Engaging Agnes Heller: A Critical Companion 9781461633341, 9780739122563

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Engaging Agnes Heller

Engaging Agnes Heller A Critical Companion

EDITED BY KATIE TEREZAKIS

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200 Lanham, MD 20706 Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Engaging Agnes Heller: a critical companion I [edited by) Katie Terezakis. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2256-3 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-I 0: 0-7391-2256-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2257-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7391-2257-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3490-0 (electronic) ISBN-10: 0-7391-3490-6 (electronic) 1. Heller, Agnes. 2. Sociology-Philosophy. 3. Philosophy, Hungarian-20th century. I. Terezakis, Katie, 1972B4815.H454E543 2009 199'.439--dc22 2008046468

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Engaging Agnes Heller: A Critical Companion Table of Contents

Editor's Introduction

Katie Terezakis

1

Chapter 1. Laudatio for Agnes Heller

Yirrniyahu Yovel

11

Bryan S. Turner

23

Peter Beilharz

37

Simon Tormey

45

Anthony Kammas

63

Kira Brunner Don

79

Richard J. Bernstein

87

Janos Boros

101

Chapter 2. Marxism and Exile: Reflections On Intellectual Migration Chapter 3. Agnes Heller's Theory of Modernity Chapter4. Why Does Agnes Heller Matter? Political Action, Social Change and Radical Politics in the Twenty-First Century Chapter 5. The Power of Radical Needs Chapter 6. Remembrance of Things Future: From Totalitarianism to Fundamentalism Chapter 7. Existential Choice: Heller's Either/Or Chapter 8. Narrative Philosophy: An Essay on Agnes Heller

v

Chapter9. To Agnes Heller: An Open Letter on Philosophy and the Real Problem of Woman

Katie Terezakis

123

Amos Friedland

141

Preben Kaarsholm

159

Dmitri Nikulin

167

Horst Hutter

193

Chapter 14. From Contingency to Destiny: On Heller's Existential Ethics

John Grumley

223

Chapter 15. Reflections on the Essays Addressed to My Work

Agnes Heller

235

Appendix "Von der Armut am Geiste": A Dialogue by the Young Lukacs

Agnes Heller

253

Chapter 10. Loving Fate Chapter 11. Agnes Heller as Autobiographer: History and a Myriad of Contexts Chapter 12. The Comedy of Philosophy Chapter 13. Nietzsche's Thumotic Politics: A Programmatic Statement with an Eye on Agnes Heller

Further Reading

263

Index

265

Contributors

271

vi

Editor's Introduction Katie Terezakis Agnes Heller's work has been described as a ''true product of the twentieth century," a "defense of liberal modernity," "a Lebensphilosophie"; as "Marxist," ''post-Mandan," "existentialist" and "postmodern," to name a few. Where each of these abbreviations fails is not in its expression of a vital aspect of Heller's thinking, but in supposing that that thinking might be best encapsulated with reference to any one philosophical epoch, methodological form or dominating ideal. Heller has written that the key question animating her work is "good people exist; how are they possible?"-appropriating Gyorgy Lukacs' transcendental approach in the Heidelberg Aesthetics ("Works of art exist; how are they possible?"). In several works and interviews, she has also made plain that the three events that most powerfully shaped her life and thought were the Holocaust, her encounter with Lukacs and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In a backwards glance that spans from her early works to her current writings-for having begun in the middle of the twentieth century, Heller has never ceased to write-it is clear that a consistent concern with human emancipation and flourishing runs through them all, as does the distinct character of her authorial voice. It is in and through that concentrated interest and an inexhaustible willingness to pursue it that Heller continues to produce a body of work that resists attempts at summary and compartmentalization. One could easily mistake the nature of her rejection of forms of critical theory if one did not pay equal attention to her contextualization and critique of the "bourgeois attitude," for example, in A Theory of Feelings, or her close examination of the potential held in the "prose of everyday existence" in Everyday Life. One might misjudge as amenable to conservative politics Heller's recent polemics against terrorism and ''totalitarianism in all its guises," were one not reading them alongside her close examinations of the political and procedural conditions of personal and political freedom, for example in Beyond Justice, Can Modernity Survive? and Dictatorship Over Needs. Likewise, one might be confounded by Heller's various studies of seemingly discrete themes and thinkers, from the Biblical Genesis to Shakespeare to theories of beauty and of comedy, if one did not have the opportunity to note the inherent associations, in Heller's thinking, between aesthetics, politics and ethics, or her recognition of the consequence of formanother understanding she appropriates and adjusts from Lukacs-in both the production and examination of works.

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The claim that Heller's work resists meaningful synopsis belongs to the argument that for all its elements, Heller's thinking is internally consistent in its motivation and largely methodologically consistent in its approach. Conceptually speaking, there is no real break between her "Marxist" period and her most recent examinations of the conditions of integrated, creative individuality. And though the style of earlier works, such as Renaissance Man, is widely divergent from that of later works, such as An Ethics of Personality, in both cases the careful examination of human self-understanding develops from philosophical and literary accounts and ideals, through the relevant anthropological considerations, through the social and ethical projects in which self-understanding is engaged and extended. Albeit in diverse styles, Heller's unfailing methodological approach involves the designation and analysis of each element and process entailed in the creation or prolongation of the particular phenomenon or system of meaning at hand; she follows these both for individuals and for groups; and she tracks the internal connections and external constraints on the elements under consideration rather than attempting to finesse a unified whole for analysis. For example, in Radical Philosophy, she meticulously details the sorts of needs philosophy addresses and explains just how it is appropriated to do so, freely pulling examples for orientation from philosophy and literature. She then concentrates on each form philosophy can take in everyday experience and communication, in terms of its personal, interpersonal and political manifestations, again with generally recognizable examples where possible. With this groundwork in place, she turns to reified needs and relations of social domination, showing how these are taken up by radical philosophy-the philosophy that speaks directly to real needs-in particular. As the nature of her critique and deployment of radical philosophy becomes clearer, we find that the work is both a thorough examination of the forms of radical philosophy, and a paradigm case of radical philosophy. The work employs the methods of radical philosophy insofar as we appropriate it in our own attempts at radical philosophy-which, Heller makes clear, means actively participating in value discussions and actually working to ensure that every rational being can participate in determining human values. This necessarily entails the creation and maintenance of social relations that are not based on subordination and superordination; the need for radical philosophy does not cease until philosophical value discussions can be "generalized" or participated in universally, which means that while the book gives a solid account of the conditions for radical philosophy, radical philosophy also remains elsewhere; it must yet be enlisted. This same methodological approach is why, for example, in presenting A Theory of Modernity, one narrative voice can guide the reader from the ''philosophical presuppositions" of "modernity from a postmodern perspective" all the way to the closing arguments about how modernity can, and ought to, do justice to the experience of contingency and self-choice-whereas in pursuing the entailments and consequences of contingency and self-choice in An Ethics of Personality, existential and normative claims are made only through the

Editor's Introduction

3

characters Heller devises to personify them, none of whom may be finally subjugated to or assimilated into another existential and nonnative possibility/personality. Heller's consistency, then, is not a matter of topics or of the ready application of an easily recognizable formula, but is marked by the insistent pursuit of each aspect of the theme at hand, the commitment to shape the analytic framework and the style of analysis in a way that is fitting to its theme, and to the balanced pursuit of the personal as well as the social aspects of a given theme. Moreover, at every turn, Heller will rise against those internal or external constraints that she takes to be undermining of authentic-understood in the full existential sense--development. At every point in which empirical facts have been ascertained, the necessary assumptions openly admitted, and the just-stated fonn of analysis pursued, Heller will make a direct normative appeal: she will point us toward a particular kind of goodness, namely, she will ask us to help ourselves and to help others. Knowing what this will entail, in terms of selfunderstanding and the actual requirements and possibilities of the given situation, tends to be the stuff of particular works and thus depends upon their particular insights; but on the whole, Heller's work ends in encouragement and it is the encouragement to become engaged in the cause of humankind. This engagement necessarily involves self-choice, self-creation, and the involved, reflective and active project of "becoming who one is." Just as categorically, it involves working to allow and promote that same project for others. So said, Heller's encouragement is simple. Yet in order to encourage us meaningfully, the full force of her polemics against totalitarian ideologies is necessary; the full weight of her affirmation of contingency is requisite; the full intensity of her analysis of false-consciousness, crucial. Likewise, in Heller's fascination with the philosophical accomplishment recorded in Scripture, in her regard for Shakespeare's ability to portray and characterize subtle achievements of individuality and human association, in her willingness to demarcate beauty and kitsch, and in her vindication of the philosophical heart of comedy-HeBer pursues and encourages the discrete achievements of human self-understanding and self-creation; she looks closely at what we think and make when we work on our pain and the pain of others, and at what shape our joy can take. Many of the authors gathered in this collection interpret not only Heller's work, but comment on her life and her personality. It is as if people cannot help but remark on her singularity and vivacity, as well as on the historical details of her biography, precisely in order to record their theoretical positions on her thinking. Perhaps it is true that all philosophy is in some sense autobiography, or more specifically, that Heller has very much lived her philosophy, including when she has had to pay for it with political persecution, social ostracism and the resultant need to emigrate from her native Hungary. But it is also true that Heller's way of being in the world and of being with others is utterly in harmony with her approach to philosophy, and this is remarkable. For who has not had occasion to notice a disparity between some thinker's avowed ideals, political or otherwise, and his other personal practices? In Heller's case, enthusiasm for the

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shared pursuit of philosophy, as the passion of individuals, dominates every conversation. And though this may come through in her writing, those who know Heller know that her genuine interest is in people pursuing their genuine interests. Heller has no concern for shows of agreement with her own position and no patience for sycophancy; she thrives on agon and stages the pleasure a philosopher can take in vigorous argument without a trace of pettiness or defensiveness; and she cheers on all who do the same, especially when they contest her own claims. Perhaps this is why Heller cannot readily be identified with a particular type of philosophy, as she is so unreservedly herself, and is herself a philosopher. It is possibly only from the perspective that acknowledges this singular life that Heller's most recent activities make sense: traveling widely at the invitation of student groups struggling to articulate an emancipatory political position, for example in Iran, Latin America and Europe, while entering into volatile debates about American foreign and domestic policy, and simultaneously continuing to pursue the hermeneutic projects she finds most worthwhile, regardless of dominant trends in contemporary philosophy. In the hopes of presenting something of Heller's singular approach for this volume and of charting its consequence for different modes of thought, authors were invited to write essays on Heller's work with no recommendations or constrictions on the topic. The contributors are philosophers, political scientists and sociologists, as well as former students of Heller who have gone on to law and to journalism. Their chosen topics, ranging from the sociology of knowledge to the viability of Heller's ethics to Heller's relevance for contemporary political activism, should convey some of the breadth of her undertaking. As I mentioned, a number of these essays return to the facts of Heller's biography, so my discussion of it here will be minimal. The first contribution, a Laudatio for Agnes Heller originally delivered by Yirmiyahu Yovel to mark Heller's receipt of the Hermann-Cohen-Medal for Jewish Culture-Philosophy in 2006, powerfully recounts the key moments of Heller's life and thought in more detail. I cannot conceive of a better written "introduction" to Heller's life and thought. Preben Kaarsholm also specifies how Heller's "autobiography" and unique history relate to her contributions to sociology and philosophy, and Kira Brunner Don reveals how especially Heller's early experiences with totalitarianism continue to inspire her politics. The task of describing the correspondence of Heller's life and thought is taken up by these authors.

Some Facts of Heller's Life Heller was born in 1929 in Budapest, Hungary, to Pal Heller, who was trained as a lawyer, and Angyalka Heller, nee Ligeti, a homemaker. Pal's mother, Sophie Meller, was a well-known and much adored teacher; she is the model for the wise grandmother in Heller's own An Ethics of Personality.

Editor's Introduction

5

Heller remembers studying and debating the merits of works of literature with her father; their relationship seems to have been exceptionally close, with Pal often at home caring for his young daughter. As Jews, the Hellers were in danger well before the deportation of Hungary's Jewish community began. Pal used his legal background to help a number of others escape from Nazi Europe. He was seized and deported and died in Auschwitz in 1945, just as the Nazis were defeated. Again, Heller's physical and emotional survival after her father's deportation and during the Nazi reign is addressed in several of the essays collected here. In 1947, Heller began her university studies, joined the Communist Party and first heard Lukacs lecture, an event quickly followed by her decision to study philosophy and to study with Lukacs. By 1949, Heller was expelled from the Communist Party; her membership was later restored, and then she was rejected by the party again in 1958, for refusing to condemn Lukacs as an enemy of the Marxist state. She was also dismissed from the university, where she had taught philosophy since 1955. By 1963, she was recognized as a key figure of the "Budapest School," first formed by Lukacs to pursue Marxist critique particularly in light of the repressive forces of actually existing socialism, and was reinstated to a post at the university in Budapest. While still a university student, Heller married Istvan Hermann and had a daughter, Zsuzsa. The marriage ended in divorce. Heller married Ferenc Feher, also a student of Lukacs and a member of the Budapest School, in 1963, and they had a son, Gyuri, even as their intellectual interests were developing from the "Marxist Renaissance" they helped to inaugurate, to the time of Heller's second expulsion from the university and from political life, this time as a result of her open criticism of Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968. Following this expulsion, Heller was banned from university teaching and from publishing. After working as a grade-school teacher and living as a dissident for years, Heller and other members of the Budapest School were invited to take up posts at LaTrobe University in 1977. Though Heller was at first separated from her daughter, who stayed behind in Hungary to marry, she threw herself into her new working environment, writing and publishing prolifically between 1978 and 1986, traveling widely, and firmly establishing her international reputation. In 1986, she and Feher took up invitations to join the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York, where Heller still holds the post of Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy. Feher died in 1994. Heller currently splits the year between the New School and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where she has again held a post since the political changes in Hungary in 1989. She won the Lessing Prize for Philosophical Activity in 1981, the Szechenyi National Prize in Hungary in 1995, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Philosophy in 1995 and the Sonning Prize in 2006.

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Editor's Introduction

Engaging Heller: The Essays In addition to the contributions already mentioned, the essays collected here take up diverse aspects of Heller's thought, both examining it and attempting to build upon it. Though the distinctiveness of each essay renders incongruous the idea of organizing this collection with closed topical sets, several key themes continue to emerge among the essays. I have already mentioned the theme of Heller's lived experience examined in several essays. Janos Boros weaves this theme, together with a survey of current trends in philosophy and an analysis of Heller's most recent books (so far published only in Hungarian), into a compelling argument that Heller's work establishes a new genre in philosophy, which he identifies as narrative philosophy. Boros gives good reasons to believe that Heller's work is constitutive of the genre of narrative philosophy, providing invaluable English translations for additional support. Insofar as his argument is ultimately convincing, he provides a powerful and very novel framework for our encounter with Heller's writing. Boros's take on how to understand Heller's interpretations of Scripture and religion in general, as well as her utilization of Nietzsche, is poles apart from the reading offered in Horst Hutter's essay. In it, Hutter alternately criticizes and plays off of Heller's hermeneutic and political positions in support of his own attempt to retrieve and defend "thumotic politics," as explored by Plato and by Nietzsche. Even more explicitly political themes are worked through in the essays of Peter Beilharz, Bryan S. Turner and Simon Tormey. Together, these essays provide a kind of sociology of political action, with Beilharz examining the consequence of Heller's understanding of modernity as encompassing, potentially, totalitarianism, liberalism and modem democracy; Turner weighing up how sociological research, including Heller's, flourishes (only) during periods of rapid social change; and Tormey making a forceful argument that even while Heller is an inspired critic of totalitarianism (and a defender of liberal democracy), today's liberal democracies share more in common with totalitarianism than Heller admits. On the one hand, Tormey asks that we return, contra Heller's defense of liberal democracy and by implication liberal capitalism as developed in Beyond Justice, to Heller's earlier skepticism about the potential for a sustained politics of liberation within those modem forms. He argues that this is particularly crucial in light of globalization and our increasingly devastated environment and declining security on a global scale. On the other hand, however, Tormey also criticizes his own earlier critique of Heller, now recognizing that it is Heller's focus on the centrality of the individual for movements of social change, as well as Heller's investigation of modernity as allowing for the proliferation of subject positions, that best explains our most promising contemporary forms of dissent and emancipatory social movements.

Editor's Introduction

7

Not unrelated to these political concerns, but concentrated upon their significance in the lives and self-understandings of individuals, both Anthony Kammas's essay, and my own "open letter" to Heller take up the issues of dependencies, interdependencies and more specifically, in Kammas's essay, of radical needs. Kammas argues that while radical needs, as Heller understands them, may appear in a paradoxical form, they also create the conditions of possibility for freely undertaken, unalientaed self-understandings and social relationships, without which a vibrant and integrated political life is impossible. Likewise, my open letter takes seriously Heller's profound and unswerving defense of emancipatory desire and freedom, and asks how it relates to her apparent rejection of feminist philosophy in general, and her concern with what she has called "sexual dependency" in particular. Another group of essays, though they share in common several of the above-mentioned subjects, converge around questions about Heller's existentialism, or more specifically about her existential and ethical insistence on "self-choice." One might say that each of these essays asks Heller to pay heed to the second half of Marx's claim that, to paraphrase, people create their own worlds, but never under the conditions of their choosing. Richard J. Bernstein questions the application of the Hellerian distinction between the categories of difference and universality, and finds that they do not accomplish as much, theoretically or practically, as good old Aristotelian habit and education, nor do they take into full consideration the contingencies of moral luck. Nevertheless, Bernstein argues that even if Heller's notion of self-choice under the categories of difference or universality will not apply to everyone, her vigorous defense of individual subjectivity (especially in the face of certain postmodern discourses) and her relentless insistence on the modem experience of contingency, mark the genuine means of dealing with fundamental choices, coping with external conditions, and undertaking our real responsibilities. John Grumley's essay also probes the ethical tasks confronting the modem subject, considering Heller's "existential leap" in this regard. Grumley, too, questions the universality of self-choice, but seems to resolve (or dissolve) the tension between the categories of difference and universality, instead returning to the contingencies and constraints that might preempt such choosing. To make his case and in a manner close to Heller's own style, Grumley draws eloquent examples from the fictional characters of J.M. Coetzee and W.O. Sebald. Likewise drawing from fiction and from narrative, Amos Friedland employs Imre Kertesz, Marcel Proust and Nietzsche-thinkers he recounts encountering as Heller's student-to both affirm the Hellerian account of choice, and to deny that it must include the affirmation of life, the resolution of pain or the love of one's fate-even potentially. What Grumley calls turning "contingency into destiny," after Heller, Friedland argues may just as authentically require an unreconciling and unreconciled refusal of this fate and this life. Indeed, to affirm a no to life, Friedland maintains, may in some cases be the only authentic choice. Alone among the essays, Dmitri Nikulin's study both follows Heller's recent work on comedy and builds upon it, developing the significance of the

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Editor's Introduction

claim that comedy is through and through a philosophical genre. Nikulin details the structural features necessarily shared between comedy and philosophy, supporting his case that comedy is a rational enterprise with a wealth of examples from Aristophanes through Terence and Woody Allen, as well as arguments from Plato through Hegel and Heller. Pressing Heller's recent work, Nikulin reveals the deeply humanistic, immanent form whereby comedy, like philosophy, rationally develops a series of possibilities into a conclusion in which "the good" is validated both non-moralistically and non-theologically. Two short essays by Agnes Heller finish the collection; the first is a response to the essays collected here. The second, included as an appendix, is an essay Heller first published in 1972 (in Philosophical Forum, III: 3-4 [SpringSummer 1972], 360-370). The decision to include it, beyond the most obvious point that it is a marvelous essay otherwise as much as lost to the archives, was motivated by the lucidity with which the short essay manifests the consistency of Heller's work. It exhibits her debt to Lukacs, but just as powerfully, her ability to critically appropriate, adjudge and reject from among Lukacs' suggestions. The essay shows Heller, even before the writing of her most commanding works, generously reading, but then readily assessing and standing apart from the approach of her teacher. In a sense, it is even true that in offering this reading of Lukacs, she tells us at least as much about her own thinking, explaining how philosophy is a tacit confession and how insight into its workings is gained. Here too, we see Heller commenting on themes she will take up more rigorously later, and on several themes at issue in the essays collected here: she comments of the dialogic form, on life-castes, on the role of women, especially the woman vis-a-vis the philosopher, on the existential leap or selfchoice and precisely under the categories of difference or universality, and on the theory and development of personality. Assessing Lukacs in the early 1970s, Heller may also be read as responding implicitly to some of the queries raised both about her work and on its behalf in this collection. For Heller here acknowledges the difficulties attached to universalizing self-choice, to its epistemic verification, and to the way that it may function as the ideal of alienated life. And she comes out clearly privileging the refusal to sacrifice others, and the commitment to meet suffering with empathy and with action, over and against the severe self-choice of the dialogue's hero. As well, Heller's appreciation of Lukacs' achievement is marked by her approval of the insight he expresses, in part through writing or narration, into the correspondence between his subjective choices and his objective ideas. Lukacs not only criticizes the asceticism of his hero and himself through his female interlocutor, he also shows how the activity of philosophy transcends the ascetic "poverty of spirit" and is itself transcended in actualization. Writing, here, ·is part of that actualization, precisely insofar as it is part of the realization of the philosopher's own being. And this is the key to understanding the way that Heller has always, consistently, incorporated real moral commitments and choices, as against any "other worldly morality," slogans and expedient ideals, into actualizations of personality.

Editor's Introduction

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*** I am grateful to my colleague and friend, John T. (Jack) Sanders for first bringing his translation of Heller's Von der Annul am Geiste: A Dialogue by the Young Lukacs to my attention and for flagging its importance. I am also grateful to Jane M. Smith, his co-translator, and to Agnes Heller and the editors of Philosophical Forum for permission to reprint the essay. The idea of putting together a collection of essays on Agnes Heller formed in the beautiful and hospitable environment provided by the Ferrater Mora Chair of Contemporary Thought in Girona, Catalonia/Spain. Under the auspices of the program, Professor Josep-Maria Terricabras invited John Grumley and me to lead sessions on Agnes Heller for the June 2005 program. The enthusiasm of the Girona faculty, students and non-academic population for Heller's work convinced us that a new volume of critical essays was in order. I am thankful to the Ferrater Mora Chair and the Girona participants, as well as to John Grumley, who actively supported the project from the outset, including in helping to formulate a proposal for it and in giving the collection its name. Further, I would like to thank the contributors to this collection both for their valuable studies and for their many helpful suggestions as it developed. I was awarded a grant to support the research for this volume from the College of Liberal Arts at Rochester Institute of Technology, for which I am grateful. I am also grateful for the support and warm, always philosophically rich environment provided by my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy at RIT. I am indebted to Lawrence Torcello for carefully thinking through with me the objectives of this volume with consideration and inevitably with good sense. As well, I was especially lucky in being able to depend upon the acumen of a group of tremendous discussants and readers. In preparing my essay for this volume, Edward P. Butler first guided me through the terrain of recent feminist thinking with his customary shrewdness and openhandedness. Angelique Craney offered both unfailing encouragement and incisive, no-nonsense critique. Megan Craig provided invaluable advice, including about the reformulation of my conflicting thoughts into the more fitting letter format. I could not have wished for a more thoughtful, savvier reader than Elizabeth Mazzolini, who stepped in at the moment of kairos, both for my essay and altogether. Finally, I am grateful to Agnes Heller for all that cannot be said and more perceptibly for her support of and participation in this project.

Chapter 1.

Laudatio for Agnes Heller Yirmiyahu Yovel The following is a lightly edited version of the Laudation delivered for Agnes Heller's receipt of the Hermann-Cohen-Medal for Jewish Culture-Philosophy in 2006, from the Hermann-Cohen-Akademie fiir Religion, Wissenschaft und Kunst in Buchen/Odenwald, Germany. I am very glad and honored to deliver this Laudatio for my colleague and dear friend Agnes Heller-a colleague at the New School for Social Research in New Yorlc, where Hannah Arendt, on whom we are having this conference, also taught. Agnes is the Hannah-Arendt Professor at the New School, and I have the privilege of serving in the chair named after Arendt's close friend, the late Hans Jonas. Agnes Heller and I are friends also philosophically, because of many things we share; indeed not all the way and certainly not in detail, but at least in our fundamental approach and some basic affinities-though not all of them. As you will see, there are also important criticisms, but it is a pleasure for me to speak both about what we share and about what we don't, in addition to our friendship. I will divide my remarks into three parts: first, some general characterizations of Agnes Heller's thought and its relation to her person, then a few stations in her biographical and intellectual itinerary, followed by selected themes from her philosophy.

*** Agnes Heller is a child of the 20th century. She was touched personally by all the great events, as well as all the tragic events, of this last century. She lived them in close personal contact, both from within and from without: Nazism and Auschwitz; communism and Stalin; the modern experience of contingent existence; the collapse of historical traditions; the fall of the Soviet Empire and the wall of Berlin, which liberated her country Hungary; the ills of modernity in the West; and the transformations and vicissitudes of the modem Jewish situation. With all this she has coped both personally and philosophically through her changing thought. In fact, "both personally and philosophically," is 11

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one and the same for Agnes, for this is the way she chose herself to be, and through this-through philosophy-she came into her own. A second characteristic, outstanding and very clear to whoever knows her, is her independent mind, her independent thinking. This stands out in her person and in her itinerary. Kant's motto sapere aude, "dare to know," is realized in Agnes Heller, not as a simplistic slogan, nor as something very sunny, but with all the conflicts and pains that are involved in maturing philosophically and in asserting one's own personal thought. Agnes Heller's independent thinking has done quite a few remarkable things for her in her own life. The ftrst is that it actually saved her life during the Nazi period; but I will give the details when I get to the second part. Secondly, it created her dissidence during the communist Hungarian period, a dissidence visa-vis two immense powers: one was the charismatic and intellectual power of her teacher Georg Lukacs, who was not an easy person to cope with; and the second was, of course, the bureaucratic and oppressive power of the communist state. Her independence of mind, thirdly, generated the personalistic ethic for which she is best known, an ethic that is anchored in the individual, in his or her personality and in his or her existential choice. And fmally, her independence of mind also saves her from any conformism, especially in the United States, where she works, and where she constantly rebels against the limitations on free speech in the American Academy-a phenomenon that we know to exist. Her personal style, which is sharp, open and honest, lacks any calculations or holding-back. A further characteristic of Heller's thought is that she philosophizes within life and within the world, in relation to time, to place, to the Zeitgeist. This is not an abstract thought about the world from outside of it, but from within it. She copes with Marxism, with Western individualism, with the crisis of modernity, with her own position as a woman, as a Jew, and she posits her own position within all those contexts. A further trait is that her thought is characterized by something I would call unlikely combinations, for instance: Kierkegaard and Kant put together, or leading one to the other, existential ethics and universal morality, amor fati and love for the other; individuality but not individualism; a sense of contingency and the sense of destiny. Personally, Agnes Heller is characterized by incessant creativity. She is very proliftc, she brings life and fermentation to every discussion, and forces people to think and to respond, and, as I said before, she is frank and speaks her mind without holding-back. Moreover, she has a rare capacity for friendship; and, in fact, friendship is an important notion in her work. And, ftnally, she manifests agelessly a wealth of energy that leaves younger men astounded.

Laudatio for Agnes Heller

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Stations in Heller's Itinerary Agnes Heller was born in Budapest in 1929 to a Jewish home of the middleclass. When she was fifteen, the deportation of the Budapest Jews to Auschwitz started. The Jews were called by the Jewish Committee, who did not know what was going on and what it meant to board the trains. The 15-year-old Agnes Heller refused to board the train. But unlike another friend of mine, Professor George Klein, later a leading scientist and member of the Nobel Prize Committee, but who in 1929 served as errand boy for the Jewish Committee, Agnes Heller had no further information. Young Klein came across a report about Auschwitz that the Jewish Committee received from two people who had fled from Auschwitz and described what was going on in the camps. The report was so unimaginable that nobody believed it. George Klein believed it and he refused to go on the train. Agnes Heller, however, did not have this information at all. She just figured that if this is what she was asked to do by the establishment, something must be wrong with it. And this saved her life, or helped to save her life. It did not save her father, nor did it save quite a number of her close friends, and not so close friends, who perished then and during the Second World War. As Eveline Goodman-Thau has already said, these events gave Agnes the sense that she had to understand the world in which this was possible, and that she had to do this as a duty. Moreover, she had not only to understand the world and the historical forces at work in it, but also to do something for its reparation. So, first she was attracted to Zionism-redemption for the Jews. But soon after her view of redemption widened; she was seeking a broader human redemption, and this drew her towards Marx and communism. Of course, George Lukacs was decisive here, and she heard him for the first time at the university. He changed her life. As Agnes remembers in an interview, she did not understand a word of what Lukacs was saying in this very first lecture, but she understood its importance-she felt it was vital and that it squared with her desire to understand history in the world. So she went for philosophy, she chose herself as a philosopher, and has been ever since. The promising philosophy then, in Hungary, seemed to be Marxism, and she was also drawn to the Communist Party. But Heller was so independent that, in 1949, at age 20, she already succeeded in getting herself thrown out of that party, the first but not the last time this happened. Heller was reincorporated into the party in 1954, but two years later the immense event of the Budapest Revolution began, not only in Agnes Heller's personal life, but in European and modem history. That shock later got her again thrown out of the party as well as the university, because she, along with her friends, refused to denounce Lukacs as a counter-revolutionary. She discovered the ills and defects of official Marxism, and she discovered that Marxism, unlike the ruling theory, cannot be applied uniformly and repressively in the same way in every state and in every context, and she started to become critical. For seven years she was banned from the university, a time she spent looking for a different kind of socialism to repair it from within.

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In 1963 she was reinstated in the Academy, as member of the Sociological Institute. There she formed, together with her intellectual and personal friends, the so-called "Budapest School," which comprised only of four people (so we might call them the "Gang of Four"): Gyorgy Markus, Mihaly Vajda, Heller and Ferenc Feher, who became her husband and whom I had the pleasure to meet. The group was critical of the ruling Marxism and like all reform movements in history they were looking for the true or authentic doctrine-that is, for the original Marx as opposed to the vulgar Marxism of the establishment. We know that in all reform movements, within religion or outside of it, reformism means first of all "back to the origins." So, in this sense, they were looking for the original Marx. At that stage, the establishment tolerated them to some extent, because this was conceived as a critique from within. But then came 1968. The so-called Prague Spring was brutally crashed by the Soviet Union (with the help of troops from the Warsaw Pact bloc, including from Hungary). This created a conflict between Heller and her group as well as with the authorities, and henceforth they became dissidents. In 1973, they were summoned to some kind of secret trial which they refused to attend, and were denounced as renegades and heretics. Heller became critical of Marxism itself rather than continuing her theoretical search for its true origins. The members of the group were expelled from the university and not allowed to work; they suffered continuous harassment from the police and the bureaucracy. If we summarize this very courageous and eventful half-itinerary, we can see three stages in it: first, a personalized acceptance of the Marxist school in 1956, together with a critique of uniform Marxism; then 1963, a reformist turn toward the original sources of Marx, as against the official doctrine; and fmally in 1968, a complete break with the political world built upon Marxism. I am not sure if this should be construed as a complete break with Marx, but certainly it was a complete break with all political culture claiming Marx as its originator and built upon his positive theory. In 1977, the group was presented the possibility of immigrating to Australia. They went to La Trobe University in Melbourne, where they found a hospitable and warm environment. We might say that for Heller this was the era of decompression from Marxism, of finding herself and coming into her own. At the same time, she rediscovered, now in a positive vein, the thought of Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinking that her mentor Lukacs had fiercely fought against. Lukacs wrote a long book, Die Zerstoerung der Vernunft (The Destruction of Reason)-! remember having read it in Hebrew translation as a student-in which he attacked the modem existentialists, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Nietzsche of having pointed the way Hitler. It was really a polemical partisan pamphlet, something not quite worthy of the notable philosopher that Lukacs really was. The mature Heller, deeply opposing her erstwhile mentor, absorbed much of the existentialist thinking and insights, and I shall illustrate how in the next section. Heller's books during her Australian period-A Theory of Need in Marx (1976), which critiques Marx, and Beyond Justice (1988)--express among other

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things opposition to the enclosure of human individuals within monistic categories defining them from the outside, such as ''need" or "nature" or ''true self," categories which they are then required to live by. Rejecting this entails a rejection of the pretension of having completely understood and deciphered the human being. As importantly, Heller identifies the way political forms can be constructed to correspond, allegedly, with a human essence. To reject the foundation of such claims is also to reject their dangerous potential for repressing individuals. Heller had insisted, and still insists, that the human being is much more illusive, indeterminate and open to possibilities than any such theory can tolerate; she therefore argues that personalism and pluralism are an adequate approach, not to deciphering, but to approaching the individual person. In 1984, Heller was offered the job at the New School that she has held, officially, since 1986. This change in environment corresponds with the socalled ethical period in her writing, as well as with her writing on modernity. It is at this point that her work becomes widely recognized on three continents, in Australia, America, and in Europe. She develops a glorious and distinguished career as a teacher, as an influential intellectual, and as a prolific philosophical writer. And not least important, she develops a network of personal intellectual friendships in all these places.

