptomatically foreshadows the terror of Kafka's world: the dialectic of Enlightenment as Kafka's myths lay it bare. However, Kant lacks Kafka's mythographic capacity to stage this terror as the very scene of self-interrogation and self-determination. Kafka's sense of the law's formal lawlessness stages, by a kind of Brechtian negative didac-

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tics, the entire predicament of living in Kant's heteronomous world. ln this world, when the gate of the law is shut forever, an abyss is opened before us, the chasm that carries as a sign the letter K. What does it mean to occupy the position of K.? This may be the most undecidable question in the twentieth century. Fully cognizant of the rules of undecidability, I would nonetheless risk responding to this question by pointing to modernity's obsession with Antigone-not as an answer, but as a response linked to the question by parabolic likeness, in Kafka's sense (Gleichnis). Not Antigone, the figure, the woman, but the staging of the figure, the social predicament that the woman helps stage before us (for she also faces once and for all the foreboding gate of the law as it is shut before her, as she is shut inside it). As we shall see later in the essay specifically devoted to this issue, Antigone has nothing to do with the resistance of kinship to State rule, nor is it the tale of some brave and defiant revolutionary heroine, nor is it the paradigmatic idiom of Dasein. Modern philosophy's need for Antigone testifies to the interminable power of staging myth before the polis. It signifies the "mythic foundation of thought," which means traversing the phantasm, the screen projection, of God and leaving God far behind. In this trajectory, one looks out from the position of the abyss to see that both nomos and anomia, arche and anarchy, can never be sublated, that they are always in crisis: objects of krinein. And how is krinein ever to be presented, to be (self-)taught? By placing myth on the stage, by performing myth in all its undecidability, a performance that is political by definition, just as its pedagogy is a pedagogy of undecidability in order to make possible the emergence of decision (krisis) in each one of us. For the Athenians, both Antigone and Kreon are tragic in their transgressive, monomaniac decisions-one for not respecting the law, the other for not respecting the myth. The Sophoclean play demonstrates this undecidable relation between these two elements-read from our contemporary vantage point, a transition from law to myth. Antigone opts for myth against the law, and this is what makes her the great, if socially insane, outlawY The moment of Antigone in Kafka's world, our world, is the revolutionary moment that Benjamin seeks in a pure elsewhere. It demonstrates without a doubt that the mythic is not embodied in the legal (nomic). On the contrary, the legal has devoured the mythic. But it is

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easy to forget this cannibalization, for still unable to overthrow the weight of "Judea-Christian" monotheism from our secular shoulders,4 2 we forget that the mythic means nothing outside a "pagan" imaginary (while the legality of the nomic is perfectly suited to the transition from the monotheistic to an atheistic imaginary). In a "polymythical" society, to remember Odo Marquard's distinction, mythic thought does not signify a law-preserving Gewalt, as Benjamin is led to argue, for the simple reason that it entails an imaginary dispersal at the core, a society where truth and falsehood coexist, not as antagonistic partners but as mutually negotiable possibilities without guarantee. In a plurality of modalities of belief-where belief itself is by definition never devoid of interest, never disinterested-there is no law to be preserved, but only the daring of the social community to institute itself and yet always recall (in the sense, of both remind and repeal) its own institutions. 43 We are now, as a world nurtured by the Enlightenment, at a peculiar juncture: following the end of a century that demonstrated the dialectic of Enlightenment at its fiercest antinomy. This historical juncture is consumed by apocalyptic fantasies, dark desires that convey tremendous anxiety at the prospect that the project of "autonomy" may finally fail. The allure of such fantasies confirms that the Enlightenment (as condensed in Kant's paradigm of autonomy-freedom of contention in the public sphere, ethical order in the private sphere) not only failed to disenchant the world, but instead fed an explosive core of repressed violence that returned to swallow liberal institutions with a vengeance. In what were resolutely ancient times, Antigone issued a warning against the propensity of anthropos to play god alone: monos phronein. The advent of a monotheistic God, a human invention, arrived as vengeance on all those who left the theater without thinking. The explosion of repressed violence against this God (the decapitation of the King, the daring erasure of the calendar, Nietzsche's inimitable pronouncement) was in turn duped by its own antithetical force, and monotheistic desire was further strengthened by the radical imaginary institution of a textual atheist law. Kafka merely let this institution resound in its annihilating silence through the enigmatic idiom of a literature he thought better burned. After the end of the twentieth century, Kafka teaches us that this is

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hardly the end of modernity, but rather the time when modernity's abyssal nature might pass from project to experience. If the foundations of modernity are legal-predicated on foundations of authority presumed mystical-then we might want to traverse the terrain of the legal and its mystical guilt (the complicity with violence) and encounter, with an ineffable sense of mortality (which is nothing but the most sensuous devotion to life), the order of the mythical. Let us not forget, however, that before the eyes of Enlightenment law myth is constitutively criminal; it belongs to the order of the outlaw. In modern society, where law as order rules unencumbered, myth is dangerous because it accedes to the most forbidden (l'interdit: the interdicted, but also the interstitial)/" because it opens up the horizon between the necessary and the contingent and therefore demands acrobatic alertness to the slippery mysteries of life. To make the transition from law to myth is to dare imagine the world beyond the order of the sacred. Myth exists at the limit of the sacred. To be at this limit is actually to embody the moment of ethical decision, the moment of krisis. The moment of ethical decision-which is always a political decision (a decision open to contention) and is always a social act in its full singularity (the instance of social autonomy)-is just that instance, not before the law, but beside the law, the moment of paranomia, when myth is staged (as l'interdit) in an ever-transitional theater of history.

