Modernity and the Political Fix 9781350096974, 9781350096998, 9781350096967

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Modernity and the Political Fix

Political Theologies Edited by Ward Blanton (University of Kent), Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University), Michael Dillon (Lancaster University) and Yvonne Sherwood (University of Kent) This series explores the past, present and future of political theology. Taking its cue from the ground-­breaking work of such figures as Derrida, Agamben, Badiou and Zizek, it seeks to provide a forum for new research on the theologico-­political nexus including cutting edge monographs, edited collections and translations of classic works. By privileging creative, interdisciplinary and experimental work that resists easy categorization, this series not only re-­asserts the timeliness of political theology in our epoch but seeks to extend political theological reflection into new territory: law, economics, finance, technology, media, film and art. In Bloomsbury Political Theologies, we seek to re-­invent the ancient problem of political theology for the 21st century. International Advisory Board Agata Bielik-Robson (University of Nottingham) Howard Caygill (Kingston University) Simon Critchley (New School of Social Research) Roberto Esposito (Scuola Normale Superiore) Elettra Stimilli (University of Rome La Sapienza) Miguel Vatter (University of New South Wales)

Titles in the series: The Withholding Power: An Essay on Political Theology, Massimo Cacciari The Weakness of Belief, Michel de Certeau Unnatural Theology, Charlie Gere Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson Debt and Guilt, Elettra Stimilli Apocalyptic Political Theology, Thomas Lynch

Modernity and the Political Fix Andrew Gibson Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 This paperback edition published in 2021 Copyright © Andrew Gibson, 2019 Andrew Gibson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: At Dawn by Charles Hermans (1839–1924). Found in the collection of Musées royeux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique © Heritage Images/Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-­party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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To Thomas Docherty and Martin Dzelzainis, the two friends who contributed most to this book, in admiration of their intellect, learning, courage and sense of principle. Therefore is justice far from us, neither doth justice overtake us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity. . . . Isaiah, 59.9 Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour.

Wordsworth, ‘The River Duddon’

Contents Acknowledgements Introduction: Modernity and the Political Fix Ironical modernity Byron as paradigm Benjamin and ‘satanic modernity’ Functions of modern literature 1

2

3

4

5

ix 1 1 8 13 15

The Implosion of Modernity The way we live now Twelve features of the neoliberal mythos Leibniz triumphans Political theology and counterdemocracy

23

Absolute Historicity Heidegger and radical finitude Foucault and his methods Joyce’s historical materialism

51

Event Back to Badiou Pro and contra the event Kant and speculative reason Woolf ’s ‘strata of being’

69

Remainder Carpaccio and the atomized emporium ‘Mondes atones’ from Hobbes to Schopenhauer Wagner without redemption

89

The People Untransformed The unbridged gap Agon of Weimar Joseph Roth and ‘the indolence of the heart’ Canetti and general solipsism Rancière, Orwell and knowing the people

23 31 41 44

51 55 63

69 75 81 85

89 91 97 111 111 113 116 124 125

Contents

viii 6

Transmission A melancholic-­ecstatic conception of history Occultation and the survival of truth Lacanian caveats Transmission against the grain

135

Conclusion: A Political Theology An inductive thought Political theology and its critics Schmitt, Blumenberg, Lefort Metaphorics from the Old Testament to Kierkegaard In the end, the poets

161

Notes Index

135 142 144 154

161 164 169 176 189 199 227

Acknowledgements My first and major debt is to Mick Dillon and Arthur Bradley, who had read some earlier work of mine, approached me with the suggestion that I might have a political theology in me, and asked me to write it up for their series. Far from being conscious from the start that they were right, initially, I had only a vague idea of what a political theology actually was. As I became increasingly aware that, indeed, not only had they been on to something, but that political theology might actually be my way of thinking politics, and that I could commit myself to it, I realized how extraordinarily valuable and significant their first intuition was for me. They have never ceased to be patient, helpful and supportive. I am deeply grateful to them and their confidence, not least because a certain self-­recognition has been involved in writing what I’ve written. My second great debt is to my dedicatees, Thomas Docherty and Martin Dzelzainis. Once again, I assume they saw an aspect of me that I didn’t see myself, because they were unstintingly generous with and fertile in encouragement, intellectual stimulus and, above all, suggestions for reading, virtually all of which have found their way into the book, and without which it wouldn’t have become what it is. I wonder whether they didn’t understand where the book might go better than I did. At all events, both have long set me an example of how to continue to lead the intellectual life with integrity in notably unpromising times. Once again, my heartfelt thanks. My third debt is to Liza Thompson and Frankie Mace at Bloomsbury. To agree to publish one book by me looks like a misfortune. To commission another looks like carelessness. They, again, have been patient (as they needed to be), understanding and encouraging throughout. I am immensely grateful to them. I should also express my thanks to one particular reader for Bloomsbury, whose sometimes challenging but always sophisticated and thoughtful remarks prompted me to improve the book (I hope) quite markedly; and to Mark Fisher, for his expertise, tact and sensitivity as copy editor. The book allows me, in Chapter  2, to place my previous work on Joyce a little differently, and perhaps to elicit a thought and a set of meanings that have hitherto tended to remain implicit in it. Once again, I am grateful to all the Joyce scholars and enthusiasts, too numerous to mention by name, many of them friends, who contributed to my work, helped and supported me along the way. This is the first book of mine to owe a serious debt to Australia and Australians, and I’m glad to acknowledge it, not least because I’ve rapidly developed a respect for the seriousness of Australian intellectual culture at the current time, at least, in the few small pockets that I know. I presented some early and frankly rather indifferent drafts of parts of the book at the Universities of New South Wales, Melbourne and Adelaide, and the discussions that ensued were enormously useful to me and helped me raise my game. Sincere and friendly thanks, then, to Robert Boncardo, Christian Gelder and Sean Pryor at New South Wales; to Justin Clemens and Kim Mereine, not least for

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Acknowledgements

pulling me up on flaccid thinking, and Joe Hughes, all in Melbourne; and to Jennifer Rutherford and Brian Castro, with great respect for the real sense of conscience, and Rita Horanyi, all at Adelaide. I gave an early draft of part of Chapter  3 to the English Department at Queens University, Belfast. I am grateful to Alex Murray and Brian Caraher both for the invitation and for their astute interventions. Much of my account of Leibniz in the book first saw the light of day at the conference on ‘Set Theoretical Ontology and the Philosophy of the Event’ at the University of Liverpool in 2015, and I am grateful to Oliver Downing for the invitation to speak there, and to Alain Badiou and Oliver Feltham among others for responding so thoughtfully to what I had to say. Thanks also to Julian Murphet and Grace Hellyer for asking me to write an essay on Rancière that eventually fed substantially into my Introduction; to Marc Botha and Patricia Waugh, who invited me to provide an early version of Chapter 4 for their Bloomsbury volume Critical Transitions: Genealogies and Trajectories of Change; and to John Brannigan for the invitation to speak about Norman Nicholson at the Irish Sea Symposium organized by the University College Dublin Humanities Institute at the National Maritime Museum of Ireland in 2016. Much of that lecture has been reproduced for the first time in the concluding pages of this book. Otherwise, thanks to: Ian Littlewood, for first getting me fully to recognize the enigmatic beauty of Carpaccio (at the Schiavoni, quietly insisting in the teeth of a noisy tour group); to Justin Wintle, for his expertise on R.S. Thomas, and for numerous long and lively discussions of Thomas and Wales, and to the late Gwydion Thomas, the poet’s son; to Vicki Mahaffey, for taking such an interest, sharing my love of Wagner and reading some of the book for me; to John Carey, for his example, and for conversations about St. Augustine and another shared love, Orwell; to David Cooper, and especially David Boyd, for a great deal of knowledgeable and scholarly help with Norman Nicholson; to Owen Hewitson for telling me where to look in Lacan, and to Richard Klein, for a great deal of help in understanding him in a certain way; to Andrew Whiffin, who invited me to speak on Evelyn Waugh at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, leading to one of the perhaps more surprising passages in the book, if a short one; to Rachel Jones, for getting me to re-­read Huysmans, and for stimulating me to think about him in fresh ways; to Gerlinde Bolton, for introducing me to Berlin Alexanderplatz; to Marc Farrant, for directing me to Martin Hägglund; to Shane Weller, and also Emilia Borowska, for conversations bridging the gap between my previous book (on Misanthropy, also published by Bloomsbury) and this one; to Robert Hampson, alert as always beyond my powers to political reality and nuance; to Judith Balso and Joe Brooker, also for a serious sense of the meaning of politics; to all the students who have recently taken my course on ‘Byron, Modernity and Europe’ in the English Department at Royal Holloway (College), University of London, for all our many and various exchanges, more helpful to me than they may have known; to Thomas Gibson, for his humorous and acerbic criticisms, not always merely personal; to James Smith, for his consistent interest; to Pamela Church Gibson, for kind support at a crucial moment; to Amanda Dennis and Emmanuel Dayan, for last-­minute help in Paris; and to John Creaser, for the support he has given me for thirty years. It goes without saying that all errors in the book are mine. Except where specified, all translations are my own.

Introduction: Modernity and the Political Fix

‘Modernity’ begins with splits, inconsistencies and ironies. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason There is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour. Derrida, Shibboleth

Ironical modernity My book takes as its chief starting-­point a concept of modernity as beginning in the period 1780–1830, and above all with the French revolution. This modernity, of course, is sporadically if scantly apparent earlier, in the Lumières, for example, in Swift and Hume, and indeed at least as far back as Hobbes. The book will engage with this incipient modernity from time to time. But, crucially, it is only with the French revolution that not merely thought but also praxis can take ungroundedness, the final absence of all foundations, the power of the virtual within the actual, the possible transformation of all forms, as its first principle. As Agnes Heller puts matters, from now on, the ‘non-­founding foundation’ of modernity means that ‘freedom grounds’; but this also means that ‘everything is ungrounded’.1 Once this modern knowledge imposes itself, it can never disappear, whatever the ruses, shifts and stratagems by which people seek to deny or reverse it, notably at the current time. Immanuel Wallerstein even goes so far as to call it an ‘eternal’ as opposed to the many ‘fleeting’ modernities.2 It insists – however fragile, almost non-­existent the promise it embodies may sometimes seem. I take this modern knowledge to be a knowledge of the possibility of justice and the good. This knowledge is logical. If the foundation is ‘non-­founding’, if only freedom grounds, then the possibility that, theoretically at least, a secular justice may come to pass is ungainsayable. Since the terms ‘justice’ and ‘the good’ recur throughout the book, I had better define what I particularly mean by them. Injustice of course is historical; it has taken many historical forms. If it had not, this book would not be possible. So we might do well to start by limiting our attention and focusing on the contemporary scene. By contemporary justice, then, in the simplest terms, I mean the reverse of the myriad forms of staggering contemporary injustice it takes Daniel Dorling more than three hundred pages fully and very precisely to document.3 If it is

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important to read Dorling’s book, however, in a way one scarcely needs it: injustice is always everywhere around us, all the time, pervasive wherever we look. Justice requires a concept of the good beyond the correction of immediate, particular injustice. By the good, then, I mean the conditions necessary for justice to occur and prove sustainable. This in turn means giving absolute priority to a politics underwritten by a comprehensive, all-­encompassing concept of equality. Together, justice and the good amount to something precious but very straightforward that is in part what Hannah Arendt calls ‘public freedom’ and ‘public happiness’.4 ‘Happiness’ here is inseparable from justice. Both would comprehensively depend on and be defined in terms of liberty, community and equality for all. These three goals were par excellence those of the great modern political principle and dream, and it is the terms of the survival of all three that this book is chiefly about. The familiar objection to such thinking is that it is hopelessly utopian or idealist, or rooted from the start in abstraction. It is worth noting to the contrary that, right now, we are witnessing the rapid growth of a literature arguing the imperative of equality, if in widely varying terms, some of which, like Richard Wilkinson’s and Kate Pickett’s relentlessly statistical case, is very practical.5 But much though I respect this work, my logic here is not its, nor is it utopian or, I believe, fundamentally abstract, at least insofar as it aims to take the immensely sobering weight of history. That is why the book can at length propose itself as a political theology, though my reasoning will hardly be apparent as yet. Indeed, how it proposes a political theology will become fully clear only at the end. This was altogether necessary, and I emphasize it strongly, because, for me, political theology is a conclusion to which we should come, not an a priori. My method is inductive, as was crucial to the rigour of a strictly secular thought, as mine is. If, however, there is finally no good reason to suppose that it is impossible that justice and the good should come into being, there is equally no good reason to suppose that they are remotely likely to. That is what the historical evidence ceaselessly tells us. That, in brief, is everywhere my position. Everything I have to say follows on from it. I can’t see that it’s disputable. Thus, however reluctantly in some ways, the book severs itself from those who believe they know or might come to know the route to justice. History does not give us adequate information about that. Yet the book insists on the protection of the idea of justice and the good, for all the massive odds that are stacked against them, which it does not shirk. This is admittedly to set the bar high. In theory, at least, I suppose I might have chosen a position closer to a range of liberal and pragmatic politics, for some of which I have respect and on occasions admiration (Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin). I don’t do this, not because I am a utopian, but because, it seems to me, one’s politics should not allow one to subside into an ease with the dominant idiom of the world as it is, chronically wrong, or arrive at an accommodation with it, as liberalism, social democracy and pragmatism surely can, are almost bound to do, if sometimes at length. That would be to surrender at the point at which intellectual principle and self-­respect should make one least willing to. But the question may also be one of sensibility, perhaps above all, and remaining faithful to what sensibility tells one, however troubling that is, without immediately clutching at any of the usual resolutions, panaceas, sublimations or comforts or retreating into what I shall

Introduction: Modernity and the Political Fix

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later thematize, borrowing the words from Jakob Wasserman, as the opposite of sensibility, die Trägheit des Herzens, an ‘indolence of the heart’. There is always an unconscionable quantity of misery, pain and hardship in the world, but that can be no reason to accept its infinite multiplication by injustice. To think otherwise is, for us at this particular conjuncture though probably at any moment at all, to refuse to look clearly at what J.M. Coetzee (somewhat obliquely) calls ‘the dishonour, the disgrace of being alive in these times’.6 So equality, community and liberty – justice and the good – have to be our hope; and this is the case, at the present time, not because the apocalypse may be looming round the corner, but because yet another moral catastrophe may be. There would be different ways of articulating this, but I am particularly thinking here of what I take to be Giorgio Agamben’s great fear, a full realization of our starkest divide: the gulf between existence and inexistence, those who ‘belong’ versus Saskia Sassen’s ‘expelled’, those who count versus those who do not.7 According to Naomi Klein, right-­wing US think tanks are already referring to ‘sacrifice zones’ and ‘disposable peripheries’.8 Issues of this kind are real and concern us all. No extant liberalism, pragmatism or social-­ democratic politics can successfully address them. It will rather leave them untreated in its wake (save via good will and charity). Hence my continuing, in large part, with a Francophone tradition of thought that has shown the intellectual courage to keep questions of such scale in mind. But, though the book hardly repeats their modes of analysis or terms, which partly defines its focus, it also indirectly owes a great deal of its spirit and even tone if not its orientation to Adorno, Benjamin and, again, Agamben. There is at once a problem, as I’ve already effectively indicated. Historically, the manifestations of the modern knowledge with which I began have everywhere turned out to be mixed, muddied, compromised, ambivalent. I take this as seriously as I take the logic of modern knowledge itself. Hence the pervasive resort in this book to terms that signify a qualified modernity: ‘satanic modernity’, ‘modernity under erasure’ and, above all, ‘ironical modernity’. From this stems the fact that, throughout, the meaning that the book has initially and principally given to the term modernity will be stalked by other, more conventional ones. There will be a certain amount of deliberate slippage. This is precisely to write (of) modernity as, from the start, an ironical phenomenon. It’s a means of rooting the book more substantially in and refusing either finally to clarify or to rise above the modern imbroglio. Terms cognate with ‘ironical modernity’ will also emerge, particularly ‘the political fix’. Here, again, it will be as well to provide a definition at once. We think politically, can scarcely avoid doing so, as other historical cultures thought theologically. That is the condition of our modernity. Yet the proponents of a politics of justice and the good, if split, differentiated and very various, have repeatedly to confront the same problems. Not only do we not know how to make our politics prevail. We don’t know how to ensure that it does not end, as it so often has, in either dismal failure, or, worse, moral disaster. Furthermore, we don’t know how to protect it from contamination by its Other, by its antagonists, and there is not even any commonly shared view as to who those antagonists are. Nor do we know how to separate ourselves decisively from other claimants to the title of modernity. Nor do we know how to unite. Pace, say, David Harvey,9 the result is actually a blocked and stymied politics, a politics

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in which there is a great gulf between the abundant declarations of commitment and intent, and the reality of stagnancy or stasis, a dearth of positive momentum. Indeed, in present circumstances, the politics of justice and the good begins to look like a mirror-­ image of the very atomized culture of ‘opinion’ that those hostile or indifferent to it prefer to cultivate. So much is this the case that I’m inclined to agree with Alain Badiou: what we have long called ‘the left’ may be finished.10 Political investments in the future should perhaps look elsewhere. But the difficulty is one we inherit. From the beginning, modern politics has presented the political subject with a fix, a dilemma, quandary or conundrum. Modern politics itself may appear to be a fix. It has certainly left us in a fix. It has abandoned us to paradoxes. Yet, as I say, many modern minds, amongst them some of the most august, have insisted on the priority of politics, fixed and fixated on politics, as if, in the end, we could really think nothing else, as if, too, the political fix could be conclusively fixed; though, self-­evidently, the priority that politics has been granted has repeatedly had alarming if not disastrous consequences. ‘The political fix’ has all these connotations. What, then, if anything, can we still hope for from modern politics, what should we want to salvage from it? The question powers my book. The issue of where we are now relative to modern politics I leave to Chapter  1. But clearly the fate of modernity in our time is sufficiently complex and uncertain as to suggest that we should be sifting and evaluating our modernities, asking what we should preserve from them. What, then, are the concepts deriving from modern politics that we might wish to sustain and transmit to others? My book both defines the concepts and considers possible modes of their transmission, thus proposing an answer to the question that at length properly emerges as a political theology, explicitly articulating it as such in the conclusion. But what exactly is ironical modernity? What has been the political fix? At the risk of repeating some by now rather familiar ideas, we may start to get a grip on it if we take our initial bearings, first, from the period of its inception and, second, from concepts of modernity that have little or no truck with irony, concepts that are historical, theoretical and aesthetically focused together, as ours will be, and emphasizing the same historical beginnings of modernity. Let’s start out from the affirmative concept of the world-­historical importance of the beginning of the modern period, as in Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolutions 1789–1848. Hobsbawm’s period of the ‘dual revolutions’, French and British (or Industrial), is one of ‘qualitative and fundamental transformation’ that is ‘constant, rapid and up to the present limitless’.11 The initial transformations take place abruptly and with violence, in a ‘sudden, sharp, almost vertical turn upwards which marks the “take-­off ” ’ (AR, p.  44). Here, with all the explosive power of a missile or jet engine, revolution launches history into a blue-­sky future. Hobsbawm’s period sees rampant new energies swirling out of France and Britain and tearing down obsolete and moribund structures across Europe, from feudalism to the Holy Roman Empire to the Italian city-­states to the German free cities. The Industrial revolution in Britain has consequences world-­wide. The French revolution sends liberal and radical-­democratic politics spinning round the globe from Latin America to Bengal. The revolutions colonize all space. Their effects spread everywhere, ‘by spontaneous contagion’ (AR, p.  138). The future of modernity is a

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universal one. ‘No-­one could fail to observe’, writes Hobsbawm, ‘that the world was transformed more radically than ever before in this era. . . . No thinking person could fail to be awed, shaken, and mentally stimulated by these convulsions and transformations’ (AR, p. 353). At the opposite pole to Hobsbawm stands the catastrophic vision of modernity. The Carl Schmitt of Political Romanticism is perhaps its great representative. For Schmitt, the period is characterized above all by an individualist, irrationalist, romantic disintegration of the concept. This disintegration has its major origins in 1789, but occurs whether romanticism takes on a revolutionary hue, as in France, or a reactionary one, as in Germany. The disintegration of the concept, the schism Kant opens up between thought and being, as contrasted with, say, the Hobbesian will to hold them together via ‘systematic rationality’, has several consequences, notably, again, ungroundedness, which appals Schmitt.12 The disintegration of the concept leaves the romantic rootless or unmoored in that he or she is no longer capable of holding fast ‘to an important idea on the basis of a free decision’, and can no longer find any ‘inner resistance’ to ‘the most powerful and immediate impressions that prevail at the time’ (PR, p. 51). This means that the political romantic or fledgling modern is always frail, vulnerable to betrayal and self-­betrayal. He or she yields to subjectivism and accepts no objective imperatives: as Schmitt puts matters, ‘in the struggle of the deities’, the political romantic ‘does not commit himself and his subjective personality’ (PR, p. 64). Furthermore, absolute subjectivity breeds absolute creativity or ‘productivity’. The historical and political worlds, the moral and legal spheres are of interest above all for what the subject can make of them. Or, as Friedrich Schlegel says, the real beloved is only the occasion of a ‘marvellous flower of [the] imagination’ (PR, p. 84). But this also breeds disenchantment, disillusionment, despair, since any return to ‘limited reality’ itself is likely to mean contact with the dullness and futility that, in Schmitt’s phrase, ‘a lottery ticket has after the drawing’ (PR, p. 69). Out of this logic springs another consequence of subjectivism, romantic irony as an absolute way of seeing. Romantic irony takes the supposed inadequacy of reality as its target, and, in doing so, once again promotes the ‘suspension of every decision’ (PR, p. 56). Certainly, the modern finds him- or herself bereft of foundations. Foundations fix limits, of which the modern is dismissive. He or she rather abandons him- or herself to possibilities, to promises and prospects, to plans (‘plan upon plan unfolds’, says Goethe’s Faust),13 and, in doing so, also to an unbounded future, limitlessness. But once the limit has disappeared, ruin follows in its stead. All categories in the Kantian sense, all pure concepts of the understanding, break down. Revolutionary attachments shade, mutate or bleed into reactionary ones, and vice versa, interminably. At the far end of this tendency stands indifference or ‘emotional pantheism’, the appreciation of ‘everything and its opposite’ together (PR, p. 128). Thus the moderns prize aesthetic and, above all, literary experience, finding in them a sublime indeterminacy or open-­endedness. But this is a lure that should not take us in. The truth is that the modern simply ‘does not want to be bothered’ by questions of choice, ‘the constraints of objectivity’, ‘the task of a concrete realization’ (PR, pp. 71–2). Hobsbawm, or Schmitt? A potential for limitless transformation, and ensuing elation, or failure, disaster and ensuing despondency? A world-­historical and affirmative

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view of the emergence of modernity, or a catastrophic and negative one? As two centuries wear on, it seems increasingly that we are obliged to think the two together; hence the need for a certain sense of irony; that is the condition of the political fix. Beyond both positions, the conception of modernity as from the start a phenomenon afflicted with historical irony, constantly bogging down in its own counter-­valences, slowly but steadily evolves and gains weight. Marshall Berman has articulated some major aspects of the idea. Berman sees that Marx understood modern life as ‘radically contradictory at its base’ (ATS, p. 19), that Nietzsche like Marx perceived the currents of modern history as ironic, that a thread of irony runs right the way through two centuries of modernism (recalling that the term is originally Rousseau’s). Berman knows that ‘modern irony’ repeatedly animates ‘great works of art and thought’ (ATS, p. 14). He also traces modern irony back to 1780–1830, supremely, in the case of a work whose composition, more even than that of The Prelude, spans the whole period from beginning to end, Goethe’s Faust. What Berman grasps as quintessentially and unsurpassably modern in Faust is this: Faust’s vast drives are both creative and destructive; but they are also creative and destructive at the same time, at once, and this, their immediately paradoxical constitution, is irreducible and inescapable. In other words, the modern affirmation is not to be extricated or separated out from havoc and monstrosity. One way of putting the point, of defining the political fix, is that Goethe understands proleptically that Stalin (a name Berman introduces) is part of modernity, that it is impossible to filter modernity out from what the name of Stalin represents. With every modern advance, the evidence of gross, unwarranted suffering will ‘pierce the night’, in Goethe’s phrase (ATS, p. 64). Faust’s extraordinary development of human powers is indeed a pact with the devil, and there is no way out of or beyond this double-­bind, whether in sexual relations (as with Gretchen) or political and social ones (as in Acts IV and V of Faust Part Two), which embody and confirm it. Goethe grasps the logic of modernity at its beginning and with preternatural acuity. It is a logic of explosive power and disintegration, of forward thrust and backward drag together, or what Berman calls ‘the tragedy of development’,14 which we pursue with, at one and the same time, inexorably and unacceptably high costs. Furthermore, the ironical logic of modernity afflicts the progressivisms indifferently with capitalism. The desire to eliminate tragedy incessantly produces more of it. So long as we remain modern, Goethe’s Philemon and Baucis endlessly go to the wall. Here modernity becomes, not a finally insidious process that leads to the singular and pre-­eminent evil of the Holocaust, but, in Derrida’s great formulation, a condition in which, from the start, ‘there is a holocaust for every date, and somewhere in the world at every hour’.15 Yet for all Berman’s understanding of modern irony, his discourse is in some degree lacking in it. Irony repeatedly shades into dialectics, and indeed he repeatedly pairs the two words in his book. But it is essential that we push them further apart. We may do so by turning to the second aspect of ironical modernity. Published in 1925, Karl Mannheim’s Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge suggests that we can properly understand modernity only by placing within it what is habitually conceived of as anti-­ modernity, recognizing that anti-­modernity is modern, too – Peter Sloterdijk even thinks that it is ‘possibly more modern and complex than what it rejects’16 – expanding the

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meaning of modernity to encompass anti-­modernity and thereby, again, charging it with irony. The most obvious and well-­known example of this is the emergence of conservatism, which arrives in 1790, the year after the beginning of the French revolution, with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France; though so startlingly new is the conservative phenomenon, so distinct from the traditionalism that preceded it, that it finds a name only nearly twenty years later, with the foundation of Chateaubriand’s journal Le Conservateur. The English word ‘conservative’ takes on this sense only in 1830, a long time after the first appearance of the word ‘modern’. Similarly, ‘reaction’ in its recent sense dates back only as far as Constant’s Des reactions politiques of 1797. Conservatism turns out to be more modern than modernity, reaction newer than revolution (as seems logical enough, when one pauses to think about the exact meaning of the word). Pursue this logic through to its obvious consequence, and modernity appears as the revelation of groundlessness and the swift restitution of grounds, even if they are grounds that, whether in the shorter or the longer run, cannot hope to hold fast. As the unironical Badiou puts the point, both modern and what he calls ‘reactive’ forms of subjectivity are ‘new figures’ determined as such by modernity.17 Thus, for example, Christianity after the Enlightenment is a new Christianity, indeed a series of new Christianities, marked by the very historicity that their insistence on eternal truth ought logically to debar. The event of the new requires that the ‘reactive’ subject not merely resuscitate but refashion old forms, even whilst projecting them as ageless. Mannheim particularly demonstrates this with reference to the traditions of the new, post-­revolutionary thought piquantly known as German Altconservatismus, ‘old conservatism’, as exemplified in Möser, Muller, Savigny, Stahl, Gustav Hugo et al. The beginning of the nineteenth century sees the culmination of a process whereby ‘the political element’ has increasingly become ‘the point around which all of the currents in the ideological universe crystallize’.18 Thus ‘we are no longer concerned with a unified, though internally variegated world-­view; from now on, in accordance with the plurality of strata in the social, whole. . . . . .worlds confront one another’ (C, p. 52). The French revolution spawns two disjoined traditions of thought, one which, in all its diversity, we might loosely call progressive, the other conservative, each of which have their own immanent logic. Certainly, ‘the conservative element’ is always secondary; that is, ‘it is not the bearer of events, authentically creative, but rather “reactive” in the sense that it first becomes aware of itself as antithesis’ (C. p. 53). But this does not make it less of ‘a specifically historical and modern phenomenon’ (C, p. 72), and we ignore the insistence with which antithesis shadows thesis at our peril. Furthermore, the two traditions often share the same ‘formal assumptions’. Both rely on a concept of ‘what lies behind us’, whether that which is antecedent in time, or ‘the “germ”, the seed which has yet to unfold’ (C, p. 37). Both tend towards an intuition of totality. Both expand upon the particular. Both think in terms of historical substrata, whether supposedly laid down by past generations or as classes or relations of production. Both repeatedly exchange terms, like Volksgeist and freedom, adapting their meanings as they proceed. Nor are they necessarily identifiable with individual subjects: ‘it is frequently not at all clear whether an individual is to be taken as conservative, or as progressive’ (C, p. 47). ‘Something which is progressive today’ may quite readily take on ‘the function of conservatism tomorrow’ (C, p. 81). Finally, indeed,

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conservatism during this period gives ‘shape’, like revolutionism, ‘to an entirely new way of thinking’, one ‘capable of interpreting the world in a new way’ (C, p. 101). Unlike traditionalism, modern conservatism cannot merely assume that things remain the same. It must reflect on that which it wishes to maintain, thereby fracturing the connection even in reasserting it. Albert O. Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy provides an additional sophistication to Mannheim’s case. Right from the start, conservative modernity developed a new set of rhetorical strategies, as if, in Mannheim’s terms, it knew that it had to leave traditionalism’s automatic assumption of continuity behind; as though it knew it had to cover the void that modernity and revolution had opened up. If, with the French revolution, modernity embarks on a ‘protracted and perilous seesawing of action and reaction’, precisely in keeping with its tacit recognition of the void, reaction requires rhetorics.19 Radicals, progressives and liberals themselves learn from and co-­opt those rhetorics. There is osmosis between camps. Here again modernity shows itself to be ironical, in that the two sides both foster what Hirschman calls ‘rhetorics of intransigence’ (RR, p. 168), but in the very ferocity of their discursive antagonisms seem all the closer to each other. Violent opposition and resemblance, ferocity and intimate relationship: like creation and destruction and transformation and catastrophe, these are paradoxes intrinsic to modernity.

Byron as paradigm The logical consequences of the emergence of Mannheim’s two traditions or modes of thought are Hegel – Mannheim’s last words in the manuscript of Conservatism are ‘We now turn to Hegel, and his attempt at a synthesis which somehow works its way through all the problems of the time’ (C, p. 188) – and, after Hegel, Marx. Indeed, Hegel and Marx are arguably involved in an admirably courageous if doomed attempt at Überwindung, the overcoming of ironical modernity. But since, we now know, ironical modernity was not to be overcome, that it has also become a problem by now, here we might fasten rather on modern literature, retaining for the present our focus on 1780– 1830. It was literature from the start that both understood and enacted or dramatized modern irony, that thought it. Chateaubriand’s and Kleist’s various tergiversations, mutations and shifts of position, for example, both amply testify to the ambivalences of the new modernity and bear out Mannheim’s assertion that one can often not even decide whether the modern subject is conservative or progressive. Both are sunk in an irreducibly contradictory modernity. But it is Byron – freedom fighter yet at times aloof, disdainful and world-­hating aristocrat – who offers a peculiarly striking example, who both grasps the modern political fix and puts it at the very centre of his work. Byron seems like a summation of Mannheim’s case. No-­one better than Byron both captures and represents the ambivalences surrounding the beginnings of modernity and organizes them as such. Unlike Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, Byron remains both a faithful subject of the French revolution and exceedingly, indeed bitterly clear-­eyed about what succeeds it. But this bitterness, even negativity is present whether he is writing of the consequences of the revolution or resistances to it (on the

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one hand the Terror, on the other the Holy Alliance, the Congress of Vienna and the triumph of the reactionary powers). He is the very type of the modern thinker most important to this book. His work will both illustrate and amplify the meaning of ironical modernity and the political fix and amply demonstrate the appropriateness of both concepts even to the early phases of modernity. Childe Harold sets out on his pilgrimage from an England as antique and retrograde as his tottering and mouldering ancestral hall, as trapped and sombre as his own reflections, as archaic as the Spenserian diction with which the poem starts. His gloom and muted anguish are clearly products of aristocratic decadence, as are his sexual indifference and cynicism (love ‘keeps aloof ’).20 The question of how Harold can experience regeneration is therefore clearly a question about and for modernity. How modern can Harold become, how much hope can modernity afford him? How much modernity is there to encourage hope? ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ is above all a historical document and a historical meditation. If, as Jerome McGann rightly says, ‘Don Juan’ is ‘a conscious attempt to explain critically the meaning of the entire period of European history stretching from 1789 to 1823’,21 then ‘Childe Harold’ is a kind of trial run, offering a small-­scale, less ambitious version of such a project for 1809–11.22 Byron converts the structure of the Grand Tour into a quest that is spiritual and political together. But, though the grip of the Spenserian language will lessen as the poem progresses, what Harold sees in post-­revolutionary Europe is for the most part unpromising, and certainly not sufficient to dispel his melancholy. Such faltering modern developments as Harold and Byron observe are equivocal, balked or abruptly snuffed out. The initial irony of Harold immediately plunging from England into an even more backward and benighted Portugal is prescient. But more revealing is his encounter with the Spain of the War of Independence (the Peninsular War).23 Spain is poised, exactly like Harold, uncertainly on the edge of modernity, with liberal and modernizing forces warring on reactionary ones, and popular resistance to arbitrary authority showing strongly, as the ‘bold peasant’ threatens to ‘storm the dragon’s nest’ (CHP, 1.49).24 Here and there, Harold witnesses an affirmation of a fledgling modern spirit. For a while, ‘proud Sevilla’, the holdout town – home of the Supreme Central Junta from 1808 to 1810 – ‘triumphs unsubdued’ (CHP, 1.45). So does holdout Cadiz, home from 1810 to 1814 of the liberal-­dominated Cortes or national government in waiting, and origin of the liberal Spanish Constitution. Cadiz is the cradle of Spain’s (brusquely aborted) entry into modernity. The warrior Maid of Saragossa, smiling ‘in Danger’s Gorgon face’, is a modern paragon, a woman coming into a modern woman’s own (CHP, 1.55). But she is as powerless as anyone else ‘to retrieve’ the cause when the ‘flushed hope is lost’ (CHP, 1.56). Beyond such fleeting if luminous instances, the modern dream is bleeding to death on the Spanish killing fields, as it will later do on so many others. ‘Ambition’s honour’d fools’ end up feeding the crows ‘on Talavera’s plain’ (CHP, 1.41–2). It is no accident that Byron ends Canto 1 with a charged account of the primitivism of the bullfight. At more or less the same time, Goya is thinking through the same set of relations with the same Spanish question in mind, quite as compellingly. His portraits of the Bourbons in all their awkward, commonplace (and sometimes hilarious) humanity suggest a Spain on the point of seeing through and sloughing off empty hierarchy and

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spurious power, and therefore on the threshold of a modern, democratic intelligence. But the ‘Disasters of War’ sequence suggests a Spain heading in the opposite direction, overtaken by monstrous horror, chiefly at the hands of that great force for modern transformation that is also, inextricably, a force of modern devastation, the Napoleonic army. As starkly, the ‘Caprichos’ and ‘Disparates’ series and, perhaps above all, the Black Paintings of 1819–23 present a nightmarish vision of a Spanish people direly surrendered to mediaeval lunacy (and all too inclined to abase itself before the most preposterous manifestations of power; see ‘Witches’ Sabbath’). For Goya as for Byron, the work of modernity ‘is scarce begun,/Nor mortal eye the distant end foresees’ (CHP, 1.89). Modernity is fledgling, deeply shadowed – and may remain so indefinitely. Modernity appears under similarly mixed and contradictory auspices in ‘Childe Harold’, Canto 2. For all their abject status over the centuries, the Albanian Suliotes have successfully resisted the fading, anachronistic power of old Venice. Albania is nonetheless a land of ‘foul superstition’ of all kinds (CHP, 2.45), haplessly at the mercy of the ‘dread command’, ‘lawless law’ and ‘bloody hand’ of the despot Ali Pasha (CHP, 2.47). Yet even Ali is thinkable in different lights. He stands in the way of Byron’s most cherished instance of a desired modernity, Greek independence. He has presided over a range of atrocities. Yet in the teeth of the Empires, he has created an almost totally independent state. He is tolerant in matters of race and religion, and his Albania is a vivid, animated, ‘conspicuous’ mix of peoples (CHP, 2.59), an early nineteenth-­century instance of a rather successful multiculturalism. We should feel deeply uneasy about this mixture of appearances, but it gets to a modern truth. Byron himself felt uneasy about it, in some degree disquieted by the disparity between Ali’s modern-­looking, homoerotic fondness for and even sense of fellow-­feeling with him, and other aspects of his rule. Hence the fact that he leaves out other of Ali’s more appealing qualities, like his learning and his love of ancient Greeks (he sometimes roasted modern ones). Finally, in Canto 2, there is Greece itself,‘sad relic of departed worth’ (CHP, 2.73), original home of liberty, democracy and the notion of an uplifting ‘common joy’, but presently incapable of self-­determination, of renewing its tradition as part of the modern impetus, and pathetically awaiting deliverance from ‘Gaul or Muscovite’ (CHP, 2.76, 79). Byron deliberately refuses to take up a superior position relative to his protagonist, and indeed blurs the dividing line between himself and Harold. This, in exemplary fashion, is how he thinks: what he observes in Europe he also dramatizes in himself. The poem is essentially concerned with a deeply problematic modernity whose ‘toilsome way and long, long league to trace’ (CHP, 1.30) require protracted meditation, arriving at no conclusion. The problem is also the poet’s. On the one hand, a radical and modern Byron is ready to finish with religion and nationhood along with wars, and urges that man settle for his limits and his finitude, as a ‘poor child of Doubt and Death’ (CHP, 2.3). This Byron finds in ancient Greece, and particularly in Greek analytical rigour, a beacon for modernity. But there is also a Byron who looks back fondly to the age of Spanish chivalry. His nostalgia for the glories of Greece includes ‘the vanished Hero’s lofty mound’ (CHP, 2.5).25 He is as willing to refer to Zoroaster for a sense of ‘right’ (CHP, 2.8) as he is to identify with the modern drive. In any case, what is to be said for modernity if one of its major representatives is ignoble Elgin, that philistine ‘modern Pict’, who is also a figure for Imperial rapacity (CHP, 1.12)? For the ‘defacement’

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of Athens ‘by British hands’ appears to be an instance of modernity, too (CHP, 2.15). It is hardly surprising that, like many modern hearts later, the Byronic heart should end up ‘lone mourner’ of its ‘baffled zeal’ (CHP, 2.23). Written several years later, Cantos 3 and 4 deepen, ramify and point this complex analysis. Canto 3 begins with a diagnosis of Byron/Harold as ‘The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind’ (CHP, 3.3). The rest of it tells us why. Modernity keeps on alluring the subject with prospects it cannot sustain or complete, and so divides him or her between hope and melancholy. Napoleon has offered one such prospect. But his ‘antithetically mixt’ spirit ensured that his ‘fire and motion’ became its own raison d’être and took him beyond all bounds. Here modernity tips over into ‘fever’ and insanity (CHP, 3.48–9). Not surprisingly, and gratefully, the Lion has been struck down. But people now ‘pay the Wolf [Britain and the Holy Alliance] homage’, and the Wolf is merely ‘reviving Thraldom’ (CHP, 3.19). Here and there, recent history throws up a ‘spark immortal’ (CHP 3.14), a singular instance of an honourable prowess that is distinctly modern, as in the case of revolutionary general (François-Séverin) Marceau. But it also presents us with a dismal extension and indeed aggravation of past abominations, as at Waterloo, ‘the grave of France’ (CHP, 3.18). It therefore repeatedly plunges the would-­be modern mind into terrible despair. ‘And thus the heart will break, and brokenly live on’, in ‘shatter’d guise’ (CHP 3.32–3). Byron’s predicament therefore drags him backwards, too, as in his own momentary outbursts of military enthusiasm. But for Byron, that ironies everywhere harass modernity does not mean that one should give up on it. The French revolution resulted in a glorious ‘wreck of old opinions’. It rent the veil so that ‘what behind it lay all earth shall view’. True, it also destroyed good will and led to the restoration of ‘Dungeons and thrones’ (CHP, 3.82): But this will not endure, nor be endured! Mankind have felt their strength, and made it felt. They might have used it better, but, allured By their new vigour, sternly have they dealt . . . They were not eagles, nourish’d with the day; What marvel then, at times, if they mistook their prey? CHP, 3.83

Hence Rousseau is crucial. In a hugely brave defiance of a miserable old world, the Genevan ‘apostle of affliction’ cast his ‘erring deeds and thoughts’ in an ‘overwhelming eloquence’ (CHP, 3.77). He broke new ground, for everyone. No matter that, finally, none would venture with him, and indeed society turned on him. Others must take up the sword. The poet launches himself into an extended passage of lyrical, Rousseauian meditation, which not only pays homage to the philosopher but consolidates, confirms, underwrites and even enhances his thought, liberally quoting Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats as though it were assembling disciples to pay tribute. Here, to anticipate a later argument, the poets become the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’, points of transmission for what matters in modernity.26 The same thought is at the centre of Canto 4. The modern hope threatens to seem futile, and modern disappointment recurrent and inevitable. That is the burden of the

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long passages in which a Byron who has now explicitly shed his mask contemplates the histories of Venice (CHP, 4.1–19) and Rome (CHP, 4.78–160). Venice, Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done, Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose. CHP, 4.13

Venice and Rome tell us that there are local occasions of freedom and justice here and there, like Rienzi or Trajan (CHP, 4.94, 100), but these examples neither prevail nor endure. Nor do they form or underwrite a narrative of progress. They rather appear here and there in history, as meteors in a night sky. Oppression ineluctably and ceaselessly swallows them up, now with the Holy Alliance as it once did with Nero: There is the moral of all human tales; ’Tis but the same rehearsal of the past, First freedom and then Glory–when that fails, Wealth, vice, corruption,–barbarism at last. CHP, 4.108

Obviously enough, then, the modern subject is torn between desire and the lesson taught by unfulfilment. This may take him or her as far as chronic self-­distrust, and even self-­disgust. The poet starts to suppose that ‘Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,/And fevers into false creation’ (CHP, 4.122). What tells one otherwise is the work of the great writers and artists. In the basilica of St. Peter’s, for instance The fountain of sublimity displays Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can. CHP, 4.159

‘Renew thy rainbow, God!’ (CHP, 4.92). If there is evidence of an answer to that plea, it is present above all in literature, writing. Cicero, Virgil, Livy portend a ‘resurrection’; ‘all beside—decay’ (CHP, 4.82). But it is the Italian poets who most preoccupy Byron, because of their will to express defiance, their peremptory resistance to ‘omnipotence’ and the world of ‘Opinion’ surrounding them (CHP, 4.93): Dante, ‘Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore’, excoriating tyranny and ‘Ungrateful Florence’ (CHP, 4.57); Boccaccio, who helped form the independent beauty of ‘the Tuscan’s siren tongue’, but nonetheless bore ‘the hyaena bigot’s wrong’ (CHP, 4.58); Ariosto, maintaining the relics of the chivalric tradition in an Italy become ‘A funeral dower of present woes and past’ (CHP, 4.40–2); Petrarch, whilom supporter of Rienzi and his revolution, retired to Arqua, where he seeks ‘to raise a language, and his land reclaim/From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes’ (CHP, 4.30). These are, supremely, the avatars of modernity, the vehicles of the kind of ‘great conceptions’ necessary to withstand and outlast the many twists and turns of modern irony. Again, literature becomes a primary mode of transmission.

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The more one looks at Byron’s work, the more deeply the political fix and an ironical thought of modernity seem written into it, and from many and varied perspectives. One could show it at work in ‘Darkness’, or ‘The Giaour’, the greatest and most modernistic of the Turkish Tales, one in which the central character grows into a fearful image of the ‘blast’ of modern European dynamism and its onward motion however futile: ‘He came, he went like, the Simoom’ (‘The blast of the desert’, as Byron explains in a note, ‘fatal to everything living’).27 Or take ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ (1816). It begins with a paean to a post-­revolutionary concept of freedom: ‘Eternal spirit of the chainless Mind!’. Or rather, the prefatory ‘Sonnet on Chillon’ does (BSP, p. 412). Like the prose preface, it lauds the heroism of the prisoner François de Bonnivard, dauntless and indomitable fighter for Genevan freedom in the sixteenth century, and a proto-­ revolutionary figure. But the main poem does not. It is rather a tale of adjustment to a hopeless, profoundly dehumanizing and demoralizing, seemingly absolute captivity, to an experience of a void that is finally ontological, but also moral, to the point where the protagonist can actually assert, when finally liberated, ‘I/Regained my freedom with a sigh’ (BSP, p. 411). The sonnet seems to belong with Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’, the main poem with Samuel Beckett. It is as though Byron were conceiving of the prisoner twice over, both in himself and as a figure for modernity. But the poet’s intuitions were exact, not least in that, over the next two centuries, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ could have served as a moral handbook in millions of modern cells. To continue this strain of analysis into ‘Don Juan’ would take a book: This is the patent age of new inventions For killing bodies and for saving souls, All propagated with the best intentions.28

The long-­range historical purchase of this acrid comment on modernity can be aptly gauged from the fact that Graham Greene used it as the epigraph to The Quiet American (1955), his novel about the wars in Indochina. On the one hand, we have Jenner’s smallpox vaccine and Humphry Davy’s safety lamp, on the other, Guillotin’s fearsome machine and William Congreve’s solid fuel rockets, the (British) weapons of mass destruction of their time, as Indian princes rebelling against the British Empire and Danes sympathetic to Napoleon knew to their cost. Finally, beneath the familiar paradox, there is fear, a fear that the deeper truth of modernity may after all be boundless inanity, the inanity of the grins on the faces of freshly galvanized corpses. Modernity promises – deceivingly. It promises revolutions that turn out to be archaisms and offers remedies that turn out to be poisons, always with a consoling and even an uplifting gesture. In Byron’s terms, it is precisely by grasping such profound ironies that the rare modern subject becomes truly modern.

Benjamin and ‘satanic modernity’ A century later, Walter Benjamin will provide a fresh gloss on the paradoxes Byron encounters and wrestles with. He is important, here, because of the intensity with

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which he encourages us to hear the irony in the very word modern, to recognize the intimate daily experience of the hollowness of its positivity. He grasps ironical modernity, and therefore the political fix, in their most serious aspect, one we have already seen indicated in Berman’s (and Byron’s) apprehension of modernity as Faustian: if modernity is almost infinitely beckoning, it is also not just catastrophic, as Schmitt would have it, but what Benjamin calls a ‘catastrophe in permanence’.29 In Françoise Proust’s terms, Benjamin’s is a ‘satanic modernity’,30 as for example in his work on Baudelaire. In Meryon’s engraved views of Paris, Baudelaire sees the historical reality of the modern city under the Second Empire. What beckons is an inexhaustible, infinitely alluring ‘wealth of variations’.31 Yet, simultaneously, differences fade. Worlds die. The new phenomenon of gaslight both illuminates the streets and obliterates the night sky: ‘The moon and the stars are no longer worth mentioning’.32 People are drawn to celebrate the modern achievement at the expense of a proper consciousness of modern damage, but that is because the constant celebration of supposed progress drowns the disaster out. That is how modernity works, cannot but work: hence what Proust calls the ‘demon’ of modern ambiguity.33 As Thomas Mann suggested in the ‘Snow’ chapter of The Magic Mountain, in reality, the God of modernity requires cruel and unstinting sacrifice. This is the harsh screw of the modern political fix: every modern triumph, every new step forward is matched, somewhere, by an abrupt and unprecedented loss, a fresh instance of suffering and injustice to be mourned. Furthermore, this is the peculiarly modern fate, in that inconsequence and inexorability now coincide. Unlike the fatum of the ancients, modern fate does not dictate the truth of that which cannot but be; or rather, it does, but paradoxically, as the truth of ungroundedness itself. Modernity condemns us to Nietzsche’s eternal return, and it is as implacable as fate in the classical notion of it. Fate is the unstoppable return of modern renewal (by now, the banality of ‘innovation’). Satanic modernity taunts us: we see this all the time. As we embark on yet another new modern project or effect yet another new modern rupture with custom or tradition or an outgrown past, we are merely repeating what is by now itself a profoundly obsolete gesture. Satanic modernity is thus the jester accompanying modern hubris. It begins in consciousness of the element of futile repetition in every fresh departure, every declaration of a new advance. This is written deep into the logic of the modern political fix, and we should underline it, a logic by which modern freedom proves inseparable from modern tyranny, the modern project from the modern defeat, modern peace from modern violence, modern fulfilment from modern destitution, revolution from reaction – one could considerably lengthen the list. To quote an early modern poet, the moderns are doomed ceaselessly to ‘seek with garlands’ to ‘redress’ each ‘wrong’, only to find a serpent twining about the flowers. They must grope, haplessly, for some means of disentangling ‘all his winding snare’.34 To grasp modernity as satanic is to glimpse the uncanny rictus on the face of modern history. For the irony of modernity is double: part of the modern condition is a well-­nigh terminal incapacity to see modernity straight. If modernity is ‘catastrophe in permanence’, part of the catastrophe is modernity’s failure to know itself, or, if it does at all, to act upon that knowledge. Benjamin’s famous Angel of History stares incredulously, eyes wide open, because the truth is astonishing beyond measure.

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Indeed – Benjamin’s whole point – it requires an angel to see it. For if ‘catastrophe in permanence’ is the law of satanic modernity, it is doubly catastrophic, in that it unremittingly destines the modern catastrophe to oblivion. Oblivion is what is at stake in Benjamin’s account of the buckliche Männlein (little hunchback). When Benjamin rummages in the cellars of history, what he hopes to find is not there: the buckliche Männlein has already exacted ‘the half part of oblivion from everything to which I turned’.35 ‘Catastrophe in permanence’ remains catastrophic because oblivion ceaselessly erases catastrophe, because catastrophe ceases to look like what it is. For Baudelaire, the doubling of catastrophe in the forgetting of it is as awesome as anything else about Second Empire Paris.

Functions of modern literature Given the sheer power of Benjamin’s thought, its trenchancy, if curious and half-­ smothered, it may seem idle to conjure other ways of meditating on the problem, and indeed something like the Benjaminian thesis will haunt this book, even in its more sanguine moments. Yet other explications of modernity are possible. Jacques Rancière in particular affords a perspective rather different to Benjamin’s, indeed, to the one we have adopted so far. I’ll particularly emphasize the crucial importance he attributes to the functions of modern literature as the best guide we have to the maze of the modern political fix, the discourse that has proved most adequate to it. This is a crucial argument for my purposes, since my book will develop its case above all through literature (and on occasions art and music). If not expressly, Rancière takes the components of ironical modernity and redistributes them so that they fall into a different pattern, with different implications. He is well aware of the ironies and contradictions within modernity. JeanFrançois de La Harpe, who announces the radical disintegration of the hierarchies of the beaux arts, was by turns a revolutionary, a Montagnard, a Thermidorean and a proselytizer for the restoration of Catholicism. The young Wordsworth who made his short-­lived journey to the realm of the people later became an old Tory. It was actually the counter-­ revolutionaries who, cast ‘outside time and the language of opinion’ by revolutionary upheaval, as often as not were the vehicles of a new, modern literature.36 If the modern lyric poem involves ‘a new political experience of the sensible’ that is ‘liberated from the iron collar of the genres’,37 this does not commit the modern poet to being either revolutionary or counter-­revolutionary; he or she may be either, or from time to time both. Rancière remains conscious of the insistent deflations of modernity, its compromises and complicities. However, they are not what matters most. What matters is the inextinguishability of the modern promise, the insistent and various if sporadic character of its occurrences and thus, necessarily, the preservation of its spirit, irrespective of what are so frequently the denials, temporizations, equivocations and retreats of those who, for a while, function as its representatives and spokespersons. That emphasis allows Rancière’s work to stand as a model of a certain kind of isolation of what matters, and persistence with it. As such, though my terms are quite often not his, it serves as a model for this book. We may stay focused on the period 1780–1830. Rancière repeatedly refers back to it as apparently in some sense decisive for modern politics and art.38 Yet he also aims to

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break with what he calls ‘the standard intelligibility of history’,39 and therefore turns out to be distrustful, sometimes deeply distrustful, of concepts frequently associated with the inauguration of modernity, modernity itself: (the beginning of) the democratic revolution, (the inception of) the modern will to liberation, (the inauguration of) the modern progressivisms, (the emergence of) the modern narratives of progress. Rancière urges the need to resist a conception of any modern politics as being ‘tied to a determined historical project’ (PM, p. 51). He is likewise sceptical of explanatory historical systems that too crudely map historical and cultural phenomena on to allegedly coherent historical contexts thought of as wholes. Indeed, he opposes all ideas of the ‘grand historical master-­signifiers’ which might appear to govern epochs, like modernity itself, as mere carryovers from onto-­theology (TP, pp. 207–8). The French revolution, then, is rather one manifestation of a historical movement that is in some degree anonymous, dispersed, less a volcanic upheaval than a broken set of uneven but cumulative tectonic shifts; less a historical watershed or an unheralded and unprecedented historical dynamism, less Hobsbawm’s space rocket or jet engine than an unpredictable rhizomatic propagation that is lateral as well as linear, but at the same time scattered, scant. Above all, there is no totalizing drive in Rancière’s concept of modernity. This makes it both various and sparse. If modern politics does occasionally appear ‘in its purity’, as an egalitarian assertion that an irrecoverable, inexplicable event releases from the ‘ambiguities’ of social existence, then it does so only briefly and locally.40 So Rancière both repeatedly resorts to a concept of the modern and repeatedly fights shy of it, in a subtle manner that, if not ironical itself, seems commensurate with ironical modernity. For him, 1780–1830 is the crucible of a certain modernity that has remained ours, a modernity that in some degree was and has remained limited, suspended, quiescent, intermittent, diffuse or adulterate, ambivalent, Janus-­faced. The period in question witnesses the birth of a modernity ‘under erasure’ that is the one we might know by now we have to work with.41 For Rancière, there is a clear logic to modernity, but it is undramatic, not explosive. It is probably most evident in the aesthetic realm, notably in literature. Rancière’s work has increasingly presented the aesthetic as perhaps the central category for modernity. Indeed, modernity confers an unprecedented significance on the very concepts of art and literature. Furthermore, modern art and literature repeatedly deal in a concept of ironical modernity, place it within our grasp, operate as modes of treatment of it, and, in doing so, function as counter-­discourses, counterblasts to the incautious positivity of other modern discourses, above all, immediately political ones. They point less to the ease of the resolution than they do to the gnarled, enigmatic knot of the fix. For Rancière, modernity means that the hierarchies founder, for example the ‘old hierarchies’ of the beaux arts (PM, p. 8). The ‘normative system’ of aesthetic, generic and rhetorical rules, of vraisemblance, of the necessary relations between discourse and character, words and action, this disintegrates (PM, p.  13). Literature mutates, expels the glories of yesteryear and ‘includes forgotten continents’ (PM, p. 12). Literary language is the modern ‘parole muette’, an ‘orphan language’. Closer to living language than it was before, it is nonetheless deprived of the immediate power of living language, and so begins to roll ‘haphazardly’ in different directions. It makes itself increasingly available to n’importe qui, whoever comes along (PM, pp. 81–2). This ushers in new

Introduction: Modernity and the Political Fix

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forms of literary equality; this, in part, is how literature preserves a thought of justice and the good in unpromising circumstances. Take Keats, for example: as one of the ‘children of the people seized by the power of words’, by the adventure of a thought and writing to which ‘neither their birth nor their education’ seemed to predestine them,42 he launches himself into a poetic career in which he will maintain a concept of poetry as ‘not first and foremost a manner of writing but a manner of reading, and of transforming what one has read into a way of life’ (FP, p.  78). But literary equality prevails above all in the novel, the anarchic genre, the genre that knows no generic limits. For the modern novel, the adulteries of a Norman peasant’s daughter will be as interesting as the loves of a Carthaginian princess, and require no specific, a priori mode of expression. Modernity recasts a variety of seemingly pre-­ordained relations, not least those subjected to the twist of ironical modernity, opens them to question, to negotiation and transformation, as not before. Keats does this. The relations between work and rest, business and idleness, for example, come into question not only in Keats but in Winckelmann, Rousseau and Kant. In effect, in reshaping a given world as he does, Keats imagines appropriating a feature of a supposedly privileged mode of life that has traditionally excluded his like. The possibility of recasting relations in general is the real meaning of the famous Keatsian ‘negative capability’ (FP, pp. 79–80). This is not merely, nor even principally, a matter of social, economic or class relations. An age-­long order of things is sagging or giving way, and what this makes possible is redistributions or new distributions of the sensory world, the visible and sensible. Recounting his experience in revolutionary France, Wordsworth sees, literally sees, ‘humanity renewed’ by nature (CM, p. 25); he subsequently both records the new invention of a political landscape and invents one himself, turning July into springtime, offering ‘a new benediction to the world’.43 Rancière is also much concerned with the simultaneous autonomy and heteronomy of the modern artwork. This appears particularly clearly in his account of Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. For Schiller, ‘aesthetic judgment is neither subject to the law of understanding that imposes conceptual determinations on experience nor to the law of sensation which imposes upon us an object of desire’;44 that is, it is neither merely idealist nor merely empiricist. It rather suspends both laws on each other.45 Their relation becomes one of a conflict of faculties, or dissensus, in which imagination and experience are pitted against one another. Thus modern art both confirms things in place, or, better, confirms them as in place, and disputes the place itself. But here art is precisely a product of and gestures towards an ironical modernity, insofar as it corresponds to and reflects a world in which there has been a political promise that has been sensible, apprehensible if unfulfilled, but which art by its very nature, by virtue, not of its form or content but its mode of existence, cannot retrench on. Modern art does not present us with an image of or call to revolution. It is rather concerned with the question of the forms of the future, the forms that have yet to arrive, as virtualities within an actuality to which the work of art is nonetheless also tied. The mode of existence of the modern work of art is both virtual and real. This is evident in what Rancière takes to be its condition of ‘suspension’, which also designates a ‘limit [échec]’ beyond which it cannot go (PM, p.  98). Modern art may

18

Modernity and the Political Fix

represent any subject and correlate it with any other subject whatsoever. Yet at the same time, art bends back on itself, on its own materiality, becomes radically more conscious of itself as language or writing, turns inward. For the world in which all dividing-­lines are thrown into question or disappear remains comprehensively beyond our reach, definitively remote from us. The ‘limit’ to modern art is decisive and cannot be broken or transcended. At a certain point, it decrees that literature is not and can never be anything more than a linguistic assemblage forever incapable of merging with the material world, other than as words. Thus the world of modern literature is that of ‘sensation insensible’ or the ‘quasi-­ corporeal’ (CM, passim). Literary worlds exist in a mode like that of a modern promise, since they will continue indefinitely to anticipate their embodiment or actualization. The politics of literature and art is sui generis, a politics of suspension, of ghostly bodies that have yet to take on flesh. For Benjamin, Leskov offers the paradigm of the storyteller for whom storytelling is still ‘rooted in experience’, a link broken by ‘the new technological age and the traumatic experience of the First World War’.46 But under modernity, says Rancière, literature is ‘already itself the loss of this experience’, of this form ‘of continuity between words and life’ (ibid.). Modernity makes literature of cardinal political importance as it had not been before. Indeed, Rancière states very clearly that ‘man is a political animal because he is a literary animal, because he lets himself be deflected from his “natural” destination by the power of words’ (emphasis added).47 In this respect, the many political literary theorists and critics of the late-­ twentieth century were often pointing in the right direction. But as modern literature retreats into and declares its own literariness, the literariness of its language, so it also declares full and comprehensive equality unrealized and indefinitely unrealizable; in that respect, if as we have seen, it notionally breaks the bonds of the political fix, it also bears witness to its enduring power. The new literature and new conceptions of literature are statements of the uncompleted project that is modern politics. ‘All is seed’, wrote Novalis in a notebook.48 With the beginnings of modernity, literature and art spawn potentials for equality that their producers hope may find some actual form in a more or less distant future. But there is no logic according to which this must or will happen, no actual forms that necessarily will ever appear that correspond to the potentials. Nonetheless, modernity at least suggests that, in principle, there is equality to be had. So, too, modern literature becomes a dispersed set of generative possibilities – or fragments, since the Romantic fragment as elaborated by Novalis or Schlegel is not a ruin of something gone but in fact the token of a promise. The fragment is a fragment of a future. The orientation of my book is different to Rancière’s. But in a number of important respects, not least its sober, cautious and heavily qualified but nonetheless determined attempt to persist with modernity, it gets its direction partly from him. Like Rancière, it thinks of modernity as imperilled in its very emergences, everywhere inclined to recidivism. At the same time, however, like Rancière again, it continues obstinately to take the side of a modernity however piecemeal and compromised. It, too, insists on maintaining, keeping the record of, passing on, transmitting the modern spirit however fitful. Thus it devotes a whole chapter to the question of modern political transmission. Like Rancière, I grant a major significance to art, chiefly literature. Furthermore, the

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book is much concerned both with literature as a mode of ‘suspension’ and with literature and the forms of the future. It fastens on modern literature as the principal means of understanding, getting to grips with, expressing, working with and on the irony of modernity. If for Rancière modern literature confirms things as in place and interrogates the place itself, this book also asserts as much. At the same time, it underscores the element of disappointment in modernity, of the melancholy, even tragedy of modernity, the truth that one of its conditions is its failure to fulfil its promises. Modern art has repeatedly called this dimension of modernity to our attention. But what, exactly, do I mean specifically by literature? From Nietzsche on Sterne to Adorno and Badiou on Beckett, Mulhall and Singer on Coetzee, Critchley on Beckett and Stevens and Cavell on Beckett and Coetzee, to name but a few, modern philosophers have asserted that literature thinks, if it does not think as philosophy does. This has by no means been an idea confined to the (radical) margins of philosophy: Bertrand Russell, for example, included in his History of Western Philosophy a chapter on . . . Byron. For Russell as for me, if in differing respects, Byron is a thinker. Philosophers have repeatedly understood literature to think in ways that are instructive and even exemplary for philosophy. Writers have sometimes followed suit: Coetzee, for instance, rightly speaks of his writing as a thought. It is their and the philosophers’ sense of the particularity of this thought that I follow. I have already exemplified what I mean with Byron. Here literature – elsewhere I call it major literature – is a non-­philosophical writing that nonetheless contains and articulates a thought. This is demonstrable, if only at great and perhaps arduous length. The thought is non-­philosophical in that, obviously enough, it is not principally given over to theoretical concepts, abstract reason or systematization, that its major and often primary elements will be imagination, sensory concretion, affect; that its thought may include, may well be grounded in paradox, contradiction, will be toned, nuanced; that it does not fight shy of complication, obscurity and even confusion. Yet at the same time it is a thought that proves to be unrelentingly intelligent, with something more or other than a philosophical intelligence. In my terms, such a thought distinguishes literature from other forms of writing. The literary work appears as a mode of thought insofar as it declares its singularity. What this means is that it also appears as such in its irreducibility to or distinctness from doxa. That is why Russell can compare Byron to Rousseau and Nietzsche, can assume that their courses run parallel. Byron, too, is one of those ‘forces’ that are significant causes ‘of change in the social structure, in judgments of value, or in intellectual outlook’.49 As a thought, literature is unlocked by a science other than hermeneutics. It is not an ontological category. There will be no absolute agreement on what constitutes literature. Who one includes in the category will vary from person to person. The category will always require construction. But the judgments in question are not thereby bound to be endlessly relative. Literature is defined partly by the quality of attention that literary works attract. To claim that literature is indistinct from doxa is to substitute a (lesser) language for its, to its detriment. So, too, to claim that Ian Fleming thinks as, say, Sarraute and Borges think is about as futile as to claim that Morrissey and Alain de Botton think as, say, Hobbes and Wollstonecraft think. This is not to sneer at popular culture, some of which I love.50 It is vigorously to assert the

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Modernity and the Political Fix

crucial importance of the right distinctions, not absolutely or canonically, but in a given and limited sphere, to reassert the value of strenuousness, of a certain demand as a major foundation for a category of thought. At the current time, we very badly need this. Like Rancière, again, this book dispenses with or seeks to scale down certain ‘grand historical master-­signifiers’ and is distrustful of certain concepts frequently associated with modernity. It too resists any totalizing drive in political thought, resorts to a concept of any significant politics as occasional and rare. In the first instance, it is important, however regretfully, to abandon a modern temporality which was insistently gripped by each new dawn, propelled forwards dramatically by each new surge of the new. This by now has tipped into parody; we can leave it to the high-­tech industries and the bureaucrats and their incessant upgrades. The time in question is by now all too obviously that of ‘satanic modernity’, according to which, and within the logic of the political fix, the modern subject can hardly wait for the next innovation, revolution or transformation, can hardly wait for it to find its fulfilment, and can hardly also not end up stale, deceived or just over-­familiar. What ‘satanic modernity’ partly leaves us with, I’d suggest, is a work of retrospective thought, a work that tries better to understand the ironies and contradictions of modern history, especially political history, but also to understand what might most usefully be salvaged from it. Given the double-­binds with which modernity constantly plagues us, what are the legacies of modernity we want to carry with us and pass on? That is the question from which my book starts out. There can be no timeline for modernity. Modern time is commonly both proleptic and recursive; recursive, in that it defines itself against, and thus remains ambivalently tied to, what preceded it. It both commits itself to re-­elaboration of past forms, saying things again, but differently, and introduces a modern anticipation of the pas encore, that which has yet to arrive but, as such, remains nebulous, unclear. It is a time in which a present overlaps with indefinite presentiment and interrogative retrospection, together, a time within which relations in worlds that no longer exist are connected with others that have recently appeared or have yet to come into being. In its paradoxical novelty, its anachronism or untimeliness, this complex and ironical temporality is precisely the one we will increasingly experience as deeply modern. Modern time consists of ironies, temporal ambiguities, splits, fissures, internal differences in time, a kind of eddying of time, a swirl or ‘confusion of times’.51 There is not necessarily any perceptible development within it, and it looks forward to no quick or ascertainable completion.52 Yet there are also interruptions of ironical time. Truly significant modernity happens, here and there, and now and again. However, it does not happen very much, and only certain reassuring presumptions regarding the historical process can lead us to suppose that it does. Much of it happens as a kind of low-­level or what I call a ‘minor’ modernity, a modernity deeply subdued, scarcely visible, dispersed, or ambivalent, tainted, even given over to radical corruption and well-­nigh betrayed, but nonetheless not worth absolutely nothing. That does not mean that there are not ‘filiations’, subterranean runnels and channels, growths, hookings and graftings that link the separate emergences of modernity together. But the significant emergences nonetheless remain distinct, sporadic.

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Modernity becomes ironical, the political fix is what it is, because of multiple and complex breakdowns, of which five seem particularly important. There is the breakdown of system, the extent to which structures of modern thought and value fail, yield to or are contaminated by their other. We have already seen this in the case of Byron (and seen it articulated by him). It is precisely the system that, in his spiritual fervour, Dostoevsky turns against, endowing his would-­be modernizers, notably revolutionaries like Stavrogin and Peter Verkhovensky in The Devils, with the most passionate and violent contradictions starkly at odds with the system of the ‘network’ they belong to. By contrast, Turgenev captures such contradictions as irony. Both novelists are responding to exactly the same contemporary phenomenon: modern western Europe’s cultural invasion of Russia. Second, there is the breakdown of historicism, the fear of thinking historicity all the way to its logical endpoint. Marx’s blinding insights into historical determination, for instance, are in some measure qualified by his subscribing to a historical narrative of progress that has not proved good. Third, there is the failure of modern temporality, a time within which everything is supposedly practicable promptly and at speed. No modern failure has come to seem more glaring or is more problematic. It sometimes seems that nothing really happens quickly or at speed, except an endless, wearisome recapitulation of the same. It is precisely this failure that was in Samuel Beckett’s mind just a month before his death, when, in an old people’s home, he was watching the Berlin Wall come down. He grew extremely anxious, and rushed out of his room, exclaiming, ‘Ça va trop vite! Ça va trop vite!’53 For Beckett the minimalist, the occasions for significant modern change, if they existed at all, were indeterminate and rare. As all his work testifies, Beckett begs us to reconsider the relationship between time and political value, as I seek to myself. Fourth, there is the irony of the patent shortfall of modern positivity, its repeated failure to demonstrate or bring into being the good it promises or claims. No-­one fixed on and wrote from within a sense of this irony more compellingly than Flaubert. Like Schopenhauerian pessimism, his deadpan refusals or sardonic mimicry of all uplift in Madame Bovary and L’Éducation sentimentale are in effect attempts to bury a whole range of modern positives, to pronounce them stillborn, to declare them as, at best, insufficient. That is why he has so angered people, and continues to do so. Finally, there is the irony of the failure of the modern subject, imagined as by now ubiquitous, actually indefinitely caught in the toils of its own (modern) anti-­modernity. It is this irony that, after the collapse of his hopes of the revolution of 1848, Baudelaire takes as his principal subject, as a way of thinking about himself, poetry and (importantly) the masses, together. This book seeks to avoid the ironic failure of system in two ways. It eschews the presentation of a systematic thought, not in that it functions as a critique of or deconstructs (a) system, but in that, necessarily modest in intention, it does not get as far as the erection of one. It seeks to isolate a set of key concepts in anticipation, if you like, of the work of a political future, a democracy to come, and that is all. It finally structures those concepts in terms of a political theology, but does not systematize them. It also makes the concept of the event crucial to its endeavour, the event as I understand it, following Badiou, being outside or beyond system. As Badiou puts the point, Being is ‘regulated’, where the event is a singularity, and not.54 As far as the irony of historicism is concerned, I seek to promote and further the thought of absolute

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historicity through arguably the two great modern masters of it, Foucault and Joyce. In the case of the irony of modern temporality, I seek to counter the futility of both progressive time and the perpetually and hopelessly urgent time of modern political praxis, and their repeatedly disastrous consequences, with an altogether slower, more cautious and meditative time that is nonetheless not in the slightest a meliorist or ‘gradualist’ time. It is partly the time of transmission, envisaged as a necessary work through epochs when political truth is occulted and seems to disappear. I also seek radically to counter the neat modern positivities that, arriving from all political quarters, in George Orwell’s phrase, ceaselessly contend ‘for our souls’.55 I rather dwell on the extent to which the experience of modernity has been an essentially melancholic and unhappy one, an experience of ‘nothing happening’, of the seeming impossibility of all resolutions, the apparently definitive unavailability of justice and the good. This experience, I suggest, is expressed above all by perhaps the supreme master of modern distress, Wagner. Where the irony of the modern subject is concerned, focusing principally on the subject that almost never arrived, or did so only momentarily, the modern mass subject, the subject of the ‘popular will’, I argue that any project regarding a democracy to come must work from the assumption of the seeming (though not certain) untransformability of the people. Here I take my bearings from the Weimar novel, Rancière again, and Orwell. In the last chapter, I explain why I take my project – though, I stress, categorically secular in that no religious faith or investment underpins it – to be a work of political theology in a serious and precise sense. To clarify this project as such, I adduce models deriving from both theology and modern theological poetry. Again, I emphasize the poetry; it becomes my last word. Victoria Kahn has stressed that ‘art is precisely what has been missing in the current debate about political theology’,56 a lack she seeks to rectify (with reference, however, to early modern literature), as I do differently. But if, throughout the book, literature is perhaps the key element in its thought, that is, above all, because the moderns have lived in a condition of founding irony that it has often been difficult for them to perceive or admit as such. By contrast, irony has been modern literature’s natural element. It has thrived on irony as perhaps nothing else. Irony has been its way of thinking modernity through. Furthermore, its mode of thought has been proved right (by the modern catastrophe), where political projects unwilling to postulate a founding ambivalence, or thinking of it as dialectical, have faded and died. After so much work, from Lukács to Eagleton, that, from a platform that one cannot help but feel might be secretly significant because it is reassuring to the political subject, insisted on the ‘scientific’, explicatory and indeed moral priority of politics over literature whilst actually, it is surely now clear, historically mistaken, we may at least ask whether the reverse insistence might not be more helpful. In a condition of ironical modernity it might be as well to be thinking from literature to politics, not the other way round.