Elements of Heller's Mature Thought Let me now cite a few examples of Heller's thought. In being a "child of the 20th century," she has been interested in history and in ethics, among many other topics. These, however, form the core of her project. I will take them one at a time, starting with ethics. In both her thinking about ethics and about history, the basic experience is one of being thrown into the world; a category framed by Heidegger, but to which Heller gives her own interpretation. This thrownness of human beings into the world means that we are contingent beings. And contingency or thrownness has two forms or meanings: the basic meaning is that the contingency of human existence as such, of our place in the universe, or our place in being, has neither inner meaning nor inner justification, it is just there, as a bold fact. The second meaning is historical. It applies to our contingency within history, namely, regarding our loss of organic traditions in which premodem societies and individuals were living, and from which they drew their clues about how to live and how to be anchored in being. Those organic historical traditions conceal from us our own existential contingency; we cannot see it from within those traditions. Therefore, the breakdown of historical traditions is also the emerging into consciousness of both senses of contingency, the existential and the historical. Still, to be thrown into the world also means, for Agnes Heller, to be thrown into freedom, an idea we know from Sartre, who was an existential thinker. In

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freedom, which in itself is nothingness, the person stands before the need to make an existential choice. But what kind of choice? What to choose? Heller's answer-and here she follows Kierkegaard, the father of existential thought-is: the existential choice does not refer to this or that object, goal or meaning; rather, the fundamental existential choice regards ourselves, as persons. We have to choose ourselves, that is. The fundamental choice, Heller suggests, is for a person to choose herself and thereby to become herself. This is again Kierkegaard's motto "Be what you are." We are not what we are just by being there, for by being there we are nothing, we are just waves swept by the ocean, meaning nothing. To give meaning to our contingency, we have to become what we are. And to become what we are we have to make a choice for that purpose. As Heller says, a person who chooses him or herself transforms the contingent facticity of his or her being into a destiny or a vocation. To me this is a form of Nietzsche's idea of amor fati. Heller goes on to argue that by this choice we become someone, we become a person, a personality. Any person who doesn't choose him- or herself, who fails to become him- or herself, lets his or her being go, loses the meaning of his or her life. At the same time, such a person allows others to choose for him (or her), to determine her, making her life determined mechanically and by external forces that mean nothing to him or her, and not by the organic tradition of the past which is lost by indefinite forces-again an idea that resounds with Heidegger's idea of conformity, das Man-becoming only a nobody, determined by the forces of society working from the outside. Let me quote Goethe, from his Westostliche Diwan, which Heller also quotes in one of her books, and which gives the gist of her idea of personality: Volk und Knecht und Ueberwinder I Sie gestehen zu jeder Zeit: I Hoechstes Glueck der Erdenkinder I Sei nur die Persoenlichkeit. So far, we have followed a genuinely existentialist move. The basic choice is an ethical choice, and even the foundation of ethics is grounded in the question of "how do we live?" But in itself, the basic choice is not involved in any objective values, except for the value of personality and authenticity, and it is certainly not a prescriptive morality. But then a surprising shift occurs in Agnes Heller's thought. She argues that we have to give our existential choice a universal dimension; we have to choose ourselves under the sign of the universal. And to her that means: I have to choose myself as a good person. This does not mean that in every case I will do the good, or even know what the good is-there is uncertainty in morality. It means that I have chosen as a calling for myself to live within the distinction of good and evil, to live within good and evil, not beyond, as Nietzsche says. Her amor fati brings you back, brings you into good and evil, and within that framework of good and evil we enter this world. Having done some work on Kant myself, I wish to add that Kant also speaks about a fundamental choice as a strategy of life that we have to undertake, to implement it in particulars as we go. Kant's fundamental choice is very similar to the kind of existential choice that Heller is offering us. And it also comes, in Kant, from the nothingness of WillkUr. This is the beginning of what I called an ''unlikely combination" in which Heller puts Kierkegaard and

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Kant together, or rather draws Kant out of Kierkegaard, which is very paradoxical and very interesting, because the move towards Kant leads us to a morality which has a universal orientation, a morality in which we understand both the other person and morality as an end-in-itself, a purely Kantian idea. At the same time, the universal element here, unlike in Kant, is not abstract, is not divested of time and place. This is not a view from nowhere, as my friend Thomas Nagel believes morality should be, but it is an element of universality which is embedded and incarnated within particular, historical and communal circumstances, similar to the spirit of Hegel's concept of Sitt/ichkeit. Also, it is very important for Heller to emphasize that we are talking here about the integral person, not a person divided into reason and passion, noumenal and phenomenal aspects. It is the whole person with his or her passions, judgments, understanding, imagination, and moral sense, who is to be taken as a whole. Morality is not about some pure reason which hovers above us, or which is a ghost within us telling us what we should do, in the mode of a prescription. Heller emphasizes that this ethics requires first that our life-world already be invested with some norms, without which there could be no Sittlichkeit. On the other hand, she reminds us that we did not grow up in an atmosphere of compact norms, as in a traditional society where no room is left and no need is felt for personal choice. Now, I suspect that this attempt to combine existentialism and Kant may be one of the secrets of the attraction of Heller's philosophy, but it is also a source of paradoxes and wonder, especially in view of the fact that in her second book on morality, The Philosophy of Morals, Heller even talks about prescriptive ethics. She gives us a whole list of virtues and moral maxims, which looks as if it were drawn from several philosophical traditions, selected to Heller's own preference. That is why she realizes that this way of writing morality, the way she did in the 1980s, is no longer possible today. In her conclusive work (so far) on ethics, An Ethics of Personality, Heller changes her approach and genre of writing. First of all, the norms and the values here, which earlier had looked like a list of prescriptive norms, are now considered to be merely "crutches" that help us choose. There is much more awareness here of the problems of uncertainty, moral ambiguity, and the difficulties of judgment, which had also occupied Hannah Arendt's attention. There is also an original new genre of writing philosophy: the book is composed of three parts (as a triptych). The first part is composed in the form of lectures, the second in dialogue form, and the third is as an exchange of letters between an old lady and her granddaughter. The dialogue has several characters; one speaks for Kierkegaard, another for a Kantian viewpoint, and one who speaks for neither, a female character called Vera. I found out from Agnes that the name Vera comes from Lukacs. I suspected that Vera speaks in Agnes' own voice, but when I read the text again and spoke with Agnes, my impression was that her voice is the whole trio; she speaks through all three characters. Unlike the way Agnes speaks in actual lif~the openness, the frankness, the lack of masks which is so characteristic of her-as writer Heller understands the need

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for masks. For if you speak in three voices, and all three are yours, then which is your own unique voice? It can only be none and all of them. And if none of the voices is made supreme, then you have to be mindful and careful about what you say in each of the voices, and you have to wear masks, as Kierkegaard did when he used his different synonyms. Heller discovers her own need for the power of irony, for the possibility of a play of words, and for other literary devices that take us a step away from the genre of Kant to the genre of Erasmus (or of Kierkegaard himself). I find this very interesting and original, yet I also see a philosophical problem here. To define it succinctly, I will say this: the problem is that the universal does not emerge from the personal or the singular without us supposing some more objective basis for its emergence. But this objective basis is one that existentialism cannot supply, and refuses to supply, because it will undermine the existentialist position. Even Kierkegaard, who Heller uses as the existentialist voice that chooses morality, chose ethics only at the second stage of Either/Or, not in the final stage. On the contrary, in the fmal stage, Kierkegaard chooses religion or faith and suspends the ethical; it is through this suspension that his existentialist stance attains its climax (in the religious phase). Further, at the stage in which he chooses ethics, Kierkegaard does not opt for a Kantian universal but for something that is closer to Hegel's Sittlichkeit, rather than being fully existentialist. So there is an inner tension, to say the least, between the panels in Heller's triptych. The need to put all these elements together, to join all three voices, is, on the one hand, very appealing; we feel sympathetic with all the elements of this trio, and yet we can see that there is an unresolved tension between them. It seems to me--l have not spoken with Agnes about this, but I suspect that she understands the problem-that her new style of writing, which is distinctive in content and not only form, provides us the possibility of understanding that the tension between the three different elements is resolved not by logical means, but by an existential choice. It is resolved by the will rather than by the intellect, by the will of the person to choose all three elements and to hold on to them together in his or her own personality, and in his or her own personal way of life. If my reading is correct, then we have here an existential choice not only at the beginning of the process, but also at the end-and this is something that holds all the elements of the tension together.

History, Redemption, Modernity A few words about history, redemption, time, grand narratives and, of course, modernity are in order. This is a broad area in Heller's work and I shall have to skip some important issues. The problem of history starts with the same idea of being thrown into the world. I have indicated that our thrownness into the world is also historical. We fall, in modernity, into a new type of time, which

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has been drained of all internal justifications, of all the organic traditions mentioned before, traditions that gave the individual, from the outset, a direction and an anchorage in being. However, not only have the times been evacuated of the power of traditions, but the individual person too, in his loneliness vis-a-vis the new situation, discovers that he (or she) is required to cope with this situation on his own and to respond to it from him or herself. In this context, certain types of escape reaction develop. For instance, the individual escapes, runs away from himself, not to the tradition which is no longer viable, but to either to extreme relativism, even nihilism, or on the contrary, to modern ideologies, most of them big, world-encompassing ideologies, which replace tradition and which now determine him from the outside, mechanically, without his Personlichkeit being involved in it. There is also an attempt to run away from the emptiness of time, of modern time, either by turning back to the past, which leads to fundamentalism, or by projecting into the future, which leads to utopias. Both these dimensions of time involve an escape from the present, from the actual life and from the actual individual. And in both of them, looking back and looking ahead, there is the temptation of big narratives that will explain or anticipate the whole of history in visions of global salvation or redemption. Inevitably in these grand narratives, the present is emptied of its value and it becomes a mere passage from the past to the future. In such an attitude there are always the following two dangers: first, imposing a narrow and abstract perspective on life, and therefore, speaking with Arendt, the danger of totalitarianism. And second, there is the temptation of placing ourselves above the world, in a pose of controlling the world, knowing everything, omniscience, or having at least a clue to understand everything-which is the danger of hubris, tyranny and the loss of independent, critical thinking. Instead of this, Heller requires that we live in the actual world, which is also the present world with its nearby horizons; to remain within the near horizon of the present, to improve the world from inside what it is, without a sublime vision of redemption, and, especially, without seeing in our world a mere passage between past and future. I call this a philosophy of immanence, or at least I see in this something I would characterize in my own words as a philosophy of immanence. This also means life without absolutes, yet with values, whose origins are in our choice, our autonomy, which is always only relative autonomy. A horizon beyond the moment, but not beyond the world, that reflects upon modernity, because for Heller modernity remains a break with the past-yet a break with the past that bears no teleological promises for the future. Heller therefore objects to the fashionable talk about modernity not having fulfilled its promises. For her, this is a romantic view of modernity, because it derives from improbable and impossible and faulty expectations. Modernity remains built upon the principle of freedom, but freedom is involved in paradoxes. So what we need is a demystification of modernity, a sobriety about it and a removal of all remnants of providentiality, be it theological or secularized.

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Heller's Existential Jewish Belonging Since Agnes Heller is receiving this medal from an institute for Jewish culture-the Hermann-Cohen-Akademie fUr Religion, Wissenschaft und Kunstlet me say something about her relevance for this culture. Again, the key concept here is not Jewish culture per se, but more primordially Jewish existence. Agnes Heller has lived through and instantiated several typical patterns of modern Jewish existence. We start inevitably with Auschwitz, the radical, absolute and existential rejection of Jews, not because of their religion, but because of their being Jewish. The Jews were rejected by the Nazis and by modern antisemites in general, by using the vulgar category of race as a cover for what I call existential antisemitism-that is to say, there is no predicate of the Jew that is rejected, there is no particular property of the Jew that is rejected. Take away all these predicates, change them into other predicates, or even convert the Jew into a Christian, and still the person will remain a Jew in his or her bare being, regardless of any predicate. It is as a Jew in his or her being that this person is negated and excluded and sent to the KZ. Agnes Heller encountered this existential antisemitism as a teenager, and in its most acute modern form. Zionism, though a short episode in her life, was nevertheless a marked phase and experience for the young Heller. Today, and for a good number of years now, she has come back to recognizing her existential Jewish belonging, particularly as a European Jew, without negating the Israeli Jews, of whom she is a close friend. But for her, the concept of the European Jews is a viable and important as a historical, existential concept. Another pattern of modem Jewish existence can be seen in Agnes Heller's adoption of communism and Marxism during her Luka.cs-period. When we look upon quite a number of non-religious Jewish figures since the 19th century, such as Ferdinand Lasalle, we see the pattern of a non-religious Jew who nevertheless inherits something of the fire of the prophetic or messianic element in Judaism, secularizes it, and joins movements for the betterment or even the redemption of the world. The redemption of the Jewish people becomes a cause transformed into a universal, secularized or Western messianism. This pattern is exhibited also in the trend over the last 150 years whereby so many Jews, disproportionately to their number in the society, joined all kinds of movements for the betterment and the changing of Western and world society. But, again, in Heller's case this is a choice. Finally, Heller's choosing herself as a Jew reintegrates her in a community, but no longer a historical community in which your one's belonging is the first thing from which one draws conclusions and imperatives and clues for action. It is the very opposite. It is the existential choice of recognizing, affirming and accepting the Jewish existence as one of the many communities in which one participates, one makes this one's community. So, again, the existential person is here the operative factor.

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A Final Note on Marx and Lukacs I want to end on a speculative note about Heller's relation to Marx and Lukacs. Lukacs was a very interesting and complicated person. He sacrificed his intellectual life to the Cause. He surrendered his earlier work, for which he was celebrated, and he did it in a conscious way, because he sacrificed much of his intellectual productivity, power and persona to the Marxist cause, with which he then became partly disappointed. Now: Did he choose himself? Or did he rather renounce himself? Isn't his choice the choice to sacrifice his intellectual, personal persona for something greater, which he thought was worthy of that sacrifice? I wonder where the complex relationship of Heller with Lukacs, and the idea of choosing oneself, stand in this respect. As for Marx, I said before that Heller ended up rejecting the whole political and cultural world of Marxism, although perhaps she did not completely and totally divorce Marx. I came to realize this when our late friend Jacques Derrida came to the New School to speak about his book Specters of Marx, in which Derrida was one of the first Western thinkers to say something positive about elements in Marx after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of communism. An interesting dialogue developed between Agnes Heller and Jacques Derrida on this topic. I had the impression that they were attempting to distinguish between something interesting and important in Marx's diagnosis, and the despotic political culture that was built in his name and upon the rest of his theories. Of course, there are very strong links between Marx and what was made in his name. But are they exactly the same? Does Heller believe that they are? Heller likes to say that what made the Soviet regime totalitarian is not so much the theory of Marx, but the character of the party. Lenin built a party, the character of which was totalitarian, and the fascists took it from him. When the totalitarian party took over the state, it gave the state its own character. Of course it too used elements of Marx's theory, and these elements really do exist in Marx, but the identification of the two is somewhat superficial and there is a disparity to be observed if we want to be independent thinkers who think new answers, and who do not think in slogans. To conclude, I wish to say that if I have made some mistakes in interpreting Agnes Heller, it is because we all have our own views of others' work, but all was said in admiration and friendship. And I am very pleased to note that one of Agnes Heller's last books-her latest book, for there is no last book in Agnesdeals with irony and comedy. For someone I called a "child of the 20th century," someone who has known the tragedies of that century from such a close range, to start the new century with a book on comedy is a very encouraging sign, especially in times that seem to be darkening again.

Chapter 2.

Marxism and Exile: Reflections on Intellectual Migrations Bryan S. Turner Introduction: Three Theses on Intellectuals Three components frame my discussion of Agnes Heller. These three components also indicate that I am less concerned with the content of Heller's philosophy and more concerned with its context. This orientation is not because I do not take the contents exceptionally seriously. Rather, it is because I assume the nature of her thought has been addressed elsewhere and will be further discussed in this volume (Grumley 2005; Polony 2007; Tormey 2001). In any case, I am a sociologist, not a philosopher, hence I am more concerned with the sociological nature and setting of her philosophy than with its substance. From a sociological perspective on intellectuals as a social group, it is interesting to consider her career in the context of twentieth-century communism, post-war intellectual migration and the implications of migration for social theory. In short, this contribution is more an exercise in the sociology of knowledge than a contribution to social philosophy. The first component of my exposition is the proposition that massive social disruption from war and migration tends to promote or indeed provoke strong traditions in social theory, because traumatic events force intellectuals to rethink their basic premises and to address major public issues. In commonsense terms, we might reasonably assume that peaceful and prosperous times produce social theories that one might jokingly call "low intensity sociology." I have elsewhere argued that post-war British society in which, according to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, the British had "never had it so good," did not produce an outstanding sociological culture, whereas post-war France and Germany did (Turner 2006). The gradualism and individualism of British history has not favored a creative or critical intellectual elite (Anderson 1968, 1964 and 1990). Twentieth-century critical social theory in Britain (and the United States) was produced largely by refugee Jewish intellectuals fleeing from persecution under National Socialism, and the gradual disappearance of that generation is reflected in the erosion of the intellectual excitement of sociology in Britain, and to some extent in the United States. The New School has been notoriously a haven of 23

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Jewish intellectual life in the States. The career of Hannah Arendt was in this respect paradigmatic (Young-Bruehl 2004). The migration of Jewish intellectuals to British shores constituted the foundations of post-war social science in such diverse figures as Isaiah Berlin, Norbert Elias, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ilya Neustadt. Obviously there are many other factors involved, but stable and secure generations are less likely to become involved in social transformations that require penetrating and important sociological insights. In a comfortable, secure consumer culture, sociology is likely to become decorative rather than critical (Turner and Rojek 2001 ). The disruption by revolutionary change of intellectuals who then are forced into exile through involuntary migration is a further aspect of the creation of critical schools of social theory. The theme of exile, nostalgia and intellectual creativity is a well known dimension of modem academic life, perhaps most clearly illustrated in the career of Edward Said and in his autobiographical sketch Out of Place (1999). The growth of sociology as a critical theory and the rise of public intellectuals are therefore closely connected with political crises that require a collective, dynamic response. The crisis of the Hapsburg Empire produced major Hungarian social scientists that were in some sense forced into the role of public intellectuals, for example, Gyorgy Lukacs, Karl Mannheim, and Istvan Meszaros. Another European example would be the contribution of Polish migrants to social science in a society that was in more or less permanent crisis: Florian Znaniecki, Stanislaw Ossowski, Maria Ossowska, Leon Petr8Zycki, Leszek Kolakowski and Zygmunt Baumann (Mucha 2006). In the contemporary world, sociology appears to be (re)emerging and flourishing in places where social change is rapid and politics are problematic; places such as Turkey, India, Vietnam, and China. Therefore, the so-called the Budapest Circle, of which Heller was a key member, appears to be a good example of the argument that traumatic political crises often produce a set of conditions that stimulate the emergence of new insights, paradigms and occasionally schools. The second aspect of my thesis is that the migration of intellectuals from communist to capitalist societies in the post-war period produced academics who often defended individual civil liberties and were correspondingly skeptical about social rights. By contrast, "indigenous" left wing intellectuals tend to support social rights against individual rights, often regarding the latter as merely "bourgeois" rights. In short, Western intellectuals have often seen liberalism as a smoke-screen for capitalism, while emigre intellectuals have been critical of communism, embracing individual rights as a necessary condition for freedom. The result has been that migrant intellectuals, and migrant Jewish intellectuals in particular, are often thought to be turncoats by local progressive intellectuals. This was the fate for example of the New York intellectuals. While a sociologist like C. Wright Mills gained an unambiguous reputation as a left-wing intellectual, the New York intellectuals were thought to have sold out to conservatism, becoming patriotic supporters of American culture. Norman Podhoretz (1967) can be taken as paradigmatic, but in the social sciences it was their promotion of the idea of the end of ideology, as

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argued by Daniel Bell, that brought them into intellectual conflict with local leftwing academics (Liebowitz 1985). The conflict between Mills and Bell over ideology and the nature of capitalism is also characteristic of these divisions between (East coast) Jewish intellectuals like Bell and radical sociologists from the late 1940's onwards (Mills and Mills 2000: 123). Alasdair Macintyre (1971) condemned both Daniel Bell and S.M. Lipset among other things for not recognizing that the compromise of the liberal political consensus was based on the continuing exploitation of the working class and marginal groups. In 1962 Isaiah Berlin, then the Chichele Professor of Political and Social Theory at the University of Oxford, published his now famous article "Does Political Theory Still Exist?" in the influential (second series) Philosophy Politics and Society (Laslett and Runciman 1962). This article did much to reverse the declining fortunes of political philosophy in British universities and further distinguished political philosophy from political science. The article outlined Berlin's objections to determinism and historical inevitability in the social sciences, which included both American political science and more significantly Marxist historical materialism. Berlin's criticisms of historical materialism had already been developed in his biography of Karl Marx (Berlin 1939), where he had explored conflicting interpretations of Marx's political theory between the Hegelian dialectic and a virtually Darwinian view of causality. According to Berlin, crass materialism produced a deterministic picture of human history in which political rights played little part in social change. Berlin clashed with socialist and Marxist historians such as E.H. Carr, and complained that Marxist historians, in emphasizing social and economic conditions, left no space for the role of ideas, beliefs and intentions. Their quest for what he called "amoral objectivity" failed to grasp the force of moral evaluation (Ignatieff 1998: 236). The social and political background to Berlin's liberalism was the Cold War and the struggle to defend liberalism and individual rights. Berlin as a result regarded sociology with some degree of suspicion; it sounded like "socialism," appeared to embrace deterministic arguments, and claimed to be a science. At this time, Berlin probably equated sociology with the trend towards positivism in philosophy. He had criticized these trends in Concepts and Categories (Berlin 1978). As a Jewish refugee from Russian communism, he matured intellectually in the context of European fascism. Berlin's commitment to liberal political theory and his antagonism to sociology (or any discipline committed to an assumption about "historical inevitability") were therefore hardly surprising. It is worth comparing Berlin's liberalism with the social philosophy of another intellectual refugee, this time from Poland, namely Leszek Kolakowski. In 1968, Kolakowski was forced out of Poland, becoming eventually a fellow of All Souls College Oxford. As an academic who had been deeply interested in Thomism, Kolakowski was critical of Marxism, but recognized in his monumental Main Currents of Marxism the appeal and achievements of Marxism in developing a comprehensive doctrine that both explained and exposed the social inequality and injustices produced by capitalism. Like Berlin, Kolakowski was

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highly critical of the Stalinist certainties of "historical progress" and in "Responsibility and History" he chastised communism for excusing brutality and authoritarianism under the guise of historical inevitability (Kolakowski 1971: 105-175). In any case, Kolakowski was influenced by Kantianism, concluding that one significant lacuna in Marxist economic determinism was its inability to deal adequately with ethics. Like Berlin, Kolakowski was highly critical of the bureaucratic, authoritarian and elitist consequences of Party domination over civil society and the loss of civil liberties. And like Berlin, Kolakowski was criticised by the left for abandoning Marxism and thereby apparently selling out to bourgeois capitalism. Famously in 1973 in an open letter to The Socialist Register (1978), the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson criticized Kolakowski for abandoning the Marxism of his youth and for allowing his experiences of actually existing socialism in Poland to cloud his understanding of socialist ideals. Kolakowski replied in "My Correct Views on Everything" (1974) to say that one cannot save Marxism from the failures of communism in the name of an ideal that is allegedly grounded in material reality. The intellectual gulf between Thompson and Kolakowski was symptomatic of a deep rift between Western intellectuals who had had no direct experience of communism and Eastern emigre intellectuals who had suffered under its crushing cultural monotony and political authoritarianism. Like Berlin, Kolakowski was shocked by the naivety of Western intellectuals who, while condemning the militarism of the United States, ignored the militarization of Chinese society, or the enforcement of punitive labor discipline, or the suppression of freedom of religion. The third component necessary to frame my discussion of Agnes Heller is the claim that migration and disruption tend to produce in the dislocated intellectual a negative picture of the present often combined with a nostalgic vision of the past. Furthermore since the emigre intellectual is isolated from power, his or her intellectual activities are often directed towards the analysis of aesthetics rather than contemporary politics. In some emigres such as Eric Voegelin, who fled to the United States from fascism in Austria, it resulted in his life-long fascination with Gnosticism, with religious nationalism and the political crises of the twentieth century-fascism, communism and nationalism (Heilke 1999). However, it is Theodor W. Adorno who provides the classical example. Theodor Adorno arrived in the States via Merton College Oxford as an emigre from Nazi Germany in February 1938 and he stayed eleven years, until November 1949. He saw little of American society, making one brief stop in Chicago on his way to Los Angeles. His principal locations were New York (1938-1941) and Los Angeles (1942-1949). Adorno, who struggled to come to terms with his escape from German fascism, produced a series of brilliant if highly controversial analyses of modernity, culminating in his Aesthetic Theory (1984) and in the criticism of The Culture Industry (1991). Adorno is the most negative and pessimistic of twentieth-century sociological travelers, for whom America as an advanced outpost of cultural destruction offers the perfect

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location to contemplate the nihilism of progress. This advanced terminal of the culture industry awaits us all. Adorno's pessimistic analysis of jazz, the culture industry, and authoritarianism subsequently received little substantial support from sociologists. Perhaps the connecting theme in this history of academic migration is what Claus Offe (2005: 2) calls ''the precarious fate of liberty in modem capitalist societies," also described in sociology in terms of the "tyranny ofthe majority," "the iron cage of dependence," and "the administered world." The migration of intellectuals from "old Europe" to the "new world" posed a problem about how they were to respond to modernity-a problem that remains unanswered, as one might recognize in the question Can Modernity Survive?

Agnes Heller and the Budapest Circle Because the story of Heller and the Budapest Circle is well known, I shall not dwell for too long on an account of her career, recently explored by various authors (Grumley 2005). Heller and her husband Ferenc Feher were members of the Budapest School and in more general terms were figures in a broad movement of "Marxist humanism" that was influential in eastern Europe in the postwar years (Satterwhite 1992). Gyorgy Lukacs was the most important figure in the revival of Marxist thought in the twentieth century (Kadarkay 1991) and the main figure behind the Budapest School. Through his interpretation of the Paris manuscripts of the young Marx, Lukacs developed a powerful attack on the conventional materialism and determinism of the scientific Marxism of the Party in his History and Class Consciousness (1971), first published in 1923. Lukacs offered an interpretation of materialism in which he explored the idea of the reification of thought, showing by implication that the Party line on materialism was simply a reification of Marx. Lukacs's work was heavily criticized; he was only able to provide a posthumous defense in his Tailism and the Dialectic (2000). Lukacs remains an ambiguous figure in this historical evolution of Marxist thought and the ambiguity is nowhere more interesting than in the ironic representation of Leo Naphta-Jew, Jesuit, communist-in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, who proclaims a spiritual dictatorship of the proletariat to strike terror into the modem world as an act of redemption (Marcus 1987). The main point of Lukacs's revival of the Marx of the alienation thesis was that it underscored the philosophical limitations of historical materialism, thereby revitalizing Marx's emphasis on the idea of praxis or practical human agency in changing the world. It opened up within a Marxist paradigm that was itself an alternative to liberalism the possibility of a Marxist theory of freedom. The real achievement of the Budapest group was to recognize and then develop the implicit philosophical anthropology in the young Marx, thereby, in Heller's case, laying the groundwork for much of her subsequent work on The Theory of Need in Marx (1976), A Theory of Feelings (1978), On Instincts (1979) and

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Everyday Life (1984). One finds the same interest in Marx's anthropology in Gyorgy Markus's Marxism and Anthropology (1978). Heller was dismissed from her academic position together with Lukacs after the Hungarian Revolution. With the death of Lukacs in 1971, the position of the Budapest group became increasingly tenuous, and in 1977 Heller and her husband emigrated to Australia where she became a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at LaTrobe University (Tormey 2001). They contributed to the transformation of the journal Thesis Eleven and published critical studies of the command economy of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Dictatorship over Needs (1983). Heller's sociology involves essentially a philosophical interrogation of modernity, capitalism, the human condition and the possibilities of agency. Her work contrasts with another Hungarian who migrated to Australia to become the founding chair of sociology at Flinders University South Australia, namely Ivan Szelenyi. Coming from a background in economics and political economy, Szelenyi wrote influential books on social class and economy in Hungary, for example Socialist Entrepreneurs ( 1988), but his most influential work has been The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (1979) with George Konrad. The book examines the status and functions of intellectuals in social systems that are undergoing processes of rationalization; in particular Szelenyi and Konrad look at how radical intellectuals were eventually separated from the working class and dominated by the Party bureaucracy. In many respects this sociological study of the intellectuals within the class structure of European societies perfectly describes the conditions that determined Lukacs's own academic career. While Heller enjoyed the security and a supportive academic environment in Melbourne, La Trobe University is a marginal institution in a higher education system that is dominated by the older "sandstone universities" of Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide. Heller and Feher subsequently left Australia in 1986 to take up academic positions in the United States, where Heller became the Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate Faculty program at the New School for Social Research New York.

Ethics, Agency and the Character of the Modern Marx's philosophical anthropology was the foundation of Heller's early work. The point of Marx's anthropology was both to criticize what he took to be the idealism of Hegel and to criticize the determinism of mechanical materialism. Marx therefore saw human beings as creatures that, as it were, constantly create and recreate themselves by working on and with their natural environments. As they change their environment through their labor, so they change themselves. In changing themselves, there is also a sense in which human beings create their own bodies. Human beings work on their bodies just as they work

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on the environment. This aspect of human embodiment in relation to culture and technology is brilliantly summarized in the twin notions of ''the naturalization of man" (the growth of his "inorganic body") and ''the humanization of nature" in the transformation of nature by human activity (Markus 1978: 14). Marx's notions of praxis and labor mean that history is not in fact determined in a mechanical fashion by laws that are as rigid as the laws of nature. The world is open and contingent. There is always the possibility of choice and agency, and it follows that human beings can be held accountable. The connections between Marx's notions of humanity and technology (not as equipment but as a process of the transformation of nature), and their relation to Aristotelian philosophy and to its relating of phusis and techne, have not received the attention they deserve, since this understanding of practical action on nature provides the linking thread between Aristotle, Marx, Arendt and finally Heller (Brogan 2005). Like any complex thinker working on a large canvass of ideas, Marx often contradicts himself. For example, some have argued that while the young Marx recognizes the creative nature of human practical consciousness, the Marx of Capital is deterministic. This issue gave rise to the dualistic notions of the "young Marx" and the "later Marx." To challenge this distinction was the great achievement of Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness. All subsequent theories of practice are to some extent dependent upon Lukacs's retrieval of the original Marx. Heller's own philosophy comes down to the argument that human ontology is historical; namely, it is a process in time and space. Because human beings share a common ontology, we can have a notion of a common humanity, namely a common vulnerability {Turner 2006). Because of this common ontology, ethics is possible. Because we are vulnerable, we need to be nurtured and nourished if we are to grow as ethical beings capable of responsible action but also able to experience sympathy for others. To express responsibility, we need to have the capacity to care for the Other. We need more than mere recognition of the Other; we need a relationship of mutual nourishment. Although Hegel's master-slave metaphor is useful as a basis for recognition ethics, we also need the capacity to nurture other beings. Ethics is not hospitality unless it can also include some notion of mutual nourishing in which the shared meal can become a symbol of shared affections. Heller's early philosophy depends heavily on her interpretations of Marx's anthropology as a position from which to criticize explanations of human behavior that privilege the role of instincts. For Heller, the social inserts an allimportant mediation between the stimulus and response, and hence she develops a view of the great plasticity of human nature. However, as she came to abandon her Marxism in the years she taught at the New School, coming to emphasize the contingencies of human history and becoming attracted to ideas associated with postmodemism, she rejected her own earlier commitment to a philosophy of history, and with it her engagement with Marxist philosophical anthropology appeared less defensible. The catastrophic events of the twentieth century-the Holocaust and Hiroshima-made the idea of universal history appear untenable.