3 The Concept of the Mythical

The question ofliterature as theory is best articulated as the intersection between the poetic and the political. It is often the case that writing which is explicitly political, both by genre and by intention, achieves a high level of performativity, indeed a certain poetics, without which its historical force would seem doubtful. I say this without thinking in the least that the force of political writing could be reduced to mere rhetoric. On the contrary, I would argue that such force could be traced to the political gravity of the specific poetic principle at work in each case, going further to suggest that the intersection between the poetic and the political may be in fact an entwinement. In this respect, there is much to learn about how literature thinks of its world (of the political universe which gives it existence) by interrogating in what sense political invocations of this universe bear an immanent, if unacknowledged, "literariness." An exemplary artist in this sort of political writing is Carl Schmitt, so that the task of recasting the claim of literature's theoretical disruption of social identificatory mechanisms through the prism of political writing makes an encounter with Schmitt (and certain of his political conversations) imperative. The conversations I have in mind are specifically with Georges Sorel, Walter Benjamin, and Hans Blumenberg. They not only happen to be political conversations whose performative terms are characteristically "literary" but also edify themselves by negotiating with the concept of myth. In fact, I would argue that though these conversations take place largely in early-twentieth-century terms, they provide an incisive way of interrogating the "antimythical" tendencies of contemporary historical reality, which claims to have become

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"postpolitical" and shows definite signs of turning to theological modes of understanding and acting. This turn is arguably propelled by the desperation that follows a historical-epistemological void, the loss of a stable axis of meaning that characterizes what we identify symptomatically as the era of "globalization" and "fundamentalism." The hard reality of such a void becomes inevitable when a historical universe, for reasons that in this juncture still remain indecipherable, subjects the political to nearly exhaustive self-occultation. My hunch is that myth-in the specifically performative way I use it here-has much to offer to the process of disintegrating the self-occultation of the political. Schmitt, in particular, emerges as an intriguing interlocutor in this process not only because his theorization of the "concept of the political" has been so influential and because he was himself an exemplary political creature (with all conceivable ramifications of this notion) but more so, from my standpoint, because he understood the profound importance of the mythical, even if in terms marred by his political decisions and his theologically motivated limits. In this respect, the "concept of the mythical" becomes possible expressly on account of Schmitt, and it is conducted more or less as a fragment of a continuing Begriffsgeschichte (to which this book is in part dedicated), which is delineated here specifically by Schmitt's encounters with Sorel, Benjamin, and Blumenberg. The crux of the matter is neither to decide the significance of Schmitt's work in our time nor to determine, by some sort of distributive logic, which of Schmitt's concepts and ideas are useful and which are not. Although an assessment of Schmitt as a writer and thinker is inevitable, it is secondary to the task of raising certain questions and uncovering certain trails in the wake of Schmitt's passage through history. This passage was hardly negligible and hardly innocent. On the contrary, Schmitt's alertness to the most subtle shifts in historical contingency throughout a long life in a troubled century surfeited with innumerable untimely deaths resulted in a historical passage of unusual complexity and magnitude, as evidenced by the greatly deferred, indeed retroactive, disturbance (I mean the term literally, not pejoratively) his writings continue to produce nowadays. My own encounter with Schmitt necessarily partakes of this disturbance, but only to the

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extent that it incorporates it as historical motivation for the inquiry that follows. The present text resumes an argumentative tack concerning the question of national sovereignty in Schmitt's Political Theology that I proposed previously in Dream Nation. That argument, which recognizes the circuitous and often contradictory tendencies in Schmitt's thinking, and its specific terms, can be summed up as follows. Although Schmitt consistently and in the most trenchant terms exposes the secret metaphysics of constitutional liberalism, his own Statist metaphysics cannot but provide a blueprint for a heteronomous social and political order. More specifically, though the most important contribution of Schmitt's Political Theology is precisely to unmask the heteronomous real nature of a political order (constitutional liberalism) that claims to safeguard society's autonomy, his underlying logic demonstrates-how consciously of its implications I am not prepared to say-that national sovereignty is the enemy of social autonomy. Consequently, from the standpoint of the political person, of the active citizen in the polis, Schmitt's theory of sovereignty must conclude in a politics of subjugation, indeed in the kind of subjugation that demands the sacrifice of critical interrogation to the inner truth of an apocalyptic origin of history, as we encounter it in every monotheistic order. 1 In regard to the last point, my position echoes Heinrich Meier's thesis that at the core of Schmitt's understanding of the world reigns an intransigent Christian imagination. 2 Much evidence points to this conclusion, even when we take into account that Schmitt's thought is deliberately open to historical contingency and thus does not unfold continuously from an unadulterated source. This position does not amount to the rather narrow pronouncement that Schmitt was above all a Catholic thinker, but recognizes that his epistemological universe emerges from a monotheistic order which, in the last instance, undoes his otherwise acute political understanding of history. Unlike Meier, I see no distinction between political theology and political philosophy; I find both terms highly questionable, if not untenable, and I shall return to this at the end. My initial concern, as the groundwork for Schmitt's encounter with the mythical, is Schmitt's encounter with Marxist dialectics, despite the