1

The Implosion of Modernity

To be sure one may hear – especially in the places where men festively gather in order to deceive one another by many speeches – one may hear magnificent words about how the world progresses, and about our world and about our century. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing The present eye praises the present object.

Pity the planet, all joy gone from this sweet volcanic cone; peace to our children when they fall in small war on the heel of small war . . .

Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

Robert Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’

The way we live now This book is concerned to isolate and to codify a set of political concepts that I take to have been cardinal to modernity. But why do I think that, at this particular historical juncture, a work of isolation and preservation becomes necessary and important? Because it seems to me that, over the past few decades, modernity, if we are still modern at all, has taken on a different, more drastically qualified and therefore more unsettling complexion. So I need to give some account of what I take to be our present condition, which this chapter tries to do at some length. Where are we now, relative to the ironical history of modernity? For a couple of decades, some of us dared to think that ours was a ‘postmodern condition’.1 There were those who tried to hedge the ‘post-’ in postmodernity, to make it ambivalent. Yet it never ceased to imply, if not an advance, at least some kind of movement on from modernity, a salvation of or from it. Jean-François Lyotard thought of ‘the postmodern’ as a radicalization of modernity, ‘undoubtedly a part of the modern’, but a purification of its principle of renewal, modernity ‘in its nascent state’.2 By contrast, for Gianni Vattimo, postmodernity involved what Heidegger called Verwindung, as opposed to modern Überwindung, overcoming, as in the Hegelian Aufhebung, the ‘raising up’ of

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Modernity and the Political Fix

contraries to their synthesis. Verwindung meant both ‘an acceptance and a deepening’ of modernity, a convalescence and a passage towards resignation, an act of healing that was also a ‘going-­beyond’.3 By now, what has been the case for two decades or more is abundantly clear. There has been no radicalization, purification, healing or going-­ beyond. Postmodernism was another version of the fresh assertion of modern difference, once more promoting a specifically modern positivity that has always downplayed the truly significant modern paradox, the paradox of ‘satanic modernity’. In fact, we are stuck with a certain historical manifestation of modernity – lately, modernity in peculiarly blurred or tarnished form. It might seem that modernity is currently in abeyance or has stalled. But neither description is quite precise enough. Apart from anything else, both imply that Hobsbawm’s jet engine is likely to fire up again. There are no guarantees of that. Ours is rather a period in which modernity has imploded. This is not a concept reconcilable with an understanding of late modernity like, say, Henri Lefebvre’s, which entails an intensification and shift of emphasis in its problems and contradictions.4 ‘Shift’ may seem right, but ‘intensification’ feels unconvincing, an instance of hope against hope. ‘Bifo’ Berardi appropriately notes that Marx had no concept of ‘the possibility of exhaustion’.5 We are living in a period of imploded, exhausted, decadent, almost parodic modernity, a period when modernity has finally come to seem definitively burdened down by a knowledge that it cannot overcome the problems it has itself created, the ironies and contradictions that have bedevilled it from the start. Ours is a time when the slow historical corrosion of modernity by its ironies finally becomes patent. The objective evidence is how far the word ‘modern’ itself has come to sound hollow, emptied of meaning, token, gestural, a claim to an advance where none is apparent, a feint to disguise the regressive element within any assertion of progress, even a means of staving off the fear of imminent catastrophe. At this point in time, we are ‘modern’, in effect, if we do not know where we are or what we should be doing any more. In practical terms, as Peter Sloterdijk remarks, ‘deep down no-­one knows how things should go from here’.6 Let’s consider some examples large and small of what I mean by imploded modernity, not presented chronologically or in order of significance: the leader of a notionally left-­of-centre party becomes prime minister of the UK and recites a mantra of ‘modernization’ whilst instituting a series of consistently right-­wing policies and eventually launching an illegal war with an extremely conservative American president. He later enters the Roman Catholic church and joins the plutocracy.7 After the global financial crisis of 2008, a liberal-­democratic, black US president appoints as his Attorney General a man who, for all the profligacy and dishonesty of bankers, traders and executives prior to the crash, negotiates out-­of-court settlements for Wall Street banks whom he had formerly represented . . . as part of a Wall Street law firm. No banker goes to prison for legal infractions whilst the Attorney General is in office.8 Free market ideology produces monopolies of unprecedented size and power. As Tony Judt says, ‘liberty-­vaunting’, social-­democratic societies get more and more ‘Orwellian’.9 They pride themselves on their concern for freedoms and rights whilst increasingly dispensing with traditional guarantees of freedom (habeas corpus, open courts, the rule of law) and countenancing torture, kidnap and secret rendition and instituting a

The Implosion of Modernity

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massive surveillance of citizenry.10 Liberals praise the virtues of an increase in ethnic diversity in our societies. But this also serves the interests of neoliberal employers very well, in that it lowers the wage bill. So, too, the cachet of revolution is now claimed by the most unlikely parties, from vodka bars to skate parks to makeup lines. The name of Che Guevara gives birth to ElChé Cola (‘change your habits to change the world’). The anomalies extend in more directions than one. Former Marxist professors (re)turn to Christianity. Others equate corporate spirit with community and togetherness. But one should not merely turn alternately to right and left. The condition is one of widespread if unadmitted complicity. Ecologically minded research professors like myself take their ‘interventions’ around the world, carbon footprint notwithstanding. Deleuze becomes fashionable on Wall Street, whilst ethical philosophers lecture on Levinas at Merrill Lynch. Formerly radical theorists write books about global mega-­businesses like football and sport. In effect, the same syndrome is everywhere one looks: Green NGOs keep indigenous peoples from their own land in the interest of the environment. The Nature Conservancy starts drilling on land it bought from Exxon Mobil for conservation purposes.11 ‘Postcolonialism’ betrays ‘its original promises’, producing native elites who replicate colonial structures to their own advantage.12 Western feminists go clad in garments made by sweated (and sometimes child) labour, if no doubt often unknowingly.13 The media celebrate a gay individual who escapes Africa for sexual liberation,14 but have little or nothing to say on behalf of the teeming masses of Africans who hunger for ordinary economic freedoms. Or turn to culture: Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs nods its homage to a Godard the exquisite delicacy of whose filmic moods, in its fuck-­you ‘modernity’, it is ferociously intent on repudiating. The British, so often seemingly wary of modernism, take to it with a will in the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years, producing a handsomely funded degree zero of it in Britart. The syndrome has a clear structure of its own. The neoliberal order of the past four decades dissolves established solidarities, but also divides subjects from within, in a manner that permits them to live with themselves. It does this very effectively. A certain kind of ‘doublethink, double roleplay, double decision’ becomes de rigueur (Sloterdijk, CCR, p. 522). As Owen Jones notes, from the late 1970s, the right borrow habits for which it has long jeered at the left, thinking from abstract ideas to practical policies and investing in change as crisis.15 As Howard Hotson points out, progressivism becomes the official ideology of vast outfits like that ‘global consortium of large transnational corporations’ the World Economic Forum, with its ‘commit[ment] to improving the state of the world [sic]’.16 As Rancière points out, the grand narratives called into question by postmodernism are promptly re-­instituted by the ‘managerial oligarchs’ and bruited abroad as narratives of ‘the global triumph of the market’ and the blessings it increasingly brings.17 As David Graeber points out, the post-Cold War freedoms of the market go hand in hand with an exponential growth of bureaucracy and management that puts the old Soviet apparatus to shame.18 As Nick Srnicek points out, hi-­tech industries announce the ‘end of ownership’ whilst concentrating it.19 As Benjamin Noys points out, we even witness the rise of an ‘imploded theory’ (his term) which, taking capital to be ‘the unsurpassable horizon of our time’, sees hope only in the possibility of it pushing itself to the point where it destroys itself from within.20 In

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Modernity and the Political Fix

Daniel Dorling’s phrase, the epoch of imploded modernity means that ‘governments that say they are against elitism do most to promote it; that governments which say they are to reduce social exclusion actually create it; that movements which pretend not to be prejudiced foster hate . . . and that many experts argue that the best that most can hope for is a life of which they themselves would despair’.21 Such contradictions flourish partly because those who articulate them repeatedly, more or less explicitly claim to be modern. The fate of modernity is by now to have become the necessary alibi. As such, it must necessarily displace or ignore questions of justice and the good. As early as 1983, Sloterdijk brilliantly diagnosed this condition as a question of the modern subject turned ‘cynical’. Take the contemporary media, as both symptom and cause. Sloterdijk thinks that the most significant feature of the media is that they work paratactically, through ‘and . . . and . . . and’. In this way ‘chains and neighbourhoods arise that no rationalist and no aesthete would have allowed themselves to dream about: expenditure-­cuts-and-­premieres-and-­motorbike-world-­championshipsand-­street-walkers’-tax-­and-coup-­d’états’ (CCR, p.  312). The ‘and’ juxtaposes antagonistic elements; it couples items, rather than polarizing them. In this lies ‘the germ of a cynical development’ (ibid.). For the ‘and’ tends to elide into an ‘is-­equal-to’ (ibid.). ‘From this moment on, a cynical tendency can propagate itself ’ (ibid.). Now ‘everything becomes the same as everything else’, enters into ‘false equations’, produces ‘false samenesses of form and false samenesses of values’ (CCR, p. 314). Our world lives with and thinks in terms of ‘pseudoequivalences’. ‘When you can do that’, when you are properly habituated to a doublethink that involves ‘the amoral equating of different things’, you have become ‘a full citizen in this cynical civilization’ (CCR, pp. 314–16). In contemporary culture, logics of separation or distinction collapse under the weight of their own proliferation, their multitudinousness. We inhabit a world that (in one sense) has simply become unconscionably large, bringing forth a boundless empiricism and a boundless theoreticism, together. The subject corresponding to this mutation is the ‘average social character, fundamentally asocial, but fully integrated into the work-­a-day world’.22 He or she is an inward emigrant whose alienation from ‘fundamental values’ leads nowhere else (CCR, p.  119). This specific kind of split subject combines enlightenment with resignation and apathy, is characterized by an ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (CCR, p. 5). Quietly rueful, the subject understands that he or she must ‘act against better knowledge’ and accommodate ‘to given circumstances’ (CCR, p. 6). Thus enlightenment creates a kind of twilight of survival at odds with itself. It ends in political hypochondria, the naive artfulness or artful self-­stupefaction of the exemplary political sufferer, and a general muddling along in ‘immorality, semimorality, and the morality of lesser evils’. This spells dismay, but mainly shoulder-­shrugging (CCR, p.  88). With its ‘illusory realism’ and ‘false reasonableness’, its specific blend of ‘coercive apparatuses’ and ‘orders of freedom’, social democracy is a regime peculiarly appropriate to Sloterdijk’s imploded modern subject (CCR, pp.  41, 425, 432). For in a mediatized social democracy ‘everything looks “as if ” . . . the “authentic” does not distinguish itself from the “inauthentic” in any way’ (CCR, p. 199). There is no longer any trace ‘of “moral critique” ’, of ‘an intelligence that

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not only “knows” but “acts” ’ (CCR, pp.  201, 291). As Ludwig Marcuse remarked, political engagement now takes place in the ivory tower.23 All this leaves reason rare and homeless. It is worth adding that, with Weimar in mind, Sloterdijk asserts that the best literature has the edge over philosophy when it comes to grasping cynicism (CCR, p. 477). But does an imploded modernity differ in any very precise way from an ironical modernity? Certainly, a nuance may be at stake, rather than a categorical distinction. But, if so, it is a very precisely weighted nuance. For irony always retains a trace however residual of the modern Idea, even in remarking on its disappointment or betrayal. Irony was modernity’s rueful perception of its own falling short. Or, to put the point differently, just as the Heideggerian term under erasure lingers on beneath its own crossing out, so the modern prospect does not exactly disappear or die with the onset of irony. Or, differently again, there remains a kind of leftover Kantianism in irony, a judicial vestige, a trace of the Kantian tribunal, even if it despairs at the possibility of justice even remotely beginning to materialize. One need only think of, say, Madame Bovary. Such worlds of modernity becalmed may be worlds in which modernity has become lost to itself, is drifting, rudderless. For all that, they do not indicate an implosion of modernity. Here modernity does not cede to or willingly embrace its other. That kind of meltdown is particular to imploded modernity. In the first instance, the point is semiotic. With the implosion of modernity, the signs of modernity and modern anti-­modernity converge, bleed into each other. There is free exchange across the bar. In Sloterdijk’s phrase, ‘the historical semantics of the left and right that we have used as orientation for the past two hundred years’ dissolves ‘in a kind of confusion’.24 Oppositions collapse, in a movement heralded by deconstruction. Oppositions collapse . . . and it makes, it seems, no difference; indeed, indifference is precisely the point. That is perhaps the crucial insistence. What drives Flaubert, Baudelaire, Turgenev, Melville or George Eliot into profound modes of litotes or irony is shock or pain at the ironies of modernity itself. It is essential that one differ, however minimally, from what one perceives and seems to be the rule. By contrast, as Tony Judt amongst others has emphasized,25 carelessness – or, as I will later call it, Leichtsinnigkeit – has become one of the principal features of contemporary culture. The implosion of modernity means ceasing to care, or care enough. It ceases to concern us, for example, that, in the whirligig of modern politics, left borrows from right and vice versa, indefinitely. We resign ourselves to the ironies of or contradictions in modernity, stop investing in the notion of their possible rationalization, finally give up on any struggle to surmount them, even to render them for what they are. The Kantian head vanishes beneath the waves. But contra the World Economic Forum and others, this is not where the good can be, nor can any serious good properly come of it. The assertion is not only moral. It is also logical. If modernity meant anything significant it was as an aspiration to justice and the good, and a conviction that they might possibly be achievable. Capital cannot have it all ways, much as it currently aspires to. If we have gone global, then all our criteria must be global. For all the recent shift to neo-­nationalisms and populisms, local or partial criteria become redundant and irrelevant. Arendt puts forward a version of precisely this when, as I noted in the Introduction, she refers to public not private

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freedom and happiness. Private happiness is a myth or category error, insofar as, as Lacan observes, ‘there is no satisfaction for the individual outside the satisfaction of all’. Alas, however, as he also adds, ‘If there is indeed something that can be called [the subject’s] good or happiness, there is nothing to be expected in that regard from the microcosm, nor moreover from the macrocosm’. With modernity, happiness, justice and the good have become a ‘political matter’ . . . and, because political, ‘indefinitely postponed’.26 The implosion of modernity is the latest of the ‘postponements’. However, it is also the most drastic, not least, in its implications for political prospects. How most accurately to date imploded modernity, and what are its principal consequences or features? Historical implosion does not require, indeed discourages a linear formulation, with start date, phases and finale. The implosion of modernity can be traced to a number of different originating points. One obvious candidate might seem to be the period of the first Thatcher and Reagan victories, 1979–81. But Thatcherism and Reaganism also tended to generate new antagonisms and polarities (or energized old ones), which actually sustained a certain modern drive, if in compromised form and increasingly depressing circumstances. Much more to the point would be the crucial years of the Clinton and Blair victories, 1993–7. In their more or less immediate capitulation to the status quo even before their assumption of power, Clinton and Blair erased a political stand-­off and produced the ideal scenario for a continuing and more marked implosion. However, if one turned to, say, France, one might think of the implosion of modernity as beginning with the Mitterrand victory in 1981, evident amongst other manifestations in the increasing prominence of the nouveaux philosophes, and half-­accomplished by the end of the long Mitterrand presidency in 1995, though it needed Macron to complete it. Yet, again, the true moment of implosion might seem to come with the economic crisis of 2008 and subsequent recession, which finally neutralizes those fledgling elements of modernity within total Capital which might have yet decisively broken away from it to constitute a different terrain for thought. This, after all, is the era when, as Jones and others note, the State is called on massively to subsidize the very private interests that disdain it and seek to dictate to it.27 But equally, there are aspects of imploded modernity that go quite a long way back before the advent of Thatcher. Judt captures how far the easy-­going doublethink of imploded modernity was part of the mindset of the sixties generation, the baby boomers, those Jean-Luc Godard humorously called ‘the children of Marx and Coca-Cola’.28 This was the generation that, from the start, did not conceive of politics in terms of ‘disciplined mass action defined and led by authorized spokesmen’ (IF, p.  86). How many, Judt remarks, ‘expressed enthusiasm’ for Mao Tse-­tung’s ‘ “cultural revolution” while defining cultural reform at home’ as self-­development, self-­promotion, self-­fulfilment, the free satisfaction of autonomous desire and ‘the maximizing of private initiative’ (IF, pp. 86, 89). ‘It was’, says Judt, ‘the distinction between praiseworthy private freedoms and irritating constraints’ which actually ‘most exercised [radical] emotions’ (IF, p. 91) – a position from which the right duly learnt much. Hence both left and right tend quite often to agree, for example, that the desperate poverty of vast swathes of the Muslim world matters much less than its supposed resistance to sexual liberation and conservative notions regarding gender. The seeds of

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Thatcherism were in sixties radicalism, as Johanna Bockman convincingly shows that ‘socialist ideas’ influenced and remained latent ‘within the neoliberal project’,29 as, in California, love, peace and the counter-­culture shaped and fed a world of billionaire technicians.30 The generation of radical politics and radical experiment turned out to be globally the wealthiest, most powerful and most ruinous generation in history.31 Indeed, it may well be that the contradictions inherent in the mindset of the sixties generation lie at the heart of the implosion of modernity, that its true patron saint is . . . Richard Branson, hippie plutocrat, now championing the green economy, with his vastly successful airline as dynamo.32 It is no accident that Judt entitles a whole section of Ill Fares The Land ‘The Ironic Legacy of the ’60s’ (IF, pp. 85–91). But there is one date which, obviously enough, represents or symbolizes the implosion of modernity, and that is 9 November 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, in effect the formal end of Communism and Cold War. For the fall of the Berlin Wall spelt the collapse of an alternative world to that of capitalism and sounded ‘the death knell of a 200-year [modern] promise of radical progress’ (Judt, IF, p.  139).33 Not, it goes without saying, that ‘really existing socialism’ had the slightest appeal or moral legitimacy, or that it could conceivably seem to indicate one. The point was rather the sheer fact of its existence at all. For it left a space, in the West above all, for the political imagination, for the possibility of thinking otherwise. It relativized Capital, however unconvincing the material embodiment of the other cause, and the relativization of Capital meant that things always came to people as ideology. A competition between ideologies necessarily offers a fulcrum for questions. Capital triumphed, the fulcrum disappeared, and the left were abandoned to ‘chastened’ contemplation of ‘the disasters of the twentieth century’ (Graeber, UR, p.  80). The modern belief in the ‘common’ collapsed, was seen not to work.34 But the very triumph and what Jones rightly calls the ‘triumphalism’ of Capital (TE, p. 18) left it with a forbidding and indeed impossible task, which was to show that it deserved its victory. Capital was left to the question of its own moral vindication. Hence, amongst other consequences, the recycling of modern and socialist iconography and paraphernalia after 1989, though certainly gloating, was not just that. It was also an attempt to appropriate some of the symbols at least of the moral authority and above all the Idea that had inspired the other side. But a convincing claim to the good, and even to a potential good, is beyond Capital, though it briefly tried to put the claim in.35 Hence a further implosion of modernity, and the emptying out of political discourse, which soon led to ‘modernization’ in the Blairite sense. One inspiriting feature of intellectual life during the past two decades, however, particularly since the crisis of 2008, has been the emergence of some very fine radical and quite often non-­academic critique. Graeber, Klein, Judt, Dean, Dorling, During, Monbiot, Hotson, Picketty, Docherty, Pettit, Sassen, Berardi, Jones, Land, Noys, Srnicek . . . one could go on. Their admirable work lies behind this chapter, though it comes up with a different perspective on their arguments. We should identify with them, not least because another feature of the implosion of modernity is that, if sophisticated critique seemed to come to an end (partly because of deconstruction), as Jones astutely points out, it did so only to reappear in cruder form, but with its vector reversed. Its new targets were now the wretched of the earth, the impoverished and disempowered

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(TE, p. xi). Compare George Monbiot: the rich became the new righteous, the poor the new deviants and parasites.36 However, the authority who looms largest, here, not least, for his refusal of all specious palliatives, is Wolfgang Streeck. He particularly confirms the need for the work of preservation that is at stake in my political theology. For Streeck, capitalism is bedevilled from the start by contradictions it cannot resolve or surmount. It promises infinite growth in a strictly finite world. It promises the happiness of the greatest number whilst principally serving the interests of a tiny minority. For as long as there were challenges to it, paradoxically enough, it was able to sustain itself and flourish. Now, however, ‘it has entered a period of deep indeterminacy’ and ‘severe crisis’, of ‘multi-­morbidity in which different disorders coexist and . . . reinforce each other’. Ours will be a ‘prolonged period of social entropy, or disorder’ (HW, pp.  12–13), a time of ‘the three apocalyptic horsemen of contemporary capitalism – stagnation, debt, inequality’ (HW, p. 18). In reality, we are witnessing the beginnings of an ‘age of entropy’, a ‘society in interregnum’ which will be effectively ‘de-­institutionalized’, dominated by a sauve qui peut principle and therefore ‘essentially ungovernable’ (HW, pp. 14, 28, 35, 40). The signs of this are already legion: ‘vanishing macroeconomic manageability’, ‘steadily growing indebtedness’, an economy artificially inflated via quantitative easing and always quite close to breakdown; ‘the erosion of public infrastructures and collective benefits’ (HW, p. 15); dispersed, uncoordinated forms of political protest and conspicuously ‘primitive’ forms of revolt (political trolling, violent fundamentalisms, terrorisms, HW, p. 59); the dominance of ‘structurally self-­centred’ and disempowered forms of behaviour (HW, p. 40); the rise of ‘oligarchic rule’, the ‘neo-­feudal’ and ‘post-­ social’ separation of the super-­rich from the world (HW, p. 28); the redistribution of wealth, not from the top to the bottom of society, but the other way round; the huge growth of a ‘wealth defence industry’ (HW, p. 30); the deterioration, impotence and indifference of government, with policy ‘as public provision for private “competitiveness” ’ (HW, pp. 22, 24); political leaders who leave office and promptly sell their connections made through and in the public interest, peddling their ‘inside knowledge and public goodwill’ to ‘private consulting, lobbying and, above all, financial firms’ (HW, p. 33);37 the substitution of networks of private connections for sociality; ‘the omnipresence of corruption’, ‘the gross violation of legal rules and the systematic betrayal of trust and moral expectations in pursuit of competitive success and personal or institutional enrichment’ (HW, p. 30); the failure to achieve the promised stable order after 1989, including the failure of ‘nation-­building’ and the fact of failed states (HW, p. 36); the global dependence of an affluent, consumerist world, including its new ‘labour aristocracy’ (a large section of the former white working class championed by the left), on, first, the ‘low wages’ and barbaric conditions’ pertaining in the vast misery of a sweat-­shop world that remains out of sight and to which it can therefore remain indifferent, and, second, a migrant labour force much-­beloved of liberals and employers alike but not paid or treated accordingly, and deeply reluctant to further endanger its precarious position by opting for militant action (HW, pp. 25–6). In fact, for all our ‘much-­publicized exercises in philanthropy’, Capital has actually definitively lost its ‘last, consequentialist moral justification’, the Mandevillean argument that private vices generate public virtues. Now they merely generate more of the same.

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Indeed, they harness public virtues in their own behalf. The ominous rise of the ‘new’ populism is just another symptom of the ‘growing instability of the democratic-­ capitalist system’ (HW, p.  34). But, socialist as he is, for Streeck, if capitalism is disintegrating, it is not as the result of any struggle organized by opponents: ‘we see no successor approaching’.38 There ‘is no new social order waiting to succeed it’ (HW, p. 37). Streeck quotes Gramsci: ‘the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born’, ushering in a (surely indefinitely prolonged) ‘interregnum in which pathological phenomena of the most diverse sort come into existence’.39 This is clear from our everyday experience.

Twelve features of the neoliberal mythos Entropic, neoliberal capitalism rejects or discounts modernity in various ways.40 It disregards and extinguishes properly modern perspectives because they might require it to confront its own entropic tendencies, their implications and consequences, to see them for what they are. Thus a cardinal feature of the implosion of modernity has been the construction of a mythos, of which the following seem to me to be the principal characteristics and features. I list them as crucial aspects of the contemporary scene that a political theology that is an aide-­memoire of political modernity should seek to counter: 1) Self-­enclosure. One possible if overly simple way of telling the story of modernity is in three stages. Throughout the nineteenth century, modern culture appears to head ever more decisively in the direction of a nihilism to which it cannot reconcile itself – nihilism being a certain way of describing the absence of foundations in the world and thought – culminating in Nietzsche’s classic declaration: ‘Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?’41 Post-Nietzschean culture, however, at least finds in nihilism and radical, even absolute doubt a basis for constructive freedom, experiment and adventure whether aesthetic, political, scientific, moral, social, in the sphere of sex and gender. . . . From 1989 onwards, by contrast, if not well before, we begin soberly to assess the costs, or so the logic of the political unconscious runs, and decide that the losses far outweigh the gains; not without reason, that is part of the problem. This completes a movement, evident over several decades, involving an accelerating shift from what Blanchot called the passion for an ‘outside’, a passion conspicuous however minimally or liminally in, say, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and Lyotard,42 to an adjustment, reconciliation or capitulation to an inside. The patron saint if not prime mover of this turn is Richard Rorty. But, Rortean or not, pragmatism cannot of itself counter nihilism. This problem is perceptible in Rorty’s work. The culture needs stronger defences. Imploded modernity must close in upon itself, exclude all thought of ulteriority, of anything that might seem to arrive from a space altogether outside itself. Otherwise all we are appears rethinkable, and the void is confirmed. Thus, as Graeber has it, our culture seems designed to make us feel that events are impossible.43 Self-­enclosure becomes imploded modernity’s way of protecting itself. There are many aspects to our current will to self-­enclosure, but the most obvious one is (the relentless homogeneity of) the media. Niklas Luhmann puts

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matters thus: ‘Every morning and every evening the web of news [and advertisements] is inescapably lowered down to earth and determines what has been and what one has to be aware of ’.44 Jones expresses the point more pungently: ‘The modern media control opinion as did the Mediaeval Church’, their priorities increasingly being those of ‘the government itself ’ (TE, pp.  96, 123). As Luhmann says, the media are by now legitimizing a social order. At the same time, they close us off from another world, from a suffering that ‘exists on such a massive scale and in such forms that they are beyond description’.45 2) Presentism. Self-­enclosure and presentism are closely allied. Presentism is our culture’s more or less voluntary and conscious historical confinement within the temporal horizons of its epoch and its forms of discourse and knowledge, the conviction that no other culture has mattered or can matter as it does, or rather, that no other culture can matter to it more than it does, that it alone really speaks to itself, tells itself about itself. There is no higher perspective according to which we might see what we ‘really are’ or relativize our historical condition. Thus the culture gives itself over to what Quentin Meillassoux nicely calls ‘communal solipsism’.46 Presentist culture is incapable of thinking the possibility of its own insufficiency, can no longer re-­imagine itself. For as John Berger suggests, if the present becomes ‘cut off from all futures’, the media in particular add to this ‘by cutting off the past’.47 Whatever its (abundant) historical discourses, the reality is that a presentist culture is less and less capable of recognizing the exteriority that is history, even as a distant alterity, intuition or trace; or, believing that it can no longer hear history, turns history into a simulacrum to which, in what it takes to be its own worldly realism, it then resigns itself as all the history there is to know. By the same token, it has shut off any sense of the exteriority of the future as that which may set our present terms at naught, or mean that we do not have to bear with them for ever. If presentist culture is indifferent to anything, it is, ironically, to alterity. There is no alterity, in that there is no longer an exteriority to Capital. Outside its limits, there is only death; or, as Badiou has it, in a presentist culture, the only thing that can happen to us is death (there are plenty of signs around us that people think this).48 If the end of alterity spells finis to the historical sense, it is also, more largely, a failure of the imagination of otherness tout court that was part of what enabled the idea of political possibility to survive. Contemporary technology provides ever more formidable resources not only for buttressing the present’s involvement with itself, but for the simulation of (historical) alterity as presentness. It is perhaps the most formidable instrument for closure invented over the centuries. The media become global cage and specular image, the mirror in which we ceaselessly look to confirm our present identity as the only one that matters. In 1988, Guy Debord presciently noted that a combination of ‘incessant technological renewal, integration of state and economy, generalized secrecy and unanswerable lies’ was being shored up by the appearance of an ‘eternal present’.49 The fortifications have grown more imposing since he wrote. 3) The New International. Contemporary culture repeatedly indulges in delusive notions of oneness (One World, globalization, OneWeb etc.). What Monbiot calls the

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‘money-­making monoculture’ (HD, p. 31), and Gray the ‘single integrated system’ of technology (SM, p. 142), by now seem globally hegemonic. But neither can disguise the truth that, as Gray observes, ‘in geopolitical terms the world is fragmenting’ (ibid.). Economically, it is all too obviously riven: rich nations versus poor nations; vast affluence versus chronic deprivation; the plutocracy versus the rest; heavily protected ‘off worlds’ (e.g. gated communities) for those too rich to belong anywhere versus all the others;50 what Sloterdijk calls the ‘comfort zone’ (SE, p. 149), globalized but enjoyed only by about a quarter of the world’s population versus the larger mass cast into outer darkness (in bald statistics, the 80 per cent living on less than $10 a day). This is what I meant earlier by the world of inexistence, of Saskia Sassen’s ‘expelled’. It is where Luhmann’s ‘suffering beyond description’ is most obviously if not only located. According to Mike Davis, there is by now a stark division between two ‘existential humanities’, the millions upon millions who quite literally ‘live in shit’, and those to whom the very idea is remote, alien, sheerly unconscionable (Davis, PS, p. 138). But the epitome of all this is the Olympics. The official or corporate fantasy is that what we witness is one world joined together in the very spirit of Capital triumphans, happy and glorious competition on a level playing field. The reality is first, a separation and magnification of a super-­athletic elite overlapping with a media elite from those who vicariously enjoy their achievement but who cannot begin to aspire in the direction of the stars; and, second, as in Seoul (1988) and Beijing (2008), massive clearances of ‘the others’, hundreds of thousands of the homeless and the slum- and shanty-­dwellers in the way of Olympic development, the ‘dirt’ and ‘blight’ the One World must be able to keep ignoring (Davis, PS, pp. 104, 106). 4) Linguistic slippage. The implosion of modernity has a notable effect on language. It requires a considerable shift in the meaning of words and terms, of quite a complex kind. Berardi writes of ‘a semiotic of transgression and of sliding’, citing Berlusconi, for whom ‘the meaning of words’ was unimportant (AF, pp.  105, 115–17). Words must sound modern but also be flexible, capable of incorporating anti-­modern meanings or deflecting the attention from an anti-­modern content. On the one hand, there are terms that indicate a cynical, unflinching ‘modern’ realism, as though frank admission were a justification unto itself. Thus weapons operators call drone kills ‘bug splats’ and mining corporations call trees and mountains ‘overburden’ (Klein, TCE, p. 169). But on the other, words shift in the opposite direction, euphemism or grandiose cover-­up. A British government boasts its ‘ethical foreign policy’ precisely as it takes its leave of political morality (and starts bombing underdeveloped countries). ‘Pedagogy’ substitutes for education precisely at the time when, as schoolchildren delight in their A-stars, some English departments in UK universities contemplate introducing remedial English courses for new entrants.51 So, too, big words must be transferred to the only contexts that have meaning any longer. ‘Passion’ is something one now experiences when selling insurance. ‘Innovation’ means innovation within limits, on our terms and most certainly not beyond our horizons. ‘Civilization’ is defined in opposition to terror.52 ‘Egalitarianism’ means professional equality for middle-­class women, sportswomen and female celebrities or institutional equality for homosexuals, but never involves questions of wealth or power.

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‘Vested interests’ defines a group or class who supposedly enjoy a superfluity of privileges, but these have nothing to do with wealth, political or economic status. In the UK, the term designates, not landowners, tycoons, bankers or established families, but vocational professionals and public servants. The impoverishment of the language occurs in other ways, too. Owen Jones’s interviews with the eminences of the business and money worlds tell us of a wasteland of values and attitudes pervasively evident in their talk. The upper echelons of the corporate world turn out to be deserts of dead language: output, impact, blue skies thinking, service providers, secretariats, vision statements, accountability, ‘entrepreneurship, leadership, best practice, targets, benchmarks, excellence, world-­leading, content-­providers’ (Docherty, C, pp.  18, 28) and much else. Here modernity is purely for show, scarcely hiding any lack of substantial modern content. The re-­wording is best, or most starkly and immediately, evident in France, with the incursions of ‘la Macronie’ and ‘le style Macron’.53 As Cécile Alduy has shown, this style has its own particular syntax, verb forms and rhetorical constructions (notably those that reconcile the strictly irreconcilable).54 The ‘bon langage Macroniste’ presents itself as a ‘langage de vérité’. It identifies this ‘truth’ with ‘competitiveness’ and ‘the duty of effectiveness’, though the truth is one that may still require ‘un travail “de pédagogie” ’ if it is to prevail. ‘La Macronie’ moves away from a tired old world of ‘-isms’ (with the obvious exception of terrorism; the suffix now solely indicates that singular evil) to a brave new world of ‘-tions’ (‘transformation, gestion, innovation’). Part of the point is the creep of the ‘managerial virus’ from the world of business and enterprise, where it belongs, to other spheres of French life where it does not, notably politics and education (MMC, p. 8); and of course the source of the virus is that of the new mercantile spirit. Not surprisingly, thus, for the first time ever, presidential and governmental discourse in France suffers an ‘irruption of anglicisms’ (ibid.): ‘marketing, deadline, process, streamlining, update, reminder, timeline, project management, low cost, deal, data, feedback’ CVS, p. 9). Once again, the claim is to modernity – the ‘bottom up’ modernity of a ‘start-­up nation’ that is now becoming ‘business-­friendly’; all three terms are currently in vogue – as though France had never been modern before. This incidentally captures the meaning of imploded modernity extremely clearly. At the same time, ‘euphemisation’ is de rigueur: cuts become ‘optimizations’, staff reductions ‘plans for voluntary departure’ (MMC, p.  8). Alternatively, negatives become positive: a ‘disruption’ is now a magisterially entrepreneurial move (as Airbnb and Uber are ‘disruptive’, CVS, p. 9). On occasions, Macron himself resorts to a theoretical vocabulary and even poeticisms, by way of softening the blows as they fall, or disarming his adversaries in advance. To put matters the other way round, the one-­time assistant to Paul Ricœur ends up sounding like a DRH (Directeur de Ressources Humaines); but then, as Alduy points out, with novelist Édouard Philippe as Prime Minister, the effort precisely to lend a literary tinge to the ‘novlangue’, to make art and business appear to collude, is patent (CVS, p.  9). What is at stake in all this, however, is, above all, a necessary sweetening of the pill, ‘the camouflaging of social violence under abstract expressions’ (ibid.). Here Macronism is altogether of a piece with the indifference to contradictions intrinsic to imploded modernity.

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5) Rectitude. Contemporary Western modernity believes, if often rather vaguely, that it is in the right. Though it turns away from the injustices on the basis of which alone it can survive, imploded modernity wishes to believe in its own good. Hence the moments, from Band Aid to the ritual occurrences of Red Nose days, when Capital victorious formally demonstrates that it cares, but without discontinuing its celebrations, the excitement and headiness of triumph; that is the point. We must be, not only elatedly prosperous, but good. Hence our pride in our sportswomen and gay vicars: look at the advances we have made and continue to make. But there is an obvious problem with progress defined only in terms of an ever-­greater recognition of rights. Social justice is a question of rights only in the advanced economies. To conceive of justice chiefly in terms of rights is once again to screen out, in effect to ‘expel’ the inexistents, the majority outside Sloterdijk’s comfort zone. Which women, gays, non-­ whites? Only the ones who get their rights in more or less indifference to the condition of billions of others? The majority outside the comfort zone do not need rights in the first instance, or do not need rights alone. The obsession with rights, especially the absolute right of everyone to his or her own pleasure, rejects a vast mass of other people from the start. Yet it is at the very centre of our current notion of rationality and morality. So, too, has been what Klein calls ‘the fetish of centrism, the habit of thought of our era’ (certainly until 2016): reasonableness, splitting the difference, the dispassionate attitude, moderation with a smile. As she says, like our philanthropic carnivals and our conversion of identity politics into morality and law, social-­democratic centrism is a veil pinned over disturbing facts (TCE, p. 22). In Luhmann’s (crucial) terms, the truth is in fact that we are ‘trapped’ in a ‘formally rational’ but ‘substantively irrational historical social system’.55 It is hard adequately to think the madness of our reason. But our rectitude is paper thin, and has no solid support. This, too, is intrinsic to imploded modernity. 6) Plenitude. One obvious constant within imploded modernity is Sloterdijk’s ‘double roleplay, double decision’. Another aspect of this would be the contemporary dream of plenitude. We can have it all. We can make our fundamental choices for ourselves more than once, perhaps many times over. Ethics treats with the unethical, as, in 2002, the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility at the University of Nottingham was founded with an endowment from British American Tobacco. One can work for oil companies exploiting West Africa or caught up in major scandals and then become an Archbishop of Canterbury for whom an act of terrorism may abruptly threaten one’s faith in God and the good world, though Luhmann’s ‘suffering beyond description’ clearly did not.56 Business persons make fortunes and then write PhDs or turn scholars. Chefs and footballers become philosophers. Rock stars become professor stars. This is another version of Sloterdijk’s parataxis. Behind it all lies the assumption that the principle of the world is the limitless satisfaction of unlimited demand. One figure for it would be that very contemporary image, obesity, hunger endlessly, hopelessly appeased. At all events, we continue to cling to a ‘fantasy of lasting abundance’ (SE, p. 146). This locates us at the opposite end of the spectrum to the Badiou who

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insists on intermittency, the rarity of value, or the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.57 Sartre takes scarcity to be the original condition, at least insofar as thought must begin from it. Scarcity is various and manifold, and exists in a complex and dialectical relation to need. Together they produce violence. ‘In the Manichaeism of scarcity’, writes Sartre, ‘violence is the service of Good – it is Good itself ’, and ‘there are a hundred, a thousand different ways to realize oneself . . . as Good making itself terrible’.58 This is very remote from our culture’s understanding of itself. 7) Populism. One aspect of the contemporary Western faith in plenitude has been its promotion of what it means by democracy. Democracy seemingly means that more and more people can have more and more freedoms, rights and possessions, diverse forms of enjoyment and, above all, say, at least in the sense that no superior judgment apparently reigns supreme, and your ‘opinion’ is as good as my and anyone else’s ‘opinion’. Of course, the notion that our democracy is fundamentally anti-­elitist is misleading. Elites of different kinds have come into being, more powerful and exclusive than ever before. But there has also been a change: in the case specifically of the rock, sport, television, film and media stars, the celebrities and to some extent the press barons and even some of the business moguls, the people themselves have underwritten the elites and legitimized them. Thus when lead guitarists, film stars or racing drivers found and foster dynasties, they are not doing so as Norman barons or nineteenth-­ century industrial magnates did. They are there by the people’s favour, however much the people also take swipes at them. Intellectuals and academics have increasingly gone along with this. Beginning more or less with John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses, critique of the masses is by now bad form.59 The modern belief that the good and properly rational people are the people-­to-come has collapsed into the belief that the people are right and properly rational in themselves right now. Sloterdijk notes what he calls a corresponding ‘idealization of popular culture’ (SE, p. 183). It is by no means confined to the left. But of course everything depends upon the question, which masses? The Roman masses at the Colosseum, the masses as represented in the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre or the Orange lynchings of the liberal de Witts, the German masses of 1939? The masses are neither a transhistorical nor a transcultural entity or value. What is striking in all this is that, until 2016, so many did not see that the historically specific formation that they called contemporary democracy was actually looking ever more like populism and would at length declare itself as such, as it has duly now done, above all, in the US and UK. Blair, Cameron, Clinton and Obama were the logical forerunners of Trump and Farage. Populism was the consequence of a particular understanding of democracy in which those with any claim to knowledge, responsibility, authority or expertise, above all political leaders, were handing it over to the people, as surgeons, bomb disposal technicians and air traffic controllers thankfully do not. Populism 2016–18 is the terminus ad quem of imploded modernity. So, too, is what looks as though it may be its inseparable companion, ‘post-­truth’ culture. According to A.C. Grayling, ‘the whole post-­truth phenomenon is about ‘my opinion’ being ‘worth more than the facts. It’s about how I feel about things’.60 The rise of social media, where strong opinion and the voices of either power or the multitude can shout down the

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evidence, has played a major part in this. However, to trace it back only as far as 2008, as Grayling does, is surely mistaken. Post-­truth society begins with the triumph of a culture to which advertising is intrinsic and inescapable, everywhere present, and we come routinely to accept and even approve, as part of a democratic way of life, that others are legitimately trying to persuade us to a view without telling the whole or even much of the truth. 8) Complicity. Why was democracy after 1989 so compromised from the start? Why was populism its logical endpoint? Because it was not about a choice between two or more possible orders. It was about upholding a single order, that of neoliberal capital, or how that order might be best upheld. As Docherty asserts, ‘the norms of neoliberal capital have subsumed everything in our time’ (C, p.  21). Thus the many were incorporated into or contained within the one, which is what populism means. This specific relation between the one and the many is a relation, not of endless democratic difference, but of total complicity. Here total does not mean universal: one can hardly accuse the people of sub-Saharan Africa of complicity. Rather, the West is by now thinkable as a self-­complicit totality. Streeck austerely notes the grim truth that ‘the neoliberal life’ enjoys ‘apparent [and general] support’, with ‘the masses . . . firmly in the grip of consumerism’, and even those who dissent from it on one level buying into it on another (HW, pp. 37–8, 59). This is a genuine and seemingly uncircumventable problem. For Klein, where climate change and its growing number of victims are concerned, the developed world is ‘looking away’ all the time from the imminent catastrophe, and thus complicit with it twice over, in producing then ignoring it (TCE, p.  3). What are we to make of our toleration, not only of the devastation of the Inuit world by climate change, but its invasion by ‘extinction tourism’?61 Klein’s book is, among other things, an indictment of the constant, more or less oblivious complicities of the Western middle classes. So, too, as Docherty points out, we apologize for past offences whilst refusing to confront present ones.62 Many will deplore the sufferings of economic migrants, but who is willing to have their status reduced in that direction? Pursue that conception of a moral limit to its logical conclusion, and one ends with Trump’s wall. Finally, it implicates us all, indiscriminately; myself as much as anyone else, I don’t dissociate myself from what I describe. As Docherty suggests, we are being drawn into complicity ‘with a system that might lead to the impossibility of survival of other humans’. As he again notes, here linguistic slippage certainly has its uses (C, pp. 19, 64). 9) Compassion Shortfall. The poverty of the new lexicon can of course not be separated from a generalized poverty of feeling. Graeber and Klein both resort to the concept of ‘compassion fatigue’,63 a term deriving from Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments argues that the poor and low are so consistently miserable that one ends by screening them out. But in doing so they overlook Smith’s liberal optimism. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed’, Smith wrote, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him’.64 The contemporary evidence, however, does not suggest that such ‘principles’ are self-­evidently widespread. According to Klein, the plutocrats are

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beginning to protect themselves from future climatic extremes.65 Their subordinates do not protest. Few if any wish to entertain the scandal of the world. It would be better to think in terms of compassion shortfall or deficit. Klein tells us exactly how far and on how many fronts the ‘advanced’ world is currently developing to the detriment of the poor one.66 As Judt suggests, ‘These days, we take pride in being tough enough to inflict pain on others’, rather than tough enough to endure pain ourselves (IF, p. 36). Hence we arrive at the contemporary version of what Sloterdijk calls ‘the moral paradox of capitalism . . . the peculiar tolerability of the “intolerable”, comfort in devastation, and high life in permanent catastrophe’ (note the echo of Benjamin, CCR, p. 320). 10) Toxic Positivity. There is one aspect of contemporary Capital to which Sloterdijk like most of the other cultural critics cited here is largely deaf, and which literary types are especially well-­equipped to register, though they quite often don’t. Clearly populism combined with compassion shortfall is not a recipe for justice. What keeps that recognition at bay is possibly the most noxious feature of imploded modernity: toxic positivity. I get the term from Judith (Jack) Halberstam.67 Toxic positivity is at once a language, a timbre, a semiotics and an orientation or disposition appropriate to what Sloterdijk calls ‘the euphoria of affluence’ (SE, p. 150). The continuous array of smiling faces on television would be a precise instance of this. Toxic positivity promotes a tone peculiarly favoured by contemporary Capital, and it means talking up. Its great diagnostician in an early manifestation was Sinclair Lewis (in Babbitt), who skewered it as boosterism. Toxic positivity works in terms of discursive highs. It is relentlessly hyperbolic. We hear it around us all the time. In institutions of higher education, ‘fantastic’ events now occur on a weekly basis. We live in a culture of the routinely ‘exciting’, ‘brilliant’ and ‘amazing’, a whoopee culture in which spinning, cheering, cheerleading can sometimes seem normative. In reality, of course, toxic positivity is a mode of evasion and concealment, what Lacan calls méconnaissance. It is one of the ways in which we misunderstand ourselves. Monbiot thinks of our méconnaissance as induced by the proxy life or ‘trance-­world’ of consumerism (HD, p. 28). ‘We have our bread’, he writes, ‘now we are wandering, in spellbound reverie, among the circuses’ (HD, p. 100). Toxic positivity is the tune we hum to ourselves as we go. As Streeck sees matters, ‘culture’ has grown ‘more important for social order’ as the status of other institutions that ‘would otherwise normalize social intercourse’ has waned (HW, p.  38). The culture in question is enthusiastic, buoyant, playful, effervescent, feel-­good, enabling a sense of gratification, well-­being and even normality that is at root ‘unreasonable’ (HW, p. 45). It promulgates ‘ideological enthusiasm’ and generates unearned happiness (HW, p. 64). It ‘elevates being optimistic to the status of a public virtue’ (HW, p. 43). But there is no basis for serious optimism within entropic Capital and imploded modernity. As Berardi says, at the moment, the state of depression ‘comes closest to truth’ (AF, p. 64). To say the very least, the time is ripe for a renewed critique ‘of false consciousness’ (Streeck, HW, p. 38). This would surely also involve a critique of the vast and notably the technological power which by now shores false consciousness up. Streeck insists on the vital importance ‘of a consumerist culture for the reproduction of contemporary capitalism’ (HW, p.  65). At the level of tone and representation, this is inseparable from the

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importance, again, of advertising. Jones notes the centrality of advertising and ‘advertising men’ to the first thrust of neoliberalism, above all, perhaps, the figure of (Lord) Timothy Bell, arch-­proselytizer for neoliberalism in general. As Jones makes clear, for the likes of Bell, politics and advertising work or should work in the same way.68 The positivity of advertisement becomes a kind of universal norm. The arrival of the Internet hugely enhances its scope, especially given what Srnicek describes as the emergence, vast power and ‘vigorous dynamism’ of ‘advertising platforms’ (PC, pp. 50, 58). Facebook derives 96.6 per cent of its income from advertisers, and ‘our social interactions’ are increasingly, intimately theirs (PC, p. 53). It is not enough, however, to point the finger at the Bells of this world. They may even be as much symptom as cause. Deep within the political and cultural unconscious, something else may be at stake, as in the (noticeable if partial and fitful) theodicean tendency in recent intellectual life. If, originally, theodicy is a thought vindicating the divine attributes – justice, bounty, beneficence – relative to the existence of evil, if it indicates a belief that out of any evil God will invariably bring eternal good, from the early nineteenth century there is a rapprochement between theodicy and secularism, to the point where by now the concept of a secular theodicy is common enough. The major instance of secularization is Hegel who, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, explicitly claims that his work ‘can be seen as a theodicy’ in that it presents God as wholly immanent in history, as the rational necessity of history.69 God has in effect become a historical Providence that is progressing, aiming ever higher and better, a God seen, not by the eye of faith, but by das Auge des Begriffs der Vernunft, the eye of the concept of reason. In contemporary culture it reappears stripped of its intellectual content, but armoured by the material forces supporting it. If there remains a concept of reason at stake in it at all, it is economic reason, the reason of homo œconomicus. One obvious example of this kind of positivity would be Dacher Keltner, and his belief that the Machiavellian conception of power is by now dead, that compassion and benevolence increasingly usurp the places where ruthlessness once dictated the shots.70 Another would be the work of Steven Pinker, notably The Better Angels of Our Nature,71 with its portrayal of an ever-­improving, ever more peaceful humanity. Gray’s demolition of Pinker’s case is imperious and comprehensive (SM, pp.  80, 90–6). This kind of upbeat progressivism, we might add, is merely founded on what the best theorists of democracy have long recognized in the contemporary Western democracies (and them alone), the ‘democratic peace dividend’; the fact that, for reasons of self-­interest, they don’t appear to collapse into civil strife or go to war with each other.72 But that is so little a cause for optimism that, in his persuasively argued ‘minimalist’ case for democracy, Adam Przeworski asserts that it is the only democratic good of which we can at present be assured.73 What price Pinker’s positivity, one wonders, what price any toxic positivity at all, run up against what is represented in what the World Health Organization has recently told us of the 90 per cent of the world’s population (largely the poorest and most marginalized) breathing polluted air, seven million of them dying of it each year;74 Misha Glenny’s profoundly disheartening account of the vast contemporary scope and reach of global crime;75 half the world living in severe and one billion living in extreme poverty; the contemporary reality of the 20 per cent of the world’s children who are growing up in war zones; the ‘one billion city-­dwellers who

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inhabit postmodern slums’ that are scarcely an improvement on conditions at the dawn of city life nine thousand years ago (Davis, PS, p. 19) . . . one could enlarge this random list at great length. Even if Pinker were right about the decline of violence and war alone (and, as Gray argues, he is not), that decline has taken place only in the comfort zone – which, for the Keltners and Pinkers and according to Sassen’s logic of ‘exclusion’, provides the very definition of humanity – on the basis of a steady increase in a different kind of violence that they ignore. 11) Expendability. Streeck asserts that, by now, culture is lagging behind structure or, better, ‘substituting for a structure that has long dissolved’ (HW, p.  46). Nowhere may we better detect this than in the gap that yawns between those in the developed cultures who, as Berardi says, often ‘see only the euphoric aspect of the world’ and stubbornly ignore its ‘devastating effects’ (AF, p. 67), and those beyond the pale. The gulf grows ever wider between the world of toxic positivity and what is the dawning Age of Expendability (my term). People now become ‘human resources’.76 A vulnerable ‘precariat’ emerges, low-­wage, low-­skilled, casually employed workers without job security, representation or collective bargaining power, who are precisely, expendable.77 Berardi suggests that this is also increasingly true of the cognitariat, digital or knowledge labour (AF, p. 91 and passim). Beyond that, there is the de facto expendability of the natural world: the vegetable species (98 per cent lost since 1900), species of wildlife (halved in number during the neoliberal period alone).78 The issue, here, is by no means sentimental, if, like Rorty, we increasingly call in question the ‘natural cut’ that separates human and non-­human worlds,79 for it is then impossible to justify our wanton exploitation and destruction of that which is not us. And – this is supremely Agamben’s question – where exactly do we stop? What are our limits? We don’t know. The answer lies in our behaviour. We seem incapable of decreeing limits. As we lament the Holocaust, in the escalating barbarism that separates the losers from the winners, people are actually becoming ever more expendable. This is not just a totalitarian or genocidal logic. It has different variants, including ours. As, Klein tells us, the failure to address climate change and global economic inequality demonstrates, there are by now places, people, cultures ‘who count so little’ that they can be left to go to the wall (TCE, p. 170). American right-­wing groups and think tanks increasingly recommend giving up on the poor nations and even subcontinents (according to a supposedly archaic doctrine of racial superiority) and see potential benefits in doing so (TCE, pp. 52–3, 464). The ‘advanced’ societies, and above all the plutocracy, increasingly if tacitly take whole subsets of humanity to be categorizable as not fully human – and therefore expendable. 12) The Imminence of Evil. The logic of expendability, complicity, theodicy and toxic positivity together means that before very long we may be living in evil; unless we are already doing so. The evil world will be a culmination or fulfilment of the way things have for a long time, if not indefinitely, been tending. We have in no way mitigated, let alone overcome the last century since 1990, but have merely translated its terms, softened them sufficiently to be able to sleep. Since moral self-­vindication is beyond neoliberal capital, at this point, the only sane philosophy might seem to be of an

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unprecedented kind that we are arguably seeing beginning to emerge in the dark radicalisms, ontologies and ecologies;80 or a kind of secular Manichaeism or Gnosticism (Gray thinks our logic has already arrived there).81 Then the dream of apocalypse becomes a dream of it in its original meaning, ἀποκάλυψις, apokalupsis, an uncovering or climactic revelation. I shan’t go in this direction, but I can feel its lure.

Leibniz triumphans Which philosopher might one take to be the presiding spirit of the contemporary mythos? The answer will help us pin it down more fully, in the interests of the salvage operation that the rest of this book will undertake. Badiou has suggested that ‘[o]ur contemporary moment is defined by an immense “return to Kant” ’.82 This was in some degree plausible in the late nineties. But by now the period from 1989 onwards looks like the age of the triumph of Leibniz. The culture is aspiring in a Leibnizian direction, aiming at a Leibnizian completion and totality. Leibniz abhors the void, the unpredictable, drastic change. He prefers that there be no conflict. He is above all an eirenical philosopher, a philosopher of conciliation and reconciliation, so right for Klein’s era of the fetish of centrism. He is a great thinker of the multiple, multiples within multiples, multiples within multiples within multiples, and so on ad infinitum, precisely befitting the commercial smorgasbord. But he is also an implacable thinker of the One. Everything must come back to the One, to God, and the One (in our case, Capital) must be justified in everything. The essence of all things is therefore necessarily the same: they differ only modally. So, too, Leibniz thinks infinite difference and dispersal, but only in terms of modalities. The simple, self-­contained substances that Leibniz calls monads are causally independent, self-­sufficient and infinite in number. They even have ‘points of view’, are infinitely different in their perceptions. But these perceptions are always and only of ‘a single universe’.83 Furthermore, this infinitely ramifying universe is characterized by its coherence, by a total interconnection between all things ‘whose principle is: Relations’.84 Leibniz thinks relativity, but within a single, self-­enclosed order. A vinculum substantiale, the Law of Continuity, binds all things and unifies them into a whole.85 According to Leibniz’s ‘hypothesis of concomitance’, which later becomes his ‘Principle of Pre-­established Harmony’, the universe is subject to a regulation that ensures that ‘everything conspires together most beautifully’.86 Everything stands in a relationship of perfect complicity with everything else. Point by point, all this offers a remarkably appropriate gloss on the contemporary mythos I have just described. Leibniz’s thought is also preformationist. There is progression, change; but in Leibniz change can only follow the same old pre-­established lines which themselves do not change. Laws govern the development of different substances. The individual concept of any given monad in effect functions as a law, since it involves once and for all everything that will ever happen to it. All matter contains forms or entelechies that determine that it shall be as it is, and no other. Change is therefore never a free principle; or rather, it is so only within Leibniz’s particular concept of freedom. Leibniz was anxious to assert both human freedom and a causal determinism deriving from God.

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Hence his concept of compatibilism: a free act, he maintains, is determined but not necessary. Truths may be contingent and therefore demonstrate the existence of freedom if their opposite does not imply a contradiction, as in the case of the statement ‘Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon.’ But this does not mean that Caesar might not have crossed the Rubicon. That he did so is a predetermined truth. Leibniz’s concept of freedom is a matter of formal logic and without effective value, and indeed he asserts that necessary truths are ‘logical’ and ‘sometimes geometrical’, not causal.87 According to the Theodicy, any ‘truths’ that appear to contradict absolute necessity ‘neither do exist, nor will exist, nor have ever existed’ (TH, p.  105). Antoine Arnauld asserted that Leibniz’s defence of freedom in effect amounted to so little that it ushered in ‘a necessity more than fatal’.88 It is hard not to take that general line. The line is precisely related to the Leibnizian doctrine of possible worlds. This might initially sound liberating: on the one hand, ‘as the vast Region of verities contains all possibilities it is necessary that there be an infinitude of worlds’ (TH, p. 96). But on the other hand, if there is an infinite number of possible universes, only one is actual. The actual is in fact the only possible world. For Leibniz, contingency and freedom exist but are inoperable, ineffectual, unrealizable, finally nugatory, otiose. Leibniz lets both concepts in only in effect to keep them out. Unsurprisingly, thus, we end up with the famous assertion that ours is the best of all possible worlds, since it turned out to be the only one possible, and, since God is beyond question good, he must have created the best. True, it is a world that is imperfect. It has to be: a perfect world would be one with God and indistinguishable from him. But we can explain its imperfections. Sometimes God sacrifices moral to physical perfection. Sometimes a partial evil conceals a whole good beyond our comprehension. Evil renders good itself ‘more discernible’ (TH, p. 92). Good even depends on evil. Most importantly of all, the infinite network of relations justifies all evil because it makes it impossible to remedy evil without changing the good. In any case, ‘the proportion of that part of the universe that is known is almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown’ (TH, p. 95). The evil of which we are aware is therefore likely to be insignificant. All this seems to chime with a culture characterized by its self-­ enclosure, by toxic positivity and by a notional freedom that hardly masks pervasive constraint. Leibniz proceeds from a presumption of actual infinity to lockdown, total closure. Some associate him with the idea of possibility, yet he is above all concerned to proscribe the impossible. All worlds are impossible save one. He is the philosopher particularly appropriate to the contemporary persuasion that impossibility is equivalent to falsehood. False ideas are what Leibniz calls ‘impossible chimeras’ (TH, p. 93). The very distinction between the true and false can only be established ‘according to whether the thing is possible or not’.89 ‘Nothing comes about by chance’ (Arthur, L, p. 175). For Leibniz, precedent is always supreme. Equally, a given state tends towards or pre-­involves the state that follows it. The past was pregnant with the present as the present is with the future. The forms or entelechies within the plurality of forms always portend lawful development. Lawful development is the sign of a strong system that makes for the best of all possible worlds, whereas ‘nothing is so weak’, says Leibniz, ‘as those systems where all is unsteady and full of exceptions’ (TH, p. 103).

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So in Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds, nothing happens; or rather, things happen all the time – the ‘continual fulgurations’ of God and his creativity – but such events are immediately limited ‘by the receptivity of their created nature, the essence of which is to be limited’ (MO 47, p. 107). It is thus absurd to think ‘that change would happen through a leap, or momentaneously’ (the famous natura non saltum facit).90 The whole is regulated, and there are a priori reasons ‘why things could not happen in a different way’ (MO 59, p. 125). The Monadology states the point bluntly: ‘It is impossible to make the world better than it is’ (MO 90, p. 159). What happens is always predictable, issuing in the well-­being ‘of the good, that is to say, of those not malcontents in this great state’ (ibid.). In the best of all possible worlds, to be a ‘malcontent’ is to have the weight of both God and the whole against you. It is hardly surprising, then, that Bertrand Russell should have claimed that everything Leibniz published ‘was designed to win the approbation of princes and princesses’,91 or that, in the Theodicy, he curries favour with the Queen of Prussia. Leibniz has a deep drive to reconciliation, running from the bringing together of the Aristotelean and Cartesian traditions to the reunification of the Churches to the combinatorial project of a universal language. Like the contemporary implosion of modernity, this was very clearly a response to a recent history of horror (the Thirty Years’ War). Equally, for Leibniz as for our world, we should not push any morality too far. When he asserts that self-­interest and sociability are smoothly compatible, that social justice can be limited to giving each their own, that there is no need for State intervention or regulation, he sounds like a neoliberal. He’s our contemporary, too, in asserting that the moral should not outweigh the physical: after all, God ‘is like a great architect whose aim in view is the satisfaction or the glory of having built a beautiful palace’ (TH, p. 113). There should be a balance between simplicity of laws and richness of phenomena; here again Leibniz seems almost uncannily close to us. The Leibnizian paradoxes – total network and total self-­sufficiency, limited contingency and actual necessity, an ungainsayable but very particular freedom and comprehensive determination – mutatis mutandis, these are in large part ours. What is sheerly impossible in Leibniz’s philosophy, then, as for so many contemporary minds, is any kind of root-­and-branch transformation that, in earlier phases of modernity, the moderns were capable of investing in. But, surely, to see Leibniz as a master-­figure for imploded modernity is obviously wrong in one respect? True, he invented the word theodicy, but he was thinking of a divinely ordained world. This thought is not what founds the contemporary mythos. But there is no spiritual dimension to Leibniz’s thought. His God is in fact a super-­programmer. He is a God for Apple and Microsoft. Leibniz is one of the great predecessors of our hi-­tech culture. He hated political invention but was obsessed with technological innovation. His combinatorial project anticipates computer language, and he devised increasingly sophisticated calculating machines. He invented binary arithmetic. For Leibniz, both natural and artificial machines have substantial forms with determining laws or programmes for their actions, as we now suppose in the case of DNA. Along with all this goes theodicean uplift. Leibniz has his own version of toxic positivity: he thinks that people are naturally inclined to be happy, and seeks to give them reason why they should be. He is the ideal philosopher, if only they knew it, for the advertising industry and the media, for consumerism.

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To refer back to Leibniz is to get something of the staying power of the contemporary mythos. Voltaire’s satire on Leibniz in Candide is well-­known. So are its reasons. F.H. Bradley sardonically remarked that Leibniz believed ours to be the best of all possible worlds – ‘and everything in it . . . a necessary evil’.92 But his and Voltaire’s are objections that put morality first. In a sense, they come from a region of thought altogether outside Leibniz’s sphere of reference. Leibniz’s develops his system qua philosophical system with the most extraordinary mathematical and logical intelligence. He thinks freedom and necessity, infinite diversity and universal relatedness or connectedness together with steely rigour, by pushing paradoxes and contradictions to their limit in order to reconcile their terms through the most strenuous possible reason. He proves the non-­existence of ‘impossible chimeras’ as forcefully as he demonstrates that certain concepts cannot exist because they are contradictory (TH, p.  93). Indeed, so long as one remains committed to the ‘analytic manner’ that Leibniz espoused (HE, p. 275), and refuses any thought of virtuality or a position exterior to it, his logic appears to be incontrovertible.