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Consequently, her later works, such as General Ethics (1988), show the influence of Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (1958) and the departure from the legacy of Lukacs's interpretation of Marx. Arendt (1958: 27) points out that when Aristotle referred to man as a zoon politikon he added an important second definition in which man is also zoon logon echon, that is, a "living rational being capable of speech." The highest capacity of human beings is contemplation and the virtue of the citizen can only be realized within the public realm, within the polis. Arendt's reading of Aristotle underlines the difference between the idea of"the human condition" and philosophical anthropology. This rejection of philosophical anthropology appears to be connected with the fact that it fails to abandon the idea of a given biological reality of the human, whereas the idea of the human condition involves "substituting social regulation for instinct regulation" (Heller 1990: 47). Thus Heller eventually came to reject the Greek idea that we are political animals for the idea that we are social beings. There is no space here to argue the case, but my main reservation about Heller's intellectual development is that we do not need to reject philosophical anthropology on these grounds, because it is important to retain Marx's idea that human beings are involved in a praxis that is an endless refashioning of self and environment through time, and that we are involved in this as practical beings. This idea has been retained to some extent in debates about the body in modern sociology, where the language of stimulus, response and need has all but disappeared (Turner 2007). Marx's notions of practice and embodiment provide an important understanding of the human that is not entirely captured in the idea of "the human condition." While a concern for embodiment and practical action does not require us to embrace the legacy of the science of instincts, the more difficult problem for contemporary social theory is our response to the revolution in genetics and microbiology. The erosion of this Marxist dimension of Heller's thought is consistent with the experience of other emigre intellectuals to the United States and Britain, but it also reflects a change in the conceptualization of modernity. For Marx, modernity would always be an industrial modernity, but much of the late twentieth century was concerned with post-industrialism as described persuasively by Daniel Bell in The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1974). Modernity increasingly looks like a post-industrial, global consumer society, making many of the assumptions about industrialism that shaped sociology from Saint Simon to Raymond Aron look less and less relevant.

Heller on Modernity One thing that is striking about Heller's intellectual career is that she has kept an open mind about the possibility of human development, unlike other

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members of the critical tradition, especially Adorno, who produced a theory of modem society characterized by negativity and resignation. Modem philosophical views of modernity have been shaped by a range of perspectives that either reject modernity or are skeptical about it. These critical views include the messianic and traumatic vision of the "angel of history" in Walter Benjamin (Wolin 1994), the critique of technology in the essays of Martin Heidegger (1977), and, as we have seen, the analysis of religious nationalism in Voeglin. Heller's vision of the future by contrast remains open and her evaluation of modernity on the whole is positive, especially in Can Modernity Survive? She has retained a more optimistic view of modernity and liberal capitalism than other critical theorists, and in this respect has remained more relevant to the world in which we happen to live. Much of the critical rejection of modernity has had to pose, at least implicitly, a nostalgic view of history. Why has she been able to retain this openness to the unfolding of modernity? First it is because her view of post-modernism is not, as it were, substantive, but is epistemological and ethical; it rests on the assumption that valid knowledge is the outcome of dialogue and engagement. It does not involve taking an objective, external and dominant view of social reality, but requires a dialogical engagement with subjects. In rejecting positivism she did not therefore also have to reject a substantive view of modernity as is characteristic of some writers. Secondly, Heller insists that modernity has done much to break down the patriarchal barriers of pre-modem societies. She argues for instance that "modem representative government is the first kind of governance that opens up the avenue to overcoming patriarchy" (1990: 122). Equally, she rejects the typical condemnation of ''the masses," ''the culture industry" and "mass culture," which sociology inherited from Horkheimer and Adorno, noting that criticisms of commercial culture often come from the standpoint of an elitist high culture. Let us tum finally to the problem of intellectual nostalgia (Turner 1987). Cultural nostalgia has played an important role in cultural and critical theory, and was a significant component of European critical theory. Adorno's work on the culture industry is essentially a backward looking criticism of capitalism and art. We might note more generally that many Jewish intellectuals in the twentieth century embraced a nostalgic critique of modem post-Holocaust society. This problem is prominent in the work of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem ( 1991) whose work on the mystical Godhead in Kabbalah mysticism is exemplary. Perhaps the best representative of the nostalgic cultural criticism of modernity in recent years has been made by Philip Rieff (2006) in his notion of three cultures-first, second and third-and the idea of deathworks. With the concept of deathworks, Rieff categorizes artworks and other phenomena that stand at the juncture of two cultures, as one of them is collapsing. A deathwork is a destructive and deconstructive work that signals and contributes to the collapse of a culture. Rieff believes that we are standing at the collapse of a second culture and the arrival of a third culture. The third culture is post-sacred, post-literate

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and post-communal. Recent deathworks are those by Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Piero Manzoni, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The first and second worlds were sacred spaces, characterized by a high literature, and a priestly class. For Rieff, the modem world still has a priestly classsociologists, welfare workers, psychoanalysts and so forth-but it no longer has a sacred space or a literature. Rieff recognizes that the democratization of culture in the third world involves a celebration of illiteracy: "The democratization of deathworks is seen in the rise of armies of principled illiterates" (Rieff 2006: 92). However, the implication of his nostalgic critique is that no social order can survive without some notion of the sacred as a foundation for a shared sense of what constitutes authority. His condemnation of Andres Serrano is possibly the clearest statement in his work on the issue. Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) is seen as a direct and pathetic assault on the sacred that seeks to rob identity of its underpinnings in the sacred. We should applaud Heller's balanced inquiry into modernity partly because she helps us to recognize, in much criticism of modernity, the resentment of a social elite that is in decline in the modem world. She does not belong to the nostalgic culture that characterized the fin-de-siecle pessimism of both the 1890s and the 1990s.

Conclusion: The Return to Aesthetics Heller has retained, from the influence of Lukacs, a dominant interest in aesthetics; her lifelong interest in the work of Shakespeare can be taken as illustrative of this continuity. She had in fact no intention ofbecoming involved in politics, she says, but revolutionary circumstances forced her into that role. She has however departed from her early interests in Marxist humanism as a viable view of humans in society. Unlike Zygmunt Bauman, however, she has not moved from socialism to hyper-postmodernism, even if the return to aesthetics does appear to be characteristic of her generation of intellectuals. In his Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Perry Anderson argues that the characteristic aspect of twentieth century Marxism was that it was the product of a political defeat. The failure of the socialist revolution to spread outside Russia provides the common background to Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness, written in exile in Vienna, to Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, written in jail near Bari, and to the work of the Frankfurt School, written in exile in the United States by Adorno, Marcuse and others. The irony of twentieth-century Marxist thought is that it was sustained primarily by emigres who were forced to work in the heartlands of capitalism-the United States and Great Britain. These societies showed relatively little sign of imminent collapse, whereas the problems of planned economies and the political dominance by the Party were only too evident in Yugoslavia, Hungary and

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Poland. The need for an "alternative in Eastern Europe" to actually existing communism was all too obvious, as Rudolf Bahro (1978) demonstrated. Late Marxist thought is the product of intellectuals who rejected bureaucratic, militaristic, Soviet communism after the invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and after the building of the Berlin Wall. These post-Marxists often drifted into post-modernism as a final rejection of the claims of any universalistic rationalism based on grand narratives. Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard's account of his own slow departure from orthodox Marxism in Peregrinations ( 1988) is, against this background, instructive but unsurprising. Heller's trajectory from the early Marx to postrnodem hermeneutics is therefore a journey shared by other emigre intellectuals from European Marxism, but her social philosophy has allowed her, so far, to avoid sipping with Adorno and his modem disciples at the Cafe Abyss.

References Adorno, T.W. Aesthetic Theory (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Adorno. T.W.1991 The Culture Industry (London and New York: Routledge, 1984). Anderson, P. Considerations on Western Media (London: NLB, 1976). Arendt, H. The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951). Arendt, H. The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Arendt, H. Responsibility and Judgment (New York: Schocken Books, 2003). Bahro, R. The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: NLB, 1978). Berlin, I. Concepts & Categories. Philosophical Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1978). Berlin, I. Karl Marx (London: Home University Library, 1939). Berlin, I. "Does Political Theory Still Exist?" in P. Laslett and W.G. Runciman, eds. Philosophy, Politics and Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962). Brogan, W.A. Heidegger and Aristotle: The Twofoldness of Being (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). Feher, F., Heller, A. and Markus, G. Dictatorship over Needs. An Analysis of Soviet Societies (Oxford: Blackwell. 1983). Grurnley, J. Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex ofHistory (London: Pluto Press, 2005). Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977). Heilke, T.W. Eric Voeglin: In Quest of Reality (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Heller, A. Can Modernity Survive? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Heller, A. The Theory ofNeed in Marx (London: Billing & Sons, 1974). Ignatieff, M. A Life ofIsaiah Berlin (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998). Ignatieff, M. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001).

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Kadarkay, A. Georg Lukacs. Life, Thought and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). Kolakowski, L. Marxism and Beyond (London: Paladin, 1971). Kolakowski, L. "My Correct Views on Everything: A Rejoinder to E.P. Thompson" The Social Register, 1974. Reprinted in My Correct Views on Everything (Chicago: St. Augustine's, 2005). Kolakowski, L. Main Currents of Marxism. The Breakdown (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Konrad, G. and Szelenyi, G. The Intellectuals on the Road to Power: A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979). Laslett, P. "Introduction" Philosophy Politics and Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956). Liebowitz, N. Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985). Lukacs, G. History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1971 ). Lukacs, G. Tailism and the Dialectic: A Defense of History and Class Consciousness (London: Verso, 2000). Lyotard, J-F. Peregrinations. Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Macintyre, A. Against the Self Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1971). Marcus, J. Georg Lukacs and Thomas Mann. A Study in the Sociology of Literature (Amherst: University ofMassachusetts Press, 1987). Markus, G. Marxism and Anthropology (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1978). Mills, K. and Mills, P., eds. C. Wright Mills. Letters and Autobiographical Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Mucha, J. "Poland in Central and Eastern Europe, Polish Sociology within the Central European Context" Journal of Classical Sociology 6.3 (2006): 251-256. Offe, C. Reflections on America. Tocqueville, Weber and Adorno (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). Podhoretz, N. Making It (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). Polony, C. Interview with Agnes Heller http://www.leftcurve.org/LC22WebPages/heller.htrnl, 2007 Rieff, P. My Life Among the Deathworks (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2006). Said, E. W. Out ofPlace. A Memoir (London: Granta, 1999). Satterwhite, J.H. Varieties ofMarxist Humanism. Philosophical Revision in Postwar Eastern Europe (Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992). Scholern, G. On the Mystical Shape ofthe Godhead. Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah (New York: Schocken Books, 1991 ). Szelenyi, I. Socialist Entrepreneurs. Embourgeoisement in Rural Hungary (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). Thompson, E.P. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press, 1978). Tormey, Simon. Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern (Manchester University Press, 2001 ). Turner, BryanS. "A Note on Nostalgia," Theory, Culture and Society, 4.1 (1987): 147-156. Turner, Bryan S. "British Sociology and Public Intellectuals: Consumer Society and Imperial Decline" British Journal of Sociology 57.2 (2006): 169-188.

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Turner, Bryan S. Vulnerability and Human Rights (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). Turner, Bryan S. "The Sociology of the Body" pp. 90-97 in Bryant, C.D. and Peck, D.L., eds. 21'' Century Sociology: A Reference Handbook (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2007). Turner, Bryan S. and Rojek, C. Society and Culture. Principles ofScarcity and Solidarity (London: Sage, 2001). Waldron, J., ed. Nonsense Upon Stilts. Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (London: Methuen, 1987). Williams, R.R. Hegel's Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Wolin, R. Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1994). Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Hannah Arendt: For Love ofthe World (2"d Edition) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

Chapter 3.

Agnes Heller's Theory of Modernity Peter Beilharz For Agnes, with affection Over the last twenty years there has been a sea-change for radicals, and a radical semantic shift with it. These days everybody talks about modernity. Modernity includes capitalism, but is not exhausted by it. Sometimes we call our moment postmodern, though no longer with much enthusiasm, more as a statement of fact or an attitude. But then, twenty years ago, the key signifier was capitalism. This indicated the residual power of Marxism, however radical. For period Marxism, into the eighties, all social problems were structural symptoms of the crisis of capitalism. These days, we are back or fmward with Weber, who understood full well that modernity was our fate and that capitalism was its most fateful force. This Weber, via LukAcs, was brought back to us by thinkers like Agnes Heller. Heller's contribution to rethinking modernity as modernity has not been alone, but it has been vitally influential without gaining much formal recognition for its influence. The fact that we now routinely speak of being modern or culturally postmodern owes a great deal to her work. But let us begin by stepping back, or to the side. For there were obviously others involved, and one other in particular: Heller's life-partner, Ferenc Feher. Agnes Heller's vast project includes fascinating work on the emotional division of labor between the sexes (Heller 1982/3). The relationship between her perspective and Feher's is bound to be complex, but it is tempting to say as a first characterization that Heller focuses on the bright side of modernity and Feher on the dark side. Certainly a strong motif in Heller's work is that we "choose ourselves," whereas Feher's temper is more fateful, as in his extraordinary essay "In the Bestiarium" (Feher 1987). Feher and Heller wrote together and separately. One of the key essays to be discussed here, "Class, Modernity, Democracy" (1983/1987), was collaborative. Another key work in the critique of modernity, Dictatorship Over Needs (1983) was published together, as well as with Gyorgy Markus, though with separate and distinct contributions. Yet the methodological message of Dictatorship Over Needs is loud and clear: Soviet-type societies, neither capitalist nor socialist but sui generis, also offer a distinct path in modernity which is politically rather than economically constituted in its derivation. This is one theme upon which each of these thinkers emphatically agreed. Their contributions are written by each independently of the other, though sometimes the hand is hard to tell.

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To set the mood, consider the essay by Feher entitled "The Status of Postmodernity." Heller views the sociological character of the diagnosis of modernity as uncontroversial, an emblem of even the most ordinary empirical sociology. Feher suggests that the postmodem, in contrast, is neither a historical period nor a trend with well-defined characteristics. Postmodernity, he says, is the private, collective time and space, within the wider time and space of modernity, delineated by those who have problems with or queries addressed to modernity and artistic modernism; by those who want to take it to task, and by those who want to make an inventory of modernity's achievements as well as its unresolved dilemmas (Feher 1991). The postmodem pluralizes spaces and temporalities; it evokes the sense of "being after." Twenty five years after the postmodem controversy, Heller's response is historical or at least situational. Postmodemism is a kind of cause celebre into the eighties; its progressive style and avant-garde self-consciousness are entirely reminiscent of early modernism's self-importance (Heller 2007). Nevertheless, theremaining issue, after all the fuss has died down, is that the postmodem interpretation of modernity has replaced the modernist interpretation of modernity; that is, we now see ourselves differently than we did before. Perhaps we simply expect less, these days, than we did in the sixties. Postmodem is also, therefore, post-Marx. Yet Marx remains central, as Heller acknowledges in "Marx and Modernity" (1984), though here Marx also acquires a fascinating intellectual travel companion: Niklas Luhmann. In this context, Heller volunteers seven theses on Marx (not eleven). Again, she takes modernity as an obvious challenge, the problem par excellence of contemporary social theory, which Marx manages remarkably to anticipate, though simultaneously to misconstrue. Modernity is dynamic and future oriented; economic expansion and industrialization comprise its main features, though it is also rationalized and functionalist in character. Science, rather than religion, becomes the basis of the accumulation of knowledge. Traditional customs and habits are dismantled, uncloaked, and traditional virtues are lost. Certain values become universalized, while canons of creation and interpretation dissolve and, finally, the concepts of ''right" and "true" become pluralized (Heller 1984: 44-45). Heller weaves her theses around these claims. Marx was indeed a modernist; this not least because he did not entirely identify industrial capitalism and the modem, for to equate these would be to leave out socialism. Industrialization, in this Marx-contra-Marx view, is therefore logically a larger concept than capitalism; this is why, and how, capitalism self-revolutionizes itself into communism in Marx's later worldview. At the same time, however, Marx's logic points backward as well as forward, for the image of the utopian society of direct producers precedes his diagnosis of capitalism as modernity. Rationalization, in contrast, we associate historically with Weber, though as Heller proposes, Marx anticipated this as well, which explains Lukacs' magical synthesis of the two streams in History and Class Consciousness (1923). In Marx's case, the prime carrier of the process of rationalization is factory labor. Functionalism enters as the principle of economic organization shifts from status to function performed, which is also to say that capitalist classes are mutually constitutive; this is why Das Kapital, despite its author's best intentions explains not revolution but reproduction. Revolution in Das Kapital is a conceptual trick, which covers over

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the later realization (as in Hannah Arendt) that Marx's essential failure was to develop a theory of politics at all. Luhmann plays the role of the joker in this story, for he is anti-Marxist rather than Marxist, yet through him, Marx also becomes a systems-theorist. The joke is on Marx, for Luhmann. Not only class or economy but all of culture is functionalized. Marx unwittingly substitutes a modern social theory for a pre-modern, transitory one; but this science then remains, all revolutionary claims to the contrary notwithstanding (Heller, 1984: 45). The text which lies behind these claims is the most apparently systematic essay ever published by Feher and Heller, "Class, Modernity, Democracy," the style of which even reads like a scientific manifesto. This is the place where Feher and Heller open up the idea that modernity is best understood as a period and region characterized by three interlocking logics, those of capitalism, industrialization and democracy (Feher and Heller, 1983/1987: 201). Capitalism might expand throughout modernity, but this historical expansion could never be conceptually rendered as primary or all-explanatory. Capitalism struggles with democracy, and the logic of industrial expansion does not always coincide with the private prerogatives of capital. The result is that In our view, modernity is a dynamic (in other words, unstable) coexistence of these different trends, in proportions varying from one society to the other, rarely in harmony, rather in more or less constant collision. Any radical position which embarks on explaining the vast period called modernity has to account for all three factors and their interrelations. A monocausal explanation of any kind is either a self-delusion or an ideology (Feher and Heller 1983/1987: 202).

Like capitalism, Marx is therefore placed within modernity, not the other way around. Moreover, viewed in terms of historical sociology, the theorem anticipates the more recent project of alternative or multiple modernities; for again, the experience of the Soviet Union has to be placed within this conceptual constellation, as does the disaster of Nazi modernity-democracy, in both cases, being submerged by particular logics of industrialization, politics by anti-politics. Fifteen years later Heller returns to these themes, though of course they are also constant for her. Having written various installments of theory, A Theory of Instincts, A Theory of Feelings, and A Theory of History, she then publishes A Theory of Modernity in 1999 (Beilharz 2003). The mood has changed since the pioneering 1983 essay; the addressee has changed, and the voice has become more fully postmodem, this signaled nowhere better than in the lines which close the book: "Postscript: perhaps I have answered too many questions-more than I should have. If this is so, please re-translate my answers into so many new questions" (Heller 1999: 235). Heller presents her book as a personal theory, one theory of modernity among others. It is a generous, rather than demanding book, though all Heller's writing also makes its demands on us as readers (for postmoderns in a hurty, a condensed essay version of its core theses appears in Thesis Eleven 75, 2003). The approach is autobiographical as well as philosophical, but it is also intuitive. The experience of totalitarianism is central to it. Heller chooses three primary interlocutors: Hegel, Marx and Weber. Weber appears here as the first swallow of the postmodern trend, this even though he is also more fully modem than either Hegel or Marx. In her

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self-understanding, this book can also be seen as the last installment of a trilogy, the earlier volumes of which were A Theory ofHistory and A Philosophy ofHistory in Fragments. Yet this trilogy only appears so after the fact. As she explains here, the destiny of modernity became the major shared theoretical concern in her collaboration with Feher. Feher's early death put an end to other plans, which were only to be revived in the middle nineties due to the enthusiasm of others for it, in Caracas, in Pisa, and in New York. So there emerged a need for the settling of accounts. Heller's voice here is firm, well-considered, but also paradoxical. Consider this: Postmodemity is not a stage that comes after modernity, it is not the retrieval of modernity-it is modem. More precisely, the postmodem perspective could perhaps best be described as the self-reflective consciousness of modernity itself. It is a kind of modernity that knows itself in a Socratic way. For it (also) knows that it knows very little, if anything at all (Heller 1999: 4).

Marx's utopia, now, is simply too far away. For high modernism legitimated modernity with the future, not the future of the present but of a distant future allegedly incipient in modernity itself from its gestation onwards. The result of this pursuit of Heaven, however, was the achievement of Hell (Heller 1999: 81). So here, the spirit of Kierkegaard hovers, not the Owl of Minerva-if modern thinking is paradoxical, then postmodem thinking more so. Yet the path of the narrative is also historical, with Hegel as the spirit of the eighteenth century, Marx as the dream of the nineteenth, and Weber as the sober anticipation of the twentieth century. Now Heller revisits the subject matter of her earlier essay on Marx and modernity. "I will sum up Marx's modernist concept of modernity (chiefly capitalism) in eight theses ... "(Heller 1999: 31). The same motifs follow: modernity is dynamic and future-oriented, rationalized, functionalist, scientized, detraditionalized, canons of creation and interpretation erode, concepts of right and true are pluralized. Thesis 8 is new: The modern world is inscrutable, and human existence is contingent (Heller, 1999: 33). Commodity fetishism, here, exemplifies the modem experience of disorientation; the newly disenchanted world is simultaneously re-enchanted. Marx is a systems-theorist after all. Weber, in comparison, pluralizes worldviews and fates-we are fated to choose our own gods, history does nothing for us. The competing logics of modernity, like the Weberian value spheres, cannot be reduced to one another. Postmodern or contemporary creatures understand themselves as visitors in a place and time of which they know little and where they can only do small things (Heller 1999: 39). Of course, this is confessional, too; this is where Agnes Heller stands, and we with her. A Theory of Modernity proceeds to detail not only the sensibility of modernity but also its sense. Heller now distinguishes between the dynamics of modernity and the modern social arrangement (Heller 1999: Ch. 3). The dynamics of modernity precede the epoch; they reach back to Athens. They are reframed by Enlightenment and romanticism, each of which also needs its other. Marx's infamous "all that is solid melts into air'' signals the impossible dream of Enlightenment, present or perhaps future alone, without past. For romanticism, in contrast, not at that is solid melts. Life is not a technological problem to be solved: it needs to be lived (Heller

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1999: 44-45). The dynamics of modernity are both destructive and self-destructive at the same time. The dominant modem social arrangement, in this context, is the ever-changing status quo. The modern social arrangement includes the distribution of social positions, the social division oflabor, and so on. This is Luhmann's distinction, though not only his, between stratified and functionalist social models. Stratified societies are governed by prescriptive status models-1 am my father's son, my mother's daughter, bound by the time and place of my birth. The modem social arrangement, in contrast, is performative; presidents are not, normally, begot by presidents. Modernities, consequently, are mixed; some will have the formal institutions of modernity without the dynamics; but at the same time, there will never be any "perfect modernity" (Heller 1999: 52). Heller distinguishes between three logics of modernity: the logic of technology, the logic of the functional allocation of social positions, and the logic of politicat' power. This is Heller's personal perspective: modernity is not to be seen as a homogenized or totalized whole, but as a fragmented world of some open but not unlimited possibilities. Further, these logics do not operate like natural forces. They develop because they are developed by historical actors or agents (Heller 1999: 67). Thus, for example, the essence of technology is not technological. It does not reside in the machine, in the thing. It resides in the way people think and operate (Heller 1999: 69). But unlike Heidegger, Heller will not totalize this view. For Heller, the one single dominant imaginary institution of world explanation in modernity is not technology but science. Technology elevates science to its position of dominance, not the other way around. But there is also more than one imaginary institution in the modem world (Heller 1999: 70). Technological imagination, for example, coincides in modernity with historical imagination. Heller's second developmental logic of modernity encompasses the logic of the division of social position, functions and wealth. It could also be called the logic of civil society. It includes the idea of modernity; however, this idea is never attained. Moreover, it depends on the contestation of justice. At this point, Heller takes a sideways glance at Soviet-type modernities. Soviet type modernity functionalizes social arrangements, yet it outlaws the contestation of justice. As a result, the three logics of modernity present in Soviet-type societies behave not just differently, but differ essentially from the three logics under liberal democracies (Heller, 1999: 83). Liberal democracies have a greater capacity for survival because they couple the market with private law and human rights. Market, here, indicates in the first instance the labor market. The labor market means that it is in the market that men and women allocate themselves by choosing or finding a place in the hierarchically structured institution (Heller 1999: 84). With Simmel, now against Marx, Heller proposes that monetarization has contributed essentially to the destruction of the pre-modem, prescriptive social arrangement. Modernization rests on monetarization. This is one key difference setting apart European and American models of modernity. Europe's stronger residual pre-capitalist traditions explain both the welfarism of its state institutions and the persistence of some leftovers of socialist language. Romantics, of course, abhor this development to monetarization. The limit of their perspective is in its holiness-in its presumption that the point of comparison is not past and present, but present and imaginary future, or utopia (Heller 1999: 86). The upside of the situation is equally apparent. Monetarization frees men and women from personal dependency. Mone-

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tarization is no guarantee of dignity, but it does offer increased freedom (Heller 1999: 87). Yet some threads of the argument connect us to the past, and so Heller persists in arguing that at the same time monetarization is accompanied by the homogenization of needs structures into "alienated" needs. She writes: I use the Marxian expression of 'alienated' needs because I find it fitting. Needs are alienated if they are superimposed on men and women who then become obsessive, working as a kind of compulsion. Systems of needs sold by the media and forms of life are also superimposed on the single person; they become effective through imitation (Heller, 1999: 90).

More free than before, but never yet quite free, we are bound to remain dissatisfied. The members of the underclasses are not the only citizens who carry the weight of social domination and oppression, but they are the most significant (Heller 1999: 93). Modernity never reaches perfection or an equilibrium of social inclusion. Enter the third logic of modernity: political power, or domination. The state forms of modernity include totalitarianism, liberalism, and modem democracy. Bolshevism does not exhaust totalitarianism, but pioneers it. The secret of the totalitarian state is the totalitarian party, in tum pioneered by Lenin (Heller 1999: 104). Totalitarianism is based on the prohibition of pluralism; this is its organizing principle. The modernity of totalitarianism is evident in this, but also in its basis in modem technology. German fascism, and to a lesser practical extent Soviet communism, are clearly entwined by the technological capacity and will-to-power of modernity. Yet, it is not the factual employment of technological devices but the mobilization of technological imagination that essentially matters. Gas chambers are not employed because they are available just like guns, but because their employment appears as a case of problem solving (Heller 1999: 106).

Nazism specializes in the rational pursuit of efficiency in murder. "The question is the productivity of mass murder, the per capita expenditure (in money and effort) of the task of murder" (Heller 1999: 106). This technological problem which the Nazis set themselves first had to be set, and this task was not set by the technological imagination. The problem here becomes a technological problem as the result of translation through an ideological system, in this case that of Nazi ideology. Modem democracy seeks to limit, or actually succeeds in limiting totalitarian possibilities because it combines majority rule and representation, even if all states contain totalitarian capacities at the very same time. The main value ofliberalism is freedom; the main value of democracy, in contrast, is equality (Heller 1999: 109). Modem liberal democracies, as the juxtaposition implies, rest on a struggle or tension between the two principles. There is simultaneously an ongoing war between the legal and illegal use of violence. In this context, Heller turns to the discussion of culture and civilization.

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Agnes Heller's contribution across a life's work probably deserves to be called philosophy rather than sociology, though its sociological dimension and sensibility is inescapable. This is perhaps one point of contrast between her work and that of Zygmunt Bauman, best known for his part in critical sociology. The connections between the two are apparent, though they are not entirely synchronized. The above-mentioned discussion of Nazism in A Theory ofModernity crosses over with and amplifies Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman 1989). At this point of her text, Heller's path parallels that of Bauman's earlier Culture and Praxis (Bauman 1973). Like Bauman, Heller identifies three concepts of culture: high culture, cultural discourse, and, following Markus, the anthropological concept of culture (Heller 1999: Ch. 8). Modernity differs from other cultures or cultural formations in that it is omnivorous. Here Bauman is momentarily her interlocutor, especially with the ghostly image of the shift from gamekeeper to gardener and industrial farmer (Heller 1999: 143). Yet for all the abundant legislators, there must also be interpreters. For all the omnivorous modernism, there must still be nostalgia, utopia, the sense that the future could indeed be different from the past. The concept of civilization also divides, this time into technological and moral dimensions; only here the system of reference is everyday life rather than abstraction. Here there is what Heller calls a ''pendular movement" between conformism and chaos. This pendular movement is also evident in historical judgment and historiographical controversy. Heller's example, unsurprisingly, is in the contested interpretations of Nazism or Bolshevism (though the former prevails). Two decades ago, according to Heller, technological imagination was identified as the major issue, this trend exemplified by Bauman's work. Now, in reverse trend, the "historical imagination" explanation gathers influence once more. But alongside this, a new trend emerges, which emphasizes the total contingency of the emergence of totalitarian states and their survival (Heller 1999: 161 ). Now Heller's book opens like a flower, to discuss time, space, place and home, justice, happiness, perfection, authenticity. So A Theory of Modernity closes with an ethics of personality. Happiness is elusive for moderns not least because it is subjective, yet remains ineffable. The elusive nature of happiness comes to be felt as a deficit. But the modern condition is, as Heller puts it, still the human condition (Heller 1999: 226). With K.ierkegaard, we have to choose ourselves, lest others choose on our behalf. Perhaps this is a sociology, too, and not only a philosophy, and this not only because it evokes David Riesman's Weberian distinction between the innerdirected and outer-directed personalities who together make up The Lonely Crowd. Agnes Heller's is a philosophy, or sociology of contingency, but it is not only that. Contingency occurs in time and place, and it is framed by traditional residues as well as by technological and historical imagination. Tucked away in a footnote at the end of the text we find the following thoughts, no doubt also framed by place, time, and circumstance, from Budapest to Melbourne to New York, and back to Budapest again. It is not contingent which authors and works become 'famous,' or prescribed reading, or themes for conferences, and quoted many times; but it is entirely contingent which do not. There are at least ten times as many authors who are neither worse nor less interesting than those who have 'made it,' and yet they remain entirely unknown, and rarely published. It becomes important, for example, where one happens to be

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Chapter 3 born. A man or woman who is born in Paris has a thousand times greater opportunity to become prescribed reading than a person born in Australia. Whom one knows, who is quoting someone, and who meets whom (by accident) are also important factors of selection. And, in addition, it is often the case that the world famous too, are dancing, symbolically, just for one summer (Heller 1999: 283 n.l9).

Agnes Heller has danced for so many summers, in so many places and worlds, never to be idolized, never perhaps sufficiently fashionable for publishers and impresarios, too stubbornly independent, speaking in her own voice as well as through those of her chosen interlocutors, Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marx, Weber, and the others, with Ferenc Feher, and after him. She has always been marginal, in one sense or another; always self or inner-directed, yet so willing to share and with such a wealth of wisdom to convey. The dancer is the dance. Play on.