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ideological abyss between them. Indeed, Schmitt's greatest political enemy (at least in the Weimar period) was not liberalism or parliamentarism but Marxism, precisely because in the 1920s Marxism constituted an equally uncompromising and actual force against liberalism and parliamentarism. How else are we to interpret the fact that half of Schmitt's initial treatise on parliamentary democracy is occupied with extensive polemics against Marxist philosophical categories? I would argue that, in the language of Schmitt's figuration of the political on the basis of the friend-enemy principle, Marxism emerges as the enemy who "enables" self-constitution, and it is precisely because of its radical foundational significance as enemy-and here the textual evidence puts Schmitt's adherence to his own principle into question-that the real magnitude of enmity is consistently veiled. Marxism is foremost a philosophical enemy, which is why, after he dispenses with the Romantic ideology of liberalist metaphysics, Schmitt must conduct a disintegration of dialectics in the same terms, as a logical immanence that forever defers the moment of decision in politics. Nonetheless, a question which is methodologically crucial to my discussion emerges as an undeconstructible remainder from this confrontation: Of what use is a polemical method without dialectical understanding? I shall limit my reading to the last two chapters in The SpiritualHistorical Situation of Contemporary Parliamentarism (known in translation as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy), which are concerned with, as Schmitt terms it, the rationalist dialectics of Marxism and the irrationalist violence of anarcho-syndicalism. My concern is less the argument that Schmitt catapults against Hegel and Marx-he tends to stage his attack on the most identitary and teleological view of dialectics-and more the argument he unleashes on Georges Sorel in the last chapter. Even from a cursory look at the text, Sorel emerges as a formidable enemy, toward whom Schmitt reveals a definite, though barely discernible, ambivalence of desire, a barely realized trace of admiration that further fuels the polemical impetus of the argument. Schmitt recognizes in Sorel the same unabashed polemical spirit as his own, which dares to expose one's writing to full-fledged enmity, matching the vehemence with which the text pursues its enemies to the dead-end of their inner logic. But while Schmitt's theologi-

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cally inspired force can implant a corrosive element at the core of any rationalist metaphysics, it runs aground on Sorel's mythical understanding of history, precisely because Sorel's brilliant anarchic articulation of myth shows that myth has no core, no singular arche. The provocative text that historically mediates this encounter is Benjamin's "Toward a Critique of Violence" (1921), which is situated between Schmitt and Sorel and succeeds, in Benjamin's inimitable way, in raising the issue of myth as a challenge to sovereignty. After his encounters with Surrealism and Brechtian theatrical theory, Benjamin's reconceptualization of his own terms led him eventually to a more dialectical understanding of myth. In his later work, when he elaborates on his notion of the dialectical image (principally in the notes that formed the Passagenwerk, but also on various drafts and fragments dating after 1928), Benjamin again becomes a valuable resource for elucidating how a performative dialectics of myth can withstand the enveloping powers of "political theology." Schmitt either did not keep up with Benjamin's trajectory or he never really understood him; his only gesture toward Benjamin is a reciprocal elaboration-in the form of a "correction"-on the Trauerspiel thesis, where, unpredictably, Schmitt's observations point to a theory of tragedy that actually unlocks myth from the binds of political theology-a gesture that T see as Benjaminian, if not even Sorelian.l take up this paradoxical moment in Schmitt's oeuvre at the conclusion of the essay, as an internally deconstructive instance that demonstrates the untenability of political theology before the political challenge that Sorel's thought places in Schmitt's way: myth without arche or telos. The great German dramatic poet Heiner Muller once commented, "Carl Schmitt is theater. His texts are theatrical performances. I am not interested in whether he was right or not. His best texts are simply great performances."3 I am fascinated by this comment, not least because the man who made it was decidedly against any intellectual or political fad and celebrated, with a notoriously consistent lack of compromise, his being out of joint with the times. To my mind, no other comment addresses the question "Why such fascination with Carl Schmitt?" more incisively than Muller's casual remark. Muller restages the question by

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foregrounding the act of thinking as form, which is at the heart of the matter whenever we seek to evaluate the significance of human thinking as action-indeed, from my standpoint, as action in an inescapably political universe. Muller's gesture restores the inherent performativity of philosophical thinking, usually subsumed in the name of logical argumentation, objective reasoning, and, more often than not, a moralistic righteousness whose unstated aim is to conceal the complicity of a discourse with its ideological location. Muller's restaging is crucial for Schmitt's legacy in at least two ways: (1) it provides an alternative account of the recent fascination with Schmitt-a reason other than the alleged misapprehension of his theories which, for example, fuels Schmitt's patronage by various neofederalist tendencies in political theory, sometimes hailing from the Left but also from more traditional conservative domains; (2) it realigns Schmitt's avowed preference for polemical structures, not only to reveal the impact of this preference on the concrete materiality of his writing (which is what makes his writing so seductive), but, more importantly, to challenge Schmitt's polemical structures from the standpoint of theatricality, from what I discuss here in terms of a performative dialectics of myth-incidentally, the very idiom of Muller's theater. To speak of thought from the standpoint of theatricality is to acknowledge the agonistic performativity of all thought: the fact that all thought (even what might be silently conducted in a hermit's cell) takes place within an arena of contention, wherein it is always dialectically engaged with its interlocutor-whether friendly or adversarial, public or self-referential, real or imaginary-in order to problematize and articulate a dialogic and thus "collective" concern. In this respect, no thinker is ever contained within the bounds of his/her singular viewpoint, but always exceeds them by virtue of the performative act itself. The art of theater is a hypocritical art, according to the original sense of the Greek hypokrisis, which in addition to its explicitly theatrical signification also means the act of responding from the standpoint of an other. Conceived in terms of its originary matrix, theatricality is always a political attribute; it is a means by which the polis stages its self-representation, which, in concretely historical terms, involves a dramatic performance of its mythical foundations-the very terms of its social-