Political theology and counterdemocracy Leibniz is the master of a closed world, and we are presently caught up in a neoLeibnizianism. ‘There is no alternative’, ringing as it does from Thatcher onwards, is a Leibnizian declaration. There appears to be no way out. This is my justification for insisting on a thought of the event and the remainder; for casting it as a political theology; for explicating some of the obstructions that require it (in my fifth chapter); for considering how it should be transmitted as a political knowledge; and for relying above all on art, chiefly literature, to specify and articulate it as such. None even of the radical critics have a plausible exit strategy to propose. The Graeber so very astute about the contemporary predicament ends up praising the virtues of vegan bicycle collectives, clowns on high bicycles, theatrical dancers and persons in pink tutus armed with feather dusters to tickle police (Graeber, DP, pp. 240, 245). He takes comic books, superheroes and Tolkeinian fantasy as adjuncts to serious political thought (UR, pp. 280–3, 207–26). Love becomes a ‘revolutionary act’ and partying a form of activism (DP, pp. 127, 240). The remarkable Naomi Klein calls for ‘a process of rebuilding and reinventing the very idea of the collective’ and tells us that ‘mass social movements’ alone ‘can save us now’. But, by way of example, she can only offer the loose alliance of native Americans, hippies and disaffected sections of the American middle-­class she calls ‘Blockadia’; worthy, no doubt, but not very encouraging (TCE, pp. 293–310). But then, nor are European efforts to address the problem without reference to a collective, like Sloterdijk’s kynicism. Klein and Graber’s movements, and others like them, are instances of ‘minor’ modernity. As of 2017, to some, the multi-­pronged American Resistance movement (#MeToo, #NeverAgain) might seem a shade more serious and promising, and certainly deserves support. But in order not to be yet another ‘minor’ modern false fire – it may even be that successive generations are coming to expect their own political frisson, before it goes the way of all frissons; perhaps that is really what began with the 1960s – it would surely need to get beyond identity politics, special

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pleading, the particular cause, and cast itself in the context of radical justice, justice thought in relation to the whole, and a truly serious conception of the good. Alas, it doesn’t seem to give much sign of even recognizing the issue; which means that it will duly take on the complexion of yet another liberal modification; which will duly leave it vulnerable to the right, because the right are aware that liberals and social democrats tend partly to lean in their direction anyway.93 As Berardi asserts, neither the anti-­capitalist nor the anti-­global movement was ‘a social transformer’ (AF, p. 12); nor will the Resistance movement be. The proponents of contemporary critique comprehensively, definitively and usually quite knowingly fail to articulate a convincing transformative major praxis. If, for example, as Klein says, the solution must include ‘battling new free-­trade deals, reining in our overconsumption, and sensibly relocalizing our economies’ (TCE, p. 413), neither she nor anyone else knows how that might be accomplished. As Jones rightly states, there is a lack of any ‘meaningful or countervailing pressure from below’ (TE, p. 236). The great revolutionary question as first posed by Chernyshevsky was ‘What is to be done?’ Far from answering it, no-­one really knows how to address it. Even a mild social democrat like Thomas Piketty can only end his devastating analysis of global inequality with a proposal for ‘a progressive annual tax on [global] capital’ that he admits is merely utopian.94 But this is understandable. The political unconscious is understandably still stunned, fraught with justified horror at what transformative praxis has hitherto meant. The evidence keeps on coming in.95 Modern history has made us profoundly reluctant to countenance answers that would require intellectual courage and ruthlessness, and with very good reason. No radical political thinker is remotely inclined to entertain the iron logic of a Machiavelli or a Lenin. No-­one will entertain the force of the Machiavellian ‘nevertheless’. (‘This is the ideal or desirable practice. Nevertheless, experience tells us we must . . .’).96 No-­one shares Lenin’s prioritization of ‘organizational tasks’ or his insistence on being prepared to match the enemy in craft, lack of scruple and brutality.97 Yet, in that respect, any radical opposition today remains complicit with entropic Capital, if not, I’m afraid, sentimental. This is a further token of the very implosion of modernity that, in seeking to reassert or rediscover old polarizations, the left would hope to overcome. There are, as Peter Hallward valiantly and rightly keeps on insisting, exceptional instances of the localized explosion of a popular will.98 But there is no serious trace anywhere of a massive and extensive popular will on the basis of which political transformation of major and lasting significance might take place, and there quite probably will be none, though we can’t be certain of it. This is a truth. Berardi and Streeck are the critics who stay closest to it. For Berardi, once a serious and committed activist, the catastrophic trends of Capital are by now irreversible, not least because the Western populations from top to bottom are determined to defend their economic privileges. Political activism has failed. There is no discernible ‘path to a conscious collective subject’, to ‘a common ground of understanding’ or to ‘common action’. There is no ‘counterpower’ evident in ‘daily life, in factories, in neighbourhoods, homes, in the affective relationships between people’ (AF, p. 14). Neoliberalism is busily recasting human beings as homo calculans (AF, p. 142) and has inflicted lasting damage on psyches, sensibilities, relationships, and cultures. We are increasingly in thrall to a system of ‘techno-­economic automatisms’ (AF, p.  59). The infosphere is killing

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‘communication, empathy, solidarity’, leaving the ‘infospheric subject’ to his or her curious solitude (AF, p. 14). The links between people increasingly become connective rather than conjunctive (AF, pp. 38–41). Hence we witness ‘a wholesale devitalization of the social field’ (AF, p. 142), and a paralysis of the will that spells the impossibility of politics. Thus, as Streeck says, capitalism appears to be slowly degenerating, but with no alternative foreseeable or even remotely in the air. No ‘moral revival of capitalism’ will be possible (HW, p. 71) But at the same time ‘it is the working class and revolutionary socialism, much more than capitalism’, for which ‘the end is nigh’, as a result of mechanization, technologization and out-­sourcing (HW, p. 8). No ‘effective opposition’ exists, and no ‘practicable successor model’ is ‘waiting in the wings of history’ (HW, p. 13). The ‘destruction of collective agency’ has made the assumption of even a modest degree ‘of political control of our common fate’ unthinkable (HW, p. 57). The historical period after the self-­inflicted demise of capitalism will thus lack ‘collective political capacities’, making the transition to anything else long and indecisive. It will be a period ‘of crisis as the new normal, a crisis that is neither transformative nor adaptive and will be unable either to restore capitalism to equilibrium or to replace it with something better’ (HW, p. 37). On every side, our modernity is rotting on us. This might finally seem to beg for a Luhmann-­derived explanation: the system and its rationality are contingent, unlikely, but that does not mean that it is steerable. It is rather autopoetic; it evolves from within. Luhmann takes to task the interventionism of vast swathes of political, social and cultural theory, from Hegel and the Marx who famously told us that ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’.99 Luhmann thinks that theory should disconnect itself from this heritage. We can describe and understand the evolution of social systems but not affect it. The passions of the left have sadly been futile. There is apparently no alternative to entropy, to the slow onset of disaster. It may be, writes Sloterdijk, that we ‘have to put up with this “spirit” for a very long time’ (CCR, p. 385). Over the past few decades, nothing has given more weight to such judgments than the increasing pathos of the voices, usually academic, however commendable, which have presented us with a plan for or call to political action that was never going to be realizable. In crucial if not all respects, those laudable political projects, interpretations, programmes, statements of intent, rallying cries, calls to rise up and analyses of states of affairs have proved ineffectual. They stood no chance of producing significant material effects. Such a politics often had little or no bearing on or implications for any praxis and seldom appealed to any constituency or a people beyond the academy. But without a serious programme for a serious praxis we are merely drifting in the wind. In bleak reality, we are still in what Marx thought of as the pre-­ political condition. Importantly, however, this does not mean that we never previously escaped it at any moment, anywhere. The concept of the ‘pre-­political’, in my sense of it, need not imply a progressive temporality. This book does not subscribe to one. Nevertheless, brilliant and often persuasive as Streeck’s, Berardi’s and Luhmann’s diagnoses and theoretical commentaries are, I think we should also finally seek to resist their sense of inexorability. As Arendt says, very finely, of public freedom and public happiness, ‘[t]he history of revolutions . . . could be told in parable as the tale of an

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age-­old treasure which, under the most varied circumstances, appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again. . . .as though it were a fata morgana’.100 Daniel Dorling, master-­describer of the forms of injustice at large in the world today, writes of the predicament he evokes that ‘it has no solution save “the impossible” – but the impossible has happened before’ (I, p.  32). My case coincides exactly with both positions and seeks to justify them, amplify them, understand them further and even set them in stone; with the proviso that the impossible has happened only extremely seldom, that it has flared to life abruptly and, in historical terms, usually been quickly extinguished. We have never had any convincing notion of what to make of either that, or the remainder which is our more familiar and customary condition. It is nonetheless the case that, in Badiou’s axiomatic terms, ‘From now on, we depend on the event’.101 So the tradition of the academic political programme or call to action has no relevance here. Regretfully, it would perhaps be better abandoned, since it gives us the satisfying illusion of engaging in a significant praxis whilst making it less likely that we will do so. This book recognizes the sadness of the tradition and refuses to identify with it, if reluctantly. I prefer to say with Berardi (and Sloterdijk) that ‘I don’t pretend to have a solution’ (AF, p. 14). Judt, however, is also right in saying that ‘[t]he left has something to conserve’ and that it must conserve it (IF, p. 221), and this belief effectively underlies my whole project. If, in fact, the left has no proposals for a viable praxis, there is surely no alternative for the indefinite future but to follow Guy Lardreau in eschewing any positive ‘great politics’102 and curtailing theoretical ambitions, keeping them modest (as does Berardi; though by modest I don’t mean gradualist or social-­democratic, any more than he does).103 Modernity produced a few political truths, if occasionally and sporadically. There is a genuine need for their preservation, but also, at the same time, for grasping them in a certain way, for an elaboration and illumination of their structure, and the lessons to be learnt from it. This is the case because political truths are seriously vulnerable to being trashed, dismissed, relegated to insignificance. However far their traces may persist in theoretical and historical discourses, they can be forgotten, erased, occulted, even abolished or obliterated as lived experience, felt truth. They can disappear, and therefore not renew themselves at a later date, in different form. The modern political truths have been under widespread attack for some time, and at this juncture require protection. That is my rationale for my own particular kind of political theology. I take a political theology to be, like theologies themselves, a developed and coherent account of a faith. As such, it resorts to a religious frame of reference, which it secularizes. No God is at stake in this book. I have none at all, am an atheist and have been one all my life. It does so because it assumes that that frame of reference may supply it with resources unavailable elsewhere, not least given the millennia over which religious thought evolved, compared to the poverty of a secular thought still in its historical infancy and with certain inherent intellectual, discursive, rhetorical and tonal weaknesses (they are peculiarly evident at the current time). This political theology remains conscious at every stage of its borrowings (that is, it is not an expression of a religious drive that to a greater or lesser extent remains secret or unconscious). The secularization is initially of concepts. But actually, this book is if

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possible more interested in secularized versions of structures, moods, orientations and dispositions, even rhythms of thought and feeling. One example would be the extent to which the book seeks to articulate a distinct political temporality which I call melancholic-­ecstatic, and with which the rest of it is much concerned, though I expressly articulate it as such only at a late stage. We don’t know for certain that modernity is finished, but nor do we know where it is going. We should give up on progressivisms and progressive models of temporality. They have been either co-­opted or found wanting. The time of modernity has never been linear: compare Byron’s inspired modernity with Blair’s ‘modernity’. As Gray suggests, modern history and evolution have been ‘erratic and discontinuous’ (SM, p. 143). A political theology is peculiarly appropriate to rendering them as such. Hence, as this book develops it, its concept of melancholic-­ecstatic temporality owes a substantial debt, as we shall see, to Christian Jambet, Islamic Gnosticism and esotericism, the messianisms, St. Augustine, Pascal and Kierkegaard. But it is also a kind of temporality evident in modern British religious poets (R.S. Thomas, Norman Nicholson) who were (sometimes radical) socialists. The political theology put forward here, then, is meant to provide a thought, a certain understanding of (historical and political) experience, a mode of sustaining and perpetuating political truths, and a vessel for political value under chronic threat, a memorandum, even a provocation. But in this respect, my turn to political theology is merely a turn to where literature and art have been for more than two centuries. Thus, to give a single example, in the wake of the disaster and disappointment following the Congress of Vienna and the victory of the reactionary powers (the Holy Alliance), Shelley provides us with a great political theology, notably in ‘Prometheus Unbound’. When it comes to consciously pitching a thought against entropic Capital and imploded modernity, Simon During has offered us an exemplary response, which he calls ‘counterdemocratic’.104 In effect if inexplicitly, During understands the contemporary scene as a terminus ad quem of the Benjaminian diagnosis. For ‘innovation and social reform’ have become merely ‘automatic’ and a functional part of an integrated and complexly organized ‘democratic state capitalism’ (his term). Yet at the same time politics has become mediocre, incoherent, with official purposes ‘radically disjunct from actual effects’ and ‘interests . . . swamping principles’ (AD, pp. 2–3). What During calls democratic state capitalism appears as the ironical climax and fulfilment of what is actually a failed modernity, postulating itself as the very end of history, ‘global society’s final horizon’ (AD, p. 4). During is withering about the notion of the end of history. He correctly asserts that it is impossible to claim ‘that emancipation or human potential has been maximally [or even partially] achieved’ (ibid.). Whether in terms of distribution, management, justice, equality, security, clarity, beauty, care – the political good in a significant sense – imploded modernity fails us comprehensively and everywhere. Democratic state capitalism ‘is not perfect enough to be endorsed on any grounds at all’ (AD, p. 17). Benjamin’s ‘catastrophe in permanence’ remains the unstated norm of the contemporary scene. Yet we should go further than that: democratic state capitalism also ends history prematurely, compels us to live ‘without historical hope’ (AD, p. 5). Hence a major need for ‘counterdemocracy’, by which During means a persistent ‘distrust of democracy’

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(AD, p.  8). Modern literature has insistently conveyed this, if sometimes in rather unnerving forms. It has continued to identify with the cause of the exception not the rule. This does not betoken a resistance to democracy per se – During agrees with Rancière that modern literature repeatedly institutes its own alternative form of ‘literary democracy’ – but rather as an objection to the radical inadequacy and chronic self-­deception specifically of contemporary democracy. My own project here is ‘counterdemocratic’ in During’s very precise and historicized sense (but emphatically not anti-­democratic, save in what is historically an extremely specific way). It begins from a point that has much in common with During’s version of the present state of affairs. It coincides with During, too, in assuming that it is art, and above all, serious literature, that serve as principal guides in any effort to orient oneself in a counterdemocratic direction, and that the beacon lights they offer need not be construed as ‘elitist’. However, During goes further. Ours is a time of the serious predicament both of critique, crushed partly by ‘democratic state capitalism’s insurmountability’ and smothered by the commercial media, and of the emancipation movements of the 1960s and after, now ‘integrated’ into it (AD, pp. 41, 55). At such a time, we may need to turn to the ‘lineages of conservative refusal’, to literary conservatism, a conservatism ‘that has almost nothing in common with those political groupings who call themselves conservative’ (AD, pp.  42, 57). Take Blanchot’s notion that, in its ‘remorseless transparency and confidence’, democracy is ‘radically inhospitable to literature’ and its ‘power to create the new and other and so annihilate the world we have’. For During, Blanchot invents a literary thought that seeks to rub democratic capitalism’s nose in ‘bare existence’, ‘debased and diseased natural law’ and ‘disaster’, fiercely disputing reformist theodicy (AD, pp. 32, 35). Disraeli posits an ideal of democracy ‘in which antidemocratic conservatism may flourish’ (AD, p.  86); T.S. Eliot promotes the value of ‘significant experiences’ decisively beyond ‘convention and doxa’s web’ and tending ‘toward the arbitrary and, indeed, the mad’ (AD, p. 63); and so on. The idea of ‘significant experiences’ is very important to During. He thinks literature harbours and nurses experiences that State democratic capitalism makes less and less available, harder and harder to come upon. Serious literary criticism is called upon to elaborate them, to re-­present them to us. During by no means confines himself to rescuing literary conservatives or putting them to serious use (and I myself certainly have no concern to do so). In Exit Capitalism, he rather turns for example to Stalinist Christina Stead.105 Eclecticism becomes a strategic necessity, in this book as for him. What concerns During above all is not any reactionary aesthetics but the imperative of challenging and radically exceeding contemporary-­democratic norms and pieties via literature (and theory and art). Both During’s repudiations of democratic state capitalism and his larger case are admirable. In effect, he tells us, so far has the implosion of modernity gone by now that it requires us to isolate and redefine those key elements in modernity with which we might want and hope to persist in thought, and in some degree reshape and redistribute them, reorganize their relations. That is precisely how, in the next five chapters, I will build my political theology, before finally explicating it as such.

2

Absolute Historicity

MADEMOISELLE DE L’ESPINASSE: ‘. . . Beware of the fallacy of the ephemeral. . . .’ Doctor, what is the fallacy of the ephemeral? BORDEU: That of a transient being who believes in the immutability of things. Diderot, D’Alembert’s Dream

Heidegger and radical finitude If there is a great modern political theme, a political concept bequeathed us by modernity that we should continue to hold to, cannot at any rate escape, it is historicity; absolute historicity, historicity ungainsayable and not to be surpassed, the contingency of all cultures, political structures, set-­ups or arrangements, all political theory, all forms of political knowledge and belief. There is nothing that we suppose we know politically that is not determined by a particular context. We can cherish no certainties as to where history and politics are going or any stases in which they are bound to terminate. There are no repetitions or constraints that must necessarily limit them, and equally no narratives that determine their unfolding, no developments, advances or stages in a progress intrinsic to their movement, no goals towards which they are inexorably tending. When we think or speak otherwise, and most of us do, at least some of the time, we are ourselves rehearsing assumptions that are prevalent or at least current in a specific context for a specific set of historical reasons. That those reasons may be debatable and far from clear or difficult to fathom is beside the point. They will nonetheless be the reasons of a transient being who wishes to believe in the immutability of things, if only fleetingly. Even a narrative of progress conceives of mutability within a frame certain elements of which are immutable. But the historical tale is never pre-­ordained. History can be blown off its apparent course, and find itself in quite other waters, as, to their amazement, transient beings have sometimes registered, usually before they righted themselves, and redrew its trajectory in reassuring terms. In my account of the legacy of modern politics, then, the concept of absolute historicity must loom very large. It is in effect the very foundation of my political theology, and I’ll erect the rest of the structure on its basis. But apart from elaborating it, I want also to explain the kind of thought that I take to be crucial according to it, and indicate one or two directions I think it’s better not to follow. Finally, I’ll ask how we

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may best sustain the concept, elaborate and build upon it, what examples we should, if not seek to follow, at least take certain note of. Here the chapter will concern itself above all with writing historicity, exploring what I take to be perhaps the two major paradigms of and models for it, because writing historicity is crucial to my political theology, but also what most clearly declares it to be atheological, incompatible with any theology proper at all. In doing so, I broach a theme that I’ll explore more fully in the sixth chapter, transmission, the communication of the terms of a political theology almost as though it were an esoteric truth. We may begin, however, with Heidegger, a major light to follow in thinking if not writing historicity. For Heidegger, it is an indissociable feature of Dasein that its Being is always a question for it, yet temporality is that very Being.1 It can only ground the forms of its understanding in time. As Stephen Mulhall puts matters, the question that Dasein’s being poses for it is ‘always and ineliminably marked by its historical circumstances’.2 Why should this be the case? Because there is nothing beyond Dasein save the void.3 There is no eternally regulative power or nature outside the practically unending vicissitudes of historicity, however one historical culture or another may insist to the contrary.4 Rather, ‘the nothing makes itself known with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole’ – in other words, as historicity.5 As Bret Davis points out, the later Heidegger will insert between the void and historicity a concept of Ereignis, a coming into Being, a coming into view – as in the Augenblick, a ‘moment of vision’ – which in itself is beyond history.6 But Ereignis is also a kind of motion that is other than Being. Like death and disappearance, temporality remains internal to Dasein as an aspect of its relation to the void. In one respect, there is really nothing else to know. The supposedly ahistorical or enduring ontological categories by which philosophers have sought to grasp the world are historical productions. Being lies only at the historically contingent point of their emergence. Absolute historicity is thus the very condition of philosophy, if one which philosophy commonly resists, and it is equally that of politics (politics almost invariably resists it, too). Hence posing the question of Being involves ‘revealing the historically specific origins of seemingly timeless interpretations of Being and beings’ (Mulhall, HBT, p. 27). Yet this also means that Dasein inhabits a realm of possibilities, is constantly aware of that which might be, cannot not be thus aware, since the emergence of the categories or interpretations is never at an end. To think the possible is as much a part of being human as anything supposedly thrust upon us by our biology. Heidegger thus becomes the major instigator of a contemporary thought of ‘radical finitude’. But there are crucially different Heideggerian legacies, and the thought of radical finitude has two different major aspects. The first appears in Rorty, in certain readings of Derrida, in Martin Hägglund, the doyen of such readings, and in some Derrida-­influenced minds, like Simon Critchley and Steven Connor. This kind of ‘finitism’ means important gains, above all, in a time of the retreat of politics and the return of religion: first, a reassertion of the irrefutable atheist premise; second, an argument for intellectual and philosophical modesty; and, third, an insistence on materialism.7 All are necessary starting-­points. But there are also difficulties with this kind of ‘radical finitism’. First, the finitists repeatedly stress the importance of thinking (within) limits. But some limits are more

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problematic than others. When Connor asserts, for example, that ‘There are many, many things in the world that are in need of remedy, but. . . .’, he seems to be equating philosophical limits with limits to care (oddly, given that his theme is Beckett, for whom ‘the air is full of our cries’).8 Rorty and Hägglund are similarly pragmatic: in both cases, it is the capacity for political opprobrium or moral horror that turns out to be radically finite. Second, the assertion of limits tends to go hand in hand with a return to the horizons of the private individual or bourgeois subject. For Critchley, a persuasion of radical finitude means acknowledging weakness, imperfection, failure, mortality, and thereby arriving at an ethics, since ‘through its very weakness, le mourir [dying] proves itself stronger than la mort [death]’.9 But this is a question for the private subject only.10 So, too, Connor’s Beckett is principally concerned with a subjective adjustment to the world. The question for the radical finitist becomes how he or she may feel heimlich, more or less comfortably at home. If, as Christopher Fynsk has it, one aspect of the Heideggerian analysis of Dasein in Being and Time ‘leads back to the solitary self’ and actually threatens unHeideggerianly to repeat ‘the ahistorical and nonsituated thinking’ defined by ‘the metaphysics of subjectivity’,11 Connor’s and Critchley’s emphases derive from it. Third, for this brand of ‘radical finitism’, the truly insurmountable limit is death. The Heideggerian conception of ours as a Being-­towards-death, ‘a matter of relating to one’s life as utterly, primordially mortal’ (Mulhall, HBT, p. 129), becomes key, but in a specific way. Death shrinks our perspectives, delimits our scope. Critchley’s modest contemporary ethics, for example, is founded on the theoretical priority of death. Death comes first for thought. Death decrees the boundary within which thought must operate. For Hägglund, thought begins in the recognition that ‘everything is threatened from within itself, since the possibility of living is inseparable from the peril of dying’.12 It is from death, and specifically my death, subjective death, that I must orient myself in the first instance. But here ‘radical finitism’ falls obediently into line with the larger culture. As Badiou has suggested, and as we noted earlier, the ‘underlying conviction’ of contemporary culture ‘is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death’.13 Death looms large as the flaw in the glass of our eudaemonism and hedonism, the sad limit to our satisfying the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’ Fourth, logically enough, this version of ‘radical finitism’ nudges close to presentism. Thus Rorty thinks that we cannot transcend our historical and cultural location, and hence the present set-­up, together with a ‘relatively local and [indeed] ethnocentric’ definition of political imperatives.14 Fifth, unsurprisingly, such presentism tends smoothly to shade into theodicy and even euphorics. Beyond the capitulation to theodicy, sixth, there is the distinct possibility of complicity with present interest. If the most egregious instances of the coalescence of presentism, theodicy and interest appear in the boosterist world of political discourse, business and finance, corporate management, advertising, government service, think tanks, the press and the media, Rorty also declares the end of history in ‘the institutions and practices of the rich North Atlantic democracies’, or what he calls ‘postmodernist bourgeois [basically US] liberalism’.15 So, too, after a critique of the academic left, Connor presents as an alternative ‘actual politics . . . dull, ugly, bungling and entirely indispensable’;16 in other words, a social-­democratic vindication of English common sense and muddling through (as exemplified, perhaps, in contemporary English parliamentarianism).

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More disquietingly, there is Hägglund’s strange, ambivalent politics. On the one hand, he commits himself to a ‘democracy to come’, an ‘always deferred’ democracy that, like Rorty’s, is or ought to be a completion of our own.17 On the other hand, he thinks there is nowhere to go beyond the law of the jungle. The ‘affirmation of survival’ is ‘inherently violent’, for to defend ‘the survival of something’ is ‘necessarily to attack the survival of something else’.18 We are caught up in a war of ‘chronolibidos’, of differentiated ‘investments in survival’ (my italics).19 Thus Hägglund’s thought remains commensurate with the duplicitous logic of contemporary politics in which democratic rectitude and violent injustice go hand in hand. This is not to say that he is not right about our world; only that his being right would not be a reason to subscribe to it. Critchley, by contrast, has in effect torn up the Rortean assurance and Hägglund’s ambivalence in the process. Right now, he tells us, we do not live in democracies. We live in plutocracies, confronting a ‘grotesque inequality’ from which, he tells us, at this juncture, we must precisely call on the ‘endlessly surprising power of the political imagination’ to rescue us.20 In general, however, radical finitism has more often turned away from that power. This first kind of radical finitism tends to make little of the second Division of Being and Time, and the way in which it turns back on the first. In the second part, Heidegger shifts from his analysis of Being-­in-the-­world as a comprehensive, articulated unity to a conception of it as incomplete as such, and therefore leaving Dasein open to an authentic life. Certainly, Dasein has a ‘concern’ with what is ‘ready-­to-hand’, the present, if you like. This is how one adapts to a historical world, functions, is integrated within it. All existence is worldly and cannot be otherwise. Furthermore, since the Being of Dasein is always a ‘Being-­with-others’ and involves solicitude regarding them, worlds are inherently communal, social and political, and Dasein joins such a world. This is how Dasein ‘falls’ into history. It cannot but fall, since falling is characteristic of it. But Dasein’s existence is also always staggered, always open to time. It is always partly outside itself, never self-­identical or at one with the immediate, always standing somewhat outside the set-­up, however it strives to ignore that; hence, again, the thought of the possible. This is because of Being-­towards-Death. For Heidegger, death is not at all the fearsome end of pleasure. It is not even the aspect of Dasein’s being to which we should give theoretical priority. The theoretical priority is possibility. Dasein is ‘thrown possibility’ (BT 31, p. 183). It is necessarily projective, as is exemplified in its capacity for understanding. Paradoxically, it is more than it can be, ahead of itself, aiming to realize some existential possibility that never coincides with its actuality. This means that finitude is actually indissociable from freedom. In freedom lies self-­transcendence and the actualization of possibilities. Certainly, Death discloses that there is no moment in Dasein’s life when it is not called in question, when its Being is not an issue. Death is what tells one that one never has power ‘over one’s ownmost being from the ground up’ (BT 58, p. 330). But death is also the means to the self-­transcendence that is authenticity. Thus Divison Two of Being in Time indicates that Being-­in-the-World as evoked in Division One is not the whole story. For Heidegger, ‘no given array of entities and circumstances in a given mode of life . . . exhausts the possible significance of Dasein’s existence’ (Mulhall, HBT, p. 168). If ‘we are essentially worldly . . . we are also always more than any particular worldly situation in which we find ourselves’ (ibid., p. 116).

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The mode of temporalization characteristic of average everydayness, its work, objects and tools, is finally not authentic. Ordinary life is not authentic, since there actuality is stable and assured. But because Dasein is an actualizer of possibilities, its being becomes an issue for it, and authenticity becomes possible. If Dasein has a choice as to its possibilities, this includes the possibility of self-­differentiation from others, or, rather, the historical set-­up to which others subscribe. Authenticity will mean overturning common sense, self-­evidence, obviousness, and the conventional understanding of oneself that they encourage. This means that Dasein must settle for a given mode of Being-­in-the-­world without being at home in it. The mode of Being in question thus becomes unheimlich, uncanny. Dasein is alive to the uncanniness of the given; which means being acutely sensitive to historicity. It is thus quite mistaken to claim Heidegger for contemporary presentism. Indeed, he dismisses those ‘completely absorbed in the present’ and for whom the past therefore ‘becomes instantly obsolete’, whilst the future is ‘more and more eagerly (but more and more unquestioningly) leapt upon as grist to contemporary mills’ (Mulhall, HBT, p. 203). Of course, it may be that the possibility of complicity was there from the start in ‘radical finitism’, as horribly evidenced in Heidegger’s Nazism.21 But there is nothing in Being and Time that urges us in such a direction. The reverse: far from the speciously integral self of nation, blood and soil, authentic Dasein confronts the contingent and over-­determined nature of its existence, the fact that it is not its own property. If Dasein is always partly outside itself, never self-­identical, a Being ahead of itself, oriented towards what is not yet actual, then it is never wholly immersed or integrated in any present at all. Certainly, Heidegger’s ‘radical finitism’ may seem to underwrite an intellectually backward-­looking return to the ‘authentic’ subject. But that is not crucially what interests me here. There are other ways of proceeding from the Heideggerian base. Dasein need not be understood either humanistically or even anthropocentrically. Furthermore: the authentic subject reflects on the uses of what is ‘ready-­to-hand’, preconceptions about those uses, and ideas about how they might be different. For Heidegger, this is notably the case with discourse. There is no ascertainable, meaningful reality definitively existing beyond discourse and upon which discourse supervenes, more or less capturing more or less of it. Discourse is never a transhistorical totality. Since there is no structural essence of reality beyond historicity to which discourse could conceivably correspond and which would be there in the absence of discursive creatures, discourse can only ever take place in a particular set of historical circumstances. This means that it is also always open to re-­imagination.

Foucault and his methods The thinker who looms up at the end of this, austerely but grandly, is the early Foucault, the ‘archaeologist’, and it is Foucauldian historicism and, almost above all, his particular way of conveying historicity that I want to underwrite here. His brand of ‘radical finitism’ is well worth (re)asserting against that stemming from the Derridean and pragmatist traditions, thus opening up a major gap that has not sufficiently been

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recognized as such. ‘For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher’, said Foucault. ‘My entire philosophical development was determined by reading Heidegger’.22 The early Foucauldian project stems from two great sources that were preoccupying him in the 1950s, Heidegger and avant-­garde ‘fiction’. Together, they propel him in a direction not exactly corresponding to the orthodox accounts of him that have thus far been integral to his Anglo-American reception.23 The early Foucault shares the commitment of a ‘radical finitist’ to atheism, materialism and philosophical modesty. But the focus on the subject, theodicy, presentism and the theoretical priority of death – at least, in the finitist’s sense – are all remote from him. Foucault derives a striking line of thought from Heidegger’s analysis of the mode of temporalization at stake in authenticity. That analysis is rooted in Division Two of Being and Time, and above all 2.5, ‘Temporality and Historicality’.24 Dasein is ‘thrown’ (into Being), but also maintains itself in ‘connectedness’ (BT 72, p.  425), which involves both projection and retrojection. This is how, in its radical finitude, it constitutes itself in and as a ‘between’ (Zwischen). In doing so, it must confront the truth that there are no degrees of historicity; everything is equally historical from the start. There is nowhere more or less significant to be in time when thinking time. Thus ‘to lay bare the structure of historizing and the existential-­temporal conditions of its possibility, signifies that one has achieved an ontological understanding’ of historicity (ibid.). It is this understanding of historicity that the early Foucault sought to convey. But for Heidegger, understanding points the subject towards a resolute appropriation of its ‘factical “there” ’ (BT, 74, p.  434). Foucault by contrast conceives of it, not primarily with reference to the subject or authenticity, but rather to ‘worlds’ (he sometimes uses this Heideggerian term).25 He turns his attention to what Heidegger calls ‘worlds that are no longer’ (BT, 73, p. 432), applying the Heideggerian understanding of historicity to historical discourse itself. We may clarify this with reference to Foucault’s Heidegger-­influenced introduction to Ludwig Binswanger’s Le rêve et l’existence (1954). There Foucault identifies a fundamental problem for thought: it cannot get to humanity save through humanity. There is no external position from which to think the human thing. Since humanity lives historically, the thinker is therefore always caught up in the same condition as that which he or she seeks to think. Binswanger’s audacious proposition is that this means that all mental worlds are equivalent to dream-­worlds. We should attribute no more positivity to the first than the second. For there is no vantage-­point outside either from which we could take an ‘objective view’. Furthermore, dreams are as available to phenomenological description as any subjective, conscious experience. Indeed, they are rich in their implications in proportion to ‘the poverty of their objective context’ (DE, p. 110). The oneiric has signifying privilege, in effect contains an anthropology of the imagination. For the condition of existence is a ceaseless emergence of the actual from the virtual, which is also a ceaseless creation of more virtualities. From this point of view, all logics function as does oneiric logic. One way of understanding Foucault’s early project is as an attempt to grasp a range of historical logics as having finally an oneiric status only, and, crucially, to evoke them, to write them up as such. Foucault understood that we have entered an epoch of ‘the unlimited reign of the Limit’, which reduces all conceptualization to the level of dream.26 The thought now

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seriously necessary is indeed that of a finitude. I agree, as my book shows everywhere. But I also agree with Foucault that our encounter with ‘the Limit’ points us towards a concept of radical finitude as, above all, the principle of history, and my book, again, is founded on that assumption. History is non-­identical through time; that is, it unfolds as an actual dispersion quite distinct from the reassuring frames in which it has been held, unifying notions like tradition, spirit, origin, influence, development, evolution, progress, ‘the reductionist concept of homo natura’, any concept of homo natura at all; one could continue (DE, p. 118). It may seem, for example, that, at certain historical junctures, the savoirs and their discourses have ‘bound truth and time together’.27 But no such ‘binding’ is possible. History springs unprecedented and disconnected surprises. The ‘unifying notions’ are merely comfort blankets for ‘agoraphobics’.28 Foucault will of course counterpose to the ‘unifying notions’ a rival set of (well-­known) terms: rupture, threshold, discontinuity, limit, punctuality, irruption, discrete events.29 These trace ‘ineradicable chronological threshold[s]’ (BC, p.  241). They articulate the insurmountable strangeness of historical epochs to each other, a strangeness which historicization commonly masks, and yet which one glimpses in and through it. Any given historical formation is haunted by its own contingency. Thus, in The Birth of the Clinic, with the contemporary understanding of the body: ‘this order of the solid, visible body is only one way . . . in which one spatializes disease. There have been, and there will be, other distributions of illness’ (BC, p.  1). There are no truths outside historical contingency; there is nothing to think outside it. Discourses establish their own positivities, but these do not elude or transcend their historicity. Each epoch has its ‘evidence’.30 Later works of Foucault’s, like the History of Sexuality, will in some measure bow before a contemporary agenda. But the great early work does not. It rather issues out of a singular, hollow space, one that is atemporal without pretending to timelessness, that comes out of Heidegger’s void, the concept of which, again, was decisive for Foucault.31 If no historical savoir offers an Olympian vantage-­point from which other positions can be surveyed and in relation to which they may be placed, our own historical perspective has no special purchase, either. A given historical discourse is beyond or discontinuous with ours and not reducible to it. This, however, does not mean that Foucault’s work has no significance for the present and does not address it. Archaeology ‘dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history’ (AK, p. 131). It interrogates ‘the theme of the origin, that promise of the return’, and a range of shifts and stratagems by means of which we confer consistency and unity on history. Thus Foucault aspires precisely to awaken us to ‘the difference of our present’ (AK, p. 204), and therefore the present as a space of potential praxis. In the first instance, Foucault thinks historicity as and in discourse, Heideggerian Rede. A discourse is not ‘an ideal, timeless form’, but ‘from beginning to end, historical’. If ‘we are doomed historically to history’, by virtue of that, we are likewise doomed to ‘the patient construction of discourses about discourses’ (BC, p. xvii). Thus Foucault denies that his work is about mentalités. Our articulations are not separable from our savoirs, as our savoirs and our historical existence are not separable; and the historicity of what we know is also the historicity of what we are, since what we know not only influences but defines what we are (there is always a ‘mediation of knowledge’, BC,

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p.  65). Thus the early Foucault repeatedly turns ontology back into epistemology. Historically, there are heterogeneous and dispersed ‘epistemological spaces’ (OT, p. xi), however one chooses to mark their dividing lines. Hence, in practice, Foucault is repeatedly concerned, not just with the historicity of discourses, but with different concepts, institutions, economic processes and social relations, ways of life, ‘a whole set of various historicities’ (AK, p. 165). Foucauldian ‘archaeologists’ will seek to avoid periodization and notions like the ‘spirit’ or ‘consciousness’ of a given time (DE, p. 1088; cf. AK, p. 159). The positivities that archaeology excavates are not synchronic. History is discontinuous, but there are also ‘temporal vectors of derivation’ (AK, p. 169), temporal persistences that complicate any given picture of a time. There are no period ‘sensibilities’. Yet the configuration of knowledge as determined by a specific episteme has implications for sensibility, not least, in that epistemes have an unconscious dimension. The archaeologist will reveal the historicity of forms of knowledge. But Foucault is also concerned with ‘the very historicity of forms of experience’.32 So, too, if, as he repeatedly insists, historically specific knowledges may be dependent on certain kinds of spatialization, that also has implications for sensibility. When he writes of changes in the ‘forms of visibility’ accompanying changes in medical discourse, he is meditating on sensibilities and how they construe what surrounds them (BC, p.  242). Epistemic shifts involve new correlations ‘of the visible and expressible’. In other words, a given historical imaginary is predicated on a ‘perceptual structure’ not a ‘conceptual system’ (MC, p. 135). Foucault alludes to ‘the coloured content of experience’ (BC, p. 242). The concept of historical ‘colourations’ recurs in his work (HF, p. 334; cf. e.g. DE, p. 118). Crucially, in the 1972 preface to Histoire de la folie (History of Madness), Foucault declares that it (the preface) does not ‘decree’ his meaning, because his meaning is not distinct from his writing.33 What he has to express is properly inseparable from how he expresses it. Foucault suspends historical savoirs and the discourses in which they are caught; he refuses them any coincidence with a truth beyond them. He is also intransigent in his repudiation of any conviction that the present might know better or best. His way of writing historicity is integral to both the suspension and the repudiation. Here he learnt much from imaginative writing (including theory). As the first volume of his Dits et écrits makes richly clear, throughout the 1950s, he was saturating himself in the nouveau roman and modernist and avant-­garde fiction: Blanchot, Bataille, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, Ollier, Simon, Kafka, Broch, Roussel, Beckett, Borges, more. What interested him was primarily how fiction articulates, transmits and modulates thought and knowledge. His acute sense that savoirs were finally inseparable from practices would be cardinal to his own writing. I want briefly to isolate four aspects of the early Foucauldian writing of historicity. My chief example will be Histoire de la folie in the full French edition. Foucault writes of the language of archaeology as always ‘inhabited by the other, the elsewhere, the distant . . . hollowed by absence’ (AK, p. 111). He ‘hollows out’ historical languages and discourses, depriving them of a voice above all. He also creates an ‘intermediate’ discursive or narrative zone, a version of the Zwischen. It is not to be subsumed under ‘the positive categories’, and resists them (DE, p. 368), though without surrendering to nihilism. It is pre-­eminently Foucauldian. The term itself derives from what Foucault

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says of Sollers, that he opens up a distance ‘in the positivity of language’, producing an effect of ‘l’intermédiaire’, an intermediate space that is simultaneously both full and empty (ibid.). Furthermore, in early Foucault, there is an intricate play with discursive and narrative temporalities, the production of a ‘hetero-­temporality’ in line with his well-­known concept of the ‘heteroclite’.34 Finally, he develops certain discursive techniques corresponding to the concept of historical ‘colouration’. These seek to render historicity as a question of affect, of differences in seeing and feeling. Foucault opposes himself to textual commentary. Commentary assumes that the text speaks, but incompletely. It requires a second or supplementary voice that will ‘give voice’ to an ‘unspoken element’ which ‘slumbers within speech’ (BC, p. xviii). Commentary completes the voice, gives it full historical presence. But that presence is an illusion: the person ‘is not in fact the cause, origin, or starting-­point of the phenomenon of the written or spoken articulation of a sentence’ (AK, p.  95). The subject is ‘controlled from afar by the arrangement of the enunciative field’ (AK, p. 98). Discourse positions the enunciating subject, enables and articulates but also constrains it. Hence Foucault is concerned to render the ‘murmuring’ of discourse itself, ‘the inexhaustible speech that animates from within the voice that one hears’ (AK, pp. 27, 95), rather than historical subjects and their supposed expressiveness. Thus individual voices are subsumed into historical processes. Foucault strips out the markers of voice and agency, together; he writes them out of the equation. If one looks, for instance, at his chapter on ‘Le Grand Renfermement’ (‘The Great Confinement’) in the Histoire, one is struck by the sheer range and variety of the kinds of grammatical subject of his sentences: these may be institutions, states and cities, parliaments, hospitals, guilds, practices, measures, decrees or tax increases.35 They may be the savoirs, or abstractions from the savoirs.36 Sentences establish intricate relations between one abstraction and another, not least an active abstraction and a passive one; but the grammatical subjects may also be concrete structures, spaces, buildings. Proper names appear, but are distributed in peculiar fashion, occurring sporadically, even haphazardly. They are effects of a disembodied voice. Foucault also makes great use of reflexive verbs and the passive mood.37 Historical processes take place anonymously. Verbs are what make this clear: Un autre est établi en 1703 à Worcester, un troisième la même année à Dublin; puis à Plymouth, Norwich, Hull, Exeter. À la fin du XVIIIe siècle, leur nombre s’élève au total à 126 . . . on renforce en même temps le contrôle et l’autorité du juge de paix . . . HF, p. 79 Another [workshop] is established in 1703 in Worcester, a third in the same year in Dublin; then in Plymouth, Norwich, Hull, Exeter. At the end of the eighteenth century, their number grows to 126 . . . at the same time, the control and authority of the Justice of the Peace is reinforced . . .

Foucault relies heavily on the forms ‘il y a’, ‘il faut’ and ‘il s’agit’.38 He designates a particular historical shift or transformation in a phrase like ‘on commence à . . . ’ . He resorts to the impersonal pronoun to the point of numbing repetition.39

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Foucault’s intermediate space is the space between knowledge and discourse and the void. It is where the void haunts knowledge and discourse, and they in turn supervene upon the void. It is where the voice is both audible and dies. To locate one’s own discourse in the intermediate space, to write from it, is, as Foucault puts the point in The Birth of the Clinic, in terms that suggest that he still has Binswanger in mind, to render the forms of knowledge as ‘oneiric figures’ (BC, p.  36). In Foucault’s hands, strange new relations between categorical and conditional statements or the indicative and subjunctive moods of the verb come to inhabit historical discourse. The opening pages of the third chapter of the Histoire, for example, about a particular group of historians and their view of the Confinement, oscillate between hypothetical and declarative statements in a movement that destabilizes the text, since it is not altogether clear which statements are the historians’, and which Foucault’s.40 Foucault introduces a set of truth-­claims, then suspends them, without exactly cancelling them out. A historical thought becomes a speculation, without suffering brutal erasure. The production of the intermediate zone in effect involves a detached and sophisticated mimicry of historical logics. Foucault evokes epistemes and reproduces historical systems of thought without their conviction, but equally with no counter-­ conviction, since any counter-­conviction would imply a superior position, a position supposedly above or outside the shifting sands of historicity, notably one supplied by and suffused with present thinking. Hence a curious paradox: on the one hand, ‘speaking’ of historical worlds must involve an adequate articulation of their ‘curious and complex structure’, the fact that they are ‘meticulously’ and ‘rigorously’ organized (MI, p.  45, BC, p.  56, OT, p.  32). Foucault aims at an extreme, almost labyrinthine specificity in his historical accounts, a specificity adequate to sheer complication. But the hollowness of the voice in early Foucauldian discourse also everywhere testifies to endless historical redundancy, the (predestined) idleness of any given epistemic complexity. The doubleness in question – sedulous attention to the detail of the thought, sedulous evacuation of its truth-­value – is crucial. It is hard not to think that, in this respect, he learned from Kafka, whose major work consists of protracted, convoluted, byzantine, super-­subtle cases regarding the character of the Law, as it might be, (in The Trial), or political power (Klamm in The Castle), which are capable of neither proof nor disproof, that merely hang in the air. In effect if not grammatically, Foucault writes history up in the subjunctive mood that is everywhere present in Kafka’s work. Literature and art are uniquely capable of conveying the spectrality of the worlds conjured by the savoirs, of reproducing them as intermediate spaces. It is literature that most vividly conveys the experience of historicity, of the finitude of worlds, that best understands that Being manifests itself not within the limit nor beyond it, but in the transgression of it (DE, p. 273): hence Foucault’s particular taste for works of literature and art that exist on epistemic thresholds and borderlines. The oddity and outlandishness of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, for example, are the consequence of its acute registration of a historical shock: the madman has re-­entered society, and society is now impelled towards a relationship with madness, must seek to find some way of accommodating it.41 Velázquez’s Las Meninas exists ‘at the threshold of . . . two incompatible visibilities’ (OT, p. 4): Foucault offers us a story of the historical movement from the one to the

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other by actually narrating an experience of the painting itself. Most of all, in Don Quixote, we witness an epistemic shift as a seismic event in thought, in which two historical worlds, the mediaeval world of endless similitudes and the Renaissance world in which things ‘remain stubbornly within their ironic identity’, collide and illuminate one another – and one another’s ungroundedess.42 Rameau’s Nephew, Las Meninas and Don Quixote are all concrete representations of an intermediate space (OT, p. 47). ‘Hollowing out’ and the intermediate space bring historicity to the fore. The same effect is born of Foucault’s treatment of discursive and narrative time. Here for instance is Foucault on madness in the age of sensibility: Désormais, on est malade de trop sentir; on souffre d’une solidarité excessive avec tous les êtres qui environnent. On n’est plus forcé par sa secrète nature; on est victime de tout ce qui, à la surface du monde, sollicite le corps et l’âme. HF, p. 372 From now on, one is ill if one feels too much; one suffers from too great a feeling of solidarity with the creatures that surround one. One is forced in that direction by one’s secret nature; one is the victim of everything that, on the surface of the world, beckons one’s body and one’s soul.

The passage effects an almost mischievous, heretical temporalization of the concept. In the narratological sense, the early Foucault prioritizes narrative over discourse, and with it the movement of historical time through any concepts that might appear to be congealing on its surface. He narrates discourse. The most seemingly perdurable concepts, the most total and final ones – death, apocalypse, reason, evil, nature, the cosmos, ‘human existence’ (HF, p. 104), finitude itself 43 – lose any changeless purchase to which they might lay claim, and become eerily narratable. Take as an example Foucault’s narrativization of Dürer’s ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’: . . . ce ne sont pas les anges de Triomphe et de la réconciliation, ce ne sont pas les hérauts de la justice sereine; mais les guerriers échevéles de la folle vengeance. Le monde sombre dans l’universelle Fureur. La victoire n’est ni à Dieu ni au Diable; elle est à la Folie. HC, p. 39 . . . These are not angels of Triumph or reconciliation, nor heralds of serene justice, but dishevelled warriors of mad vengeance. The world founders into universal Fury. Victory belongs neither to God nor to the Devil. It belongs to madness.

Narrative, as it were, flows ironically through the Last Things and discourses upon the Last Things, pushes them to one side, and continues on beyond them. Foucault also multiplies discursive and narrative temporalities, shifts between them, institutes a play amongst and between them, renders their relations indeterminate, refuses to ground them: hence my term ‘hetero-­temporality’. The discourse lacks any

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present time that might secure it. In Foucault’s account of it, discourse may fluctuate unpredictably between a solemn, ponderous, slow time and abrupt and unheralded events. But Foucauldian temporality does not merely consist of unities split by intermittent ruptures. Time breaks to reveal the new occurrence, but also recoils, curves back on itself, resumes itself, moves on. Foucault repeatedly stresses this: there is an eruptive but also a recursive time, of the kind that preserves ‘des figures interdites qui ont pu être transmises intactes du XVIe siècle au XIXe siècle’ (‘forbidden figures that could be transmitted intact from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century’, HF, p. 452). Discourse is left to hover in a vortex between times, the persistent and the sudden together. However, there is no time of ‘[c]e qu’on appelle traditionellement progrès’ (HF, p.  449), in Foucault’s early texts. There are rather instances of proleptic narrative in which prolepsis is curtailed, a kind of unprophetic prophetic narrative in which the prophetic voice fails: ‘Le symbole de la folie sera désormais ce miroir qui, sans rien refléter de réel, réfléchirait secrètement pour celui qui s’y contemple le rêve de sa présomption’ (‘The symbol of madness will henceforth be the mirror which, without reflecting anything of the real, will secretly perhaps reflect, for whoever contemplates it, the dream of his presumption’, HF, p. 42). The ruse is in the sly, ironical ‘désormais’, ‘henceforth’, which appears to be a scholarly deduction but is effectively an allusion to a temporality that will not in fact come to pass, which is a now defunct projection from a given time. So, too, Foucault repeatedly varies the tense in which he describes a particular situation, occurrence or sequence. The paragraph on the sentencing and execution of Deschauffours in ‘Le monde correctionnaire’, for example (HF, p.  121), oscillates between present, passé simple, passé composé and imperfect tenses. This introduces differing temporal perspectives and blurs relations between narrated and narrating times. The different times also imply different epistemes, and this unsettles any epistemological stability to the passage, leaves voice untethered to a particular historical vantage-­point. The oscillation will unfold into an even more intricate movement between tenses in the ensuing passage (HF, pp. 122–7), where the pluperfect and future tenses will also appear. Temporal frames multiply to the point where knowledge, identity, being itself all disappear into pure historicity. Foucault suggests that literary discourse can be peculiarly effective in suspending time.44 In literature, the fixity and definition supplied by historical boundaries waver, and even disappear. The literariness of Foucault’s own discourse is partly apparent in his use of ‘colouration’, or what he calls ‘the blazon of images’ (‘la charge d’images’, HF, p. 346). Historicity is captured in the image. The image, of course, as the Bachelard in Foucault well knows, is intrinsic to historical forms of knowledge. But Foucault also introduces his own metaphors in order to transmit the ‘colour’ of different historical worlds. Strictly speaking, however, colouration itself remains a metaphor: actual colour is less at stake in Foucault’s early writing than chiaroscuro, a play of light and dark. Thus in the Middle Ages madness enjoys an ‘obscure reign’ in darkness in which it communicates with ‘the great tragic powers of the world’ (HF, p. 40), whilst with the inauguration of ‘the classical experience’ a quite different madness is born, one which ‘plays over the surface of things and in the scintillation of daylight, over all the play of appearance and the ambiguity of reality and illusion’ (HF, pp. 63–4).

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Foucault shares Heidegger’s ‘ontological understanding’ of historicity (BT 72, p.  428), then, but also differs from Heidegger in seeking to render it, make it apprehensible; in other words, to create a sharpened sense of the historical uncanny, the Unheimlichkeit of historical existence. Dasein customarily attempts to thematize its world in the most familiar terms available, and, in doing so, erases the traces of historicity, to which we are therefore seldom at all alive. However, Heidegger thinks that Dasein should fully understand the depth and complexity of its finitude. It is therefore necessary to break up the average and everyday understanding of Dasein’s existence in history, of notions of historical connectedness and continuity, since these are inauthentic. The existence of Dasein as Being-­possible is always in excess of its present actualizations. It is therefore never at home in any particular world. There is no historical home. But the task of thinking, writing and conveying historicity is an awesomely difficult one. I come back again to historical irony: the modern grasp of historicity repeatedly produces a thought that exploits historical irony only to deny and even obliterate it. The delicate irony in the Diderot quotation with which I began this chapter tells the story. It is easier to challenge the ‘fallacy of the ephemeral’ than to dissipate, surmount or move decisively beyond it. If such a movement is possible at all, it is Foucault who, almost supremely, shows us how this might be.

Joyce’s historical materialism But there is a great modern rival to Foucault in this respect: James Joyce. The condition of all of Joyce’s works is extreme historicity, the specificity of a historical condition demonstrably itself and no other, and rendered as such. We may speak of a Joycean historical materialism that is, however, sui generis. Joyce is my other great example of the writing of historicity, the transmission of the concept. For my purposes here, given my concern for the survival of certain political truths, it is almost as though he and Foucault had founded two great schools. It is no accident that one of three words that Dubliners begins by emphasizing is ‘gnomon’, which directs us as to how to read Joyce’s work as a whole, since, as the rod that indicates the time by casting its shadow on a marked surface, the gnomon stands for historical precision, exactitude in time.45 Each chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is quite precisely datable and concerned with a particular historical ethos however brief. Chapter  1, to cite a single example, is set in the early and mid-1880s, after Charles Stuart Parnell had become the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, and is about the mood of uplift this generated, particularly amongst aspirational Irish Catholics: ‘a very good time it was’, as the chapter’s first sentence says.46 Compare Joyce’s play Exiles, which is set in Dublin in the ‘Summer of the year 1912’ and is exactly if obliquely about that period, when a conception of Ireland, its divided culture, future and history are opened up to question by the Ulster crisis.47 Finnegans Wake pervasively addresses the historical predicament of a newly independent Ireland in the decades when it was written, the 1920s and 1930s. But it is Ulysses, above all, with its astonishingly detailed evocation of a single day, 16 June 1904, its specific rendering of that day and its meanings, and its rich and complex pillaging of a large range of contemporary

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resources for its famous ‘styles’,48 that is the instance par excellence of Joyce’s historicizing project. Joyce was an intellectual and a theorist as well as a novelist, and he meditates on historicity as well as writing it, as Foucault writes historicity as well as meditating on it. Like Heidegger and Foucault, for all the extraordinarily concrete density of his work, Joyce begins with the void.49 The void is, in a manner, all there is: Joyce repeatedly stresses this throughout his writings. The Christian church, says Stephen Dedalus, is ‘founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world. . .upon the void’.50 Later he will ‘affirm his significance as a conscious rational animal proceeding . . . between a micro and a macrocosm ineluctably constructed upon the incertitude of the void’ (U17.1012–15). Leopold Bloom seems to affirm this too, if more vaguely (U17.1019–20). ‘The void awaits surely all them that weave the wind’ (U1.661–2). It is intrinsic to all our activities, our matter, our bodies, which, at the molecular level, are ‘universes of void space’ (U17.1064). But we are also, like Bloom, ‘conscious reactor[s] against the void’ (U17.2210), and cannot be otherwise. As Glugg in Finnegans Wake will ‘sit it all write down’ and ‘set it up all writhefully rate in blotch and void, yielding to no man in hymns ignorance’,51 so Stephen’s injunction in Ulysses, whether to himself or beyond him, will be ‘Weave, weaver of the wind’ (U2.52). Crucially, however, this line actually comes at the end of one of Stephen’s luminous historical meditations: Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass? U2.48–52

A little further down the page, Stephen answers his own question: ‘It must be a movement then, an actuality of the possible as possible’ (U2.67). Stephen clearly has on his mind principally the epochal horror and misery that is the tale of Irish history, which he calls a ‘nightmare’ from which he is ‘trying to awake’ (U2.377) – he is thinking by way of analogy. Founded on the void the history has been, and therefore unnecessary, not destined to be as it was. Yet its facts are inexorable, ‘not to be thought away’, branded and fettered in place like the colonizer’s Irish convicts and slaves.52 All the same, the force that ensures seeming historical ‘necessity’ always ‘ousts’ possibilities in a movement that is an actualization of the possible. This is the work of history and ensures the truth of historicity. Nothing is given, except the movement of history upon the void. This great Joycean recognition, that the historical fact is at one and the same time both inexorable and inessential, everywhere underlies his art and is cardinal to it. The question then becomes how to write out of that recognition. Joyce’s answer is what is usually known as Joycean modernism. He pushes in two exactly opposed directions. Joyce the historical writer went to extraordinary lengths to ground Ulysses in time, space and the reality of Dublin on 16 June 1904, and to present its real denizens

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and its culture in all their immediate vitality. The stories to this effect have by now become legends. Scholars have amply confirmed their gist.53 Joyce summons up a specific historical world, in all its vast detail, with unrivalled care and sedulousness. The same awesome specificity prevails in the case of ‘superstructures’ in Dublin, 1904. Whatever the terms of reference – discourses, political positions, ideologies, theologies, morals, cultures including popular, commercial and promotional practices54 – Ulysses is sunk as deep as is practically conceivable for a novel in a knowledge of the precise time in which it is set. To take just one example culled at random: the much discussed anti-Semitism of the Dublin in Ulysses is not, or not just, a generalized anti-Semitism of a kind that can be vaguely conflated with Nazi anti-Semitism (though it was not less noxious, whatever that might mean). It is a particular anti-Semitism that is inseparable from the Limerick boycott of January 1904,55 of which Joyce was clearly well aware, and which Ulysses responds to, as it does to the climate that the boycott produced. But he also writes a conviction that this world was not fated to take a particular shape, that it is an ‘actuality of the possible’, into its very texture, this being his dynamic reaction to the historical nightmare that had produced the paralysis of the Ireland contemporary with him. He seeks to cut across or disrupt the historical world with which Ulysses presents us, to rob it of its ontic stability and seeming self-­evidence; which is also to leaven it, to begin to loosen the historical straitjacket in which it is bound, to rewrite the actual in terms of possibilities it excluded; which in turn is also to anticipate a political future that need not be tied to a disastrous past, a major concern for an Irish artist and intellectual, particularly from 1922 on. The first way in which Joyce does this is by introducing and foregrounding the character of Leopold Bloom. By disposition and temperament and, as a scion of Hungarian Jewish stock on his father’s side, first-­ generation native Irish, Bloom is markedly atypical of the Catholic lower middle-­class world with which the novel is above all concerned. Joyce can therefore deploy him to displace and call into question the automatic assumptions of that world, which are effectively if not consciously assumptions about its historical self-­evidence, to lay bare their historicity, sometimes hilariously so. Joyce extends this particular historicizing practice in the last chapter of the novel by opening up another perspective that is in one sense foreign to the patriarchal Irish culture that dominates it, that of a Dublin woman. Molly Bloom is relentlessly if cheerfully dismissive of Dublin men, particularly the Catholic male community she knows best. She insistently and caustically belittles the male-­dominated ethos of a specific Irish political culture, a culture that has otherwise dominated the novel and suffused its aesthetic practices. Through her, Joyce exorbitantly relativizes the significance of both that culture and its historical determinants. Joyce introduces a sense of historicity into Ulysses via Bloom, Molly and Stephen’s meditations. But Molly, Bloom and Stephen are characters. For what is properly and fully a writing of historicity in Ulysses analogous to if distinct from Foucault’s, we must turn to the novel’s famous ‘styles’.56 Ulysses is remarkable for the degree to which it resorts or responds to discourses contemporary with its setting: the discourses of contemporary Irish journalism in Chapter  7, of contemporary Shakespeareanism (9), Revivalist musicology (11), Revivalist historiography (12), popular literature and culture for women (13), literary anthologies of a kind that enjoyed wide circulation in the colonies (14) and handbooks and primers in ‘proper’ or ‘standard’ English (16) and ‘Imperial science’ (17).57

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Joyce sets to work on these discourses. Critics usually refer to the work in question as ‘parodic’. But other practices are at stake, too, practices that suggest that Joyce’s intentions went a long way beyond parody, beyond more or less critical, affectionate or mocking reproduction. Take Chapter  14 in particular: it is composed of ‘parodies’ of a great historical range of English authors and texts, from Latinate and Anglo-Saxon to the late nineteenth century. They appear in historical sequence, as they do in the contemporary anthologies Joyce used,58 and in one of its aspects, the chapter is an anti-­anthology directing its animus precisely at the place of the literary anthology within the ‘civilizing’ project of the colonial power. But it is the detail of Joyce’s practices that is particularly important. Transplantation or anachronism, for instance: Joyce transplants phrases, to give just one example, from Walter Raleigh’s account of the embattled naval galleon Revenge in the Anglo-Spanish battle of Flores in 1585 to an account of Irishmen emigrating to America done up in Swiftian style, both the touches of Raleigh and the Swiftian vocabulary deriving from one of Joyce’s principal sources, W. Peacock’s English Prose from Mandeville to Ruskin.59 This kind of anachronism is repeatedly evident in Chapter 14 (U14.639–46).60 It does not mean that historical specificity is blurred; rather, that fragments of one historically particular discourse interrupt another, indicating both its historical limits, and the more drastic historical limits of the contemporary anthology. Or take the practice of what I call infidelity. Hugh Kenner long ago noticed that Joyce’s Macaulay ‘parody’, for instance, is actually constructed on quite unMacaulayesque principles.61 Another of Joyce’s sources, George Saintsbury’s A History of English Prose Rhythm,62 provided quite a detailed analysis of the workings of Macaulay’s prose. But Joyce appears to have been indifferent to it. Indeed, he wilfully eschews the possibility of an expert parody of Macaulay’s techniques. In other words, he refuses the subservience of parody to the master discourse; he is rather unfaithful to that discourse, denying the historical assumptions (of the relative longevity or permanence of a great Imperial tradition) that underlie both it, and its anthological afterlife. Or take Joyce’s work of adulteration: historically, the colonizer has adulterated Irish culture at every level, compromised it through domination and importation. Joyce strikes back, reversing the vector of adulteration, ‘Irishizing’ English discourse, to adopt Douglas Hyde’s term.63 Contemporary Irish demotic becomes audible in English prose rhythms, as when Joyce writes Lenehan’s quip about Mrs Purefoy ‘expecting each moment to be her last’ into what is supposed to be a Malory ‘parody’ (U14. 178). The spark of an evanescent, contemporary vernacular interrupts and compromises a discourse that, both in itself and as part of an anthology, aspires beyond evanescence. Or, my fifth term, take the production of ersatz: Joyce sometimes actually fakes his styles, confers a kind of bogus archaism upon them, rather as though he were touching up antiques. In the Defoe ‘parody’, for example, he uses the phrase ‘what belonged of women’ (U14.633). This might sound suitably seventeenth-­century. In fact, it is quite unDefoean. The phrase Joyce actually copied from Defoe was ‘what belonged to a woman’, which is altogether more pedestrian and commonplace.64 The voice in Joyce’s text is ‘fake archaic’, a kind of plastic reproduction. Or – the reverse of archaism – wilful updating: in A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne has Yorick tell of an occasion when he ‘popp’d upon Smelfungus’.65 Joyce noted this down, but his echo of it – ‘out popped a locket’ (U14.754) – is ordinary and modern-­sounding. Or take the intrusion

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of Joycean coinages that might come straight out of Finnegans Wake, like ‘twikindled and monstrous births’ in the Gibbon ‘parody’ (U14. 974): the effect, once more, is of a flagrant break with the original discourse. Again and again, one time interrupts another – Foucault’s transgression of the limit – declaring the immediacy, the contingency of both, underlining their historical difference. Transplantation, anachronism, infidelity, adulteration, ersatz, wilful updating: this is by no means an exhaustive list of forms of stylistic contamination in Ulysses that function as instruments of historical awareness. The range of practices in Chapter 14 that are clearly in excess of ‘parody’ repeatedly betrays English literature in its historical dimension. On the one hand, the shape of a literary history remains, as it does in an anthology. On the other hand, as J.S. Atherton suggests, there is a ‘deliberate confusion of [historical] margins’,66 which is also a deliberate confusion and mutual displacement of historical voices. So, too, by the same means, Joyce constantly writes a sense of historical virtuality into historical actuality, and this tends to hollow out discourse in a manner comparable to Foucault’s. The confusion of margins refuses to underwrite a triumphalist, patriotic or Imperialist historical logic and the curious amalgam of metaphysics and organicism that underlies it. The practice interferes with the specious coherence of such notions, and does so through an implacable emphasis on historicity. As we have seen, Chapter 14 insists on the historicity of the moment that sees the production of the genre of the Imperial anthology itself. The larger point will be fully clear if we compare it with Chapter 16. The style of Chapter 16 is a glorious compendium of blunders in English. But these are not violations of timeless rules (imagining there to be such). They are errors according to what was then the developing concept of ‘proper English’ or ‘standard English’, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century English linguistic nationalism supremely embodied in the works of Henry Fowler and his brother Francis.67 This nationalism specifically elevated the English (and English voices) of a Home Counties social, educational, economic and cultural elite, very largely private school- and Oxbridge-­educated, over those of everyone else. But the class war, here, was a defensive one: in the first instance, the Fowlers were fighting on behalf of an established, affluent, privileged, well-­educated, middle-­class few whose strongholds were being progressively threatened if not yet eroded by a new middle class that had come into being in the later nineteenth century and had not benefited from the best British institutions, but was growing progressively hungry for knowledge and culture. Joyce himself belonged to a Dublin version of this class. Its long-­term fortunes were not to be obstructed. Chapter 16 is actually something like a hyperbolic extrapolation of its cultural aspirations, and an elaboration of the relevant language into a style and an aesthetics. So the chapter engages with the precise historicity of a contemporary linguistic question, and its language is everywhere historically specific. The word ‘anent’, for instance (U16.323, 431, 986, 1797), which the Fowlers described as evoking ‘a mechanic wearing his Sunday clothes on a weekday . . . nothing less than a masquerade costume’,68 was a word quite fashionable in the nineteenth century, starting to sound archaic towards its end, and disappearing from use during the twentieth. ‘The hoi polloi’, which Henry Fowler thought of as ‘equally uncomfortable in English whether “the” (= hoi) is prefixed or not’,69 was a middle- or lower-­middle class expression still around in British usage until the mid-­twentieth century, but now rarely heard. Chapter  16 is not an

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assemblage of locutions that pass through the ages as the solecisms known to all men. It is rooted in historically specific, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­century uses or, in the Fowlers’ terms, abuses of English, and debates about them. Finally, in its ineffable casualness, its exhilarated (and hilarious) indifference to perfection or mere competence, it becomes a celebration of an ‘improper’ language, caught at the historical moment that both defines it as such, and allows us to savour its emergent drive. The very saturation of Chapter 16 in its linguistic world is its mode of capturing and expressing historicity. The reader finds him- or herself in the position of foreigner or alien visitor, not principally because of any experimental modernist technique, though of course Joyce packs the solecisms together as no real historical context could conceivably have packed them, but because of the sheer thickness of historically specific detail as he renders it. Here, in the last analysis, he is at the opposite pole to Foucault. In Foucault’s hands, as we have seen, any given historical world and its episteme become spectral. They have the substantiality only of dreams. What the early Foucault wanted to do was to persuade us that we are always dreamers of our own knowledge. Joyce, by contrast, aims at a kind of hypertrophy of the historical real and its excluded possibilities, together, a project whose logical conclusion is Finnegans Wake, and that more and more pervasively suspends discourse, because it can only take place in a kind of endless shuttling between historical presence and a sense of its contingency. But we do not have finally to choose between Joyce and Foucault. In political terms, we stand in vital need of both their and a multiplicity of other versions of their projects: that is why this chapter has focused so intently on styles. Such projects matter seriously, as seriously as those of a Kant or a Hegel. Foucault’s most significant target is the awesome effectiveness with which men and women ceaselessly persuade themselves of the rationality or rational self-­evidence of their own historical set-­up, their plausibility to themselves, the rightness of their reason. It is in giving up on any such conviction that people become capable of significant praxis. For that reason if no other, we need more great writers of historicity. Our historicity is always with us, everywhere, all the time. Bodies, voices, speech, space, time itself are all immediately historical, and change. We undergo unconscionable changes in who we are, changes that are spatial, temporal, intellectual, somatic, material and experiential together. Our modes of signification and representation, and therefore commonplace thinking, usually lag woefully behind such changes, because language and signification do so. But politics is the greatest laggard, and remains backward. Until it begins to accept, live and articulate its historicity much more fully than it has so far been capable of doing, it is hard to see how the so-­called ζῷον πολιτικόν (zoon politikon) can really forge and sustain a successful major politics of any kind. Foucault and Joyce were exceptional. In their own unique ways, they teach us an immense amount about how to think historically; not only that, but how to apprehend historicity with peculiar point and vividness. In this respect, in the context of a political theology, they might be thought of as rather like prophet-­figures, anticipating and pointing towards a kind of consciousness that would underwrite both the moment of redemption, and the truth to which it bears witness; and also evangelists, keeping the good word alive and passing it on.