References Bauman, Z. Culture as Praxis (London: Routledge, 1973). Bauman, Z. Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity, 1989). Beilharz, P. "Budapest Central: Agnes Heller;s Theory of Modernity" Thesis Eleven 75 (2003). Feher, F. "In the Bestiarium" Eastern Left, Western Left, Feher and Heller, eds. (Oxford: Polity, 1987). Feher, F. "The Status of Postmodernity" The Grandeur and Twilight of Radical Universalism, Feher and Heller, eds. (New Jersey: Transaction Press, 1991). Feher, F. and Heller, "Class, Modernity, Democracy" Eastern Left, Western Left. (Oxford: Polity, 1987). Feher, Heller and Markus, eds. Dictatorship Over Needs (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Heller, A. "The Division of Labour Between the Sexes" Thesis Eleven 516 (1982). Heller, A. "Marx and Modernity" Thesis Eleven 8 ( 1984). Heller, A. A Theory ofModernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Heller, A. (2007) "What is Postmodem: A Quarter of a Century After?" Moderne begreifon. Magerski, R. Savage, C. Weller, eds. (Wiesbanden: Deutsche Universitiits Verlag, 2007).

Chapter 4.

Why Does Agnes Heller Matter? Political Action, Social Change and Radical Politics in the Twenty-First Century Simon Tormey Among major intellectual figures of recent decades Agnes Heller is surely one of the most versatile. Her contribution ranges across numerous disciplines and subfields from sociology and aesthetics to literary theory, philosophy and political theory. I suspect, however, that history will record Heller's contribution to political thought as deeply situated in the context and time that shaped her work, diverse and eclectic though it is. This context is the dark times of communist Central Europe and more or less everything she has written can at one level be read through the prism of being a critical liberal intellectual in a time and place where this produced the most extraordinary existential pressures. Heller is above anything else a product and critic of totalitarianism in all its guises. Many of her key works are either tacit or explicit critiques of totalitarianism; commentaries on the nature of and potential for resistance to overwhelming power or explorations of normative alternatives to all forms of totalitarianism ranging from radical socialist utopias to constitutional democracy. Her work is suffused with a concern to safeguard the individual against arbitrary power, best exemplified by really existing communism. Like Arendt, Kolakowski, Havel and indeed an entire generation of Central European intellectuals, her work will forever be associated with the struggle against communism. But now that communism has gone, or is on the wane, does this mean that Heller's own work should be read historically, that is, as a distinct response to a particular moment in modernity associated with the march of world transforming ideologies such as communism? Is there a future for the political thought of Agnes Heller? There are several responses to this question. The first and most obvious is to note the strong normative thrust of one or other aspect of Heller's work. A good example of this is the work of Angel Rivero, who argues compellingly that Heller should be read as a neo-republican thinker who gives us some of the resources we need to reconceptualize republicanism under postmodern or late modern conditions (Rivero 1999). Others (myself among them) reach back to her humanist work for resources to breath new life into libertarian or humanist socialism (Tormey 2001). Others are interested in Heller's democratic theory, her theory of citizenship and so forth (Kammas 2007). My suggestion in this paper is perhaps more counterintuitive and runs against the grain of these responses. In my view, Heller's greatest contribution is indeed as critic and chronicler of totalitarianism and of the possible modalities of resistance to it. This is not, as my comments above imply, to say that we should be reading Heller historically, or as rooted in a particular moment ofmoder45

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nity. On the contrary, I think her critique of totalitarianism, of powerlessness and thus the necessity as well as desirability for individualized or everyday resistance, is highly relevant for describing the options open to the concerned citizen under contemporary conditions. Let me explain further. The paradox of the mainstream reception of Heller is that it accepts Heller's own assessment of the historicity of totalitarianism and thus of the binary between democracy and actually existing socialism. I think a more compelling way of reading Heller is produced by insisting, contra Heller, that today's liberal democracies share rather more in common with totalitarian systems than Heller in her latter work admits. Today's "democratic citizens" are, as Heller herself used to argue, largely passive spectators in a process that is far from open and transparent. Those who share the same care for the world, for equality, for the condition of "everyman," as does Heller, have been excluded from mainstream or official politics, dominated as it is by narrow sectional or corporate interests. Progressives find themselves at the margins and marginalized by the narrowing of the terms of political debate, by the ramping up of security threats against ''radicals" and "extremists," by a repressive tolerance that excludes non-conformist views whilst defending "freedom." Thus we need to repeat Heller, in the sense that her work on totalitarianism retains a relevance to understanding the dynamics oftoday's democratic systems and the artificial forms of participation and citizenship they maintain. We also need Heller because as a theorist of resistance in and of everyday life, her work offers resources for understanding why marginalized and excluded citizens behave as they do. It also offers resources for exploring the potential that lies within citizens for prefiguring and creating forms of autonomy that are fully consonant with Heller's humanistic view of the needs and values of the many-sided individual. In short, we should see Heller's work not merely as of historical interestbound up with the Cold War problematique-but as a theory of everyday politics following in the footsteps of, among others, Stimer, Tolstoy and Vaneigem (Gardiner 2000). One might also add that this approach provides, importantly, an alternative account of how to read resistances and the possibilities they contain to the dominant or fashionable left alternatives. I am thinking here for example of Zifek whose lauding of the act that "carves the field" and institutes a "new truth" is all form and little substance (Zizek 2002; Robinson and Tormey 2005), as well as of Hardt and Negri's politics of the "multitude." But I am also thinking ofLaclau and Mouffe's ''post-Marxism," which represents a gesture similar to Heller's response to the crisis of Marxism (Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Tormey and Townshend 2006). In particular, their advocacy of the need to work in and on democracy to produce a practicable form of socialism follows in the footsteps of the great socialist thinkers of the nineteenth century and is redolent of Heller's later political writings (Feher and Heller 1987; Heller and Feher 1988). However, this is not the Heller I think we should be interested in. It is Heller the critic of powerlessness who is at stake here. Powerlessness undercuts these strategies. It induces its own style of politics: subterranean, "disorganized," concealed, and seemingly without logic or rhythm (Cohen and Taylor 1992; Scott 1992; Vaneigem 1994). This, it seems to me, is an apt description for today's resistances; as opposed to the politics of the Spectacle-the politics of the powerless.

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From Democracy to Totalitarianism At one level, to identify the contemporary problematique as the overcoming of powerlessness is objectionable, provocative and quite possibly absurd. How can we credibly compare mature, relatively stable pluralistic systems with communism, a system that is renowned for its brutality towards dissenters, for the cowering mendacity of its leaders and the sheer bullying irrationality of a command planning system that, in the name of satisfying needs, produced deep systemic scarcity, miserable working conditions and environmental catastrophe? Compare such a state of affairs with liberal-democratic welfare systems, governed by the rule of law and a minimum respect for human rights, pluralistic and open debate, governmental accountability and so forth. What could the connection possibly be? For the early Heller (1960-1980) little distinction could be drawn between capitalism and communism in terms of where it left the individual. Everyday Life reminds us of the essentially Lukascian character of her critique of advanced capitalism (Heller 1984). Here we encounter liberal-capitalism as a world seeped in commodity fetishism, reification and anomie. In an account that echoes the similarly bleak prognostications of contemporaries such as Marcuse, Vaneigem, Debord and Baudrillard that were largely inaccessible to Heller, she reminds us that capitalism is a world of appearance, a world where nothing is as it seems and where the individual is compelled to look outside of the system and its mediated control over "reality" for the necessary resources to mount a critique of it. One must thereby begin to exemplify or demonstrate in one's bearing and comportment the possibility of "another world." On Heller's terms this task was a necessarily individualized process. Groups, movements, classes and other collective entities cannot think, imagine, and expand the horizons of possibility. This is the work of the conscious mind, brought to awareness of the contradiction inherent in the promises of today set against the reality of a miserable, exploited and alienated existence. It is this disjuncture between the promise and the reality provoked through exposure to materials ("for itself objectivations," as they are unpromisingly translated) that sets off a chain of events that evokes the chrysalis-like reemergence of the Particular person as the Individual person-and by extension of what Vaneigem will term the "revolutionary in everyday life." Everyday resistance is not then an "individualistic" response to the problem posed by Marx as to how social transformation is to be effected. What it represents is the realist's response to the scenario that Marx failed to entertain: the perpetuation of capitalism fuelled by increasing demand and the ability of capitalists to make us want the products they create. As a heterodox critic, Heller was a lot less persuaded of the "inevitable" collapse of capitalism and thus sought resources from within the social totality to mount a critique of it, and to begin the task of assembling groups of committed, self-aware individuals to social transformation in the name of what would variously be described as "libertarian" or "humanist" socialism, "radical democracy," and so forth. In later years Heller's gaze would fall upon forms of powerlessness induced by the system that had periodically silenced her in her formative years, namely the system of communism. To Heller, as for other critics of neo- or post-totalitarian

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systems such as Havel, the contrast between democratic and totalitarian systems is marked at two distinct levels: the public-institutional and the private-everyday. As regards the former, totalitarian systems are closed, inward looking systems based on a single social rationality. As Heller and her colleagues explain in Dictatorship Over Needs, the Budapest School's most developed account of totalitarianism, the social rationality of communism is different than that of Nazism, in that it concerns the nature of human needs, as opposed to human racial characteristics (Feher, Heller et al. 1983). Communism promotes the idea of production for need rather than profit. Yet as they explain, unless planners are able to interpret what people's needs are, then it is impossible to plan, and the market will quickly reassert itself as the only workable basis for establishing who should get what. Thus the need to enforce this maxim of human needs compels the regime to close down the sphere of contestation and to manufacture the necessary "consensus" that will allow the planning process to take place. Social rationality can brook no argument, and thus democratic debate is snuffed out. A necessary consequence of the domination of a single rationality is the weakening, if not collapse, of the distinction between public and private under totalitarian conditions. What is ordinarily described as private becomes public and vice versa. Criticism assumes a public character, whilst the need to conform to social imperatives snuffs out the meaningful exercise of a private or autonomous existence. Communist citizens have to appear to behave as if they agree with the state, even when it is obvious to anyone with any insight into the nature of powerlessness that they do not. Havel's wonderful and insightful analysis of the Greengrocer in his essay "The Power of the Powerless" is one that could have been furnished by any dissident writing from the inside about communist Europe (Havel, 1985). It certainly chimes with Heller's own account of the system that provokes a Svejkian insincerity on the part of the individual, as a strategy for survival. And this also accounts for the mendacious and hypocritical nature of social life in posttotalitarian conditions, as opposed to classically totalitarian conditions such as those found in certain contexts in the communist bloc and Nazi Germany. In the latter, processes of indoctrination and propaganda are so all-enveloping that it makes more sense to talk about the transformation of the subject herself. But as the periodic uprisings and insurrections that punctuated the history of Eastern Europe show, their regimes were never able to attain these levels of control, relying rather on a complex set of variables, including fear of losing one's job and position, apathy and fatalism, to maintain social control. The net result is a world of banal public pronouncements, outright untruth and deep social anomie. This is the world of what Havel terms ''post-totalitarianism" (Tormey 1995). Deprived of a meaningful public sphere in which the individual can express herself, participate in debate and influence common goals and the collective good, the individual is reduced to a covert struggle to preserve her own integrity as an individual. Collective forms of action and mobilization are in effect ruled out. Any effective resistance has from this point of view to be individual and individualistic, which is to say rooted in the desire to break out of the monotonous conformity to social rationality required by the system and its representatives. Throughout Heller's work then, there is a ribbon of conviction that the individual is the key unit of agency, as opposed to the working class. At the outset this is a thought promoted by consideration of Lukacs's work on the reifying properties

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of commodity fetishism. Capitalism induces such depths of alienation in us that only a heroic effort of Nietzschean proportions will allow anyone to free themselves of generalized alienation. Later on, this accent on the individual is more systematic; it reflects the limitations of any kind of collective politics under conditions of totalitarian control. Once freed of such a context, it is still the individual who holds sway in the Hellerian imagination, but this time as a mainstay of the virtues required in a fully functioning democratic community. However, what undergoes change is the object and manner of individual interactions with the governing system. It is after all one thing to see the individual as offering resistance within and against a closed system either of total reification of the kind promoted by advanced capitalism or a dictatorship over needs, and quite another to see the individual as an advocate for an ongoing expansion of the democratic revolution. It is the former project that I think should interest us in Heller's work and that should provoke reflection on the merits of an individualized notion of resistance in and of everyday life.

Neo-Totalitarianism So what then is the relevance of Heller's analysis of totalitarianism for analyzing contemporary politics? As I think is obvious, Heller's analysis of powerlessness retains a resonance-at the very least. It does so in my view because of the very evident domination of a single social rationality, which according to Heller is the hallmark of oppressive regimes (Feher, Heller et al. 1983). Of course the notion of "social rationality" dominating the social field is one that Heller herself only applies in connection to the "dictatorship over needs," but it is not clear why this should prevent us from using it to describe contemporary liberal-capitalism. As many commentators from both left and right observe, debate over the ends and purposes of social life is attenuated under contemporary conditions by a perhaps more complex amalgam of forces than those at work under communism, but to similar effect: the reduction of meaningful debate to platitude, thereby denuding the public realm of substance and in effect compelling the "concerned" individual into an individualized pattern of interaction that bypass "official" political processes in favor of (dis-)organized forms of behavior-what Michele Micheletti memorably terms "individualized collective action," but what we can also term "everyday resistance" (Micheletti 2003; Tormey 2007). Before getting to the latter points, some justification at least is required for ascribing to liberal-capitalism the same logic as that attributed to communism: the domination of a single social rationality. What could justify such an observation? If, for Heller, we wish to account for the dictatorship over needs, then we should examine the underpinning rationale for the system; and this of course she ascribes to Marx. Marx describes a planned system at various points where production is mediated by the requirement to satisfy need. Given the elasticity of need, it follows that the state has to second guess what need is and then to plan in accordance with a rationality it imposes on the system. As the Budapest School analysis persuasively shows, the net result is the inversion of social rationality as the state in effect has to

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determine for individuals what needs are legitimate and to use these assumptions to guide the planning process-hence of course the epithet "dictatorship over needs" (Heller 1976: 68-69; Feher, Heller et al. 1983; Heller 1985: 285-286). Capitalist systems do not of course have the same social rationality, but if liberal theorists are to be believed, capitalism is certainly itself a kind of social rationality, one that if disturbed in some fundamental way is catastrophic for human liberty and purpose. Adam Smith, Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek are united in the view that it is harmful to see the market, commodity production and ultimately capitalism as "choices" on a par with other forms oflife from which one can choose. The market underpins social rationality, and any deviation from it represents irrationality, malfunction and a perturbation to the "natural order of things." Of course, the idea of the market order as a self-regulating default setting for any kind of human society is a convenient fiction that has been exposed over and again, not least by Marx and more recently by theorists such as Karl Polanyi. The market order may well be a fragile "catallaxy" as Hayek puts it, but it is one that rests upon the exercise of state power both at a national level and increasingly at a global level, where the "Washington Consensus" reigns. How does this affect our discussion? "Social rationality" is as much a discursive device as an abstract concept. The point for Heller is that it sets the parameters of the possible in political terms and beyond that in terms of the individual's place within the system of reproduction. It is this sense of the barely stated necessity and inevitability of a particular way of ordering affairs that bears down on the availability of alternatives in the present. This is felt in a number of different ways that are especially relevant for our purposes. Firstly, it means that the discourse of the political is highly attenuated under contemporary conditions. It was Mrs. Thatcher who insisted that ''There is No Alternative," handily abbreviated to ''TINA"; at the time this evoked howls of protest from politicians and public figures who did not share her wholehearted embrace of the market. Now such a slogan would be perfunctory, precisely because "there is no alternative." Official political discourse operates under what Zifek usefully terms a "Denkverbot," which is to say that one has no need to declaim TINA, which would remind us, perversely, of the reality of an alternative that has to be negated (Zifek 2001). The point is, there really is no alternative, which means that genuinely political discussion can only meaningfully be expressed in utopian terms ("Another world is possible!"), far removed from the ''political" considered as an everyday or routine activity. Public discourse is permeated not by politics-the affairs of the polis-but by ethics and morality. The politicization of the personal and the elevation of particularistic politics of race and gender, and moral dilemmas such as abortion and homosexual marriage, displaces the universal-that which pertains to everyone. Or rather, the universal has been taken hostage by "security" whether in the form of security from "terror" or security from the effects of monstrous developments such as climate change and the transnational migrant tide. The affairs of the polis as described for example in Heller's Radical Philosophy-how we should live together, under which rationality, to which ends-does not figure as an aspect of public discourse (Heller 1984). It is now banal to observe that politics, history and ideology are "dead," but the banality of the observation serves to mask what is just as equally true but less remarked upon: in the void created by the retreat of the political comes the dread jargon of the New Public Management and the preoccupa-

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tion with "delivery" that characterizes "post-democracy," a democracy that has given up on democracy in favor of the efficient administration of things (Crouch 2004). This last phrase should remind us of the curious logic at work: Engels's dictum on the ''withering away" of politics and the democratic state under communism is only fully realized under capitalism. Secondly, market rationality has infected every social relation in a very similar manner to the way in which communism infected every social relation. To take universities as an example, in the UK all courses now need to demonstrate their worth or utility in market terms. Every module comes with a statement of ''transferable skills"; transferable to the context of the market, that is. Applications for research support must carry a statement in relation to the economic benefits of the research to be undertaken. Students are primed from their first days on the importance of building a "personal development record" of use to future employers-and on it goes, largely without critical comment. It is as if the ideal of the autonomous university with education as an end in itself was so obviously fatuous and ill conceived that it didn't merit a second glance. The remorseless juggernaut of market rationality squashes every other meaningful consideration under the wheels of progress. It goes without saying that if relatively self-confident and critical institutions such as universities have succumbed to the logic of the market, then it is hardly surprising to find that other institutions and practices of civil society have as well. The commodity form is relentless and remorseless in its conquest of the spaces and niches of society that were once the preserve of some other value or imperative. Even "counter-cultural" or self-consciously critical discourses succumb to its domination. Thus, for schools in this region of the UK, it is the Mars Corporation that sponsors materials relating to global citizenship. Indeed, one local school has simply been bought out by a local entrepreneur under the "City Academy" initiative that allows business to dictate the entire fabric of the pedagogical experience, usually to the detriment of subjects and activities that do not have a directly "relevant" character-code for non-transferable "skills." Likewise, protests and demonstrations evince the universal commodity form. "Make Poverty History," a supposedly counter-cultural initiative, is underwritten by extensive corporate involvement, its concerts and "happenings" marked by corporate logos, reserved areas for corporate guests, and ubiquitous images of helpful and caring corporations saving the planet from itself. Indeed even the World Social Forum, flag bearer of global civil society, is notorious for its reliance on corporate sponsorship and the infiltration of sessions by those with a stake in preserving as opposed to contesting global capitalism. But the very fact that it exists at all is already testimony to the redundancy of national politics in the face of transnational capital. Capitalism is ubiquitous, and it is this very ubiquity that forces out all other considerations other than profit maximization. Public discourse is a discourse dedicated to utility. The dismal science, as Dickens termed economics, has infected every area of life and activity, from art and music to love, dating, and relations of intimacy. Even marriage and family resembles the firm, with pre-nuptial contracts, separate bank accounts and high divorce rate as novelty wears off, with children as fashion clothes horses and so on (Bauman 2001). In view of the above, it should not be surprising to find, thirdly, that official politics is in danger of collapsing altogether. Party membership and engagement is in free fall across every industrial country. Turnouts are in steep decline, particu-

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lady when elections fail to spark a media frenzy due to a lack of bankable celebrities to sell to the public. Thus, whilst typically presidential and national elections hold up, the level of discourse used to describe these events makes all too clear that these are less political events than beauty pageants. The 2008 U.S. presidential primaries were noted for the complete absence of anything "political" in favor of a banal rhetoric of "hope," "choice," "trust" and "change." In the midst of a media dominated spectacle, politics moves elsewhere. Radical activity of any kind becomes progressively more demanding as market rationality is underpinned by security measures that demand a permanent "state of exception," which in turn makes non-conformist behavior immediately suspicious. It is little surprise to find in these circumstances that terror laws are extended to cover a multitude of activities and positions that have nothing or very little to do with the nature of the threat to which they are supposedly a response. Thus animal rights protestors are routinely targeted for surveillance and detention and those espousing radical religious or political views quickly become the objects of suspicion. Worse, an unholy admixture of neo-liberal restructuring and all-embracing security concerns means that an entire repertoire of behaviors (intransigence, idleness, "slacking," etc.) fall under the category of the "anti-social," the response to which are prohibitions against movement, "Anti-Social Behavior Orders" or ASBOs, disciplinary measures such as compulsory training regimes, workfare, benefit cuts, the denial of social housing and so forth. Increasingly, our societies take on the intrusive, disciplinary, intolerant character of the dictatorship over needs in turn characterized by Heller as a system that seeks "to homogenize a system of values, patterns of behavior and institutional procedures according to the will of the state" (Feher, Heller et al. 1983: 161 ). Liberal-capitalism is less a "statist" project in this sense than a complex "catallaxy" of disciplinary imperatives that are part state, part corporate, but whose effect is similar: the coordination of the social under a single imperative. In this social order, capitalist values and patterns of behavior are enforced, not communist ones. Here sanctions follow not for those who fail to recognize the party as the sole arbiter of the social interest ("Worker's oftQe World Unite!"), but for those who fail to offer the correct "greeting" ("Have a Nice Day!"), to offer the "supersize" option before being prompted, to appear less than enthusiastic and ''positive." Similarly, resistance does not take the form of challenging the ethics and values of the party, but of turning up to work looking overweight and unattractive to customers, being "surly" or ''unhelpful," stealing from the cash till, surfing the internet without permission, downloading porn, losing keys, ''throwing a sickie," and so on (Fantasia 1988; Steele 1992; Townsend 2003; Mulholland 2004). The oppression of contemporary capitalism is not the same as the oppression induced by central planning, but it is still a system that can be extraordinarily humiliating and alienating to those subject to its rationality. And clearly it is a system that is increasingly intolerant of organized, overt, collective forms of dissidence. Hence, the need to rethink resistance as an everyday and individualized activity under contemporary conditions.

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Resistance in and of Everyday Life It is the domination of a social rationality that I believe gives rise to the key phenomenon of contemporary politics that Heller's work helps explicate. This is the passage from "collectivized collective action" to "individualized collective action." The movement has several notable aspects, all of which can be found in Heller's analysis: the importance of exemplification, that is, of unofficial, non- or post-political figures for generating critical consciousness and a sense of the true extent of the miseries that confront the world; the catalyzing effect of individual actions that are generated through acts of solidarity, affinity and allegiance; and finally the emergence of disaggregated social movements that are less collective "molar'' agents than individualized "molecular'' constructs-or in the words of Hardt and Negri-that are a "Multitude" (Hardt and Negri, 2004). Each of these aspects has consequences not only in explanatory terms but also in normative terms as we seek to think about how a genuinely democratic politics can develop in the twenty first century. Let us look at each in tum.

1. The Rise of the "Post-leader"-Exemplification and Social Change As we noted above, Heller's initial critique of capitalism followed the logic of Lukacs's analysis to its logical conclusion. Everyday Life recounts the dilemma of bringing about social change in the context of the commodity fetishism and generalized reification that make it difficult for ordinary men and women to grasp the availability of non- or post-capitalist forms of life. In a world saturated by consumerism and the necessity to work ever harder to keep up with the capitalist lifestyle, "the individual" is too engrossed in the minutiae of daily life to give any thought to the "outside" or beyond. Given these barriers to "dereification," Heller's analysis suggests that social change is most likely to be prompted by the emergence of individuals who, because of their privileged access to a world of objectivations that clarify the options available to us, can play a role as catalysts of social change. Rather like Heller herself, these individuals exemplify or embody the values and beliefs of an alternative social order and thus can act as spurs and intermediaries for others to query or question the existing social system. This exemplification is not suggestive of "leadership" in the formal sense of someone leading a body or organization dedicated to overthrowing the existing order, but a much looser notion of leadership, meant as the capacity to escape conformity and provide a model for others to follow or study. On first reading of this suggestion what comes across is, as I argued in one of the chapters of my own book, a kind of Nietzschean or heroic elitism (Tormey 2001 ). It is easy to find such an account both of the origin and the necessity for "leaders" objectionable when so much of the thrust of radical and progressive thought, including Marxian thought, has come from the notion of the "selfemancipation of the working class" (to invoke The Communist Manifesto). However, there is considerable danger in arriving at such a conclusion and in forsaking the message Heller is trying to get across, one moreover that resonates sharply with today's politics. Though I could not address it previously, a key point here is the

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differentiation between leadership as a function of an ethical stance of resistance to the status quo, and leadership of the kind that we find in "official" politics; the politics of parties and parliaments. Heller's point is that we should forsake the latter for the former. We don't need leaders of parties, indeed we don't need representatives as such; what we need are reminders that it is possible to live according to a set of values and beliefs that are radically at odds with extant values and beliefs-a view that chimes with Tolstoy's earlier remark that "everybody thinks about changing humanity; and nobody thinks about changing himself' (Tolstoy 1990). The position demonstrates Heller's attachment to a model of social change that is very far from being elitist, but one that seeks to avoid elitism through undercutting the role of the politician, the leader, the representative removed from "everyday life" and the concerns and causes of ordinary people. I think it is also a highly pertinent position for thinking about social change. Why? In a century marked by catastrophic social changes, the few successful social transformations have almost all been marked by the key role played by exemplary individuals of just the kind that Heller describes in her text. A largely peaceful process of decolonialization was led by Gandhi, perhaps the most important exemplary political leader of the twentieth century. His Satayagraha movement set the template for non-violent social movements and for the development of strategies of resistance that set great store by juxtaposing an ethics of peaceful collective change to an ethics of violence, confrontation and antagonism, whether perpetrated by those maintaining elite power or by those opposed to it. The same can be said for Vaclav Havel, a fellow Central European dissident under communism. Havel's own modesty, lack of care for the trappings of office, clear ethical stance in relation to the inhumanities of communism and "reluctant" (non-)leadership were key to setting the tone for the immovable force that became the Velvet Revolution in then Czechoslovakia. The relative ease with which the transition from communism to liberal democracy was effected, the minimal loss of life, and joyous sense of unburdening so evident in that country were in stark contrast to virtually every major social transformation in the region over the previous century. Yet it reflected almost precisely the character of the man "leading" it: modest, non-confrontational, earnest. Lest it be thought that such examples are too idiosyncratic or located in the specificities of non-democratic contexts, we need only recall as an example the key role played by exemplary figures in the U.S. Civil Rights and Anti-War campaigns of the late 1960s and 1970s. Would these movements have had the same success without exemplary figures such as Martin Luther King, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez to embody and embolden them? Arguably not-and contrast their role with the more negative "antagonistic" ethics of the militant groups that vied with these figures to "lead" these social movements. As I think is obvious, such considerations are just as important in today's social struggles as they were in previous decades. Across the globe we see how important are exemplary figures who embody in their own dealings with people the ethics they think the rest of us should aspire to embracing. Figures such as Vandana Shiva and Walden Bello lead by example as much as by function of their role as public intellectuals. Perhaps the most obvious and most discussed case is that of Subcomandante Marcos, a spokeperson for the EZLN or Zapatistas. Whilst a commander in an insurgent army cannot claim to be leading a "non-violent" movement in the manner of a Gandhi or a Havel, the ethics he espouses and embodies is

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clearly exemplary in the manner being explored here (Clarke and Ross 1994; Collier, 1999; Marcos, Ortiz et al. 2001; Tonney 2006). Marcos has, for example, long been at pains to explain that the Zapatistas are not a vanguard with leaders dedicated to imposing or dictating a particular fonn of life to those who are represented in passive fashion. The Zapatistas are a force constructed in negation, a nomadic war machine, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, whose function is to prevent their communities being dictated to by outside forces and political figures (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). This is thus an "anti-political" movement dedicated to facilitating autonomous governance, whilst at the same time ''warding off'' the crystallization ofleadership, hierarchy, ideology (Tonney 2004a). More generally, one can see in the politics of the Anti-Globalization Movement (AGM) the same concerns that animate Heller's thoughts on leaders and leadership. This after all is the first movement, or more accurately the ''movement of movements" that has self-consciously rejected leadership of an official kind. The World Social Forum which is the principal forum internationally for radical voices "contesting neo-liberalism" says explicitly in its Charter that it cannot be represented and that consistent with being a genuine open space for dialogue it is a "nonpolitical" space, meaning a space where the nonnal apparatus of political mobilization does not apply. No one may speak for the WSF and there are no leaders. Of course there are very many figures of an exemplary kind who address the WSF, people like Susan George, Noam Chomsky and Ignatio Ramonet (editor of Le Monde Diplomatique), but they do not lead in any official sense. This is a leaderless movement, with exemplary leaders-a paradox fully consonant with Heller's approach, stressing the role of leadership as a vehicle for a different ethics and a different way of being in the world. This kind of leadership seems as pertinent for the twenty first century as it did for the twentieth.

2. Right Here; Right Now: The Individual as an Agent of Everyday Life As is apparent from any schematic overview of Heller's political thought, one of the most striking features of her trajectory in ideological terms is the move from a clearly anti-capitalist and humanist Marxist position, to a libertarian (liberal) or democratic socialist one, to a pluralist neo-republican one that can co-exist comfortably alongside the capitalist economy. However, what is equally obvious is an impatience with any fonn of utilitarian or consequentialist ethics and the defence of a Kantian-derived view of autonomy as requiring us to treat individuals as ends in themselves as opposed to mere means for the achievement of ends, no matter how noble or just the cause. This derives from Heller's critique of Marxism, which over the course of its development has tended to two extremes in ethical tenns, neither of which is of service to those genuinely concerned about changing the world for the better. The first is the insistence with Trotsky that "one has to break eggs to make an omelette"-the very epitome of consequentialism in political terms. The other opposed tendency is a moral and ethical passivity brought about by a belief in an exogenously derived systemic crisis that will "solve" ethical problems by bringing about the collapse of capitalism and a new socialist dawn. This latter position is in effect a fonn of complicity with the existing structure of domination, however defined, for in effect, it rests on underwriting the powerlessness of the individual in

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the face of structures that are apparently impervious to intervention endogenously or from within the logic of the system itself. Inspired by the Kantian Marxists Otto Bauer and Max Adler, Heller's view consistently held through the decades is that we are impelled to act in the "here and now," in the face of injustice no matter how futile or piecemeal our individual efforts may seem in the face of overwhelming power. Such a position is not merely philosophical in origin but one born of life in "dark times," where the possibility for acting collectively is greatly diminished by the oppressive impact of surveillance and overwhelming police power of the kind that characterized life under communism. Once this oppressive weight is lifted, Heller's view does not change, but on the contrary reaffirms the centrality of the individual to any progressive political project. As we remarked above, Heller is not merely a critic of the powerlessness that is the consequence of living under totalitarian conditions, but also of the powerlessness that comes from subordinating oneself to the logic of representation. Like other heterodox Marxists who emerged out of the shadow of orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Castoriadis, Deleuze, Guattari and Vaneigem, Heller always saw representation as a formula for passivity, a kind of ceding of our power to others who are then empowered to act on our behalf (Tormey and Townshend 2006). The mediation of certain representations lauded by others as creating the basis for collective empowerment meant, on the contrary, enslavement to agendas, programmes and ideologies that were effectively beyond the reach of the individual to control or influence-and of course the same went for oppositional politics as for "official" politics, whether communist or liberal-democratic. The effect was the installation of guardians of our "interests," who are removed from critique or questioning. Heller always insisted that there are no objective needs or interests, and thus that the consistent Marxian or left libertarian position was to see interestformation as a procedure requiring democratic participation (Heller 1976; Heller 1987). Later in her career when addressing a liberal democratic audience the focus switched but not the message. Some of her most pungent essays of the 1980s and 1990s were addressed to the "concerned citizen," whose desire to address inequality and injustice moved them to act, as opposed to mandating politicians who acted for her (Heller and Feher 1988; Heller 1990). In doing so, Heller presciently predicted one of the most remarked upon features of contemporary political life, namely the emptying out of official politics, and its displacement by what we have been calling individualized collective action. Increasingly individuals are moving from official modes of participation to unofficial modes. We vote less; we are reluctant to join political parties; to join in "big conversations" or other sanctioned "consultations." We watch less elite-driven news and buy fewer newspapers. The young in particular have decided that politics is "elsewhere." By contrast, we are witnessing an explosion of unofficial and (dis )organised politics, of protests, demonstrations, petitions, hactivism, pinging and blogging, detournement, subvertising (Jordan and Maloney 1997; Danaher and Mark 2003; Notes From Nowhere 2003). One of the most important areas of individualized behavior is ethical or political consumption (Featherstone 2002; Micheletti 2003). Increasingly, we are drawn to make use of the market to evince our values and beliefs through buy-cotting or boycotting--exercising choices for and against corporations and businesses through selecting or ignoring their products. As Heller urged, we are turning our

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backs on the logic of consequentialism and acting here and now. Nor, as she implies, should such gestures be seen merely as a reaction to perceived powerlessness, or in the contemporary case as induced by the futility of trying to change the system through the corporate dominated party political machine. They are forms of empowerment, of taking back the task of changing the world from those who claim to represent our interests, needs, wishes or innermost desires. Again, one cannot help remarking how such a stance resonates under contemporary conditions, whether it be through the emergence of (dis)organized politics, autonomous social centers, disaffiliated and "independent" political initiatives, and the emergence of spaces of a dialogical, horizontal kind, as opposed to parties, groupings and movements of a vertical and hierarchical kind, as per traditional politics. It is as if Heller's admonition to translate feelings of solidarity and concern for others into concrete action had become the (post-)manifesto of the new politics.