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imaginary, as Cornelius Castoriadis would say-for the purposes of theoretical critique (keeping in mind, again, the significance of the Greek terms theasis and krisis). The dramatic performance of myth is a dialectical affair whereby the staged self-representation may or may not lead to self-recognition, and therefore an Aufhebung (at least in the Hegelian sense) is by no means guaranteed. In this sense, Athenian tragedy becomes paradigmatic in today's political universe precisely because in its own time it was not exhausted in the confines of the stage. As an art form living in history-though essentially unperformable in its full-fledged political range since the fourth century B.C.E.-it exemplifies the ways in which the polis (long dead as a socialhistorical entity but still living as a social-imaginary form) continues to exercise its imagination. Schmitt's encounter with Sorel demands this sort of dialectical confrontation, and his performative polemics against what Sorel had already established-in a rival performative gesture titled Reflections on Violence (1908)-is conducted with superb theatrical intuition before the audience of a historical moment with the highest political stakes: postSpartacist Weimar society. Like Schmitt, Sorel was an idiosyncratic, controversial, and anomalous figure in European intellectual history. Assessing his irascible and unpredictable character, Isaiah Berlin rightly compares him with Karl Kraus 4 (which resonates correctly in light of Benjamin's fascination with both) and proceeds to describe his tendencies in terms that could apply equally to Schmitt: vehemently antiliberal and antibourgeois; animated by an avowedly polemical desire; suspicious of the Enlightenment legacy and its democratic institutions; privileging action over discussion; occasionally driven to anti-Semitism, insofar as he identifies intellectual cosmopolitanism, which he detests, with Jewish culture. 5 Moreover, as with Schmitt, the consistent appropriation of Sorel's work by both the Left and the Right (often in their extreme positions) makes a political evaluation of his historical significance highly problematic. Sorel's influence in his lifetime may have been greater abroad than in France, where he became increasingly isolated as an intellectual and was never really part of the syndicalist movement he advocated with such passion. Sorel had a significant (and like Schmitt, diverse) impact on Italian intellectual and political circles, due primarily to his friend-

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ship with Benedetto Croce (who translated Reflections on Violence and proclaimed him the Vico of his age), but also due to both Mussolini's and Gramsci's explicit interest in his positions. 6 The English translator of Reflections on Violence wasT. E. Hulme, who, along with Wyndham Lewis, brought Sorel's work within the Vorticist literary circle, which espoused a similar aesthetics of form on the basis of creative violence? The link here was Hulme's affinity with Henri Bergson, whose philosophical categories were reconfigured by Sorel in a uniquely creative understanding of the role of intuition and elan vital in revolutionary politics. Sorel's incorporation of Bergson's ideas into the political domain not only becomes crucial in tandem with Sorel's contribution to my argument about the performativity of myth, but constitutes in itself a line of argument that enables us to see in what sense the political and the poetic are intertwined in the societal imagination. Sorel's politics is thus a poetics; he views society as a theatrical stage; his method of anarchy as praxis is tantamount to the method of literature as theory. Bergson kept his distance from Sorel's politicization of his philosophy but acknowledged Sorel's seriousness and skill in understanding and elaborating his philosophical positions: "It seems to me that Sorel's spirit is too original and independent to be enlisted under the banner of his claims; he is not a disciple. But he accepts certain of my views, and when he cites me he shows a man who has read me with great attention and who has understood me perfectly." 8 Benjamin's gesture of incorporating both Schmitt and Sorel in a longstanding historical-philosophical meditation that articulates the theological together with the mythological suggests that Sorel's presence in Weimar political consciousness was hardly negligible. 9 Two aspects of Reflections on Violence exercise a grave fascination for both Benjamin and Schmitt: (1) the passionate advocacy of the general strike as the absolute revolutionary gesture, and (2) the theorization of myth as society's primary mode for self-alteration. Both aspects expose and challenge, in dramatic fashion, the questionable nature of secularization and legal egalitarianism allegedly achieved by standard bourgeois democracy. Both aspects are intertwined in their simultaneously creative and destructive force: thus Sorel recreates the general strike as the great proletarian myth in action. Schmitt recognizes the merits of this challenge, and his first gesture

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is to degrade its connection to Marxism. In philosophical terms, this means that any connection of Sorel's thought to Hegelian-Marxist dialectics must be disproven or discounted, which in Schmitt's polemical universe would have to be seen as a compliment, as an act of raising this challenge to the status of an enemy worthy of serious pursuit. Schmitt's argument proceeds as follows: To the degree that it claims to organize theoretically a method of revolutionary action, dialectics conjures up an insurmountable contradiction. Insofar as it prescribes a developmental historical scheme according to an immanent logic, it makes impossible the interruption that would signify the moment of revolutionary alteration because, as Schmitt argues, echoing his position in Political Theology, "the essential point is that an exception [Ausnahme] never comes from outside into the immanence of development [Entwicklung]." 10 Because of its built-in methodological absorption of aU negation and contradiction, Hegelian dialectics, according to Schmitt, provides no real means of ethical decision, but rather presents itself as the actualization of the real-rational: "If [Hegelian] world history is also the world court, then it is a process without a last instance and without a definitive disjunctive judgment" (CP, 56 I 69). This particular argument underlies Schmitt's attempt to show that the Marxist desire for dictatorship (of the proletariat) as a practical means of abolishing liberal bourgeois order-and to the degree that it follows a dialectical method inspired by Hegelian categories-has resulted in a duplicitous position. On the one hand, it has participated in the practical impossibility of dictatorship, insofar as it has contributed, along with the rest of bourgeois liberalism, to the "dissolution of the absolute character of moral disjunction" (CP, 57 I 69). On the other hand, the very process of dialectical absorption of contradiction and disjunction has produced a practical permanence of dictatorship by the systematic rationalist principle over the singular and accidental nature of history. The practical outcome of this second manifestation would be the notion of a philosophical vanguard that would represent the world spirit in its development (in the Hegelian strain), or the vanguard revolutionary party that would control the significations of revolutionary action (in the Leninist Bolshevik strain). At the heart of Marxism, Schmitt thus sees an absolute logic that forces all elements to their most extreme so that they can be overturned, historically, by dialectical necessity.