3

Event

Established custom is not easily broken, till some great event shakes the whole system of things, and life seems to recommence on new principles. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

Back to Badiou This chapter begins with a logic. It is a logic that will take us from one of the book’s key concepts to another, from absolute historicity to the event. The event is central, here. If absolute historicity is the foundation from which the book builds its political theology, the event is the central rivet in both. In my view, the concept of the event must be cardinal to a modern political thought, but the event shorn of the theoretical and narrative constructions in which it is commonly embedded, constructions that are not without value, but are fictions, and I accordingly relocate them, notably in the political temporality that I have already called ‘melancholic-­ecstatic’ and which I will explore in detail later. This is hardly surprising, since the association of modernity with both the event in itself and the concept of the event is by now not uncommon. Indeed, one of the goals of this chapter is to articulate the event as spanning modernity, as a properly modern phenomenon: hence my turning later to the very beginning of the period, and Kant. Otherwise, what the chapter aims to do is to isolate the meaning and import of the event, chiefly through the contemporary philosopher most famously associated with the concept, Alain Badiou; to consider some of the recent debates about it; to intervene in those debates, bolstering the case for it via evidence on the one hand and Kant on the other; and finally to look, again, at a paradigm of transmission, this time the fiction of Virginia Woolf, particularly The Years, though others (Chamfort, Wordsworth, Orwell) will have appeared here and there. In Heideggerian terms, there is nothing beyond Dasein except the void. Nothing dictates its specific appearances, which means that it always belongs to a historical world. However, as I noted earlier, the later Heidegger places the concept of Ereignis between the void and historicity. Ereignis is the becoming or what Heidegger prefers to call the ‘donation’ of Dasein, its ‘inauguration’, its historically contingent emergence. Ereignis is a principle of ontological instability, an ever-­present flicker of possibility in Being. In Heidegger, it has religiose and romantic connotations, Badiou even claiming that the concept approximates to that of an all-­giving, providential God,

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‘the God of the obscurity of time’.1 But Heideggerian inflation or portentousness is perhaps most evident in his notion of Ereignis as ‘poetically proffered’. Poetry is ‘the basic happening of being’, writes Heidegger. ‘It founds being and must found it. . . . The poet is the grounder of being’.2 Poetry is the privileged, in effect oracular expression of Ereignis in its quasi-­divinity. I allot poetry a different role. In the end, piquantly, the concept of Ereignis is too close to being properly theological to underwrite a political theology. The distinction may sound overly subtle. In fact, it is crucial to my project. Badiou himself supplies a more decisively secular and more neutrally abstract term than Ereignis: événementialité, or ‘the event of the event’.3 However, it appears only very incidentally in his work. He does not formalize or elaborate and later abandons it. I want to insist on its significance and develop its meanings and implications as he does not. Événementialité betokens a kind of play at large in Being and the world that is not reconcilable with religions or metaphysics. Religions and metaphysics are rather its productions or, better, effects. It ensures that, if gods are born, they also die. It underwrites the volatility or fragility of any given logic of historical appearance. It guarantees, not only the contingency of any emergence whatsoever, but its singularity. The condition of événementialité is not unity but irreducible multiplicity. As with Heidegger and Ereignis, Badiou gives poetry a key role in the articulation of événementialité. But for Badiou the poet is not primarily concerned to intuit, much less to render or convey a vision of it. He or she is rather a thinker of événementialité, and as such attentive above all to the undecidability that is ‘its [very] form’ (EE, p. 215). The poet thinks événementialité as a threshold. If he or she organizes a poem as a great, protracted work of indecision, that is because it is poised between void and appearance. The key instance, here, is Mallarmé. Événementialité, then, is what founds absolute historicity (doubly paradoxical, but it works). It ensures that what seem like the historically cast-­iron assurances of today may be figments tomorrow. It is also what ensures that there will be events; that is, conceptually, it is the connecting fibre between the concepts central to the last chapter and to this one. Pace progressivists, événementialité is the condition of the event (and political hope), but the event is not, as it were, within événementialité. Of itself, événementialité produces only a ‘minor’ modernity. So what is an event? As conservative a sage as Samuel Johnson effectively supplies a definition. An event breaks with the whole preceding system of things. It clearly establishes new principles of being. It arrives to introduce a scission with a prior history, to set it at naught. Johnson believed in the reality of events. But for a formal description of the event, Badiou remains crucial. He is key to this book specifically at this point. I’ve provided long accounts of Badiou’s philosophy of the event elsewhere.4 I shall sum his philosophy of the event up, very briefly, then give a short account of a few of my most significant differences with him before turning to other resources. Badiou’s importance derives from his implacable decision to rethink the world from the ground up on the basis of the absolute philosophical privilege of contingency. The world as it is given us, already there before us, is of little or no importance for thought alongside certain chance occurrences that break into it and break it up, that is, events, and their consequences. What matters to philosophy is not Being, but what

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arrives to supplement Being. As a function of the ‘pure hazard of the world’, the event is that supplement.5 The event is an occasional or intermittent historical rupture with an extant condition. It is the moment of the tabula rasa from which things begin anew. For Badiou, the overarching logic of the event is as follows: Being is indefinitely multiple, a banal infinity. Modern mathematics, particularly set theory, everywhere shows us this. There are only the void and multiples, multiples of multiples to infinity, multiples of infinity, infinities upon infinities, infinities of infinities. Clearly, therefore, there will be a fault-­line in Being. We know this through experience but can grasp it logically. As an infinity of infinities, Being is founded on the void. Events take place, must take place, because there is no other foundation save the void. The void is always everywhere, definitively in excess of the consistency of any given historical situation. The possibility of a breakdown in consistency and an ‘irruption of inconsistency’ always exists. The flaw in Being then gives rise to the ‘explosive’ arrival of an event (EE, p.  90). In themselves, however, events may be very little, almost nothing. It is by their consequences that they are known as such. ‘Everything depends’ on how the possibility the event opens up ‘is grasped, worked on, incorporated, deployed in the world’;6 that is, everything depends upon the subjects who commit themselves to events and develop and promote their effects. Events distinguish themselves from their condition, événementialité, in three ways: first by their consequences (Badiou calls these truth-­procedures); second by having their effects in certain specific domains; and third by their rarity. Badiou has meditated the question of the ‘domains’ at great length. There are four peculiarly significant ones, though their number is by no means fixed or determinate. I will revise Badiou’s account of them and their exemplification below, for my own purposes. There is the immediately political domain (e.g. the French revolution, Daniel O’Connell and Catholic emancipation in Ireland, Parnellism, the Russian revolution, Suffragism, the Spanish revolution of 1936, Gandhi’s Indian independence movement, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela; note that if my list implies a decisive valuation, it is not of revolution, still less of violence, as equivalents in Badiou often seem to, but of the reign however brief of an imperative of justice).7 There is the domain of scientific discovery (the Copernican revolution, the Einsteinian revolution). There are events of art and thought (Beckett’s art of impotence, Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God, Marx’s philosophy of history, Mallarméan poetics, the Wittgensteinian philosophy of language). Badiou would want to distinguish two domains, here: the one, art, a truth-­ domain, the other, philosophy, not. There is a curious paradox, however, to his reasoning. His logic is that of philosophical modesty. Philosophy does not produce truths but rather, tends, cultivates and preserves them, arranges them in relation to one another. But in the very act of thus situating philosophy, Badiou actually distinguishes thought, marks it out, allots it a distinguished space. He casts philosophy in an unassuming role, yet at the same time grants it special privilege, his model surely being Plato. Modesty isn’t really any more a notable feature of Badiou’s thought than of Plato’s. If, for Badiou, philosophy does not share the kind of adventure involved in a truth-­procedure, it nonetheless occupies a contemplative height which in effect is traditional, classical. This not only tends to deprive philosophy of a certain charge. It denies its existence as a speculative production comparable to if generically quite separate from art. But there

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are no compelling reasons for doing so. Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Irigaray all are names that signify events. My fourth domain lies inward. I see no reason not to grant and foreground this domain, not least because it can serve as an (admittedly rudimentary) basis or starting-­ point for a politics. However, the stake here is, not, in one sense, a theory of the subject but of the desubjectification of the subject as commonly formulated, which at the same time betokens the possibility of the emergence of a more ‘authentic’ subject; a subject, if you like, of the void. Here the event in question is a personal experience of ‘the openness of the open’,8 the ungroundedness of the world. It is demonstrable. It may be a political, philosophical, artistic or scientific experience, but may also be none of them. It may be very ordinary. It includes falling in love (Badiou’s fourth domain). It may be the result of a crisis that is both intellectual and psychic, like Kleist’s ‘Kant crisis’ of 1801, his extreme experience of the loss of the Ding an sich, or Mallarmé’s crisis of 1866, his ‘discovery of nothingness’.9 It may be the analysand’s experience in Lacanian analysis, an experience of the eventual ‘dissolution of the supposed knowledge of the subject’,10 with Johnson’s preceding ‘system of things’ understood as in this case a psychic given. But it may also be the consequence of an experience that has no obvious contextual trigger. We should insist on this, because modern art and particularly literature so pervasively and insistently bear witness to precisely this kind of event. It is crucial that events have subjects. They are even defined, realized as such by the emergence of a new subjectivity within a given domain. The event opens up a space of possibility to which a subject or subjects subscribe, and which they elaborate into a truth. We should add, however, that the event may beckon, may invite but, however much it affects and even overwhelms the subject, he or she still has finally to choose its truth. This choice is an expression of value. Here we may address one of the most common misgivings about Badiou’s theory of the event. Surely, we cannot simply prize the event per se? What, for example, of the event of German fascism? Badiou’s answer is that fascism was not an event at all.11 Events take place on the edge of the void. Fascism did not. It took its bearings from identifications that preceded it: blood, race, soil, nation, the German people. Its projection forwards was inseparable from a retrojection. Furthermore, (I’d add), the truths originating in events are not and do not produce dogmas. Because they are founded on the void, they are open to infinite dispute and disagreement, in the understanding that their condition is the originating space of possibility, as it has been from the start. This distinguishes a truth from belief systems (reactionary politics, religious faiths). Truths are haunted, often direly, by absence, inexistence, aporia. One might cite Samuel Beckett, here, as in effect a paragon. Truths are delicate, vulnerable, frail. Badiou himself says this, but his assertive or ‘affirmative’ style of philosophizing – which sometimes seems a little too close to toxic positivity for comfort – tends repeatedly to mask and occlude it.12 The insistence, however, is intrinsic to the concept of events and truths pervasive throughout this book. If events and truths are fragile, they are also rare. In the present culture, with its strange conviction of democratic plenitude and boundless cornucopia together, this is an unfashionable emphasis, but Badiou tirelessly and austerely returns to it. When asked ‘Is there such a thing as a subject?’, for example, he makes the point quite firmly: ‘Yes, there is, but not many, not as many as some believe, and far fewer than people

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hope’ (HE, p.  340). ‘Far fewer than people hope’: we should take that rather stark admonition very seriously, as contemporary leftist and, especially, progressive-­ democratic Badiouistes are sometimes disinclined to do.13 In Logiques des Mondes, rarity is explicitly a part of what Badiou defines as his materialist dialectics: ‘truths,’ he writes, ‘only exist as exceptions to that which is’.14 ‘Injustice is clear, justice obscure’, he writes, rather beautifully, elsewhere, ‘for who will bear witness to justice?’.15 Who will, who can conceivably bear witness to justice? An event is not any production of historicity whatsoever. There are an infinite number of such productions of comparatively little importance, without meaning, or more or less without value. For to grant contingency a philosophical privilege is not to assume that it has existential priority. The priority of contingency is more thinkable than liveable or lived: this maxim may be very simple, but its common-­sense force should be immediately recognizable. Thus politics is always and irreducibly sporadic, occasional, a ‘restricted action’ bearing no relation to any ‘massive history’ (AB, p. 118). If worlds are always contingent, that does not mean that they are readily available to transformation. Indeed, the reverse: in a sense, the transformation of a world is strictly impossible from within it. Worlds are not absolutely static or becalmed and could never be so. But they are governed by their own modes of change. Events must be distinguished from their delusive lookalikes. They turn out to be few and far apart, whether in space or time. So events, truth-­procedures, subjects are likely to suffer a swift and abrupt eclipse. All too easily, they fade and fail, are brusquely snuffed out. This is the logic of the remainder, of which more shortly. But why is there a remainder? Why are events not more durable? Why should this evanescence be so conspicuous a feature of modernity, of modern politics? Why are the odds always seemingly stacked against the modern event, why its ‘extraordinary precariousness’ (LA, p. 52)? What is the logic of its rarity and frailty? For Badiou, initially, we require a concept of metastructure.16 Every historical situation is structured. But it is also always multiple, and its multiplicity exceeds its structure. There are always other potential orders hidden within structure. In other words, the scope of a given order is not determined by the elements that comprise it. This is the principle par excellence of an irreducible instability to any given situation. Since structure makes its own demand, and that demand may suffer obstruction, it therefore always ‘calls for a metastructure’ (EE, p. 99). Structure is as it were, structured twice over. Structure is always haunted by the void on which it is founded, threatened by an eruption of the very multiplicity that it seeks to hold at bay. Hence a metastructure is imperative. It gives further form and shape to indifferent consistency. It thereby protects structure against disaster. The ‘doubling’ of structure (EE, p.  109) usually holds the event at bay and provides a defence against its consequences. Badiou’s great example, here, is the classical State, which doubles the structure of the social bond. Metastructure has a unitary force. Badiou is a great foe of the One. Steven Connor suggests the reverse.17 But the true apostles of specious oneness are elsewhere – see under the New International in Chapter  1 – if nowhere near as philosophically visible (or impressively coherent). By contrast, Badiou wants to see scission, division, conflict, everywhere, as opposed to consensus, the indistinct middle ground. Connor’s disagreement in fact obliges him. He wants to antagonize other minds, to make them

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declare themselves. Here we might also turn to Badiou on the late Lacan and the One. Lacan thinks we yearn unstoppably after unity. For philosophy, the ‘temptation of the One’ is seemingly ever-­present (LA, p. 129), not least in politics, where it repeatedly legitimizes the State. Everywhere the One constantly threatens to triumph. This requires the ever-­repeated subjection of multiplicity, and the triumph of a fiction facilitating and bringing into being a vast structure of unities that is itself unitary. Thus, in a favourite phrase of Lacan’s, metaphysics ‘stops up the hole’ in politics.18 But Lacan also admits that ‘il y a de l’Un’, there ‘is something’ of the One.19 Unity is actually functional, operational. This is particularly the case in that it repeatedly interferes to balk the progress of a truth. Truths are holes in what Lacan calls semblance. But the tendency of semblance is always abruptly to reconstitute itself and block all gaps, to reassert its oneness, like some finally indissoluble organism. This does much to explain the rarity of truths. But why should the One constantly threaten to triumph? A certain answer is present in the philosophical tradition itself. The question of Being is not the essence of philosophy. Its centrality was the result of a Parmenidean decision. Parmenides is not the original thinker of the One. He rather thinks the Two, thinks division, but then decides in favour of the One, in favour of Being. Parmenides inaugurates the founding philosophical distinction between Being and non-Being. But he also makes the founding decision: ‘Do not take the way of non-Being’.20 There is nothing to be gained by doing so. For Badiou, that the very history of Western ontology is actually founded on a Parmenidean decision is extremely important, because it precisely exposes its lack of necessity. Yet it has only been recently, with modernity, that the decision has been called into question (for Badiou, by the Heideggerian insistence on Geschichtlichkeit, historicity, and the Lacanian insistence on an original and irreducible lack in Being). So ‘[t]he essence of philosophy is not the question of Being’ (PA, p. 23). It is division, and with division comes emergence, the event. The tradition has thus far always held division at bay in favour of unity, or, as in Hegel, subsumed division in unity, and it has had and continues to have a coercive power. This again leaves the event looking precarious. But, overdetermined as (we are seeing) it is, the question of rarity crystallizes above all around Leibniz, again; or rather, Badiou’s concept of indiscernibles as opposed to Leibniz’s. For Badiou, indiscernibles are a figure of the pure scission or division that is the event, the Two prior to any attributes, to characterization or nomination; think clones. Indiscernibles are two and yet in-­different. But for Leibniz, famous for his principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, indiscernibility does not ‘institute the Two’ (PA, p. 186). Indeed, ‘for him, there is no indiscernible’ (HE, p. 292). Leibniz cannot think indiscernibles, and therefore cannot think events. If he did, the whole structure of his philosophy would collapse. For, like our present culture, it is founded on the notion of a universal order requiring the self-­sufficiency and self-­boundedness of an infinity of monads, autonomous, single units. But if indiscernibles exist then the isolation of the monad cannot be universally true, since it is no longer possible invariably to ensure that any given monad is other to another. For Badiou, by contrast, indiscernibles must exist. The event must occur: one must divide into two. But the Two will remain indistinct, because, if they are distinguished, not least by names, then they are monads, and we promptly return to the One again. If Being is reproduced in a

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second instance – think of clones again – then Being is no longer Being. This then holds open the space for a possible event. However, Badiou asserts that Leibniz’s objection must nonetheless be taken very seriously (HE, p. 298). It is not enough to seek to counter Leibniz’s hostility to the concept of the event – natura non saltum facit, again – by asserting an imaginative knowledge or apprehension of discontinuities (see EE, p. 354). As we noted earlier, Leibniz’s logic is extremely rigorous and, seen from within his ‘analytic manner’ (HE, p. 275), appears to be irrefutable. So Badiou keeps the rigour but changes the manner. He argues that, first, truth-­ procedures do not just begin with events or in indiscernibles. They articulate the indiscernible in a given situation, are indiscernible and tend towards indiscernibles (see HE, p. 294). Truths are not nuggets of wisdom. They do not essentially consist of new forms of knowledge or even, finally, praxis. They rather arrive at new forms of openness. Second, the tense of an event is the future anterior, ‘that which will have been accomplished’. The subject has no certainty of being caught up in an event until a truth-­ procedure has arrived at the indiscernible towards which it was tending. Third, this point of arrival is not a conclusion or summation, a final, comprehensive state. Truths are always ‘inachevé’, unachieved (HE, p.  253). But this also means that, fourth, no event is perceptible as such until a truth-­procedure has been accomplished. Events, are proved, indeed come into being, only retrospectively. Fifth, the processes by which events and truths come into being are immensely complex, finely nuanced, full of atomistic ‘subtleties’ (HE, pp. 279, 287, 297, 304). Truth-­ procedures are very fine constructions, elaborate structures of ‘connection and disconnection’ (HE, p.  294). They involve ‘enquêtes’, ‘inquiries’ of a most strenuous kind.21 They are littered with ‘zones of conflict’ and involve modes of commitment that are ‘enchevêtrés’, tangled (HE, p. 296). There is an ‘absolutely aleatory’ element, not only to the event, but to truth-­procedures and their associated inquiries (HE, p. 286).There can be no certainty from within a truth procedure that that is what the subject is engaged in: ‘a truth is always unknown’ (ibid.). The protocols for evaluating truths are intricate. At this point the logic of frailty and rarity becomes fully clear. Indeed, given how ferociously the odds are stacked against events and truth-­procedures, it may seem remarkable that any prevail at all, however fleetingly. But the major difficulty is not ‘out there’, in the relationship between Being and event, or even in metastructure and the prevalence of the One. It is interior or intrinsic to truth-­procedures themselves, and, since it is only as a consequence of truth-­procedures that we can be sure that events take place at all, difficulty afflicts the event, too. The subject of an event is indeed fragile or rare, because it is ‘a far more rigorous construction than the subject supposed to know’, and perpetually traversed by uncertainty (HE, pp. 323–4), never sure that it has not merely surrendered to a chimera. We will encounter a very fine example of such a subject at the end of the book, in Kierkegaard.

Pro and contra the event It is important not just to take the concept of the event for granted, particularly if one is giving it priority in thought. There are of course many other questions around the

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theory of the event I have just outlined. Should an event like, say, the Einsteinian revolution really be linked to a single name? Whether it should or not, that an event took place in scientific thought in and as a result of it is ungainsayable. The world changed as a consequence of it. Did the Copernican revolution not take place gradually and over a long period of time? Such an objection is naively objectifying. However long its incubation, the Copernican revolution was an event. The duration of an event, the time it takes, is an incidental or immaterial question. What exactly goes to define the time of an event, once all we have of it is language, discourse? Something we know as the Copernican revolution transformed the world. We know it, not in the first instance objectively, but subjectively, because it created subjects, subjects who proclaimed their allegiance to it. The most common and powerful objection to the concept of the event, however, is the deconstructive one. Michael Sayeau, a proponent of it, quotes Derrida: ‘the condition of [the] possibility’ of events ‘is simultaneously, once again, the condition of their impossibility, of the impossibility of their rigorous purity’.22 In Sayeau’s terms, ‘what would seem to be an event – an experience in the present – is haunted both by past precedent and by the anticipation of the future’ (AE, p.  26). There is always repetition within seeming difference; repetition inexorably assimilates, compromises, contaminates difference, leaves it perceptible but renders it negligible. Yet this theoretical position, emerging out of an extremely subtle and sceptical engagement with the traditions of metaphysics, is surely metaphysical itself. Why should repetition necessarily tarnish difference, render it ‘impure’? Does that not depend on exactly what gets repeated? Clearly the subjects of an event have to work with certain materials, and those materials will already be to hand. Everything depends on what they make or fail to make of them. But that does not nullify the event. In Badiou’s terms, the event is always in composition with what he calls its site, from which its elements partly derive, and which furnishes it with its substance, provides the conditions of its intelligibility. Language would be a crucial example, here. The new names in use after an event may already be part of the existing site, and in that respect are repeated. But they are also ‘supernumerary’ insofar as they become or are associated with the name of the event itself (EE, p. 363). They are ‘hypothetical’ designations that were first supplied by the resources of the site (EE, p.  413). However, their usage after the event does not duplicate their previously established functions (EE, p. 436). The new meanings may be radically new. William Watkin has very effectively promoted Badiou’s case against Derrida’s. Derrida, he says, is not really concerned with uniqueness but unicity. Unicity belongs only ‘to the realm of same and other, which are effects of structure’, though they pass themselves off as Being. But there is no ‘being unique’. Uniqueness is not a question of Being. It is a question of what has never happened before. Uniqueness breaks with all prior structure.23 At that point, it requires a decision. Take for example the French revolution: a sophisticated, highly able, professional contemporary historian like Colin Jones may now not only adopt a social-­democratic and at times anti-­revolutionary vocabulary and emphasize continuities between the pre- and post-­revolutionary eras, but also question whether the French revolution even so much as formed ‘part of one of the founding grand narratives of Western modernity’.24 (In effect, he replaces it with a

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‘grand narrative’ of his own, that of the burgeoning business mindset). Clearly all depends on one’s vantage-­point, which will decide which details one attends to and which positions one identifies with. The discourse of eighteenth-­century French entrepreneurs will clearly bear out the present-­day scholar and expert working in the neo-­liberal spirit of total Capital. The voices of the poets, philosophers, intellectuals, composers and painters and those of a host of very ordinary, very destitute French people often will not. With whom do you want to side, to associate yourself? Once again, the question is of subjective allegiance, which of a number of historical vectors and trajectories one commits oneself to and stays with, however improbable and indirect one’s commitment and seemingly defeated one’s cause may seem at a particular time. Badiou currently has prominence, at least, in a certain sphere. But Sayeau, Jones and Connor are much more representative of the larger contemporary scene. At the very start of what we have called the modern period, Stendhal thought that modernity was smothering the event: ‘Maintenant la civilisation a chassé le hasard’, he wrote, ‘plus d’imprévu’.25 Our epoch is the culmination, the very fulfilment of his prescience. For it is peculiarly resistant and obtuse to the event. Indeed, this turns out to be yet another instance of historical irony, an oddly arresting one: it is precisely in an age peculiarly, even intransigently hostile to the event that the concept of it comes philosophically to the fore and is properly formalized as such. The resistance derives partly from the culture of security. As Mark Neocleous has suggested, its ideology has become central ‘to the logic of capital and the logic of the state’. There is now ‘a deadly complicity between security and capital’.26 By another historical paradox, what Neocleous calls ‘the security fetish’,27 precisely because it is a fetish, an obsession, breeds an equal and opposite fascination with insecurity, and at length the event, if in the negative. This paradox is cognate with and inextricable from Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’, in which the security that modern science and technology ceaselessly promise is proportional to the risks they actually create.28 But it is not only the culture of security that holds the event at bay or sets it at naught. The media increasingly aspire to a form of closure in which all representation will be determinate, convention-­bound and predictable. There must be no events on television: nothing on television must genuinely surprise, save in specific terms that are pre-­ordained, and therefore unsurprising. Florian Sprenger suggests that media theory has always been ‘oriented towards unity’ and is not ‘a theory of difference’, but is rather implicitly religious, even Catholic;29 indeed, here one gets a political theology that is seriously theological. As such, however, it has merely reflected the progress of the global empire of the media themselves. The ready transferability of television programme formats from one national culture to another is just one index of just how homogeneous the dominant forms of representation have become, as with the modes of knowledge and understanding they promote. This means total explicability by new elites (pundits, ‘specialists’) and total visibility, transparency,30 the end of all obscurities. This spells the seeming death of the event. So, too, whether in finance, science and technology or even sport, the very currency of the terms risk avoidance, risk reduction, risk elimination, risk analysis, risk management and the evolution of manifold forms of prediction, forecasting and projection are profoundly illuminating. For neoliberal capital, the unpredictability that

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makes the event possible is the menace par excellence. In the Journal of Risk Research, the words risk and event repeatedly overlap.31 As far as we can, we must work to neutralize or contain hazards of all kinds. If the new technology institutes new forms of global ‘community’, it also effects and spreads new forms of control of the alea. Technological systems increasingly define the terms in which it is possible to think and work, which means that they increasingly prescribe the forms of thought and work themselves. Here the Heidegger of ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ is germane.32 For Heidegger, the essence of technology is on the one hand ‘enframing’ (Gestell), on the other ‘destining’ (Geschick). That is, technology imposes a set of forms, an ‘ordering’ that is ‘supposed to be the single way of revealing’ and seeks to determine a predictable future (QT, p.  17; this becomes more and more literally the case). Heidegger sees ‘enframing’ as of ‘supreme danger’ to us, since it encourages ‘the impression . . . that everything man encounters exists only in so far as it is his construct’ (QT, pp. 13–14). This works against and seeks to cancel out the truth of an open future and the event. For ‘man is given to belong to the coming-­to-pass of truth’ (QT, p. 17). Of course, there is no ‘essence of technology’. Technology is not in itself a problem, as Heidegger seems to think. Technology has no inherent nature beyond a set of historical determinations and historically specific uses. We can imagine very different kinds of technological set-­up to our own. Everything comes down to, on the one hand, who controls technology, who makes it what it is, and the subject of technology on the other. Most strikingly of all, resistance to the concept of the event is now also increasingly invading the very intellectual domains that previously most assiduously promoted it, notably literary and cultural theory and criticism. Bryony Randall, for example, gives pride of place to modernist authors who she thinks sought to develop an ‘alternative modernist temporality’ to ‘the disruptive moment’ (that is, to the exception that is the event). Randall’s ‘alternative temporality’ is uneventful daily time, the time of everyday life.33 Sayeau expressly takes up and indeed theorizes what he calls an ‘anti-­evental’ position. Modernity is characterized by a double time both historical and personal, a time of ‘incessant change and dramatic developments’ which is the time of events, and a time of ‘listless uneventfulness’ (AE, p. 2). These two times have been paradoxically interdependent within modernity. Much modern literature, says Sayeau, has actually privileged the second time over the first, and he thinks that we too should give it priority. Many modern novels concern themselves with ordinariness, everydayness, ‘banal continuity’ rather than ‘revolutionary shocks’. They resist ‘the eventual organization of time’ (AE, pp.  5–6). This ‘anti-­evental modernism’ – which Sayeau finds in Flaubert, Wells, Conrad, Joyce, Kafka and Woolf – calls into question the modern tendency ‘not only to expect that meaning arrives eventfully . . . but further to valorize this shape as the only possible indicator of change or development’ (AE, p. 34). So, too, Connor takes against what he calls ‘the glamorous and exciting politics of the absolute break, revelatory and revolutionary at once’.34 For Badiou, he writes, ‘only absolute change could be real change, and, without absolute change, everything must inevitably remain absolutely the same’ (BM, p. 145). This turns him into a ‘political mystic’, a foe of what Connor calls ‘worldedness’ (BM, p. 146). Like Jones, Randall, Sayeau and Connor coincide with the materialism of the dominant contemporary ethos (and the contemporary surrender of critique, if seldom

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explicitly). Connor seeks to cancel out the modern event, to render its logic null, whilst Sayeau is more concerned to dispute the modern valuation of the event. Yet it is clear both that events took place repeatedly throughout modernity and were one of its most crucial tokens, and that there is frequent and unignorable testimony both to this and the extraordinary power they exerted over minds and hearts. For two centuries, the subjects of events bore vivid witness to them. Take Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, best known as Chamfort. From a humble background but scintillatingly talented, deeply literary and learned but also an inveterately witty free spirit, Chamfort found life under the French Ancien Regime unendurable. The court was venal, worldly, corrupt, a hive merely of self-­interest, in which wealth and power alone counted. Hence, when the revolution arrived, for Chamfort, it was indeed an event ex nihilo – he compared it to ‘the instant when God created the world’35 – and it absorbed him from the start. He threw himself into it, joining revolutionary groups, listening, watching, orating, bubbling with revolutionary talk and ideas. He became a true and steadfast subject of the revolution. ‘We must start human society all over again’, he wrote (MP, p. 134). A more obvious example, a cardinal witness to the modern event, one who spends his life meditating on its immense significance, is Wordsworth. Of course, in one of its aspects, The Prelude is about the subject of an event necessarily becoming a sadder and wiser figure after political disappointment. But one can equally note how much, not just of the force and the exhilaration of the event of the French revolution, but also its meaning, still remains evident even for the Wordsworth of The Prelude of 1850, how much that Wordsworth is still charged with the awesomeness of the historical break (‘yet I feel . . ./The aspiration, nor shall ever cease/ To feel it’).36 The memory of the event remains, and demands a continuing meditation. Even in 1850, Wordsworth knows that he has experienced an inaugural truth of modernity which is also a truth of inauguration. Or take George Orwell in Barcelona in 1936. After the July revolution, with its compelling blend of libertarianism, anarchism and communism, its extraordinary women’s movement, Mujeres Libres, its will to abolish the material symbols of the past, its air of instantaneous friendship, automatic and unquestioned solidarity, Barcelona seems strangely unreal. One ‘breathed the air of equality’, wrote Orwell. There was everywhere ‘a belief in the revolution, a feeling that the bondage of centuries had been broken’.37 He himself shared the belief, and became the subject of what he ‘definitely’ knew to be ‘revolutionary events’. ‘I . . . at last believe in Socialism, which I never did before’, he wrote to Cyril Connolly (ELJ1, p. 269). He saw around him a profound and genuine democratic spirit in which democracy and equality went strictly hand in hand, involving ‘generous feelings and gestures’ between ordinary men and women, and evident generally in ‘small things’.38 Orwell tells us that the experience of this will remain unforgettable and ineffaceable; which is precisely the point to thinking about transmission. But we should not limit our examples to luminaries however sympathetic. Ordinary people also leave records of events, and of becoming subjects of events. Take the Russian women caught up in the revolutionary period.39 The event was a feature of many women’s lives in the period 1905– and even 1898–1917. For Clara Zetkin, the appearance of the ‘carpenter-­genius’ August Bebel’s Women and Socialism was ‘not just

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a book, but an event’ (WLM, p.  237). So was (the arrival of) European suffragism. Different kinds of crack were opening in the social fabric. For Mariya Pokrovskaya, the important event was the idea of a feminism that truly ‘equalizes all’ (WLM, p. 215). For Alexandra Kollontai it was literary and political, the encounter with The Communist Manifesto, and psychic, the emergence in her childhood of a new will ‘not to live like others’ or ‘to take the usual course’ (WLM, pp. 247–8). The heroic Mariya Spiridonova bears witness to the revolution itself as an event (‘We have entered a new phase of history. . . . it is our duty to cleanse the air’, WLM, p.  311). Indeed, the revolution appeared to have opened up an indefinite sequence of events that would develop from one phase of justice and good to other, higher ones, for ordinary people. Mere Bolshevism will in due course itself prove obsolete. But of course, everywhere within modernity, there is also crisis. There are difficulties for events and the truth-­procedures they have produced. Truth-­procedures decline and collapse, and the ensuing desolation of their subjects may be lifelong. When Orwell returns to Barcelona from the front, he finds that a ‘deep change’ has come over the town. The civil population has ‘lost much of their interest in the war’ (HC, p. 107). The militia uniforms and ‘blue overalls’ have almost disappeared. Summer suits and sleek cars are much in evidence. The revolutionary forms of speech are dropping ‘out of use’ (HC, p.  111). In effect, as Orwell notes, gloomily, the ‘Communists and right-­wing Socialists’ are ensuring the return of ‘an ordinary bourgeois State’ only ‘a year after the outbreak of war and revolution’, thereby ‘killing enthusiasm’ (ALT, pp. 274–75). They are stamping out ‘all revolutionary ideas’ and breaking up the bases of the new equality (HC, p. 336). So, too, when, in 1791, Wordsworth meditates on the stone he plucks from the debris of the Bastille, he is genuinely perplexed at how complicated revolutionary politics seem to have become. The ‘shocks’ of the revolution go on repeating themselves ‘day after day’ (P, 1805, IX, l. 182). Apparently ‘[t]he earthquake is not satisfied at once’ (P, 1805, X, 75). The event has and goes on having repercussions which may be inassimilable and untreatable. It is no accident that the story of the lovers Vaudracour and Julia figures so largely in Book IX of The Prelude. For their story is one of a new and modern kind of love, a love doomed to disaster for precisely that reason. Wordsworth evokes their love itself in the same terms as he evokes the French scene in 1790: ‘Earth lived in one great presence of the spring’ (P, 1805, IX, 586; cf. 1805, VI, 367–70). But finally Vaudracour is destined to endless ‘days of dejection’. He runs up against the same problem the revolution has faced, ‘a reservoir of guilt/And ignorance, filled up from age to age’ (P, 1805, X, 437–8). This problem is not to be solved overnight; modernity will not triumph soon, if it does so at all. So too Chamfort, who worked as secretary to the Jacobins for a while but was subsequently betrayed by them, arrested, imprisoned, released, then threatened with arrest again, asserts his persistence as a free spirit and continues quixotically to declare his revolutionary subjectivity. In a sense, he casts himself as sole faithful subject of a revolution going astray. But this finally means that all that is left to him is suicide (a suicide which he hideously botches). So events, truth-­procedures, subjects are likely to suffer an abrupt eclipse. They fade and fail, are brusquely snuffed out. We have already looked at some of the reasons why this might be the case. But whilst we can in fact discover a logic of the fragility of the

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event in Badiou, that logic is not really integral to his thought. This is because he is a Platonist. Events and truth-­procedures are sufficient to themselves. To preoccupy oneself with their demise, with the question of why they founder, is as idle as to ask why the shadows in the cave are merely shadows. For those of us not Platonists, however, this might ask us to offset Badiou’s concept of the event against another or others that are differently modulated, that think the event and its unlikelihood together. We can in fact discover one that emerges with the very beginnings of modernity itself, though one we have partly to construct for ourselves, since it is not exactly given as such. It is particularly suggestive, and deeply ambivalent.

Kant and speculative reason With the third antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant broaches the question of whether reason underwrites the concept of freedom or that of necessity. Freedom for Kant, we should note, is ‘a power of absolutely beginning a state’, ‘an absolute spontaneity of the cause’;40 in other words, the power of an event. Is the only causality ‘one in which everything in the world takes place only in accordance with the laws of nature’? Or is there also ‘another causality, that of freedom’, from which other ‘appearances of the world’ are also derived (CPR, p.  409)? The first causality, Kant says, is that of the ‘principle of pure empiricism’ (CPR, p. 424). It is what experience tells us, a thought of inexorable concatenation. As Hume ‘inferred the nullity of all pretensions of reason to advance beyond the empirical’, so pure empiricism deprives ideas like freedom ‘of all power’ (CPR, p. 607). It does so by assuming ‘that the understanding is always on its own proper ground’ (CPR, pp. 425–6), which is that of the natural order and not ideas. There is no power in nature that operates independently of the laws of nature. Freedom is therefore impossible. The second causality derives from the ‘speculative interest of pure reason’ (ibid.). Empiricism puts forward the impossible notion that there are no beginnings at all, only an infinite recession from one condition to another. For Kant, it is at this point that we must not ‘misinterpret our empirical concepts’ or over-­estimate their scope (CPR, p. 443). The speculative interest of pure reason does not deny ‘the empirical mode of explanation’, but presupposes ‘intelligible beginnings’ in addition to it. (This is also a thought derivable from if not made explicit in Hume). For empiricism does not deal in the noumenon. It does not have access to things in themselves. Its domain is the phenomenal one; it is concerned only with representations. Like space and time, empirical causality is just one of the ‘forms of our sensibility’ (ibid.), one of the conditions of the world of appearances. But these have no absolute sway. Therefore freedom and the event must be possible. The speculative interest of pure reason also insists that there will be objects of possible experience undreamt of in our empirical philosophy that may nonetheless become available to us with ‘the possible advance of experience’ (CPR, p. 440). Again, this opens up a dimension of freedom. The antinomies in general arise because we cannot but take appearances for more than themselves, more than representations, when there is no evidence to support our doing so. But this, the ‘transcendental ideality

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of appearances’ (CPR, p. 449), itself also works in favour of the concept of freedom. For it means that, since representations never capture a totality, the world is never ‘a whole existing in itself ’ (ibid.). It always anticipates a supplement. Since self-­evidently we cannot know what that supplement will be, there has to be freedom. Events must be possible. However, Kant thinks that we cannot know the supplement directly or be sure of it beforehand. Here we are groping in the dark. Thus antinomies in general and the third antinomy in particular seem destined to end in an aporia: the question of freedom, writes Kant, must surely provoke a dispute that finally ‘defies all attempts to come to a decision’ (CPR, p. 446). In the end, the antinomies leave it up to us to decide. But we cannot do so on the basis of a knowledge of things in themselves, since this is not available to us, so we must shift our ground. Kant says that we can’t just stay contentedly within the empirical gaol. If we do, we entirely neglect the domain of reason in which we do not know and might no longer need ‘to observe and investigate . . . but only to think and to invent’ (CPR, p. 426). Now, we have to attend to this sphere because we have political and moral interests, interests like justice and the good. Since justice and the good have yet to become realities, they require thought and invention. They require us to act as though a transcendental idea like freedom were possible, even though we can never be sure of its truth. From a Kantian perspective, even if we had no evidence of events of the kind that Chamfort, Wordsworth and Orwell supply, we would have in a sense to take events on trust. Unless we side against justice and the good, that is what reason tells us to do. For here knowledge is no longer a certain guide. We can never be sure that any empirical truths have unlimited and unconditional credibility, and this in itself must serve the cause of freedom. Such uncertainty produces an argument for ‘a regulative principle of reason’. This would assume ‘the greatest possible continuation and extension of experience, allowing no empirical limit to hold as absolute’ (CPR, p. 450). For there is ‘no experience of an absolute limit’ (CPR, p. 455). But this does not mean that the question of the event becomes straightforward. Quite the reverse: in various ways the antinomies, and above all the third antinomy, exemplify perhaps the most significant tension in the first Critique, articulating a reason set ‘in unavoidable conflict with itself ’ (CPR, p. 443). There is a Kant hostile to ‘presumptuous speculative pursuits’ (CPR, p. 591). This Kant stresses the importance of negation, of ‘rejecting [speculative or theoretical] error’ (CPR, p. 574). Such error only occurs in the speculative, not the empirical employment of reason. There is ‘a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason’ which ‘will not cease to play tricks with reason and continually entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again calling for correction’. We should beware of it. Hence the first Critique is partly involved in cleansing an Augean stables. An ‘imaginary science’ repeatedly fills ‘the gap where knowledge is wholly lacking’, thus keeping multitudes ‘in bondage to theories and systems’. It requires ‘the sobriety of a critique, at once strict and just’. The critique should take as its target any representation treated as an object beyond any possible experience (CPR, p.  361). The speculative interest in pure reason too often appears to give licence to theoretical woolliness or imaginative extravagance. It all too easily ventures into spheres ‘where no-­one can boast of understanding’, where ‘there is no end to the plausible arguments which it can

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propound’, and it wanders ‘as it does amidst mere ideas, about which no-­one knows anything’ (CPR, p. 428). This Kant can sound close to Pyrrhonism. Indeed, Guy Lardreau is right to wonder, if slightly whimsically, whether Kant really believed in Kantianism. Lardreau suggests that he feared that ‘Kantianism . . . was of no use’, and even that ‘a truly moral act’ – that is, an unconditioned act, an event, born of the speculative interest of pure reason alone – ‘could not be found’.41 There is certainly a Kant who asserts that there are no differences ‘admitting . . . transition from one [state] to another per saltum’ (CPR, p. 543), by leaps. There is a Leibnizian Kant. We cannot trust to the truth of freedom, of the event, only that it is ‘not incompatible with nature’ (CPR, p. 479). It remains the case, however, that, if appearances ‘are not viewed as things in themselves’, and they must not be, ‘but merely as representations . . . they must themselves have grounds which are not appearances’, and therefore ‘a causality must exist outside the series’ (CPR, p. 467). It is only by insisting on the total reality of appearances that we finally destroy freedom. In effect, then, though Kant would not say exactly this, the thinker of freedom and the event will be a precarious figure. But his or her conviction must not be ‘set aside on the very sorry and harmful ground of impracticability’ (CPR, p.  312): hence the extraordinary if quite rare and abrupt moments of sublime enthusiasm in the first Critique, textual ‘events’ in themselves. Here something quite different is at stake from the critical rigour on which Kant elsewhere so unflinchingly and awesomely insists. Take for example his recognition of the sheer daring of the Copernican moment, ostensibly so ‘contradictory of the senses’, to a phase in the history of empiricism (CPR, p.  25); or his hymn in praise of the ‘visionary perfection’ of Plato’s Republic (CPR, p.  311). Kant’s iron-­clad belief is that ‘the experience . . . of the good is itself made possible only by the ideas’ (CPR, p. 313). That any empirical expression of them has thus far always remained chronically incomplete by no means disqualifies that experience. The ‘rightfulness of the idea’ may very well never come into being (ibid.). That is no reason to cancel it out. We should always remain open to the event that appears to come from nowhere, and subscribe to the logic that makes it what it is. But equally, empirical causality always has the upper hand. Its logic is that of the given, self-­evidence, knowledge not theory. The empirical interest can always point to what is already there for our apprehension. The speculative interest cannot do so. It can only keep insisting that empirical causality is conditional and applies to the phenomenal world only; insisting, in effect, on historicity. Kant allows us to understand why events and their subjects are fragile, but also reverses Badiou’s formulation. Badiou the Platonist devotes a mere handful of pages in Logiques des mondes to what he calls mondes atones, lifeless worlds, worlds without events. He feels obliged to designate them, but not to know them from within. By contrast, nearly two-­thirds of the first Critique of Pure Reason remain within the empirical purview and pursue with Humean rigour a critique of the transcendental illusions whereby appearances are taken for things in themselves. It is only much later in the Critique that Kant begins to open the doors to the speculative interest, and then only with great care, and within precisely defined limits. In this respect, Badiou thinks the event from the perspective of the truths it makes possible. Kant thinks it from the perspective of experience of the world. Up to a point, this book tends in Kant’s rather than Badiou’s direction.

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Kantian restraint, the Kantian caution, are quite as evident in his historical essays, but in more vividly and immediately political terms. In ‘An Old Question Raised Again: Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?’,42 Kant argues the need, not for a natural, but for a moral history of man, a history that will be moral because it looks to future time, is ‘predictive’ (OH, p. 137). Because it is predictive, it will be visionary, not history as told by the men of the world who enjoin us to ‘take men as they are’ (OH, p. 138). These practical men, whose logic is resolutely empirical, do not recognize that the problem of advancement cannot be resolved through direct reference to experience. Because humans are free, their future cannot be foretold with any certainty, and that means that, at any particular juncture, the ‘moral disposition’ may abruptly ‘turn anew towards the better’ (OH, p. 141). A theory of free actions does not stem from the same intellectual dispositif as scientific explanation, not least because it is not reducible to a thought of natural law. Man ‘requires coherency according to natural laws, but with respect to his future free actions he must dispense with this guidance or direction’ (OH, p. 142); here one can leave nature behind. There must be, there is ‘an experience in the human race, an event’ which points to its capacity ‘to be the cause of its own advance towards the better’ (ibid.). We can point to events in history, says Kant, as I have done, though we cannot know that we will experience one. The French revolution, again, is Kant’s example. That the revolution triggers a ‘wishful participation’ in ‘the hearts of all spectators’ (OH, p.  144) shows the ‘moral predisposition’ at work in them. Yet Kant is not careless or even unequivocal, here. The event may misfire, the French revolution and its expression of ‘the pure concept of right’ breed ‘misery and atrocities’ (OH, pp.  144, 145). Indeed, revolution ‘is always unjust’ (OH, p.  146). It represents a major advance, not because it forms part of a development, but because, in its radical difference, ‘such a phenomenon in human history is not to be forgotten’ (OH, p.  147). It has revealed a new faculty, where no practical politics could have done so. On the one hand, then, ‘it can promise [any advance] only indefinitely and as a contingent event’ (ibid.). On the other, the prophesy remains whether the event miscarries or not. We should expect little; but through the history of events, what we learn is that true political creation is thinkable. The Kantian ambivalence is still more perceptible elsewhere.‘What is Enlightenment?’ asserts that we should enter into no contract that would ‘shut off the advent of all further enlightenment from the human race’, but is hardly optimistic about people’s capacity to free themselves from others’ ‘tutelage’.43 The work of emancipation is ‘extremely difficult’ (OH, p. 4).‘Perpetual Peace’ asserts the need for peaceful coexistence between nations on the basis of world citizenship, a republicanism according to which all are free and equal as citizens and dependent on the ‘common possession of the surface of the earth’ and a single common legislation.44 Nothing will otherwise finally save us from ‘the vast grave that swallows both the atrocities and their perpetrators’ (OH, p. 101). But Kant knows all too well that the scoffing ‘practical politician’ with his or her ‘empirical principles’ has credible taunts to hand. Republicanism is ‘difficult to establish and even harder to preserve’ (OH, p. 112). Historically, it has had an inevitable tendency to degenerate into sovereignty and despotism. Any peaceful alliance is ‘in constant peril of [the hostile, lawless passions] breaking out again’ (OH, p. 102). Yet if nature functions as a teleological principle, ‘predetermining providence’ (OH, p. 107),

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it cannot be all there is. Against it we must set the maxim of the ‘formal principles of pure reason’ which is concerned, not just with man, but ‘what can be made of him’ (OH, p.  121). Indeed, this maxim must have priority. Such an argument leads to what is perhaps Kant’s great assertion of the imperative of the event via the motto of Ferdinand I, ‘Fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’ (OH, p. 126). But about the realization of the imperative in the French revolution he is distinctly ambivalent, and indeed it is hard not to hear irony in his quotation. The world constantly prevails, and justice forever fails us. In the end, ‘perpetual peace’ may be little more than a ‘sweet dream’ of the philosophers, permissible in that it in no way threatens ‘the security of state’ (OH, p. 85). Kant was, after all, a Professor. Finally, in ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’,45 Kant argues that there is a universal (and progressive) movement to history. He is partly working with a familiar organicist model of progress of a kind in doubt here. But there is also a Kant in the essay uneasily and darkly aware that the organicist logic lacks conviction, may indeed presage disaster. This Kant is also inclined to think that the laws of a universal history are ‘as stable’ only as the ‘unstable weather’, hardly a commonplace or immediately reassuring model of progress (OH, p. 11). All he can hope for is to find ‘a clue to such a history’: another thinker will have properly to account for it (OH, p. 12). In confrontation with the ‘folly, malice and destructiveness’ of humanity, Kant struggles to discover ‘a natural purpose in the idiotic course of things human’ (ibid.). The struggle and attendant confusion are evident throughout the essay. Once again, he distinguishes human ‘potentialities’ from natural ones: nature’s are teleological, man’s those of reason. But here the use of reason seems to promise little more than it does in Hobbes. Kant sometimes asserts that it is men’s mutual antagonism, their ‘unsociable sociability’, their ‘unamiable characteristics’ that are the source of progress (OH, p. 15). Mutual antagonism is the law of the relations between states, but can result in peace and security. Wars are means of creating ‘new political bodies’ (OH, p. 19). So, where the future is concerned, we must hope that men will exhaust their brutish selves to the point where a ‘league of nations’ becomes possible (OH, p. 18). But Kant knows full well how precarious this logic is, how far it threatens to founder into a comprehensive and gloomy pessimism. As in his near-­contemporary Byron, one witnesses in Kant a modern torment over what the true meaning of modernity may be. Morality is the ideal, yet continues to escape us. From this spring ‘pretence and glittering misery’, the ‘cruellest hardships’, ‘vain and violent self-­expansion’ and the ‘devastation brought on by war’ (OH, pp.  20, 21), If we can trust to anything, it is not an organicist logic or a teleology of nature. It is rather a thought of an imperilled enlightenment repeatedly at the mercy of ‘folly and caprice’ (OH, p.  22), but also of the ‘fortunate accident’ inaugurating the unprecedented and unpredictable new formation (OH, pp. 19–20).

Woolf ’s ‘strata of being’ Thus, at the end of modernity, Badiou provides a formalization of the event and its consequences. By a piquant irony, it is Kant who, at the very start of modernity, offers a

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more qualified thought of the event in, to borrow Connor’s term, a ‘worlded’ context. But it is modern literature above all that has presented the event in the second way, which is principally ours, though this is not to cancel Badiou out, but to supply a context he neglects. Modern literature has finally been less concerned with celebrating, identifying or characterizing events, or pursuing their consequences, than with thinking them from the vantage-­point of the seeming continuities, the platitude they arrive to break up. It is in literature that we find the amplest, or at least the most subtle, thought of the event. Take Virginia Woolf, for example, specifically the Woolf of the thirties, and the novel The Years. Woolf had previously achieved a hard-­won equilibrium. In the thirties, however, it began to fail. She grew increasingly ‘worlded’, if hardly in Connor’s sense; rather, a more sombre one, in that the world increasingly pressed in upon her with terrible intensity. The air was ‘full of funerals’.46 Friends died with dreadful regularity. Husband Leonard would later describe the thirties as a decade when the two of them suffered ‘the erosion of life by death’.47 But as Woolf ’s letters of the period amply show, the process chiefly ‘gathered momentum as we went downhill to war’. She grew to hate her beloved London (‘crowded, arid, sordid, unhuman’).48 Though still living a quite hectically social life, she was increasingly inclined to revulsion from it. At the same time, the continental European disaster proceeded apace. The Nazi coup d’état in Austria, she thought, was ‘the beginning of the end’. The Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 was a monstrosity. With Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland in 1936, hers started to become a ‘world of horror’ (SS, p. 446). The guns, bombs and madness were getting near her private life. When war broke out it was, she said, ‘the worst of all my life’s experiences’.49 Meanwhile, she was reading Freud for the first time, and finding in him confirmation that ‘we ourselves are like primeval man, a gang of murderers’.50 ‘World aggression’, she now believed, had ‘psychological, deeply buried, inherited human sources’.51 In Julia Briggs’s phrase, she was ‘driven by mass murder, hatred and cruelty’ towards ‘those darker aspects of our inner life that we normally resist or dismiss’.52 Woolf ’s letters give the real-­life version of the central concern of The Years: the radical inadequacy of a historical phase of English social life inseparable from a catastrophic stage in European political history. She moves through a social world full of mutual incomprehension at best, snarlers, backbiters and people who ‘torture each other unnecessarily’ at worst (SS, p. 9). She endures the ‘hypocrisies, fluencies, palaver’, ‘the incessant rubbing and rasping’, the ‘perpetual fizz and fritter’ as best she can (SS, pp. 67, 86, LL, p. 298). Yet it is hard not to experience it all as ‘a panjandrum of misery’ (SS, p. 181), to be almost overwhelmed by ‘the inane pointlessness of all this existence’.53 There is a sense of a world gone wrong, irreducibly, fundamentally wrong, perhaps from the start and at every level, the psychic, personal, social, international and political, all together. But at the same time, in the last years of A Writer’s Diary, Woolf largely forsakes the world described in her letters for a world characterized by its événementialité, and in which there are always occasions of extraordinary lyrical uplift that she renders in exhilaratingly liquid prose. Though this side of her had of course long been in evidence, the last years of A Writer’s Diary show it at its most intense. Here we encounter moments of redemptive power when a transformation of ‘the pale disillusioned world’

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still seems possible (WD, 11 July 1937, p. 343). Needless to say, this has partly to do with Woolf ’s dipping almost daily into the ‘enchantment’ of the world’s major literature, and she was also succoured by writing itself, ‘that old rapture’ (LL, p. 29, WD, 17 August 1937, p. 345). But her greatest debt in this respect was to the physical life around her, Sussex landscapes, nature. A kingfisher skimming a river is like a vision. A flooded prospect reflects ‘an extraordinary tropical purple sky all across the marshes’, like ‘lakes in dreams’ (LL, p. 2). Woolf said that The Years was about ‘different strata of being’ (WD, 1 November 1934, p. 281). The novel itself tells us what she means by this: there is the stratum of événementialité, ‘flowing in wide sweeps overhead’.54 It runs through The Years like a live stream, in evocations of lapping water, sunlight, wind, changing colours, gleaming flowers, the rush, stir ‘and turmoil of variegated life’, all that can ‘toss’ her characters ‘aloft, out of [their] usual surroundings’ (TY, pp. 71, 110). Second, there is the stratum of the Kantian diurnal world, ‘tip-­tapping circumscribed along the pavement’ (TY, p. 110). This is the world of London, with its mixture of ‘parrot house’ and ‘bear garden’, its ‘insane traffic of “seeing” people’, its ‘meetings, politics, societies, all . . . of the utmost futility’ (LL, pp. 45, 61). It is a world full of idle talk, predictable responses, faintly inane bickering. People are hopelessly ensnared in repetitive patterns whether political, economic or class-­determined, or egotisms, or habits of thought and deed and speech. Characters may make impotent efforts to liberate themselves, but as a fly struggles ‘to haul itself up out of a saucer’ (TY, p. 95). They therefore hunt round wistfully and vaguely for the relevant political inspiration or reassurance. ‘When shall we live adventurously, wholly’, wonders Eleanor, ‘not like cripples in a cave?’ (TY, p. 282). ‘There must be another life’, she says to herself. ‘Not in dreams but here and now, in this room, with living people’ (TY, p. 406). This is the article of faith to which The Years clings, and it does so partly by insisting on the importance and currency of events. In between the first two strata is the stratum of events and their subjects. Psychic events like Lily Briscoe’s vision in To The Lighthouse had long been scattered through Woolf ’s work. So, in The Years, we get Kitty’s epiphany at the end of ‘1914’ or Peggy’s ‘vision’ in ‘Present Day’. But The Years also gives us a Woolf alive to the significance of actual political events as not before, and indeed in some degree aware of the analogy between them and other kinds of event. This is the meaning of certain names and terms that hang over the novel: Parnell, Kitty O’Shea, Antigone, Suffragism, atomic physics, Wagner. . . . Certainly, the point is also that the characters in the novel are actually very seldom at all caught up by events. The names of events rather indicate the possibility of becoming a subject. Perhaps the most arresting moment in The Years is a very simple one. It comes when, after Parnell’s death, Eugénie exclaims, of Kitty O’Shea, ‘Ah, but how she must have loved him!’ (TY, p. 116). For one realizes with a profound shock that none of the characters in the novel would really have the smallest notion of what that truly means. Yet Delia will be touched, indeed obscurely haunted, not just by a thought of Parnell, but by his image and words. Eleanor feels that his death is ‘like something fading from the sky’ (TY, p. 109; the melancholy in the sequence, perhaps partly Joyce-­derived, is seriously intended and important). Rose goes to prison as a suffragist. The event and the subject appear, but only in rigorously defined spaces and fleeting passages. Certainly,

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Woolf presents events from a ‘worlded’ point of view. But it is the world in all its radical unsatisfactoriness that crowds in upon her reader. This is finally the very genius of The Years, its ironic perfection. The novel gives us event and subject in the negative, by foregrounding Kant’s empirical world, Connor’s ‘worldedness’, Sayeau’s ‘everydayness’, by granting them priority, but merely insofar as they are what we habitually know. To Ethel Smyth, in 1938, Woolf wrote that there was in fact ‘a spring’ somewhere inside the English – ‘but so impeded’ (LL, p. 247). In a way, this sums up the late Woolf ’s view of modern history as a whole, European as well as English: the spring must be glimpsed, can only be (obscurely) glimpsed, through all the myriad impediments. Woolf tended a tiny little utopian flame, a frail attachment to the event, in the teeth of a scarily insufficient world. Her importance for any serious political thought is comparable to Badiou’s and Kant’s. The Years is a text that might serve almost as a summation or embodiment of the political theology developed here, and Badiou on the one hand and Kant on the other provide a sophisticated philosophical sense of what is at stake in this. The event is possible, one can bear witness to it; yet at the same time it commonly has something like the status of a deus absconditus that we know only as scattered and occasional traces, not as presence. That is how it appears in a political theology. Clearly, then, we need a supplementary concept, though supplementary would seem to be the wrong word, since the concept has to be of everything that is not the event, which is almost the whole, hardly a supplement. Indeed, the event arrives to supplement it. In Christian terms, this might be, for example, the lightless valley of the shadow of death. The next chapter will tell us what it might be for a political theology, and provide some differing versions of it.

4

Remainder

There was of course a fourth case, or case nought, as I pleased to call it, by far the commonest, in the proportion of nine hundred and ninety-­nine to one, or nine hundred and ninety-­eight to two, when I begged in vain, deep down into the dead of night, until I wearied, and ceased. . . . Beckett, . . . but the clouds . . .

Carpaccio and the atomized emporium The Accademia in Venice houses a compelling painting, a work of art darkly magical and rarely beautiful. In Carpaccio’s Miracolo della Reliquia della Croce ai Ponte di Rialto (Miracle of the Cross at the Rialto), Venice is the location for an unattended moment of historical grace. On the left of the painting, in a loggia at mid-­level, a miracle is taking place. In the Palazzo di San Silvestro, Francesco Guerini is healing a madman with a relic of the true cross. But the miracle is not the central focus of the painting. Indeed, save for the dominance in the loggia of white clothing not visible elsewhere, the event is scarcely prominent at all, overshadowed as it is by the crepuscular tones of the rest of the picture, and outweighed by its sheer proliferation of detail. Initially, we may find our attention drawn less by the miracle than alternately by the vista of the Grand Canal and the faces of the crowd outside the Palazzo di San Silvestro, the gentlemen and merchants, foreign visitors, gondoliers and their fares, women beating carpets, masons and coopers, life about its diurnal business. But it is the eyes that are most likely to fascinate us. Carpaccio’s figures stare out into unspecific distances, as if astounded or entranced. Yet it is not at all clear that the world of the painting is a rapt one, or, at least, that its subject is a shared religious rapture. Carpaccio was a wry, sophisticated, urbane if (one would guess) moody Renaissance Venetian (the ground-­breaking eighteenth-­century art critic Anton Maria Zanetti described him as ‘fanciful’).1 It seems rather unlikely that he took miracles very seriously. They would have seemed to belong to a mediaeval twilight now past. Art historians have repeatedly considered the Venetian religious istorie (narrative paintings) to be ‘pious pretexts for profane interests . . . examples of secularizing tendencies within the society at large’.2 Furthermore, Carpaccio’s painting is an instance of what was a mini-­genre. The Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista

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commissioned various painters to commemorate the supposed powers of the relic donated to it, and Gentile Bellini, Giovanni Mansueti, Lazzaro Bastiani and others all produced ‘miracle paintings’ like Carpaccio’s. All these paintings markedly share certain generic features: a particular, identifiable historical location (the Rialto, San Lorenzo, Campo San Lio); a collection of more or less dignified, patently worldly figures; figures turning their gaze on the spectator; figures in the foreground with their backs turned to us; and so on. But Carpaccio’s picture also differs from the others. In Mansueti’s, Bellini’s or Bastiani’s, the miracle in question is central to the painting, or at least takes up more of its space. Power, wealth, eminence, distinction all draw the eye. The worldly may seem awed: they do not shed their worldliness. The source of their awe is partly the very alliance of divine with human (Venetian) power that the paintings exist to confirm. For Carpaccio, this coincidence of powers is of no interest, or simply not the case. His figures are actually staring in many different directions, and seldom even looking towards the Palazzo. Very few appear to be aware of the miracle, and it is not clear that it has even obliquely touched them. The most arresting figures in the painting, the two gondoliers in the middle, might seem to be staring heavenwards in amazement. But their eyes are differently directed, and this along with other details effectively turns a kind of irony on any illusion of transcendence, any notion of a celestial vision by which Carpaccio’s people have together been transfixed. The gist of the painting is a kind of thought. In ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Auden famously evoked the old masters never wrong about suffering, notably the Pieter Breughel of The Fall of Icarus: . . . the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed quietly on.3

But Carpaccio has not engineered a contrast between an extraordinary occurrence and a mundane, robustly indifferent world. His figures are merely somewhere else, in an elsewhere of their own. Yet, in their own fashion, they are also part of a drama, a drama, however, not of revelation but of its negative, a faint effect or trace of the possibility of a revelation or transmutation formally acknowledged in the downbeat depiction of the miracle. In other words, most of the Miracolo is concerned, not with the event, but its remainder. But the remainder is not just the daily life of a historical State. Carpaccio’s Venice is an absorbed or mesmerized world. The painter both renders a historical present in its presentness, its substance, density, concretion and immediacy, its commitment to and so its seriousness about itself, and yet, at the same time, strips it of them. The present has become unheimlich without exactly being ghostly. The insubstantiality of this present, however, has less to do with solitude than with disaggregation, separation, non-­relation, monadic life; and we are to know this life as such, since the painting itself seems to solicit the very melancholic, abstracted, contemplative gaze that it typically depicts. In writing of one of Carpaccio’s preliminary drawings, Michel Serres captures the very foundation of his way of seeing:

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L’épure, ainsi nommée malgré les inevitable bavures, dit l’isolat ou l’insulat. . . . nous dirions l’autisme. . . . Silence de tous avant toute conversation.4 The sketch, named as such in spite of its inevitable blurs, speaks of isolation or insulation. . . . we would call it autistic. . . . The silence of all before any conversation.

Seen in this context, the Miracolo is even ironic. The crazed, gaping madman in the loggia, seemingly and in one respect obviously a face apart, also looks merely like an embodiment in extreme form of the objective condition of a vastly successful mercantile and commercial culture – recalling that the Rialto was then ‘one of the world’s most important emporiums’5 – whose opulence is perceptible everywhere in the painting. Carpaccio’s typical, inerasable melancholy has to do with the perception of an atomized historical world determined as such by the seeming absence of any possibility of historical redemption. His figures are staring, not in visionary ecstasy, but because there is nowhere properly to look. If they are gripped, ‘autistically’, it is by the uncanny power of a historical moment that, for all its lack of necessity, remains obstinately closed to the possibility of being anything else.

‘Mondes atones’ from Hobbes to Schopenhauer Carpaccio’s painting is a limpid if distinctively toned presentation of what I call the remainder. The remainder is the world as it appears without events or not seriously touched by their consequences. Though occasionally attributed to Badiou,6 the development of this crucial term is substantially mine, as he would readily admit. (His version, ‘le reste’, occurs perhaps only two or three times in his work; to me it is central). We may nonetheless orient ourselves initially from him. Badiou assumes that the truth-­ sequences to which events give rise appear only very fitfully. Otherwise, we are left with a world or worlds in which ‘a present is lacking’ (‘[u]n présent fait défaut’, in Mallarmé’s phrase), when the world is ‘captive to the idea that nothing begins or is going to begin’ (CO: 23; LS: 197).7 These are what Badiou calls ‘monde atone[s]’, lifeless worlds,8 worlds lacking a productive intensity or tension, instances of Woolf ’s ‘pale disillusioned world’, so obviously in need of leavening fervour.9 For Badiou, events produce ‘tense worlds’. In a ‘tense world’, decisions are everywhere: every reckoning is ‘a unique and unrelated crux requiring a decision for which no precedent can prepare one’ (LM, pp.  445–6). Circumstances are problematic, encounters difficult, requiring watchfulness and clarity. In a ‘monde atone’ there are no cruxes. There is no surge of resistance on the basis of which an active subject might truly fashion itself. Everything is organized, assured. No decisions are possible. Lifeless worlds are complex, ramified, nuanced but static. There is no moment of conflict at which their stasis might be radically interrogated. In a lifeless world, the subject vacillates at every instant, is ‘playful and desperate’ but armed against its own desperation (rather like Sloterdijk’s split subject). This is how we become ‘servants of the atonia [l’atonie] of the world’ (LM, p. 446). These lifeless worlds, then, constitute the remainder. A political theology requires a remainder. How else to specify that sense of almost invariable political deficit, of

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chronic shortfall, that haunts us, the persistent frustration of what in a theology proper would be a transcendent principle that scarcely manifests itself? All mondes atones refer to a single condition (of lack) and are identifiable with one another. However, they are also, in their own way, very various, as we’ll see. Carpaccio’s atomized emporium is merely one such. I began with it partly because it seemed to some extent appropriate to us at this juncture. This chapter seeks to tell a little of the history of the modern remainder through selected instances of it, with vast lacunae filled in at brutal speed. But it also aims to convey something of the tone of the remainder, because tone is crucial to it as it will not exactly be anywhere else in my book. The remainder is always charged with a certain tone, for which even the word melancholy finally seems inadequate. My great example, here, is Wagner, for reasons I’ll supply when I introduce him. One incidental spin-­off of this is that I find myself finally understanding the Wagner’s extraordinary power. For his part, having characterized his ‘mondes atones’, Badiou pays little attention to them. They are unworthy of thought other than polemically, mathematically, as pure multiples, or as a source of ‘bavardage’, chatter.10 He may bracket the remainder off or slight it. He may anathematize it. He is nonetheless clear-­eyed: the world will mostly prevail. The remainder is therefore a wasteland one cannot but traverse (‘we cannot function otherwise’).11 But Badiou refuses on principle to think the remainder integrally and from within. As a Platonist, he can simply proscribe the remainder, relegate it to the level of shadows in the cave and leave it there. This is intrinsic to his increasingly explicit doctrine of ‘affirmationism’, on which we remarked in the last chapter.12 ‘I would agree with Nietzsche without hesitation’, Badiou writes, ‘philosophy must be integrally affirmative’ (CI, p.  8). ‘Affirmationism’ insists on illumination but turns away from its fading and extinction, its patchiness, its oscillations and its obverse, shadow. This determines an affective repertoire. What follows does not share it. The thought of the remainder has been above all a modern thought, quite shatteringly so. There is a side to Badiou that knows this, knows that truths have undersides, that the modern State, for example, ‘almost always cheats political hope’ (EA: 50), that modern love involves ‘violent quarrels, real sufferings’, is ‘one of the most tormented [douloureuses] experiences of subjective life’, causes deaths, suicides and has its own regime of contradictions and horrible brutalities.13 For the most part, however, he shrugs that knowledge off. Yet modern art and above all modern literature articulate an indissoluble and profoundly self-­enfolded and inescapable relation between modern truth and melancholy. That is because they take the full weight of the radical intermittency of the event as a condition of modernity. They keep on telling us about the event, but also keep on telling us about the remainder. From Hölderlin and Keats to Beckett and beyond, this doubleness has been one of the great themes of modern literature, and the pertinent affects have been, certainly, affirmative, but also and inextricably frequently and deeply melancholic. If, however, the themes of the event and the remainder together are embedded in modern literature and art, that is only because they are deeply woven into the texture of modern experience. But the thought of the remainder is also a historically cumulative thought: the desert quietly grows. If Carpaccio views his theme with a certain detachment, it

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nonetheless appears within a theologically oriented world. For an early but properly secular grasp of the meaning of the remainder, if one still immediately influenced by the theological inheritance, we will have to turn elsewhere: Hobbes, for example. Let’s grasp Hobbes thus: the desirable commonwealth must be possible, or at least, thinkable. The Hobbesian bottom line is that, whilst indeed human beings may always be laying ‘the foundations of their houses on the sand’, nonetheless, ‘it could not thence be inferred, that so it ought to be’.14 It must be possible for them to covenant amongst themselves to establish their sovereign, to surrender their will and their natural right to govern themselves. Then sovereign power can regulate difference in coming up ‘with rules or measures that will be common to all’.15 This is necessary to the security of the commonwealth, in which ‘the safety of the people is the supreme law’ (OC, p. 143). The commonwealth alone ‘is the empire of reason, peace, security, wealth, splendour, society, good taste, the sciences and good-­will’ (OC, p.  116). Hobbes wrote that his mother bore twins, ‘me and together with me fear’.16 Without the commonwealth, everything perpetually threatens to dissolve into interminable terror. The commonwealth must be possible. But is it likely? Seemingly not. Life is motion alone, and hardly affords the tranquillity on which a commonwealth would thrive. The constitution of the body and desire, continually mutating as they are, make it almost impossible that all human beings should consent ‘in one and the same object’ (L, p. 48). In truth, the ζῷον πολιτικόν is not born fit for society or naturally equipped for it, for ‘association’, the harmony of human beings freely and easily involved in collaboration and exchange. What they primarily enjoy is rather gloria, their own glory – ‘there are very few, perhaps none, that in some cases are not blinded by self-­love’ (L, pp. 205–6). They therefore eye one another with profit, honour or advantage in mind. They do not naturally find any common cause with others, any more than Carpaccio’s figures in the Miracolo (as Hobbes like Carpaccio tells us, ‘many eyes see the same thing in divers lines’, L, p. 197). Human beings ‘associate’ only seldom: Close[. . .] observation of the causes why men seek each other’s company and enjoy associating with each other, will easily reach the conclusion that it does not happen because by nature it could not be otherwise, but by chance. L, p. 22

Covenanting with others requires an oath; but a form of words will not bind human beings together. The only cast-­iron guarantee is the pride that forbids all compromising one’s integrity. ‘But this latter is a generosity far too rarely found to be presumed on, especially in the pursuers of wealth, command, or sensual pleasure; which are the greatest part of mankind’ (L, p.  111). So, too, the ‘keeping of covenant’ spells justice, but the will to justice is a very precarious thing: ‘That which gives to human actions the relish of justice, is a certain nobleness or gallantness of courage, rarely found’ (L, pp.  116–17). Where or when has there existed for any length of time a kingdom free from upheaval, ‘sedition and civil war’, or human beings capable of erecting more than ‘a crazy building, such as hardly lasting out their own time, must assuredly fall on the heads of their posterity’ (L, p. 157)? In any case, we might add that, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, the Hobbesian commonwealth paradoxically

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threatens merely to re-­establish at another level the very state of imminent conflict it was supposed to debar, since its logical consequence is an ‘international anarchy’ in which natural competition is translated into a war of States.17 But Hobbes himself knew this, envisaging commonwealths as perpetually ‘upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed, and cannons planted against their neighbours round about’ (L, p. 162). Association, then, is not the rule. Equality (in Hobbes’s sense, not mine) is the rule – and the remainder. Nature grants equality as ‘a full and absolute liberty in every particular man’; in nature, ‘every man has right to every thing’ (L, p.  163). But that means that there is ‘no mine and thine distinct, but only that to be every man’s, that he can get: and for so long, as he can keep it’ (L, p. 101). Under these conditions, each man retains ‘the natural and necessary appetite of his own conservation’; otherwise humans suppose they will have no ‘security’ (L, pp.  103, 138). Without the commonwealth, there is only ‘the empire of the passions, war, fear, poverty, nastiness, solitude, barbarity, ignorance, savagery’ (OC, p. 116). The basis of this empire is the familiar Hobbesian law of wolfish nature, homo homini lupus. The consequences of living by natural law must be unruliness, disorder, internecine violence, ‘horrible calamities’ (L, p. 140). The bellum omnium contra omnes (the war of all against all) suspends all notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice. There is no common power, and therefore human beings hold no values in common save force and fraud. Human beings’ lives unfold ‘in continual fear, and danger of violent death’ (L, p. 100). But the fearsome law of nature is not a Hobbesian absolute. It is a remainder. This is logical enough, since the original model of the commonwealth is for Hobbes that of the kingdom of God as covenanted with Abraham. This, the Bible tells us, is a real kingdom, a kingdom upon earth. The word περιούσιος (periousios) conveys as much. For it betokens ‘a peculiar, that is an extraordinary, people’, as opposed to the world of the επιούσιος (epiousios), the quotidian world, the life of nations that are not God’s ‘in a special manner’ (L, pp. 297– 99). This last is the monde atone, the remainder. As the last sentence underlines, the Hobbesian remainder is theologically derived. It is not theologically oriented. But Hobbes is clearly an early modern mind. In the centuries after him, the remainder takes on greater scope and diversity. It threatens to devour things. Without relinquishing its historical, political and social purchase, it increasingly manifests itself as encompassing other forms of experience and other modes of life, the psychic and private, the romantic, sexual and domestic, which become interchangeable with the political. This has the effect both of pushing the concept of the remainder further away from its theological roots and embedding it more deeply in modernity. The experience of the remainder is above all a modern feeling, and this for one obvious reason: part of the modern conviction is that there should no longer be a remainder; there is no certain reason why it should persist. We come across a new and sheer surprise at the durability of the remainder, distress that the remainder remains. Rousseau provides an excellent example, though we must clear away some of the Rousseau who was, to so many of his heirs and successors, a great uplifting source of revolutionary, romantic and progressive modernity. The shock of the remainder partly accounts for Rousseau’s increasingly unfortunate progress. After all, he discovers a

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Europe where others will stone you for writing on behalf of freedom. Initially, however, he might seem a less than promising candidate for my case. For Rousseau, everything is good in nature. The Savoyard Vicar in Emile presents the ‘order of beings’ as a ‘picture of nature’ in which, universally, there is ‘only harmony and proportion’. However, it turns out that this picture does not include human beings at all: indeed, in stark contrast to it, ‘mankind presents me with only confusion, disorder’, says the Vicar, ‘evil on earth’.18 Everything ‘is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things. Everything degenerates in the hands of man’ (E, p. 246). Human beings are in thrall to ‘prejudices, authority, necessity, example’, and submissively conform to social institutions (ibid.). They therefore mix and deform things, produce muddle and monstrosity, and surrender to the perversities and vices. If they would respond ‘only to what nature demands’ of them, humans would ‘do nothing but good’ (E, p. 322). But humanity is, ‘from the first steps’, outside nature (E, p. 259). But surely ‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains’?19 Is Rousseau not concerned with a historically oppressed humanity, if one complicit in its oppression? First, there was a side to Rousseau that felt that the chains were unbreakable: it is always too easy for that which ‘favours the malignity of man’ to ‘establish itself ’ (DCS, p. 588). Law, for example, ‘will always favour the strong against the weak’. Justice and ‘subordination’ are mere ‘specious names’ for the ‘arms of iniquity’ and ‘will always serve as instruments of violence’ (E, p.  524). Second, the chains are not necessarily those of gross inequalities in wealth and power, though Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality might lead one to think so. They are partly the twining fetters of sheer complication, with which Rousseau was impatient. Thus, whilst Emile begins with a version of the familiar case regarding nature, in Book II, a more startling argument appears. Rousseau asserts that man is good by nature but bad by association, that social involvement of any kind is dangerous. But the social chains are the rule, natural freedom the rare exception. One happens upon the same structure repeatedly in Rousseau’s thought. Take for example The Social Contract, which evokes ‘a moral and collective body’ (DCS, p. 361). The civil state constituted by the contract changes man, giving his actions ‘the morality they had formerly lacked’ (DCS, p. 364). However, if the people will the good of the contract, they do not see that good itself, as they no longer exist in a state of nature, and so must be taught to know what it wills. Hence ‘the Legislator’, an extremely rare figure who maintains what is otherwise ‘an impractical, speculative chimaera’ – note ‘speculative’, and compare Kant – bearing ‘no relation to our nature’, and is therefore capable of changing that nature, of transforming each individual (DCS, pp. 381, 392). Through the Legislator, there is the possibility that a future humanity – what ought to be – will become the present one. Humans are at least creatures who can infinitely exceed their own boundaries, and no philosopher can say, ‘this is the limit of what man can attain and which he cannot surpass’ (E, p. 281). Rousseau struggles to think about actual and historical man from the point of view of an infinite excess. But this leads him to create what he fears others see as his ‘imaginary and fantastic beings’ in challenge to those who dare ‘to assign precise limits to Nature and say: here is as far as Man can go, and not beyond it’ (E, p. 549). In comparison with such beings, actual and historical humanity is the remainder.