3. The Party's Over-Individualizing Collective Action An obvious criticism of everyday life or individualized approaches to analyzing political action and the potential for social change would be that it underplays the importance of collective action. It is certainly true, as we have already noted, that Heller is a stern critic of certain kinds of collective action. The Party form in particular is the barely concealed object of critique in The Theory ofNeeds in Marx, to take one example, and there is a persistent suspicion in her more directly normative work such as Beyond Justice of any collective agent that seeks to advance the collective interests of humanity, considered as something permanent or unchanging and thus beyond formulation and critique. Nonetheless, it is important to resist the temptation to conclude that Heller's work and approach rules out collective action or even that it makes collective action more difficult to conceive and theorize. Rather, it individualizes the problematic of collective action in a manner that is evocative of the work of the Situationists and Deleuze and Guattari, and which helps us to explain the dynamic of non-vanguardist approaches within the AntiGlobalization Movement (AGM). Moreover, it does so in a way that is more consistent and useful to us than rival approaches, such as that of Hardt and Negri, whose own evocation of the Multitude is designed to capture the contemporary problematic: the development of a collective politics that preserves the singularity of the constituent parts-that advances the One at the same moment as the Many. As we have noted, Heller's approach is underpinned by a Kantian ethic, even if in her own work she avoids the transcendental approach favored by neo-Kantians. Autonomy is a key value for Heller, and this in turn means rejecting the view that there is some permanent interest, set of needs or blueprint for happiness that can unproblematically buttress political action. This is not to say that she is opposed to normative thought, and over the course of her career she developed a number of different normative models, from the "Great Republic" through radical democracy to the model outlined in Beyond Justice. But her approach is always qualified in these respects with the need explicitly to frame such models as ''utopias" or suggestions that could evoke discussion, reflection and reformulation. By framing her work in such fashion, Heller avoids the trap of utopian theorizing that lies at the heart of both rightist (Popper) and leftist (Zizek, Stavrakakis) critiques of the concept, whilst opening a space for the imagination, an otherwise disregarded aspect of

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political theorizing (Popper 1966; Stavrakakis 1999; Zitek 1999; Martin 2000). The key term here is "space." Heller's ideal of a collective politics has always been spatial in conceptual design, explicitly in evoking the idea of a republic, implicitly when thinking about the nature of the democracy-to-come, as for example in Radical Philosophy, where she greatly enlarges the scope and extent of the Habermasian public sphere, so that the space of democracy, the agora, becomes a central facet of life under late modern conditions (Heller 1984). Here her work conjoins with other contemporary democratic theorists like Arendt, Lefort and Ranciere; but what is striking about Heller's treatment is the recognition that the creation of such a space is not an accomplishment of modernity, but a potential within it. A properly democratic space, she argues, can only be contemplated on the basis of a thoroughgoing transformation of the system of production, so that democratic discussion can be meaningful. A public sphere denuded of the ability to deliver on its promises turns into the Spectacle-a semblance of democracy without the content of democracy. Thus the task of collective action under democratic conditions is to push the boundaries of democratic space and to create new space, so that deliberation can be made more complete, so that equality and justice become more meaningfully realizable. Once again, one is struck by the degree to which as a description of the means and ends of contemporary politics, these ruminations map into the concerns of contemporary actors. And again, the World Social Forum provides a useful example. The WSF describes itself as an "inclusive space" as opposed to a political party or programmatic body. It is directly prefigurative, in the sense that it seeks to embody a democratic ethos and a commitment to inclusivity-which admittedly it can fall short of. Participants at the WSF do not arrive as delegates, members or as representatives of it, though they may be representatives of movements and campaigns with an affinity to it (again, it is called a "movement of movements"). The point of forums is to create a space where none existed, to give vent to the many specific injustices and inequalities that continue to multiply under the regime of global capitalism, to provide a means of networking, comparing, coming together-as part of a collective cause ("contesting neo-liberalism") which is nonetheless held open to negotiation, reformulation and reexamination. Tempting as it may be to say that the WSF is the space of the Multitude, it is not, for reasons that are implicit in Heller's approach. To Hardt and Negri, the Multitude is a collective agent that is constituted by virtue of the redrawing of the factors of production so as to constitute a global working class. The Multitude is not therefore produced by affinity, affiliation or solidarity, but by the common characteristic of immaterial and affective work (Hardt and Negri 2000). The Multitude is thus a form of agency produced "behind the backs" of those who are held to be constitutive parts of it. In short, it is a new Marxian subject, albeit dressed in contemporary clothes. The Multitude has no need of a space or forum in which to generate collective action; it is always-already constituted as a collective agent. From this point of view, Heller's notion of collectivity is much closer to that of Deleuze and Guattari, who in A Thousand Plateaus articulate the idea of a new "minoritarian" agency based on the interactions of those who are outside of "majoritarian" categories such as the "Multitude," the ''working class," the "oppressed," and so forth. Their collective agency is the unnamable "outside" of readily assailable identities such as these. It is a "becoming-something" and thus a

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mobile, fluid fonn of agency that provokes ideas of self-constitution or immanent constitution as opposed to auto-constitution through the labor process. As for Deleuze and Guattari, so for Heller, agency is contingent and immanent: singularity conjoins with multiplicity in chaotic and complex ways-not in ways that map very readily onto pre-existing identities. The spaces such multiplicities create are what Deleuze and Guattari term "smooth" spaces, as opposed to striated spaces with generals, rules, programs and ideologies (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). A feature of the spaces created by the AGM is often this warding off of "statism," of ceding social and collective power to something outside of itself. Marcos describes the Zapatista zone as "an antechamber" looking into a democratic space, "a world of many worlds, where all worlds are possible" (quoted in Tonney 2006). This idea of a space that is utterly contingent, plastic and immanent is repeatedly invoked in some of Heller's political work, perhaps most clearly in Radical Philosophy and Beyond Justice. It is remarkable that a movement that is often described as a radical break with the past should connect in such direct ways with a thinker whose work is so evocative of the Cold War era.

(By Way ot) Conclusion As a longtime student of Heller's politics, I have been drawn to remark on what I perceived to be its shortcomings as a basis for rethinking radical politics in the twenty first century. I offer this essay less as a reassessment of Heller's work and more as a reassessment of my own interpretation of its strengths and weaknesses. I do this because it has become clear to me that Heller was more nearly right than wrong about modernity; about the centrality of the individual to processes of social change (and I use the plural advisedly here); and about the direction that politics, representation and participation are heading. On the other hand, I also think that she was more right than she later thought (and still thinks). For what becomes obvious is that perhaps the central hope of her later political works (i.e. the work after Beyond Justice), namely that liberal-democracy, or more accurately liberal-capitalism, will provide a fruitful basis for enlarging the sphere of equality and justice and in turn the opportunities for individual flourishing are, at the very least, in danger of capsizing under the pressures of globalization, environmental degradation and eroding human security. It is becoming clear that there is a price to be paid for expanding equality and justice and that this is the sacrifice of the global many to the global few, and of precious resources to capitalist accumulation. The price of continual expansion is the reduction of liberty to "managed consumption." Meanwhile, the cardboard shanty towns, ghettos and barrios of the global metropolis explode in size and number, extending poverty, squalor and unimaginable suffering. On the other hand, Heller's intuition that none of this can be addressed let alone cured by the resuscitation of the Party, the International or some other product of the nineteenth century imagination is surely sound. As now seems clear, ''the working class" may have a sociological reality in very broad tenns, but the idea that this alone will translate the class "in itself' into the class for itself, and hence that the myriad subject positions of the global citizen will be transcended in some

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unifying moment of Aujhebung seems progressively more difficult to contemplate as modernity unfolds. Heller's intuition that modernity would further complicate the image; that it would lead to a proliferation and multiplication of subject positions; that in short it entails a massive process of differentiation as opposed to unification, appears much more compelling in sociological terms. Heller's position is compelling in a normative and political sense as well. What becomes obvious is that if the new politics and the new structures that arise to give witness to it (such as the social forums) are characterized by anything, it is the avoidance ofreductionist teleology of the kind that was such a feature of the modernist imaginary. It is quite significant that the degree to which this politics avoids the evocation of collective subject positions, whether it be in the form of Marcos's careful calls to the peoples of the Chiapas and his multiplication of his own self-identity to reinforce the image of complexity and incompleteness in his own role as post-representative ("Marcos is a gay in San Francisco, a black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe ... "), or whether it be the WSF's studious self-guarding of itself as an inclusive space for dialogue. All around are reminders of the political failure of communism, and of the reductive politics of objective, class or group needs, interests and desires that allowed the left to forget all about the individual and her specific needs, wants and desires. All around are reminders that Heller's instincts were essentially the right ones: that the worst kinds of oppression are caused by the positing of transcendental truths and social rationalities that become immune to criticism; that a failure to allow room for the individual, for idiosyncrasy, for difference to speak will spark cataclysm; and that resistance to oppressions often involves a complex interplay of exemplification, leadership, solidarity and affinity. In helping us to grasp the complexity of the political in all its various dimensions, Heller's work transcends the limitations of its own milieu and historical moment, and takes its place in the canon of liberal, democratic and radical thought.

References Bauman, Zygmunt. The Individualized Society. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001). Clarke, Ben and Clif Ross. Voice ofFire: Communiques and Interviews from the Zapatista National Liberation Army. (Berkeley: New Earth Publications, 1994). Cohen, Stanley and Laurie Taylor. Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life. (London: Routledge, 1992). Collier, G. A. Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas. (London: Food First Books, 1999).

Crouch, Colin. Post-Democracy. (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). Danaher, Kevin and Jason Dove Mark. Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power. (New York; London: Routledge, 2003). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (London: Athlone Press, 1988). Fantasia, Rick. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action and Contemporary American Workers. (Stanford: University of California Press, 1988). Featherstone, Lisa. Students against Sweatshops. (London: Verso, 2002). Feher, Ferenc and Agnes Heller. Eastern Left, Western Left: Totalitarianism, Freedom, and Democracy. (Cambridge: Policy Press, 1987).

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Feher, Ferenc, Agnes Heller, et al. Dictatorship over Needs. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Gardiner, Michael. Critiques ofEveryday Life. (London: Routledge, 2000). Grumley, John. "Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History" Sociological Review 54:1 (2006):194-97. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2000). Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. (New York: Penguin, 2004). Havel, Vaclav. The Power of the Powerless. (London: Hutchinson, 1985). Heller, Agnes and Ferenc Feher. The Postmodern Political Condition. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Heller, Agnes. The Theory ofNeed in Marx. (London: Allison & Busby, 1976). Heller, Agnes. Everyday Life. (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984). Heller, Agnes. Radical Philosophy. (Oxford, New York: Blackwell, 1984). Heller, Agnes. The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). Heller, Agnes. Beyond Justice. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). Heller, Agnes. Can Modernity Survive? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). Jordan, A., Grant and William A. Maloney. Protest Businesses? Mobilizing Campaigning Groups. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). Kammas, A. "Reconciling Radical Philosophy and Democratic Politics: The Work of Agnes Heller and the Budapest School" Critique 35 (2007): 249-74. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. (London: Verso, 1985). Marcos, Simon J. Ortiz, et al. Questions & Swords: Folktales of the Zapatista Revolution. {Texas: Cinco Puntos Press, 2001). Martin, S. "Slavoj Zifek, the Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology" Radical Philosophy 100 (2000): 60-61. Micheletti, Michele. "Global (Sub)Political Representation: The Clean Clothes Campaign and No Sweat Movement" ECPR Joint Workshops. (Edinburgh, 2003). Micheletti, Michele. Political Virtue and Shopping: Individuals, Consumerism and Collective Action. (New York: Palgrave, 2003). Mulholland, K. "Workplace Resistance in an Irish Call Centre: Slammin', Scammin' Smokin' an Leavin"' Work Employment and Society 18:4 (2004): 709-724. Notes from Nowhere, eds. We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism, (London; New York: Verso, 2003). Popper, K.R. The Open Society and Its Enemies. (London: Routledge, 1966). Rivero, A. "Agnes Heller: Politics and Philosophy" Thesis Eleven 59 (1999): 17-28. Robinson, Andrew and Simon Tormey. "A Ticklish Subject? Zizek and the Future of Left Radicalism" Thesis Eleven 80 (2005): 94-107. Scott, James C. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Stavrakakis, Yannis. Lacan and the Political. (London: Routledge, 1999). Steele, J.R. "Carnival, Resistance and Transgression in the Workplace" Communication in Uncertain Times, (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1992). Tolstoy, Leo. Government Is Violence: Essays on Anarchism and Pacifism. (London: Phoenix Press, 1990). Tormey, S. "Not in My Name: Deleuze, Zapatismo and the Critique of Representation" Parliamentary Affairs 59:1 (2006): 138-154. Tormey, S. "Consumption, Resistance and Everyday Life: Ruptures and Continuities" Journal ofConsumer Policy 30:3 (2007): 263-280. Tormey, Simon. Making Sense of Tyranny: Interpretations of Totalitarianism. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Tormey, Simon. Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy and the Postmodern. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 200 I).

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Tonney, Simon. Anti-Capitalism: A Beginner's Guide. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2004a). Tonney, Simon and Jules Townshend. Key Thinkers from Critical Theory to PostMarxism. (London: Sage, 2006). Townsend, K. "Leisure at Work, Who Can Resist? An Investigation into Workplace Resistance by Leisure Service Employees" Journal of Industrial Relations 45:4 (2003): 442-56. Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution ofEveryday Life. (London: Rebel Press, 1994). Zi~ek, S. "A Plea for Leninist Intolerance" Critical Inquiry 28:2 (2002), 542-66. Zizek, S. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, (London: Verso, 1999). Zi~ek, Slavoj. Repeating Lenin. (2001) http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm

Chapter 5.

The Power of Radical Needs Anthony Kammas To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. A radical revolution can only be a revolution of radical needs ... -Karl Marx

Grasped in its fullness, Agnes Heller's concept of radical needs is both an arche and a telos; the above quotes from Marx hint at exactly why. Radical needs mediate between dynamic subjective processes and objective social arrangements in ways that radically open up the wondrous possibility inherent in human existence. In her many explications of the notion of radical needs, Heller often evokes Hegel and Kierkegaard, Plato and Nietzsche, as well as Marxism and existentialism, to better illustrate the complexities of which this concept speaks. This notion, furthermore, has continued to play a central role in her thought, despite the fact that she has undertaken some significant philosophical changes. 1 By revisiting its origins and inner dynamics, therefore, we can gain greater insight into an enduring aspect of her oeuvre. Through such an inquiry into radical needs, we also may reconsider the privileged place of logos, as opposed to eros, in the Western philosophic tradition as it relates to democratic politics. If we recall Plato's critique of democracy in the Republic, one of its key problems is that it abounds with immoderate eros. But where Plato sees cause for alarm, Heller perceives a vast repository of wealth. This wealth springs from historically situated expressions of politically charged eros-or, what she terms radical needs. "Radical need" is a concept whose worth can best be grasped in connection to freedom. Indeed, especially with regard to her political works, one can see how Heller's early formulations of radical needs and a man rich in needs come to ground what she later explains is the foundation that does not groundfreedom (1999: 12). A person or people's desire for freedom, therefore, is what precariously anchors it in time and space. As she explains in A Theory of Modernity, Europe's autobiography begins with the love of freedom. The people of Europe, so the story runs, have been kept continuously oppressed, exploited, enslaved, and frequently tyranny reigned. But the desire

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for freedom has burst out again and again in the great acts and events of liberation and the constitution of liberties throughout European history (1999: 12). But, Heller goes on to explain, if freedom is the principle that founds modem contract society, it is also the principle that can void the legitimacy of such social contracts. This paradoxical condition, she continues, is our modem condition, and it is the task of a critical, reflective postmodem consciousness to think through this paradox. To do so well, it is necessary to grasp how the radical desire or need for freedom has the power to found modem political structures as well as to undennine them. The challenge then is to understand the power of radical needs and their existential relation to freedom. A good place for such an inquiry to begin is with historically situated political struggle. On the one side of this struggle there is an effort to maintain particular social structures, and on the other, an outcry against those structures on account of their inadequacy as compared to some ideal vision of good, ethical, dignified, autonomous, political life. What is important to clarify from the outset is that radical needs are deeply felt though contingent desires, and are not the stuff of deterministic necessity. One can express and pursue one's radical need for freedom from a similarly contingent, oppressive society, but there is no necessary mechanism by which this need will be fulfilled. Rather than formalistic necessity or causality, therefore, radical needs are much more closely related to the dynamic of eros. In this regard, Plato's Symposium is a surer guide than the Republic. In part, Socrates defines eros as a profound desire for what one lacks. It is also conveyed how Diotima (among other things) revealed to him that eros is an intermediary between mortality and immortality. Considering our modem secular sensibilities, it would not be too much of a leap to grasp how radical needs are intermediaries between finite social relations and the infinite possibilities people's imaginations conjure up when they desire freedom. If they are feeling (or, more accurately, suffering) their radical needs, then they already feel a pervasive lack; this lack brings on an appreciation of how their social and existential finitude is alien to their social and subjective needs. People are inspired by the possibilities for fulfillment that await them on the other side of their society's limits, and know that they have only one path before them-to struggle against immediate inadequacy to attain possible fulfillment. Through this struggle, this pursuit of one's radical needs, subjective and social change is created where it did not previously exist. Thus, radical needs bring new expressions of human freedom into the world; first negatively-freedom from subjective and social conditions of lack; and then positively-in new social relationships and structures that fulfill what had been desired. In this specific sense, we can justifiably assert that radical needs make human freedom infinite and immortal? In terms of Heller's thought, we can return to a few early, key texts in which her conception of radical needs is first conceived and elaborated. In Radical Philosophy (1978), Heller defines radical needs as "[ ... ] all needs which arise within a society based on relationships of subordination and superordination, but which cannot be satisfied within such a society. These are needs which

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can only be satisfied if this society is transcended'' (1984b: 138). The first part of the defmition clearly is the generalizing principle-it is difficult to imagine a society without subordination and superordination; this might even be an overarching definition of society. 3 Nor is it likely that even the most equitable society will fulfill all of its members' needs, even if many of them can be fulfilled within its given structure. But the qualifying moment of Heller's definition is also the one which, conversely, is the most pregnant with possibility. Because certain needs arise that cannot be fulfilled by the given social order, they address themselves ipso facto to something beyond what is; such desires, therefore, are at once social forces of negation and creation in potential. As was indicated above, they are the ground out of which theory and praxis aimed at freedom arises; they in fact may be the one and only true ground out of which freedom has ever arisen. Yet to move from one social order to another ultimately adds up to trading an old framework of limitations for a new one. As Nietzsche points out in Twilight of the Idols, "liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions" (§38). Perhaps a starker example of this can be seen in the difference between socialism in opposition and socialism in power; in both the liberal and socialist cases, the desire for transcendence and the act that aims at this desire's fulfillment is at the very heart of Heller's conception. Her various formulations and explanations of radical needs represent (in the full sense of darstellen) a dynamic moment-one that begins with people's desire for freedom becoming flesh and bone, action and enterprise, and yet ends (ideally!) with these people creating a social order that is the concrete fulfillment, and thus negation, of their radical needs. What these people are now left with is an order that reflects their desires and is the embodiment of their conception of freedom-but, to the detriment of all others. For such fulfilled people, the desire for freedom is no longer a prominent star in their new social constellation.4 But history has yet to end with fulfillment: "Every age creates the age that it needs, and only the next generation believes that its fathers' dreams were lies which must be fought with its own new 'truths"' (Lukacs 1974: 13). For Heller (and her Budapest School colleagues) this age of radical needs and political struggle was the turbulent era of really existing socialism.

*** Like many of her contemporaries during the 1960s who located themselves somewhere between Western Marxism and existentialism, Heller finds "man" at the center of alienated everyday life. She explains, Man is born into a world that exists independently from him. This world presents itself to him as a ready-made datum; but it is in this

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Given this condition, the problem she then focused on was how a person's subjectivity is produced and reproduced according to the system's needs; such subjectivity is not free to develop expressions of individual desires. From the perspective of systemic rationality, such freely developed desires would either be inefficient, or worse, possibly antagonistic. Heller explains this dynamic condition through two generalized types of subjectivity-particularity and individuality. The particular person is understood to be overwhelmingly molded by socializing forces into patterns of thought and action that, although man-made, appear natural and immutable. The individual is the person who becomes aware of these external and unessential limitations on her subjectivity, and begins to think and act in a way that negates these constraints. "Individuality," according to Heller, "is a development; it is the coming-tobe of an individual. [... ] But whatever form concrete individuality, or its ideal, takes in a given age, individuality is never complete but is always in a state of flux" (1984a: 15). Heller, therefore, characterizes becoming an individual as a historically contingent event that illuminates real political contradictions between a person and his or her society. Thus, her critique aims at revealing the heteronomy present within people-the internalized, coercive yet productive power of modern society. As opposed to the system's mass production of subjectivity (however diverse it may appear), Heller continually emphasizes "man's uniqueness, his non-repeatability," declaring it to be an "ontological fact" (1984a: 19). The internalized opposition between systemically produced particularity and autonomous individuality forms a highly paradoxical situation as well as a potentially creative field of tension. To some extent, everyday life does indeed need to be reproduced, and normalized or rationalized patterns of behavior do facilitate the smooth reproduction of social norms and institutions that can be generally beneficial. Yet Heller thinks that people also desire a meaningful life in which they can express their uniqueness and actualize their individuality beyond social proscriptions. She holds that an everyday life that is void of (or hostile to) the pursuit of individuality is inhuman, and she explains how modem societies (East and West) have a vested interest in the production of reproducedreproducing forms of subjectivity. Thus, she shows how the overarching logic of efficient social reproduction clashes with the pursuit of individual desires of self-actualization; the fact that both sides of this conflict claim legitimacy on the basis of freedom make this into a social struggle with revolutionary possibilities. 5 Yet, she shows, the Peoples' (or Workers') Democracies, in which class

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struggle and alienation were supposed to be things of the past, stood opposed to individual exercises of autonomy and singular expressions of human dignity. The latter two were precisely the great human wealth that Marx's vision of communism imagined once human pre-history with all its exploitation, scarcity, and need were overcome. That such needs went unfulfilled after the revolution, despite Soviet ideologues' best efforts to convince otherwise, meant that the societies founded to fulfill radical needs stood radically opposed to them. The site of such productive heteronomy, however, is also the ground from which emancipation could emerge. As Heller explains, the initial moment of emancipation would occur internally, where the objective had become the subjective. Immanently, individuality must struggle against and overcome particularity in order to make manifest a transfigured subjective existence. At this critical juncture in her early thought, Heller's connection to Western Marxism was quite clear. Both Marx and her friend and mentor Lukacs assert that it is people's social existence that conditions their consciousness.6 As Marx states in the Theses on Feuerbach, ''the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations" (1978: 145). Yet Marx also argues that man is more than this ensemble; the social conditioning that man receives from internalizing the ensemble of his social relations is not wholly deterministic. According famously to Marx, man makes his own history, though not under conditions of his own choosing (1978: 595). The place of particularity, therefore, is also where individuality must struggle to gain hegemony; and this struggle is both subjective and social. 7 Grasped as a whole, the subjective and the social are two mutually dependent yet contradictory sides in a constant state of flux. On the one hand, we find the process by which society reproduces itself within and through subjectivity, and on the other hand, there are attempts to forge individual expressions of subjectivity against the generalized rhythms of everyday life. The process of twofold liberation, however, is hardly a simple task. As Lukitcs lamented, ''the path to consciousness throughout the course of history does not become smoother but on the contrary evermore arduous and exacting" (1971: 24). It is precisely this arduous path that Heller wished to make, if not smoother, then at least more accessible. Through her critique of particularity she sought to solve the key problem of Lukitcs' monumental Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat. Indeed, particularity is an expression of subjective reification [Verdinglichung]. With regard to the character of society in general, a reified consciousness subjugates the power of human subjectivity, which in tum produces and sustains alienated and dehumanized political relationships. The effects of reification described by a onetime fellow participant in Eastern Bloc circles of Western Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski, are as disturbing as they are illuminating: The transfonnation of all human products and individuals into goods comparable in quantitative terms; the disappearance of qualitative

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links between people; the gap between public and private life; the loss of personal responsibility and the reduction of human beings to executors of tasks imposed by a rationalized system; the resulting deformation of personality, the impoverishment of human contacts, the loss of solidarity, the absence of generally recognized criteria for artistic work, 'experimentation' as a universal creative principle; the loss of authentic culture owing to the segregation of the different spheres of life, in particular the domination of the productive processes treated as an element independent of all others ... " (1978: 334335). Through this description, we can get a sense of the far-reaching implications of reified, particularistic forms of life. The particular person is reified; she is an object produced by external needs. This occurs due to either a subjective lack of awareness or strategic acceptance of heteronomy in her everyday life. But as is indicated above as well as in Heller's work, with this loss of personal autonomy, there is also a loss of personal responsibility for one's life. The massification and bureaucratization of politics and culture are only the most obvious aspects of reified ways of life. The underlying obliteration of political solidarity and compassion for other people's suffering and needs are the less evident but more costly casualties of particularity. Reified living justifies indifference and self-defeating attitudes toward the prospect of political change by reinforcing the perceived immutability of existing conditions, however inadequate they may be. Primarily, what particular people produce and reproduce are themselves. Consequently, whatever connections such people have between them are alienated political relationships, which in tum produce a societal condition of alienation. Alienation, however, is not a clear or consistent concept among thinkers even within the Western Marxist tradition-and becomes even more complicated when existential definitions of the term are considered. Heller's usage of alienation synthesizes Marxian and certain existential insights into a new understanding of the phenomenon. Generally, alienation characterizes how extemalized8 aspects of people's creative powers come to confront them as alien, hostile entities. Heller understands alienation as a problem affecting both Eastern and Western societies, but she considers it to be a historical problem and not an essential aspect of human existence. In a refutation of the essentialist Heideggerian conception, Heller writes, I deny however that everyday life must necessarily be alienated. In the final analysis, the reason for the alienation of the everyday world is not its structure, but those social relationships by virtue of which an alienated relationship of everyday life becomes the typical relationship (1984a: 257). Following Heller's lead, it becomes all the more clear that by beginning with the particular person's reified condition, we can grasp the underlying

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source of alienated everyday life. Through her critique of the particular person, therefore, we also find her initial efforts to challenge alienation in general. Living in the center of Europe during the middle of the 20th century meant that the most immediate examples of alienated societies were those of really existing socialism. The regimes of Eastern Europe (abiding Moscow diktats) sought to subordinate all human needs to the needs of the system, which ultimately meant the Party.9 Up until a certain crucial moment, Heller and the members of the Budapest School (among others) thought that the expression of individual needs in terms amenable to the Party's Marxist-Leninist ideology could humanize really existing socialism. But Moscow's crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and later, the Prague Spring in 1968, convinced Heller otherwise. 10 Out of these experiences, and frustration with Moscow's dogmatism and brutality, came a radically critical understanding of really existing socialism. From then on, the Party's grip on everyday life was conceptualized as a "dictatorships over needs" (Feher, Heller, and Markus 1983). The dictatorship over needs sought to suppress-and under Stalin, to eliminate-the free and pluralistic expression of radical needs through the "totalization and homogenization of society" (Feher, Heller, and Markus 1983). According to Feher, this process has a twofold effect on the subjects of the dictatorship: it demands that the identity of its subjects fit with the dogma of the Party, and in doing so, it perpetuates a process of de-enlightenment (1983: 194-196). Practically, both of these aspects of the dictatorship over needs come together to create-and reproduce-the particular person. The Party's ruthless methods of perpetuating its subjects' identity with its own systemic needs demonstrates that the mere reform of really existing socialism could not be enough. Any deviation from the leading role of the Party clause in every communist regime's constitution is simply not tolerated. As Heller explains, A one-party system excludes by definition all organizations with essentially alternative programs in the field of politics, culture, economy, etc. and with it also the possibility to propose such alternatives. It excludes at the same time contractual relations among individuals and collectives independently of the state. A one-party system oppresses civil society. Its ideal type, its overt (or hidden) goal is totalization, the complete submission of society to the state (Feher, Heller, and Markus 1983: 156).

But as was mentioned above, the site of oppression is also one of emancipation; through the Party's efforts to suppress and control its population, communist regimes inadvertently lit the slow fuse of their own destruction. The power and impact of even the smallest instances of individuality prove to be tremendous against the backdrop of such overwhelming demands. Ironically, some Eastern European regimes went to ''unorthodox" lengths to maintain even the veneer of identity. In Heller's own Hungary, the general political agreement not to bring up the execution of Imre Nagy and after 1956-to "play the game" of

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public acceptance of Kadar's regime-was the ransom paid by many for the relatively liberal atmosphere that prevailed. 11 The process of de-enlightenment was a more subtle yet equally pervasive force; it was an effort to undermine the possibilities of isolated expressions of individuality from even bubbling up within one's heart and mind. According to Immanuel Kant, enlightenment is the process by which people liberate themselves from self-incurred immaturity (i.e. the dogmatic mystifications of religion and myth}. The motto Kant proposes for the project of enlightenment is "Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!" 12 (1991: 54). What the process of de-enlightenment brings about, however, stands in stark contrast. If enlightenment requires the use of one's own reason, deenlightenment requires that one should never use it but should rely upon the collective intellect of the Party which does the thinking, instead of the person's own intellect. If enlightenment requires that one should reflect before acting and find out whether one's option is good, de-enlightenment requires that one should never reflect, but unhesitatingly obey the Party. Enlightenment emphasizes personal responsibility, de-enlightenment substitutes sheer obedience for personal responsibility. De-enlightenment 'liberates' humankind from moral, intellectual, and political freedom (Feher, Heller, and Markus 1983: 195).