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In this schema, thought itself becomes proof that history has in fact taken place, given that the present moment of intellectual judgment merely reveals the outcome of some dialectical contradiction unfolded in the now deceased past. According to Schmitt's reading of dialectical Marxism, once it becomes possible for consciousness to grasp the present moment, the contradiction has already been historically completed and resolved: "The thinker only knows coming things concretely in the negative, as the dialectical contradiction of what is already historically finished. He discovers the past as development into the present, which he sees in its continuous evolution [Entwicklung]; and if he has correctly understood it and correctly constructed it, then there is the certainty that this, as a thing perfectly known, belongs to the consciousness of a stage that has already been overcome and whose last hour has arrived" (CP, 61 I 73). Marxism's alleged science consists, according to Schmitt, in "an evolutionary metaphysics [Entwicklungsmetaphysik] that makes consciousness into a criterion for progress [Fortshritt]" (CP, 63 I 75). However we evaluate the accuracy of this statement, it nominally explains why interwar Marxist circles placed such emphasis on correctness of understanding and why class consciousness specifically became the most underscored and negotiated theoretical domain in early-twentieth-century Marxism (Lenin, Luxemburg, Lukacs, Gramsci). I shall forego here the obvious critique that comes to mind-that Schmitt judges Marxism with the statutes of the most progressivist and teleological view of Hegelian dialectics. (If nothing else, the dialectics of Benjamin and Adorno would cast, in distinct ways, their spectral disproof over this assumption.) Instead, I shall take as my point of departure Schmitt's fascinating conclusion that dialectical Marxism is intrinsically incapable of revolutionary action, precisely because it claims to have the logic of history under control. Regardless of its philosophical (or even historical) accuracy, this position is crucial because it enforces a singular track in Schmitt's argument: namely, all revolutionary Marxism (in his time, Lenin and Trotsky were the eponymous culprits) proceeds with a theory of direct action that undoes the Hegelian-inspired desire toward, as he calls it, "an educational dictatorship"-the despotic rule of enlightened reason by the representatives of the Spirit-and turns instead to a wholly irrationalist praxis. This irrationalist force doesn't even obey the dictates of the drive to-

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ward "the dictatorship of the proletariat," whose logic points, after all, to an emulation of Jacobin rationalism-a position Schmitt had already developed in The Dictator (1921). In his own words: "This is not a rationalism that transforms itself through a radical exaggeration into its own opposite and fantasizes utopias, but finally a new evaluation of rational thought, a new belief in instinct and intuition that lays to rest every belief in discussion and would also reject the possibility that mankind could be made ready for discussion through an educational dictatorship [Erziehungsdiktatur]" (CP, 66 I 78). In this sense, Schmitt places Bolshevik action in the anarcho-syndicalist tradition, which in his mind tends to look away from science and toward art as methodological grid for understanding social existence and social action and whose legacy extends from Proudhon and Bakunin (through Bergson) to Sorel. 11 There are two things to be said here. (1) Schmitt follows a course of analysis that must reduce the basis of revolutionary action to an irrational principle; this is a dead-end point, in the sense that it is the only possible outcome-an evolutionary endpoint-drawn from his analysis of dialectical thought. (2) By mere logical consequence, Schmitt must begin his discussion of Sorel's mythological theory by confining myth to irrationalism. To do this, he reduces the rich conceptualization of Sorel's notion of myth entirely to the Bergsonian category of intuitionwhich is itself problematic, since Bergson's intuition is not at all irrational-meanwhile ignoring the long, albeit peculiar, trajectory of the notion of intuition in Western rationalist philosophy, including, not least, its importance in Kant. Perhaps the most interesting and revealing aspect of Schmitt's argument regarding the legacy of Sorel occurs in the course of his juxtaposition of Proudhon with Donoso Cortes, whom he proclaims to be Sorel's precursor from the other side of the political divide. It is particularly revealing insofar as Schmitt considers the passion of Donoso Cortes against socialism to reside in the belief that socialism is the greatest enemy, "something enormous, greater than liberal moderation, because it went back to ultimate problems and gave a decisive answer to radical questions-because it had a theology" (CP, 70 I 82, my emphasis). No doubt, Schmitt absorbed both the logic and the passion of this position at the core of his political thinking, which is why, as I suggested at the