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It is finally Julie that provides the great example of this Rousseauian tendency. With their moral elevation, their sensibility ratcheted up to the nth power, their transports that ‘elevate’ them ‘above [them]selves’ and their ‘hearts warmed by a celestial fire’, all the main characters qualify as ‘beautiful souls’.20 The novel is correspondingly founded on a belief in an exquisite language that exists apart from actuality and can appear only in private and intimate documents, confessions, diaries and, above all, letters. This, the language of the few, the initiates, is the only true language, and Rousseau and his characters pit it precisely against the remainder. The exemplary souls at length close ranks, creating Julie’s ‘adorable and powerful empire of beneficent beauty’ (J, p. 427). Her Elysium, a garden in which those who tend it take ‘great care’ to ‘efface human footprints’, is a figure for the novel as a whole (J, p. 461). In the second Preface, ‘N’, a man of letters, protests that a Julie there has never been. Rousseau’s characters ‘are people from the other world’. The editor and Rousseau-­figure ‘R’ merely replies, ‘Then I am sorry for this one’ (J, p. 738) – the world left over, or behind. The shock of the remainder ripples on insistently through modernity. But there is equally a tradition within modernity that recognizes the remainder from the start, and confronts it, in the conviction that it is both radically inescapable and unassimilable. The supreme example here is Schopenhauer. In Schopenhauer, the will is a remainder. Not only that: as such, it has an ontological status. Schopenhauer takes will for Being. It is clear that ‘this world’s non-­existence is just as possible as its existence’.21 What determines that the one prevail over the other? Will. Will ensures that there is not nothing: that is its essential drive. The will strives for existence, but that is all it does. It endlessly achieves its simple purpose. As its drive is quenched, so it at once begins afresh. Satisfied desires can only give birth to new occasions for desire. The conduct notably of human beings towards one another is determined by the general struggle, which stems from an irreducible ‘want or deficiency, from dissatisfaction’ (WW1, pp.  308–9). This means that ‘the phenomena in which the will objectifies itself ’ are involved in an ‘endless and implacable struggle’ with each other (WW1, p.  153). All creatures compete for the air of being, as if in an infinite jungle crammed with feuding forms. The will buries its teeth in its own flesh: life-­forms eliminate each other. Everyone ‘wants everything for himself, wants to possess, or at least control, everything, and would like to destroy whatever opposes him’ (WW1, p. 332). These are the whips ‘that keep the top spinning’ (WW2, p.  359). Luther was right to suggest, in his Commentary on Galatians, that the devil is ‘prince and lord’ of the world; we are all subject to him (WW2, p. 580). The Schopenhauerian remainder, ‘the in-­itself of life’, is therefore ‘a constant suffering’ (WW1, p. 267). But Luther’s is not the last word. Human beings can only live in a world of appearances determined by the principle of sufficient reason. The world of appearances is structured by forms, those of space, time and cause and effect. The principle of sufficient reason governs the laws of this empirical world: causality, succession, position. These laws provide a ‘ground’ for phenomena (WW1, p. 163). The ‘ground’ founds explanation, will always answer the question why. Here everything becomes its representation. But representation is of the phenomenon only. We can also abstract from our representations and represent them all over again, as Ideas. Then the object passes ‘out of all relation to something outside it’, so that ‘what is thus known is no

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longer the individual thing as such’. So, too, the abstracting subject passes ‘out of all relation to the will’, and becomes that rare thing, the pure ‘subject of knowledge’ (WW1, p. 179). The act of abstraction is, in particular, the basis of every work of art, and the state of ‘pure objectivity of perception’ in which the subject also becomes ‘the pure subject of knowing’ is a fundamental constituent of aesthetic enjoyment in particular (WW2, p. 371). The pure subject of knowing escapes the Lutherian nightmare. This is as close as we can come to freedom, save for the figure of the saint. The saint or ascetic can cure his or her heart of ‘the passion for enjoying and indeed for living’ (WW2, p. 635). Saintly knowledge brings about ‘the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still’ (WW1, p. 196). The subject no longer ‘affirms its own inner nature’, but experiences a horror of it which ‘proceeds from the immediate and intuitive knowledge of the metaphysical identity of all beings’ (WW1, p. 380, WW2, p. 601). The saint also comes to understand the ‘heavy guilt’ the human race incurs simply ‘through its existence itself ’ (WW2, p.  604). But such understanding is a ‘hairy garment that causes its owner constant hardship’ (WW2, p. 607), a hardship that can only be allayed by a denial of the will in oneself. If that becomes possible, one sees that the apparently ‘exceedingly desirable benefits’ of life are in fact ‘chimeras’, and acknowledges ‘the true end of life’ as ‘a euthanasia of the will’ (WW2, pp. 635, 637). Art and asceticism alone can liberate a subject from servitude to the will, can quiet it; they are also what mean that the will is always a remainder. However, relatively speaking, they are together extremely singular modes of thought. They are exceptional. Schopenhauer quotes Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘all that is excellent and eminent is as difficult as it is rare’ (WW1, p. 384). Artistic distinction is always added ‘from outside so to speak’, and is therefore strange, and even unnatural (WW2, pp.  377–8). So, too, goodness, beauty, nobility, saintly asceticism and wisdom appear but scantly. Otherwise, however, the world is only will. On rare occasions, artistic and ascetic, the will may turn against itself (WW1, p. 146). Yet, in the end, as is clear enough, art and asceticism are ways of not living. Schopenhauer finally recommends disinterest, the wisdom of letting go of the world. He agrees wholeheartedly with Artabatus as evoked by Herodotus: there has never been a man who did not wish he did not have to live through the following day.22 The one freedom possible is established in a kind of abnegation that is also a detachment from the otherwise overbearing truth of the remainder.

Wagner without redemption Incipient in the early modern period, the idea that there is, has to be a remainder is explicit if not specified as such in the several phases of modernity from the late eighteenth century onwards. With modernity, this becomes the case above all in art. There is, self-­evidently, a romantic remainder (Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Hölderlin, Kleist, Chateaubriand, Lamartine). There is, self-­evidently, a symbolist and decadent one (Baudelaire, Rimbaud’s later poems, Mallarmé, Laforgue). There is a remainder for the greatest modern women writers (Dickinson, Woolf, Nin, Rhys, Bowen). There are great new modern modes of expressing or articulating the remainder (modern

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American jazz; hardly surprising that Afro-Americans should be so gorgeously fluent about the remainder). There are great late exponents of the remainder in art, the major recent and contemporary writers, notably Beckett, Coetzee, Morrison, Sebald and Banville. But this is the point at which I want to focus on Wagner. Badiou has rightly urged us to set aside philosophical misgivings about Wagner like Adorno’s and LacoueLabarthe’s.23 We can also rapidly dismiss the vulgar anti-Wagnerian prejudices, which have never been rooted in any serious or subtle thought about the operas (though there were obviously rebarbative and nasty aspects to Wagner the man).24 What then emerge as the salient features of Wagner’s work? What kind of structure of thought do they represent? Wagner’s operas provide us with the very modern paradigm of the remainder if, one might suggest, in indirect and even allegorical rather than immediately political terms. Wagner seldom stops brooding on the remainder. Indeed, the Wagnerian project increasingly became an awesome full-­scale statement of it, a statement sans pareil. It was even a prophetic one. It continues to gather resonance today. We might think of the operas as dramatizing a hugely protracted tension (or agony) of and within the remainder. Though I get some of my initial orientation, here, from Badiou on Wagner,25 I will also radically and crucially break with him, and substantially rewrite his terms.26 Though Badiou strangely ignores them, there are both events and subjects in Wagner. There is also a music of the event. In one of the great climaxes of Der Ring, for example, the end of the first act of Die Walküre, Siegmund and Sieglinde declare their passion for one another. There are two aspects of this declaration worth emphasis. The first is the impression of sheer amazement, shock, as captured in Sieglinde’s stunned interrogation of a setting in which nothing can be taken for granted any longer: ‘Ha, wer ging? Wer kam herein?’ (‘Ha! Who went out? Who came in?’).27 This is a subtler version of the more prosaic question she initially asked when, in the very first scene, she initially saw Siegmund: ‘Wer kam in’s Haus und liegt dort am Herd?’ (‘Who has come into my house and is lying there on my hearth?’, DW, p.  144), the echo only enhancing the impression of a radical estrangement from the world, and the need to reconfigure it. The imperative at stake, here, is of the kind sometimes associated with visions or visitations. But of course, for all its plethora of divinities and semi-­divinities, its magical aspects and exchanges between separate spheres (divine/human, etc.), in the world of Der Ring, there is no possibility of any visitation properly so-­called, just as there is no possibility of any theology. (Indeed, the mythological dimension of Der Ring to some extent exists to debar all theology). Here a visitation precisely involves happenstance, a chance encounter with a transformative power, a stray, unexpected, mortal other. By virtue of their encounter, Siegmund and Sieglinde are captured by what Badiou calls ‘[l]e trajet d’une vérité’, the trajectory of a truth, a truth of love. In political terms, the event induces a subject apart from the law (the ‘lois étatiques de la situation’).28 This is clearly the point to Wagner’s blatant and morally indifferent stress on the lovers’ utterly heedless defiance of the ban on incest. A peremptory self-­separation from ‘State law’ is repeatedly a cardinal feature of Wagnerian love, as in Tristan und Isolde. Wagner’s great heroes and heroines repeatedly declare State law null and void. It is in response to such defiance that, in the name of decency and respectability, Fricka will upbraid

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Wotan for aiding and abetting the lovers. By way of reply, Wotan accuses her of conventionality, where his concern is with ‘was von selbst sich fügt’, the spontaneous or unprecedented occurrence, the event and its consequences: Stets Gewohntes Nur magst du verstehn: Doch was noch nie sich traf, Danach trachtet mein Sinn. You always only understand the customary: But what has never happened before, That is what occupies my mind. DW, p. 158

Otherwise, the intensity with which Siegmund and Sieglinde brusquely set the law at naught is precisely an indication of this truth’s character. The politics of love is a participation in ‘the birth of the world’. ‘Weilt ich bisher in trügerischen Räumen’, sings Senta in Der Fliegende Hollander, ‘brach des Erwachens Tag heute an?’ (‘Was I idling my time away in some delusive world,/Has the dawn of my awakening broken into it today?’).29 Thus the couple find themselves ‘interior to [love as a] truth-­procedure’ and ‘decentred’ by it (CLW, pp.  60–1). It quickly comes to have extensive and complicated ramifications for them, as in Badiou’s terms it will necessarily do.30 But there is another aspect to Die Walküre Act 1 worth stressing, one that allows us further to see just how far the event of love is interchangeable with the political event. As a truth-­procedure, love imposes a norm on my primordial narcissism, my supposedly irreducible singularity. This lends it a finality that drives it counter to the seemingly hard, durable, self-­sealed, impermeable Spinozan conatus essendi, as defined above all in Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavours [conatur] to persevere in its being’.31 But Siegmund and Sieglinde allow us to imagine the event of love in relation to a quite different description involving the concept of inexistence. In Badiou’s terms, objects appear in worlds to a greater or lesser degree, exist in worlds with greater or lesser degrees of intensity or vividness. All worlds contain an element of ‘minimal existential value’ (LM, p. 339), an element that appears only in the least degree. Mathematics demonstrates this: the appearance of any multiple entails the non-­appearance of one of its elements, like the square root of a negative real number.32 This is what Badiou means by an inexistent. Inexistents belong to worlds only in not belonging. The least degree is solely the mark of an absence. In the words of the Internationale, ‘the lovers’ declaration is “We are nothing, let us be everything” ’ (EA, p.  95). As we have just seen with Senta, Siegmund and Sieglinde make patent their previous inexistence. This is above all the case with Siegmund’s infinitely bleak evocation of his Unheiligkeit, his (migrant-­like) pariah status, his constant misfortune, the irony whereby his own drive to happiness incurs only misery and his social presence becomes a ceaseless invitation to violence, his certainty that his judgments are always the reverse of the established ones:

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ob ich um Freund, um Frauen warb, immer doch war ich geächtet: Unheil lag auf mir. Was rechtes je ich rieth, Andern dünktes es arg, was schlimm immer mir schien, andere gaben ihm Gunst. In Fehde fiel ich, Wo ich mich fand . . . Gehrt’ ich nach Wonne, Weckt’ ich nur Weh. . . . whether I sought friends or wooed women, I was always ostracized: Calamity stalked me. What I thought right seemed evil to others. What seemed wicked only to me won others’ favour. Wherever I found myself, I fell into feuds. . . . If I longed for delight, I awoke only misery. . . . DW, p. 148

Sieglinde adds her own, briefer account of the death of the spirit in a disastrous personal history and a loveless marriage. ‘We are nothing’, indeed: Wagner appears to have deliberately cast the lovers’ circumstances as haunted by a deathliness or an absence from which only the extraordinary surprise of an event can redeem them. The Spring that seemed far-­off in a wintry world, (‘der Lenz,/Nach dem [ich verlangte]/in frostigen Winter’s Frist’, DW, p. 158), abruptly arrives. As Badiou says, pace Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe, Wagner’s thought is not Hegelian. But at moments like the one I have just described, he nonetheless seems fleetingly to have in mind something like his own version of Hegel’s dialectical Umschlag, a sudden reversal from pole to pole. The Wagnerian Umschlag is clearly a recurrent feature of the operas. Wagner’s however is rare and localized, the fragment to which dialectic is reduced. In Tristan und Isolde, this is most obviously the case with an event that does not happen onstage, and about which we only know because Isolde recounts it, but which is the source of all we subsequently witness: immobilized by Tristan’s gaze, she lets the sword fall, rather than avenge Morold by killing his killer. Yet there is also an aspect of Tristan and Isolde’s passion that pushes them closer to Siegmund and Sieglinde. However far Tristan’s Elend, his initial ‘wretchedness’, is the effect of his wounds, when Isolde exclaims that ‘Seines Elendes/jammerte mich’,33 that it makes her pity him, the Elend at stake is more than material, and to a far greater extent than Tristan himself properly knows. It is only graspable by Isolde in an obscure intuition. It is the condition of the ‘traur’ge Mann’, the melancholic concealed beneath ‘Sein Lob’, the adulation the hero attracts (‘Hei! unser Held Tristan’, TI, p. 315).

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Elend is even a logical consequence of Tristan’s status, of what we might call his State function. Tristan at the start of the opera has been stifled by ‘Zucht/und Fug’, ‘propriety and custom’; hence his stillness and inconspicuousness. His Elend is a token of inexistence, but an inexistence abruptly reversed with the magic draft. As the potion takes effect, Wagner plunges Tristan into Verirrung, the bewilderment in which the event also leaves Sieglinde. Like Sieglinde, he undergoes a loss of all familiar relations, as is evident in his response to the approach of the King (‘Welche König?’, he asks, ‘What king?’, TI, p. 324). With deft irony, the composer also neatly counterposes two manifestations of joy now brusquely pointing in different directions, that of the waving crowds on the Cornish shore, and that of the lovers. The Umschlag, of course, is subsequently consummated in Act  2 Scene 2, as is emphasized in the lovers’ initial strings of questions: their new situation is ‘Ungeahnte,/nie gekannte’ (TI, p.  327), unexpected, they know nothing of it. They must start to construct it. They do this above all via metaphor, the rejection of daylight and the position of the Tagesknecht (‘thrall of day’), and the choice of Nachtsichtigkeit, night vision. The progress in and through obscurity denoted here is part of a truth-­procedure and is welterlösung, ‘world-­ redeeming’. Accordingly, a previously inexistent music sounds out, a music of the event that is ‘Welten entronnen’, ‘broken free of the world’ (TI, p. 323). What stands over against the event, and the thrilling music it attracts, in Wagner’s world? What is its structural opposite? It might seem, initially, that the answer is a second music, the music of a State formation. To Tristan’s immersion ‘im weiten Reich/ der Weltennacht’ (‘the wide kingdom of the world’s night’, TI, p. 339) and Urvergessen, ‘original forgetting’, the void that precedes life and to which it returns, he can counterpose one value alone: the event that has overtaken him and made him a subject, his ‘heiss-­inbrünstig Liebe’ (ibid.), his ardent love, and the Sehnsucht, the unending longing it generates. He does so in what has suddenly become utter indifference to the values of the State (Mark’s Cornwall). But if Tristan and Isolde have their well-­known music, the State also has its. State positivity is trumpeted throughout the opera by the boisterously conventional voices of sailors, soldiers, knights, squires, huntsmen and courtiers, but most literally in the brassily masculine Hörnerschall, to which Isolde is so indifferent that she cannot actually hear it. If this is the case with Cornwall, mutatis mutandis, it is also true of the Wartburg (Tannhäuser), Brabant (Lohengrin), Heinrich’s Germany (Lohengrin) and in some degree Valhalla (Der Ring). State music has various aspects: formal, ceremonial, celebratory, firm, assertive, resolved, declarative, even jaunty. Only in two of the major operas do we not hear it; or rather, in Der Fliegende Hollander, though the struggle between the two musics, in the final battle between the two crews’ voices, is literal and uniquely ferocious and intense, we hear the more affirmative one as a music of jovial bourgeois normality, whilst in Parsifal we hear a cruelly damaged version of it. But equally, only in one major opera does it unambiguously triumph, Die Meistersinger. Wagner clearly takes a certain pleasure in the music of the State formation. But it is remote (and protected from) the fiery core of the operas, and a music that is open-­ended, provisional, forever shifting its ground. The Wagnerian problematic is truly at stake in this music. Der Ring is key, here. Siegmund’s Elend is finally not Tristan’s, above all, in the structural position it occupies in Der Ring, or the clarity and exactness of that position

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within what, from the beginning of Das Rheingold, has been an unfolding logic. In Tristan und Isolde, the general sense of a convulsion preceding the lovers’ narrative, the mayhem of the Cornish–Irish war, looms large over events. But whatever the possible consequences had Wagner chosen to build out of the Tristan and Isolde story as he did out of the Siegfried narrative, in the opera we have, any logic leading from the war to the tale of the lovers is unelaborated. In Die Walküre, by contrast, that things should have gone badly for Siegmund and Sieglinde as individuals and that they should go badly for them together seems of a piece with a world going badly from the start. The ‘start’ in question most obviously consists in Alberich’s theft of the gold, though the initial error actually resides, not in the Rheinmaidens’ rejection of Alberich (to which after all they are entitled), but the (to him, malicious) levity with which they treat him, since from it springs his repudiation of love, which in turn leads to plundering, devastation, a violent conflict of interests and the emergence of a catastrophic logic. It is nonetheless clear that, from the moment in the first scene when the music dramatically shifts from fluent serenity to sinister foreboding – with Alberich’s ‘Erzwäng’ ich nicht Liebe,/doch listig erzwäng’ ich mir Lust?’ (‘If I cannot compel love, can I get my pleasure by cunning?’)34 – the world of Der Ring is going awry. At once, with the beginning of Scene 2, events are casting a long ironic shadow over Wotan’s bourgeois pride in his new property, Valhalla, putatively an ‘ewige [eternal] Werk’ (DR, p. 106). The shadow lengthens even as Wotan demonstrates his casual indifference to the giants. The Rhinemaidens have set the tone. The problem seems to be one we can recognize, Leichtsinnigkeit, carelessness. In a world far more precarious and potentially threatened than anyone suspects, no one appears to be taking matters seriously enough, especially given the course on which Alberich is embarked. Freia is taken from the gods, Wotan begins to compound his error. As the gods abruptly begin to age, Alberich delivers his curse and Fafner and Fasolt violently fall out. The world of Der Ring is now lurching dangerously, like a pilotless vessel. Fricka’s rebukes to Wotan’s vainglory and his facile male erotic attachment to ‘Wandel und Wechsel’ (‘wandering and change’, DR, p. 107) – ‘das Spiel drum kann ich nicht sparen’ (‘I can’t give up on the game’, ibid.) – will eventuate in Erda’s superb, dark, brass-­heralded address to him, her injunction to an awe and dread without which the ring spells vast destruction, and her warning of ‘Ein düstrer Tag’ (DR, p. 137), a ‘dark day’ for the Gods. Imposing though this may be, however, it matters little, since Wagner has already made it clear that Wotan and the gods can have no hope of transcending the web of relations in which they find themselves caught; which means that, even for Wotan, fear is always close at hand. Siegmund and Sieglinde will duly find themselves haplessly caught in the same web. By the end of Das Rheingold, the voices of the Rhinemaidens will sound faded, distant, almost lost. The obvious objection, here, is that fate makes itself felt in Der Ring. But exactly what does this fate consist in? It is certainly not a classical concept: there is no sense of a fate that steamrollers over contingency. That the Norns supposedly weave the strands of fate is of practically no significance, other than as a superstitious alibi which very occasionally flickers in the background. What matters is the drama, at the beginning of Götterdammerung, of seeing the rope finally break, which is itself an absolute confirmation of the illusory character of fate. The world in which a classical conception

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of fate was sustainable, which The Ring has always known to be in fact ephemeral, is finally dying; fate is fated, and this knowledge was more or less written into the cycle from the start. Fate is fated by history, by the dawning of unending historicity: this is what is so crucial in the inversion of the Rhine motif at the beginning of Götterdammerung. But the stark truth is that there is no necessary and incontrovertible reason for uplift in the logic of historicity. This knowledge – of the only certainty, ungroundedness, but an ungroundedness that does not of itself automatically spell promise – is one of Wagner’s most extraordinary, prophetic inspirations. The operas invariably proceed from it. It is a modern knowledge, and Der Ring is powerfully and persuasively gripped by a kind of modern portent or augury. That is why we in our turn are so gripped by it. George Bernard Shaw asserted that, ‘under the reign of Alberich’, Nibelheim ‘is a poetic vision of unregulated industrial capitalism as it was made known in Germany in the middle of the nineteenth century by Engels’s Condition of the Labouring Classes in England’.35 One need only recall the sound of Nibelheim, the clinking, hammering and screeches of pain, to feel that Shaw is right. Der Ring begins in a frenzy of uprooting, a demonic exploitation of resources, accumulation run wild, a maniacal struggle for power that is a consequence of deregulation and an ugly and sinister violation of the natural order. Of course, Wagner subsequently pursues the catastrophic logic that emerges in relation to a set of mythological gods and mediaeval heroes and heroines, and this might seem problematic. But we can read it Schopenhauerianly: it was the rare genius of the artist, Schopenhauer thought, to be able to lift the objects of thought out of their customary relations, place them in new ones and thus contemplate them beyond their embedded absorption in the world of will;36 thus in Der Ring. This is what Wagner does with modernity and the new phase of capitalism and the old mythology, together. Equally, however, whilst not simply an allegory of it, the mythological structure of Der Ring generalizes and abstracts from the historical moment to which Shaw alludes. But to say that it generalizes the historical moment is not to say that it grants the moment an eternal or inescapable hold. Wagner rather generalizes the principle of historicity itself. This, Der Ring tells us, is a unique moment, a unique story. But alas, by a seeming paradox, uniqueness may be infinitely repeatable, for nothing like fate promises any longer to root or endstop the endless, aimless, disoriginated production of historical singularities (which is precisely what Capital feeds off). In this respect, Der Ring is about événementialité. But it is about événementialité and historicity thought in the negative. If in événementialité lies the possibility of the event, événementialité itself is also the condition of Benjamin’s modern ‘catastrophe in permanence’.37 We might understand that idea within the frame of an ecological critique of capital (certainly relevant to Der Ring): the rude and heedless violation of the cornucopia of the earth leaves disaster ever more imminent. That is perhaps what Der Ring most starkly says to us today. But its sheer grandiosity, its immense ambition, will not allow us to rest there. The special combination of mythological and modern features allows Wagner to express an intuition that is not just, again, the Nietzschean premonition that, with modern capitalism, that uncanniest of guests, nihilism, arrives at the door. Wagner’s is a fear beyond the consciousness of the onset of modernity, a fear that catastrophe

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in permanence unveils nihilism as what in any case was always lurking within the mythical worlds that preceded modernity, and now stands exposed as the absolute rule of which modernity has finally become the manifest expression. If any supposedly significant effects of the Norns’ weaving seem purely notional, this is certainly not the case with their powers of prophecy, above all, in the case of the third Norn’s correct forecast of the final climax, the end of the Gods. In fact, in Der Ring, a prophetic vision of the world prevails as the destinal vision collapses. But prophetic vision does not involve the bleak, fatalistic announcement ‘This will happen . . . ’ . The prophet rather wagers against power, the dominant formation, the historical logic whose trajectory he or she can only perceive as catastrophic, and which is precisely that of the remainder. His or her declaration is, ‘This will happen, unless . . .’ As Walter Brueggemann has emphasized, the prophetic vision is irreducibly historical and social.38 One of the great achievements of modernity has been how far, above all in its art, it has produced a new kind of predominantly secular, prophetic tradition running from Blake to Hölderlin to Rimbaud to Woolf to Soutine to Plath . . . one could continue, expand and vary the list at great length. Wagner is a master-­eminence within this tradition. The event in Wagner is the introduction of an ‘unless’ into a catastrophic logic that otherwise implacably exposes us to the remainder. Clearly one condition of that exposure is immense suffering. Of all the weapons in the anti-Wagnerian armoury, Adorno’s argument that Wagner sublimates, recuperates or instrumentalizes suffering, that suffering is always a means to an end or a stage in a progress, seems peculiarly and oddly feeble, not to say cloth-­eared. Suffering firmly lodged in a context of redemption, in Tristan und Isolde, Der Ring? What antiWagnerians slight as Wagnerian longueurs are often protracted if not unremitting struggles with more or less obscure but nonetheless harrowing forms of pain from which there is no immediate or obvious issue. If indeed redemption is not impossible, Wagner’s are not worlds in which, sooner or later, pain must duly dissolve or yield to transcendence, and is therefore secondary. Wagner’s music is infused with an astonishing intimacy with, not only pain, but its nuances and vacillations, the struggles with which it is always tied up. The sheer subtlety of Wagner’s feeling for suffering, its complexities and contradictions, supremely in the case of women (Brünnhilde, Kundry, Elsa), definitively frees the operas from all charge of sentimentalizing, spectacularizing or crassly theatricalizing it. But Wagner also offers us a new and modern understanding of suffering that he created for and in modern music. It is closely related to his creation of a new musical subjectivity, nocturnal, inextricable from sensual intensity. Suffering in Wagner is an irreducible ‘tear [déchirement]’ in the world and experience (Badiou, CLW, p.  81). Wagner invented the music of and for this ‘tear’ (CLW, p.  115), the tear which événementialité of itself effects in the social subject. ‘Torn’ as he is between Christianity and Venusberg (between Venusberg and the career of a Thuringian court poet, career and arrogant waywardness, and so on), Tannhäuser is the obvious example, but only the most obvious (CLW, pp. 116–17). As is patent in Tannhäuser, Wagner immerses us in a suffering that is drastically of the present and cannot be otherwise, because inseparable from the subjective cleavage everywhere operating within the music. That Wotan should become ‘der Wanderer’ in Siegfried is precisely symptomatic of the

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restlessness of the torn Wagnerian subject. Conflicted, belonging to more than one context, Wagner’s people cannot stay still, are compelled to shift their ground, the Dutchman, of course, being the supreme instance. The suffering Wagnerian subject is incurable. Another compelling example of this would be Tristan und Isolde Act One prior to the drinking of the potion, where two riven subjectivities – Tristan’s, with his brief collapses from distance into passion, Isolde’s, with her savage self-­wrenchings from passion to distance – soar and plunge with the movement of both music and Seeschiff. Here and repeatedly, the Wagnerian subject, the subject of the remainder, endures a real internal heterogeneity, which can apparently never be surmounted. The Wagnerian self-­division is pervasive but non-­dialectical. The typical Wagnerian subject is not an actualizable structure nor a peripeteia but split, fissured, that is its form. It is not available to dialectical resolution; its development is a work of change without finality. Contra Adorno, again, there is no end-­driven, Hegelian structure to Wagner’s operas. Resolutions in Wagner are non-­dialectical, and Adorno’s argument that Wagner finally produces an inauthentic version of musical difference because it is one ineluctably heading towards a finale is obviously not convincing. Indeed, one might push further than this and wonder about the character of the ‘finales’ themselves. What is a Wagnerian ‘ending’? If there is a finale to Lohengrin, for example, whose is it? Elsa’s, Lohengrin’s, Brabant’s, Germany’s, Montsalvat’s, even Ortrud’s? What exactly is at stake, at the end of the opera? The radical openness of this question has major implications – as it does at the end of Der Fliegende Hollander, where one might say that the point precisely is that nothing has truly been resolved. Even with Parsifal, one can at least ask whether, in contrast to the great, protracted evocations of the stricken Gralshalle, the ending is not strangely brusque and peremptory as it is in the Hollander, a means of wrapping the issues up insofar as is possible, rather than standing in intricate dialectical relation to them. Parsifal can certainly be staged this way, and the closing music played accordingly, as in some degree sober and even sombre in mood. For, unsurprisingly, the sweet and beautifully toned promise of redemption at the beginning of Act Three, in natural surroundings, has necessarily become considerably more complicated once brought to the Castle and the human world at large. Certainly, as the continuation of the mad agony of Amfortas right up to the closing sequence and the silent (if adoring) death of a Kundry (as much neutralized as saved, in Act Three) suggest, the thought of redemption is haunted throughout by a sense of a world actually lapsed beyond retrieval, and therefore by suffering, self-­interrogation, consciousness of error from which there may finally be no true release. This complex blend, division, suffering and the absence of any resolution together, is perfectly exemplified in one of the great Wagnerian passages, Tristan’s aria ‘Wo ich erwacht . . . ’. Here, if anywhere, we find a paradoxical continuity of Wagnerian opera which Badiou insists on, and of the remainder itself. Tristan sums up the thought behind the aria in its first two lines: ‘Wo ich erwacht,/weilt’ ich nicht’ (‘Where I awoke, there I was not’, TI, p. 339). The location of the subject is not its location; it is always dragging behind or already moving on elsewhere. Longing and love drive Tristan from the terror of death and towards the light, to which he and Isolde had earlier responded only with ‘Hass und Klage’ (‘hatred and grievance’, TI, p. 328). For light was apparently only a ‘falschem Prangen’ (‘false glitter’, TI, p. 331), intrinsic to a world well lost and its

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deceitful lures (honour, renown, glory, reception into the fold, State triumph). The ‘sight of the world’ (‘Blick der Welt’) had to be ‘dimmed’ (‘erblödet’) for their passion to luxuriate (TI, p. 325). Yet now love and longing impel Tristan towards an impossible composition with that very world. Even in turning to the light, however, he evokes death in paradoxical terms, is drawn back to the beginning of the aria as it progresses and he progresses with it. Hence his expression of ‘Todesgewonne-Grauen’, ‘death’sdelight-­terror’ (TI, p. 339) – German making possible a peculiar intimacy in the fusion of contradictions. Tristan goes on to evoke the bursting open of death’s door, which means emergence from night. But the world of light apparently beckoning is at once convicted of madness, error, deceit, folly, which in turn push him back to something like the point from which he began: ‘Das Licht – wann löscht es aus?/Wann wird es Nacht im Haus?’ (‘The light – when will it die? When will it be night in the house?’, ibid.). Wagner does not intend any of this ironically (there is a profound and subtle Wagnerian irony in the operas, but not of the kind that diminishes his characters). The process can begin all over again, and in effect does so under different auspices. The aria consists of paradox, involution, an argument that is not an argument because it cannot possibly go anywhere or arrive at any end. It designates an infernal circle. In Wagner, the event burdens the subject with the ‘anguish’ of the void.39 But the split Wagnerian subject is characteristically a subject of the remainder, and his or her suffering is not usually of this kind. Tannhäuser’s déchirement is not such an anguish; he rather suffers over divided commitments. Indeed, he suffers because he is not the subject of an event that would decisively clarify his ambivalences. His intervention in the Sängerhalle does not do so. It is more a function of nostalgia for Venusberg than anything else, which means that no artistic truth-­procedure follows from it. For Badiou, whatever the anguish involved, the faithful subject remains an enthusiast for the new and its intimacy with the void. By contrast, in his turn to penitence and the Catholic church, Tannhäuser turns from subjectivity without even experiencing his reaction as offering the ‘tranquil power’ of ‘conservation’.40 Having renounced the truth-­procedure that might have begun in defiance of the noble Kreis at the Wartburg, he begins to look like the desperate, vacillating subject who is a ‘servant of the atonia [l’atonie] of the world’ (LM, p.  446). The impossibility of wholesale trust in a truth-­ procedure is equally the Dutchman’s undoing, more so than Erik’s final intervention in itself, in that that intervention so readily prompts him to exclaim to Senta that ‘Ich zweifl’ an dir, ich zweifl’ an Gott!’ (‘I doubt you as I doubt God!’, FH, p. 29). Outside events and their consequences, in which time is transformed, Wagnerian time is specific. It is not exactly a blocked time, nor a time determined by the conclusion towards which it is inexorably leading, but a time of two aspects, a time that, contrary to the anti-Wagnerians, is deeply and inherently unresolved. The aspect of this time that is peculiarly relevant here is ‘the time of the period of incertitude’ (Badiou, CLW, p.  155), a time when a transformation, whether via a peripetia, a new turn of the intrigue, a new development in a subjectivity or a decision, has not (yet) occurred. It is a time of possibilities suspended or unrealized or, as Wagner’s contemporary Matthew Arnold put it, a time “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born”.41 A good example here would be the Prelude to Act III of Tannhäuser,

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between Tannhäuser’s departure for Rome and his return from it. But there is also ‘the time of tragic paradox’, a time in which a flaw appears in the appearance of things, indicating a ‘vast, hidden temporality which governs appearances’ (CLW, p.  158). Badiou cites Hagen’s monologue in Act One of Götterdämmerung, in which he sings of ‘his own victorious destiny’, the destiny he is weaving for Siegfried, precisely as Siegfried voyages along the Rhine and ‘the glorious future of the hero seems assured’ (CLW, pp. 153, 157–60). This is an ironical as opposed to an uncertain temporality, but the two are inter-­involved, indeed, batten upon one another. Badiou also disputes the anti-Wagnerian belief that Wagner is never concerned with the situation of ‘waiting in itself ’, that waiting in Wagner’s operas always slots into a more or less crude teleology. This is an important question since, in modern literature and music from Flaubert to Mahler’s tenth symphony, Eliot, Beckett and Glass, ‘waiting in itself ’ has seemed an intrinsic part of living with the remainder. But the longest episode of waiting in the whole history of opera surely involves Tristan in Act III of Tristan und Isolde. Of course, Isolde actually arrives. But this does not affect the presentation of ‘waiting in itself ’, not least since all that is truly left Tristan is to die; the excitement with which he returns to life is altogether futile. In a sense, Isolde finally arrives to confirm that futility, no more. Vain waiting is a crucial theme of Wagner’s, and he draws from it ‘an unprecedented poetics, a stupefying musical system which constantly defers resolutions and creates a state of [often acute] harmonic incertitude’ (CLW, p. 60). At the very least, he presents waiting as a structure that ‘has its own end in itself ’ (CLW, p. 151). This is the case at the beginning of Parsifal, which is about a world without Parsifal, waiting for its Parsifal – ‘Durch Mitleid wissend,/der reine Thor/harre sein’ (‘The pure fool is awaited, with his knowledge born of compassion’)42 – and that is not sure that it has found him when he arrives, with good reason, for his arrival is unpromising. The music dominant in Act One exactly captures the sense, not so much of irresolution, perhaps, as of incompletion, a condition of suspension from which no progress is possible (without the reine Tor), because, without intervention, like the world of Der Ring, this is a world that is irremediably, structurally flawed. Of course, one cannot claim that there is nothing in Parsifal beyond vain waiting. The intensity with which waiting is conveyed in Act One is present precisely to enhance the Wagnerian persuasion, which Elsa shares in Lohengrin, that there are always exceptions to vain waiting, that there may be a vanity of waiting, that waiting need not be all. Waiting is nonetheless the attitude par excellence of the subject of the remainder. Wagner’s music is exactly fitted to this sense of a seemingly irreducible predicament. For all Wagner’s deep love of Schopenhauer, the Wagnerian subject cannot be the ideal Schopenhauerian subject, free of the world and the will. Tristan is beset by the relevant Schopenhauerian trials: ‘inner conflict’, a confrontation with ‘essential vanity’, intimacy with ‘the suffering of all that lives’. But he cannot – will not – develop and complete this knowledge. He therefore does not attain to the Schopenhauerian consciousness that is a ‘quieter of the will’ (WW1, p. 397). This, of course, is because he cannot renounce his love. The music confirms him in his continuing attachment, not least because Wagner surely recognized that full Schopenhauerian consciousness would spell the end to Wagnerian drama itself. Tristan’s ‘Wo ich erwacht . . .’ gives this understanding mimetic

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form. It begins in dreadful stillness, with almost no instrumentation. As Tristan sings of Sehnsucht and light, however, the orchestration begins, winding up, if never unanxiously, through crescendos, to the moment when Tristan evokes death’s door open to the sun’s beams. There is no musical resolution at this point, however, no triumph, but rather hesitation, ambivalence, then a continuation. As the aria proceeds and Tristan further pleads the case for escaping night, so his voice repeatedly refuses to harmonize or coincide with orchestra. Ironically, it comes close to doing so only when he curses the light again, before his voice gradually dies back into the muted condition in which it began, though this condition, too, cannot be called final. Badiou hears in Wagner exactly what one should hear, the beginning of a great sway of modern suffering which in effect keeps saying: there is no final reason in nature that the world should be as it is, why Elsa should not keep Lohengrin, why Tristan and Isolde should not delight in their love until the end, why Tannhäuser should not resolve his dilemmas. How is it, then, that all are so bafflingly tormented by such disastrous cross-­purposes? This is the great Wagnerian question on which we linger, the modern question, always a deeply political one, however displaced. If suffering in Wagner is a ‘tear in the world and in experience’ (ClW, p. 56), it is because the sufferer knows that it is necessary yet inessential. This is why Wagner’s creatures writhe and agonize haplessly, yet are not without an obstinate if obscure belief that all may somehow turn out for the good. But the event is rare. Given the major features of Wagnerian opera, no other conception of it seems possible. So events appear as parentheses within a catastrophic logic, tokens that history in its groundlessness need not point in a catastrophic direction. Schopenhauer was Wagner’s great, abiding philosophical love and, up to a certain point, he underpins the Wagnerian vision of modernity. If it is impossible to conceive of Wagner’s operas as properly Schopenhauerian, that is because, for Wagner, there is always a flaw in the Schopenhauerian system and its insistence on endless and ubiquitous suffering, a flaw notably represented by Siegmund and Sieglinde, by the event. All else, everything that is so hugely and tormentingly protracted in the operas, is remainder. Badiou falls well short of the heart of the Wagnerian paradox, not surprisingly, since (perhaps for ‘affirmationist’ reasons) his account of Wagner never mentions Schopenhauer. In 1849, in Dresden, a young revolutionary Wagner had conducted himself like one. For good reason, this Wagner could not survive without adaptation. So he became that weird and implausible phenomenon, a Schopenhauerian and a revolutionary together. Badiou insists that Wagner’s ‘revolutionary attitude did not change’ (CLW, p. 125), that the revolutionary Wagner never died. I would put the point differently: there is no doubt that, after 1849, Wagner withdrew massively from revolutionary ardour into Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and derived great consolation from it; and yet the revolutionary never quite dies. This is the difficult and improbable basis for Wagner’s modern thought. It is a kind of thought Wagner can supply, but unavailable to philosophy; a thought extraordinarily appropriate to a modernity that was always, in a sense, improbable in itself. It is the Thomas Mann so very close to the Schopenhauerian seduction, the Wagnerian seduction, the Schopenhauerian seduction within the Wagnerian seduction, who finally grasps this. Mann’s writings on Wagner were very various, and

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his conflicting attitudes to Wagner shifted and swayed, combined and recombined according to changing historical, political and personal imperatives. But the later, passionately anti-Nazi Mann arrives at a profound conception of Wagner which, if never fully articulated as such, is nonetheless the right and necessary one. It does not renounce all feeling for German romantic pessimism – Mann could hardly do that; it was far too deeply and pervasively written into him and his work – but neither does it surrender to it, as Zeitblom must not surrender to Leverkuhn in Doktor Faustus (though this is not to reduce Wagner to Zeitblom’s kind of humanism; that would be absurd). As Mann’s ‘Leiden und Grösse Richard Wagners’ has it – that it is written in exceptional circumstances in 1933, with a ferocious parti pris, only enhances its importance – certainly, Wagner was melancholic, attached to night and death, ‘the most illustrious confrère and comrade of all these symbolists for whom life was an affliction’.43 Certainly, he found in Schopenhauer his great support. But his art itself was ‘revolutionary in character’, and could not but propel him towards ‘the overthrow of the existing order’, requiring that he ‘set his face resolutely’ against class, ‘power, money, violence and war’ (PCW, pp.  134, 148). This other Wagner directed his ‘artistic enterprise’ wholly ‘towards renewal, change and emancipation’ (PCW, pp. 147–8). In recognizing both Wagners together, Mann grasps a paradoxical disposition repeatedly perceptible in modern art but seldom thinkable to philosophy or, with very rare exceptions (Benjamin, again) modern political theory, to their and our great detriment. It is the paradox of living with and in the remainder.44 We end, then, in a double-­bind that would have seemed rawly apparent in 1933, and that earlier, as Mann is aware, Wagner grasps with the most extraordinary intensity, not least, as a cruelly disappointed survivor of 1848. The lesson of 1848 at its height is a vindication of a political dream of the advent of justice and the good. The lesson to learn in its aftermath is that the antithesis of that dream will seemingly indefinitely prevail. So night falls over the Wagnerian world, save in Die Meistersinger, where he seems to have yanked himself up into a nineteenth-­century version of social-­democratic good cheer.45 But what is the difficulty ensuring that the great gulf between political promise and fulfilment repeatedly opens up? The answer to that question will supply the next important element in the construction of my political theology. The following chapter seeks to provide at least a partial account of it.

5

The People Untransformed

Under the pretence of a great upheaval, the old want of character persists. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do. J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

The unbridged gap On 23 June, 2016, a British people who, at great length, had seemed to be countenancing the concept of modernism voted for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. The vote appeared to have xenophobic and racist, and certainly had defensive and anti-­ modern, implications. In November, Donald Trump was elected to the American presidency. What price the old narratives of modernity, in the significant sense? In themselves, Trump and Brexit are perhaps not very important – features of what have been for some duration imploding modern cultures in becalmed times. But one aspect of both developments that was really rather intriguing if not arresting was how far they took so many intellectuals and progressivists by surprise. By no means for the first time, causes that, if only superficially, seemed ‘modern’ had run aground on the resistance of the people. The elites who had promoted the causes were largely unprepared for this. The ‘moderns’ had remained oblivious to the anti-­modernity that had in fact been stalking them from the start. They had not learnt from modernity. For the resistance in question has a two-­hundred-year-­old history. Indeed, Peter Sloterdijk suggests that a ‘modern hatred’ amongst the populus, not just of an aristocracy but of ‘elites of all kinds’, actually begins with the French revolution itself, and the knowledge it brings that the power and status of all elites are finally baseless.1 Seen from that kind of perspective, we might even think of such a response as a kind of perverted egalitarianism. But the major popular reactions against modern elites have been directed at those who most assertively claimed to identify with, lead or speak for the people, notably revolutionary or radical elites. This particular form of modern resistance to modernity is the subject of this chapter. At the times when the cause of modernity was critically at stake, the people turned out repeatedly not to be there. They failed to turn up in support

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of modernity, or did not arrive in sufficient numbers to make a decisive difference, or arrived briefly and then disappeared. The vanguards, the elites, the intellectuals, could not take the people with them, but were often unprepared to admit it, resorting instead to compensatory fictions. It has never been clear that, on the whole, the majority of people wanted modernity or, if they did, wanted much of it or, as in the French and Russian revolutions, wanted it for very long. Yet intellectuals have frequently appeared to set this aside. In fact, however far modernity has pleaded the cause of solidarity, equality, radical democracy and the spread of universal liberty, it has also repeatedly and ironically confirmed, created, enhanced or been a pretext for a separation of the very sort against which it protested. Hence the recurrence of a particular kind of modern dismay: that of the French soixante-­huitards discovering that the proletariat who had seemingly joined forces with them were going back to work; or the English leftists of the sixties and seventies who preached the cause of the working class only, in 1979, to see significant numbers of it vote for Thatcher; or the Global Justice activists who closed down the WTO Ministerial in Seattle in 1999, only to see the mass movement they had hoped for become mass neurosis about terrorism after the attacks of 9/11.2 We can go much further back: when the Easter Rising broke out in Ireland in 1916, for example, there was widespread and sometimes extraordinary initial hostility amongst ordinary Irish people to the intellectuals and poets who led it. Robert Holland noted the crowds of ‘Dublin citizens’ cheering British regiments who ‘had as prisoners their own fellow citizens’.3 Thomas Mallin, concluded, with exquisite if presumably involuntary irony, that ‘Ireland is a grand country but the people in it are rotters’.4 The gist of this Irish bull encapsulates the kind of melancholy contradiction into which modern history repeatedly if belatedly plunged the avant-­garde modern mind. More than anything else, the revolutionaries and radicals have demonstrated their own Quixotism, in the sense that Rancière sees Althusser as a Quixote.5 They have rather often not seen it for themselves. The popular defection has provided reactionaries with an assurance and arguments that have become altogether commonplace and may seem formidable. But, whether from cunning or not, the reactionaries are indifferent to the truth of the void and historicity and the corresponding Kantian proviso (the speculative interest of reason). This is only in their interests. But it makes their case unphilosophical and finally dismissible, however commonplace it has become. For they are incapable of looking beyond a present stake. Serious thought can’t start here. But steering between the Scylla of the unacknowledged Quixotism of the left and the Charybdis of the dogged philosophical and moral failure of the right might seem to leave us with disquietingly little room for manoeuvre. The point once again, however, is to grasp modernity in paradoxical terms. One of the more conspicuous features of modernity is popular recalcitrance. The gulf between the intellectual’s modern pitch and a people obstinately untransformed turns out to be intrinsic to modernity. But, where ideologues, theorists and activists have struggled to admit this, modern literature has not. Hence the wariness of at least some left intellectuals when it comes to, say, Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale. This chapter steers its way between Scylla and Charybdis by focusing on the people insofar as they have been refractory to a transformative politics. It seeks to do so,

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however, in a way that doesn’t replicate the kind of Olympian detachment of the philosopher from the popular disposition that Rancière repeatedly takes to task, a detachment he finds even in philosophers in some sense representing the people, a detachment too likely to make of the people an abstraction or a pawn: Sartre, for example, looking down from the height of his apartment window at the bus queue outside.6 I prefer instead to take the vantage point of certain thinkers and writers – Weimar novelists, Orwell, Rancière himself – who have sought to stay close to the people, even almost buried in the people, or the archive of the people, in all their complex political mixture, in an attempt to think politically from within the people and popular truth, however problematic the consequences, but without for a moment lapsing into populism, or anything like it. This takes my chapter, as I think it takes my thinkers and writers, to the point, not of any repudiation of any transformative politics, but rather a clear-­eyed, lucid recognition (as in what we shall shortly encounter as Sachlichkeit) of the prodigious obstacles that lie in its path, and therefore the application of a major brake or caution. It is precisely at this point that one aspect of the logic of a political theology becomes peculiarly apparent. For, in my terms, a political theology exists to supplement a drastic lack, and that lack has yawned particularly in the persistent refusal of the people to go along with the intellectuals or correspond to their ideas.

Agon of Weimar Unsurprisingly, there are few if any better places to turn, in this context, than the Weimar Republic. For Sloterdijk, I think rightly, Weimar (the ‘Weimar Symptom’, the unconscionable Weimar tragedy) is par excellence the modern case.7 Even if one grants that we may have moved beyond the reach of fascism, we have certainly not moved decisively beyond Weimar, indeed still seem plunged deep in certain aspects of the Weimar syndrome, which is why so often, politically, so many people seem to be running scared. So, too, there are few if any better resources, in this context, than the Weimar novel, chiefly the Jewish novel, including one or two texts that belong to Weimar but appear after its end, like Elias Canetti’s Auto da Fé, completed in 1931 but published only in 1935. Canetti’s original title, Die Blendung, The Blinding, indicates precisely both his theme and mine: blindness to modern truth is also an ineradicable feature of modernity. In Germany and central Europe, the Weimar Jewish novel was very definitely ‘the most politically charged genre of the time’.8 It was a vehicle par excellence for a serious and powerful modern political thought of a kind whose literary form I stress throughout this book. Alfred Döblin, Gabriele Tergit, Vicki Baum, Jakob Wasserman, Canetti and, above all, Joseph Roth convey an appalled sense of modernity going wrong, tipping over into a monstrous travesty of itself that must nonetheless also be considered modern. In effect, all show an advanced grasp of the political fix: Weimar is an almost classic exemplification of it. The modern errance to which the writers bear witness is, above all, a question of the disposition of the people. Hence the novelists become anatomists of the popular temper as key to the political fix, the coincidence of the modern promise and the modern disaster to which, in my terms, a political

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theology is finally the only adequate response. How do people otherwise suppose that we have really ‘got beyond Weimar?’ For the writers, at all events, anatomy becomes, not a mode of explanation, much less one of arriving at specific proposals, but rather open-­eyed, heuristic, clarifying a peculiarly stark predicament to which no immediate answers seem possible. In 1918, the departure of the Kaiser, the end of the House of Hohenzollern and the declaration of the German Republic, the naval revolt, the Novemberrevolution, the inauguration of the revolutionary councils and the proclamation of the revolutionary republics, notably the Bavarian Republic, together constituted Germany’s modern event. It was however an event compromised and even threatened from the start by its social-­democratic dimension, and over which ironically loomed the minatory presences of Hindenburg, Ludendorff, the army and Freikorps and the inauspicious strength of an extreme if various right for whom Jews and socialists were an alien and unGerman twin enemy. The event culminated in the Spartacist uprising. This failed precisely because of the lack of the desired or projected popular support that Rosa Luxemburg had declared would be essential to its success. Certainly, after the early 1920s, the Communist vote that briefly existed in Germany, however relatively plentiful, never constituted the people as such. Out of this emerges what is in fact the most compelling political vision of the period, what David Midgeley terms the ‘radical realism’ of much German art and, above all, literature.9 George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz and Otto Dix are all examples of it in art. The aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit – Sachlichkeit is most often translated as objectivity, but also points towards a more exigent principle, an unstinting commitment to rendering the actual however harsh, dismaying and repugnant – set an admirable premium on the destruction of airy and unfounded political illusions, and the sober priority of seeing things straight, unblinkered (‘unblinded’). Crucially, it was itself radically democratic. Grosz, for example – for my case in general, a paragon – was a Spartacist arrested during the uprising who thereafter turned to an art that he intended would tell the people who they were, what their world was, what their determining conditions might actually be, and alert them to their ‘fear of modernity’.10 He specifically published in periodicals and journals that would circulate his images among the working class. There were perhaps two dangers to which the radically democratic writers and artists sought to alert the people on their own behalf: reluctance to enter into an imaginative thought of the kind that literature promoted, and what Benjamin saw as the great modern affliction, acedia, ‘an indolence of the heart’.11 Indolence of the heart, anaesthesia, intellectual inertia, and with them the failure and corruption of the popular will, the perception of all of them sharpened by the Jewish identity of the writers: they are recurrent themes in the Weimar novel. As a popular journalist, Tergit repeatedly saw ‘the new opportunities of the Weimar Republic’ spilling over ‘into theft, fraud and murder’, notably political murder.12 Her Käsebier erobert [conquers] den Kürfurstendamm addresses both the disintegration of the Weimar Republic and the people’s implication in it. It is about the destructive effects of financial speculation, as Tergit herself said,13 but also the destructive popular investment in it. The point about folk-­singer and celebrity Käsebier’s rise to fame and fortune is that, with his ‘Berliner

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schnauze (Berlin snout)’, he is Berlin man, up from the streets, representative of the Berlin working class, who adore him. Like them, he is thoughtless, unconscious of and powerless to resist his exploitation and corruption, caught up in a structure that will inexorably move him (and them) from boom to bust, false high to profound low. The popular investment collapses in ruins. On the other side of the ruins, like monstrous phantoms, fascism and its final catastrophic development begin to loom large. The people cannot rally, are swayed, seduced elsewhere, cannot withstand the seduction. Where might they not be seduced, asks Tergit, if they do not feel sufficiently strongly and will not reflect on their political experience? Like Tergit, Baum was a popular novelist who hoped to alert them: she was partly responding to an emphasis within Neue Sachlichkeit on an art that would go out to a rapidly expanding and democratizing readership and address its concerns.14 Her novel about the assassination of Walther Rathenau,15 Feme, is a historical allegory in which she pleads that her reading public resist an ominous historical turn. Feme, Summary Sentence or Summary Judgment, that is, judgment passed and/or sentence executed without due process, without feeling or thought: downwardly mobile killer Joachim Burthe represents two converging classes (his own, obscure middle class, and the working class to whom his family are forced to sublet rooms), but also their political vulnerability, the ease with which they can betray their own interests. The relevant political logic plunges Burthe as it will duly plunge the Berlin working class into suffering both prolonged and acute. So, too, in Wassermann’s Caspar Hauser oder die Trägheit des Herzens, ‘the indolence of the heart’, Hauser is the unlucky victim of the populus, and the ‘indolence’ at issue is deeply populist. Furthermore, since Hauser is historically German (as the famous foundling discovered in Nuremberg in 1828 was), but also, for Wassermann, surely an encrypted Jew, the popular Trägheit not only takes many and varied forms, but in effect appears as a feature of the modern period as a whole. If Wassermann’s novel is about Trägheit, the backward popular drag, what that actually comes down to is a drastic failure of collective mentality and affect, together. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, Döblin – who, like Grosz, started out as a Spartacist and then became, like Benjamin, an inspired critic of social democracy and an appalled witness to the growth of Fascism – grasps this analytically and expressively in a fully social context. Döblin writes altogether ‘out of the people’. But he also subscribes to his anti-­hero Franz Biberkopf ’s version of Neue Sachlichkeit: ‘Ich habe die Augen auf und fall so bald nicht rein’ (‘I have my eyes open and won’t so easily fall into your trap’).16 Döblin understands how a whole society begins to founder, above all morally, when the people will not take responsibility for their world. Hence the swirl of irrationality, of undirected mayhem, and at times, the outrageous chaos that runs through the novel from beginning to end, and which he plays off ironically against the highly structured aspect of Berlin life (judicial, administrative, bureaucratic, etc.) The people do not coincide with the structures imposed on them, but nor do they radically dispute them. Thus, in Berlin, conduct and experience can only ever be provisional and casual. Violence and suffering are ubiquitous and random, meaningless. Various political movements and parties leave their mark, but in the world of Berlin Alexanderplatz they surface as do the words Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Communism, that is, indifferently, amidst a welter of phenomena, great sweeps of undifferentiated street life and popular

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culture. So, too, Biberkopf can variously cede to a range of positions on the political spectrum. Like Berlin itself, he is in a sense beneath political reason. This is what prompts Benjamin’s great insight into the novel:17 what happens to Franz Biberkopf is at one and the same time astonishing in its blatant contingency and yet apparently as inexorable as fate. The protracted vision of the slaughterhouses and their indifferent, mechanized mass brutality sum this up: The beast stands there, submits, surprising how easily it submits, as though it were in agreement and is giving the sanction after all it has seen and knows: that this is its fate and there is nothing it can do about it. BA, p. 122

The trouble is that, since he is incapable of orienting himself from and thinking through the truth of historicity and contingency, Franz Biberkopf is willing his defeat from the start, as – it is clear that Döblin is saying this too, via his Berlin everyman – are the people. So contingency returns in another guise, with Biberkopf and the people always steadily on the way to getting their logical deserts. As Benjamin says of Franz, he has painted the devil on the wall ‘repeatedly and from the start [immer von neuem]’,18 and it is therefore hardly surprising if the devil comes to fetch him. As it turned out, there could hardly have been a more exact account of a popular failure or a more prescient diagnosis of the German condition.

Joseph Roth and ‘the indolence of the heart’ Collective failures of modernity were of course by no means confined to Germany, but they remained perhaps most patent in Weimar. What is notable is that, in an extremely political phase of German history, the Jewish novelists nonetheless do not suggest that the crisis is amenable to ideological solution or any extant form of political praxis. The problem for political thought has to be located elsewhere, or identified in a different manner, according to a composite and complex but singular logic. This becomes all the clearer if we turn to the greatest of the Jewish Weimar writers, Joseph Roth. Roth both elaborated and developed the novelistic mode of political analysis and added to it whilst taking the ethics and aesthetics associated with Neue Sachlichkeit to a principled, increasingly isolating and unbearable extreme, insisting on the most rigorous clarity of vision. ‘Ever since I’ve been able to think’, he wrote, ‘I’ve thought mercilessly’.19 His ‘merciless thought’ is, or ought to be, shockingly exemplary for us today – and of course he paid the price for it. Roth was inspired by 1918–19: in Badiou’s terms, he was a subject of the German event. He initially signed his journal articles der rote Joseph (red Joseph) or rote Roth. He was politically suspect and spent time behind bars.20 A certain mode of this commitment remained to the end: Roth was finally to drink himself to death when he heard of the suicide of his old, idealistic, anarchist and Communist friend Ernst Toller. However, the radical hopes of the writers, intellectuals and artists in 1918–19 swiftly collapsed. Even Brecht rapidly if temporarily turned his back on politics. Rilke

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despaired, bemoaning a lack of popular morale.21 The so-­called Vernunftrepublikaner (‘rational Republicans’) began to assert that the German people had yet to grow into any democracy worth having.22 Roth could not continue as red Joseph. In one sense, he never separated himself from the people; or rather, his Jewishness separated him from them, but he also instinctively sunk himself back in them. He died amongst the people, if a French people now, far more drunk than any of them. But he also mutated, in his words, into an ‘apolitical observer’. He came to believe that writers are ‘the only revolutionaries’ (WIS, pp. 179–217, especially at p. 210). Literature became the political project. This project had two dimensions. First, obviously enough, Roth was concerned with observation and reportage, both as a journalist and in the spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit, notably in his feuilleton work for the Frankfurter Zeitung. What sets him off from the other novelists is his ambitiousness and scope. Certainly, he inquires into the German crisis and disaster. If the right increasingly wishes to kill conscience, the possibility of doing so has first been opened up by a social-democratic polity that had wanted to put it to sleep. But beneath the patent inadequacy of social democracy, the familiar internecine feuding on the left and the threat of a partly unreconstructed old order, Roth obstinately insists that much of the trouble in daily political and social life is ‘the fault of the public’ themselves (WIS, p. 101). After all, it was the German people who voted en masse for the Hindenburg who boasted that he had never read a book.23 ‘Dull-­ edged, deaf ’, lax and ‘complacent’, he says, the people breed, even sanction indifference.24 ‘What I see, what I see’, writes Roth. ‘What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality’ (WIS, p. 13). Berlin speaks fearsomely of drastic injustice. It is a city thronged and haunted by outcasts, the homeless, lost, poverty-­stricken, down and out. But in a world dismayingly lacking in content,‘unreal’, the generality are ‘blithe’, scarily unserious (Leichtsinnigkeit, again, WIS, pp. 26, 37; see Roth on the general culture of ‘Amüsemang’, from sport to shows to amusement parks, WIS, pp. 153–75).25 Indeed, worse: as antiSemitic atrocities take place on the Vienna Prater, so the people desert the Chamber of Horrors to witness them, redirecting their capacity for vicarious, sadistic pleasure (EW, pp. 43–5). It is the Jews alone who, at this particular historical juncture, with their ubiquitous knowledge of Wailing Walls and pogroms, bear witness to the truth of history, seem to carry history with them. It has become the task of Jews to convey the ‘terrible moral law’ to ‘the cheerful, blithe peoples of the world’ who have only a ‘false sense of life’ (WIS, pp. 47, 80). The ‘moral law’, however, is not to be conveyed theoretically or in abstractions. It is apprehensible to anyone who prowls the streets observantly, noting the ‘slightly bent hand’ that ‘can hold in it the misery of all time’ (WIS, p. 96). It is from the ‘bent hand’ that one must set out when thinking. As Midgeley says of Döblin’s Berge Meere und Giganten (Mountain Oceans and Giants, 1924), Döblin realized that impersonal modern systems, notably technological ones, cannot in themselves be a source of popular, democratic and egalitarian power.26 Roth says very much the same: modern rationality cannot possibly develop ‘the capacity to properly take in the scale of the madness that it encourages and favours by its own objectivity’ (EW, p. 63). He can of course affirm the world of skyscrapers, triangular railway junctions and the myriad other features of ‘the new life’. But that world is problematic, too. A modernity that is

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solely material continually lifts the people away from a consciousness of the ‘bent hand’ and ‘the dust of which we are made’. It can underwrite no politics or morality (WIS, pp. 105–8, 119). The ‘blithe’ however are extremely resistant to such a consciousness. The writer must convey that. In the gap between what the public is (in its ‘blitheness’) and what the writer knows appears that strange, indefinite modern melancholy that haunted Roth from the start. It was a melancholy of the remainder. But, second: Roth’s was a moral intellect of the highest order, and – emphatically – no-­one is exempt from his critique. Outside Germany, he sees the rest ‘ “of the civilized world” ’ dragging its feet and engaged in ‘almost as criminal acts’. Assuming it ever existed, the ‘European conscience’ is by now ‘depart[ing] from the people’.27 During the twenties and thirties, Roth increasingly scans the scene Europe-­wide (east as well as west, as a Galician Jew in Vienna, Berlin and Paris was perhaps uniquely equipped to do). He cannot believe what is taking place, and therefore asks, not just why and how it is that the European peoples are allowing it to happen but, the most difficult question of all, how and why they are complicit in it.28 In Roth one absolutely never encounters the poor insistence on the ‘evil exception’. Even with the burning of the books (WIS, pp. 207–17), the most serious question is not how such barbarism can be happening in a vile Germany, but why ‘the European mind’ as a whole seems to be ‘capitulating’ (WIS, p. 207; the retrospective theme precisely of immediately post-Holocaust Jewish minds like Shmuel Zygielbojm in Warsaw).29 In this respect, says Roth, sagaciously, ‘the arrival on the scene of Corporal Hitler’ represents nothing new (WIS, p. 214), since the rot is already everywhere. If by 1933 the Jews ‘have been defeated’ (ibid.), it is by Europe. It is in France that Roth compares the European Jew with the bull at a bullfight, surrounded by a baying populus (WC, pp. 49–53). Here, too, like Döblin, he was to turn out to be prophetic. Sunk in Amüsemang, the peoples of Europe are standing by while monstrous things take place, negligent of ‘the avalanches in store’ (WC, p. 75).30 ‘Why? Why?’ writes Roth, in despair (WC, p. 174). Why is the Catholic church preaching a concordat with the enemy? Why are Protestants censoring the Bible? Why are the European peoples so obsessed with their ‘characteristic features’ and disturbed by the thought of their being mixed (WC, p. 109)? Too few are demonstrating the grave intelligence that is needed right now. Everything is grist to the mill that says ‘Enjoy.’ Already, in 1926, Thomas Cook is driving tourists to the battlefields of 1914–18: why do the Europeans promptly bury historical horror and thus condemn themselves to repeat it? Why are the League of Nations and international law so limited in their effects? Why will no European people intervene in the cause of justice and the good? Why is the species so willingly heading towards the slaughterhouse?31 But there is little more to be said for America, ‘land of unlimited unhumanity’ (WC, p. 189). In Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews, 1927) and elsewhere,32 Roth develops an ironical critique of the Eastern-Jewish idealization of the refuge of western Europe. In Hiob (Job), he displaces the critique on to America and structures it as a narrative. Hiob begins as an acerbic commentary on the political potential of the Russian people as represented in the history of Russian Jews (bigotry, violence, pogroms, more or less outrageously discriminatory legislation). ‘For a thousand years,’ writes Roth, ‘nothing good had ever come of it when a peasant asked a question and a

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Jew replied’.33 There, in a nutshell, is the starting-­point of his later politics, expanded beyond Russia. But the novel subsequently becomes an ironic parable, almost a satire, on the myth of emigration to America, the land of promise, opportunity and the free. For Mendel Singer, the US turns out to be ‘a real fatherland . . . but a death-­dealing fatherland’ (J, p. 156), its people politically reactionary, money-­driven, cheaply secular and, above all, indifferent to and wholly powerless to eradicate misery. If Singer is finally redeemed, it is not by America, but by a secular miracle. This is the political core of the novel. Roth’s fiction comprehensively addresses the question of the failure of Europe as a political community. After his short, heady period as ‘Red Roth’, he turns, precisely, to an art of anatomy, scrutinizing the unregenerate or unreconstructed popular mind. Why are the people failing the cause of justice and the good, betraying and indeed opposing it? Why is this the case Europe-­wide? Roth finds answers he shares with the other Weimar novelists, but also answers of his own. His early fiction, for example, is much concerned with die Trägheit des Herzens, a drastic impoverishment of collective affect. But in Das Spinnenetz (The Spider’s Web, 1923) he also combines it with a concern with the political consequences of the negligibility of the modern political subject. Theodor Lohse has decided from the start that ‘the revolution was a swindle, the Kaiser had been betrayed, the Republic was a Jewish conspiracy’.34 What underlies such conviction is a fear of simply not counting at all. It is precisely because he must count first and seemingly does not that Lohse cannot feel that others might need to. He has known no justice. He has no political conception of it. Why should he love others, or want justice for them? The conviction of negligibility rather breeds hatred. Lohse therefore joins the far right underground, where he can play God and be a ‘dangerous’ threat with serious power over others (SW, pp. 19, 25). The right prevails, not primarily in terms of any appeal to the ego or economic self-­interest, but simply in that it seems, at least, to offer the possibility of a self worth having. Lohse will lie, deceive, manipulate facts, plot, scheme, play Judas, kill, produce more murderers, merely to ensure that he is not altogether nothing, out of fear of the modern void. ‘This was the new Europe’, thinks Benjamin Lenz of Lohse (SW, p. 73). Roth evokes the workers confronting Lohse’s gangs with great poignancy, but the workers in this instance are not the people. Indeed, they are doomed to come to grief at the hands of the people as force majeur. Hotel Savoy (1924) continues with this strain of ‘merciless thought’. Here too again, in an atmosphere heady with revolution, Berlin on the one side and the newly Bolshevik Russia on the other – the novel is set in Łódź – the workers are nonetheless doomed to defeat. As Abel Glanz says, profoundly, ‘it’s not that people have a bad heart, it’s just far too small. It can’t manage that much, just about enough for wife and children’.35 Narrator and protagonist Gabriel Dan surveys his fellow-­citizens from the perspective of a Heimkehrer, a returnee (from a Russian prisoner-­of-war camp). This makes it possible for him to see his world afresh, and with Roth-­like penetration. ‘This is a collection of phantoms’, he decides (HS, p. 30). These are people who have yet to come into being, and the revolution cannot succeed unless or until they do. In effect Hotel Savoy provides us with Roth’s version of the pre-­political condition. Die Rebellion (Rebellion, 1924) examines another of Roth’s ‘small men’, Andreas Pum, who chronically betrays his own interests. He has lost his leg in the war. Official