Thus, the depths of subjective reification and social alienation in really existing socialism become clearer when we understand how the dictatorship over needs operates in unison with the process of de-enlightenment. Through this twofold process, the production of particularistic forms of "subjectness" by the Soviet system were nothing other than the alienation of humankind from the exploration and expression of its own immanent desires-its needs, possibilities, and imagination. Heller explains that the radical self-alienation that was produced by this process had ''particularly devastating psychological consequences. People not only [lost] their capacity for thinking for themselves, but [had] to pretend that they still [were]. The final interpretation of the dogma, with all its practical implications has to be accepted not passively, but actively" (1983: 195). But again, the active participation of a person in her own alienation also implies that she can challenge it, and perhaps free herself from this process. The re-awakening and expression of radical needs is the axis on which the particular person turns toward the possibility of becoming an individual. Heller first explains this process through a reinterpretation of Marx that simultaneously carried her thought beyond the limits of his philosophy. While referring to Marx's notion of human wealth, she is able to step backwards into the preconditions for the creation of such wealth, revealing the role and value of radical needs. For Marx here, as on other occasions, the most important category of value is that of wealth; at the same time, this constitutes a critique of the use that classical political economy made of the category

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'wealth,' in identifying it with material wealth. For Marx, the precondition of 'human' wealth is only the basis for the free development of all the capacities and senses of the human being, the free and many-sided activity of every individual. Need as a category of value is none other than the need for this kind of wealth (1976: 38).

It is only the person rich in radical needs, therefore, who can create such human wealth; otherwise, we are still witnessing merely the reproduction of the system's needs via the manipulation of people's radical needs. The most primary radical needs in the context of really existing socialism were autonomy and human dignity; they were core legitimating values of socialist ideology, yet they went unfulfilled (and horribly violated) by the Party. It was through the selfconscious pursuit and fulfillment of these needs that peofle began to create new types of specifically human (and humane) social wealth. 1 To this end, the "man rich in needs" was a philosophical construct meant to offer a critical perspective on the dual problem of reified subjectivity and alienated society. It demonstrated that although both were pervasive, they were not total-they only aspired to be. In the guise of Marxist-Leninist dogma, the Party sought to alienate people from themselves and from all spontaneous social relationships; it thus established a standardized one-to-one relationship between the Party and each of its subjects. With the process of de-enlightenment, the push to expunge non-conforming thought from the minds of its subjects expresses the Party's attempt to solidify its demand of identity into a permanently subjugated human condition. This was exemplified in the drive to create "homo sovieticus," or the new soviet man. 14 To recognize oneself as rich in needs is to take an antagonistic stand toward oneself, others, the Party, and society writ-large. It also means that one is ready to deny the Party recognition of the particular needs that it demands. The problem, however, is that if this revolt of recognition is to remain an individual phenomenon, the Party can crush it with relative ease. What the emerging individual requires is a different and new sort of recognition; not the kind that demands recognition from her, while offering none in return. If people wish to express and fulfill their radical needs, they need others to recognize them. For this recognition to not become just one more relationship of subordination and superordination, the others who give recognition must also desire autonomy and dignity. As Heller says, ''the highest object of human need is the other person. In other words: the measure in which man has become the highest object of need for other men determines the level of humanization of human needs" (1976: 41). This new, liberated exchange of recognition moves the struggle against particularity from the interiority of subjectivity to the exteriority of public life, and can actually constitute a public where the Party had previously eliminated it. Whereas before social heteronomy crowded the subjective, now subjective radical needs may repopulate the social. From the perspective of radical needs, freedom is on the march; from the vantage-point of the Party, this is counterrevolution.

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Though the dynamics and dawning of this rebellion have been presented, their motor-force has yet to be fully elaborated. What pushes the particular person over the edge into internal and then political conflict-is it radical thought or radical needs that take the lead? It is not reason alone--however critical it may be--that makes the transformation possible; as we said from the start, it is eros that takes the lead here, and that enlists critical reason into its service. More precisely, it is the suffering one feels, brought on by one's own radical needs, which catalyzes the particular person's struggle for individuality. As Marx points out, Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering15 being-and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential force of man energetically bent on his object. But man is not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being. That is to say, he is a being for himself ( 1978: 116).

Passion moves people; passion that arises from the understanding that one's own needs are being neglected, manipulated, and cynically played upon. Generally, this passion is also fueled by the indignation that arises from the recognition of one's own complicity in this process; the individual's suffering can be characterized as a lacking16-and the individual has come to understand that this lacking cannot be rectified within the given political circumstances. What was lacking (though promised) in really existing socialism was autonomy and human dignity-these needs already point in a direction beyond given social bounds, but also, for any individual, beyond oneself. The individual, according to Heller, is "the person for whom his own life is consciously an object, since he is a conscious species-being" (1984a: 17). This Hegelian-Marxian formulation mediates between the individual's critical self-consciousness and the consciousness of himself as a member of humanity as a whole. As such, he not only begins to reevaluate his own radical needs but the radical needs of humankind. Through this contemplation, which has already burst the bonds of reified subjectivity, the individual realizes that this act of exceeding the socially proscribed and prescribed limits of thought is good "for himself'-and it may be good for others. Thus, a significant part of this rebellious passion is rooted in the idea that one's own revolt is more than merely egoistic; it is also an ethical undertaking which declares "I rebel-therefore we exist" to those who would deny people autonomy and human dignity (Camus 1991: 22). And so, while Heller begins with the individual, she is equally concerned with the externalization of this subjective revolt, and the symbolic moral and political role it generally would play. In this vein, she argues that: Subjective rebellion against alienation with the aim of creating an everyday life worthy of man is, in itself, a necessary precondition if man is to succeed one day in overcoming alienation socially, so that a subjectively non-alienated relationship within everyday life will finally become typical (1984a: 258).

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Becoming an individual, therefore, is valued for its social as well as subjective qualities. Furthermore, any such individual is justified in assuming this clearly political duty because "implicit in the summons of 'feel with me in my suffering' is the postulate that the cause of my suffering can be the cause of yours" (1984a: 10). By taking the leap into revolt, the individual affirms that he is more than the Party, or system, or society, permits him to be. A particular person witnessing revolt or any of the reasons for it can still choose to do nothing; after all, one of the forms of particularity touched upon earlier describes how one chooses to play the game--to carry on as a particular person for reasons of"self-preservation." To opt for liberation means that one opts for a struggle that might very likely end unfavorably. In fact, as Heller is developing her position, the historical record in Eastern Europe so far had proved the futility of opposing Moscow and Party dogma. Yet, even to this day, she finds that the possibilities inherent in such revolt continue to hold out the promise of autonomy and human dignity. Criticisms could be leveled against the arguments made about revolt and liberation thus far; perhaps the most damning one being that this revolt and "becoming an individual" is inherently elitist or an intellectual affair, and is not even an option for most people. However, we can answer that by grounding the struggle for individuality in the experience of suffering arising from the selfconscious awareness of one's own unfulfilled autonomy and dignity, the project of becoming an individual is (and will continue to be) a possibility for any and all. From this passionate basis, Heller insists that the meaningful life for which subjective revolt strives is "democratic in principle[ ... ] and consciously chosen by men and molded to their design" (1984a: 268). But subjective revolt, even if it is democratic in principle, is not the whole; as Heller repeatedly argues, something more is necessary: The consciously chosen and accepted task of those individuals who today lead meaningful lives is to create a society in which alienation is a thing of the past: a society in which every man has access to the social 'gifts of fortune' which can enable him to lead a meaningful life (1984a: 269).

A transformed, emancipated everyday life must be able to nourish countless expressions of individuality through political and social institutions in practical ways. For this seemingly utopian social arrangement to even begin to become a reality, individuals must realize that they radically need others to be free as much as they need their own autonomy for a meaningful life. Alone they can be autonomous, but such autonomy would likely mean nothing because it would go unrecognized. With others, autonomy can form the basis for human dignity and social freedom because it is not merely recognized by others, but is recognized by others who are similarly autonomous and who live with dignity.

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*** By now it should be clear that although the possible fulfillment of one's radical needs may be paradoxical, radical needs in themselves create a field of tensjon that holds the promise of freedom's perpetuation. And with freedom, so too comes the possibility of feeling at home in the world; the profound need to be at home in the world is not merely the philosopher's homesickness, as Novalis tells us-it is a passionate desire that creeps into most (if not all) people's lives. It crept into Heller's life too; "[t]he philosopher" she writes, "mediates between what is and what ought to be, not as philosopher but as a person: as one person amongst millions, as one of those who want the world to be a home for humanity" (1984b: 186). To be at home in the world is to autonomously order one's own subjective immanence and to find aspects of that immanence out there, in others and in society-in its institutions and culture, and in its spirit and dignity. Such relations between individual and social existence would be proof of unalienated political life. They would mark the realization of a social harmony dreamt of by political thinkers since the ancient Greeks; alas, such relations also are the rarest of political phenomenon. Most often, some coerced bargain is struck between the powerful and the weak-typically, certain basic human needs are provided for by the powerful, while the weak begrudgingly abide the neglect of other, more political needs (e.g. they take food and certain physical comforts over liberty). The pages of history attest to the fact that such precarious balancing acts, though common, do not long go unchallenged; stories of suffering, longing, conflict, and revolt, mingle together, without definitive conclusion. But Heller teaches us that if we genuinely desire freedom from our given subjective and social limits, we ought not despair or smile cynically about our prospects. For the infinite and immortal possibilities inherent in such an emancipatory desire are quite real. She is likely to think that we ought to declare along with Kierkegaard, "if I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere" (Kierkegaard, 1987: 41). It is precisely the power of radical needs that animates the possibilities inherent in freedom.

Notes 1. The works on her thought available in English typically speak of her Marxist humanist, post-Marxist, and postmodern phases. See Tormey (2001) and Grumley (2005). 2. Such demiurgic acts are typically the province of divine beings, though for some in ironic ways. For example, recall the well-known passage from Goethe's Faust: Faust: Enough, who are you then? Mephisto: Part of that force which would do evil evermore, and yet creates the good." Faust. Walter Kaufmann, trans. (New York: Anchor Books, 1989): 159.

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3. This is a historical and not an essential definition. 4. Kant understood this paradox well; at the close of his essay What is Enlightenment? he writes, "[a] high degree of civil freedom seems advantageous to a people's intellectual freedom, yet it also sets up insuperable barriers to it. Conversely, a lesser degree of civil freedom gives intellectual freedom enough room to expand to its fullest extent." Kant: Political Writings. H.S. Reiss, ed. (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991): 59. For Kant, however, it was reason and not need that takes the lead. 5. Actually, it seems that (by definition) the presence and pursuit of radical needs always carry with them revolutionary possibilities. 6. The exact quotes from Marx and Lukacs are as follows, respectively: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness" (Marx, 1978: 4); and "It is not men's consciousness that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Lukacs, 1971: 18). What is important here is my use of "conditions" in place of"determines." The word "conditions" leaves the necessary room open for active will on the part of the subject being conditioned, whereas "determines" implies otherwise. The problem is rooted in translation. As political philosopher Bertell Ollman explains, especially in his political and historical writings, "Marx seldom uses bestimmen (determine), preferring to characterize relations in these areas with more flexible sounding expressions. English translators have tended to reinforce whatever 'determinist' bias is present in Marx's work by generally translating bedingen (which can mean condition or determine) as 'determine.' Compare, for example, the opening chapter of The German Ideology with the German original" (Oilman, 1996: 280, n23). 7. Although Heller does not use the term hegemony, it seems proper and evokes another important thinker of Western Marxism: Antonio Gramsci. Hegemony, understood here as the inner hegemony of individuality over particularity, admits that one cannot wholly extirpate social conditioning from subjectivity. The overall process is best understood in the dialectical sense (of aujheben}-particularity is negated, overcome, but also preserved-though in a very different capacity among the aspects of one's inner unity. Thus, society always colonizes subjectivity, but the degree to which it does and the power it exerts is crucial. For individuality to be hegemonic in terms of this "inner dimension" (or second dimension, as Herbert Marcuse would describe it in One-Dimensional Man (1964), would mean that one has the inner space necessary to first think or reflect, and then act, autonomously (as much as that may be possible). This also is strongly reminiscent of what Theodor W. Adorno announced to be his duty in the foreword of Negative Dialectics: "With the power of the subject, to breakthrough the illusion of constitutive subjectivity" Negative Dia/ektik. Gesammelte Schriften 6:10. (My translation of: Mit der Kraft des Subjekts den Trug konstitutiver Subjekttivitat zu durchbrechen). 8. Here I wish to draw distinction between extemalization (Entausserung) and alienation/ estrangement (Entfremdung). 9. If Heller lived west of the Iron Curtain, she likely would have been taking aim at the diktats of the capitalist market. 10. During my interview with Agnes Heller (April 2004), she specifically pointed out 1968 as the "break" for her-after the crushing of the Prague Spring she no longer harbored illusions or hopes of internal democratic reforms. 11. Heller explained to me that this act of playing the game-or in her case, not playing the game-politically made all the difference. She described how, although individuals more dangerous to the regime than her were still in Hungary, she and her col

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leagues were singled out as enemies because they refused to play the game. (Interview with Heller, 7 September 2004, New York City.) 12. Habe Muth dich deines eigenen Verstandes zu bedienen! 13. It is not difficult to see the connection between Heller's conception of social wealth and the "civil society" that slowly emerged after 1968 and came to play a key role in the East European revolutions of 1989. 14. In the new Soviet man's Western counterpart, homo economicus, we find the same process at work-but in a considerably different form. The expression of reifiedparticularity is the individualism inherent in consumer society. This individualism ought not to be confused with Heller's notion of individuality. IS. Robert C. Tucker explains Marx's usage of suffering as follows: [in the line prior to the one quoted, Marx writes] "To be sensuous is to suffer"-Sinnlich sein ist leidend sein. Here 'to suffer' should probably be understood in the sense of 'to undergo'-to be the object of another's action. Note the transition in the next sentence from Leiden (suffering) to leidenschaftlich (passionate)." 16. It is in this vein that Socrates describes eros in Plato's Symposium.

References Camus, Albert. The Rebel. Translated by A. Bower. (New York: Vintage International, 1991). Feher, Ferenc, Agnes Heller, and Gyorgy Markus. Dictatorship Over Needs. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. Translated by W. Kaufmann. (New York: Anchor Books, 1989). Grumley, John. Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History. (London: Pluto Press, 2005). Heller, Agnes. The Theory ofNeed in Marx. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976). Heller, Agnes. Everyday Life. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, l984a). Heller, Agnes. Radical Philosophy. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, l984b). Heller, Agnes. A Theory of Modernity. (Malden, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). Kant, Immanuel. Kant: Political Writings. H. S. Reiss, Ed., Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ). Kierkegaard, Ssren. Either/Or. Part I. Translated by H.V. Hong and E.H. Hong. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). Kolakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). Lukacs, Gyorgy. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). Lukacs, Gyorgy. Soul and Form. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974). Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. R.C. Tucker, Ed. (New York: Norton, 1978). Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Portable Nietzsche. Translated and edited by W. Kaufmann. (New York: Penguin Books, 1976). Novalis. Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by M.M. Stoljar. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997).

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Oilman, Berte!!. Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. 2nd Ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Plato. 1991. The Dialogues of Plato. Translated and edited by R.E. Allen. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Tormey, Simon. Agnes Heller: Socialism, Autonomy, and the Postmodern. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

Chapter 6.

Remembrance of Things Future: From Totalitarianism to Fundamentalism Kira Brunner Don On October 23, 2006, on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution, Agnes Heller stood in front of an audience of over 200 at the Hungarian Cultural Center in New York City. "Totalitarianism is terrible, and it happened in Iraq and is happening in Iran. These are the sites of the new totalitarian struggle. And this is where it must be stopped." Heller is a small thin woman with dramatic red hair and poignant eyes. She speaks in full paragraphs, and every word is accentuated by a quick wave of the hand and a strong full accent. On this occasion she was part of a five person panel to honor and discuss the Hungarian Revolution, when Russian tanks drove through the cobblestone streets of Budapest and riddled the stucco buildings with bullets in a successful attempt by the Soviet Union to quell the democratic Hungarian uprising. While the other panelists sat at the long wooden table, Heller stood and exclaimed with outrage that no one-not Europe, not the United States-had come to the aid of the Hungarian revolutionaries fifty years ago, and she could not allow the same thing to happen again to the Middle East. Someone should intervene. The Iraq war was not only justifiable; it was an equivalent fight for democracy against totalitarianism. It was modernity, liberalism, and pluralism against fundamentalism, religion and terror. Heller was a forceful participant in the debates that surrounded the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Along with a handful of other leftist intellectuals, she spread hawkish wings and declared Iraq the new front in the battle against totalitarianism. Hers was a controversial position, generally criticized by the traditional American left. But Heller saw this as the struggle of our times, or more accurately the struggle of her lifetime, the struggle, that is, against totalitarianism in all its forms. And there was no mistaking where she would come down in this fight. She and a few notable others-Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens and Michael Ignatieff-argued that the tyranny imposed by Saddam Hussein's regime outweighed the murky evidence that Bush was floating around Washington and the United Nations. It wasn't that she and these other thinkers ever fully bought into Bush's line that Saddam Hussein had connections to Al Qaeda, or that weapons of mass destruction were stashed under every rock in Baghdad, or (most absurdly) that Saddam Hussein held responsibility for 9/11. Rather, it was

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that Saddam Hussein's documented, proven and grotesque practices of intimidation, demagogy, torture, and human rights abuses-including the gassing of his own people-were in a word, totalitarian. And consequently they were enough to justify an invasion aimed at nothing less then the end of his regime. "For me it is an easy choice," Heller said at the Hungarian Cultural Center. "Iraq is totalitarian and I know what I'm talking about." Her reasons for sympathizing with, if never fully supporting, the war were the same reasons that sent thousands of Hungarians into the streets to face the Russian tanks back in 1956. For Heller, totalitarianism was not an abstract political concept, it was a lived experience-first as a Jew in Hungary during the Second World War, and then again in the long dark years after the Russian invasion of Hungary. Heller was fifteen when the Germans marched into Budapest and took her father away to Auschwitz, where he died. If it is late enough at night and you ask her in just the right way, she may tell you how she and her mother, who were left behind in Budapest, survived. "Kira" she'd say leaning in with a glass of white wine, "I was my father's daughter, and now I was alone without him." Life under the Nazis was not only a loss of freedom but also a loss of her most beloved parent and her childhood. Absent her father, being left alone with her mother, the intellectual stimulation in her life withered. Like most young teenage girls, she felt resentful and rebellious. Of course the difference was that for Heller, under Nazi occupation, the stakes of her rebelliousness were high. Things came to a head one day when she and her mother were walking across one of the Danube's many bridges. Nazi soldiers swooped in and closed off both sides of the bridge. Yelling loudly and angrily, they forced everyone to stand in a row along the railing over the swift Danube waters. One by one they went down the line and asked to see papers. If you did not have your papers, or if your papers said the wrong thing, it was a loud shout, a pop, and a quick death. Heller and her mother did not have the proper papers. In the line up, Heller's mother stood closest to the throng of soldiers making their way down the line. "A plan came into my head" Heller told me. She would wait until they came to her mother, and use the time it might take them to shoot her mother to slip over the rail and jump into the Danube. Heller speaks slowly as she tells this part of the tale. "It is something I will always remember, that I was willing to sacrifice my mother to save my own life." But these are choices that only totalitarianism would force a person to make. By an odd tum of fate, the soldiers tired of this game before they reached Heller, and she and her mother were free to return home. The next time Heller had to face a totalitarian force, she was a grown woman with a child of her own. This was October 23, 1956, when Hungarian students marched in mass to the Hungarian national broadcasting studio and demanded that their condemnation of the government be heard. Secret police fired into the crowd and a battle ensued that resulted in the toppling of the thenHungarian government and the establishment of independent workers councils. That same day not far away in Heroes' Square, demonstrators decapitated and then toppled a looming statue of Stalin, leaving nothing standing but his boots.

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The image of a toppled Stalin was used for years by an enthusiastic West as a piece of imaginative propaganda in the cold war-proving that even behind the Iron Curtain there were keen denouncements of the Soviet Union. The image of those lone boots brings to mind a similar scene that unfolded years later and thousands of miles away. In 2003 in Fardus Square, a statue of Saddam Hussein was likewise toppled. This time America didn't just use the image as a propaganda tool; this time American forces used armored vehicles and cable to help pull it down, and Saddam's regime along with it. However, in the Hungary of 1956 no American tanks rolled in; there was no intervention, no support, no money, no soldiers; and although the Hungarian revolutionaries successfully tore down the Stalinist apparatus to its boots-without the support of the West, their success was short lived. On November 4th, mere weeks later, the Russians retaliated, this time armed with tanks. In the next six days over 2000 Hungarians were killed and 200,000 fled the country as refugees. The Soviet Union was back in charge.

*** In 2002, Heller wrote in the Journal Constellations that in recent years she had decided to turn her back on political theory and to write about politics solely in her capacity as a citizen. "In a momentary spell of optimism, I flattered myself by assuming that in the realms of philosophy and social theory I had already fulfilled my duty and deserved therefore to tum finally and exclusively to more rewarding subjects, such as art or religion." It was around this moment that I first met Heller. She was reveling in just such artistic decadence by teaching a class on Marcel Proust at the New School. The prerequisite for the class was to complete all three volumes of Remembrance of Things Past before the first day. As a result, the class was small-which meant that it was intimate as well. Seven of us sat bright-eyed around a wooden table where we spent weeks debating love, metaphor, painting, Cezanne's apples, and the Duchess de Guermantes' asparagus. Every evening after class we would relocate to a local restaurant to drink too much and continue our disputes late into the evening. Heller at 70 could drink us under the table, stay out later, talk louder and longer, think with more depth and wit and generally outdo us all. But as much as art consumed her, it only lasted so long. Politics, as it always seems to do, again came clamoring at the door in the form of two airplanes careening into the World Trade Center. And Heller as always answered the call. "After the attack of September 11" wrote Heller, "it became evident that a wave of terror is once again threatening liberal democracies." 1 Art was put aside for the time being so that politics could once again be taken up. On September 11, 200 1, Heller held the title of Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at the New School for Social Research, the original "University in Exile," whose pioneering faculty was made up of intel-

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lectuals and professors fleeing Nazi Germany. Among these founding members of the New School was Hannah Arendt, the original theorist of totalitarianism whose The Origins of Totalitarianism is de rigeur for any political science student. Though they never met personally, Heller and Arendt lived parallel lives both historically and philosophically. Both survived Nazi Germany, both eventually found their physical and intellectual home in New Yorlc, and both taught at the New School. But most notably, both agreed on a complementary interpretation of totalitarianism. Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism addressed Hitler's Germany and Stalinist Russia, holding them up as iconic cases of full-fledged totalitarianism. In chapter after chapter, Arendt explains how totalitarianism, unlike simple fascism or dictatorship, uses fear, violence, and terror to ensure total domination of the individual as well as the collective. A totalitarian state aspires to expand and conquer both the far reaches of the world and the inner sanctums of the individual. ''Total domination," Arendt writes, "strives to organize the infinite plurality and differentiation of human beings as if all of humanity were just one individual. [It] attempts to achieve this goal both throuft ideological indoctrination of the elite formations and through absolute terror." One of totalitarianism's main traits, according to Arendt, is its ability to eliminate "spontaneity itself as an expression of human behavior and transforming the human personality into a mere thing, into something that even animals are not. " 3 Arendt and Heller saw eye to eye when it came to Germany and the Soviet Union, but over the years Heller went even further, expanding the definition of totalitarianism to encompass new forms. "Arendt made the important distinction between totalitarian movements and totalitarian rule (governments)," wrote Heller in 1984. "I would add a second distinction to the list, that between totalitarian rule and totalitarian society."4 The Soviet state was already totalitarian as early as 1921. What followed was the totalization of society by the totalitarian state. This was the unique achievement of the Stalinist 'revolution from above. The end result was, and has remained, a completely new social system and completely new attitudes that ensure the maintenance of the system. 5

In order to maintain a totalitarian society, Heller explains, the party must be ''the sovereign of the state (the source of all powers)" and must "outlaw pluralism.',(, In this way, totalitarianism has the unique ability to eradicate pluralism, debate, and dissent. It makes the world uniform, rigid and subject to one totalizing idea and one totalizing truth. Totalitarianism invades every aspect of life, from the most minutely personal to the most publicly political. It seeps inside and takes over even our individual quiet thoughts. So that even when the door is locked, and the phone is off the hook, we wonder: Is someone listening? Will my child accidentally repeat what he hears at the dinner table to a teacher? Is there a microphone in the wall? Is someone reading my e-mails? We begin to censor ourselves even when no one can hear. We internalize the state and lose

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our own individuality. "Totalitarianism," Arendt famously writes, "is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within."7 Totalitarianism at its worst not only imposes a reality from on high, it creates an individual's reality from the inside out, so that the regime itself is breathed from within. When we live with such fear, the fear becomes everything-thought closes down. Independent ideas become too dangerous, too complicated or too unwieldy. They do not fit into the omnipresent category of truth that the totalitarian narrative provides, so they are brushed aside. And if these dangerous ideas are encapsulated by a certain kind of person-Jew, homosexual, democrat, Sunnithen they too must be brushed aside in order to preserve the one totalizing truth. In recent years, it has become passe to talk of totalitarianism in such Arendtian terms. Scholars such as Juan Linz or Abbott Gleason have continued to find the very word ''totalitarian" to be an antiquated oversimplification of a more complex problem. But for those like Heller, who have lived under Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or, even say, Baathist Iraq, it is a real and active category. Not only was totalitarianism the right category to describe Nazism and Stalinism-it indeed manifested, in the later half of the 20th century, in new forms not yet imagined by Arendt, although she did hint occasionally at their possibility. ''Totalitarian solutions," wrote Arendt, "may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man. " 8 According to Heller they have done just that. In the thirty-three years since Arendt's death, Heller has acted as a witness where Arendt could not. She has made a point of calling by name different regimes she believed to be totalitarian. She even went so far as to pen a preface that Arendt herself might have written, titled "An Imaginary Preface to the 1984 Edition of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism." In this preface Heller writes that totalitarian thinking can be found not only in the fascist "race thinking" of Nazism or in the Bolshevik "class thinking" of the Soviet Union, but also in the Maoists cultural revolution, and in the class genocide executed by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and in the "religious doctrine" of Khomeini's Iran. 9 But most notably, today Heller recognizes totalitarianism in the speeches and actions of the "Fiihrer," as she calls Osama Bin Laden and the Muslim fundamentalists of AI Qaeda. It is this recognition that led her to stand up on the anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution and call Iran as well as Baathist Iraq totalitarian in name and deed. (She has since been invited to speak in Iran by Iranian student groups and traveled to Iran to visit and address them.) Many of the liberal hawks have made a similar argument, but Heller's interpretation is different. Most have relied on a telling of the story that emphases Islamic fundamentalism as pre-modem and thus as an affront to our modem enlightenment thinking. But for Heller and Arendt, totalitarianism is an outgrowth of modernity and is thus fully modem. Heller consequently has had to

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reconcile how it is that the fundamentalism of Iran, AI Qaeda or the Taliban can rely on a wholly pre-modem imaginary while functioning as totalitarian. But according to her, fundamentalism is a natural extension of totalitarianism and thus of modernity itself. [It] is a modern phenomenon. It is a reaction to the process of enlightenment, to the destruction/deconstruction of traditional social arrangements, to the ideas of progress, to belief in rationalism, to the loss of natural communities, identities, security, and certainty-a reaction to contingency and to the burdens of an abstract freedom the individual can use for better or worse. Fundamentalism is a closed system of beliefs, secular or religious, and it disallows any discussion of its compatibility or incompatibility with any other system of beliefs.10 With these views it becomes obvious why, for Heller, the fight against totalitarianism led so naturally to a fight against Islamic fundamentalism and a desire to stop it wherever it might flourish. But has this fight gone too far? In hindsight, the havoc wreaked in order to shut down the totalitarian reign of Saddam Hussein hardly seems worth the price: an estimated 600,000 Iraqis dead, over 4,000 Americans dead, and anation-state in chaos and civil war. Many acknowledged the destructiveness of Saddam Hussein and still did not decide to support the war. But to renounce the war in Iraq was not a simple thing to do. It meant saying "yes totalitarianism exists, fundamentalism is rampant and yet I choose not to let my desire to end it trump my alarm about what may happen in an American-led invasion." This was a choice Heller, as a woman who lived through two totalitarian regimes, would not make. But even if we disagree with her ultimate decision to support the war, we can use her life and work to remind us that totalitarianism breathed free in the 20th century and is still very much alive and well today. It is alive in the streets of Tehran; hints of it are in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela; there were glimpses of it in the 1990s "ethnic cleansings" of the Balkans. Naming it correctly and confronting it without ideology, without the moral certainty that seemed to overtake the Bush administration, and without stumbling into destructive wars is our current political challenge. And to do so is to walk a precarious tightrope. In 2002, Heller writes: It is terribly difficult to navigate between fundamentalism and nihilism, between fanaticism and cynicism, and between totally closed worldviews and total relativism. And it is exactly this difficult navigation itself that needs to be defended. Why do we--democratic liberals-need to apologize for being absolutely convinced that the open possibility for such a navigation is the treasure in the maze of modem life, why do we so often shy away from saying simply 'no!' in an unsophisticated way whenever this treasure becomes a select target for hatred, whenever self-elected redeemers try to destroy it? 11

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Heller demands that we think of a politics without fundamentalism, without totalitarianism, and to do so is quite simply the hardest thing. We are not granted the grandeur of ideology-a seductive crutch that can make beautiful sense of our actions. And we cannot retreat to the nihilism of thought in which we study impotently every angle of a problem, rather then act to solve it. How do you both act and think? How do you both denounce totalitarianism and not become dogmatic yourself? How do you face a complex problem without being reduced to moral platitudes?

Notes l. Agnes Heller. "911, or Modernity and Terror," Constellations 9:1 (March 2002) 53-65. All textual references to Heller's Constellations article are to this essay. (Hereafter 911) 2. Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1976) p.438. (Hereafter OT} 3. OT, 438. 4. Agnes Heller. "An Imaginary Preface" The Public Realm: Essays on Discursive Types in Political Philosophy. Reiner Schiinnann, ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). (Hereafter IP) 5. IP, 256. 6. IP, 256. 7. OT, 325. 8. OT,459. 9. IP, 262. 10. 911, 57. 11.911, 57.

Chapter 7.

Existential Choice: Heller's Either/Or Richard J. Bernstein I begin with a confession. I find it difficult to write about Agnes Heller without writing a love letter. When we first met, almost thirty years ago in Dubrovnik, we both felt a strong intellectual and personal affinity with each other. We have been colleagues at the New School for Social Research for the past twenty years where our friendship has grown and deepened. I admired Agnes as a philosopher and as a personality long before I met her. I first became aware of Agnes as a courageous and audacious young Marxist humanist who strongly opposed totalitarianism in all its forms and participated in the Hungarian uprising in 1956. I followed her career and writings as a Hungarian dissident who was kicked out of the Communist party, fired from her university position, and who moved to La Trobe University in Australia before coming to the United States to join the philosophy department of the New School. Agnes is one of the last cosmopolitan Central European intellectuals of her generation with a lively interest in the entire range of human knowledge and experience. What I most admire about Agnes as an intellectual is that she is an independent thinker (Selbstdenker) who hates all "isms," who has had the courage to criticize, rethink, and revise her most cherished beliefs, and who approaches life experiences with an ever renewed freshness and vitality. What I most admire about Agnes as a person is that she is a thoroughly decent (good) person: generous, caring, loyal to friends, sensitive to the suffering of others, and always vivacious. There isn't a trace of ressentiment in her. Her being-in-the-world epitomizes what Hannah Arendt calls amor mundi. One comes away from an encounter with Agnes feeling more alive and more attuned to the world. The scope of her writing is breathtaking. She has written about virtually every major thinker in the history of philosophy (and many minor ones too!); she spans the full range of the social and humanistic disciplines, literature, art, and music. There is, however, one theme that runs throughout all her work and to which she returns over and over again from a variety of perspectives. She is always seeking to understand human singularity, ipseity, uniqueness-and its relation to what is universal, to what transcends our singularity. At an abstract level, this is one of the oldest and most tangled issues in philosophy. What is the relation of the singular, the particular, and the universal? This colorless abstract 87

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formulation takes on dramatic human vitality when she relates it to our individual existence, our existential choices, and how we live our everyday lives. I have spoken of my admiration, friendship, and love of Agnes. But like the best of friends, we also have had our passionate disagreements and lovers' quarrels. I want to pursue one of our ongoing friendly quarrels. Although I think that Agnes has many insightful things to say about morality and what she calls "an ethics of personality," I have never been completely happy with some of her central claims. Let me begin by summarizing her key claims (frequently citing her own words), and then raise questions about them-indicating what I find problematic. Heller has written three volumes dealing with ethics and morality in order to develop "a comprehensive yet modem moral philosophy."' "There is indeed one decisive question that I raise and try to answer throughout the whole inquiry. [ ... ] The fundamental question addressed is "Good persons exist-how are they possible?" (GE 6-7). This is the question that she seeks to answer from three different perspectives in these volumes: from the position of theoretical reason; practical reason; and, finally, "from the position of a person as a whole." She speaks of "modem moral philosophy" and the modifier modern is crucial because she argues that a fundamental change has occurred that distinguishes "the modem" from "the pre-modem"; a change that has the utmost consequences for our understanding of a modem moral philosophy. "The modern person is a contingent person" (PM 5). The philosophical metaphor that expresses this life experience is "being thrown into the world." Now strictly speaking, this contingency is a constituent of the human condition because "nothing in our genetic equipment predetermines us to be born in precisely such and such an age, in such and such a social condition, caste, class, and the like" (PM 5). So the feature that distinguishes the modem from the pre-modem is really the consciousness or self-awareness (actually, the growing self-awareness) of our contingency. The condition of the modem person is one of dual contingency. In addition to the initial, mostly unconscious, contingency of the person, a secondary one qua 'form of existence' in the modem world has been gaining momentum in the last 200 years. The modem person does not receive the destination, the telos, of his or her life at the moment of birth as happened in pre-modem times, when people were born to do this and not that, to become this rather than that, to die as this and not as that, for better or worse. The modem person is born as a cluster of possibilities without telos. This newborn bundle of possibilities, furthermore, without socially patterned telos cannot make its choices within the framework of a socially determined destination: it must choose the framework for itself. The existentialist formula of "choosing oneself' can also be read as a descriptive comment on the form of existence in modernity. The modem person must choose the framework, the telos, of his or her life-that is, choose himself or herself. One can say with Kierkegaard that, if you do not choose yourself, others will choose for you (PM 5-6).