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outset, Marxism is his real enemy and the polemics against Marxism is a tlzeologicallife-and-death matter. This is why Sorel is such a formidable enemy and simultaneously why he is treated with such ambivalence: because at the origin of Sorel's privilege of praxis resides, not intellectual clarity, but creative/ destructive passion. To consider this passion religious, however, not to mention theological, is profoundly erroneous. 12 Following Donoso Cortes's perception that syndicalist action is based not on "the dialectically construed tensions of Hegelian Marxism" but on "the immediate intuitive contradiction of mythic images" (CP, 70 I 82), Schmitt proclaims that Sorel's martial elan, as he calls it, has nothing to do with a militarism of the Spirit. Schmitt reads correctly Sorel's hatred of all intellectualism, centralization, and uniformity, and he understands fully that Sorel's sense of creative/ destructive force, always plural and anonymous, strikes against the rationalism and monism that leads to the educational dictatorship of a dogmatic Hegelian Marxism. The most creative gesture of proletarian force, Schmitt argues, is to usher violence into the place of power, which is to say, to institute an entirely new means of struggle, to refuse the means of the parliamentary game, which is bound to paralyze all proletarian action. Facing the formidable opposition of Sorel, Schmitt takes up two points of critique. The first is of a practical nature and more or less suggests that the irrationalist insurrectionary tactics of anarcho-syndicalism can never constitute an affirmative politics (as we would say in today's terms) because at some point anarcho-syndicalism's political terms of struggle would inevitably have to confront the economic sphere. This would lead by definition to a certain bourgeois domestication of principles-to a domestic order of rule in the literal sense of oikonomia (CP, 73 I 86). Schmitt fortifies this standpoint by pointing to the bourgeoisie as a social-historical category restricted to the West, which explains for him why Bolshevik action in Russia was successful. The anomaly of the Russian revolution in terms of political economy poses a notorious problem for Marxist circles. Schmitt explains the event as evidence that Bolshevik action has nothing to do with the Marxist cultural tradition: it signifies an explicitly anti-Western act, the

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proletarianization of a society without a capitalist bourgeoisie-in effect, a nationalization of society (the term here must resound both literally and in its usual economic terms). Building on Sorel's own assessment, 13 Schmitt argues that, in making Russia Muscovite again, the Bolsheviks proved that nationalism was stronger than the myth of the class struggle (CP, 75 I 88). This historically correct observation becomes the basis for another, rather typical Schmittian formalism. It leads to the questionable conclusion that the strongest myth in the modern world is nationalism and to the embarrassing position of attributing a Machiavellian political realism to Mussolini, whom Schmitt then quotes as a visionary brave enough to proclaim socialism an inferior mythology. This trajectory precludes Schmitt's real engagement with two essential elements in Sorel which, to my mind, form the crux of his contribution to political theory: the significance of the general strike as historical form (as pure praxis) and the nature of myth as a social-imaginary element. The two are intertwined. Sorel conceives the general strike as the exemplary instance of violence that undoes the violent logic of the State precisely because it is propelled by the catalytic power of mythic imagination. He sees the general strike as a figure whose importance lies more in its potentiality and less in its eventuality, since even in the strictest historical terms the general strike rarely occupies the status of event. The general strike, Sorel argues, exists in the domain of myth, and precisely this insight makes Sorel's contribution invaluable. He claims from the very beginning that "proletarian violence changes the aspect of all the conflicts in which it intervenes." 14 Proletarian violence is not of the same epistemic order as bourgeois political violence because it exposes the so-called primordial rights of man as being a historical construct; it demonstrates that the rights of man possess class content. 15 The general strike promises nothing short of paralyzing society. It disregards bourgeois society's foundational right: the free right to produce, to develop economically without obstacle. The catastrophic promise of the general strike thus operates at the level of social-imaginary signification with a sense of certainty irreducible to its parts, impervious to analytic technique: such is the intuitive knowledge of myth. Anticipating the usual objections, Sorel quickly clarifies that myths are neither illusions nor facts (RV, 23 I 33). Myths are incommensurable

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to facts because they may exceed facts, much as revolutionary desire (or utopian vision) can never be exhausted in the fact I event of revolution. Yet myths are also not illusions because myths are demonstrable historical forces: imagined alterities of society that make historical action possible.16 The main characteristic of myth, according to Sorel, is infinity, which is also said to include a sense of indefiniteness. Socialism, as theory only, is ultimately reducible to its words, indeed to its word (of promise, of definition, etc.). But praxis, exemplified for the anarchosyndicalist Sorel by the act of the general strike, "puts forward no definite project of future social organization" (RV, 27 I 39), and is thus irreducible: indefinite and infinite both because it is irreducible to its parts (that is, singular) but also because it is interminably reproducible each time anew. 17 What enables Sorel to make this argument is Bergson's philosophy of singularity within duration, whereby a past moment in one's life, unrepeatable though it is, may be reinserted in the historical flow as the basis for a present moment of decision. Sorel believes that society is capable of such catalytic moments whereby, in a fashion reminiscent of Vico's ricorso (or, in another register, Holderlin's Umkehr), an imagined alterity is achieved by invoking the experience of the past, not in order to repeat it, but in order to peel off the accumulated inertia of culture on the way to a rejuvenated history. Such recursive moments have nothing instrumental about them. The general strike exemplifies a moment of imagined alterity, whether it will actually succeed or not. In the same way that its instrumental failure (the fact that it won't lead to a takeover of power) does not preclude its reoccurrence with an equally radical transformative potential each time, its actuality is always singular and exhausted in its own historical moment. 18 There is in this respect "a heterogeneity between the ends in view and the ends actually realized" (RV, 135 l179), which is Sorel's way of describing the relation between theory and praxis. It is praxis, more so than theory, that "takes place" in the domain of myth, and it is the very lack of speculation that praxis holds over theory-an irrevocable present whose potential future as analytical plan is irrelevant-that registers the mythic nature of proletarian violence. The general strike is "the myth in which Socialism is wholly comprised, an organization of im-