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negligence has left him playing the hurdy-­gurdy on the street. He nonetheless has a devout, almost mystical faith in the government, military and Fatherland, is pathetically content with his Sunday portion of gruel and wholly dismissive of others’ dissatisfaction. Roth sees a special tragedy in the political obtuseness of the Pums. For like Döblin’s Biberkopf, Pum is caught up in the turbulent unreason and brazen wrong barely concealed by the seeming rationality of the Berlin apparatus. The ironic core of the novel is that Pum’s armour ‘against the offences and hurts of the world’ does not protect him.36 He is in fact mistaken for the very kind of ‘heathen’ (Spartacist, Bolshevik, revolutionary) he has most despised, and this starts him off on a downward slide. ‘The great grinding wheels of the State’ ensure that he is ‘slowly and comprehensively crushed’ (R, p. 76). Even Pum must finally understand the truth of ‘crass, inexcusable, criminal injustice’ and awaken from ‘servile meekness’ to ‘red, rebellious obstinacy’ (R, p.  107) – but by this time, alas, he has been reduced to a crazy, senile lavatory attendant. The beginnings of political insight have glimmered too late. Again and again, the Pums turn out to be belated, unable to see what they must see in order to get to grips with their world at all. In 1926, Roth made a trip to Soviet Russia. He asserted that ‘a new world was being born’ and that he was ‘happy to witness it’, in spite of his scepticism (LL, pp. 84–5). Andreas Kilcher suggests that ‘revolutionary idealism’ was ‘still at his heart’.37 Yet Benjamin, who met Roth at the time, thought that he had gone to Russia a Bolshevik and left it a royalist.38 Roth’s responses were clearly ambivalent and ironical, and the focus of his fiction correspondingly shifts, narrows in more closely on the life beneath political reason that Döblin had anatomized. The key passage comes in Rechts und Links (Right and Left, 1929), when its eminence grise Nikolai Brandeis explains his rise to wealth and power: Did you ever wonder why I’ve become so rich? You think it’s because I’m a great businessman? You’re wrong, Colonel! I owe everything to the supineness of people and institutions. Nothing nowadays puts up any resistance.39

In a situation where political drift and indeterminacy prevail, where the people are swayed interminably hither and thither and few if any know on what exact grounds they should make a binding political decision and commitment, the way is always open to exploitation, ruthless self-­interest, the amoral diktat. Die Flucht ohne Ende (Flight Without End, 1927) comes out of Roth’s Russian experience and reverses the structure of Roth’s previous three novels especially subtly. For Heimkehrer Franz Tunda is not a Lohse or Dan. Nor does he suffer from feelings of negligibility or an indolence of the heart. Indeed, he is for a while a revolutionary: in 1918, he makes his way back from Siberia through a revolutionary Russia that at first wins him over. His recent abject and anonymous destitution seems to place him on the side of those who have until recently been nothing, the Russian people. Nonetheless, he cannot finally identify with the new Soviet state. How is it, Roth now asks, that, presented with the possibility of political reason, a revolutionary identification, his paradigmatic ‘small man’ can go so far with it and no further, cannot sustain it? It might seem that, if Tunda is unlikely to adjust to the relentless pragmatism and ‘hard factual speech’ of the new Russia,40 its willingness to sacrifice any individual to a

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greater good if necessary, the fault lies chiefly with his residual conformist instincts. But this, though more or less the analysis of Tunda’s revolutionary lover Natasha, is but to scrape the surface of the predicament of this ‘ “modern man” ’ (FWE, p. 59). That he deserts the revolution does not in the slightest leave him or Roth free to re-­identify with western European people and their values, with democratic capitalism, as his further travels go to show. Western Europe has identified ‘society’ with ‘commerce’ (FWE, p. 132). It ‘takes pity on pavement beggars yet tramples a thousand lives with each light step it takes’ (FWE, p. 135). It is the home of a lifeless abundance (lifeless in its heartlessness). Germany is a rule-­bound, comfortable, complacent, dead world, bereft of intensity. The bourgeoisie and their intellectuals and artists are dying of inanition because they do not ‘mingle with the people’ (FWE, p. 91). This, it seems, is a world that needs the very revolutionary upheaval Tunda has abandoned; so, too, France. The West has become a world walled in against helplessness. Even the monuments and testimonies to the war dead are there not to honour them but to reassure the living. Why, then, can neither Roth nor his protagonist identify with the kind of enlightened political programme articulated by Natasha (she is not an unsympathetic character)? Tunda’s ‘most significant feature’ is his ‘desire for freedom’ (FEW, p. 58). This is no banal bourgeois or economic drive: Tunda is as free of egoism and greed as he is of moralism, and is seriously, entirely unafraid of going under. The freedom he hankers after is in fact Dostoevskean, the freedom ‘to throw away his assets’ if he so chooses, to behave ‘as the mood took him’. There is an irreducible waywardness to Tunda that begs comparison with Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Tunda will finally prefer living ‘in a fully accepted unreality’ to a reality of ‘false categories, soulless concepts, amorphous schemata’ (FWE, p. 139). He is in a way the quintessentially perverse popular subject. Roth emphasizes his vitality. It binds him to a present life, even if he recklessly squanders it, and it means that he cannot commit himself to any theoretical concept of a justice or a good to come. But this also leaves him suspended in a void. The last, admonitory sentence in the novel reads ‘No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he’ (FWE, p. 144). Men like Tunda, writes Roth, ‘are the greatest enemies of compassion and the so-­called social conscience’ – indolence of the heart, again – and they are legion (FWE, p. 26). To his earlier analyses, he begins to add another diagnosis of the problem for politics, that, in Steve Fuller’s phrase, ‘there may be something fundamentally unreliable about being human’, something repeatedly and automatically destructive of political rationalities.41 So, too, in Rechts und Links: like Tunda, three of the four main characters enjoy a radical or revolutionary or close-­to-revolutionary phase. None of them, however, sustain their commitment. It is one of the novel’s most profound ironies that Theodor Bernheim, who starts it as a member of the ‘God and Iron’ society (Aryans only), wears the brown shirt and hates the Republic, Bolsheviks and Jews, is the only one of the four who ends the novel as a ‘progressive’ (FWE, p. 221). The problem, as with every character in the novel, such is Roth’s ‘merciless thought’, is that all four suffer from a chronic political and moral instability which means that, given the appropriate circumstances, they can finally in principle subscribe to any political position at all. In that respect, they are themselves thoroughly of the ‘supine’ people as Brandeis (we saw earlier) evokes it. In their mishmash of ephemeral, actually impoverished selves,

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nothing decisively orients any of them. With this as the type, it is bound to be the Mephistophelean Brandeis, who understands and has taken charge of his own shape-­ changing, who repeatedly prevails. In Tarabas (1934) and Confession of a Murderer (1936), the various strands of the Weimar novelists’ and above all Roth’s political anatomy – indolence of the heart, the refusal of imaginative thought, life beneath political reason, waywardness, the plight of the ‘small man’, the threat of the void, fundamental unreliability – come together. Like Brandeis, Dan and other of Roth’s protagonists, Tarabas is briefly a revolutionary.42 Before very long, however, he finds himself believing in the occult threat of ‘chimney sweeps, white horses and red-­headed Jews’ (T, p. 17). But his imperative need is above all to swell himself up, to claim an identity however transient. Soon he is in the Tsarist army, leaving behind him a trail of gleeful violence, murder, general mayhem and grief. When the Tsar is deposed, Tarabas passively and indifferently accepts the revolution. It neither bewilders nor transforms him: ‘It was not for him to understand what politics had brought to pass . . . history was no concern to Tarabas’ (T, pp. 43, 54). In this he resembles the people he moves among. (‘They were all innocent’, says Roth, mordantly, ‘they knew nothing of history’s murderous laws’, T, p. 58). The beginnings of a Soviet Union struggling to enter modernity baffle, then enrage Tarabas. When he is asked to clean up his company for the new army now emerging, the Tarabas balloon is brusquely punctured. He feels himself growing ‘small, infinitesimal’ (T, p. 98). He has been ‘deserted, spat out and betrayed’ (T, p. 104). The logic leads inexorably to anti-Semitic atrocity. For who should the likes of Tarabas and his men pick on if not ‘[t]he Jew!–The ancient spectre . . . The festering enemy in the flesh’ (T, p.  130)? ‘The hearts of foolish, easily intoxicated people are impenetrable’, declares Roth (T, p. 22). Tarabas never grows or ripens. His senses rule and confuse his head. He plunges headlong into whatever comes his way (T, p. 161). The ‘hearts’ of the Tarabases are historically composite, multi-­layered, subject to time-­lags, capable of ‘moment[s] of insight’ and indeed of good (T, pp. 162, 201), but not yet modern and at key junctures deeply benighted. So, too, Beichte eines Mörders (Confession of a Murderer, 1936) is also an examination of the common man who cannot conceivably be made into revolutionary material. Lowly and obscure, indifferent to politics, emphatic in his declarations of lack of sympathy for the revolutionaries in immediately pre-­revolutionary Russia, Golubchik actually burns with class resentment. Yet this does not turn him into a Bolshevik. It rather leads him to the betrayal of Jewish socialist Salomon Komorov, then many others. Roth’s achievement is to show not only how his ‘scoundrel beyond redemption’ is absolutely irredeemable by the revolution, but also that it is the Golubchiks who cannot identify with the revolution who may most strikingly obstruct it. Class war merely makes Golubchik brutal, capable of ‘every sort of deceit’.43 He is, as he admits, a man whose ‘guiding principle’ is the misuse of power (CM, pp. 107, 117). The Bolshevik alternative is there for Golubchik, yet there is not the slightest chance that he will opt for it. Like Tarabas and all of Roth’s political anti-­heroes, he is a stark demonstration of what the revolutions are always up against. I have so far conspicuously avoided what many take to be Roth’s great novel, The Radetsky March, and its companion piece, The Emperor’s Tomb. In the interest of

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reading him as an ironic radical and radical ironist, I seem deliberately to have disregarded a more conservative dimension to some of his writing. But Roth becomes nostalgic for the Austro-Hungarian Empire only late in his career, and in crucial respects his nostalgia is a function of his loathing of fascism. He starts advocating a return to the Empire as a last bulwark against Hitler, hoping (against hope) that Austria may somehow uphold such political virtue as there has been in the German tradition.44 In any case, The Radetsky March and The Emperor’s Tomb are political anatomies, too, scrutinizing people caught up in the intricate modes and mechanisms of political repetition. Their subtlety, delicacy and fineness of feeling only enhance their power in this respect. Roth not only conveys the seductive undertow of a world drastically lacking in political kinesis, but draws us into experiencing the drag of the undertow in ourselves. At the same time, however, he insistently underlines the melancholy, bitterness and unhappiness that lie just beneath the Empire’s surface, and its gross violence, whether anti-Semitic or military and draconian, as in the chilling account in The Radetsky March of the courts-­martial and executions on the Eastern front.45 The fascination with the structure of historical recurrence and popular investment in it had been there in Roth’s writing from early on.46 For all their absorbing detail, the two ‘Imperial’ novels present political inertia to us almost in an abstract design, where the other novels give us the psychology. The ‘Imperial’ novels can do this because Roth’s Empire is actually teetering on the edge of modernity, and this sets its ‘ancient, traditional, invariable and insidiously effective’ recoil from modernity in particularly vivid relief.47 When Simon Demant reflects that ‘his thinking couldn’t keep pace with his life’ (RM, p.  86), he is registering a temporal disjunction at the heart of Roth’s ‘Imperial’ fiction. The Ruthenian peasants unaware that the Empress has been dead ‘many years’ (RM, p. 133) are just a rather extreme example. Everyone in these novels is time-­lagged, at odds with their present selves. Virtually no-­one is adequate to the future that is bearing down on them, because the past seems apprehensible whilst the future is only fearful. (‘Electricity and nitroglycerine will be the end of us’, says Chojnicki, RM, p. 177). Thus it is possible to live under the Empire and ‘hardly know what freedom [is]’ (RM, p.  219). A sufficiently paralysed world warps the forces of change themselves. It is only suddenly and as a kind of exceptional revelation that Lieutenant Trotta will see that ‘these men with their drilled precision’ are really ‘dead parts of dead machines that didn’t produce anything’ (RM, p. 226). What is far more common is a hyperbolical if not hysterical reaction to any disruption of the norm, like Herr von Trotta’s revulsion from the ‘ghastly’ telephone, or his shock, ‘for the first time since he had put on trousers’, at seeing ‘upsetting’ creases on them (RM, pp. 266, 294). ‘[W]e had no desire either to see, or to be seen clearly’, says the Trotta of The Emperor’s Tomb (ET, p. 43). In this respect, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the very antipodes of the aesthetic of Neue Sachlichkeit. We should note, however, that Trotta specifically adds ‘or to be seen’. If the people were not adequate to their historical situation, no-­one was seeing them clearly, either. This was also what the novelists were telling the Weimar Republic. Rathenau was particularly important here: the novelists kept on returning to him. In Feme, Baum presents him as a fine-­grained idealist, but a man rendered solitary and in one sense dim-­witted by his high-­mindedness. Roth pays a tribute of quite uncharacteristic and exceptional beauty to Rathenau (WIS,

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pp. 183–7). But he cannot finally avoid the fact that, again, Rathenau failed to see: failed to see what was heading in his direction, because he failed to understand, not just those whose victim he was to be, but how little safety from his enemies the people themselves could afford him; that he was, precisely, a Quixote of the type with which I began.

Canetti and general solipsism But it is the culminating novel of the period, Auto da Fé (1935), that gives us the fullest version of the problem in that it is directly concerned, not just with the people obstinately untransformed, but, very immediately, with the relation between the unredeemed people and their intellectual other. It is, in effect, one of the great modern allegories of modernity itself. Canetti recognizes the problem in its fullest extent. Furthermore, he understands it as a problem of what we might call general solipsism: individual and mass solipsism. We might sum Auto da Fé up thus: the man of intellect, literature and ideas, though not in this instance politically inclined, is hopelessly remote from the ‘low’ domain of the Thereses, Pfaffs and Fischerles; thus the world ends in flames. Peter Kien is a Rathenau-­figure, if somewhat distantly. Canetti’s genius lies in the extraordinary tenacity and intensity with which he registers the gulf between his Quixote and his Sancho Panzas as a gulf between self-­sealed monads, unflagging and definitively irreconcilable monologues, deranged forms of self-­intentness. The reference in the original title was clearly to this: ‘our being is one vast blindness’, writes Canetti, ‘save only for that little circle which our mean intelligence . . . can illumine’.48 Certainly, for Kien, from the start, truth is discoverable only in seclusion and ‘experience’ is ‘superfluous’; he has ‘not the slightest desire to notice anyone’, to get beyond his blindness, to be dragged into the ‘slime’ (AF, pp. 15–16, 185). Hence the fact that, utterly meticulous and painstaking in his thought and work, he is also mad. Yet at the same time he is haunted by a tiny, residual desire for the world he has barred off, which leaves him vulnerable both to Therese’s machinations and his own outrageously wrong delusions about her. The delusions come to grief with ludicrous abruptness, as they were bound to, leaving feelings only of loathing, and accusations of impertinence. The irony is that Therese knows very well that he is prey to chronic delusions, but is herself chronically deluded about them, and indeed adds other chronic delusions of her own. The same structure replicates itself between Kien and Pfaff and Pfaff and Therese. Hunchback Fischerle is almost at once a Sancho Panza, and like Sancho apparently makes common cause with his ‘master’, only steadily to expose his own monomania, his will to persuade himself of the validity of a separate, self-­involved world. Weirdly, Therese, Pfaff and Fischerle all turn out to be in one sense mirror-­ images of Kien; yet it is precisely because of that that the gulf is unbridgeable. Canetti writes all this up in an emptily wry, vastly detached style that never for a moment palliates its victims’ folly. However, he also pursues his implacable case yet further: when Kien, Therese, Pfaff and Fischerle confront each other in the Theresianum (the public pawnbrokers’), the self-­enclosure of solipsism becomes a mass occurrence. The crowd gets involved, and violence breaks out, though the crowd has not the first idea of what might be at issue in

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the quarrel, or at least, no remotely accurate one. This however is of no great importance to it: it merely invents its own version of the stake. After all, it has always ‘lived among hallucinations’ (AF, p. 307). No-­one renders mass solipsism as a modern phenomenon as Canetti does. He was after all to become well-­known for his book on Crowds and Power (1960).The faculty of subscribing to more or less lunatic myths is communal, and precedes any State or party apparatus. The major irony in the Theresianum scenes is that, in his decision to try to prevent people pawning books, Kien has actually modified his own solipsism, committing himself to what he takes, if dementedly, to be a progressive and reformist work on the people’s behalf. Yet it is the crowd who finally ‘all fall’ on him (AF, p. 294). Kien laments that ‘the number of the educated is, compared to the mass of the population, small almost to vanishing point’, and fears the ‘catastrophe’ that consequently ‘threatens us’ (AF, pp. 91–2). Auto da Fé is an allegory of the relationship between the intellectuals and the people under the Weimar Republic, and the catastrophe that loomed partly as a result. Beyond that, it is also an allegory of the modern relationship between the intellectual and the people per se, a commentary on the dilemma of modern politics almost sans pareil. But for all the brutishness and on occasions appalling violence of his specimens of the unregenerate vulgus, Canetti at no point allows Kien any countervailing sympathy. Kien has always had it coming. In the end, he does not even grant Kien any especial psychological distinction. Therese’s, Pfaff ’s, Fischerle’s, the crowds’ delusions all emerge as byzantine and complex as his. Canetti does not merely confront us with the simple, almost hackneyed polarity of misguided and unworldly intellect and ruthless common sense or street nous. As Cervantes also knew and told us, mirage is everywhere, individually, collectively. Mirage is what brings people together, but also divides them, sets them apart. The protracted coda, in which Kien’s psychiatrist brother intervenes, gets his diagnosis wrong and precipitates the dreadful conflagration, merely gives the screw a last cruel twist. The solipsist is always incurable, the would-­be curer as snared in error as anyone else.

Rancière, Orwell and knowing the people The Weimar novel offers a subtly negotiated passage between my Scylla and Charybdis, left Quixotism on the one hand and reactionary heartlessness and barbarism on the other. What it repeatedly and everywhere says is: don’t write the people off, abandon them or elevate yourself above them, pay scrupulous attention to them, but don’t write them up(wards) either, don’t mistake them, don’t without good reason have great expectations of them. In this lie the beginnings of political wisdom and a proper political thought. Synthesizing and deepening what emerges from the Weimar novel, we might turn to a political thought and writing that has been very similar in emphasis, and has put the problem of the relationship between the intellectual and the masses or the intellectual and a political constituency at its very centre. Two figures in particular seem exemplary: Rancière and Orwell. Whether one thinks of Rancière’s immense labours in the working-­class archive, labours that notably produced Les nuits des prolétaires, or Orwell down and out in Paris and London, on the road to Wigan Pier

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and in Catalonia, both have the pre-­eminent virtue of having steeped themselves in a material constituency. Rancière has rightly taken to task what he has described, again, surely rightly, as the excessive valuation of theoretical revolution in the historical parenthesis that began about 1970. But he has also rooted that valuation in the philosophical tradition. He has helped us understand how very fundamental is the habit that separates thought from the demos, those who claim to think from those who supposedly cannot. After much pestering, Descartes may finally grant the impoverished Dutch peasant and practising shoemaker Dirk Rembrantsz an audience. He may quickly recognize Rembrantsz’s competence and merit, and agree to teach him. But this is only because of Rembrantsz’s modest and courteous insistence on his dignity and the level terrain that he and Descartes share, which is that of a founding equality (or what Orwell calls ‘natural equality’).49 Like Joseph Jacotot’s egalitarian conception of education,50 Rembrantsz’s perseverance is a rare exception. Rancière shows that the philosophical tradition has everywhere refused or turned away from the Cartesian gesture. It is thus that, throughout history, philosophy defines itself against its other, excluding ‘those who work with their hands from the right to think’.51 In this manner, Rancière identifies a structure or disposition that lies deep within the tradition and ramifies in many different ways. Not surprisingly, then, in Hatred of Democracy, he develops a critique of the ‘dominant’ contemporary French intelligentsia whether left, republican or apostate new right.52 For these intellectuals, ‘democratic civilization’ as currently constituted is a ‘catastrophe’ (HD, p. 4), and at bottom what appals them is ‘the people and their mores’ (HD, pp. 3–4).The new democratic world of Club Med, reality TV, gay marriages and package deals menaces the common good of a State, of societies divided into orders (HD, p. 8). Contemporary individualism, the egotistical reign of private life and private passions, these threaten to ruin ‘any legitimate order’ (HD, p. 2). Not that Rancière himself is inclined to celebrate such features of democracy in themselves. But he is nonetheless concerned with how far the intellectuals in question take them as pretexts for justifying attacks on the democratic principle itself. This is not to say that they do not assert the need for ‘democratic government’ (HD, p. 7). But what they actually mean is always oligarchical government, government by the elites or the few. For the intellectuals, ‘the Moderns’ have ‘cut off the heads of kings’ merely ‘so they could fill up their shopping trolleys at leisure’ (HD, p. 33). This may indeed be a less than appealing aspect of contemporary democracy. The intellectuals, however, ignore the enormity of the fact that the kings are indeed dead, a fact that repeatedly and indefinitely opens up the possibility of democratic dissent and dispute. For them, the ‘exacerbated conflict between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy’ that persists in our societies is merely populist (HD, p. 80). Thus they seek to banish or belittle any democratic activity that might undermine the principles of good government, ‘respect for public authorities’, the ‘knowledge of experts’ and ‘the know-­how of pragmatists’ (HD, p.  7). They seek to shore up the masters, authority, competence, capability, epistemocracy and the privatization of power, the elites who can be left to guarantee our freedoms for us. What they most fear is radical equalization, the fatal democratic equivalence of everything, ‘that which is excessive and aleatory’ in democratic life (HD, p. 6), ‘the an-­archic supplement’ that the word democracy actually signifies (HD, p. 58).

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This is quite as much the case with those who continue to have a quasi-­scientific faith in ‘historical necessity’ and ‘the development of productive forces’ (HD, p. 87) as it is with nouveaux philosophes like Benny Levy and Jean-Claude Milner or establishment figures like Luc Ferry. The people very clearly neither share the faith nor seem inclined to bring it to fruition, which, says Rancière, soberly, leaves those ‘used to exercising the magisterium of thought’ to continue representing (in both senses) the people on their behalf (HD, p. 97). If the modern intellectual speaks of and for but not from the people, we might trace the will to do so at least as far back as Marx himself. For Rancière, there is a decisive shift in Marx’s thought in the 1840s towards the philosopher who is no longer a philosopher, but rather the ideal scientist. This scientific subject finds his object in the worker who is no longer a worker, the proletarian.53 The work of the proletarian is no longer work, production; or rather, it is the work of producing the revolution. Marx’s proletarian is the negation of the worker. This is precisely reflected in the Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France: the worker who is not yet a proletarian is lumpen. In later Marx, the unredeemed and unregenerate vulgus, ‘the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass’, have become the lumpenproletariat.54 Rancière is wary of Marx’s attitude to these ‘equivocal fauna’.55 The recidivist, troglodytic French peasantry of The Eighteenth Brumaire and The Class Struggles in France represents that aspect of the people which Marx cannot accommodate, and which he has therefore to oppose with an idea. In doing so, he establishes what will become a tradition. If Rancière raises questions for that tradition, so does Orwell, specifically after 1939. The intellectuals – for Orwell at this point in time ‘there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense “left” ’ – have severed themselves from common feeling, ‘common culture’, ‘common experience’.56 This has partly to do with habits of abstraction and abstract language, which invariably leave ‘little impression . . . on the average man’ (EJL1, p. 355). ‘As for the philosophic side of Marxism’, he remarks, ‘the pea-­and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, I have never met a working man who had the faintest interest in it’.57 Orwell’s position is encapsulated in his observation that, when he protests against what he calls the ‘dialect’ that ‘makes use of phrases like “objectively counter-­revolutionary left-­deviationism” or ‘drastic liquidation of petty-­bourgeois elements’, he gets ‘indignant letters from lifelong Socialists telling him that he is ‘ “insulting the language of the proletariat” ’ (EJL3, p.  136–7). Left intellectuals have departed into a structure of thought and a rhetoric of their own. This does duty for responsible, clear and, as far as humanly possible, accurate observation, on which Orwell like the Weimar novelists will everywhere insist. Thus the intellectuals actually inherit from and replicate the disposition of their very objects of attack, the separation of an elite sphere. They themselves are anchored ‘almost immovably’ in privilege (EJL1, p.  314). They constitute themselves quite as firmly as an elite capable of pronouncing on and standing in for the people as do the political parties, the managers and administrators, technicians, brains trusts and discussion groups, those Orwell refers to as the ‘so-­called experts’ and of whom he is as critical as Rancière, not least in that they repeatedly turn out to be wrong, because they are repeatedly foiled by the very people they claim to represent. Alternatively, the

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intellectuals save their thought from ever being properly tested, but also ensure their own ineffectuality, which they secretly prefer, since their politics is only ever a form of wishful thinking, ‘a game of make-­believe’ (EJL1, p. 94). What, then, would thinking with the people mean? First, it would mean definitively abandoning an Enlightenment temporality, the time of progress. As we saw in Chapter 1, this is by no means defunct. But the narratives of progress by now repeatedly appear for what they are, desultory and indefinitely transferable (or manipulable). Not invariably, however: Orwell in particular complicates the picture. There are, incontrovertibly, and one must agree, micro-­narratives of progress: think of medicine or sanitation. In an age of ‘concentration camps and big beautiful bombs’, it has also become in effect impossible ‘to write off a whole stratum of the population as irredeemable savages’.58 Nor should one ever write off the possibility that a grand narrative of progress however implausible might actually begin, might start to take material form, notably that of ‘a Socialist movement that also has the mass of the people behind it’ (EJL1, p. 90). Nonetheless it is clear that anyone who has a pessimistic view of life tends ‘to be justified by events’ (EJL1, p. 196). If, here and there, in flickers, history moves forwards, it also drastically moves backwards. The lesson of 1939 to 1945 in England is that the political advance that 1940 seemed to promise was ‘gradually filched away from us again’ (EJL2, p. 266). Second: one thing Orwell and Rancière profoundly agree on is that, in Orwell’s phrase, insofar as there can ever conceivably be a good politics, ‘the initiative will have to come from below’ (EJL1, p. 90; in Nineteen Eighty-Four, this will become Winston’s today rather fusty-­sounding but nonetheless plausible ‘If there is hope, it lies in the proles’).59 ‘After twenty years of stagnation and unemployment’, writes Orwell, in 1941, ‘the entire English Socialist movement was unable to produce a version of Socialism which the mass of the people would even find desirable’, let alone wanting to see it materialize (EJL1, p. 93). No politics is sufficient that is not tested against the people, that does not emerge out of the people. Do not fail to keep thinking from within the purview of Plato’s ‘untameable democratic ass’, so Rancière instructs us (HD, p. 41). To do otherwise is to surrender the democratic principle and to break with the modern democratic ethos. This cannot but be wrong, unhelpful for modern politics and thought. Do not replicate the error of the philosophers, which is to separate oneself off from the people, or to speak of and for them, but from another place than theirs, from a position of abstract mastery equivalent to that of wealth, power, government, management, administration. Never identify yourself with that position. There is however a different position that the intellectual can take – or rather a certain kind of journey he or she can make, the ‘short voyage to the land of the people’. Wordsworth, Büchner and Rilke all embark on a venture away from a familiar topography to the foreign country of the people (as Orwell did, at greater length).60 Wordsworth disembarks at Calais to encounter the revolutionary celebrations of July 1790. Here a different way of thinking and seeing imposes itself upon the young poet (CV, p. 24). Already a revolutionary, the young Georg Büchner encounters the SaintSimonian Achille Rousseau, who preaches the doctrine of labouring alongside the people. In his own way, Büchner will learn to listen to their ‘songs’ (CV, p. 68). Rilke encounters the extreme poverty of the seventeen-­year-old working girl Marthe, who offers a chilling paradigm of non-­relationship, the total absence of reciprocity. Her

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destitution is such that she is a pure watcher and listener. She is attentive, however, not so much to the poet as to what she might begin to know of herself in the poet’s speech. Rilke sees the enigma of his own solitude in her, the (Canettian) evil of separation, the absence of the social relationship. The role of the intellectual, then, is not to look down from the window, but to enter the world of the people and there discover what Rancière calls ‘a new mode of the existence of truth’ (CV, p.  24). The people give the poet his vision, rather than him conferring his vision on them. Thus, though the ‘voyages’ are necessarily of short duration, they have major consequences: Wordsworth starts to invent a political landscape. Rilke takes leave of Marthe, but then finds that he can finish the Duino Elegies. The people facilitate the poem. The point is repeatedly evident in Orwell’s work. ‘Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers’, he writes, but ‘in modern England it is difficult for these two classes to meet’ (EJL2, p. 29). It is a hallmark of modernity that it erects unreal but binding demarcations between classes or kinds of person. One function of literature, of art, is precisely to break those boundaries down, and their collapse itself fuels major art. But the people are not a unity, not one. They are a hurly-­burly, or at least diffuse. This is where Orwell ends up. The people are not a block, a phalanx, a uniform mass, as in the concept of the proletariat. They are, like Roth’s anti-­heroes, unruly, unpredictable, disputatious. They do not take to homogenization. However much modernity seeks to regiment them, ‘the pull of their impulses is in the opposite direction’ (EJL1, p. 59). They are stolid, says Orwell of the English people, a fund of decency and common sense; they are also, in their own way, committed to their freedoms, not least their freedom of speech. Hence Orwell’s willingness, up to a point, to plead the case within limits for an imperfect democracy which, whilst it means neither ‘popular rule’ nor ‘social equality’ and has not got as far as socialism, gives ‘minorities some power of making themselves heard’ and ensures that ‘public opinion cannot be disregarded when it chooses to express itself ’ (EJL2, pp. 16–17). Here Orwell is very close to Rancière’s prioritization of the demos. The demos is the great tumultuous throng asserting its own rights to its own multitudinous forms of reason. Its principle is that of ‘true politics’, a concept of reason arising out of ‘la mésentente’, disagreement.61 A ‘mésentente’ is not just a dispute or difference of opinion. It is a disagreement over what constitutes rationality itself, which means that the parties in question cannot agree on the meaning of words. Disagreement is fundamental and ineradicable. Democracy is not about agreement but the infinity of disagreement, has as its only telos a non-telos. Furthermore, democracy as disagreement always assumes equality, a basis of equality or a level ground, as in the agora; equality always precedes democracy. Democracy properly speaking cannot be instituted on the basis of a founding inequality, with equality accordingly resituated or redefined, as contemporary political doxa would have it. Yet it is crucial, as Roth would have warned, not to over-­estimate the power of the demos or overstate its virtues. Both Rancière and Orwell are good on this. In ‘Le Gai Savoir de Bertolt Brecht’,62 Rancière recognizes that the later Brecht had at length to confront an altogether challenging question: why was it that, in 1945, in the munitions factories, the very German workers whose cause he took to be his ‘fought, right to

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the end, in the factory as at the front, for the defence of a Reich that was actually condemned to death’ (PL, p.  132, italics mine)? Brecht responds, says Rancière, by refusing to elevate himself above such workers. He will not dissociate himself from an unregenerate working-­class figure who is obedient and even servile where necessary but also resists when possible (rather like Orwell’s unruly, self-­intent, unscrupulous but at the same time Communist kitchen workers in Down and Out). This figure is seemingly ‘ “indestructible” ’ and endlessly ‘ “abusable” ’ – Tergit also understood this – and yet, at the same time, the ‘mulch [terreau] of liberation’.63 But we should not ignore the tendency in the demos to mutate into the ochlos. The ochlos, the mob or rabble, the great conformist horde, the people unified into a dangerous whole, conducting itself as one, rallying around the one idea or the idea as one: Rancière cites as a major example the murder in 1672 of the moderate, liberal de Witts at the hands of an Orangist lynch mob. The mob eviscerates Cornelis de Witt whilst he is still alive and partly eats his entrails. They carve out both hearts and exhibit them as trophies. This, too, is the people. Rancière contemplates the facts ironically and with stony intentness, and for good reason, since the murders occurred among a citizenry swelled with a sense of complacent well-­being who were members of ‘that nation of mercantile capital which pioneered our boundless modernity’.64 In seemingly unlikely circumstances, the ochlos may be just around the corner, and to ignore that is to risk the kind of profound shock that Spinoza experiences at the news of the de Witts’ fate. The lesson for Spinoza is, or should be, a crucial one. It means becoming aware of ‘the irreducible region of a distress resistant to that knowledge which changes sadness into joy’ (SP, p. 28). The demos tears the people away from the possibility of forming a unity and becoming the ochlos. But the ochlos always threatens to appear again, because the demos is intermittent, unpredictable, and democracy always vulnerable. So, too, Orwell’s anti-­progessivism is partly anchored in a consciousness, not only of historical reversion – ‘Human types supposedly extinct for centuries’, he writes, ‘the dancing dervish, the robber chieftain, the Grand Inquisitor, have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as masters of the world’ – but of the types as bound up with new collectives (EJL1, p.  15). There is a void within the people that inclines them to inertia and disinterest, as in the drastic failure of the English working class to show any concern for the Republican cause in Spain. They are given to ‘ugly manifestations’ of the will to persecution (EJL1, p. 114). Here the great Orwellian value that he shared with the Weimar novelists of lucid seeing and saying is, again, of great importance. One must not coincide with those on the left who ‘cannot admit that the German masses are behind Hitler’ (EJL1, p.  176) or that English anti-Semitism ‘is primarily a working-­class thing’ (EJL1, p.  290). The people have no resistance to propaganda and are often xenophobic, stupid and lacking in any solidarity. They tolerate ‘unheard-­of silliness’ (EJL, p. 35). In 1938 they backed Chamberlain and the Munich Agreement. It is mistaken to blame the intellectuals alone for the gulf that yawns between them and the people. The disjunction or disaffection is mutual, to the degree that the people will actually identify themselves with the dominant classes rather than take an interest in ideas. One must get as close as possible to the people, but in order to think it in its stark ambivalence. All in all, it is trivial not to recognize the strength of the ‘neo-­pessimist case’, and idle not sometimes to wonder whether the

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world is indeed not really a ‘loony bin’ (EJL2, p.  66) where people consent far too readily to the most horrible politics. What the righteous left excoriate under the name of populism and the lumpen is an immitigable part of the people, too. Yet, for all that, there is a drive in the English people to defeat Fascism in spite of their frequent indifference, even their own leanings in that direction. ‘To the British working class’, writes Orwell, ‘the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, Madrid or wherever it might be’ may easily seem ‘less interesting and less important than yesterday’s football match. Yet this does not alter the fact that the working class will go on struggling against Fascism after the others have caved in’ (EJL1, p. 261). Finally, a kind of resilient democratic cussedness persists in the people. It does so because of their materialism. They have never known the luxury that would allow them to privilege the idea. They also know that ‘the promises of Fascism cannot be fulfilled’, and they know it materially, in their own bodies, as they dimly know that there is a better material life ‘now technically possible’ to them and worth aspiring to. They know there is something the world owes them and is able to give them. This is by no means a negligible knowledge. Because of it, they will return to the struggle ‘in the face of endless discouragements’ (ibid.). That is what constitutes the demos at its obstinate best. But the impurity of the demos and the possibility of the ochlos also determine the political field: inconsistency or non-­dialectical contradiction and intermittency are irrefutable political givens. The necessary image for the appropriate political thought (we might decide) is the Moebius strip. One has, says Orwell, to grasp a quintessential irony to his contemporary political scene of the (Dostoevskean) kind that Roth also noted, according to which ‘pacifists find themselves worshipping Hitler, Socialists become nationalists, patriots become quislings, Buddhists pray for the success of the Japanese army and the Stock Market takes an upward turn when the Russians [the Communists] stage an offensive’ (EJL1, p. 314). But with the people in mind, one must think irony in a positive direction, too; or, as Rancière quotes Brecht as saying, think ‘the unique positive’ within the ‘purely un-­positive view’ (event and remainder). This is the admirable, emulable essence of the late Brecht’s gai savoir. Thus, in Orwell’s account of them, the brutality and sadism of the English people go hand in hand with a feeling for the weak and the underdog. Snobbery reverses into idealism, servility into doggedness. Anti-­intellectualism breeds heresies. One must be alive to the possibility of such reversals, as one must be alive to the fact that ‘political predictions’ are repeatedly falsified (EJL1, p. 394). This is not to get overly sanguine about prospects. That purposes founder and go astray Orwell takes for granted: ‘If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done infallibly’, groans the ‘neo-­pessimist’ in him. But elsewhere he knows that the logic of mishap does not infallibly point one way. Thus he remarks for example that reactionary forces are helping to kill off ‘the belief in personal immortality’, and that this has profoundly positive implications for political development (EJL2, p. 103). For his part, Rancière ends up asserting what Brecht knew in 1945: ‘there is no politics of the dialectic’ (PL, p. 143). There is no dialectic in history. The project will not persist, it goes astray. ‘Striking workers’ may ‘acquire power’ and demonstrate ‘that they can, if need be, run their own factory’. However, that power subsequently fails ‘to find its permanent expression there on the spot, in the form of self-­management’. But, asks

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Rancière, audaciously, should we necessarily want it to? To insist that only a ‘permanent expression’ of workers’ power would properly be significant is also to privilege the idea of its philosophical systemization (SP, pp.  60–1). It is once again to side with the séparation des clercs, in effect to declare one of Orwell’s ‘shoves from below’ to be insufficient in itself (EJL1, p.  91). But the spirit of waywardness, inconsistency or dehiscence is what often actually unites the intellectuals to the people. But if political history is wayward then, again, in Badiou’s phrase, ‘from now on, we depend upon the event’.65 There is another much-­treasured privilege that the intellectual is called on to forgo: the systematic and synthetic explication, analysis and prediction of political history. Furthermore, events of justice and the political good are not only not predictable. They do not happen often, they are rare. What Rancière presents as the democratic or egalitarian moment, the moment when democracy and equality are more than just the hidden foundation, when they actually appear as such, is occasional. Politics ‘in its purity’, as an egalitarian politics that an irrecoverable, inexplicable event releases, appears only fleetingly and locally (ME, p.  9). In La Mésentente, Rancière asserts that Politics in its specificity is rare. . . . Its actual eclipse is quite real, and there exists no political science capable of defining its future, any more than a political ethics exists that can make the existence of politics solely an object of will. ME, p. 188

Again and again, this turns out to hold good for his major examples: 503 BC, when the Roman plebeians rebel against their lack of representation in the Senate, protesting their status as the sans-­part, those without a stake, flee the city, camp on the Aventine Hill and declare the intention of founding their own city; the event of an egalitarian conception of education, with Jacotot; the July revolution of 1830 in France and, more importantly for Rancière, the fact that it encouraged a few hundred workers to demand the impossible, an education and intellectual life equal to that of the bourgeoisie. Orwell too has a conception of the political event, the obvious example, again, being Barcelona in July 1936. He sees conditions edging towards the state of ‘natural equality’ in the London of 1940. He sees the flicker of an event of democratic solidarity on the train across southern France into Spain, as ‘every peasant working in the fields turned round, stood solemnly upright and gave the anti-Fascist salute’ (EJL2, p. 232). It would of course be possible to turn this kind of vision of politics around and take it to task as a form of extreme negativity. Historical and political experience, and the most rigorous examination of it, impel both Orwell and Rancière in the direction of Benjamin’s, Roth’s and Canetti’s conviction: we are not yet out of what Marx calls prehistory, and such evidence as we have does not confirm that we ever will be, save very sporadically, here and there. However, there is no reason to think this as a final truth. To return to Kant, though we must take serious account of it, we do not have to believe absolutely in evidence. This chapter has introduced a set of sufficiently fresh perspectives for me to want to end by summarizing where we have arrived and how we have arrived there, before we

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embark on the argument of the last two chapters. Absolute historicity means that there is always an effect of instability at large in the world, which means that nothing is given by way of foundation. This makes events possible. But the event of politics ‘in its specificity’ is rare. It is all too easily eclipsed, and in its eclipse what we know as the remainder looms large again. History is therefore thinkable not in terms of a structure, whether narrative, dialectical or any other of Orwell’s games of ‘make-­believe’ (EJL1, p. 94), but as a play of intermittencies. Clearly one crucial reason why this should be the case is that, whether out of complicity, perversity, indolence of the heart or, most likely of all, the overwhelming demands of their ordinary lives, the people do not lend their support to politics in its specificity, or do not do so for long. In J.M. Coetzee’s redeployment of a Machiavellian term, the people know their own necessità – Döblin was also saying this too, via Biberkopf – which is not that of the intellectual or the Idea. It asks, not for disparagement, but for understanding as such, even if one might want finally to call in question its ‘metaphysical, supra-­empirical status’ (as one of Canetti’s ‘hallucinations’).66 All this is what Roth’s kind of ‘merciless thought’ tells us. Again and again, the required collective fails to materialize. Yet, to go back to Orwell, ‘the initiative will have to come from below’, if it comes at all (EJL1, p.  90). What then becomes necessary, as surely for both Rancière and Orwell, is a politics very largely of reserve, sober caution, drastically restricted hopes, attentiveness, waiting. At the same time, this is not at all a social-­democratic or pragmatic politics, but, somewhat in the spirit of Brecht’s fröhliche Wissenschaft, a politics that, recognizing and accepting our dependence on the event, looks out for breaks in the pre-political condition and responds to them effectively when they appear. As a way of thinking politics, however, implying as it does a distinctive concept of political temporality, this is best couched in a political theology. The final two chapters will show how.

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The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited. Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures Myths are the very souls of our actions and of our loves. We can act only in pursuit of a phantom. Valéry, ‘On Myths and Mythology’

A melancholic-­ecstatic conception of history The notion of a melancholic-­ecstatic conception of history has kept coming up in what I’ve said so far. In a way, what I mean by it should already be (almost) self-­evident. If the truly significant history is that of events – this of course is not a scientific description; as we saw in our discussion of the event, questions of choice and value, political, historical and indeed intellectual, the value of a certain subjecthood, are at issue – then history consists of occasional breaks with a historical norm that will seem melancholic. In this chapter, I seek, first, to formalize, specify and give substance to such a conception of history – a procedure suggested to me by Islamic tradition, or rather, Christian Jambet’s many-­sided, extensive account of certain Islamic traditions of thought. This is all to the good, not least in that the syncretism in question here is or should be of peculiar point and relevance at the current time. What Jambet will also inexorably suggest, however, is that a melancholic-­ecstatic conception of history tends to push us in the direction of a theory of transmission, as it does in the case of esoteric Islam. For if history has its chasms, if it is riven by rare, sporadic, irregular ruptures that subsequently close, how does one counter the oblivion with which the prevalence of the remainder and what I later call the logic of occultation seems to threaten us? So this chapter becomes progressively more concerned with the question of transmission. Having presented a certain concept of transmission, however, it then proceeds to interrogate it in what I intend to be scrupulous fashion, relying chiefly on Lacan’s sceptical account of the possibility of faithful transmission in another esoteric domain, psychoanalysis. At the end of the chapter I propose a partial resolution to the problems I have raised, via literature. Given that the literature in question is mainly French decadent or symbolist, admittedly, hermeticism or esotericism are yet again at

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issue. But isn’t it the case that hermetic and esoteric traditions can sometimes be more or less the sole means of passing on significant value? Be that as it may: here, for the first time, if consciously deferred, before what I mean to be its clear, comprehensive, final articulation in my conclusion, the political-­theological form of my thought becomes properly apparent. Jambet substantially underwrites and clarifies this form, and is thus as important a presence in my book as Badiou and Foucault. I am chiefly interested in his mediation of certain strains in esoteric Islam or Islamic gnosis. This also includes their philosophization within both Islamic tradition and the distinguished French tradition of philosophy and scholarship (Louis Massignon, Henry Corbin, Jambet himself) that has progressively elucidated it.1 It’s worth noting that Jambet says of Corbin that he ‘breaks’ with certain ‘abstractions’ born of modern politics.2 So does Jambet himself, as I seek to, too. Esoteric Islam is not to be confused with Islamic fundamentalism, and certainly not associated with terrorism. (Jambet himself convincingly presents ‘Islamism’ after 1979 as a consequence of a modern amnesia, or a belated modern conflation of the esoteric tradition with European revolutionism).3 I will also draw on Jambet’s work on Islamic philosophers like Avicenna, Ibn Arabi, Suhravardi, Tusi and Mulla Sadra. The later Jambet particularly focuses on Sadra. Sadra derives much from the esoteric tradition, but also produces a critique of it, attempting to place it in what he takes to be a larger order of thought, a politique divine and a ‘theology of the spirit of sanctity’, rather than a political theology of revelation and concealment (GD, pp. 7, 36).4 This critique is of little or no interest here. Sadra is nonetheless important in clarifying certain key ideas in esotericism. I’ll tend to focus on Jambet’s most recent work,5 though the earlier Jambet will by no means be irrelevant. Sadra provides or brings to its completion ‘the constitutive ontology of Islam’ (AE, p. 13).6 The divine principle is ‘the act of being’, a key concept from Avicenna to Sadra, who presents the concept in its most advanced form. This closely resembles what in Chapter 3 I called événementialité, and can help us develop that concept. The divine principle is effusion, expansion, emanation, donation, ‘infinite energy’, the ‘free movement of the real’ (AE, pp.  14, 39).7 It is characterized by its ‘spontaneity’ and ‘effectivity’ (GD, p. 297). The divine is wholly bound up in and does not exist apart from what we may conceive of as its radiation, from an infinite theophany. If it is beyond all material existence, it is never other than immanent in its manifestations. Conversely, the material thing is not, in the first instance, ‘a simple and neutral phenomenon available to sensory experience’, but an effect of instauration (‘installation’), the world’s constantly ‘starting out from nothing’ (GD, pp. 216, 297; QPI, p. 18). This is evident in the Koran, which grants us a revelation of physis as a ‘surgissement de l’être’.8 The divine is without specifications, attributes, definitions or qualifications, and therefore unavailable to language, to ‘any representation and any demonstration’ (EB, p.  36; compare the Islamic prohibition of figuration).9 Yet at the same time there is a sense in which it is only ever there in the instant, calls to thought as ‘a science of singular reality’ (PRE, p. 21), and is therefore, almost, at risk. Things are contingent, not in that there is no reason for their existence, but in that ‘they might not have existed’.10 This means that the world quite literally looks different. We live in ‘a physical universe without fixity’. There is ‘no safety in contemplating the

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starry sky’ (GD, p. 38). All bodies are singular, and unstable in their singularity. The only stability in nature is the permanence of its being there. Hence Nature is, precisely, ‘événementielle’; its only essence is renewal.11 Indeed, the event is ‘the most general property of the universe’ (AE, p. 182). There is even an Arabic word, hadith, signifying the ‘arriving’ of the event or ‘making-­an-event [faisant événement]’. Being is ‘apparition’ (Jambet stresses the emphasis on occurrence in the French word, PRE, p. 15). At the heart of Islamic thought from Avicenna to Sadra and beyond is the assumption that a thing exists, above all, as an ‘intensity’ (GD, p. 111; cf. AE, p. 36). Not surprisingly, thus, as contrasted with phenomenology, Islamic philosophy is concerned, not with the unveiling of the thing itself, but with the revelation of the act which unveils it, not the epiphany but the ‘epiphanizing’ (AE, pp. 151n, 153). ‘Intensity’ might seem like a rather vague, even pseudo-­mystical term. But this is hardly necessarily the case. One need only think of Deleuzean materialism12 – or in Schopenhauerian terms. As we saw, for Schopenhauer, ‘this world’s non-­existence is just as possible as its existence’.13 It is the ‘intensity’ of Will that determines that the one prevail over the other. Will ensures that there is not nothing, produces what for Tusi is ‘the call to non-­being to convert itself into being’.14 But that requires a fearful power. The Will is a terrible force, but that is only to be expected, for nothing is the most intimate companion it must nonetheless surmount. According to Jambet’s essay on Schopenhauer, this is notably the case with the Schopenhauerian sublime, which is only superficially about the triumph of the Idea of reason. In reality, what triumphs, if through the Idea, is the ‘vouloir-­vivre’, the will to live.15 Translate that into the positivity of a religious philosophy, and one ends up with the intensity of being as and in what Sadra calls its ‘victory over non-­being’ (AE, p. 67).16 Because they half-­know the limits to their own material existence, human beings are notably receptive to the intensity of the event; or capable, at least, of receptivity. This is above all the case with the prophet and the Imam, those untainted, unworldly, special beings (‘non ternie par les salissures de ce monde’, GD, p.  307). But it is not they alone who are capable of the ‘sudden, spontaneous’ response (GD, p. 297). If we live in a universe deprived of fixity, however, and the event is the general property of the universe, this is a truth given to theoretical knowledge, rather than in immediate experience. Only seldom does the instability of the world appear as such or have effects. The act of being is easily eclipsed, because it is not identifiable with any singular being, yet is unknowable apart from singular beings (there is no ‘essence of the divine’ or separable divine presence). There is occultation (ghayba, a key term) everywhere. This may be quite extraordinarily drastic. To look simply at the history: according to the largest branch of Shia Islam, the so-­called Major Occultation, the concealment of the event that was the twelfth Imam, Mohammed-­al-Mahdi, and the suspension of the tradition of the Imamate because of the political threats posed to it, have been and remain in effect since 329AH/941AD. Any immediate revelation is likely abruptly to fail and disappear for an indefinite period. Thus for much of esoteric Islam, for a great deal of the time, difficulty and trouble are never far away, and tests and ordeals are extreme. If, for many, there are series of events ‘that are at one and the same time historical and transhistorical’ and anticipate an ultimate event, the resurrection, the end of the series, has yet to arrive and may conceivably not do so. The condition of

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the esoteric subject thus cardinally becomes one of attente, messianic waiting. The danger in this condition is the possibility of ‘melancholic dejection’.17 There are many ages hostile to truth, and to which therefore the only response can be melancholy. The number of the faithful is always likely to be small, and the weight of their enemies overwhelming.18 There will always be a far greater number of literalists, orthodox theologians, juridico-­political minds, those committed to political management (‘le gestionnaire politique’), those who represent or subscribe to a contemporary ‘terrestrial authority’ (GD, p. 310). There will always be the spokesmen for the Sharia, whose teaching is ‘governmental’ and therefore ‘purely privatory’ (GD, pp.  58, 65). It is rare that their dominance slackens. But this alarming diagnosis of ‘historical powerlessness’ is merely part of a whole (GD, p. 66). The world in itself is resistant to light, ‘pétri de nuit et de mort’, the very ‘gaol of the soul’ (PRE, p. 22, GD, p. 65). For the Gnostics, there is a fundamental sadness to the world whose source is ‘ontological weakness’ or ‘deficiency’ (AE, pp. 150, 267). Those who know this best are the poets. Take Jalal ad-Din Mohammed Rumi, for example, the great Persian poet beloved of Hegel. For Rumi, ‘[e]verything begins in loss’; his poetry ‘only exists’ by means of it.19 Or consider the great Iranian modernist woman poet Forough Farrokhzad. Farrokhzad particularly dwells on the experience of an Islamic exile, of the death of ‘the world of epiphanies’, particularly as it afflicts women.20 In doing so, she testifies to the habitual condition ‘of spiritual being in this world’ as one of estrangement.21 But what is the logic of occultation, why should it occur? Let’s go back to Sadra. If Sadra’s is the fundamental ontology of Islam, says Jambet, ‘the distinction between the act of being and quiddity determines the whole Sadrian enterprise’ (AE, p. 36). Things exist as both a ‘that’ and a ‘what’, as both themselves and existents. They are, and they are something. That means they have a quiddity. But – and here Islamic tradition diverges from the Aristotle who so nourished it – quiddities are second-­order phenomena. Genera, species, substances, substrates: they exist only as concepts and in the generalizing mind, which is self-­evidently inadequate to being as effusion.22 All are imposed by the historical finitude of the world. Everything has a quiddity, but quiddities appear at a lesser level of being. As Jambet puts it, quiddities are a form of ‘limitation’ and ‘imperfection’ encasing the ‘act of being’. They are the ‘limiting shadow’ of its luminosity (GD, p.  110, AE, p.  64). The world is infinitely ‘differentiated’, including differentiations between levels or degrees of perfection in being. This in its turn means that there must be levels or degrees of intensity; hence, certainly, there must be forms, quiddities, but they come lower down the scale. The act of being is diffused through a vast structure of differences, which means it weakens as it goes on, and appears in itself only seldom. What we are left with, then, in historical terms, given the starkly ubiquitous possibility of occultation, ghayba, is a structure according to which a ‘metahistorical’ or (‘suprasensible’) time breaks into or fractures historical time (in our terms, via an event), the time of historical determination, confounding the truth established within a particular historical horizon.23 But we should note that metahistory is not a hidden history separate from the diurnal one, like that of Hegel’s spirit. The metahistorical principle is beyond history, outside and irreducible to it. It does not spring from the

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empirical world but its effects, as we have seen, are empirically demonstrable. It appears in the instant that interrupts the historical course of time, as a singularity. The condition of the instant is that singularity itself. Jambet’s thought deals above all in the recurrent form of pure singularity, saving a universal, the act of being, that is ‘always and only singular’.24 Historically, certainly, what matters are singular events and the sequences or continuations that arise from them. But we should underline their rarity. Belief in anything save the outer token, the quiddity, exoteric truth, is very difficult, for exoteric truth is solid and worldly, esoteric truth a truth of light alone. We cannot fuse with the divine principle. It ‘installs’ us but cannot be us. This means that there is also ‘a paradoxical presence of non-­being’ in us, into which we are all too prone to fall. It is therefore not surprising that Avicenna and those who come after him think salvation is uncommon.25 In explicitly political terms, Sadra is clear: Al-­haqq, that which ‘imposes itself as true’, ‘makes holes in [troue]’ all given pieties, doctrine, exoteric law and ‘institutionalized and official religion’ (AE, p.  11, PRE, p.  25). But the ‘legitimate government’ to which it may lead is ‘precarious’, ‘as difficult as it is rare’ (GD, p. 67). Hence Jambet’s frequent resort to the word arrachement, esotericism as an act of ‘tearing [or being torn] away’ from everyday custom.26 The very word in itself suggests a painfully difficult move. According to the earlier Jambet, ‘the properly political and protesting attitude is projected into a messianic future’. Needless to say, this does not necessarily save the subject from ‘the torments of history’.27 But there is no closure to the esoteric scheme of things, in that no universal will ever subsume the living, contradictory world. This means that history is never endstopped, sealed, blocked off, that events are always possible, that metahistorical interruptions of history will never cease. The later Jambet, however, tends to focus on Sadra, and Sadra fears disorder. His thought is finally teleological, eschatological and in some degree moral – there will be a Last Judgment – as Avicenna’s and Suhravardi’s were not. Only ‘legislation’ according to a ‘norm of justice’ which is not ‘a spontaneous norm’ can hold disorder at bay (GD, pp. 320, 325). There must be ‘obedience’, a recognized ‘code of law’ to debar the spectre of a Hobbesian war of all against all (GD, p. 321). Certainly, a people of Gnostics would not require legislation, says Sadra. . .but most people are not Gnostics. At this point, Sadra moves beyond our purview. It is worth adding that Jambet’s later turn seems of a piece with the fact that, according to Figaro, the bust of the Mao for whom he was enthusiastic in his youth is now dominated in his study by a bust of Napoleon.28 So I have rather to go back to an earlier concern of Jambet’s: Alamut.29 The core of it is as follows: In the year 1090 AD, Hassan-­i Sabbah installs himself at Alamut and proclaims its autonomy. The community at Alamut was Nizari, Ismaili in its beliefs. It was guided by a messianic project. The Ismailis were Gnostics, esoteric, concerned with illumination or revelation. The Nizaris of Alamut took this further. They preached radical equality, ‘the abolition of the law’ and a variety of dissident doctrines, like ‘moral licence’, the freedom of women and the abolition of sexual difference.30 Above all, they were committed to a concept of the transhistorical event as that which alone might reverse the injustice of the world (see GR, p. 27). This commitment ran deep: the true religion was epiphanic, but for that very reason was also haunted by long periods of obscurity. In effect, Nizari narratives hinged on a concept of the event and the

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remainder. In 1162, a second Hassan, the Imam Hassan ibn Mohammed ibn Bozorg Ummid, assumed power. In 1164, he announced the Qiyamat al-Qiyamat, the Great Resurrection.31 For the Nizaris, the Great Resurrection was the culmination of the series, a nec plus ultra of the revival of the radical principle. However, the revival did not last long: in 1210, with the second Hassan’s death, his successor broke ‘with the doctrine of the resurrection itself and re-­established Muslim law’ (GR: 31). The messianic experience of Alamut was over. In effect, it had borne out the Nizari theory of history. The younger Jambet’s interest was in large part in communities that had known events, an ‘anthropomorphosis’ (PRE, p. 20), ‘a metamorphosis of each and every soul’.32 Alamut encouraged an indifference to all knowledge save that of singularity: everyone, for example, could now read the Koran in his or her own light. This was all born of Ismaili historical experience. In the case of Alamut, what was at stake was, not philosophy or established knowledge, but Hassan as a ‘primordial theophanic figure’,33 and with him a community that might be kept in ‘a state of resurrection’.34 Furthermore, Hassan’s intensity and power were based entirely on the exhibition of a need, ‘a desire in man’ (PC, p. 202). Men, he proclaims, are linked, not through law and government but in the freedom and equality of the act of being itself (ibid.). This is the political good, a world brusquely ‘torn away from the darkness of injustice’ (PC, p. 209). The common problem with politics is that it unendingly commits itself to a particular ‘horizon of finitude’ (PC, p.  216).35 But at Alamut the ultimate reason of politics becomes a return to the truth of the act of being, ‘this movement of spontaneity in which is rent asunder all finitude’ (PC, p. 203). This truth is not the knowledge of any particular ontic reality, but the truth of its emergence, the moment of ‘an infinite expansion’ within it (LSOI, pp. 14, 23). It reverses Koranic law and abolishes the Sharia. Law is a function of a fallen world whose redemption is now shown to be possible. Final authority lies elsewhere, in spiritual experience, ontological awareness, ‘illuminative knowledge’.36 It is Tusi, above all, who understands Ismailism. He faithfully interprets the entire Ismaili quest ‘in terms of real politics’, a real politics that necessarily appears as an anti-­ politics, with the resurrection dissolving an established political conception of the world, proving it possible to unite men in absolute singularity and therefore absolute equality by means other than ‘exploitation, oppression and egoism’, which do not unite them at all (C, p. 242). Yet the Nizaris must suffer as a consequence of Alamut. They must think through and come to terms with a spiritual eclipse. They must experience as their ‘surpassable horizon’, not only the haunted condition ‘of the act of messianic waiting’, but ‘its repeated historical check’, the consequence of the reassertion of a certain religious, theological, legal and social order (QQS, p.  253). Esoteric Islam’s ‘tragic destiny’ is to be ‘in history in order to bear witness against history’ (HE, p. 210). Jambet rather beautifully conceives of Massignon as sharpening the polarity of history and metahistory to an antithesis between the history we know, that continues indifferently, that it would be naive to think we are in any degree done with, that continues to perpetrate and spawn endless horror, and, on the other hand, redemption, ‘the event of truth and justice’ and ‘our transhistorical destination’.37 This, remarks Jambet, rightly, is where philosophy, silent today in a manner that leaves the path

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always open ‘to interest, the will to survive, omnipotence’ (PPM, p. xv), should make itself heard again. Tusi, Suhravardi, Massignon and Corbin may serve as our lodestars. To summarize: the crucial point is that, for the esoterics, historical time has the structure of a punctuated melancholia, a melancholic-­ecstatic structure. Sadra states that it is impossible to isolate Islamic ontology from ‘ecstatic’ experience on the one hand and an ‘intense melancholy’ on the other (this, again, being abundantly evident in Persian and Arabic poetry, AE, p.  175). Here melancholy ceases to be a nosological category and becomes an (unFreudianly) ontological one; and ecstasy is ontological, too (see PC, p. 217). Certainly Ismailism must have its profound melancholy, for the day of resurrection ‘dawns with intense clarity only to fade away in that very moment’ (ibid.). The time of resurrection that breaks through ‘temporal duration’ appears only sporadically and rarely (GD, p. 148). From early on, the Imams had to think of their true victory as taking place in a hypothetical or indeterminate future. That kind of reservation seemed particularly plausible to the various violently oppressed minorities within Islam, who turned all the more willingly to messianism. Sadra differs from the Gnostics and the Ismailians in his conviction of the ‘absolute positivity’ of the divine (GD, p.  112). Yet even Sadra is uneasily aware that, since God is exempt, not only from nomination or representation, but from any self-­manifestation apart from the world, the history of being cannot ever quite rejoin its ‘supreme principle’ (AE, p. 178). This builds a nostalgia or yearning, a waiting for parousia, into the very heart of Islam (HE, p. 208). Here an Islamic form of thought helps us understand ourselves. For all the progressive Western persuasions and mindsets, radical or not, over the past two centuries, and for all the efforts to counter progressivism with assertions of changelessness, modern experience, political history and political truth have borne out neither. They have rather constantly exhibited a melancholic-­ecstatic structure. With a very few exceptions, notably the grandeur of the Frankfurt School, and Agamben, politics and political thought have not wanted to know or dwell on this kind of perspective. By contrast, from Wordsworth to Beckett, modern art and above all modern literature have said it repeatedly. As we’ve seen, Woolf and Wagner, for example, grasp the melancholic-­ecstatic core of modernity with a virtually unparalleled intensity, power and insight. Equally, the melancholic-­ecstatic structure offers us an important means of re-­describing ironical modernity. To put the point in a Gnostic idiom: modernity seems to point towards a theory of ‘the irruption of events’ in a world where shadows constantly impinge upon ‘the light of being’ (QQS, pp.  119–20). There are many modern writers and artists who would have understood that statement. Put matters more Kantianly and, as Jambet says, without a theory of the event, the phenomenal world will always threaten to reduce us merely to our ‘penchants pathologiques’.38 It is striking to find Jambet claiming that his most profound interest is ultimately in the vital (and for us, surely contemporary) Kantian question: ‘What am I permitted to hope?’ (PRK, p. 8). A full recognition of the melancholic-­ecstatic structure of modernity drastically revises the modern hope, without exactly cancelling it. It beckons us away from what is by now the hollowness of any coherent narrative of progress, and towards Suhravardi’s recognition that, so far as we know, the sole form of ‘salvation’ lies in the power of singularities in the face of the insistent groundswell of

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negativity (PA, p. 101). If, always, ‘l’homme est à faire’,39 that knowledge is a messianic knowledge and the capacity to act on it only very intermittently available. Since, however, the event always introduces a certain experience of the void, we cannot exclude the possibility of an event which would transform the melancholic-­ecstatic structure itself.

Occultation and the survival of truth But how do we orient ourselves, relative to a melancholic-­ecstatic modernity? What should we do with the remainder, in the great, extended epochs of occultation? Here, again, Islamic tradition can help us. What matters is the prosecution and survival of (political) truth, and therefore its transmission. However, the problems besetting transmission are many and formidable. Much of what follows will be concerned with them. For Corbin, writes Jambet, ‘the living essence of spiritual Islam could not but be a rare and hidden reality, living in a few faithful hearts’, the rest being merely ‘un jeu d’ombres néfastes et futiles’ (QQS, p. 18). How can such a ‘reality’ be kept alive, persist at all, given the historical oscillations to which it is prey, the breaks and lacunae in its historical trajectory? After Alamut, the idea of a life ‘outside the legislated city’ becomes sustainable, and even necessary (PTI, p. xiii). But who should sustain it, and how? Esotericism bequeathes a ‘secret legacy, the haqiqa’, as its abiding truth (HE, p. 219). But how does one ensure that the truth indeed abides? How does one communicate an ‘inspirational’ knowledge (PC, p. 198)? How does one convey the difference between it and idle ones? The law of history ‘does not favour messianic movements, which are exceptions incapable of resisting their milieu and reproducing themselves’.40 Gnostic knowledge does not amount to a ‘historical progressivism’, and so the visionaries and philosophers of the past are ‘contemporary with us’ (GD, pp.  9, 37). But equally, obviously enough, there is a certain incentive to clear and credible transmission in a progressivism, however unlikely and doomed to fail it is, and a certain logic to the stages of its story, that are not present in the messianisms. Historically, what matters are events and their continuing effects. But the knowledge of metahistorical time does not automatically survive a period of obscurity. In ‘the time of darkness’, it requires particular forms of transmission (GR: 66). How can the messianic act take a form that allows it to outlast the instant? How does the truth of the resurrection persist? How does it determine its own history, a history proper to itself, without collapsing into mere chronos? The history proper to Islamic ontology is ‘a liturgy of the spirit’ not incarnated in ‘concrete, temporal effects’ (SE, p. 361). But in a time of occultation when the truth lies hidden, when the world will at best ignore and at worst beleaguer and seek to annihilate it, is an indifference to ‘concrete, temporal effects’ not a hostage to fortune? The question of the preservation of a truth, and therefore of the ‘chain of transmission’, the modes of possible transmission, cannot but be at issue (GD, p. 9). Jambet’s key term, here, is hierohistory. Hierohistory is transmission via the ‘mediators’ between the divine principle and man, the prophets, Imams and messianic subjects (GD, p. 26). They are underwritten as mediators by the ‘rarity’, the ‘exceptional

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character’ of their ‘intellectual life [vie intellective]’, and by their past experience of an ‘étincelle suprasensible’, an event (GD, p. 56). They are committed to a sense of political possibility, because their experience has made them understand the proximity, the ‘voisinage’ of the event, the logic and the reality of the metahistorical encounter (GD, p. 311). They pass on a knowledge that is transhistorical, and which therefore brings out the spectrality of any specific historical formation. Hierohistory, then, is the history of the occasions of spirit and the series of subjects of messianic truths. In 1256, Alamut surrendered to the Mongols. At that point, both it and what it signified were at an end. The invasion and the ensuing dispersion and dissolution, the chasm they open up, call for the development of a hierohistory. What is left of fidelity to the event, in times of darkness? How can one continue as a subject, when ‘it is apparently no longer possible’ to do so (GR, p. 333)? What is the ethics of a dissolved community? How is it possible to produce such an ethics without falling back into the governmental and juridical disposition? How to find principles, methods and a system of conduits for a messianic thought? These are the motivating questions that galvanize a tradition and call for creative solutions. The appearance of Hassan seemed to obviate any need to think in terms of forms of transmission (like education), since he promised liberty at once. But the community must renounce the idea of an immediate and imperative liberty, because it will inevitably encounter forces threatening to destroy it from without and erode it from within, must inevitably decline, fragment and disperse. Here the hierohistorical tradition comes into its own. In a time of occultation, the messianic subject asserts the imperative of a turn inward, to an inward sense. Transmission itself is inseparable from a form of interiority, an inward assumption of ‘the burden of revelation’ (QQS, p. 260), of which there are nonetheless outward signs. The power of the messianic subject is visible to others, even if they lack the experience that conferred it and do not exactly recognize the subject for what he or she is. Messianic subjects share a subjective orientation that is readable or perceptible in them in a variety of different ways. Within the interior space that has become more real than the real world, the messianic subject can remain more or less faithful to malakut, the world of events, to the memory of events. This is by no means the same as ‘personal development’. The Gnostics distrust the ‘personal impulse’. In the luminous life, there is rather extinction of self. The messianic subject strives to live with or close to, even to ‘imitate’ the act of being; that is, to cultivate a certain openness to process, to effusion, a spontaneity that mirrors the spontaneity characteristic of the act of being and leaves no place for ego (QQS, p. 246). A messianic interiority need not be conceived of, however, as condemning the subject to solitude. The faithful survive, not as dispersed monads, but as a ‘hidden’ world, ‘an interior community whose memory mocks both time and place’ (GD, pp. 67, 69, HC, p. 14); that is, they recognize each other by their detachment from their historical surrounds. This is comprehensible enough, since they are waiting, turned elsewhere. At the same time, however reluctantly, messianic subjects will learn to compose with law, even whilst not believing in it. The subject is not invariably required to stand forth. There may be a point to taqiyya, dissimulation tactics (QQS, p. 103), a need for prudence, secrecy, silence, for quietism, clandestinity. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was the very opposite of this, privileging the Sharia, appropriating and claiming to

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represent the tradition of the Imamate whilst actually fusing it with political power, the world of the jurists and theologians. Foucault, of course, saw in the Iranian revolution the emergence of a ‘spiritual politics’ decisively breaking with the assumptions intrinsic to modern Western political thought.41 Jambet does not. The truly significant politics in Islam lies in a tradition that it was once possible for Europe actually to share with it. This faded from the European scene with the increasing dominance of Copernican and Galilean thought, and the accompanying decline of a world represented in its dying phases by Florentine Neoplatonism and the Cambridge Platonists,42 but that remained alive in the intellectual culture of Islam. By contrast, the Ayatollahs, says Jambet, startlingly, are actually not unlike modern Europeans – the title itself does not go back beyond the twentieth century – in being modern rationalists bereft of the patience that comes of an acceptance of a melancholic-­ecstatic history. They do not recognize the truth of occultation or the necessity of ‘l’attente messianique’ (QQS, p.  278). They rather seek, in the typical modern manner, to fill all the lacunae in, to want completion here and now. But Jambet also has only a little in common with the modern progressives and the contemporary liberals who deplored Foucault’s indifference to the Ayatollahs’ authoritarian position on gender and sexuality.43 Since he takes his bearing from esotericism, his conception of equality is more capacious than theirs, though, as we saw in the case of Alamut, in its capaciousness, it incorporates sexual freedom and gender equality, that goes almost without saying. But it is nonetheless not captive to any modern, progressive or liberal positivity. Taqqiya means that the esoterics return ‘to the exoteric cult’. But this is an ‘apparent return’ ‘and must remain apparent’ only (PC, p. 204). They know that, where laws are fugitive, truth endures, that ‘the eternal Imamate’ always returns in the singular Imam. But they also recognize the force of what Jambet calls ‘a dialectic of duration’ (GR, p.  350): that is, they recognize the irrepressible persistence of the Imamate but also foresee the worst, anticipate defeat and failure, and incorporate senselessness and fortuitousness at the core of their thought, though never as its final word. The faithful subject must keep the transhistorical scheme in mind and await a new event (though, evidently enough, the new event may not involve him or her). Faithful subjects must dispose themselves as ‘subjects in waiting’.44 Certainly, in an era of occultation, a time of distress, the faithful subject may feel a great sadness born of the experience of a historical project not accomplished. But the messianic imperative remains immanent in the world. The faithful at least have their ‘separate hypostases’, even if these are unHegelian and no longer involve a vision of unity (GR, p. 336). The subject should therefore continue to attend to the obligations of messianic knowledge, even when the possibility of liberty is veiled. This constitutes his or her ‘ethical lifestyle’, a life ‘ “in the state of Resurrection” valid for the whole period of concealment’ (PC, p. 204).