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Heller is certainly aware that in distinguishing the pre-modern from the modern person, she is describing "ideal types." Empirically, in modern times, many persons' lives are actually determined in pre-modern ways; they lack the freedom and opportunity to choose themselves. But note how easily Heller moves from the description of contingency to the language of choice. After all, one might accept what she says about contingency and then move on to a discussion of how persons are socialized in different ways in modern societiesdescribing how their actual choices are conditioned by the ways in which they have been socialized. But Heller immediately "leaps" to a Kierkegaardian formulation, a Kierkegaardian "Either/Or": Either you choose yourself, or others will choose for you. We will soon see that this "choosing oneself' has the utmost significance for Heller. But what does it mean to say that a modern person "chooses himself or herself'? What kind of choice is this? It is an existential choice. Choice of yourself is the choice of destiny; more precisely, choosing yourself is tantamount to knowing yourself as a person of a particular destiny. You do not "have" a self whose knowledge predates choice. Existence and the consciousness of existence are indivisible. The choice of self is an existential choice, for it is the choice of existence. Existential choice is by definition irreversible and irrevocable. You cannot choose your destiny in a reversible way, for a reversible choice is not a choice of destiny, by defmition not an existential choice. As Kierkegaard once remarked, after having made the existential choice, you continue to choose all the time. Yet these consecutive choices occur within a framework that was already predestined by your choice ofyourself(PM 10). I want to raise some questions to keep in mind without pausing to answer them. If one does not have a "self' before an existential choice is made, then who or what is making the choice? How are we to characterize the "I" that makes the existential choice? Even if we grant that such a choice is a choice of one's destiny, why can't one choose to change her or his destiny? What are the grounds for categorically claiming that an existential choice is "irreversible and irrevocable?" What is the warrant for "defining" existential choice in this manner? What precisely is the relation between existential choice and ethics? Heller distinguishes two types of existential choice: choosing oneself as difference and choosing oneself as universal. To choose oneself as difference is to choose oneself as the "person of this particular cause" or the "person of this particular calling" (PM 11 ). Thus I may choose myself as an activist of a movement, a member of a religious community, or as a scientist. This is not to be confused or reduced to choosing a goal or a strategy for achieving a goal. It is an existential choice-a choice by which I become what I am-and as such it is irreversible and irrevocable. In "choosing yourself you transform your contingency into your destiny" (PM 12). Consequently, "once you revoke it, you lose yourself, your own personality, your own destiny, to relapse into contingency" (PM 11 ). Choosing oneself as difference may have nothing or little to do with

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ethics. I may (existentially) choose myself as an activist, scientist, a lover or philosopher, and yet I may be a thoroughly morally despicable person. But the existential choice as universal (that is, under the category of universality) is to be sharply distinguished from choosing under the category of difference. The "existential choice under the category of universality is the fundamental moral choice: it is the choice ofmorals" (TM 15, emphasis added). '"Choosing ourselves' means to destine ourselves to become what we are. Choosing ourselves ethically means to destine ourselves to become good persons that we are" (PM 14).2 It is important to understand the precise sense in which the existential choice of morals is the choice of the self under the category of universality. This may sound odd because when we make such a choice we choose what we are in all our singular determinations. "Yet since we can all choose ourselves ethically to the same extent, the choice of our singularity, as the gesture of freedom, falls under the category of the universal: 'every human being"' (PM 14). The choice may be easier or more difficult for different persons; nevertheless ''the existential choice of goodness is the same" (PM 15). We make an existential choice to become decent persons. Another way of characterizing modernity is to emphasize that "it is only in the modem form of existence that the choice of self under the category of difference and the choice of self under the category of universality can be completely separated. And yet the two kinds of choice can also be mediated and in this sense combined, albeit never fully united" (PM 18). Moral philosophies, as Heller tells us, can address only those who have already made the existential choice to be decent, good persons-to persons who have already chosen themselves under the category of universality. Modem moral philosophies offer advice and wisdom to those who have made such a choice. To those who have not chosen themselves under the category of universality, there is only one response: Choose yourself as a human being who is destined to be good. Destine yourself to become what you are: a decent, good person. Choose yourself under the category of the universal. Be the addressee of a moral philosophy so that it can speak to you (PM 24).

In short, modern moral philosophies have nothing to say to persons who have not--or who refuse to make-this existential choice. 3 To penetrate to the heart of what Heller is claiming, we need to scrutinize more carefully just what is involved in an existential choice. We are told that such a choice is "neither rational nor irrational" (PM 24). More precisely, between the state prior to the choice and the one after the choice, there is a leap. One does not choose to become what one is because one has previously listened to all arguments for and against this choice, and then one arrives at the conclusion that the arguments supporting the choice of self are better or weightier. Yet, whether a particular instance of deliberation and decision can be recalled or not, no one who has ever

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made an existential choice would doubt that it was indeed a choice, that once upon a time there did exist the possibility not to become this possibility for good (PM 24). Not everyone makes such a choice, but if one makes an existential choice then the "momentous character of an existential choice cannot be forgotten" (PM 25). To emphasize her point, Heller tells us that, although to a greater or lesser extent every choice is a leap, nevertheless "the choice called 'existentialist' is the longest possible leap in a person's life, for, in the case of the holistic choice, the whole of a life is put at risk" (PM 25). Although an existential choice is neither rational nor irrational, it doesn't follow that such a choice is completely arbitrary. An existential choice may occur in an instant but it can also take place over a long stretch of time. And such choices can be made anytime in one's lifetime; even children make such choices. But there are two conditions that must be met in order to choose oneself as a good person. "First moral categories and concepts must somehow be around 'in the air.' And secondly, the child's fate must not be predestined by dense ethical regulations as in premodem times. If the first condition is absent, there is no possibility of choosing goodness existentially. If the second condition is absent, it is neither possible nor urgent to choose existentially" (PM 26-27). Heller sums up the "central insight" ofher ''philosophy of morals" as follows: [T]here is a fundamental leap, the leap that renders moral meaning to all consecutive leaps, and this is the (existential) choice of ourselves as decent (good, honest) persons. For only after this leap has been accomplished will men and women ask the question: What is the right thing for me to do? The fundamental leap has no 'reason' and no traceable cause. For such a fundamental choice no norms can be provided, no advice given, no orientative principles presented (EP 6-7).

Of course, the existential choice, the leap in choosing ourselves to become good, decent persons, is only the beginning-the necessary condition-for becoming a good person. It is the condition that is essential for my being open and responsive to the question of what is the right thing for me to do. Heller insists that if I have not made such an existential choice then a philosophy of morals has nothing to say to me-except to urge me to make such a choice. I have presented a succinct statement of Heller's understanding of existential choice, especially as it pertains to the choice under the category of the universal by which a singular individual chooses to become a decent, honest, good person. I now want to probe her claims in order to expose what strikes me as unpersuasive and even paradoxical. Consider again what Heller takes to be her fundamental question: "Good persons exist-how are they possible?" I agree that good persons exist and that their goodness is quite independent of their education, religion, class, or gender, etc. If Heller simply claimed that some good persons have made the existential choice to be good, her thesis would have an air of plausibility, but Heller is mak-

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ing a much stronger claim. She is claiming that all good persons have made the existential choice under the category of universality to become good. But how does she establish this? Certainly not by any empirical investigation. It seems to be an a priori or conceptual ''truth." But the grounds for making this claim are never clear or persuasive. What seems to be a "necessary truth" for her comes very close to looking like a stipulative definition-about which we may have serious doubts. It seems presumptuous and even a bit elitist (in the pejorative sense) to claim that anyone who is correctly judged to be a good person ''must" have made such an existential choice at some point in their lives. (Of course, it is a truism that at some time in our lives-when, for example we are very young infants-it makes no sense to speak about our moral goodness.) There are many good simple folk who "intuitively" do the right thing, even in crisis situations. It seems completely artificial and gratuitous to claim that at some point in their past they must have made an existential choice to become good. Do we really want to say that each and every one of the good villagers from the Le Chambon who risked their lives to help save Jews during the German occupation of France made the existential choice to become a good person?4 My reservation can be put in a slightly different way. Heller's basic question has Kantian ring: How are good persons possible? It is a variation of the Kantian question about the possibility of experience or the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments. But when Kant seeks to answer these questions, he doesn't do this by stipulating definitions; he presents an elaborate transcendental argument to explain and justify his claims. I fail to see that Heller presents us with an analogous argument that demonstrates that if a person is good then they must have made a "momentous" existential choice--one that "cannot be forgotten." The burden of proof is on her to demonstrate that anyone who becomes good does so by making such a momentous existential choice. Drawing on Kierkegaard, Heller distinguishes existential choice from all other choices. Existential choice is a choice of one's destiny and it is irrevocable. If I make the existential choice to be activist in a movement, a member of a religious community, or a scientist, then these are existential choices under the category of difference. But what are the grounds for claiming that such choices are irrevocable? Suppose I choose to be an activist in a movement because I firmly believe that it seeks to achieve what is good and noble. But painful experience teaches me that the movement or party is corrupt and betrays the very ideals that I initially thought it sought to achieve. I may gradually become wiser and choose to break with the party. I may decide to give up on a life of activism and even decide to dedicate myself to the study of philosophy. Changes and reversals like this happen all the time. But given Heller's definition of existential choice, she is committed to saying that I never "really" made an existential choice. Why? Because by definition an existential choice is the type of choice of one's destiny that is necessarily irrevocable. But why should we accept this extremely restrictive definition of existential choice? Indeed, Heller's understanding of an existential choice made under the category of difference seems better suited to describe the religious militant fanatic who makes the existential choice

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to become a suicide bomber-and then begins to have serious doubts about going "all the way." This is a person about whom it might be fair to say: "Once you revoke it, you lose yourself, your own personality, your own destiny, to relapse into contingency" (PM 11 ). I fail to see that such a description applies to the person who breaks with a corrupt party and gives up a life of activism-or why we should deny that she originally made an existential choice to become an activist. Let's also consider what we might be called the "logical grammar" of choic~any choice. To choose presupposes that, at the very least, there arealternatives between which I choose. In "The Dilemma of Determinism," William James illustrates this in a charming way when he imagines the example of choosing whether to walk home by Divinity or Oxford Street, arguing that before the actual choice both are real possibilities. 5 The language of choice also presupposes that a choice is made at some determinate time. There is a time before the choice and a time after the choice has been made, even though it may take a shorter or longer time to make a choice. Heller accepts both these points; they are applicable to existential choices under the category of difference and universality. I can choose to become an activist, but I can also choose not to become an activist; I may choose instead to become a scientist. I can also make the existential choice to become a good, decent person or I can choose not to destine myself to become a good person. Such a choice can be made anytime in one's life, again, even when one is a child. And such a choice can happen in an instant or drag on for a long time. "Without doubt, there are existential choices which are made in an instant, while others drag on for months and years, yet both have the same result" (PM 27). Let's go over this carefully focusing on the time before such a choice is made under the category of universality, that is, the existential choice to become a good person. How are we to describe the "I" who makes an existential choice? Heller categorically declares: "You do not 'have' a self whose knowledge predates choice" (PM 10). But she also says that one of the necessary conditions for making an existential choice to become a good person is that "moral categories and concepts must somehow be around 'in the air"' (PM 26). But they must be more than "in the air." The person who is to make a choice must have some awareness-that is, some knowledge of moral categories and concepts. If a person did not have some understanding of the meaning and consequences of moral categories, it would not even make sense to speak of the existential choice. And the issue is complicated because moral categories and concepts change in the course of history; indeed they change in the history of modernity. So the question arises: which moral categories and concepts have to be "in the air" for someone to make an existential choice to be a good person? I am not suggesting that this means that a person who makes such an existential choice knows what they ought to do when confronted with new situations that demand a moral response. But an existential choice cannot be completely blind. No matter how young a person may be who makes an existential choice, she has had some experience, knowledge, and training that shapes her character. A person making an

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existential choice is not an empty cipher. In some sense then, despite Heller's claim to the contrary, a person who makes an existential choice already has a developing self-the self that makes the choice. This is not to deny that such a choice, like every choice, involves a "leap." But there is someone who is making the leap; and that someone already has a character shaped by her experiences. Heller may not want to call this "a self," but she owes us some account of what characterizes the individual who makes an existential choice. Heller declares that an existential choice is neither rational nor irrational. And she seeks to clarify her meaning when she writes: More precisely, between the state prior to the choice and one after the choice, there is a leap. One does not choose to become what one is because one has previously listened to all the arguments for and against this choice, and then one arrives at the conclusion that the arguments supporting the 'choice of self are better or weightier. [... ] We often refer to salutary accidents, sudden illumination, of being 'carried away' by a stronger power, and much else. Yet, whether a particular instance of deliberation and decision can be recalled or not, no one who has ever made an existential choice would doubt that it was indeed a choice, that once upon a time there did exist the possibility not to become what one really is, and that only one's resolution excluded this possibility for good (PM 24). The first observation that I want to make is that much of what Heller says above applies to most choices-including non-existential choices. For example, I am not convinced that my decision to become a philosopher was an existential choice (as Heller defines it), and I would be hard pressed to date when I made such a decision. I recall vividly that I had many doubts about this choice right through my first years of graduate school. I even contemplated switching fields. Of course, this choice like all choices involved a leap. I doubt very much that I ever listened to all the arguments for and against this choice before making a decision to become a philosopher. Yet I know that there was a time before I decided to become a philosopher. I also know that the choice to dedicate myself to philosophy involved a risk-indeed, many risks. There were a variety of considerations that were relevant to making this choice. I could have become a lawyer or a furniture salesman, but I did not. Now consider the much more momentous existential choice that Heller thinks is involved in becoming a good, decent person. If someone actually decides to become a good person, then before such a choice is made, there are some considerations or "reasons" for making this choice. It is very easy to caricature what we call "reasons." Rarely does anyone really listen to all the arguments pro and con before making any choice. I use the term in a very broad sense where all I mean is that there are some considerations or experiences that I judge to be relevant to making a choice. (Reasons are not necessarily good reasons.)

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Suppose after making an existential choice to be a good person, someone challenges me and asks why I made such a choice. I do not respond by shrugging my shoulders or by saying I don't have the foggiest idea why I made this choice. If I did, it would be hard to deny that such a choice was simply arbitrary and unmotivated; it would not be an existential choice. Philosophers from Kant to Sartre have insisted upon a thesis that is central to Heller's understanding of freedom and ethics. Nothing in my past completely determines my choices, including my existential choices. There is always a gap here, an ontological gap, which opens the possibility of the freedom to choose. (This is what Kant called Will/cUr). Whatever I have done in the past or whatever has happened to me, I have the capacity to change the course of my life radically. But it doesn't follow that nothing in my past influences or predisposes my choices and decisions. The leap in making an existential choice does not necessarily involve a total rupture with my past. Let me indicate why this is important and relevant. I have already indicated that in my judgment Agnes Heller is a good, decent, honest person. Now if we accept her theory of existential choice, then we must say that at some point in her life she made the existential decision to become what she is under the category of universality. Knowing something of Agnes Heller's biography, I suspect that she made such an existential choice at a very young age. Yet, we can ask what Agnes Heller was like before she made this choice. And we do not have to guess because she provides many clues. In the preface to A Philosophy of Morals, she quotes a passage from her father's last will and testament written before he was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz. It is a beautiful passage and worth quoting. My dear daughter Agi, if you think of me, you should remember that if you choose the path of love, your life will be outbalanced and harmonious; you only need a little greater share ofluck than had been allotted to your father, and all will be right with you. [ ... ] In spite of everything that had happened in the last years, I have not lost my faith. [ ... ] Evil can carry a victory for the time being-but it is goodness that, finally, will be victorious. Every good person contributes a grain of dust to its final victory. [ ... ]Please keep me in your friendly and merry remembrance (PM xiii).

Commenting on this passage, Agnes writes, "In this book [A Philosophy of Morals] I have invented nothing. I have only written variations on the theme that had been passed on to me by my father" (PM xiii). Also, the third part of An Ethics of Personality consists of letters exchanged between a character called "Fifi" and her grandmother, Sophie Meller. Heller tells us that all the characters in her book are fictional with one exception. "The exception is Sophie Meller, the grandmother of the correspondence. In her character I tried to draw a reallife portrait of my own grandmother, nee Sophie Meller (1858-1944). My inferior ability in characterization cannot do her justice. I would have needed Goethe's genius to show her as she really was" (EP 8).

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Yet the portrait of a grandmother is a magnificent one! One gets a vital impression of a woman who was sensitive, vivacious, practically wise, understanding. She is an exemplar of a good, decent, honest, caring person. I mention these facts about Agnes' father and grandmother and her early upbringing to make a philosophic point. With a father and grandmother as she describes them, we can easily imagine the moral influences that helped shaped the early character of Agnes Heller. Now assuming that Agnes did make the existential choice to become a good decent person, it is difficult to discount the moral influence of these relatives on shaping her own character. Stated more positively, Heller gives us plenty of evidence to conclude that from her earliest childhood there were positive moral influences shaping her character-her hexis-that, at the very least, predisposed her to make the existential choice of herself as a good person. Suppose one asks counterfactually, could Agnes have turned out differently, could she not have chosen herself as a good person? Of course, the answer is yes! But this only amounts to saying that our choices are never completely determined by the education, emotions, dispositions, and habits that are always at work in shaping our moral character-from the day we are born, and even before we are born. Furthermore, if we take her understanding of contingency seriously, we can say that it is a contingent fact that she had such a morally sensitive father and grandmother. To be born into such a family is a matter of moral luck. Suppose we try the counterfactual thought experiment of imagining what she would be like if her parents were fanatical members of the notorious Hungarian Arrow Cross. Would she be predisposed to make the existential choice that she did make-or would she even be likely to make an existential choice? I suggest that any adequate account of what Heller calls existential choice must also take account of those influences that shape our lives and character-yes, our selves-before we make the existential choice of our selves. The acknowledgement of the influences that shape the moral character of singular individuals before they allegedly make an existential choice raises even further questions about Heller's understanding of existential choice. Whatever one thinks about Freudian psychoanalysis, there is one lesson that we have learned from Freud that is relevant to the issue of existential choice. Freud has taught us that the dynamics of our contingent unconscious lives has a significant influence on our choices. Sometimes this point is badly put by asserting that all our choices are fully causally determined by the unconscious; our "conscious" choices are illusions. But this vulgarized Freudianism is not Freud. What Freud actually teaches us is that many choices that we initially think are completely conscious are actually influenced by the dynamics of our unconscious to a much greater extent than we realize. Heller, however, never seems to acknowledge the role and importance of the unconscious dynamics of our psyche in influencing (not determining or dictating) our moral choices. And yet this is even more relevant when it comes to understanding existential choices. An adequate theory of existential choice ought to illuminate both the conscious and unconscious factors that predispose singular contingent individuals to make the choices that they do

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make. Let me illustrate what I mean by referring to an example that Heller gives of an existential choice. In A Philosophy of History in Fragments, Heller cites the example of R.G. Collingwood. She writes, "R.G. Collingwood recollects his existential choice in his autobiography. As a boy, he bumped by chance into Kant's book on the metaphysics of morals; he started to read it and did not understand it" (PH 25). She then quotes the following passage from Collingwood's autobiography. Disgraceful to confess, here was a book whose words were English and whose sentences were grammatical, but whose meaning baflled me. Then [... ] came the strangest emotion. I felt that the contents of this book, although I could not understand it, were somehow my business: a matter personal to myself, or rather to some future self of my own. It was not like the common boyish intention to 'be an engine-driver when I grow up,' for there was no desire in it; I did not, in any natural sense of the word, 'want' to master the Kantian ethics when I should be old enough; but I felt as if a veil had been lifted and my destiny revealed. [ ... ] There came upon me by degrees, after this, a sense of being burdened with a task whose nature I could not define except by saying, 'I must think'. What I was to think about I did not know; and when, obeying this command, I fell silent and absentminded in company, or sought solitude in order to think without interruption, I could not have said, and still cannot say, what it was that I actually thought.[ ... ] I know now the problems of my life's work were deep down inside me, their first embryonic shape (PH 25-26). Heller takes this to be a paradigmatic example of an existential choice (under the category of difference). But the questions that immediately arise are: What was the young Collingwood really like before this experience; how was he brought up; what were the influences (conscious and unconscious) that predisposed him to react as he did when he read and did not understand Kant? It is misleading to describe Collingwood's revelatory experience as a choice by which ''the essence of one's existence becomes determined" (PH 25) because Collingwood's "existence" was not completely determined by the experience he describes. On the contrary, it was because his personal existence had a certain singular character before his encounter with Kant that it had such a momentous effect upon him. There is something wrong with Heller's understanding of existential choice; especially her thesis that good persons are possible because contingent singular human beings make the existential choice to become good. And I believe that what is wrong can be traced back to her interpretation and appropriation of the Kierkegaardian claim: "If you do not choose yourself, others will choose for you." Kierkegaard is telling us (or rather showing us indirectly in his pseudonymous writings) something that is at once profound and revealing. Kierkegaard shows us that it is always within our power to choose our destinies, to choose what we are and what we are to become. There is a gap between past and future, and we can make a radical leap. The existential choices that we make are

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never simply dictated by our past experiences or our argumentative reasons. Furthermore, most people do not face up to their radical contingency and their radical freedom. They allow others to choose for them, and act as if their fate is predetermined. All of this is sound and true. But this is not the way Heller interprets Kierkegaard's dictum. From Kierkegaard's point of view, although every human being has the capacity to make an existential choice, it is the rare person indeed who does make such a choice. Heller claims that every good person must have made such a choice. If one fails to make such an existential choice, thenwilly-nilly-one is allowing others to choose her destiny. But this Either/Or is too stark, and, more importantly, it actually distorts our moral lives. It ignores the fact that long before a person makes an existential choice (if she does make such a choice) she is always already being shaped consciously and unconsciously by family, community, traditions, institutions, personal history. This thick, rich, complex character development shapes what we are to become long before we are even born. The moral education that one receives (or that one doesn't receive) before making an existential decision is not to be confused, reduced or identified with allowing others to choose my destiny. One wishes that Heller, who has such a fine appreciation of Aristotle, might have better integrated Aristotle's understanding of role of habit, character and early moral education and development with her Kierkegaardian emphasis on radical existential choice. Such an integration might have led to a more realistic and robust sense of the role that existential choices can play in our lives and in choosing our destinies. I have been raising a number of difficulties about Heller's understanding of existential choice under the categories of difference and universality, and especially the role that existential choice allegedly plays in explaining the possibility of good persons. I am certainly not denying that some persons make existential choices, although I think it is a much rarer phenomenon than Heller claims. It is her extreme radical characterization of existential choice and her insistence that every good person has made such a choice that I find dubious. But this should not blind us from appreciating Agnes Heller's insights. She is right to stress the importance of contingency and the awareness of contingency in characterizing modernity (although I think this conscious awareness is much less pervasive than she suggests). We are living in a time when there is a real danger oflosing sight of the importance of our capacity to make fundamental choices and to take responsibility for the choices that we make. So much in modem life conspires to blunt and forget these central existential insights. We are constantly being told that we do what we do as the consequence of factors over which we have no control. We are told, and we frequently tell ourselves, that our choices and actions are exculpable. It is becoming fashionable to suggest that morality and even religion are "really" determined by our genetic heritage. There are even some varieties of so-called "postmodem" discourse that question whether there is a "subject" that is capable of making an existential choice. In short, there are a variety of attacks on the very idea of individual choice and responsibility for what we do and what we choose to become.

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Heller stands in a great tradition that some would trace back to Augustine, but takes a modem form in Kant, and especially in Kierkegaard-that our past lives, traditions and experiences never completely determine what we are to become; that as modem human beings aware of our contingency, we have the ability to make radical existential choices and to choose our destinies. We are radically free-or more accurately we have the capacity to exercise this radical freedom-although we should never underestimate the forces that conspire to deny or repress this freedom or the crucial positive role that moral education and moral luck play in fostering this radical freedom.

Notes 1. She entitles her trilogy A Theory of Morals. The first volume is entitled General Ethics (1988). In the second volume, A Philosophy ofMorals (1990), she gives a synoptic description of her project. "The first volume, General Ethics, addresses the problem of what 'moral' is: this volume [A Philosophy of Morals] seeks answers to the question of what we, modern men and women, ought to do; the third part, yet unwritten, will explore the possibilities of good life. The working title of the completing volume is A Theory of Proper Conduct, but I would rather term it a theory of moral wisdom, for this is exactly what the book is meant to be" (PM xiii-xiv). When she started to write the third volume, "the subject matter itself began to resist my efforts." She writes: "It was if the 'spirit of our age' spoke to me and warned me against the deadly dangers such as being untimely, too rhetorical, boring, and what is worst, assuming the authority of a judge without having being authorized. As a result I began to wonder whether there was something fundamentally wrong with my philosophical ideas. After facing this impasse I put aside the work on the third volume of my Theory ofMorals to find out first what the 'spirit of our times' actually requires. The fruit of this inquiry is my book Philosophy of History in Fragments (Blackwell 1993). I came to the conclusion that, although there is nothing essentially wrong with my preliminary ideas concerning the essential message of the third volume, there is a serious problem with the genre. One cannot write nowadays about the 'good life' of single individuals in a traditional philosophical style.[ ... ] I had to seek new forms of communication" (EP 1-2). Heller explains why the third volume required a radical shift of style (first, a series of university lectures on Nietzsche and Wagner focusing on Nietzsche's reaction to Parsifal; secondly, an imagined dialogue among students who listened to the lectures; and fmally, a series of letters between a granddaughter and her grandmother where the portrait of the grandmother is based on Heller's grandmother, Sophie Meller [1858-1944]). Heller re-baptized the third volume An Ethics of Personality. "Ethics of personality is [ ... ] an ethics without norms, rules, ideals, without anything that is, or remains, merely 'external' to the person. There are as many ethics of personality as authors: e.g., Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche, Lukacs represent entirely different versions of the common enterprise" (EP 3). 2. Heller is well aware of the Hegelian distinction between Moralitiit (morality) and Sittlichkeit (ethics), but she uses the expressions "moral" and "ethical" interchangeably when speaking of existential choice. She discusses Sittlichkeit and its relation to morality in General Ethics. See chapter 2, "Sittlichkeit: the Norms and Rules of Proper Conduct."

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3. Existential choice figures prominently in all three volumes of her theory of morals. But there is a subtle shift of emphasis; the idea of existential choice is radicalized in the course of her thinking and is given increased prominence. In General Ethics, she focuses primarily on a discussion of existential choice in Weber and Lukacs. In her initial discussion of existential choice, she says: ''The real moral issue is not the fact of choice but the 'how' ofliving up to the commitment once the choice has been made" (GE, 163). 4. See Philip Hallie's sensitive description of the people of Le Chambon in Lest In-

nocent Blood be Shed. 5. William James, ''The Dilemma of Determinism, pp. 593-94.

References Hallie, Philip, Lest Innocent Blood be Shed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994). Heller, Agnes. General Ethics. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). (GE) _ _. A Philosophy ofMorals. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). (PM) _ _.A Philosophy ofHistory. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). (PH) _ _. An Ethics ofPersonality. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996). (EP) James, William. ''The Dilemma of Determinism" The Writings of William James, James McDermott, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).

Chapter 8.

Narrative Philosophy: An Essay on Agnes Heller Janos Boros The main thesis presented in this article is that the philosophy of Agnes Heller can be best understood as a personal philosophical life, explained by her. Agnes Heller's biography is itself philosophy and her personal writings are the best examples of contemporary philosophy. As well, with the help of the great philosophical concepts and authors of the history of philosophy, she develops a new kind of genre in philosophy writing: narrative philosophy. Although narrative philosophy is not without predecessors (some examples are Augustine, Montaigne and Nietzsche), Heller develops a new style and method of writing philosophy as a response to the crisis of metaphysics and to the methodology oflinguistic analysis. To help support this thesis, I will also mention some new books by Heller, published in 2005 and 2006 in Hungarian and not yet translated into English. In order to set the context for my argument that Heller develops a uniquely narrative philosophy, I would like first to give a general interpretational framework of her thought, then in a second step, I will give a very brief overview of her life as philosophy, and finally, in the greater part of this essay, I will use Heller's most recent works to extend my analysis.

*** It is a historical fact that Agnes Heller has long held the Hannah Arendt Chair at the New School of Social Research University in New York. The choice of her for this position was the best philosophical act of the university could have made, for her role in contemporary philosophy and culture is as important as that of the greatest thinkers of the last decades, not only of Arendt, but of Habermas, Rorty and Derrida. Her writings are full of original ideas and of surprising connections between ideas and authors, which help us not only to understand our world and ourselves, but also to create, or even in a very Kantian sense to construct ourselves and our world. I would like to demonstrate, in the following, just how Heller achieves this construction and creation. Richard Rorty once said that when he goes to an art exhibition, he expects the works to surprise him. This expectation is not far from my claim here, that a good artwork is one which surprises people. If we can use this criterion also for philosophers, then Heller should certainly top our list. 101

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Heller's life is also a kind of philosophical paradigm; hers is a philosophical biography; her great decisions are exemplary ethical decisions. A historian of contemporary philosophy might very fruitfully analyze Heller's life as a philosophical life, showing how such a life can be led with exemplary dedication to philosophical thinking in a very turbulent and difficult century. As Heller writes in a work published in 2006 in Hungarian: Somehow, in a secret way, as I tried to describe in my book on personal ethics, the vocation[ ... ], the inspiration, the 'a-ha' experience[ ... ], this is a kind of revelation. A human being recognizes her destiny in a voice, in a sign, in a view, and says, even when she does not say, 'I am here'. She is sent on a difficult way; she sends herself; because whether she is sent or she sends herself is one and the same. She endures her vocation; they throw her in a hopper, they draw her out, they throw her again, but she repeats over and over again, 'I am here.' 1 The ideal biography of Agnes Heller would be a philosophical work, and it would be foremost not the analysis of her texts or even the comparison of her texts with her actual life (since such things does not exist "outside" of Agnes Heller), but would be an analysis of her public life as a philosophy. Ideally, the biographer would delve only secondarily into the books of Agnes Heller, to discover the conceptual frameworks she developed to help her to build a life as philosophy. Of course, the conceptual framework is still a question of interpretation, as is her life. All of that being said, here I cannot go into an analysis of the philosophical life of Agnes Heller, nor can I investigate "Agnes Heller'' as the name or a label of a "life as philosophy" or a "philosophy as life"-this would be certainly the task of a greater work. What I would like to do instead is to provide a general interpretational framework of Heller's thought, geared toward a more developed form of the "narrative philosophy" thesis stated above.