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ages capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the diverse manifestations of war against modern society.... We thus obtain that intuition of Socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clarity-and we obtain it as a whole, perceived instantaneously" (RV, 137 I 182). This instantaneous understanding becomes possible because the general strike is an act whose violence exceeds it. As the act is exhausted in a theater of power in which order (of one kind or another) always wins, proletarian violence generates the sort of knowledge about the contention of social identities that no power can liquefy. In Sorel's hands, this dynamic becomes a rare theorization of ideological force in which the "distortion" of reality is hardly the conduit of self-alienation but is instead the very means that keeps reality open to self-alteration. 19 Sorel is right to point out that the mythic dimension of proletarian violence has nothing to do with utopian yearning. In the sense that myth is an irreducible expression of "collective" conviction (not attained by rational analysis but intuited as integral experience), it is a radical language of the moment which does not bear dissection and classification at the level of historical description. The social-imaginary of the general strike is by definition catalytic of social order; its very conceptualization enacts an abolition of that order. By contrast, utopia is a projected model which invites discussion "like any other social institution." Utopias, according to Sorel, are concrete projections, which are therefore definite and linked to the present by analogy. Myths are not projections. They are always present and yet, insofar as they don't belong to the order of fact, they are indefinite and indeterminate, hence beyond analogy. The radical present of the general strike enacts a "framing of a future in some indeterminate time" (RV 133 I 177), but it is not utopian because it lacks teleology, whether conceptual or actual. Sorel's terms suggest that violence performs myth, not the reverse. And proletarian violence is a sort of antinomic condition to the paranomia of bourgeois law. Schmitt either does not see or does not want to confront this argument on its terms. This is quite unlike him, for he consciously cultivated the dismantling of his enemy by appropriating the logic of enemy terms. Not confident that I can subject Schmitt to a phenomenological

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psychoanalysis on this issue, I would nonetheless underline, as point of departure for an interpretation, his warning at the conclusion of his argument on Sorel: "Of course, the abstract danger this kind of irrationalism poses is great. The last remnants of solidarity and a feeling of belonging together will be destroyed in the pluralism of an unforeseeable number of myths. For political theology this is polytheism, just as every myth is polytheistic" (CP 76 I 89, my emphasis). This astute recognition of the essentially polytheistic imaginary of myth is tantamount to a confession: political theology cannot tolerate the plural indeterminacy of myth, because political theology is possible only within the boundaries of a monotheistic imagination. The immediate and obvious implication is that the terrain of the mythical is outside the boundaries of political theology and that the two domains are essentially incompatible. The instance of Schmitt's late critique of Hans Blumenberg (as an afterword to Political Theology II) suggests, if nothing else, that Schmitt was perfectly conscious of this incompatibility and that he was also committed to the theological arche of his political thinking throughout his life. Schmitt's reply to Blumenberg's arguments about legitimation and secularization is formed according to his early thesis on the crypto-metaphysics of secularization, which delineated once and for all the terrain of "political theology" as a project. Thus, Schmitt will impute to Blumenberg a forced de-theologizing that continues to occlude the reality of secular metaphysics, while Blumenberg will counter that secular thought merely reappropriates from the language of theology its suppressed and silenced mythical elements. 20 The two positions are each other's negation; their incompatibility parallels the incompatibility between myth and political theology, which is hardly surprising, given that Blumenberg's entire project is a meditation on mythical thinking. Schmitt's notorious and unwavering vigilance against all developments in actual and theoretical politics that pose a challenge to his own positions made it inevitable that Blumenberg would command his attention late in his life. This isn't merely a matter of encountering an adversary on the same terrain (secularization, legitimacy, etc.) but, more important, counteracting a foe because he conceptualizes this terrain in mythical terms. In this respect, Blumenberg's position almost becomes a

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late version of Sorel's, with the significant exception that it lacks the political expediency which characterized Sorel's forceful challenge to Hegelian Marxism and therefore turned him from foe to adversary with a distinctive (even if repressed) mark of ambivalence. Still, in the same way that Schmitt was deeply troubled by Sorel's insurrectionary epistemology in the Weimar years, he is disturbed by Blumenberg's challenge to his secularization thesis in the 1970s. The contested ground is formed when myth upturns the basic political-theological terms. Judging from the conclusion of the argument on Sorel, which I cited above, Schmitt had been aware of myth's epistemological disruption of his project's foundations since the early 1920s. Attempting to diffuse the threat by raising oversimplified charges of irrationalism, Schmitt never takes up the crux of the challenge, which he recognizes explicitly as the threat of "polytheism." Blumenberg renews and actually raises the stakes of this challenge because he too founds a project on dismantling the inherited assumptions of the Enlightenment's purge of "other-worldly" categories in history. Whereas Schmitt's denuding of Enlightenment authority desires a reconstitution of theological categories for historical thinking, Blumenberg disputes the notion that the Enlightenment signifies modernity's moment of transcending or obliterating myth and proceeds to recuperate the presence of myth within Enlightenment thought itself. In other words, Blumenberg's seminal Work on Myth is a continuation of the Dialectic of Enlightenment project-a dialectical continuation, in which Enlightenment is rescued by means of myth. This isn't as far-fetched as it seems, considering that Horkheimer and Adorno's project essentially consists in a philosophical outwitting of myth through a specific exercise of Enlightenment thought that would be conscious and critical of its own mythological propensities. 21 One doesn't need to consider the matter from this standpoint, however, in order to realize that a chasm separates Schmitt's and Blumenberg's critiques of Enlightenment and secularization. Schmitt's answer to his correct reading of the metaphysics of secularization is the famous thesis in Political Theology according to which the exception that guarantees sovereignty is, in the language of jurisprudence, analogous to the miracle in theology. In the last instance, this analogical gesture is ac-