Lacanian caveats All this is relevant to a political truth or truths of modernity that we might think of as by now at risk of occultation, and even oblivion. But I want further to problematize my

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account by running Jambet up against a different kind of concern with the transmission of a difficult, rare, obscure truth: Lacan’s. I shall focus on the late Lacan, Seminars XVI and after, with forays back into Seminars VII–XI. Introducing Lacan is a way of buttressing and enhancing the truths of history and politics I have been developing; raising some awkward questions for the historical preservation of those truths; and preparing the route to a final section in which I aim to provide at least some sort of answer to the questions. I’ll proceed with the points in that order. There are several reasons for taking a Lacanian direction. First, the late Lacan was a major influence on the young Jambet, and something of a Lacanian orientation and vocabulary persist throughout his work. There are many significant overlaps between the two, but also some vital differences, not least Lacan’s conviction that central to the problem of transmission is the fact that meaning-­making itself produces ‘opacity’.45 Second, the structure of Lacanian analytical thought and Lacanian analysis bears a certain resemblance to the structure of historical and political experience that I evoke in this book. At this point, it will be as well to review a few basics. In Lacanian terms, language gives rise to a ‘splitting’ in human beings between their linguistic and their non-­linguistic selves and lives. This is a problem and a predicament. Men and women are the beings who turn in upon themselves reflectively, lose themselves in doing so, and have never had any idea what to do about it. Everything we have been told about ‘the mainspring of the unconscious’ represents nothing but this ineluctable truth.46 It is a permanent conundrum for us, not least politically. In sexual relations, the ‘split’ gives rise to another disjunction, that between enjoyment or fulfilment and the image or semblance. (It is worth stressing that modern literature, of course, has long understood this. Valéry, Proust and Eliot are merely three figures who immediately spring to mind). Women particularly know it, because it is above all men who approach them in the hope that they will give the semblance form, a body or locus. Thus, famously, ‘there is no sexual relationship’. In ‘the simple relationship between man and woman’, writes Lacan, with delicate irony, ‘things haven’t been able to move beyond that point’.47 This is key, and at the same time a metaphor or illustrative. In Aristotle’s terms, microcosm and macrocosm are everywhere interconnected (SVII, p. 22). In between us and the goal of our endeavours there is always the image that goes before us. The Freudian Ebenbild, the likeness, the similitude, the counterpart that resembles something else, is ‘always the same, without variation’, and always ‘accompanies the subject structuring its desire’.48 ‘The structure never lets go [n’en démord pas]’, and the ‘non-­dupes’ who suppose that they have seen through it, or escaped it in demystifying it, merely return to it (SXXI, p. 11). Psychoanalytical experience unearths a truth, here, in its central domain, the sexual relation, which applies to ‘every conceivable form of our condition’, ‘all the torment of our experience’.49 We try to escape it, but merely keep on designating it as a founding and ineradicable defect in the structure of our relation to the other. Truly significant political change could only take place on the basis of a different kind of disjunction according to which we would no longer shore up the Ebenbild as a form of knowledge both underwritten by and ensuring potency. This would mean no less than an end to the dominance of consciousness itself.50 This, however, is not to turn Lacan into a fatalist. Could an analyst properly be one? In all spheres of human activity, including the political, but notably in love and above

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all the analysis itself, Lacan is vitally concerned with the ‘slim chance’ of the break or rupture.51 Everything hinges on that. Most obviously, perhaps, the seventh chapter of Seminar XX, entitled ‘A Love Letter’, is very much about love as ‘occasionally’ possible when, in a rare event, the sexual relationship drops ‘into the abyss of nonsense’ (SXX, p. 87). More generally, there is the occasion when the plus-­de-jouir, surplus enjoying, involves a displacement in which the drive and what Lacan calls jouissance are ‘zielgehemmt’, diverted from their ‘goal’ (SXVI, p.  214). The plus-­de-jouir (of which sublimation is a major instance) is the rare break with the infernal condition that is ‘where we are already’, all the time (SXVI, 150). The rarity of the break is hardly surprising, since it involves a difference with the Law, is a stranger to norms and any return to them. This particular structure of thought reappears pervasively in Lacan. Any knowledge worth having ‘se produit en un éclair’ (SXVI, p. 200). It occurs only when the subject extricates itself from a certain signifying discourse. The analytic passe, where the analysand overcomes the impasse in which he or she was previously stuck and finds that he or she can ‘live anew’, is a strange, uncommon and unpredictable event of this kind.52 Badiou (a serious Lacanian) glosses this well. As modes of emancipation, the passe and the event are alike in being ‘localized, an exception, an almost invisible flaw in the order of things’.53 Indeed, Badiou asserts that his own (so-­called) ‘radical materialism’, which ‘acknowledges the unforeseeable [Lacanian] real’ in the form of the event, follows in Lacan’s footsteps.54 In a phrase of Lacan’s to which Badiou returns, like the event, the passe ‘raise[s] impotence to the level of the impossible’.55 (Compare Daniel Dorling, also on ‘the impossible’; I referred to this in Chapter 1, p. 47). A third reason for bringing in Lacan is that the political thought most plausibly derivable from his later work has a structure analogous to the political theology I am elaborating. Whilst political readings of Lacan have been around for a long time, above all Slavov Žižek’s,56 they have tended to serve what I call the psychic reassurance of the political subject. There is actually little to reassure us in Lacan’s politics. Insofar as Lacan turns to the positive at all, it is by way of a rigorous political minimalism, that I like to think rather resembles mine, which takes as its starting point the seeming unbreakability of repetitive patterns, without giving up on the possibility of the decisive rupture. For Lacan as for Badiou, the rupture is logically possible. Lacan takes us to be caught in extreme political difficulty. We are overshadowed by our history. To think otherwise is merely evasion. To suppose that we have finished or can readily finish with the history of the camps is an especially idle and ‘absurd idea’ (SX, p. 173). The predicament is the more notable in that, by now, happiness ‘has become a political matter’. But there is ‘no satisfaction for the individual outside of the satisfaction of all’ (SVII, p.  292). With striking prescience, in the midst of the Cold War era, Lacan foresaw an epoch – surely ours – that would be given over wholesale to empty progressivism and false cheerfulness.57 Psychoanalysis cannot underwrite progressivism.58 Progressivism is a ‘type of cretinization’, even a ‘scandalization’ of thought (SVI, p. 174; cf. SXXI, p. 112). The Hegelian synthesis is, notably, a delusion.59 Yet all this does not mean ‘that there are not things that change’ (SXXI, p. 112; cf. SXVII, p. 113). We should hope for no more from revolution than from progress. Freud was right to be pessimistic about the masses: ‘The proletariat are like the Roman plebs. . .very

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distinguished people. . . . Senatus populusque romanus. They are on the same side. And the entire Empire includes all the rest’ (SXVII, p.  190; here, again, Lacan seems prescient). This truth needs to be held up to all who sustained a certain revolutionary fantasy in the mid- to late twentieth century. For Lacan, nothing changes with revolution.60 The demand ‘to have a chance’ of getting out of our predicament is part of the predicament itself (SXXI, p. 30). Here, again, modernity turns out to be ironical. Marxism exposes a ‘dupery’ (SXVIII, p. 164); but, says Lacan, the political ‘non-­dupes’ then reaffirm the Name of the Father in a different guise. There is no ultimate demystification of the kind the non-­dupes aspire to achieve. ‘How is it’, Lacan asks, ‘that as soon as everything is organized around the power to do good, something completely enigmatic appears and returns to us again and again from our own action – like the ever-­growing threat within us of a powerful demand whose consequences are unknown’ (SVII, p. 234)? One root of such failure is our inability to overcome the ‘fundamental hallucination’ on which perception is organized, and which dictates that our most immediate responses to each other are distrustful, threatening and isolating (SVII, p. 53).61 For Lacan too, then, we remain mired in the pre-­political condition. This is what psychoanalysis repeatedly confirms in the microcosm, and what, without knowing it, patients actually come to their analysts indirectly to ‘complain’ about (SXXI, pp. 140, 150). Lacan is very direct about our backwardness, the fact of the pre-­political as usual. Underdevelopment is not archaic; everyone knows that it is produced by the unrelenting extension of the domain of Capital: ‘I would even say more, what one notices, and what one will notice more and more, is that underdevelopment is precisely the condition for capitalist progress. . .underdevelopment that is going to be more and more patent, more and more widespread’ (SXVIII, p. 37; prescient yet again). Lacan even anticipated the concept of ‘sacrifice zones’ and ‘disposable peripheries’ that I discussed in Chapter 1. In truth, ‘everyone is sick’, and civilization is ‘a sewer. . .there is strictly no other trace of it’ (SVII, pp. 187, 197, SXXI, p. 133). Humans defend themselves by ‘lying about evil’ (SVII, p. 73), and ‘what makes what we call “human relations” bearable is not thinking about them’ (SXX, p. 105). The Colossus of Daniel, the great image of earthly power in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (DN 2, 31–5) continues to dominate the political scene.62 Lacan applauds the purity of the Cathars, who considered the world to be ‘execrable and bad in its essence’ (SVII, p. 124). Perhaps his finest and most lapidary sentence comes in Séminaire XVI: ‘l’enfer, ça nous connaît, c’est la vie de tous les jours’ (SXVI, p. 161). Note the phrasing. Analytic practice, then, is at best a matter of sporadic, broken lights. So too is the historical process, but there is at least this to be said for both, that they do not know final closure. Like Samuel Beckett, Lacan tells us that we should expect nothing, but that that does not mean that nothing can ever happen. This is precisely what qualifies Lacan’s political thought as melancholic-­ecstatic. The ‘meteor’ may always appear in the historical night (SXX, p. 86), as in certain practices ‘in non-­historical societies’ (potlatch, mediaeval rites, SVII, pp. 234–5). Here ‘everything occurs as if the foregrounding of the problematic of desire required as its necessary correlative the need for ostentatious forms of destruction [of goods], insofar as they are gratuitous’ (SVII, p. 235). The ethics of psychoanalysis itself involves a sacrifice of the good that is jouissance, lusty self-­

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intentness, the poursoir – a Lacanian coinage denoting the pursuit (poursuite) of what is for-­oneself (pour-­soi) – to the good that is desire appearing as the plus-­de-jouir. In such an act of sacrifice, the world in which jouissance is everywhere becomes the inert remainder left by desire. So, too, the sacrifice is always in potentia political. In Lacan’s great account of her in Seminar VII, Sophocles’s Antigone emerges precisely as a paradigm of that. My fourth reason for introducing Lacan is that, whilst it is true that he has little or no time for historical thought per se,63 that he claims there is always an artifice to thinking historically, he is also Foucauldianly conscious of historicity. He is very aware that psychoanalysis is a historical phenomenon, that it shifts and modulates with the times (as is clear enough in his engagements with Freud),64 that discourses are historical, that they can succeed or fail historically.65 He knows that analysis must adapt to social and cultural ‘trends’ (to the limits of ‘the meaning in which you live’, SXX, pp. 51, 79; see also p.  54). One obvious example would be the way biological advances in the determination of paternity change the question of the Name of the Father.66 Lacan has a keen sense of the particularity of his epoch (the age of the end of humanism).67 Resistant as he undoubtedly is to historical thought as knowledge and representation, he also vividly experiences the gulf between a seeming historical and political impasse and the truth of absolute historicity. The question of transmission, of how one passes on psychoanalytical knowledge, is also crucial to him. But what is at stake is complex, difficult and uncertain. The psychoanalytic orientation cannot be transmitted as are official, established, dominant or orthodox forms of knowledge. Like the knowledge of Alamut, it involves an obscure lore, a knowledge that is frail and may easily die, a knowledge at risk (‘there is no plausible reason why reality should be heard and should end up prevailing’, he says. ‘The prospect is exactly the opposite’, SVII, p. 39). The orientation cannot be transmitted through the learned discourses, universities or other institutions. Discours universitaire aims for an integral transmission according to which the learned pass on knowledge, whole, to those eager for it or in need of receiving it.68 It (necessarily) ignores its own historicity, its commitment to historically particular forms of making sense (SXIX, p. 28).69 As Lacan himself suggests, the title of Seminar XVIII, Of a Discourse which Might not be a Semblance, expresses the tacit but unrealizable aspiration of all university discourse and learned research.70 University discourse ignores and denies its own passional cause, the degree to which it might have obscure roots in the jouissance of the sujet supposé savoir, the subject supposed to know. In other words, it reverses what psychoanalysis recognizes, that ‘the knowledge which is not known. . .is really what is doing the work’ (SXVII, pp. 35, 41). Philosophical and theoretical discourses are likewise not adequate to the task of transmission. Philosophy makes a fundamental error: that you can think first, and the image, the Vorstellung, the ‘imaginary composition’ comes second. But the image is always there from the start (SVII, p. 60). It is always there already because language is always already there too, determining what is possible.71 Because of language, ‘the subject believes he or she can attain to the concept, that is to say, believes he or she can seize the real by a signifier which commands it’ (SX, p. 344). But language itself has produced and conditioned the very real it seeks to grasp. We are always and inescapably

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lodged in the world of appearances.72 Thus ‘the whole world is suspended on a dream of the world’ (SXVI, p. 193), and so is thought. Furthermore, philosophy like discours universitaire is dislocated, in that thought itself ‘by its very nature occurs according to unconscious means’ (SVII, p. 32). Under all thought lies a question of something more real than thought itself, the jouissance of the thinking subject. Philosophical discourse can only function in detaching itself ‘from that in which we are caught and engaged’ (SXVI, p.  159), as Socrates and his companions bracket off the question of his relationship with his wife Xanthippe from his wisdom. Thus philosophical transmission must always run the risk, not only of occlusion and unself-­consciousness, but of backfiring, exposing that which it did not mean to expose, reversing into a message it could not have anticipated because it had always excluded the possibility of it. The trouble with philosophical and learned discourses alike as vehicles of transmission is that they are founded on a fantasy of mastery where there can be none, where history, the unconscious and language conspire to erode all such pretensions. In this respect, knowledge has always been ‘an affectation in the service of the discourse of the master’ (SXIX, p. 223). All such discourses are of what Lacan calls the phallic function; that is, they are implicated in an assertion of power and authority that disguises and evades the truth of impotence or lack. Here microcosm and macrocosm coincide: men and women alike are fated to impotence by the symbolic weight they in their different ways attribute to masculinity,73 and this breeds and shores up a deceitful pretence to power. Power and authority today are professions, in more ways than one. For the phallus is not there where it should be, as we know every time the sexual flux withdraws ‘and exposes the sand beneath’ (SX, p. 311). Hence the fact that we have to put power everywhere else, find surrogates for it: this is a necessary consequence of the anguish that is ‘the truth of sexuality’ and that is a function of another truth, that of irreducible separation.74 One surrogate for the phallus is the ‘transcendental I’ of philosophy and its variants and spin-­offs. The transcendental I ‘is what anyone who has stated knowledge in a certain way harbours as truth’ (SXVII, p.  62). But this ideal I, self-­identical, not discontinuous or myriad, is an illusion. The discourse of the transcendental I has always and from the start been bound up with the subject’s interests, interests that it is likely both to repress, in supposedly bracketing off its jouissance, and obliquely to indicate. The lack intrinsic to the sexual relationship will always be mutely at stake in the discourse of the transcendental I however seemingly commanding. As we just saw, Socrates would be a case in point, but with any given philosopher, the question will always be there. It is a question for the final credibility of any transmission of philosophical knowledge. We nourish the belief that discourses can supplement lack, make for completion. That is the foundation for any assumption of transmissibility. But the lack is created by discourse itself, which then turns back to and seeks to stop it up (‘le combler’, SX, p. 156). We cannot escape the lack precisely because it is the signifier that is forever striving to erase it. For its part, psychoanalytic discourse overcomes nothing (‘Le propre de la psychanalyse, c’est de ne pas vaincre, con ou pas’).75 It stands ‘at the opposite pole’ to the master’s discourse (SXVII, p. 87). It puts into question any authority seemingly deriving from science and scientific discourse, including its own, which is finally ‘rogation de savoir, surrogaton de savoir’ (SXIX, p. 79). Here knowledge

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becomes inseparable from a psychological orientation in which the jouissance of the knower or thinker is zielgehemmt, and does not relentlessly impose itself. But in what mode is it possible to transmit a knowledge determined by such a condition? Here Lacan oscillates between a radical, intellectually-­driven doubt and a wry, often playful concession of limited possibilities. At one extreme, his position regarding communication seems close to that of a peculiarly grim, late existentialist. We grasp nothing certain when we read Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, he tells his audience; but then, they themselves do not begin to understand him.76 His Entretiens at the Chapelle of Sainte-Anne are entitled Je parle aux murs, I am Talking to the Walls.77 Indeed, everything we write only reinforces ‘the wall’ (SXIX, p.  75). If thought ‘communicates itself ’ at all, it is ‘by means of misunderstanding’ (SXVII, p. 159). The difficulty lies in the very ironic foundation of signification itself: ‘Since we have signifiers, we must understand one another, and this is precisely why we don’t’ (SXVII, p. 33). However, this situation by no means simply leads to a counsel of despair. What Lacan rather pervasively insists is that transmission involves sustaining and communicating a crucial truth that at the same time can only be mi-­dit, half-­said. His starting-­point, again, is always the ‘fracture’, the ‘bi-­partition’ of ‘the [human] being to which the being accommodates itself ’ (SXI, p. 106). This ‘splitting’ means that truth is never complete. Beyond the half that is sayable, ‘there is nothing to say. Here, consequently, discourse is abolished’ (SXVII, p. 51). The supposed whole truth ‘can only be found outside all propositions’ (SXVII, p. 91). The concept of truth is founded on a claim that language can grasp the world whole. But the Real is precisely what ceaselessly resists or refuses inscription, articulation, lies beyond or behind ‘the automaton of language’ (SXI, pp. 53–4); that for Lacan is what defines it as such. The subject ‘is divided by the effects of language’ (SXI, p. 188). All transmission is thus ‘contaminated by the fact of being involved in another satisfaction’ which is ‘at the level of the unconscious – in so far as something is said there and is not said there’ (SXX, p. 49). But the unconscious is not some primal or archaic force, ‘to be placed at the level of being before it is revealed’. It ‘is not at all. . .a field of elementary, organic, carnal facts, of biological thrusts [poussées], but articulable as being of the order of thought. . .articulated in linguistic terms’ (SXVI, p. 287). Language produces the unconscious, but does so specifically ‘in its own image’, according to its own structure (SXI, p. 149). The Other is always already there ‘in its formations’ as ‘a play of the signifier’ (SXI, pp. 53–4). But what this in turn means is that we are made up, not of a coolly rational self and a wild, unruly, unreachable other, but of two systems. True, one of these must be relegated, made secondary. We are thus always conditioned by an ‘imbalance’ or ‘radical inadequation’ (SVII, 28). But the subject is nonetheless in both places. However, it is not there in both places in the same way. For unconscious knowledge is ‘the debris of conscious savoir’, a ‘disjointed knowledge’, which cannot properly make its way back into ‘the discourse of science’ (SXVII, p.  91). Here the subject ‘alternately, reveals itself and conceals itself ’ (SXI, p. 188), appears as ‘all sorts of affects that remain enigmatic’ (SXX, p. 139). All the same, any serious truth must find support in unconscious knowledge, ‘knowledge which is supposed to be supported by the fact that one does not know that one knows’ (SXXI, p. 95). What this means for transmission, again, is that truth will necessarily be only half-­conveyed.

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The objet petit a – the most characteristic ‘pollution’ in the world, ‘from which man takes his substance’– has a similar effect (SXIX, p. 218). Every truth ‘has the structure of fiction’ (SVII, p. 12). Because he or she is a construction in language, this is equally the case with the subject (SX, p. 137). As such, the subject is barred from an other that cannot be authenticated, that is created by and always definitively beyond any means of representation. We ask the other to complete our lack, but this is in vain. The subject necessarily responds to the lack by producing the objet petit a as that which will putatively ‘stop up the hole of desire’ (SX, p.  146). He or she requires the other to correspond to the stopgap (SXI, p. 33), a demand that spells damage: ‘I love you, but because inexplicably I love something more than you – the objet petit a – I mutilate you’ (SXI, p. 263). Objet a can never be the adequate counterpart of desire. In the objet a we can only miss our object, as Oedipus misses the real Jocasta.78 Yet we are in this position ‘at every moment of our existence’ (SXIX, p. 89). The macrocosm mirrors the microcosm. Why do modern political purposes so universally go astray? Why do our best intentions and highest and most luminous values lead to disaster? Why do our modern political projects misfire, or rebound upon their projectors? Why, given all our struggles for and assertions of progress, do we seem condemned indefinitely to tread the same frustrating circles? Why does one feel that the logic of modern politics is twisted and warped? Why do we no longer have ‘any kind of Idea of what might trace out for us the path of the Good’ (SXXI, p. 122)? Why is modernity never other than ironical? ‘Between the motion/and the act/. . .Between the conception/And the creation. . ./Between the potency and the existence/. . .Falls the Shadow’.79 Always, the lack: language between us and the world, fiction between us and the truth, the imagined object between us and the object proper, the gap between desire and completion or fulfilment, unconscious production between intention and realization: the political vector or trajectory cannot but be deflected or refracted, stray off course. Whether or not, as Lacan himself asserted, the unconscious is politics, it is surely a mistake to doubt, in the manner of contemporary managerialists and their intellectual camp-­followers, that there is a political unconscious. But what then of transmission, which, hypothetically at least, takes the form of a vertical descent, or a straight line from aim to target? How, if at all, can it take place, in spite of the objet petit a and the lack? The Lacanian thesis has a number of different consequences. To begin with, transmission has to include the communication of its own incompleteness. There is always a shortfall in transmission, an acknowledgement that light and illumination also bring shadow.80 There will always be a sense of the ‘failure’ or ‘unworthiness’ of the transmission (SXVII, pp.  83, 182–3). For ‘resistance accumulates’ even as the transmitted content ‘makes its way’, and the relevant concepts are blurred and uncertain (‘si floue, si incertaine’, SXVI, pp. 46, 86). The fact that one is speaking and enjoying speaking remains forgotten ‘behind what one says’ (SXIX, p. 230). But that one, one alone, l’un tout seul is speaking gets forgotten too. The singular subject can of course transmit. But he or she cannot transmit whole, first, because the isolation of the transmitter makes it impossible, and, second, because he or she is divided. Transmission does not come from a unitary source, and is therefore uneven: when ‘the [transmitting] subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as “fading”, as disappearance’ (SXI, p. 218). The faithfulness or consistency of

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the receiver of the message, too, must always be in doubt. If Lacan stipulates that there is ‘no way of following me without passing through my signifiers’, he also knows that he must lose his ‘followers’, which must inevitably lead them to assert a ‘difference’ (SXI, p.  217). The disparities intrinsic to communication, and therefore to transmission, seem insurmountable. In psychoanalysis, only the analyst can play the role appropriate to transmission. For the analyst knows that the Real sets a limit to knowledge, and the Real is ‘indicible’, unsayable (SXVI, p. 170). The analyst also knows that transmission must necessarily take into account the fact that discourse ‘holds the subject in its sway’, and not the other way round (SXVI, p.  161). He or she also understands that transmission is not the transmission of a value or ‘unities of value’. Since the analyst must think division and the indefinite – confusion ‘is always proper to sense’ (SXIX, p.  153) – transmission cannot deal in whole messages. At the same time, there is a politics implicit in incompleteness: the receiving subject must complete the transmitted formula him- or herself, creatively, produce a meaning thus far inexistent. In other words, the subject invents. Invention has a legitimate place in transmission, says Lacan: ‘indeed I do not see any other way except inventing’ (SXXI, p.  135). The ‘desire to know’ includes a legitimate desire ‘to invent knowledge’ (SXXI, p. 136). Transmission must be scrupulous, but not over-­ambitiously or pedantically so (SXI, p. 49). The scruple has rather to do with knowing and admitting that one is working in a field of approximations and conjectures, which requires admissions of limit. As psychoanalysis has many ‘paradoxical, odd, aporic qualities’ (SXI, p.  19), so transmission is a paradoxical task: it is always the same and never the same. It is subjected to a principle of internal modification steadily down the line, not least because one’s relation to those who follow is ‘a relation to the reality of the unconscious’ (SXI, p. 149). Since (an) unconscious disposition(s) will regulate if not determine any reception of the transmission, transmission cannot legislate for its own eventualities, cannot foresee its own fate (as indeed Freud could not foresee his fate at Lacan’s hands).81 Indeed, we should relish distortions of the message, since the ‘consequences’ of the ‘emerging’ of the unconscious in the receiver indicate ‘that something may change’ even where it would seem that change ‘is not possible’, where it surely cannot be possible (SXVIII, p. 21). Analytic discourse leads to ‘an impasse’, and remains there, is designed to do so (SXX, p. 65). Yet Lacan’s acutely self-­aware paradox is also precisely an indication that, at the point of impasse, one is left only with the option, again, of ‘[raising] impotence to the level of the impossible’; in other words, of trusting to the passe or the event. But Lacan himself does not exactly follow his own logic in this way. His solution to the problem of psychoanalytic transmission – unsurprisingly, given his account of language – is rather the matheme. The matheme is a mathematical or quasi-­ mathematical formalization of a psychoanalytical concept. It is via the matheme alone that a transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge is possible whole. The matheme is precisely appropriate to a truth at risk, a truth in need of firm anchorage because sometimes so little shared, or threatened with eclipse, a truth like Jambet’s esoteric and Gnostic ones, a truth in need of encryption. Hence the matheme becomes ‘the pivotal point in all teaching’; what is transmitted ‘is the formula’ (SXIX, p. 27, SXIX, p. 113).

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Furthermore, through the matheme we overcome the problem of division. The matheme teaches the One, and only in teaching the One can we produce clarity, fixity, measurability, ‘logical consistency’ (SXVI, p. 136). The matheme has this power because it can ‘suspend’ the truth from axioms, prior decisions (SXXI, p.  35). Otherwise a subject ‘can only be the product of signifying articulation’, which it ‘never masters’ because it is an effect of it.82 Furthermore, the matheme is not context-­dependent. It can be ‘enounced and defended on its own’, ‘is knowable at every instant and can bear witness to it’. Otherwise repetition and citation necessarily introduce an element of uncertainty, since contexts change. Yet the matheme also preserves a hole, lack or absence. It necessarily has limits; there are points that ‘cannot be posed’ within it, as in the case of the series of whole numbers, which can’t be written, and therefore leaves ‘something impossible’, something that is ‘in the Real’ (SXVI, p.  330, SXVIII, p. 135). The question of how far the case for the matheme in psychoanalytic transmission is finally plausible is beyond my scope here, and indeed my expertise, though one may wonder whether it does not raise certain questions about the insistence within psychoanalysis on its scientistic claims. But when Lacan asserts that the ‘imaginary function’ is ‘absolutely foreign’ to ‘scientific enquiry’ (SXVI, p. 269), is he not barring off a certain set of methods, not least as literature and the arts particularly supply them? What of the possibility of kinetic models of understanding less inclined to fetishize clarity, fixity, determination, measurability and logical consistency than the matheme, but perhaps more able to incorporate contradiction and confusion? Do we have to insist, via the matheme, on a work of structuration that Lacan interrogates with reference to language? Do we need integral (rather than approximate) transmission? Is the insistence not a residue of the old Freudian prioritization of grand, universal, durable truths? Might an effective psychoanalysis need integral transmission less than better modes of historical specification and richer, more diverse and indeed more inventive ways of responding to historicity, historical contingency and the historical contingency of the subject? See, earlier, Foucault and Joyce. Lacanians often take a special pleasure in the arcane mystique of Lacan’s mathemes (an interesting example of jouissance)! But it is hard to imagine the ‘mathematized’ transmission of a political theology or political experience. This leaves us in a cleft stick: on the one hand, there is Lacan’s extreme scepticism: neither the sender nor the receiver or addressee can know what is properly at stake in a transmission. Equally, no transmission can survive the vicissitudes of history with any clarity or certainty. History bends, distorts, deflects messages. Their aim is open to question, their trajectory unpredictable and their end unforeseeable. One need only think of the history of, say, Wagner’s reception. But what then remains of Jambet’s account of transmission, save a charismatics? Whatever the viability of a charismatics of transmission to religious minds, we can hardly promote the idea in the case of politics. (The name of Parnell, say, here, is not to be thought of as designating a charisma). The dangers of political charisma are all too familiar. On what principles could one ever know how to repose one’s trust in one charisma and not another? In any case, assuming it to be possible at all, any firmly asserted distinction would necessarily have to resort to argument, pleading, signification – and would thus return us to Lacanian doubt.

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Transmission against the grain Here we may rather turn to the power of literature as a mode of transmission, a power too seldom grasped and appreciated as such, and on which much more work is necessary, though literary transmission happens all the time. For modern literature knows that messages have to be mixed, understands their necessary incompleteness, and transmits accordingly. Take an example that would certainly not occur to (or indeed please) everyone, might even seem almost outrageous: Evelyn Waugh. Waugh’s responses to modernity are absorbing, even galvanic. One is almost tempted to call him, as much as Wagner, a modern visionary. Waugh was expert in a modern ‘zone of insecurity’ where ‘only the artist dare trespass’.83 His work exhibits, on the one hand, an extraordinary imaginative exhilaration at the ‘crazy enchantment’ of the modern,84 the kind of new and surprising connections and disconnections that modernity opens up (the comic and supposedly satirical impulse in his writing is inseparable from glee, delight). But that freedom of connection, implicitly revolutionary as it is, suggesting that anything might be possible, is predicated on an absence of foundations, on the possibility of an ultimate truth of the void. This Waugh (like Dostoevsky) cannot accept. He shares his mentor Ronald Knox’s fear that with modernity arrives the possibility that there might be ‘an indeterminate element in the heart of things’.85 As The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold shows, Waugh was terrified that the very modernity that he so relished artistically might be ushering in a dreadful form of insanity. Hence the world productive of crazy enchantment and infinite mutation must also be reducible to a sceneless tedium, ‘flat as a map’.86 Like his boredom, Waugh’s traditionalism and Roman Catholicism and even, in old age, his gin-­soaked crustiness are necessary in order to damp down the siren voices of modernity in himself, to crush his own modernity, to serve as bulwarks. Waugh is steeped in the ironies of modernity. As Kant transmits a truth of modernity, so does he – and, precisely, in mixed manner. Lacan himself does actually point us towards literature, if fitfully and partially. He may seem distrustful of the imagination per se. He may tend to prioritize the mathematical over the literary and the aesthetic, certainly where transmission is concerned. He clearly disagrees with the Freud who, to quote Paolo Lollo, thinks that ‘Only literature can give students of psychoanalysis what the university is unable to give. . . . Literature is able to transmit what the university is unable to’.87 Yet he also concedes that psychoanalysis is usually on the receiving end of literature and cannot but fail in explicating it, which partly preserves the status Freud granted it. His engagements with Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ and Sophocles’ Antigone are well known and important, and he relates his own work to the contemporary French literary avant-­garde (SXVIII, p.  124). When he writes of the ‘poubellication’ of his work, publication for the dustbin (poubelle), he calls Beckett to mind, and indeed he thinks of his era as ‘dominated by the genius of Beckett’ (SXIX, p. 65, SXVI, p. 11). Most of all, perhaps, in Seminar XXIII, Joyce becomes a Lacanian paragon insofar as he takes his symptom on and, without supposing he can shed or transcend it, refuses to maintain it in repeating it, and rather creatively displaces it. He achieves this above all in Finnegans Wake, where he understands that language ‘is the very cancer with which the human being is afflicted’.88 Joyce produces a work that, ‘without rejoining the universe of

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discourse’, can ‘nonetheless be sure of remaining included within it’ (SXVI, p.  74). Lacan’s Joyce actually refuses to be ‘unduped’. He is rather ever more strongly ‘the dupe of this knowledge which. . .is our only lot’, the only knowledge we can have (SXXI, p. 12). Like Antigone, Finnegans Wake finally exists as the transmission of a paradigm. Indeed, to some extent, one can say the same of Lacan’s own style, where the transmission of knowledge becomes inseparable from an impetus in language that is self-­deprecating, self-­undermining and self-­transforming. Thus, while it would clearly not be right definitively to commit Lacan to the position that underwrites the importance of literature and art throughout this book, and he seldom seems anything other than chronically sceptical about representational literature in particular as Freud was not, he nonetheless at least indicates that literature can serve as a certain kind of means of transmission. A certain way of thinking literature as transmission is equally what we might derive from Lacan’s endorsement of invention. Truth requires invention. Since literature begins in this assumption, it necessarily proposes itself as the hupolepton not the doxaston, a dyad Lacan gets from Aristotle, and which pitches the ‘object of supposition’ against the ‘object of opinion’. The doxaston ‘is what works’, functions in a given historical set-­up and ensures that ‘one does not notice’ the Real or the void. If we think ‘in the order of the Real’ itself, by contrast, ‘we are forced all the time to suppose’ (SXXI, p. 86), or to grant the possibility of supposition, which means embracing the hupolepton. Literature thinks in the order of the Real, and thus becomes the hupolepton of writer and reader alike. For both must entertain a hypothesis. But if sense has the status of supposition, then as, say, in a poem by Wallace Stevens, it is insistently snatched from its opposite. It emerges on the basis of its own denial. This is what transmission in the mode of the hupolepton means, and it is above all literary. We can get a better grasp of the idea through Lacan’s critique of logical positivism. Logical positivism requires that texts should have graspable meanings, and can apprehend them itself only within that frame of understanding. For logical positivists, we should in principle devalorize all statements that offer the search for meaning no graspable result. If a philosophical text is caught red handed in non-­sense, ‘it is ruled out for that very reason’. But it is only too clear that this mode of textual pruning is also a form of loss, ‘because if we start from the principle that something that has no meaning cannot be essential in the development of a discourse, we quite simply lose our bearings’ (SXVIII, p. 59). The uncertain, the ambivalent, the enigmatic and obscure are irreducible features of texts and transmissions. Literary texts exist in a kind of clair-­obscur. Didn’t quite a lot of late twentieth-­century literary theory and criticism keep on saying that? What reader has not more or less secretly known it? The clair-­obscur is the natural element of poet, novelist and reader. He or she is caught up in an intermittent movement, oscillates between illumination and a shadow world. The virtue of the poet or novelist, says Lacan, lies precisely in the extent to which he or she not only knows but does not know what he or she is doing. This is ‘what gives to what he or she does its primordial value’, before which ‘one can truly bow one’s head’ (SXXI, p. 128). Here there can be no question of the definitive fidelity or consistency of the receiver of the message, and there will necessarily be internal modification down the line (think of the history of Shakespeare’s reception). Thus, where a political

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theology is concerned, if transmission via the matheme seems a cul-­de-sac, literature offers another route. For Lacan, this is supremely the case with Joyce. But Joyce’s radical disruption of language is only an extreme version of the literary break with the customary structures of a signifying order. Major literature repeatedly institutes such a break, is even perhaps marked out if not defined by it, through the surplus, the redundancy, the excess that constitutes major writing – that is, a major style (Dante, Donne and Milton are superlative examples). This is the mode of inhabiting the clair-­ obscur common to major literature, and therefore its mode of transmission. The clair-­obscur of major literature, of a literature that thinks, is peculiarly appropriate to a transmission of a political theology founded on a melancholic-­ecstatic conception of historical time and politics. But this is not the case in any simple sense. Quite clearly we cannot just map the one on to the other. The clarity of sense is not the same as the illumination of the event. The structural relation is however the same. Historical time has its moments of radiant truth, its periods when the consequences of those truths unfold themselves, and its dominant epochs when so much is lapse, irrelevance, confusion and despair. Literature has corresponding pulses, rhythms, shuttlings, movements between transparency and opacity, revelation and concealment, elucidation and complication. It mirrors the irreducibility of history, its lack of unity and final resolution. It incorporates resistances to, interferences with, deflections from a transmission within the transmission itself. There can be no vertical descent or straight line from aim to target of the kind I referred to earlier. Literature preserves, even reconstitutes the historical opening that is the event. But it does not do so in a final form or conclusive definition. It retains something of the indeterminacy of the event, its call for a response, completion. Wordsworth’s Prelude, for example, is not just an awesomely complex meditation on event and remainder in themselves, politically and in expanded philosophical terms. Read, indeed studied in its different versions (1799, the five-­book Prelude of 1804, 1805, 1850), it emerges as one of the very greatest pieces of modern historical and political transmission; and it is so precisely because of Wordsworth’s restlessness, the fact that he constantly rethinks, not just the meaning of events or their consequences, but the question of what the events actually were. There is a kind of chiaroscuro, a play of enlightenment and occultation through successive Preludes. A century and a half later, in a radically different manner and more abstract terms, though it is equally marked by an extraordinarily intense struggle, Beckett’s Worstward Ho works its arduous way through great murk and difficulty to a quite unexpected if fleeting, shaded and almost doubtful expression of joy.89 What it thus transmits to us is not only the quality of an event, its rarity and unpredictability and the imposing weight of the remainder, but, given that weight, the formidable task of keeping faith with the event at all. But this is likewise evident, according to Jambet, in various aspects of Persian and Arabic literature. At the ecstatic end of the spectrum, there are the ‘narratives of wonders’, the Sufi ‘récits de recontre’ (HE, p. 203). Here the individual identifies him- or herself with a messianic or eschatological time, and rushes ahead to meet an end, sacrificing the ego in the process (QQS, p. 118). But more representative would be, say, Nezami’s Seven Beauties, with its ‘epiphanic time’, its blend of ‘lightness alternating with melancholy’, its mixtures of epiphany and loss.90 Here literature serves something like

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the function of alam al-­mithal, the mundus imaginalis (imaginal world).91 In Gnostic lore, the imagination is not a capricious source of the made-­up, nor principally a creator of fabrications, myths or fictions. It is rather a rich source of thought. It ‘produces a certain mode of knowledge’ – prophetic knowledge (AE, p.  279). It understands that knowledge begins in the ‘blinding evidence’ of illumination, which has nothing to do with the separation involved in a subject ‘knowing’ an object (LO, pp. 38, 40). In the mundus imaginalis, the truth of illumination is sustained, nourished, developed and transmitted, as a memory or trace of an experience or knowledge, in the periods when all such experience and knowledge seems impossible and even delusive. This truth is ‘transhistorical’ and ‘transcultural’ (AE, p. 313, fn). The mundus imaginalis is a world of the spirit that occupies the ‘exiled’ subject as the real world does not. As we have seen, the refuge of the faithful subject in times of occultation becomes an invisible, secret and inward territory. Certainly, the mundus imaginalis is an expression, not of the whole or the One, but of lack. What is at stake in the imaginal world is the object of one’s desire, but as a phantom. But the esoterics think this quite differently to us. In an impoverished reality, phantoms may be the best resort to hand. They are not disqualified by their ‘imaginal status’. It is rather their ‘sole defect’ (AE, p. 335). It indicates their limit. They suffer from a ‘lack of concrete existence’ and are thereby ‘ineffectual’ (AE, pp.  335, 339). But if the mundus imaginalis is ineffectual, it is not abstract. The lack of concrete existence does not make imaginal forms nugatory. Its forms are produced by the imagination and have no existence in this world, but that does not mean they are abstractions from concrete existents, still less that they are non-­existent. The mundus imaginalis can therefore become a repository, a haven in which ideas of justice and the good shelter and are transmitted in times of distress, survive and are passed on, in spite of the endless and seemingly unstoppable work of power and authority, which includes the repetitive, apparently inexorable closure or blockage of the messianic trajectory. The law of the world, that ‘the more powerful effaces the weaker’, does not apply in the mundus imaginalis (AE, p.  329). As the event may abruptly reverse the effects of this work, so too the freedom of the imagination also makes them reversible in the mundus imaginalis. True, Jambet clearly distinguishes this use of the imagination from its aesthetic use, which may provide us with a thought, he tells us, but not knowledge. But when he notes that, from Suhrawardi to Sadra, the mundus imaginalis abounds in imaginative forms that Suhrawardi called ‘suspended citadels’, or citadels ‘without substrate’ (AE, p. 310),92 he sounds very close to Rancière’s concept of the condition of ‘suspension’, which he associates with literature and art (discussed in the Introduction, pp. 17–19). So, too, when Jambet asserts that ‘imaginal’ forms have a distinct ontological status, that of the semblance, that like mirror-­images, they exist, but not in reality, and can include metamorphosis, contradiction, freedom and creativity, it is hard to see why (in our terms, and given a different aesthetic tradition) the concept cannot modulate into an aesthetic one, too. Jambet advocates ‘a hierohistory of the spirit’ which is ‘at the antipodes of histories of the powers’. Hierohistories are histories of grand repudiation. They lift ‘the cloak of lead that has weighed down those who refused this world as given to us’.93 They are underwritten by the ‘intact conviction’ that makes writing last, and are therefore

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extremely durable (LMP, p. x). When Simon During suggests that those who take literature seriously today have effectively become ‘a tiny, beleaguered and disregarded sect’ committed to better experiences than those everywhere on offer around us, he is actually thinking in terms of a rather similar model, and both are relevant here.94 We have seen how crucial an ‘imaginal world’ may be to a hierohistory, and how far it is possible to reconcile that world with the clair-­obscur of literature as modes of transmission. Hierohistories work through ‘filiations’, disparate and sometimes strange connections. They make their clandestine way through many buried and obscure links, fitfully, brokenly, sporadically, appearing in a multitude of historical sources, from the Gnostics to Schelling to Nerval.95 Oscar Wilde also turns out to be exemplary here, if in a manner remote from the current celebration of him. For Jambet, Wilde finally knows that his lover Lord Alfred Douglas is treacherous, may even be hateful. But, in a tradition we see here and there, fleetingly, from Plato onwards, Wilde nonetheless commits himself to his love. It is ‘a love without an object’ from which the ‘creative imagination’ is inseparable.96 In effect, Wilde becomes part of a longstanding hierohistory and its filiations. Once more, Rumi is a major instance, though this time a Rumi who learns from an encounter. Rumi meets Shams-­i-Tabrizi, a solitary, wandering, unconventional Sufi. Shams becomes his guide and master, and transmits to the poet a rare truth that ignores ‘the vast accumulated knowledge of religious science’ (SORI, p. 12). He passes on ‘an erotics of non-­knowledge’ instead of ‘a pedagogy of knowledge’. He teaches Rumi how to remain within the image and the freedom of the act of being in the image, rather than seeking a correspondence between image (the objet a) and world. Thus Rumi learns about ‘the ungraspable object of infinite desire’ (SORI, p. 14). Then, at the furthest point, Tabrizi himself disappears. He himself now remains behind only as an image. Finally, Rumi must ‘epiphanize’ the ontological deficiency enshrined in the Lacanian concept of the Real (SORI, pp. 23–4). From there, he can go on to write a poetry about the unsayable and one’s inadequacy regarding it. As with any filiation, this will exhibit its own kind of melancholic-­ecstatic fidelity to the possibility of the event. This conception of transmission is also Nietzschean. Nietzsche thinks a philosophy of art is impossible, but searches for a history of art, conceived of, not as a chronology of periods, styles, influences, forms and techniques, but as a theory of subterranean concerns and their ‘filiations’, which writers and artists will know much more about than their commentators. Lacan provides a splendid example of this in the early fate of Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, which travels after Diderot’s death, unpublished, to Catherine the Great, then Jena, Schiller and Goethe, who translates it into German. Goethe’s translation is then translated back into French, the retranslation being the version that first appears in France. This could serve as a parable of transmission as filiation, or at least one instance or aspect of it.97 But I want to finish with a rather different example of my own, Huysmans’ À Rebours: not its reception, but the novel itself as a work of reception and transmission. For in one of its aspects it is a work of hierohistory. It is animated above all by an austere but violent contempt for the century of the failed revolutions and the triumph of the European bourgeoisie (of which we are the direct inheritors), its unrelenting commercialism and gospel of business, its materialism and utilitarianism, its

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philistinism and anti-­intellectualism and its political failure, accompanied by a specious ‘ethics’ and a capacity for doublethink. The bourgeoisie thoroughly deny the ironies of modernity whilst thoroughly depending on them for their prosperity, ‘profiting’ (in a paradigmatically modern fashion) from what are in fact incessant disasters to ‘enrich itself ’.98 Huysmans himself is relentless in turn: item by item, À Rebours is devoted to showing how bourgeois culture corrodes what it touches. This is a world given over to death. But no countervailing allegiance is possible. The aristocracy is exhausted and in chronic decline. The age of aristocratic glory is long gone and the Legitimist cause singularly futile, yet there is equally no hope to be derived from the working class and the ideologists who would side with it. The poor may attract des Esseintes’ sympathy, at times intensely so. But to what end would one conceivably take up the cause of a ‘populace’ which, on the whole, remains ‘the eternal and necessary dupe’ of the pitiless class that keeps on ‘machine-­gunning it’ (AR, p. 247)? So there is finally nowhere to turn. The remainder threatens Des Esseintes with solitude, alienation, misanthropy, ennui, distress, psychic collapse. He is nonetheless determined to continue thinking à rebours, the wrong way round, against the grain. This is what decadence is, for Huysmans: a thought pitched in intransigent opposition to bourgeois pragmatism and prudence, the bourgeois version of romanticism and, above all, bourgeois positivity, unveiling decay as a truth both ubiquitous and historical that the bourgeoisie prefer to conceal. This is what decadence really means. Here literature and art are crucial. Beginning with decadent Latin literature but focusing on nineteenth-­century France, Des Esseintes assembles a pantheon, composes a private tradition, and thus produces an anti-­bourgeois inheritance. In a world surrendered to gross error, he commits himself to residence in the imagination, his own kind of mundus imaginalis. From Baudelaire and Poe to Moreau and Redon, this proves to be a treasure trove of extreme forms of sensation, knowledge, experience, and thereby an insistence on something other, a thought categorically beyond and apart from a bourgeois set of historical and cultural dominants. Indeed, for all Huysmans’ caustic dismissals of the revolution, his tradition also reveals itself as shoring up a democratizing and even revolutionary thought, if of a distinctive kind. Huysmans’ is a thought of revolution in the negative, as, his ruthless logic informs us, is only fitting, given the disillusioning historical fate of the revolution and the class who powered it. Des Esseintes experiments with his life, putting together a composite modus vivendi deriving from a range of different inspirations, from aristocratic taste and connoisseurship, the aristocratic cult of the rare and exceptional, to a subcultural world beloved of the workers, and also lower-­class women: funambules, fairs, circuses, dives and bars, popular theatre and café-concerts. In the equalizing lifestyle Des Esseintes constructs, no definitive exclusions apply, even of the bourgeoisie: the construction owes a debt, for example, to bourgeois enthusiasm for new discoveries, new horizons, new materials and new technologies. The bourgeoisie avoid or conceal the increasingly apparent truth of the endless manipulability of nature (which is also the truth of absolute historicity). But they cannot escape it. Hence they also break with any conception of natural determination, of a world inexorably given us by nature; and here they are at one with Des Esseintes, and his fetishization of the ‘extraordinary phenomenon’ in which ‘nature counts for nothing’ (AR, p. 155).

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But it is modern literature and art, above all, that harbour and transmit the revolutionary principle, even whilst they declare its incompletion, the fact that, to think Rancièreanly, it prevails nowhere outside art. It is literature and art that commit themselves to change, experiment, the repeated posing of the modern question. One writer or artist passes it on to another, who reformulates it in terms or in a style that is both a continuation of yet differs from the one that preceded it. Such transmission, in effect, accepts the Lacanian condition. It has no one origin, is paradoxical, divided within itself, modified in its descent. This indeed is the aesthetic project as Jambet’s ‘antipodes of histories of the powers’, repeating a ‘horror’ of ‘the contemporary world’ (PHC, p. 12, AR, p. 209). Flaubert, Edmond de Goncourt, Zola, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbière, Hannon, Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle Adam: this is by no means a lineage merely glorifying art. It is ‘seditious’ (AR, p.  220). Its sedition, however, is not immediately political, but above all – to follow During – a matter of radical enlargements of experience and thought quite beyond the range of the culture and its pieties, in a language, as Huysmans crucially stresses, hugely richer than that culture’s. This, precisely, is to compose ‘a hierohistory of spirit’ that is concerned to hold open a space that the culture itself constantly threatens to close. True, Des Esseintes selects certain writers and works and discards others. But it is thus that he takes charge of the element of indeterminacy, of unpredictability that always belongs to a hierohistory, to transmission ‘against the grain’ and apart from the law of the world. Finally, by way of a codicil, it is worth noting that, piquantly, if he fits into his own hierohistory, Huysmans fits into another, too – the one with which I began this chapter. In the last six years of his life, he was befriended by none other than a young Louis Massignon. By then, he had been received into the Roman Catholic church, a conversion that, if politically disappointing, was in some degree a consequence of the rejections articulated in À Rebours. He had a marked influence on Massignon’s early thought and spiritual development. From Huysmans to Massignon to Corbin to Jambet: hierohistories do not follow simple straight lines. They twist and curve, cross and overlap, feed, fertilize, adulterate and replace one another. This is how transmission of anything resembling a political theology must work.

Conclusion: A Political Theology

Until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. Matthew 11.12 How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

Hope is a geological grace.

Psalms 137.4

Norman Nicholson

An inductive thought This book hasn’t put forward a theology properly speaking. No religious conviction or faith more or less clandestinely underlies it. To avoid any confusion about this, I’ve developed my political theology without explicitly articulating it as such or telling the reader how it is one. It has remained immanent, evinced only in and as a set of philosophical arguments and terms, historical accounts and literary analyses. There was also a second reason for proceeding in this way: much of the radical and critical political theory the academy has turned out over the past half-­century has alas seemed vulnerable to the charge of idealism, self-­persuasion, wishful thinking, more or less obvious implausibility with regard to any truly serious praxis. By now, any convincing and defensible contemporary political theory, as in Streeck’s and Berardi’s very fine work, must surely pay attention to the historical evidence, evidence of the kind I’ve repeatedly sought to take into account and sometimes to supply, evidence which, alas again, the right has often seen more clearly than the left. Without solely specifying the ‘failure’ as she does, I mean evidence as Judith Balso means it when she declares that ‘the communist hypothesis. . .failed. The evidence bears this out’. The proletariat ‘had no appointment with history’.1 The task for critical political theory today, and it is a serious and important one, is to escape all the dominant contemporary political idioms, as far as possible, their tone and language, their predisposition. It is also, if reluctantly and hesitantly, to surrender an unfounded, progressive optimism, without collapsing into mere worldliness, pragmatism or worse. The reimagination of time, history, possibility and political experience is at stake in this. It is with such a task in mind that, finally, I articulate my political theology as such.

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Political theology in my sense does not put forward any supposedly viable praxis. But if it comes up short, it knows it does so, knows why and says so. It doesn’t exclude the thought of a viable praxis, but prefers to await the emergence of one worth waiting for, rather than laying flattering unctions to the soul. It remains, self-­consciously, a thought; a thought that takes the full weight of what history and our present circumstances tell us, in that it bridges the gap between what might seem inexorably to be the political case – justice and the political good remain definitively beyond our reach – and a philosophically founded knowledge that this need not absolutely be so. It thinks somewhat in terms of Hobbes’s account of God’s ‘twofold Kingdom’, the ‘Natural’ and the ‘Prophetic’.2 Obviously, then, in my concluding chapter, I must finally explain what I take to be the meaning of a political theology; how I understand the structure of the thought presented here as indeed one; the reasons for insisting on and continuing to pursue it; my position relative to one or two key debates about political theology; and my response to recent critiques of it. I’m going to do all of these things here, ending, as is only fitting, by turning to the Bible, theologians themselves, and one or two poets whose work is theological and political together. How do we think a theology that is not one? In Foucauldian mode, Jambet asserts that the question of the validity of a religious faith is merely uninteresting. For to judge a faith as of no account is at once to introduce an exterior norm as to whose validity and putative superiority there can be no cast-­iron certainty. The revealed religions are not ‘cultural phenomena’; nor are they to be treated simply as discourses founded on illusion or error. They are moments in ‘the revelation of truth’, of ‘an immanent ontology’.3 The truth in question is prophetic, and has to do with the possibility of revelation. I agree: that we have no interest in or understanding of prophetic truth at the current time merely stems from an insubstantial and hubristic presentism. Certainly, if, as seems evident, if not to all, the progressive dream is now at an end, theological terms can take on a value equal to the familiar secular ones. However, an insistence on absolute historicity debars all ontology, immanent or not, save the void on the one hand and an absolute, banal infinity on the other. At this point, again, we may go back to Hobbes. I suggested that the Hobbesian view of the remainder is theologically derived but not theologically oriented. The view of Hobbes as an atheist, already current in his lifetime, seems convincing enough. Nothing comes to us save by ‘mediation’: . . . it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, than what is drawn from authority of men only, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is faith in men only.4

Hobbes did not suppose that ‘faith in men only’ could stretch very far. But the abundant religious trappings in his writings are no mere convenience or political calculation. They give form to his thought. Hobbes is a major model for a political theology like mine, and has in fact been very influential on its form, though that has perhaps not often been clear. For Hobbes, it was not obviously possible or indeed desirable that one should jettison all theological constructions, not least in thinking historical time. The

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question remains as to why one should resort to theology for forms, the more so, since Hobbes was an early modern, in some ways remote from us. The assertion that contemporary thought, intellectual habits and assumptions are still too entwined with older theological ones has by now become commonplace. Actually, something like the reverse is true: theological structures of thought are not still too much with us: they are ‘with us’ only in a shrunken contemporary manifestation, one that tends to shore up contemporary pieties of various descriptions, not least, because, for almost everyone, the sumptuous resources of theological tradition have dwindled to an undistinguished, exiguous trickle. We are no longer familiar with the kind of treasure-­house that allowed, say, a James Joyce deeply versed in Catholic tradition to rethink modernity, as in effect he did, partly on the basis of Aquinas and Dante. Far from being snared in it, we seldom if ever have any adequate notion of the possibilities offered by the theological tradition, and how it might come to our aid in producing a kind of political understanding quite distinct from those prevalent on the contemporary scene, if one shorn of the finalities of the theologies themselves. Take temporality, again, the supreme instance. The models the religions supply for thinking historical time are in fact rich and varied. They have matured into a complex and luxuriant life over millennia, which only a mistaken conviction of the inordinate significance of a depleted present dispensation – how could one suppose that a culture so comprehensively dominated over the past four decades by an increasingly hegemonic neoliberalism, whatever the concomitant softeners, has not been depleted – can lead one to ignore. Beside them, the two dominant but only recently evolved modern articulations of historical time with whose ironical relation we began and which has recurred throughout the book, the reactionary, with its insistence on insurmountable or necessary repetition, and the progressive, with its cheering forward movement and linear concatenation, seem little more than very recent creations, and even wraith-­like figments. Yet these are de facto the two conceptions of temporality that, at this point in time, we hear incessantly. We might be reluctant to grant millennial conceptions of time much if any purchase if new or progressivist ones had abundantly proved good. But by now it is evident that they have not. Hence the effort in this book to elaborate a theologically influenced conception of historical or human time as rather ‘melancholic-­ ecstatic’. This conception of time is without finality in that it does not deny the possibility of an event that would render nugatory the melancholic-­ecstatic structure itself. It enshrines no final truth. But at this particular historical juncture, it has a special power and plausibility. I for one don’t see how it can be convincingly gainsaid. Balso’s kind of ‘evidence’ is for it. There is more at stake, however, than forms. If, for example, as During says, our ‘democratic state capitalism. . .habitually overrides the potential richness of particular experiences’,5 if we increasingly struggle to find means of expressing experiences that lie beyond the homogeneous and narrow, endlessly repeated doxas all around us, and if we scarcely have those experiences any more, then, in one of its aspects, the problem is discursive. Understandably enough, we may feel mutely depressed by the meagreness, the one-­dimensionality of our dominant discourses, the extent to which business, commerce and management so pervasively lurk within them. But the theologies and the arts of the past have it in them to supplement the lack. There is a point to turning

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to, say, the King James Bible when thinking and articulating a politics, if only for its superlative language, a language charged with meaning, seriousness and intensity of a kind we cruelly lack today, and could benefit from. The theologies, like the arts, offer a host of rhythms, tones, inflections, nuances, moods and modes of articulating them that have grown largely foreign to us – to our cost, since the vacuum they have left behind them has only allowed the wrong voices to flourish and the creaking screw of the modern political fix further to tighten. There are historical dispositifs in the theologies that we may even be ignoring at our peril. Would anyone who had spent much time diligently brooding on the Old Testament prophets prior to 1914, and broadly taken his or her political orientation from (a secular version of) their vision, language and tone, have really felt that subsequent events demonstrated that he or she would have discovered more helpful forecasts and directives in Adam Smith, Bentham or Mill, Hegel or Marx? To think so is surely to fail in imagination. So, too, our culture has invested massively in a line of thought, running from eighteenth-­century rationalists to contemporary managerialists, technocrats, cognitivists and social democrats, which tells us that humankind can be clear about itself and even its destiny and control both for the better, without major cost. In doing so, it has more or less unconsciously sought to bury another line of thought stemming from the theologies and running from Christ to psychoanalysis, Foucault and Slavov Žižek, which says of human beings that ‘they know not what they do’ (Lk 23.34). Unfortunately, it is the second line of thought that has been inconveniently, repeatedly and disastrously borne out by history. Contemporary culture has wagered on a conviction that ancient, theocentric conceptions of historical logic, as in Galatians 6.7 – ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever [a] man soweth, that shall he also reap’ – are obsolete and disregardable. It is by no means clear, notably but not only in the cases of climate change, migration and terrorism, that it has been right or wise to do so. A political theology can and perhaps should serve as a standing reproach to some of our most automatic assurances.

Political theology and its critics But this is not how matters seem to everyone. Alberto Toscano, for example, has been an outspoken critic of political theology, notably with reference to Agamben, but also Jambet (more precisely, the Jambet who, with Guy Lardreau, in 1976, published L’Ange).6 Toscano believes that to ‘extract’ political propositions from ‘the militant corpus of the Christian faith’ and accord them ‘the status of secularized doctrines’ is to lapse into ‘historical-­metaphysical pessimism and suspicion’.7 However, if we subtract the metaphysics, he supplies no convincing reasons for not so lapsing. It is a question of adhering to the right belief. This may not matter much in the case of metaphysics, but it certainly does with history. As Toscano rightly suggests, any turn to political theology is patently motivated ‘by a political, or even ideological, deficit’. That is indeed so. But why not assume that, so far as we know, the deficit is real? What is Toscano’s notion for making it good – a notion, that is, that might grip persuasively on to present realities? He offers us only an abstract reassurance. He claims that historical materialism

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understands that theologies of any kind are ‘in the main nothing but an obstacle, an epochal distortion of class struggle’. But, whatever our putative conceptions, if any, of classes and class differences today, set alongside what Streeck and Berardi tell us, Toscano’s notion that there is presently any actual clear and manifest class struggle (conflict) to be ‘distorted’ at all seems distinctly unlikely, and the kind of ‘historical materialism’ that would grasp it by now unpersuasive; or, ironically enough, as Lacan more wickedly suggested, ‘nothing other than a resurgence of Bossuet’s providence’.8 To do him strict justice, Toscano has a very clear grasp of what is actually at stake in a political theology, above all in the case of Jambet and Lardreau and their ‘Manichaean thesis’ of ‘two worlds’. On the one hand, there is domination, on the other, the occasional and discontinuous but repeated transhistorical injunction to have done with it. As Toscano says, political theology à la Jambet promotes ‘a dualistic matrix of the utopian and the empirical’ (though I choose the Kantian ‘speculative’ over the ‘utopian’ – it is an irrefutable thought that is at stake, not dreams). This matrix is indeed important in political theology and has actually been at the heart of mine. Why should one slight an empirical attention to the evidence, Balso’s evidence, to likelihood, and, given the fact that the evidence is hardly encouraging, isn’t utopianism or, rather, as I prefer it, an adherence to speculative reason the logical or necessary consequence of doing so? The matrix does not immediately spell vast historical pessimism; but it does begin in drastic historical misgiving, and therefore intellectual sobriety and caution. Toscano would see this as a ‘leftist deviation’, which is how he characterizes Jambet’s thought. But in doing so he suspends the empirical principle. Jambet’s, he says, is a powerless, suicidal leftism, committing itself to a utopianism so absolute it cannot get its hands dirty with realization. But it is not at all clear what, for Toscano, Jambet ought to recognize in order to perceive the falsity of his drama of the occasional event and the remainder. What exactly should Jambet see that he hasn’t noticed? What is Toscano’s evidence, and what is the mode of ‘realisation’ he proposes? Toscano is clear about what he should think – Orwell’s pea-­and-thimble trick, the dialectics of force, the ‘real’ process of determination – but that alone. The fact that history gives no visible signs of any ‘dialectics’ becoming an actual historical process – not surprisingly, if Orwell is right and no ordinary man or woman has ever had the slightest interest in it – is the ‘empirical’ truth that Toscano brackets off. Predictably, perhaps, in his critiques of political theology at least, the Badiou he subscribes to is partly a Badiou absent from this book, the Badiou of the 1970s who was still writing that ‘the universal agent of transformation is the revolutionary revolt of the masses’.9 Thus it is Toscano who ends up looking like the man of unfounded faith. However, usefully, he does help us once more to understand precisely what is at stake in a political theology. One condition for it is that it refuses a thought of dialectics as other than theoretical and instrumental. As Balso says, ‘politics cannot be brought back to a dialectical figure’.10 The dialectical figure is by now defunct. There is no dialectic in history. This is surely the case, as it was already for Jambet and Lardeau: Toscano rightly notes that they freeze division, turning contradiction into opposition (or loosening it into separation). To speak figuratively, henceforth, at rare times, God may leave his trace in the world, here and there, but he will not, so far as we know, descend into it. Toscano makes the same claim of Agamben as of Jambet, but for him the fundamental problem

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with Agamben is rather different. Agamben is guilty of a ‘historical substantialism’ that thinks in terms of the indefinitely long durée – Trinitarian theology, Christology and angelology, for example, lay the groundwork for an economic theology of government that remains operative in the current dispensation of Western modernity – and turns away from the historicity Toscano claims orients him and the Foucauldian-­style genealogical method he says is his.11 But that is a spurious opposition. Toscano is not really profoundly concerned with historicity and genealogy. Historical materialism in his sense pursues neither all the way down. It endstops both, as a Nietzsche or a Foucault does not, lest they should grow disquieting. Toscano’s historical materialism, he tells us, points us away from Agamben and ‘the mirage of an anthropology of redemption’ towards ‘a thinking not of popular sovereignty but of collective or transindividual power’. But what difference does merely thinking that power make? Might one not ask where or how or under what conditions it might manifest itself? In fact, Toscano is an example of what Jambet himself identifies as post-Althusserian theoreticism.12 For several decades, theoreticism has been pervasive, chiefly in the academy. It implicitly assumes if it does not state that theoretical work can stand in for political work, that the two are even the same, a conflation which, Jambet says, rightly, Althusser inaugurated. Henceforth political statements did not need to survive the test of the world. As we noted earlier, Rancière in effect indicts the same development as involving an excessive valuation of theoretical revolution.13 But its most incisive critic has been Balso. Balso has been scathing about theoreticism, ‘the disastrous equivocation’ of taking philosophy or theory for a politics. Like Jambet, she traces it back to Althusser’s ‘suturing’ the two together. It was never the case that politics failed because of some philosophical deficiency that the right kind of theory might somehow magically make good. No: ‘politics proceeds on its own’, is ‘an absolutely singular thought’ that is wholly internal to political processes and responds ‘to the demand of the present’.14 This, we might add, is, finally, a genuinely materialist politics. Such an understanding of politics was central to the Organisation Politique, of which, for a long time, Balso was a principal mainstay. As Peter Hallward describes it, the OP put itself forward as aspiring to be an ‘effective political force’ that intervened ‘only on particular questions’, like the status of the sans-­papiers in the Parisian foyers. Politics was a matter of ‘political sequences as specific to particular issues in particular situations’.15 This was what defined political work as such. The political subject knew what politics was from the trajectory of any political sequence, its success or failure, nothing more. The fate of the sequence specified the political situation in itself, told one what it was. In a certain fashion, this truly effected an actual and significant marriage of the speculative principle with empirical reality. Balso has been an exemplary, unflagging if inconspicuous political worker, and her political thought has been inextricable from her work. She is not inclined to abstraction or academic idealism. In effect if not expressly, she also accepts the seeming if certainly not conclusive inescapability of the pre-­political condition that I have repeatedly insisted on throughout. Her dramatically scaled-­down conception of a political thought appropriate to a monde atone, always grounded in, determined and judged by praxis, has never been a political theology in itself. But it helps explain why Toscano’s kind of critique of political theology carries so

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little weight. Beyond Balso’s austere prescriptions, insofar as it is appropriate to think about politics at all, rather than assimilating reality to a myth, we might try to find a few elements of myth that actually fit political reality, as does political theology in my definition of it. In my view, there are only two feasible ways of thinking seriously about transformative politics today: Balso’s materialism, and the political-­theological. Adrian Johnston is a rather different kind of example. In 2009, he published a very good book, Badiou, Žižek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. He argued, quite rightly, that there is no longer any reason for a confident trust in historical teleologies or ‘the dialectical dynamics of history’,16 but that neither should we accept the comfortable discouragement implicit in the present compromise between social democracy and neoliberalism. Total capital is not a gaol from which no exit is any longer conceivable. We should rather trust to the event. This is exactly, Johnston said, where Badiou and Žižek have been pointing us: towards a seeming impossibility of a kind that nonetheless has happened before. But events are neither predictable nor explicable. However, disappointingly, Johnston has since opted for a degree of positivity inapparent in the work of 2009 but abundantly evident in his subsequent elaboration of a ‘transcendental materialism’. Johnston argues that human beings are inconceivable as matter alone, but that their materiality produces what transcends it. Subjects are both immanent to material nature and ‘irreducible’ to it’.17 In the first part of a projected three-­volume Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, entitled The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy, he proposes a materialist philosophy that can only be accomplished via Lacan’s central insight that the real entails an insurmountable gap or rupture. By now, however, he suggests, this insight is best pursued via the contemporary life sciences, notably neuroscience. These sciences are finally putting paid to the ‘big Other’ or ‘self-­consistent One-All’ that is both theological and provides the metaphysical foundation for science. What then remains ‘lacks any guarantee of consistency right down to the bedrock of ontological fundaments [sic]’ (OFP, p. 23). We discover that ‘antagonisms and oppositions’ lie at the very heart of material being, that splits ‘[are] real and ineliminable’ (OFP, p. 180). For Johnston, nature is ontologically ‘weak’, which means that neither freedom nor determinism holds final sway. There is always ‘the possibility of a gap’, and therefore of an ‘opening within being qua being’ (OFP, p. 209). This might seem to correspond both to Badiou’s theory of the event and to much of my own argument. But there is a crucial difference from my own case. Committed to the tone of contemporary uplift, Johnston is indifferent to and does not want to think the remainder, and has no time for any talk of political theology. Indeed, theology is once more the enemy. For it is compromising materialism, in a manner that Hume, Marx and Engels would have deplored. Religion is resurgent. Contemporary philosophy is altogether too willing to let theology mix in with what ought to be its ‘antagonistic others’, to concede ‘the enduring validity and indispensability of theological frameworks’.18 This is the case with Lacan, Quentin Meillassoux and even the later Badiou. Johnston rather urges upon us a realist and atheist materialism rooted in Humean empiricism. This, he thinks, might return us to a full-­blooded praxis grounded in the empirical sciences, and that would include a political praxis (leftist; to be a materialist, for Johnston, is necessarily to be of the left).