Philosophy as Adventure Western Culture is an adventurous culture, and its best protagonists are adventurers in their activities; in art, in literature, in science and in philosophy. Western culture is unimaginable without development, and development cannot be understood without the developers-people who want to change for the best the spaciotemporal, cultural coordinates into which they were born. These developers are adventurers in the truest sense. Beethoven was criticized by his contemporaries for not really knowing the traditional techniques of contrapoint; but who cares today? Moritz Schlick, one of the first analytic philosophers of the Vienna Circle, was killed by a student after his attacks on metaphysics. More recently, Richard Rorty has been ridiculed for his criticisms of analytic philosophy. Yet all were great, and very different, adventurers. I want to add that Agnes Heller, who has likewise been misinterpreted and misunderstood, is one of the greatest adventurers of our time. Before pursuing this point, let me mention an important biographical element. Heller's father died in a concentration camp in the Second World War. He taught her language and literature; he read her the great Hungarian poets; he cultivated in the little girl a love of "higher culture." When the war ended, her father was dead

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and Heller was fifteen. As is well-known, she went on to become a student and friend of Lukacs, initially following him in the expectation that Marxism would provide the best way to overcome injustice and cruelty. Since Europe's historical development led to the war and the Holocaust, it was more than natural for Heller and others to look for a new philosophy and political system to chart a different course. Many people would have stopped there; many did. Many congratulated themselves for being supporters of an intentionally just society because they were official doctrinaires of the socialist system. Not so Agnes Heller. After becoming a convinced Marxist, she discovered that orthodox or official Marxism always sings the same Leninist song, even when that song fails to correspond with the social, sociological, soci-psychological or political situations at hand. Heller openly criticized the official ideological line. She lost her position and was pushed out of the country, but she had the chance to become what she was: a free thinker, a groundbreaking intellectual, and one who took over the existentialist imperative: you are what you choose to be; become who you are. So in the second period of Heller's development, she turned to ethics, eventually writing her famous trilogy, which I want to argue is the foundation of a new kind of ethical thinking, but which remains very much in the tradition of Aristotle and Kant: narrative ethics. In her ethical trilogy, Heller ''narratively" works out her main, deeply existential thesis, namely about self-choice and self-creation through one's own unique life projects. Although she emphasizes Kant's categorical imperative as the best short formulation of the "good," Heller goes further, trying to describe what the good life looks like for someone who chooses herself ethically, as a good person. Heller argues that we neither inherit most forms of knowledge from our ancestors nor directly bequeath them to our children. This is the task of schools and professional training. But we can teach, or model, our own ethical lives, our own comportment as good people or as civilized human beings. One can be an example of one's own personal ethics, yet with this example, one already explains what is good and how to be good. Following Aristotle, Heller knows that reasoning about ethics can never be as clear as reasoning about theoretical issues, and like Rawls, she evades the trap of attempting to categorize ethical notions systematically, or with the aim of producing a theoretical tractatus of goodness. On the contrary, she argues that what is good can be best seen on good people. She knows that good people exist, and asks instead how they are possible. She also knows that a practical philosopher can choose a simple principle, such as the categorical imperative (without its metaphysical obstacles), and can then choose people, biographies or literary works to describe the ethical choices and ethical lives that best present it. In this regard, Heller's work extends upon Kant, who proposes to teach younger generations about ethics with storytelling. Both imply that ethics should become storytelling-a narrative issue-a practice that involves telling the stories of good people. 2 Generally, good people are not practical philosophers, but people living all different sorts of lives. The philosopher should try to describe such lives from the point of view of some very simple, intuitively correct (and not endlessly analyzed) concepts, in order to test how those concepts interact with personal habits, characters or biographies. In doing this, the philosopher mines the real stuff of argumentation and of narration. In the very specific situations of these different lives, there are rich possibilities for analysis and argumentation.

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Since we do not have any metaphysical skyhooks that would allow us to access or say what "goodness" is, we can only bring our narrations and descriptions into the public sphere, and allow others to react to them. Our descriptions and narrations can be the material for public reasoning and this itself can lead to content-rich discussions about what is good and bad-in the context of concrete situations, people and cultures. This is the adventure of Agnes Heller's thinking. She tells us not to decide in advance what is good, but only to present a simple principle, even a feeling, about goodness, and then tell the story of its animating people and characters. She tells us to observe, then, what happens. I called this narrative ethics earlier, and one might also call it a "descriptive ethics," but this would only capture Heller's "method." Ethics as narration is a broader initiative; it requires more fantasy and more imagination-laden activity. After Heller presents an ethics of description of the good people she has encountered or can imagine, she begins to develop the narrative construction of ethics, which comes to entail most everything in which she is interested. The project of narrative ethics must also be narrative philosophy, novel writing, and participation as a public intellectual.

Life as an Adventure of Concepts Agnes Heller's narrative philosophy is not without predecessors. The Bible is the archetype of narrative philosophy, and Agnes Heller often uses such expressions as ''the biblical narrative thinking. " 3 She emphasizes that the "Bible tells stories and does not build metaphysical edifices.'"' And she is convinced that all stories of the Bible contain a philosophical interpretation of the destiny of human being. 5 Philosophers as renowned as Boethius, Augustine, John Scotus Eriugena and Montaigne are certainly recognized for engaging in modes of narrative philosophy. Boethius looked for consolation in philosophy; Augustine narrated his life and philosophy as a conversion about the belief in God. In De Divisione Naturae-Peri Physeon, Eriugena told the Judeo-Christian story of creation and "evolution," there expressing a fundamental phrase for all narrative philosophies: Nemo intrat in caelum nisi per philosophiam (No one enters heaven except through philosophy). Philosophy should explain or tell the story of "everything" that is. If you do not think, you won't be able to enter into the realm of God; you won't be the imago Dei. About a half millennium later, Michel de Montaigne says in the Preface to his Essays that he himself is the only topic of his book. He repeats over and over again: Je n 'enseigne point, je raconte (I do not teach, I narrate). 6 He insists that the only topic of his essays is himself, "Montaigne: I am myself the matter of my book." He does not write about final causes, about "being"-je ne feins pas I 'etre, je peins le passage {I do not paint the being, I paint the passage). And Montaigne's greatest followers are Heller's predecessors in narrative philosophy: Emerson and Nietzsche. However, none of her predecessors in narrative philosophy reached the fullness and breadth that we see in Agnes Heller. Boethius looked for consolation before the death; Augustine's teleological narration was predetermined, necessarily leading to God; and Eriugena speaks about the world as creation but not about his personal life. Montaigne does describe his individual self, but in counterpoint to such Aristo-

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telian features of philosophy as generality, totality, necessity, eternity, identity, unchangeability, scientific positivism and doctrinarism. Heller's narration takes in all these topics, while showing how they continue to belong to human existence, to society, to the world and to ethics. She does not work in contradiction or counterpoint to the philosophical tradition and she does not reinforce any one given philosophical canon predominately. We can characterize her activity with the help of Richard Rorty's notion of the "ironist": "Ironists take the writings of all the people with poetic gifts, all the original minds who had a talent for redescriptionPythagoras, Plato, Milton, Newton, Goethe, Kant, Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Darwin, Freud-as grist to be put through the same dialectial mill."8 For Heller, important "grists" include, among others, Aristotle, Spinoza and Hegel. But she uses all the interesting figures of the history of philosophy, making philosophy itself serve her. 9 Indeed, she becomes one of the most talented followers of Nietzsche, who speaks about how the "true world" became a fable. 10 Whereas for Nietzsche, the fable is the history of truth, in all of its genealogical metamorphoses through the history of concepts, for Heller, the truth of this fable allows her to create and recreate herself and her identity, and in so doing, she recreates our understandings of the world at hand. Heller's narration realizes, th,erefore, Rorty's propagation: it is an overcoming of generalist philosophy, which also conserves it and ensures it for future generations. To understand ourselves and of our culture, we need philosophy-as serious thinking which keeps an eye on its own history, methodology, argumentations and concepts. But we cannot accept a philosophy as a maternal or paternalistic figure or as an enduring general master. After having learned philosophy, we should live in philosophy; but being successful in this ''project," actually doing it, means we do not need to answer to philosophy as to a master. We serve ourselves with the concepts and stories of philosophy; we ourselves become our own philosophy, which is neither master nor servant. This is the way in which we become unalienated from philosophy, in which we integrate it into our lives, and this is what philosophy is for Heller: the continuous thinking and rethinking of everything she meets, whether authors, books, explicit contemporary problems or problems hidden by contemporary ways of life or thought. To do and to live philosophy is for Agnes Heller a successful recontextualization of her past-which includes the whole history of philosophy in a way-just as she wants to address it and in whatever way suits her; because for her, to be free and autonomous is, in a Kantian sense, the condition of possibility for being personally ethical. She is free, autonomous and ethical toward the history of philosophy, and again, what Rorty writes about the ironist, applies to her: "all any ironist can measure success against is the past-not by living up to it, but by redescribing it in [her] terms, thereby becoming able to say, 'thus I willed it."' 11 Heller writes: ''when we come into the world, we do not have the world." 12 This is the contemporary formulation of Eriugena's very philosophical principle: without our creation and without our rational thinking (without philosophy), we won't have our own world (we can not enter heaven). This is also a creative reformulation of Wittgenstein's much-quoted remark in Tractatus, ''the limits of my language are the limits of my world" (5.6). 13 When we come to the world, we do not have language, and consequently we do not have a world, if our world is something expressed in language, or thought with concepts expressed in language. Our language, our world, and we ourselves are born together, are constructed together and they hold

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on together. The limits in time and space in the one are the same as the limits in the other; indeed time and space are constructed in our discursive understandings. Of course we do not simply create our world, our language. We enter into a scene, and we try to find out our role within it. Peter Sloterdijk, in his Zur Welt kommen-Zur Sprache Kommen (Coming to World-coming to Language) says that we are like people who come too late to the theater. The door opens during an act, and we go in, we look for our seats. Although we were not there at the beginning, we listen attentively and we try to follow the events. 14 This also means that we participate in the "World Game," positing ideas about its beginning and its rules, once we have participated in it for a time. The strong philosopher, then, is a strong director, setting the scene of her life and her world. Like a poet, the philosopher creates scenes in the postnatal world. She also creates in the post-philosophical and post-cultural world, in that she takes from the history of philosophy the notions, concepts and theories she needs, without submitting herself to any one of them. Narrative philosophers like Heller understand ''wisdom" to be a human construction. So she directs the scene in which she is participating. To quote Rorty again, this kind of philosopher creates ''the taste, by which he will be judged."15 I would add that the strong philosopher also creates the taste with which she will judge her own and earlier tastes. The world of a strong philosopher is post-philosophical and pos-cultural in a temporal sense because the philosophy and the culture she creates literally come after what was created before her. This idea gives rise to the "end of philosophy" concept of Hegel, Marx and others, who allow that where strong philosophers imagine until the "end" of their imaginative capacities; until the point that they could not imagine further development. These philosophers implicitly (or explicitly) make the claim that if they cannot imagine it, it cannot be; their imagination is already the doing of philosophy and its limits are already philosophy's end. Heller's role as a narrative philosopher makes her one such "strong philosopher," in a sense related to Harold Bloom's description of the "strong poet." 16 Of course, it may not be fair to borrow what Bloom says about the poet and apply it to the philosopher, because nolens volens the Platonic distinction between poetry and philosophy remains commanding; it has been shaken but not overthrown, despite the efforts of Nietzsche or more contemporary thinkers. There are, that is, now well known arguments following from the idea that truth is "a mobile army of metaphors" (Nietzsche); that there is "nothing outside of the text" (Derrida and some analytic philosophers); that "philosophy is a kind of writing" and nothing more (Rorty); or that ''truth is theoretically primitive" and there is no possible theory about it (Davidson). Still though, the intentional objective of philosophy remains to find truth and truthfulness or justice in the world, whereas poetry is something different, even when encountering or searching for truth and justice are among its topics. Heller confirms over and again her commitment to the truth, as the differentia specifica of a philosopher, although she knows well all the critical theories about truth. As she puts it, ''the practice of interpreting the holy texts of the Bible is from my point of view a close relative of the sort of philosophical thinking that I share with many of my contemporaries. It is not a lesser thought than the thinking about truth." 17 In other words, Heller understands that there is no final, absolute truth that will be founded by philosophers. But philosophers are people who are thinking about truth. This is one of the main principles of Heller's philosophical work. Although she is a poetic philosopher, Heller is still a philosopher: the pursuit of truth and justice, the attempt to give an account in correspondence with reality,

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and the effort to write directly about what there is, even when what-is is also our construction-these philosophical commitments also make her different from the strong poet of Bloom. And these commitments have required Heller to be adventurous in thinking and consequently in practice. Being conceptually adventurous or adventurous in thinking means working out, in everyday practice, what is critically read, negated and transformed in philosophical texts.

Novelized Philosophy Heller recently published two new books in Hungary (and in Hungarian), titled Megtestesu/es (lncarnation) 18 and /mho/ vagyok. A genezis konyvenek filozofiai erte/mezesei (I am Here. Philosophical Interpretations of the Book of Genesis). 19 It is not enough to say that these books are the peaks of contemporary narrative philosophy, for this would imply too close a kinship between Heller's work and other writings. No, Heller has actually created a new genre in philosophy, that of narrative philosophy; and these books are its paradigms. I am tempted to say that with them, she has created ''post-analytic narrative philosophy," and though I this would be an appropriate characterization, I do not want to force this name here. Indeed, Heller's (post-analytic) narrative philosophy is apparent in her earlier works, but in these most recent books, the new narrative philosophy comes to completion. If we look at the Stanford or Oxford encyclopedias of philosophy, we do not find entries on "narrative philosophy" because narrative philosophy is not yet a recognized philosophical genre. But since Heller has now presented it in a form that can be recognized, we can also recognize its predecessors. Ricoeur says that who one is, is the story one is telling. But again, Heller's narrative philosophy goes further. Ricoeur's statement works on a meta-level, from God's perspective or the perspective of the knowing observer; Ricoeur does not tell the story, he only writes about storytelling. Ricoeur analyzes the structural similarities of historiography and of the narration of fiction, as the two great modes of narration, but he does not investigate his own, "philosophical" mode of writing. 20 Ricoeur helps us grasp that if historiography is a narration of past events, and if the narration of fiction means telling stories of imagination, then where imagination is parasitic on past events and our fictional imagination is likewise parasitic on our knowledge about the past, imagination and historiography become interpenetrated and difficult to discern. One of Ricoeur's main theses is that time will be human time only in the degree to which it is articulated in a narrative mode. Further, narration will be significant in a degree that corresponds with its ability to design the characteristic properties of the temporal experience. 21 But even given this great significance, Ricoeur only analyzes the nature of narratives; he never tries to write a philosophical narrative and he does not mention, among narrative possibilities, the philosophiography or the philosophical narrative. Likewise, Derrida, Habermas and Rorty all speak about the conditions of storytelling in philosophy, though they speak very differently about them. Derrida works on a pre-semantic or semi-semantic level in language; he works between syntax and semantics and his play with the language at hand creates the sense of his created text. Habermas tries to clarify the social, communicative, ethical and linguistic conditions of rational interpretation in his time. And Rorty, questioning all worship of method in analytic philosophy, renews pragmatism and with it comes to argue

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that reading and interpreting as many books as possible helps us to make more imaginative democratic social communities, and to help create the conditions for global democracy. But Agnes Heller-she tells the story. This is the opposite kind of activity (if there is such a thing) to that of analytic philosophy, in its highest ideal of itself. Analytic philosophers do not tell any story; they are not engaged in the historicity or the narration of truths. Quine writes an autobiography-The Time of My Lifebut he does not consider it to be part of his philosophical work. 22 Analytic philosophers may investigate the preconditions of storytelling or even of concept usage or of the use of intelligent language, but narrative philosophy actually uses language intelligently, which means self-consciously and with the help of philosophical concepts. As such, narrative philosophy goes hand in hand not only with poetry or literature, but with vital ethical works, particularly that of Rawls. Rawls writes, "I have learned from Burton Dreben, who made W.V. Quine's view clear to me and persuaded me that the notions of meaning and analycity play no essential role in moral theory as I conceive it.' 723 In her later ethical writings Agnes Heller does not get bogged down in notions of meaning or analycity either; rather, she describes ethical characters and provides ethical stories, just as, as we noted earlier, Kant recommends. In the preface (Eiohang) of Incarnation, Heller remembers that as a child reading Erich Kastner's novel, she found exercises for thinking at its conclusion and was especially interested in their tasks. She found that she liked to think about what happened in the chapters and the questions they raised. She learned to think with the help of children's literature, and her close connection to literature is obvious in all of her works. Heller also recounts that she first wanted to write novels and to provide her own exercises to readers, but later she discovered, she says, that she lacked literary talent. Thus, she moved straight to the exercises for thinking. In this preface, she suggests that that in reverse of Erich Kastner's novel, readers should imagine and/or write the novel chapters related to her propositions for thinking. And in fact, were someone to try, a biography could evolve, as the book begins with a chapter about entering the world and ends with a chapter about leaving it. If there is novelized philosophy, this is it. Heller has cultivated this genre just as Thomas Mann once cultivated and mastered the genre of the philosophical novel. It is easy to recognize the relevance and power of philosophical novels, as they already exist (thanks to Mann and others), but how shall we recognize novelized philosophy, which did not exist before Heller? Novelized philosophy is a narrative philosophy, in which, in addition to the analysis of concepts, arguments and references to figures of the history of philosophy, there is storytelling and the stories that are told are the stories of concepts-how they work in the world or in the lives of people, as well as the stories of people-how they move in the world of concepts. A narrative philosopher is one who writes novels, with an eye to the history of literature, but she also deals with the history of philosophy. A philosophical novelist writes a novel, and there formulates different philosophical positions, but she never has to say what her own position as novel writer is to the given philosophical thought. A novel writer can present several positions and set them to work in her novel, whereas a philosopher can never do that. While a philosopher may argue different positions in university seminars or in professional articles, insofar as she has a position of her own to argue at all, a philosopher will not normally strongly affirm a position that contradicts her own. Yet a philosophical novel

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writer puts words into the mouths of her protagonists, characters also with unique personalities, and allows them to undergo the criticism of their positions. Thus, when the philosopher Agnes Heller says something about freedom in her own name, we have to take it seriously. When Thomas Mann puts words about freedom into the mouth of Dr. Phil. Serenus Zeitblom in Doktor Faustus, no one thinks that Mann should be blamed for Zeitblom's silliness: "What is freedom? Only people without character are free. What is characteristic is never free, but bound and determined; it takes with itself the stamp of its origin."24 On the contrary, readers can appreciate the way that Mann might be allowing for just the opposite conclusion, namely that the origin of the stamp of a character is in activity, in acts chosen from within oneself, that is, in freedom. Indeed, Heller would certainly argue that character and freedom are inseparable; character means habitual morality, which-as is accepted at least since Kantpresupposes freedom. Determined, causal structures can be very special but only in a narrow physical sense; we would never call them characters. Character, as Heller presents it, is part of ethical texture altogether, and is bound up too with emotions. There is no thought without emotions and we cannot have a world without emotional dependences. 25 But emotions are neither rational nor causal, which is why they tend to elude philosophical descriptions and scientific investigations. Still, we have to speak about them, and if we have to speak about them, then we have to have concepts; as concepts are inferentially embedded in the logical space of reasons, we must returning to philosophy and to the economy of conceptual, intelligent and self-conscious thinking.

A Philosophy of Emotions and Imagination Heller's narrative philosophy entails a philosophy of emotions. Her world is a human world, which is constructed in a web of emotion. There is no thinking without emotions/6 she says, and it is likewise true that there are no emotions without thinking. Whereas emotions themselves are neither causal nor rational, their investigation can be rational and they can be understood in causal chains. We humans "cannot have a world without the chains of emotional dependences," Heller writes. 27 That is why, while she does not reject scientific philosophy, she emphasizes that it is not sufficient for understanding the human situation. Science can help, but it is not only inadequate for understanding ourselves, but seen from the reverse angle, we can say that while the project of self-understanding can include scientific truths, it need not; in self-understanding, we are not dependent upon science.28 Here Heller, who usually formulates so precisely, never says who this "we" includes or where exactly these projects fail to overlap. At the beginning of her A Philosophy ofMorals, 29 Heller argues that we should bequeath only practical knowledge, ethics and moral wisdom to the next generation. Whereas this statement seems reasonable and even enlightened in ethical terms, we should again be curious who this ''we" includes, especially where it excludes scientific understandings. First, as physical and biological beings, we need to know a lot about the physical world, and much of it can be taught. Nature would have killed us long time ago without these forms of rational mastery. Science is only a contemporary development of our handling with our natural environment. As such, it belongs to humanity; scientific knowledge is our common knowledge

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about the physical world. Physicalists or many naturalists would go so far as to say that this is our only valid knowledge, even though we accept that it is fallible and falsifiable. Indeed, since Popper, this fallibility and falsifiability is considered by most as a condition of a scientific statement. This must lead some to the conclusion that scientific knowledge cannot be true, insofar as truth is something sublime, absolute, or eternal. Nevertheless, science is hugely successful in methodically dealing with the natural environment and in distinguishing between pseudo-science and convincing scientific theory. So such a sublime notion of truth is an absolute, not a useful concept, and the fact that we survive in account of our useful scientific understandings helps to underscore their usefulness. It is fair to say that "we" are here in large part thanks to those understandings. The "we" in Heller's statements, though, is the ethical we; "we" who try to make something of ourselves as individuals need not depend upon scientific truths to do so (unless once is, as an individual, a scientist or scientifically inclined). Nonetheless, insofar as ethical decision and actions actually happen, they likely play out in the physical world. This is why we, as individual members of a linguistic and practical community, should also be concerned about and should know scientific truths. To know scientific truth means to know physical nature. The second chapter of Incarnation also has the title "Incarnation"-and what else would incarnation be, if not that something becomes or is carnal or physical in nature. Heller here reviews the history of dualisms, such as those of body and mind, rationality and the subconscious, and rationality and sentiments. She emphasizes, "I am interested in the ruling imagination of a time, and not the philosophical problem-solving."30 (This is also the most important philosophical task for Rorty, who thinks that imagination is necessary for the construction and maintenance of democratic societies.) To make her point, Heller utilizes both lines of the Western tradition: Greek philosophy and biblical thinking. She makes room for both at the outset of her narrative philosophy when she says "biblical thinking is not metaphysical thinkin~, because instead of logical and rational construction it is narrative sense-giving" 1; and she then continues to call biblical thinking "narrative."32 With the help of this thinking, we are capable of approaching ourselves as artworks/ 3 that is, as projects to be constructed by us, which we do in our personal relationships and with the help of philosophical concepts. Again, Heller advises not to care about the analytical exactitude of our expression, because 1: we find over and over again in different levels of analysis the same dualisms and contradictions; and 2: as artists, we do not have time for long analyses-we have to get on with synthesizing ourselves and our natural and personal environment. The products of narrative philosophy are artworks then, both as personalities and as novelized philosophical works that phenomenologically describe the human situation, using concepts of philosophy, without suggesting that there is an end in sight, or a satisfactory solution of the contradictions at hand. Describing our "incarnation," Heller writes about "pains, pleasures and matters of the heart." 34 Here, she reveals her general attitude, which perhaps lies behind her choice to do philosophy narratively. Sentiments, pains and pleasures can be treated in the paradigm of the mind-body contradiction, although they do not actually provide the foundation for a consequent dualism. 35 That means that they cannot treated in dualistic terms, that is, it cannot be said that this or that feeling belongs to the mind or instead to the body. There cannot be an analytic philosophy of feelings and sentiments, but there can be a description and an interpretation of them-with philosophical terms. Heller

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writes, "Feelings interpret and judge."36 Interpretations and judgments obey the laws of logic, but feelings do not.

Davidson If feelings aren't submitted to logic, how can the result of their activity obey the laws of logic? Perhaps feelings belong to the realm of causes, which influence the space of reasons. As Davidson puts it, the realm of causes influences the space of reasons and our beliefs, but it can be never shown satisfactorily how a certain cause or a feeling influences a particular judgment. Heller's response to this problem is narration and narrative philosophy. We can, she shows, describe with a kind of approximation, and we can know this to be an approximation, not a full explanation of the complete set of happenings and the relations. This is very much in harmony with Davidson's concept of anomalous monism. 37 The three principles of anomalous monism are 1: The Principle of Causal Interaction, which is that "some mental events interact causally with physical events." Examples are perception, or the intention to do something followed by the bodily movement to do it. 2: The Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality, which holds that ''where there is causality, there must be a law: events related as cause and effect fall under strict deterministic laws." The causal realm is not open to influences that come from outside of the causal world; otherwise, we would be resurrecting Descartes' evil genius, able to influence events causally in ways we cannot detect. 3: The Anomalism of the Mental, which holds that "there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained." For Davidson, mental and causal events are identical, but there are no strict psychophysical laws that would identifiably connect with causal processes or mental events. But all this suggests that after Davidson, there is not much philosophical work left to do, at least on the level of the "clarification" or "analysis" of concepts. There is, however, the way Heller has chosen: telling the story of emotions, feelings and rationality as it happens in our life. Davidsonians do not aim to get the causal-mental connections right, but try to tell their story. In this sense, Heller shares something pivotal with Davidson, while enlarging his theory with philosophical narration. When she emphasizes the role of emotions in rational choices and in personal interactions, she narrates in harmony with anomalous monism: "Emotions are the expressions of human relations of the present, the past or imaginations, whereas bodily pain is only such an expression if it is caused deliberately by humans, or at least if humans could hinder it. Joy attests to and affirms our personality; it endorses our acts, our lives, life in general. Desire waits for something that gives us joy, and at the same time it is motive for action, whereas grief is an emotional answer to human disappointment, to slight or to human loss, including disappointment in myself."38 Not only reasons can be causes, as Davidson argues/ 9 but also emotions can be as well. Emotions are causal and mental. They are caused and they can be causes of events. We have beliefs about our emotions, and at the same time, our emotions are partially formed by beliefs about them; we can have partial mental influence on our emotions, and mental events can be causes.

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Davidson's theory of incontinent action presents some parallels with Heller's theory of emotions, but of course they are not the same. Davidson writes, "an agent's will is weak if he acts, and acts intentionally, counter to his own best judgment; in such cases we sometimes say he lacks the willpower to do what he knows, or at any rate believes, would, everything considered, be better. It will be convenient to call actions of this kind incontinent actions, or to say that in doing them the agent acts incontinently.'.40 However, there are sometimes cases in which an agent seems to understand all circumstances and engaged in the most serious possible evaluation, and still rejects or intentionally refuses to do the "right" thing. What does "right" mean here? It is not like a 100 meter crawl, where the fastest is the best. In empirical cases it can be never known with absolute certainty which possible action will turn out to be the "best," especially, when the circumstances are complicated. In any case, while a rational evaluation can produce a strong claim about which kind of action in a given situation is best, and while the agent can believe this claim rationally, affirming that it is the best option, he can still fail to act or refuse to act, and can convince himself that the very reasons supporting his judgment of the best action are the reasons to reject it. Davidson writes, "there is no paradox in supposing a person sometimes holds that all that he believes and values supports a certain course of action, when at the same time those same beliefs and values cause him to reject that course of action.'.41 The statement also can be negatively formulated, as a parallel to Davidson: there is no paradox in supposing a person sometimes holds that all that he believes and values repudiates a certain course of action, while at the same time those same beliefs and values cause him to support that course of action. This reversal does not change Davidson's line of argumentation in the least. One can understand what he should do (or reject), and this same thinking can cause him to rejects (or undertake) that same action. How should we understand these claims of Davidson's? Thinking and believing are mental events; in the space of reasons, their content can be as submitted to the laws of logic. But thinking and believing are also mental events that supervene on physical, physiological and psychological laws; that is, on causal laws. It is possible that the semantics of our sentences, which express a course of right action in one direction, lead us in a direction opposed to that targeted by anomalous causal structures. If this happens much, we can expect it to be accompanied by a change in the mental states, because the contradictory situation is likely to lead to serious disturbances in the actions and life of such an agent. That there are strong causal forces capable of overwriting our rational decisions is clearly a post-Freudian understanding of the person or agent, and opens wide possibilities to the narrative philosophical theory of sentiments, which is Heller's topic. Davidson continues, "if r is someone' s reason for holding that p, then his holding that r must be, I think, a cause of his holding that p. But, and this is what is crucial here, his holding that r may cause his holding that p without r being his reason; indeed, the agent may even think that r is a reason to reject p.'.4 2 This is a formulation in which Davidson supposes that the logical space is embedded in the realm of causes. Whereas reasons are, for him, causes of beliefs, not all causes of beliefs are at the same time reasons, and some causes of beliefs also can be reasons of rejecting those beliefs. So when Davidson asks "what is the agent's reason for doing a when he believes it would be better, all things considered, to do another thing?"; he can only answer that "the answer must be: for this, the agent has no reason." The final conclusion of Davidson's long analysis is ''what is special in

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incontinence is that the actor cannot understand himself: he recognizes, in his own intentional behavior, something essentially surd.'"'3 If after long analysis there remains something essentially surd in the descriptions of actions, then the rational analysis of action has revealed to itself its own limits. At the limits of rational argumentation, reasoning can do two things. 1: It can stay in the realm of rationality, and continue to pursuer only the logically secured analyses of language. This is the way of contemporary analytic philosophy. 2: It can "open" itself to new areas, which mean to the rational analysis of extralinguistic entities. Whether rational analysis can circumvent language is still an issue being heavily debated. This is the choice of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive and neuro-philosophy. 3: Reasoning can give way to narrating, analyzing neither reason itself, nor language as the host of rationality, but instead describing everything that a philosopher can observe for herself and with the help of canonical philosophical works and tools. This is the way of Heller's narrative philosophy.

Rationality as a Part of Human Existence Heller, however, does not step into the scene of narrative philosophy as someone for whom rational analysis as failed, or as someone offering a way out after the failure of rational analysis. She is convinced that the narrative way, which can include all "human elements" of thinking and action, is a good way to take care of ourselves as human-beings and as "humanists.'' She quotes Spinoza, who in holding that "there is no emotion that could be overcome by reason; emotion can be overcome only by a stronger emotion.'' This is clearly a response to Aristotle and to Davidson. Then she continues: The hwnan being conducted by 'pure reason' is said to be autonomous. For me, the question is not whether pure autonomy is possible, but whether it is desirable. I fear that purely autonomous human beings would become monsters. If it is true that mutual emotional dependence belong to the destiny of hwnans, then there is no such danger. But the desire for autonomy should not be abandoned as senseless, because no desire-which does not want to harm to hwnans-should be abandoned.44

The affective, emotional interdependence of human beings has priority, for Heller, over rational deliberations. In her worldview, the hero is a person who is affected by others, involved in the network of emotions, and who does not retire to a separated room to contemplate truth, for she is actively engaged in the feelingrich common human life. Rationality is only a part of human existence, and philosophers should try not only to understand this situation, which is already what rationalists, empiricists or analytics alike do; they should describe this situation, narrating the human story with the help of concepts from the history of philosophy. After surveying the "adventurous history of the body-soul relationship," and after destroying the traditional project of metaphysical system-building, we should rethink some of the guiding intuitions of those same traditions. "How can a building, in this case the building of

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metaphysics, be destroyed so that we can still use its stones and ornaments, although not for a new building?"-she asks. ''The post-metaphysical philosopher cannot do other than to use the stones of destroyed .old systems-although not only them-and to think about how she might invent new fables. Anyway, she asks the childish questions over and over again, because she cannot do otherwise.'o