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tually tautological because it subscribes to an explicit metaphysics; it de-secularizes a secularism that has been discovered to be metaphysical in essence, after all. Blumenberg, by contrast, counters the metaphysics of secularism with a real historical alternative. His concern with myth goes beyond the standard notion of myth as narrative of origin (the arch-tales of the world). He investigates myth as present-time logic, as history's scientia in the strict sense: a mode of knowledge that commands a generative domain of social-symbolic forms autonomous from the generative logic of science or reason-which is why Schmitt's charge of Blumenberg's scientism is at the very least myopic. For our limited purposes here, it suffices to note that Blumenberg understands myth to be a mode of knowledge that counters the "absolutism of reality" and the intrinsic terror this entails by processing and fashioning reality through imaginative invention. In psychoanalytic terms, this understanding of mythical thinking would be tantamount to the work of sublimation: the intervention into and appropriation of reality by society's psychic forces, by means of its radical imagination. 22 Mythic thought, in this respect, is irreducibly historical; it cannot precede a society's imaginary. 23 When Schmitt speaks from the standpoint of political theology, this understanding of myth is an anathema. As he consistently argues, starting with Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923), it is tantamount to the work of the Antichrist. Since he configures "mythical thinking" as an irrationalist image projection that occasionally serves to consolidate the social body, as in the case of nationalist myth (the exemplar being Mussolini's fascism), Schmitt is bound to see myth as an element that surpasses the historical, whether as arche or as telos. A most intriguing deviation from this consistent schema is a brief foray into literary criticism, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Rupture of Time in the Theater (1956), wherein a discussion of history's relation to tragedy yields some revealing conclusions about myth as historical force. This small text may be considered Schmitt's deferred response to Walter Benjamin's Trauerspiel thesis, which was itself partially indebted to the methodological avenues opened by Political Theology, according to Benjamin's explicit tribute to Schmitt in a letter that has become notorious. 24 Though I can only treat this text in passing, I believe that it deserves to shake its minor status

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in Schmitt studies, not merely for its intriguing views on the nature of tragedy but for the way in which Schmitt addresses the issue of history (and myth's implication with history) by means of a theory of tragedy which, to my mind, challenges his own "political-theological" categories. 25 In his usual way, Schmitt conducts his fleeting observations on tragedy via an underlying critique of the tradition of German literary criticism, which has operated-with the Romantics always at the helm-by privileging the lyric subject over the dramatic. Schmitt reads the prominence of poetry in German literary thought as both cause and effect of the propensity (since Goethe) toward aesthetic autonomy and the creative genius. His argument is based on an exemplary historicalsociological account of the development of German national culture in an essentially State-less transition from baroque feudal order to nineteenth-century capitalism, a point he had already developed comparatively in his essay "The Formation of the French Spirit by Jurists" (1942). 26 Very schematically, the point of comparison is not only the French model-where the privilege of the dramatic arts is exemplified by strong State institution and the mutation of courtly literature into the seventeenth-century court Classicism of Racine or Corneille-but, more important, the English model, whose own strong Trauerspiel tradition is able to mutate, unlike Germany's, into the bona fide tragic world of Shakespeare. Schmitt argues that in Elizabethan England there is as yet no institutionalized theatricality; society is internally, as it were, in a theatrical condition. Shakespeare's emergence and eventual establishment of the Globe Theater chronicles the externalization of social theatricality into artistic form, a form that actualizes social-historical demands in a distinct, performative moment of culture. Shakespeare's success, according to Schmitt, is due not to his inventive genius but to his extraordinary alertness to the genie of a reality that remains excessively performative outside the structural limitations of a centralized cultural order: "The surplus value [of tragedy] lies within the objective reality of tragedy itself happening, in the enigmatic involvement and entanglement of indisputably real people in the unpredictable course of indisputably real events." 27 Shakespeare may be said to generate culture, not

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insofar as he invents a new cultural practice, but insofar as he realizes on the stage society's own mythological performativity. The vanguard nature of Hamlet, with its circuitous, ambivalent, self-reflexive, and even convoluted structures, is for Schmitt an exemplary instance of the mythification of a precise social-historical moment. It is a case where "the play on stage could appear without artificiality as theater within theater, as a living play within the immediately present play of real life" (HH, 43), instituting a doubling effect which is set up for further externalization within its own domain in a kind of mise en abfme exemplified by the famous play-within-a-play section in Hamlet. Here, Schmitt constructs an insightful argument: "The play within a play in Act III of Hamlet not only is no look behind the scenes, but is the play proper repeated before the curtains. This presupposes a realistic core of the most intense present-ness and actuality.... Only a strong core of reality [Aktualitiitskern] could stand up to the double exposure of the stage upon the stage" (HH, 45). In other words, because reality itself has not yet sacrificed its spontaneous theatricality to a cultural institution presided over by the (theatrical) order of the State, the boundaries between it and the theater are still open and reality thus leans on the very production of the play, conferring upon it not merely retrospective interpretive significance but real-time productive significance. It is reality, not dramatic invention, that brings about the grand innovation Schmitt calls "the Hamletization of the hero," a modern mythifying gesture that enforces ambivalence and indecision upon the classic realm of heroic action in drama. This gesture does not belong to Shakespeare; it belongs to history. More precisely, it belongs to Shakespeare's attunement to history's performance, which opens a tear in the play's unity so that historical space-time may flow through it, so that drama on stage and history's dromenon (which at this very moment becomes an event as theater) can be performatively interwoven. Though this gesture may seem to disrupt the "classical" integrity of the play as pure artistic entity, nonetheless it enables the transformation of the figure of Hamlet from dramatic persona to myth (and concurrently, Schmitt argues, the play Hamlet from Trauerspiel to tragedy). This moment of mythification means nothing outside a performative actualization of a specific social-historical reality-and herein lies the

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