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Thus Johnston ends up sounding much more like Toscano than he should or might have wished to. This is particularly evident in his response to Meillassoux’s superb Après la finitude.19 Meillassoux’s is a ‘speculative materialism’ that ‘forbids positing any necessities at all to what and how being is in and of itself ’, taking radical contingency to an extreme.20 Logically enough, so Johnston thinks, this brings the French philosopher to the point of conjuring the possibility if by no means the likelihood of a ‘God-­tocome’. (Compare Clov in Beckett’s Endgame: when told that God doesn’t exist, he replies, ‘Not yet’).21 For Johnston, speculative materialism thus smuggles theology in by the back door. Meillassoux’s materialism is ‘insufficiently attentive to the ideological and institutional stakes of the practices of politics’, he says,22 though he gives no concrete indications of how his own materialism might be more successful in this respect. The focus on the ‘institutional’ gives the game away; here Johnston seems as ‘theoreticist’ as Toscano. In any case, there is a luminous subtlety to Meillassoux’s proposition that escapes Johnston. It is not at all clear that Meillassoux means by God anything like what anyone else has meant. Graham Harman is surely right to stress that Meillassoux’s God, who has never existed but may do so at some time in the future, if perhaps after ‘a thousand future Auschwitzes’ – an idea chilling beyond all measure, but not for that reason implausible – is an image of the indefinitely remote but not impossible ‘emergence of justice from thought’, and scarcely theistic at all.23 Indeed, even Johnston himself admits that Meillassoux’s God would exist as the ‘righting’ of historical wrong.24 In fact, because Johnston is so energetically concerned to discount Meillassoux, he is actually driven back on the very classic positions that, in 2009, he had declared were obsolete. ‘Religiosity’, he tells us, is making its return despite ‘the virulent theoretical and practical campaigns’ against it ‘carried out under the guidance of Marxist historical and dialectical materialisms’,25 which he has now conflated with his own. But the book on Badiou and Žižek had asserted that these materialisms were dead, and if they’re dead, they can’t be relied on convincingly to underwrite a critical project. The real reason Johnston dismisses Meillassoux’s ‘God’ is that, like Toscano and many others, he cannot countenance any alternative to, cannot really think outside the latest version of a functional, strictly modern temporality that must in principle be in the process of bringing all satisfactions and offering all solutions, and doing so without too serious a delay; the time of modern positivity this book has everywhere opposed. What Johnston and Toscano ignore, of course, is that the reason some have felt they had to think again, not necessarily about the ‘indispensability’ of theological frameworks, but their explicatory, metaphorical or descriptive power, has been precisely the explicatory failure of the progressivisms and the ‘Marxist materialisms’. Rather than following the later Johnston, I would want rather to take, first, the Johnston of 2009, second, the Johnston who insists that ‘nature lacks any guarantee of consistency’ right down to ontological foundations, and, third, a Meillassoux partly inflected through Harman’s account of his God, in the direction of a political theology in a manner that does not involve exactly the kind of compromise to which Johnston is so hostile. Indeed, in effect, that is something like what I think I’ve done. But one shouldn’t be hard on Toscano and Johnston. They are merely captive to a present-­day dispositif, a manner, even a tone, the more so in that here a left positivity

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doubles up on and feeds off a conventional academic one, latent in which combination is a continuing assumption that we are well-­embedded in an ongoing modernity, that it is an advanced modernity, even in a few aspects, possibly, complete, or quite readily completable, or completable relatively soon. At the far end of this, the lessons of the Frankfurt School disregarded (for all the attention paid to it over the past few decades), lies Lynne Segal’s ‘radical happiness’.26 On the one hand, this is just a pleasantly lightweight notion. On the other, here being ‘of the left’ becomes its own raison d’être. In effect if not by design, neoliberal eudaemonism and the pleasure-­principle win out over political seriousness. This is an instance of ‘the political fix’ in a secondary sense that has repeatedly appeared in the book: the psychic reassurance of the political subject, ‘radical’ politics as anti-­depressant, a mood- and morale-­booster. But, whatever the disclaimers, ‘radical happiness’ is not at all incompatible with neoliberalism in its social-­democratic phase. It is profoundly collusive with it. As William Davies has amply shown us, neoliberalism wants to hear more about happiness, at least, in the comfort zone, even amongst its dissidents.27 The more happiness there is, the more it would seem possible to credit the supposed neoliberal good. If even neoliberalism’s opponents are happy within it if not with it, why should neoliberals worry? Unhappy ‘radicals’ are irksomely likely to remain incredulous, to commit themselves to drastic and intransigent refusal; to identify with the uncommon calibre of a voice that, little as its possessor would relish it, is becoming a principal, rare, moral authority for our times, not least by virtue of his geographical position and experience: ‘I, as a person, as a personality, am overwhelmed. . .my thinking is thrown into confusion by the fact of human suffering in the world, and not only human suffering’.28 This, in effect, is a vivid statement about what it feels like to keep on experiencing the pre-­political truth. It is a truth inseparable from the fact that, as the Swedish Academy stated in awarding him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, Coetzee is ruthless in his criticism, not only of the ‘cruel rationalism’ of the West, but its ‘cosmetic morality’ – in which we should include cosmetic political moralities of all descriptions – and thereby ‘erodes all basis of consolation’.29

Schmitt, Blumenberg, Lefort For a serious context, at the very end, within which to evaluate political theology at its furthest reach, one which I take to underwrite my case, we might turn to a locus classicus. Another kind of book on political theology might even have started out with it. Here, at length, it will rather provide an all-­important plank in the logic for a political theology as I understand it. I mean the debate between Carl Schmitt and Hans Blumenberg as conducted in Schmitt’s Politische Theologie (1922) and Politische Theologie II (1970) and Blumenberg’s Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, translated as The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, in both the original and the revised edition (1966, 1974).30 This exchange is considerably more ramified, oblique and nuanced, shifting and various, than it might at first seem (and indeed than Blumenberg himself tends to present it). Is it even exactly a debate? The relevant chapter in Political Theology does not begin in argument. Its famous opening words are more of a constatation, they ascertain: ‘All significant

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concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’.31 For Schmitt, theology continues pervasively within the political thought and political structures of the modern world. The rationalism of the Enlightenment rejects a theology of the exception, but does so through deism and ‘a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle’ (PT, p. 37). The counter-­revolutionaries like de Maistre respond by attempting ‘to support the personal authority of the monarch ideologically, with the aid of analogies from a theistic theology’ (ibid.). The modern state institutes the ‘ “omnipotence” of the modern lawgiver’, which is ‘derived from theology’, and not only linguistically (ibid). Indeed, ‘in a positivistic age’, it is always easy ‘to reproach an intellectual opponent for indulging in theology or metaphysics’ (PT, pp. 37–8). Theology will be there even in his or her argumentation. So, too, says Schmitt, the ‘massive rationalism’ of Marxism can easily turn into an irrationalism, a theology of life-­force, ‘since it conceives of all thought as being a function and an emanation of vital processes’ (PT, p. 43). Tocqueville observes that in democratic American thought ‘the people hover above the entire political life of the state, just as God does above the world, as the cause and end of all things, as the point from which everything emanates and to which everything returns’. ‘Everything in the nineteenth century’ may be ‘increasingly governed by conceptions of immanence’. But once again, the ‘immanence philosophy’, which ‘found its greatest systematic architect in Hegel, draws God into the world’ (PT, p.  50); and so on, everywhere. Political theology, here, is not a thesis to be asserted. It is a sociological and discursive fact. This is what we must treat with, responsibly. It is worth adding that, as is well known, for Schmitt, we may lift ourselves free of modern complication by means of a decision, a decision which is a clarification of the scene, and even of terms. Schmitt thinks that all significant political ideas must now start out from an exceptional decision, the structure of which is theological in origin. This is most notably the case with the decision between the friend and the enemy, sheep and goat, the person who one is for and the person one is against, a decision that is necessary for politics to continue at all, since war is the core of politics. There must be polarization. Politics requires oppositions, and we will always need a serious politics so long as there is crisis or radical injustice. As Virginia Kahn says, for Schmitt, politics is confrontation, even existential confrontation, beyond any positive law. What Schmitt dismisses above all, (as Badiou does), is Lockean relativism, social-­democratic compromise, liberal consensus.32 But the model according to which he does so is, again, theological. In the first edition of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg grasps the implications of Schmitt’s thought with quite remarkable clarity, but inflects them in a direction that Schmitt does not, and is not concerned to. What Blumenberg derives from Schmitt is much closer to my concept of modernity as ironical to its core. In the passage in which he tackles Schmitt directly, he tells us that what Schmitt really supplies us with is a rationale for our doubts about whether our modernity is or ever has been quite modern. Schmitt supremely grasps ‘the durability of the not-­yet-modern within modernity’ (‘die Dauerhaftigkeit des Noch-­nicht-Neuzeitlichen in der Neuzeit’).33 The real power and point to those opening words of Schmitt’s that I quoted is their declaration of our historical entrapment in imperfection (‘ins Imperfekt’, LM, p. 61), their emphasis on the tenacious persistence of unenlightened resistance within

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enlightenment. We know our continuing imbroglio with the ‘Noch-­nicht-Neuzeitlich’ too deeply to dispute that or escape its implications. As for the decision, the imbroglio actually intensifies it, gives it a kind of existential immediacy, but does so precisely because the moment of modern clarity emerging out of modern confusion not only responds to but actually is the Schmittian exception. Schmitt’s response to Blumenberg’s intervention, however, nearly fifty years down the line and after a very great deal of sobering historical experience, is fascinating, and quite startling. His opening gambit is to cast Blumenberg as an apostle of total modernity, an advanced relativist for whom ‘transpositions’ from theology to secular thought and practice are merely ‘tragic mortgages from past epochs’ whose ‘liquidation’ must take place in and as part of the progress towards a ‘de-­theologized modernity’.34 Here Schmitt seems quite close to the Schmitt of Political Romanticism whom we discussed much earlier in the Introduction. But by the time of the second book on political theology, the argument does not lead him into any traditionalist assertion or wholesale denunciation of modernity. He rather claims that it is precisely the ‘transposition’ of a theological into a secular concept – the distinction in international law between the enemy (a political concept involving a decision) and the criminal (a juridical concept involving due process) – that most indicates ‘the paradigm shift in modernity’ and ‘has achieved, to date, the greatest rational “progress” of humanity’ (PT2, pp. 61–2). Transposed from its theological origins – ‘we hear Alberico Gentile’s Silete theologii! [Theologians, stay quiet!]’35 – the distinction remains an absolutism, a categorical separation that also produces a modern development. This instance of modernity is rare, however, extremely specific, and hardly amounts to any certain progress (hence Schmitt’s inverted commas). His sense of the ‘imperfection’ of modernity seems altogether more drastic than Blumenberg’s (though their interests are so very different that, in effect, they sometimes appear to be talking about different modernities). It is nonetheless the case that Schmitt has moved in Blumenberg’s direction, if steadfastly clinging to his own terms of reference. Schmitt goes on to say that the problem might seem to be that Blumenberg operates in terms of a concept of legality, that which is lawful, and not legitimacy, that which is just. Where, historically, legitimacy ‘was a justification of continuity, tradition, upbringing and heritage’, legality is linked to an interruption of ‘the unquestionable nature of the “law” ’ (PT2, p. 118). Legality is self-­affirming and self-­empowering; that is, here reason generates and asserts its truth in and of itself. Legitimacy means that authority creates law (even if it is an authority that one must hypothesize if need be), where legality means that law creates authority. Legitimacy spells decision, legality constructivism. To the moderns, however, and Schmitt includes Blumenberg here, legality presents itself as ‘a higher and more valid, more rational and new mode of legitimacy’ (PT2, p. 121). This has been the case since the French revolution. But in its self-­affirmation, vaunting its immanence and polemicizing ‘against theological transcendence’ (PT1, p. 120), legality on its own fails to recognize the truth of politics that reveals itself in exceptional circumstances, and raises questions of justice altogether beyond and apart from itself. ‘Autism’ is inherent in the argument for legality, and, since Blumenberg speaks ‘the language of a philosophy of values’ – our language, that of ‘universal convertibility’ (ibid.) – he effectively subscribes to it. At this point, it would seem, case closed.

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But that is not at all so. For what Schmitt then does – and in a way it is extraordinary, given his decisionism – is to dismantle or back away from the very dispute with Blumenberg he might appear to have been engineering. First, he asserts that he has no wish ‘to engage in a confrontation with a book that opens up astonishing horizons, theologically, anthropologically and cosmologically. . . . Neither starting nor attempting such a confrontation would be appropriate’ (PT2, p.  121). Blumenberg, then, is not an enemy. Nonetheless, a word on the criterion for a political theology, the distinction between friend and enemy, remains necessary. What Schmitt then does, slowly and hesitantly, is not so much to open up certain gaps in his own prior case as to open up another avenue altogether. Initially, it might seem as though he is refracting Blumenberg’s orientation through his own. In a way, his gripping unpacking of the history and etymology of the word stasis, as meaning uproar, unrest, civil war, as well as standstill or dead stop, tells the tale. On the one hand, says Schmitt, ‘a logically de-­ theologized and purely new human reality’ is by now inevitable (PT2, p. 123). But so, too, is continuing attention to the fate of the polarity of friend and enemy, because how otherwise will that new reality be steered, take a much hoped-­for new direction? Modernity thinks it has effected a conquest of the Gnostic divide between the good and evil worlds, and thus ‘de-­theologisation implies de-­politisation’ (PT2, p. 124). But one does not get rid of enmity by liberal prohibition or a principle of legality, which indeed only recreates it, if at length. In fact, modernity as revolution absolutely needed enmity. In modernity, ‘the possibility of stasis, or uproar, is immanent’. So ‘theology seems to become “stasiology” ’ (PT2, p. 126), a double thought of the given, and the break with the given – or the event and the remainder. In all of this, my thesis coincides with Schmitt’s. This then leads Schmitt to his final formulation of a ‘completely de-­theologized and modern scientific closure of any political theology’ (PT2, p.  128). Of course, this closure, for the present, for the perhaps indefinitely foreseeable future, must remain speculative. But what in essence the nine points in the formulation consist of is a profound reworking of ironical modernity, and even Benjamin’s ‘satanic modernity’. To quote two key passages, from points 1 and 3: There is only a novum. All de-­theologisations, de-­politicisations, de-­juridifications, de-­ideologisations, de-­historicisations, or any other series of de-­prefixed entities tending towards a tabula rasa are nullified. The tabula rasa de-­tabularizes itself and is erased with its tabula. The new, purely human and secular science is a continuing and process-­progress of a widening renewal of knowledge in purely secular terms. . . . PT2, p. 128 The process-­progress does not only produce itself and the new human being, but also the conditions for its own novelty-­renewal. This is the opposite of creation out of nothing, because it is the creation of nothingness as the condition for the possibility of the self-­creation of an ever new worldliness. PT2, p. 129

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The first passage comes as a major surprise. One expects the reference to be to the ‘entities’ themselves, rather than the ‘de-­prefixed’ version. But Schmitt’s point is that it is only by nullifying the ‘de-­prefixed’ version along with the entity itself, by annihilating ironical modernity, that we would arrive at a ‘completely de-­theologized’ and properly ‘modern’ closure of the theological. It is only by creating nothingness, rather than assuming that there is a nothingness to resort to, when in fact it vanishes as we resort to it, that we can be properly modern.36 A large demand, indeed: hence the striking manner of Schmitt’s conclusion, distant, conjectural, clinical and austere, dispassionate. Is it utopian, or deeply sceptical, verging on the parodic? It seems to me that Blumenberg interprets it in the second way, but also responds very creatively to Schmitt, as Schmitt has to him. What Blumenberg grasps is the logic to Schmitt’s hypothetical manner: The reoccupation [Umbesetzung] that is the reality underlying the appearance of secularization is driven by the neediness of a consciousness that has been overextended and then disappointed in regard to the great questions and great hopes. LMA, p. 89

What Blumenberg is saying here is that political theology is a necessary resort in a modernity full to tears with political disappointment. Schmitt would not exactly understand this assertion, since his concern had never exactly been with ‘the great questions and great hopes’. The conclusion to Political Theology II, however, tells us something of what it might mean to him to take them seriously. Schmitt deeply understood that there are modern political ‘realities and exigencies’, which ‘the sanctioned [theological] vocabulary’ in particular can make comprehensible (LMA, p. 92). He does not write out of disappointment. But he gives us a rationale for and a means of doing so. Modernity began incompletely. ‘The meagreness of what was left as a plan of construction in the wake of the great critical accomplishments of the Enlightenment’ left the door open to Romanticism, writes Blumenberg (LMA, p.  98). Thereafter, incompleteness became the very condition of modernity. Because it is incomplete, it begs for a political theology. We might gloss this logic a little further via Claude Lefort. The significant aspect of Lefort’s concern with political theology seems to me to be this. Modernity begins with the French revolution, but the revolution is not a break in time, but in the established relationship ‘between human beings and time itself ’.37 (We might be reminded of Jambet on metahistory). This abruptly relegates religion to the domain of personal belief (which Hegel takes to be a blunder). But the moderns cannot sustain it. Hence, from the start, there are those caught between worlds (Chateaubriand, Michelet, Ballanche) who do not commit the blunder, rather grasping a symbolic dimension to the theological that ‘fills in’ where modernity falls short, where the deficit in modernity that I have repeatedly emphasized become apparent. It is also a matter of sensibility, but sensibility apart from dogma. These thinkers and writers are the origin of a serious concern with political theology.

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Like Hegel, they resist the threat that the end of a millennial symbiosis, the categorical separation of theology from history, poses, which is that it reduces history to depthlessness (and thereby surely also helps to usher in a hubristic presentism). It is an illusion to suppose that the elimination of religion from the political field is necessarily of itself a marker of a rational or potentially or incipiently rational society. To the contrary: a rational society opens on to itself; but it can do so only ‘by being held in an opening it did not create’ (the reverse of presentism). That is, it knows an experience of difference beyond differences of opinion or the relativity of points of view (because the experience is not at the disposal of human beings, does not even take place within human history). This experience of difference ‘relates human beings to their humanity’, and means that their humanity cannot be contained, ‘that it cannot set its own limits’ (PTP, p.  222). What philosophy and political theory can find in religion is ‘a mode of portraying or dramatizing the relations that human beings establish with something that goes beyond empirical time and the space within which they establish relations with each other’ (PTP, p. 223). Religion testifies without cease to this, to a conceivable or, better, imaginable excess – as in the Kantian conception of speculative reason, to return to it – beyond appearance or pure self-­immanence (presentism, again). Nineteenth-­century French thinkers from Michelet to Quinet to the socialist Leroux repeatedly turn to it as such. Theology thinks the possibility of a new relationship between the immanent and the transcendent. As it undergoes an Umbesetzung, or what Lefort calls a ‘theologico-­political elaboration’, the ideas of reason, justice and right are themselves caught up in or redefined by it (PTP, p. 251). But, crucially, religion must be reactivated precisely at ‘the weak points of the social’, there where reason, justice and right are very far short of what they might be. Here the force of the theological within the political ‘is no longer symbolic but imaginary’ (PTP, p. 255). But imaginary how, and in what ways? At this point we can turn back to Blumenberg. For Blumenberg incessantly calls to political theology specifically as ‘a metaphorical theology’. Campanella ‘first described Machiavellianism as the result of Aristotle’s having promoted the idea that religion was “tantum politicam inventionem [only a political invention]” ’ (LMA, p. 101). But modern historicism has made this assertion beside the point. We can assume the ever-­growing hold of the truth of secularization, whatever the recidivisms so freely perceptible in the culture. This assumption allows the political theologian ‘to find ready for use what he would otherwise have had to invent’ (ibid.). The crucial factor to bear in mind in this rapprochement is the denial of substantialism. The principle ‘that there is no such thing as a conflict between substances’ – politics being one substance, theology another – ‘is fundamental to a political theology’ (LMA, p. 95). The means that what Blumenberg finds ‘ready for use’ is analogy, which Schmitt – for him – has not precisely grasped as such. Analogies between the theological and the secular involve an Umbesetzung. Though we have just seen Blumenberg using it, it is in the first instance a Schmittian term. It translates, variously, as reoccupation, repositioning, recasting, reshuffling. It appears in contradistinction to Umsetzung, which means copying notions from one system of thought into another in a manner that preserves the original content. By contrast, an Umbesetzung is a mediated relation, as in analogy, which Schmitt exemplifies in Hobbes’s shift from the Roman

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Catholic church’s ‘monopoly on decision-­making’ to positing, on the basis of juridical elaboration, a ‘clear alternative’ in the law of the sovereign state (PT2, p. 125–6). But it is Blumenberg above all who places particular emphasis on the Umbesetzung as designating a specific mode of translation of theological terms into secular ones which is neither a replication nor a transformation. Analogies are borrowings from ‘the dynastic language treasures of theology’ that I have just stressed (LMA, p.  93). We should additionally note that the choice of ‘linguistic means’ is not determined by ‘the system of what is available for borrowing but rather by the requirements of the situation in which the choice is being made’. Political theology does not engage in ‘an extensively demonstrable recourse’ to theology as such, but chooses elements ‘from the selective point of view of the immediate need’ (ibid.). It picks out in theology ‘what will be tolerable in the world’ (LMA, p.  95), that is, it filters out from theology what is compatible with ‘worldliness’ (Weltlichkeit, another key term, LMA, pp.  95–6). The political theologian ‘finds his stock of images ready to hand and thus avoids the cynicism of an openly “theological politics” ’ (LMA, p. 101). Most importantly, analogies are heuristic, they ‘make visible’. They have particular force or usefulness in critical or merely difficult times, when there is an excess of problems over explanations or answers; it is this excess that the modern age had repeatedly tended to produce. Analogies of the kind that a political theology consists of become the more necessary and remain so for as long as modernity remains drastically imperfect and incomplete. This, Blumenberg’s argument for the theological analogy, is also an argument for my thought throughout this book, and my way of working; that is why I have dwelt on the Schmitt-Blumenberg debate for as long as I have. To deny ‘the neediness of a consciousness that has been overextended and then disappointed in regard to the great questions and great hopes’ is lightly to turn aside from modern history and its meaning. So, too, there is no argument for not borrowing from ‘the dynastic language treasures of theology’, unless one believes that ours is an age in which the English language has uniquely taken conceptually rich, subtle, sensitive and diverse forms. But I want finally to turn to Blumenberg’s ‘metaphorology’. Metaphorology is the study of ‘the world of our images and artefacts’ that lies beneath a given ‘conceptual world’, as, for instance, the pre-Baconian metaphor of ‘the world as theatre and man as spectator’ is one Bacon expressly revokes.38 Metaphorology works contrary to the Cartesian programme for philosophy, which promotes clear and distinct ideas and the perfection of a terminology appropriate to them, by burrowing into the substructure of thought, the work of imagination on which thought erects its structures. It is ‘a necessary complement and corrective to conceptual history’.39 Metaphors are analogies ‘that tell us what the world is, “stand in” for this unattainable whole’ (PM, p.  15). At their most significant and foundational, they are ‘absolute’, projections on to a blank screen. Absolute metaphor ‘leaps into a void, inscribing itself on the tabula rasa of theoretical unsatisfiability’ (AF, p.  132). Absolute metaphors say ‘henceforth’. There is nothing anthropologically prior to that declaration. They indicate ‘a basic attitude that first gives us what we call “reality”, its characteristic gestalt’ (AF, p. 143). But a metaphorology is not a handbook. It ‘cannot result in any method for using metaphors’ (PM, p.  14). It rather indicates ‘the fundamental certainties, conjectures and judgments in relation to which the attitudes and expectations, actions

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and inactions, longings and disappointments, interests and indifferences of an epoch are regulated’ (ibid.). Metaphorology becomes a mode of historical analysis. Here Blumenberg sounds close to Foucault and, above all, Bachelard. But it is nonetheless clear that metaphorology also teaches us things; and what it teaches us, what is perhaps above all its major historical lesson, is that metaphysics has repeatedly ‘revealed itself to us to be metaphorics taken at its word’. That is what informs my political theology. Now, we have entered an age when ‘the demise of metaphysics calls metaphorics back to its place’ (AF, p. 132). Now we can try out a host of metaphors, analogies; that is what an incomplete modernity encourages us to do. For, at the very least, metaphors ‘compensate human beings for their lack of fit with a world in which they can only act at all purposefully if their actions are informed by a foreknowledge of what their world is and how they stand in relation to it’ (AF, p. 143). The thought of a metaphorics beckons to us as modernity reveals itself to be, to have always been bedevilled by profound, complex, internal asynchronies; sometimes, as now, to be sinking deeper into them, seemingly irretrievably so. Far from arriving at modernity whole, all at once and in one go, we are summoned to get to grips with a conception of a truly significant modernity as almost indefinitely fractured and delayed: hence the stellar remoteness of Schmitt’s nine points, which I quoted as much for their manner as anything else. A metaphorics seems right and appropriate because it takes the weight both of the history of modernity and our present historical context, neither ignores nor seeks to evade or finesse them, recognizes and acknowledges the manifold splits and inconsistencies to modernity. But if it recognizes such divisions for what they are, it then uses them as its working materials (as Blumenberg says, finding its stock of images to hand), seeks to give them shape (Blumenberg’s Gestalt), to arrange them in a certain order, to articulate them, lend them expressiveness. In this respect, it follows on from those Lefort names as the pioneers in his tradition, and others, too, like Byron and Goya. It is best managed, however, via attention to the literary, because, self-­evidently, literature is where the science of metaphor can thrive most sumptuously and delicately. This does not mean that a metaphorics will tend to become or have to be literary. But it is by means of a literary turn that those elements of imagination and sensibility which Lefort thinks belong with a political theology are most likely to be activated within it, and supplement its Weltlichkeit.

Metaphorics from the Old Testament to Kierkegaard So, on the basis of Blumenberg’s case, let us turn to a practice of analogy. The Old Testament and the Gospels are a copious storehouse of Blumenbergian analogies, an abundant resource for a Blumenbergian metaphorics of modernity, for a practice of the Umbesetzung (though I cannot exactly claim this last, since as I understand it, it proceeds from the theological, and my book does not. This constitutes a major difference with Schmitt and Blumenberg alike). There are biblical analogies or equivalents for most if not all of the key concepts in this book, biblical articulations, expressions and embodiments of them. Indeed, these equivalents are strewn plentifully throughout the Bible, though of course they are not named as such; and this is, not

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because I have covertly been referring to the Bible for my models from the start, nor because I am insidiously drawn to a biblical thought in spite of myself, but because the Bible is in its own manner a historical document and, as such, a fecund source for historical meditation outside the orthodoxies of our past few decades (all the more so, if we avoid certain orthodox representations and configurations of it, stressing, say, the beauty of the Book of Nehemiah). I’ll present the relevant biblical truths, a biblical Weltanschauung, in a certain philosophical but poetically inflected order, ranging widely across the Bible as I go, before turning to St Augustine, Pascal and Kierkegaard for evidence of the political force and expressiveness that can be latent in theologies. Historicity, vicissitude, evanescence, multiplicity – ‘A time and times and the dividing of times’ (Dan 7.25) – these all loom large in the Scriptures. Prior to the Last Judgment, God manifests himself as vicissitude (see for instance Ezek 29–30). Whilst creation on the one hand and eschatology on the other obviously block it at both ends, the biblical world is otherwise haunted by a sense of historical emptiness, most obviously in the vanitas vanitatum, and a thought of almost indefinite transience. After all, ‘a thousand years’ in God’s sight ‘are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night’ (Ps 90.4). The epochs are ‘even as a sleep’ (Ps 90.5), ‘ as a shadow that passeth away’ (Ps 144.4). Man therefore ‘buildeth his house, as a moth’ (Jb 27.18). His days are ‘as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more’ (Ps 103.15–16). We are ‘but of yesterday, and know nothing, because our days upon earth are a shadow’ (Jb 8.9). There is no obvious concept of historical reason here: ‘The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually’ (Eccl 1.6). The constants are rather historical amnesia on the one hand – ‘There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after’ (Eccl 1.11) – and, on the other, an absence of certainty as to ‘what the future will bring’ (Eccl 2.18). Christ tells the disciples that, in effect, they should set worldly prudence at naught and trust to a form of happenstance (Mt 6.28–34). For if God is vicissitude, God is always historical potentiality. He serves as a principle of volatility. He is a ‘living God’, (Ps 84.2), a God here and now, whose works are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Ps 139.14), with whom therefore ‘all things are possible’ (Mk 10.27; ‘nothing shall be impossible’, says Gabriel to Mary, Lk 1.37). This is what enables a suffering Job to say that ‘I know that my redeemer liveth’ (Jb 19.25). But – and this is crucial – the living God is not an invariably present God, immediately and wholly in evidence. Exceptionally, God ‘forsake[s] his covert’ (Jer 25.36). At these times the secret is made manifest, the hidden made known and ‘come abroad’ (Lk 8.17). Then the light shines ‘in darkness’, though the darkness comprehends it not (Jn 1.5). Then ‘the nail that is fastened in a sure place’ can ‘be removed’ (Is 22.25). The Lord turns the earth ‘upside down’, which leaves it ‘utterly broken down. . .clean dissolved. . .moved exceedingly’ (Is 24.1, 19). In such times, the subject may escape its ‘snare’ (Ps 124.7). ‘A new heart also will I give you’, God promises Israel, ‘and a new spirit will I put within you’ (Ezek 36.26). The seemingly prodigious comes about. The Lord may decide, for example, to create ‘a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man’ (Jer 31.22).

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But given the obduracy of the resistances to historical potentiality, on which the Scriptures absolutely insist, there must necessarily be divine violence: ‘Is not my word like as a fire?’ says God, ‘and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces’? (Jer 24, 29). Hence too the radiance of the fire’s effects, the splendour of the occasions: resurrection, redemption, transformation, transfiguration; charis, or grace, and miracles; ‘signs and wonders’ (Jer 31.20); visitations and annunciations (as on the road to Emmaus); visions like those with which Ezekiel begins, or Daniel ends; the bestowal of spirit (‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me’, Lk 4.18), of a virtue that is a power (Lk 8.46). Mountains, valleys, rivers, hills, seas appear and disappear, change shape. As the Lord ‘lifts himself up’, every valley is ‘exalted’ (Is 33.10, 40.4). Thus the people who are ‘left of the sword’ find ‘grace in the wilderness’ (Jer 31.2). All this anticipates the time of the ‘new covenant’ with the people when ‘the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose’ (Jer 31.31, Is 35.1). Then the soul of the people ‘shall be as a watered garden; and they shall not sorrow any more at all’ (Jer 31.12). Theirs will be the Promised Land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ (Jer 32.22). Along with this goes a knowledge of mutuality, the recognition that one’s desire is ‘upon [one’s] enemies’, in other words, shared by them (Ps 112.8) and, with that, the collapse of self-­righteousness, an acknowledgement of total reciprocity and complicity, the end of competitive rivalry and, at an indefinite length, the longed-­for coming together of ‘All nations’ (Ps 86.9 and passim). Then ‘every heart shall melt, and all hands shall be feeble, and every spirit shall faint, and all knees shall be weak as water’ (Ez 21.7). This is what is heralded in prophetic anticipation. Paradoxically, if there is a lack of certainty as to the future, it does not cancel out the truth of prophetic time, which thinks forwards to the day ‘that the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains’ (Is 2.2), the day of equity, peace, justice, the good and the end of false idols. The truth of the living God, however, appears precisely in the rarity of his miracles. ‘Being interpreted’, Emmanuel means ‘God is with us’ (Mt 1.23), but this is the condition of being rarely blest. As the psalmist tirelessly insists, exceptionalism is the very mode of prophetic time. ‘[H]ow little a portion is heard of him’, Job says, of God (Jb 26.14). It sometimes seems that all that is left to the prophet is to lament the vast stretches of historical nullity. For from ‘ancient times’, so many are ‘the things that are not yet done’, and ‘more are the children of the desolate’ than the redeemed (Is 46.10, 54.1). As much as anything else, the problem is fickleness: Ezra celebrates ‘a little reviving’ in the Jews’ ‘bondage’, only two verses later to mourn, ‘And now, O our God, what shall we say after this? For we have forsaken thy commandments’ (Ezr 9.8, 10). Hence emerges that concept of so much resonance in the Old Testament, the ‘remnant’. In Biblical terms, the ‘remnant’ is what matters, as in Jeremiah’s ‘we are left but a few of many’ (Jer 42.2). ‘For out of Jerusalem shall go forth a remnant’, proclaims Isaiah (Is 37.32). ‘Yet will I leave a remnant’, God tells Ezekiel (Ez 6.8). For the remnant, there is a remnant of space and a remnant of time. The remnant occupies holes and corners, is repeatedly exilic, given over to captivity, and can hope only for a fragment of history. ‘And now for a little space grace’, pleads Ezra, ‘to leave us a remnant to escape’ (Ezr 9.8). In the context of this book, ‘remnant’ can mislead. It is not to be confused with the remainder. The ‘remnant’ is what is left over from waste or worse. If the Bible, and particularly the Old Testament, are a great evocation of anything, it is, not a damned or

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categorically irredeemable world, which would not make sense, but a recidivist or, to use a word that repeatedly crops up, a ‘froward’ one. (Jeremiah’s adjective is ‘backsliding’, Jer 2.18, 3.12, 3.14, 3.22, 8.5, 14.7, 31.22, 49.4; cf. e.g. Hos 4.16). Israel endlessly falls into ‘iniquities’ (a prophetic word par excellence), which can easily seem universally shared: ‘If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?’ (Ps 130.3). Hence the ‘wilderness’ in which the prophet cries (Is 40.3). The Bible is rich in literal renditions of this condition of stark deprivation, terms and metaphors for and responses to it. In the prophets’ world, ‘the ground is chapt’ (Jer 14.4). Its symbol and embodiment is ‘the mountain of Zion, which is desolate, the foxes walk upon it’ (Lam 5.18). Here ‘[t]he heart of the wise’ can only inhabit ‘the house of mourning’ (Eccl 7.4). The reasons for losing hope are various. It may be the result of having ‘gone into captivity’ (Lam 1.3). It may stem from the collapse of civil order (‘the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence’, Ez 7.23). It may be born of a drastic loss of moral reference (‘no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land’, Hos 4.1). Things constantly tend in such directions. The wilderness is what it is because of this: the world lacks, seemingly forever lacks, a principle of comprehensive and lasting justice and equity. Throughout the Bible, again and again, the overarching question is: what is the condition of, what are the prospects for the numberless poor, the meek, humiliated, exploited, brutalized, outcast and needy, the subjects of infinite misery, those who are always there, who do not go away? What ‘righteousness’ and judgment can they expect (see Ps 103.17, Is 3.14–15)? Save on the basis of the exception, the answer is unencouraging: ‘judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter’ (Is 59.14). It may be that ‘[t]he rich man shall lie down, but he shall not be gathered’ (Jb 27.19). ‘Wherefore do the wicked live’, cries Job, ‘become old, yea, are mighty in power?. . . .Their houses are safe from fear. . . .They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance’ (Jb 9.11, 21.7). From this and similar forms of despair derive the apocalyptic vision and invective of the prophets. Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi all anticipate or invoke destruction: ‘Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field’, Micah tells God, ‘and Jerusalem shall become heaps’ (Mi 3.12). ‘[T]he fire hath devoured the pastures’, declares Joel, and ‘the flame hath burned all the trees of the field’ (Jl 1.19). The literal and metaphorical declarations are intimately bound up with one another. Elsewhere, of course, there is the risk of seemingly interminable melancholy, as the prophetic question ‘How long, Lord?’ cedes to the near-­extinction of all promise: ‘the days are prolonged, and every vision faileth’ (Ezek 12.22). How should vision not fail, given ‘the desolations of many generations’ (Is 61.4)? Then again, there is the spiritual bleakness that Isaiah, Jeremiah and Job particularly share: ‘Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery’, asks Job, ‘and life unto the bitter of soul?’ (Jb 3.20). Prophetic bitterness of soul has a mode of Gothic intensity: in ‘[t]he land of the shadow of death’ (Is 9.2), it seems as though God has abandoned one to survival only ‘in dark places, as they that be dead of old’ (Lam 3.6). Then ‘[h]orror’ takes hold of one (Ps 119.53). ‘Fear and a snare is come upon us’ (Lam 3.47). But the most compelling response to the wilderness is lamentation, especially women’s. The wilderness becomes the vale of tears. It is no accident that the most

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haunting and best-­known Biblical figures include Ruth (with Orpah) amidst the alien corn – ‘And they lifted up their voice, and wept again’ (Ru 1.14) – and Rachel: ‘In Rama there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not’ (Mt 2.18). In its closeness to a presumed literal truth, the pathetic fallacy in the Bible takes on an additional degree of seriousness. The earth ‘mourneth and languisheth’ (Is 33.9). There is ‘sorrow on the sea: it cannot be quiet’ (Jer 49.23; compare St Ambrose’s ‘diebus et noctibus patiens ingemiscit’).40 ‘How doth the city sit solitary’, declares Jeremiah, ‘she weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks’ (Lam 1.1–2). The prophet, too, must cry, but also cry out, at the state of Israel – ‘hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation’ (Am 5.1) – but also its abandonment by God. This, strictly, is the significant sense of the repeated de profundis clamavi (Ps 130.1). ‘I sat down and wept’, says Nehemiah, ‘and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed’ (Neh 1.4). ‘[H]ave mercy upon Zion’, begs the psalmist, ‘let my cry come unto thee’ (Ps 102.1, 13). Christ’s magnificently agonized ‘eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani’ (Mt 27.46) is the culmination and climax of this tradition. For any serious political theology, its resonance should be almost beyond compare. As much as anything else, the plea to God is that he allay his wrath. For it is clear that he has ‘a controversy with the nations’ (Jer 26.31), with all ‘the evil work that is done under the sun’ (Eccl 1.3). Babylon has been ‘a golden cup in the Lord’s hand, that made all the earth drunken: the nations have drunken of her wine; therefore the nations are mad’ (Jer 51.7). The world pursues a heedless and dreadful course, and does so seemingly unstoppably: ‘nation shall rise up against nation, and kingdom against kingdom’ (Mk 13.8). Out of this terror emerge the great prophetic last chapters of Daniel (7–12), with their vision of a world teetering on the edge of cataclysm and vast turbulence. For his part, Christ must suffer for, but also pit himself against the world: ‘I am not of the world’, he cries, ‘me it hateth’ (Jn 7.7, 17.16; cf. 15.18–19, 17.14). It is impossible to understand how Christianity could have become a dominant faith, still less a State orthodoxy, save through misreadings of the Bible born of self-­furthering and self-­protective instincts. At all events, the madness of the nations is the madness of their people. The people are beset by, ‘filled with’ it (Lk 6.11). ‘Madness is in their heart while they live’ (Eccl 9.3). They inveterately choose Barabbas before Christ, and side with the priests and captains (‘this is your hour, and the power of darkness’, says Christ, with an almost overpowering sadness, Lk 22.53). There is a kind of uncircumventable truth to the ‘ragged noise and mirth of thieves and murderers’,41 the finality of the violence of the ‘Crucifige!’: hence the extraordinary power and survival of the image of the Cross. ‘Woe unto the world because of offences! For it must needs be that offences come’ (Mt 18.7). But of course it is the chosen people who fail God most, and most miserably. Ezekiel’s cry that ‘the house of Israel is. . .become dross’ is merely one of many such (Ezek 22.18), as is Christ’s lament for a ‘perverse and faithless generation’ (Mt 17.17; cf. Mk 9.19). Christ and the prophets must in some sense want the people’s good, the good of all. But the people repeatedly turn out to be ‘stubborn’, ‘rebellious’ (Ps 78.8), ‘confederate against’ God (Ps 83.5). They are deeply refractory, incorrigibly contrary, their ways intractably crooked. They ‘[make] their neck stiff, that they might not hear,

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nor receive instruction’ (Jer 17.23). They ‘forsake’ the Lord and the covenant (Is 1.4) and whore after strange gods. They hearken to false prophets, who ‘speak a vision of their own heart’, and not impersonally, ‘out of the mouth of the Lord’ (Jer 23.16). They fall under the spell of the image or screen: ‘hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery?’ (Ezek 8.12). The people ‘walk in the imagination of their heart’ (Jer 13.10): this censure recurs again and again. The point is, not just that they ‘set the world’ there (Eccl 3.11) and know no larger perspective, nor merely that ‘their heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes. . .closed’ (Mt 13.15). They nourish an attachment to a private fantasy as if it were the world, and so remain obtuse to any higher or more objective demand. Indeed, they fall victim – to return to it – to a version of Meillassoux’s (or Canetti’s) communal solipsism, though, paradoxically, like the communal solipsism in Carpaccio’s Venice and as in Leibniz, it is monadic and atomistic. They ‘walk after vanity, and become vain’ (Jer 2.5). They are, as Proverbs grimly insists, faithless but unendingly self-­vindicating. Thus they pretend to an inexistent virtue (‘saying, Peace, and there was no peace’, Ez 14, 10) or ‘trumpet’ their minor virtues abroad (Mt 6.2). They build their houses ‘by unrighteousness’, on a foundation of injustice (Jer 22.13). They all ‘look to their own way, every one for his gain, from his quarter’ (Is 56.11). ‘Thou hast loved a reward on every cornfloor’, says Hosea to his people (Hos 9.2). ‘The tabernacles of robbers prosper’ (Jb 12.6.), usurers and exploiters flourish. They even ‘sell’ their ‘brethren’ (Neh1.8). No reconciliation to this condition is possible; therefore woe to them ‘that are at ease in Zion’ (Am 6.1). Hence, too, the fiery denunciation of power and wealth in Ezekiel (‘but I will destroy the fat and the strong’, Ezek 34.16). For this is a whole community indifferent to justice and the good. But the claim to justice cannot be set aside. There must be justice. ‘Be not deceived’ as to the eventuality of the Messiah, the future kingdom, the possible if never likely triumph of the good, this is the divine promise: ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways, saith the Lord’ (Is 55.8). More specifically, what God promises is an upended world, a grand reversal, a theological or messianic Umschlag: “Hear now, O house of Israel; Is not my way equal? Are not your ways unequal?. . . I will overturn, overturn, overturn it’ (Ezek 18.29, 21.27). There must be a condign redress, a new balance to the scales: ‘But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first’ (Mt 19.30). A work of levelling has to take place: ‘remove the diadem, and take off the crown. . .exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high’ (Ezek 21.27). For his part, Christ declares himself to be the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy (Is 61.1–2): The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-­hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. Lk 4.18

Freedom, charity, healing for the innumerable wretched of the earth, on the basis of a fundamental and unopposable principle of equality:

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But ye shall not be so: but he that is greatest among you, let him be as the younger; and he that is chief, as he that doth serve. For whether is greater, he that sitteth at meat, or he that serveth? is not he that sitteth at meat? but I am among you as he that serveth. Lk 22.26–7

Christ’s turning of the tables is, in the end, the only imaginable first moral law, from which all others must proceed; and ‘it is easier for heaven and earth to pass, than one tittle of the law to fail’ (Lk 16.17). But what chance justice in the wilderness? To return to Jambet’s Gnostic terms, occultation is the rule. The psalmist’s question is almost always germane: ‘wilt thou hide thyself for ever?’ (Ps 89.46). Prophetic time is – to return to it – a melancholic-­ ecstatic time, a time of intermittencies. The remnant, like Simeon, can only find themselves ‘waiting for the consolation of Israel’ (Lk 2.25). ‘Take ye heed, watch and pray’, Christ instructs the disciples (Mk 13.33). The trope of the watchman was longstanding, as in the well-­known Custos, quid noctis, ‘Watchman, what of the night?’ (Is 21.11). The condition is even a happy one: ‘blessed are all they’ that wait for God, says Isaiah (Is 30.18); ‘[b]lessed be he that waiteth’, God tells Daniel (Dan 12.12). At the very least, as, many centuries later, in Milton’s limpid formulation, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait’.42 Milton’s, perhaps, but hardly a modern one: mere waiting has certainly not seemed like a modern political virtue. How could it have done so, given modern temporality? If, for the prophets, ‘[i]t is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord’ (Lam 3.26), and this may be sufficient to itself, the logic at stake has hardly if ever seemed transferable to the modern experience of praxis, despite its everywhere failing or going more or less disastrously wrong. We are moderns, as many of us as possible must have our satisfactions immediately, or at least soon, in our time, including political satisfactions; we cannot content ourselves with conferring the relevant good fortune upon an indeterminate future. Yet, in realistic terms, the prophetic insistence on the necessary wait for an event, not least one that will open up the possibility of a previously unheard-­of, seemingly impossible praxis for oneself and others, is not an altogether paltry model. Waiting is not an inert, unconcerned, tepid or dulled condition. The psalmist waits acutely, in longing and prayer. ‘How long, Lord?’, he asks (Ps 79.5). For ‘my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee’ (Ps 63.1). God must ‘return’ and ‘cause’ his face ‘to shine’ (Ps 80.7, 14). ‘O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself ’: this is the psalmist’s cry (Ps 94.1). The blessed watchman sustains a value in the teeth of its near-­ extinction.‘Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me’: this is ‘the word of the Lord’ to Ezekiel (Ezek 3.17). It makes him a point of relay or testimony. The concern with the testament, the relay, the unbroken line that sustains a prophetic knowledge – the knowledge that is founded on a conviction of vicissitude and its corollary, grace, but occasional grace, grace with the odds stacked against it, grace in the wilderness, always menaced by recidivism – is everywhere in the Bible. Such is the indifference or resistance to prophetic knowledge that it is necessary to pay particular attention to

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means of sustaining it in adversity. ‘Set thee up waymarks, make thee high heaps’: that is the Lord’s instruction (Jer 31.21). ‘Bind up the testimony’, as Isaiah has it (Is 8.16). There must be ‘scribe[s] of the law’ (Ezr 7.12) and those who ‘bear witness’ (Jn 1.7). In the Gospels, Christ will of course insist that tidings of the miracles should be broadcast. There must also be continuity in the messianic tradition, from Abraham, Noah and Moses through the prophets to John the Baptist to Christ (see Mk 1.2). This is partly what is involved in the Biblical preoccupation with genealogy. Old Testament genealogy is partly about questions of transmission. A genealogy of the captivity, as in Nehemiah 7, is a memorial to be ‘written in the book of the chronicles’ (Neh 12.23). So, too, Luke is intent on providing a sacred genealogy (Lk 3.23–38). Continuity and connection are vital. The prophet ‘is a fool, the spiritual man is mad’ (Hos 9.7). Because he is a fool, as with all true fools, there is always the risk that ‘he testifieth, and no man receiveth his testimony’ (Jn 3.32). This, again, is the peril of ‘[t]he voice of one crying in the wilderness’ (Mt 3.3). Hence the constant habit of thinking back, as Ezekiel refers back to Noah, Daniel, Job (Ezek 14.20). So, too, the disciples on the road to Emmaus must learn about Christ by also learning prophetic history from the start: ‘And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, [Jesus] expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself ’ (Lk 24.27). Christ urges his own followers to be as the prophets (see Mt 5.12). The achievement of continuity is specifically marked, as when Baruch reads Jeremiah’s ‘roll of a book’ to others (Jer 36.2, 6–8), and even made moving: ‘and they spake unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses. . .and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book. . . . . All the people wept, when they heard the words of the law’ (Neh 8.1, 3.9). But there are other difficulties to spreading prophetic knowledge. Christ will tell the disciples that their task will be arduous and they should ‘beware of men’ (‘ye shall be hated of all men’, Mt 10.17, 22). The prophets like the disciples must go forth ‘harmless as doves’, but ‘as lambs among wolves’ (Mt 10.16, Lk 10.3). One should take such statements at face value and register their full force. It means that the disciples will encounter an invidious world but will not impose themselves, which leaves them in a precarious position. So, too, prophetic knowledge cannot be freely conjured at will. It rather conjures the prophets themselves. The Spirit is crucial to its transmission (Lk 12.10). The prophet should speak as gifted with a voice. ‘But when they deliver you up’, says Christ to the disciples, ‘take no thought how or what ye shall speak: for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not ye that speak, but the spirit of the Father which speaketh in you’ (Mt 10. 19–20). There must be the possibility of inspired speech, of talking from ‘the abundance of the heart’ (Mt 12.34), which is also a matter of the spirit ‘entering into’, speaking to and through one (Ezek 2.2). It is a condition in language and even of it, which has consequences for language itself. Yet at the same time – and the double demand is testing – the prophets must be ‘wise as serpents’ (Mt 10.16). The prudence of prophetic knowledge is that the prophet ‘hideth himself ’ (Prv 1.22), that he may often have to exist in a state of secrecy, which is the mirror-­image of the practically innumerable times when the deus absconditus does not appear: ‘pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee’ (Mt 6.6). God will often convey his knowledge in obscure, enigmatic or cryptic forms, the ‘dark sayings’ of the wise (Prv 1.6), like the parables. Sometimes the

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prophet will find he can only repeat the knowledge, not of any signified truth, but of the mere fact that there are signs at all (Lk 11.29–30). It should by now be very clear where my case has got to. Riveting though the language often is, the religious meaning of much of my Biblical commentary is remote from my book and has a metaphorical function. Certainly, I am concerned to establish a set of correspondences or Blumenbergian analogies between Biblical terms of reference and my own: vicissitude and historicity (if less than absolute); divine potentiality or volatility and événementialité; grace, redemption, resurrection and miracles and the event; the wilderness or vale of tears and the remainder; recidivism and the people untransformed; testimony or the testament, the evangel and prophetic knowledge, and transmission; waiting and the sujet en attente; rarity or the ‘remnant’ and the exception. There is even something in this of Schmitt’s theology as ‘stasiology’. But where I seek to add to Blumenberg is that thinking with and through literature, as I have done, also means thinking in terms of a certain structure, rhythm or narrative or set of structures, rhythms and narratives to historical and political experience, which the Bible repeatedly adumbrates. It is this coincidence, too, that justifies my description of this book as a work of political theology. Furthermore, here and there in the Bible, the narratives appear as such in themselves. The account of the redemption of the captives returned from Babylon (Neh 8–9), shining out as it does amidst the prevailing darkness of the prophetic books, is one example. So too is Ezekiel’s tragic evocation of the doomed but briefly ‘perfect beauty’ of Tyre, an ‘Eden, the garden of God’, fated to fall at the hands of ‘strangers. . .the terrible of the nations; and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and they shall defile thy brightness’ (Ezek 28–9). But the political logic is clearest in Luke 20–1, where a proleptic narrative doubles up on and extends a parable. The parable of the Wicked Husbandmen tells the story of the man who planted a vineyard, let it to tenants, then departed. When he sent a servant to them for some of the fruit, they beat him and treated him shamefully. They did the same to a second servant. They wounded a third, so finally the man sent his beloved son. They killed him. This in itself is self-­ evidently about the obtuse, even hostile rejection of grace. But what Christ goes on to say to the disciples in Chapter 21 is that ‘when ye shall hear of wars and commotions, be not terrified: for these things first must come to pass’ (Lk 21.9). ‘Nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. . .and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven’ (Lk 21.10–11). Jerusalem shall be ‘compassed with armies’, and ‘upon the earth’ there will be ‘distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring’ (Lk 21.25). These will be ‘the days of vengeance’, when ‘men’s hearts’ fail them ‘for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on earth’. At this point, the world will turn to the disciples ‘for a testimony’ (Lk 21.13, 20, 22). This is not exactly a paradigmatic instance of a Biblical narrative with a structure and content appropriate to a political theology. But most of the elements are there. To extend this kind of ‘thinking by theological analogy’ via merely a handful of the great theologians would take another book. St Augustine provides us with the classic narrative of the theological event, articulated in the Confessions in autobiographical terms, the event itself being the anagnorisis in the garden in Milan. Appropriately enough, the voice enjoining Augustine to ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read’, and the

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ensuing ‘act and covenant’, are situated at the exact centre of the book.43 ‘It was as if a light of relief from anxiety flooded my heart’, writes Augustine. ‘All the shadows of doubt were dispelled’ (C, p.  153). But against the possibility of anagnorisis, of course, Augustine postulates a remainder, the ‘immense jungle full of traps and dangers’ (C, p. 212), which he cannot but continue to inhabit, and which menaces him without cease. There is an exact philosophical logic to this. God is beyond time and the origin of time. He is atemporal or, more precisely, eternal, and in eternity, for Augustine, all time is simultaneous. This means that God is always at the beginning, ‘is the Beginning’ itself (C, pp.  221–30). Therefore everything in fact comes to us by grace (‘the fact of its living. . .it owe[s] only to your grace’, C, p. 275). But men and women can have no direct knowledge of this. They live in a world conditioned by mutability, which makes them cling to immediate and present forms, for they are all they have. From this derives their inveterate love of ‘created beings’ (C, p. 23), not the constant work of creation itself, from which they are, as it were, screened off. The consequence is ‘total temptation’ in a world of ‘snares’ (C, pp. 207, 210). Grace, however, is divine, and can break through the screen (‘your hand is not kept away by the hardness of humanity, but you melt that when you wish’, C, p. 72). At such times, the subject encounters ‘the newness of [his or her] mind’ (C, p. 281).44 So, too, as with grace, justice is ‘supereminent’ (C, p. 277, a key word); that is, it is God’s alone. But justice can also arrive by grace: truth may ‘arise from the earth and justice look down from heaven’, there may be ‘lights in the firmament’ (C, p. 285; the quotations are from Ps 85.11 and Gen 1.14). We should therefore ‘direct our love’ towards justice (C, p. 215). The structure of thought at stake here, the Augustinian event and remainder, is one on which, subsequent to his conversion, Augustine everywhere insists, and which distils the essence of a certain theological politics, and indeed praxis. He defends it tenaciously, intransigently and, indeed, in an almost political manner. On the one hand there is the Augustinian struggle with Manichaeism. If, as the Manichees supposed, the world is split between two powers, one good, one evil, if there exists an intractable ‘race of darkness’ opposing itself to God, then that means that there is a zone of being beyond God and against which God has built his ‘ramparts’ (C, pp. 112–13, 300), and this in turn either denies the possibility of grace or severely limits its scope. The trouble is that attacking the Manichees appears to push Augustine towards the Pelagians, who maintain that the world and human beings are inclined to the good and perfectible, that grace is in principle available everywhere and to all. (They were the Pinkers and Keltners of their time, leaving the consciences of comfortable and affluent Romans undisturbed). But the Pelagians deny the truth and power of the Augustinian remainder. Thus, to the end of his life, in his various writings against the Pelagians,45 Augustine keeps on attacking them. It is not any determinate, exterior evil that makes men and women act sinfully.46 They do so because of what they are. They cannot redeem themselves save through grace. Without grace, they remain ‘enveloped in the manifold darkness of error’.47 Grace alone is ‘indefectible’ (another key word). Augustine gives us a fundamental structure in uncompromising form. When Badiou announces that ‘from now on, we depend on the event’,48 he is expressing a kind of contemporary, thoroughly secularized form of Augustinianism with which my case

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has coincided, shorn of course of the theological determinism: we cannot be sure that a certain event might not release us from our very dependence on events. Pascal also gives us that structure. He himself underwent his own experience of grace, which was for him ‘the presence and the figuration’ of the atemporal in a time-­bound world.49 There was a ‘Pascalian event’. The Pascalian logic is that there is always a tiny flaw in any given worldly formation, rather like the swerve of the Lucretian clinamen, which can cause it abruptly to give way. The crumbling of a coal can ‘unhinge the reason’ (P, p. 68). A ‘grain of sand’ can destroy Cromwell when even Rome ‘was about to tremble beneath him’ (P, p. 405; Pascal thought Cromwell’s death was due to a kidney or bladder stone). Hence Pascal’s doubts about coming to conclusions on the basis of probability (e.g. P, pp. 312, 534, 595), and his willingness to think the possible. But Pascal’s belief in events left him burdened with a prodigious remainder. Without grace, he fears, ‘the world would not go on existing, for it would either have to be destroyed or be a kind of hell’.50 Alas, we seem ‘incapable of both truth and good’ (P, p.  62). Only grace can eradicate ‘natural error’ in backsliding man and effect his self-­transcendence (P, p. 73; see also pp. 117–19). The event is a function of a God who has disappeared. Thus spiritual meaning is ‘revealed only on certain rare occasions’ (PE, pp. 205–6). Indeed, revelation occurs so seldom that Pascal was inclined to feel ‘[c]ontempt for our existence. . .hatred of our existence’, despair at our ‘desolate heritages’ (PE, pp. 61, 182). Nonetheless, nature is never quite binding, bears its traces of the vanished God (PE, pp. 180, 241). But what finally steels Pascal most against the thought that the remainder might be total is the truth of the Messianic inheritance, which he sees very clearly in the Bible, the ‘succession’ of figures coming ‘one after the other, to foretell the same advent’ (P, p.  238). ‘From the beginning of the world’, the prophetic tradition sustains ‘the Messianic truth’, the possibility of the event, spreads a continuing belief in it (PE, pp. 144, 277). Hence we should not turn aside from the deus absconditus, but rather ‘give him thanks for revealing himself as much as he has’ (PE, pp. 145, 155). But what is most remarkable in Pascal is that we encounter, not only a theology whose structure can be given a political complexion, nor that that theology itself tends sometimes to look like an abstract political theology, but that Pascal applies it to a real historical and political situation (the France of Louis XIV), if, understandably, sometimes obliquely and even allegorically. The Pensées repeatedly offer an indirect commentary on the world of the Sun King, from the critiques of the institution of kingship (‘founded on weakness’ and ‘folly’, P, p. 61) to the deft little swipes at royal imperiousness, intimidation, levity and vacuity, and tyranny in general (P, pp. 79, 80, 122–3, 466). The ‘bonds securing respect’ for the great, he says, are merely ‘bonds of imagination’ (PE, p. 278). By contrast, reason ‘at its most refined’ knows that the Grand Turk (a convenient alias) is ‘a man like any other’ (P, p. 70). The Pensées are strewn with references to court behaviour, from quackery to flattery to casuistry to duelling. Pascal covertly casts Versailles and its over-­valuation of ‘temporal goods’ into the pit, so ‘remote’ is it ‘from justice and reason’ (PE, pp.  174, 350). Like Saint-Simon, if more delicately, he tells us it is home to a gaggle of self-­intent monsters. But the great bugbear of the Pensées is the dominant clerical influence at court, the Order of the Jesuits (‘these people’, PE, p. 243). The worldly Jesuits had refined their

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traditional science of casuistry to the point where it meant pandering to the powerful, rich and fashionable, since casuistry made for a seemingly endless flexibility in the salving of consciences. Though he refuses the label ‘Jansenist’ (P, p. 620), Pascal and his beloved sister Jacqueline sympathized if not identified with the Jansenist cause. Jansenism repudiated a theology that spelt involvement in a corrupted world and advocated the doctrine of attrition, imperfect contrition. Furthermore, many Jansenists had originally been frondeurs, active in the Frondes, the two great, doomed French rebellions against the Sun King. The king himself saw the Jansenists as a Republican party inside the Church and State. They were ‘the main source of discourses of resistance to royal authority’.51 Louis finally decided that he wanted to ‘hear no more of those endless people, those Port-Royal people’.52 He smashed what he called the ‘party of innovators’.53 The implication in the Pensées is clear: ‘holy and chosen’, the Jansenists have become God’s outcasts (e.g. PE, pp. 199, 232), where the Jesuits ‘submit decisions to corrupt reason’, and secretly assert, with the Chief Priests who surrender Christ to Pilate, that ‘we have no other king but Caesar’ (PE, pp. 231, 202; cf. Jn 19.15). But it was Caesar, of course, who won the day. So, too, the Pensées contain some subtle and clever critiques of French militarism (e.g. P, p.  76) and a certain amount of irony at the expense of a two-­faced Papacy too willing to trust the Jesuits (PE, pp.  250, 311). The book tells us that defining major concepts like justice within national borders alone is idle, derisory (see P, p. 81), and that the ‘laws of the state’ are ‘obstacles’ (PE, p.  316). But, most importantly, there is an insistently levelling drive in the Pensées. This is not surprising, given Pascal’s determination to measure the importance of all things against infinity (e.g. P, pp.  162–4). ‘In the perspective of these infinites’, he writes, ‘all finites are equal’ (P, p. 168). Pascal’s concept of the ‘true good’ – it ‘must be such that it may be possessed by all men at once without diminution or envy, and that no-­one should be able to lose it against his will’ (P, pp. 134–5) – is egalitarian. On occasions, the Pensées are haunted by a dream of a ‘true equity’ that might enthral ‘all the peoples of the world’ (P, p. 80). But this dream is of course subjected to the logic of the crumbling coal or the grain of sand. One of the fragments in Pascal’s so-­called Recueil Original, which he did not forward to the copyist for private (one suspects, political) reasons, reads: ‘In 1647 there was grace for all; by 1650 it was rarer’ (P, p.  615). The first Fronde came to an end in 1649. Pascal’s own personal moment of rare grace came four years later, a year after the end of the second Fronde. But he had glimpsed the possibility, a little as would Wordsworth, that the moment of grace could be collective, too. But the theologian to whom I finally want to give particular status, because he both coincides with this book in certain respects and finally points beyond its horizons, is Kierkegaard. Not very long before he died in 2008, the French philosopher Guy Lardreau provided a diagnosis of the seemingly insuperable problem of modern politics, ‘great politics’, a politics which, historically, ‘was seemingly destined to end in disastrous and criminal failure’.54 The ‘discourse of saints’ – by way of analogy, Lardreau was thinking of the early Christian ascetics – was either ‘bent to the needs of a church’ or comprehensively betrayed.55 According to Lardreau, the problem lay in the ‘modes’ of modern political ‘subjectivation’ available, which were ‘obviously deficient’ (GP, p. 90). The evidence is everywhere. Whether as leaders, proponents, instigators,

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activists or men and women on the ground, people could not live up to the ‘great politics’ of modernity, which therefore looked increasingly futile. In this inadequacy lies ‘the madness that the ageing Kant. . .finds haunting all our best resolutions’ (GP, p. 94, n2). Lardreau defines three different modes of ‘deficiency’ in modern political subjectivity, resorting to Lacan for a concept of what unites them, and focusing specifically on what he calls, with Lacan’s concept of the Real in mind, ‘réellisation’. In the mode of ‘réellisation’ there is no relation, ‘nothing can combine with anything’, the Leibnizian monads hold themselves obstinately apart, there is no possibility ‘of integrating self-­ love or philautia with “pathological duty” ’.56 What needs adding, here, is that henceforth any ‘great politics’ will have to incorporate from the start a rigorous interrogation of what the political subject in itself might be capable of becoming, and under what conditions. We might address this question through the Lacanian conception of singularity, on which we touched in the preceding chapter. But I want rather to turn to Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s theology can point us in a very different direction. We can specifically learn a very great deal from his critique of Hegelianism. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham the knight of faith is a figure beyond Hegel. ‘The Hegelian philosophy’ consistently demands ‘disclosure’. It ‘assumes no justified concealment, no justified incommensurability’:57 that is, the totality resumes all particulars (there is no Hegelian remainder). For Hegel, ‘the single individual is the particular that has its telos in the universal’ and annuls itself in becoming the universal, which is ethical (FT, p. 46). But for Kierkegaard faith becomes supremely possible in and as a particular ‘subjectivation’ of the individual, a subjectivity ‘incommensurate with actuality’, not absorbed by it (FT, p. 98). Faith is exactly the absurd paradox ‘that the single individual is higher than the universal’ and transcends or ‘teleologically suspends’ ethics (as Abraham is willing to kill his son, FT, pp. 47, 55). It is in this, rather than the conventionality of an ethics already in place, that commitment truly appears. Without certainty or guarantees of any kind, including any future justification, Abraham places himself in an absolute relation to what he must believe is an absolute value and ‘determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute’, rather than the other way round (FT, p. 61). The father prepared to sacrifice his son makes a gesture of ‘infinite resignation’ and thereby loses ‘the whole of finitude’, of temporality, a present. But at the same time he also returns to it, is as solid and ‘belongs [as] entirely to the world as any ‘bourgeois philistine’. He renounces everything and then grasps everything again ‘by virtue of the absurd’, and thereby comes back to actuality, but as a ‘new creation’ and an example to potentially numberless others (FT, pp.  30, 32, 34). In suspending the universal he becomes unintelligible, and the price of this is anguish and distress. But it is thus that the subject of the event – and for Kierkegaard Abraham’s teleological suspension of the ethical is an event, a ‘miracle’, it staggers him – becomes a beacon light for a theological politics. In the event, too, the particular escapes Hegelian universality. Abraham belongs to ‘the world of spirit’ with its attachment to a supreme justice, and in him ‘the preposterous, the utterly implausible, become[s] true’ (FT, pp. 16, 21, 29). For his part, Kierkegaard places an absolute value on the rare, passionate and, humanly speaking, mad decision above and in contradistinction to the world as it is.58

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Or, to put the point differently: for particular reasons, Kierkegaard is not enthusiastic for Don Quixote.59 Yet, in his terms, it is Hegel who effectively attempts to kill Quixote for modernity. Kierkegaard himself represents its obstinately Quixotic strand. The probability, the likelihood is that, where justice and the good are concerned, the Quixotic view is the only one we can plausibly, indefinitely, perhaps endlessly take. It is only the movement of faith and, in our terms, the assertion of an absolute duty to justice, that will release one from irony – Kierkegaard specifically introduces the word – that is, from the ironies of modernity.60 But Kierkegaard knows very well that, like Quixote, he has dramatically upped the stakes. The condition of Abraham’s kind of decision is equality: it is ‘equally accessible to all’. No human being ‘is excluded’ from it (FT, p. 71). Yet Kierkegaard doubts whether either he or ‘anyone in [his] age’ is capable of ‘the movements of faith’ represented in Abraham (FT, pp. 28, 101). What does Kierkegaard leave us with, otherwise? Nero, as in Either/Or. Dedicated like his Rome (and ours) to imperial power, vast consumption and satiation, for all that his experience ‘has ripened his soul’, Nero remains fundamentally depressed: ‘his innermost being is anxiety’ (EO, pp. 186). Depression is ‘a hysteria of the spirit’ (EO, pp. 188). As ‘immediate spirit’, the person lives connectedly, is bound and responsible to a community, to all ‘earthly life’ (EO, pp. 188–9). But in Nero, though ‘the immediacy of the spirit’ wishes to break through, it cannot, and is therefore ‘pressed back’ and accumulates a new and senseless wrath (EO, pp. 186). The subject cannot understand the perversion of the spirit for what it is – he or she merely medicalizes it – and therefore gives over to victimization and (an acquiescence in) vast injustice. Nero’s ‘sin’, like Lardreau’s ‘deficiency’, has to do with ‘not willing deeply and inwardly’ (EO, pp. 189), an anxious failure to have the good become imperative and prevail. Nero wills a multitude of things, but cannot will the one thing: He desired new pleasures; his enfeebled soul raged so that no ingenuity was sufficient to discover something new – something new! It was change he cried out for as pleasure served him, change! change!61

Kierkegaard clearly saw Nero as a figure for his ‘groaning’ times (EO, pp. 189). He is no less so for ours, as a host of evidence, from the anti-­natalism of a David Benatar to Jonathan Dollimore’s account of depression – one in ten Americans on Prozac, the incidence of depression possibly doubling every twenty years, making it perhaps ‘the biggest killer on earth’; like Kierkegaard, Dollimore says that depression is beyond the depressive’s comprehension – bears literal witness.62

In the end, the poets Abraham has the strength ‘not to become Nero’. In him ‘a whole outlook on life’ turns ‘upside down’ (EO, p. 185). But Abraham is solitary and his ‘otherwise’ is singular. There is, however, and has long been, another ‘otherwise’ in modernity, the aesthetic (see FT, pp.  71–2). For Kierkegaard, and here again he might seem exemplary, relative to Abraham’s paradoxical transcendence of and return to actuality, the aesthetic is in fact

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a pis aller. But how often, throughout modernity, as far as and into its implosion, has the pis aller turned out to be all that was left us. I recall again Kahn’s summons to us ‘to recover for the present conversation about political theology, the terrain of art’. It is in art, above all, literature, that we can discover the finest, most powerful and most nuanced expressions of what a political theology can be. So I end, again, with literature;63 more precisely, with two intellectually, geographically and culturally marginal and – certainly in one case, disregarded – poets, R.S. Thomas, a reader of Kierkegaard himself,64 and Norman Nicholson. Their marginality, Thomas in north Wales, especially the Llŷn peninsula, Nicholson in Millom and a forgotten, post-­industrial corner of south-­west Cumbria, is crucial. For they write out of a condition of political desolation, of drastic political neglect, that gives their voices a rare authority, not just because, in Benjaminian terms, they speak truth as only the terminally ‘irrelevant’ can, but because, in their marginality, but also as poets, imaginative persons, in the starkness of their vision, they have no recourse to the routine assurances or circumventions. One might say of both, if especially Thomas, what Jambet says of Oscar Wilde, that they testify to a ‘seemingly irredeemable fallen world which refuses to confront or assume responsibility for its fallen condition, which represents this condition to itself in quite other terms, which sees itself in another mirror and has its own justifications’.65 They are also both political poets, poets of the left,66 and religious and theological poets, together, and the two aspects of their work (and of their struggles) are inseparable. Though hardly generally recognized as such, Thomas is the major English-­language poet of the mid- to late twentieth century. (His only rival is Robert Lowell.) Like the Yeats he so revered before him, but with perhaps a greater range, he seeks to take the full weight of history, to stare the Gorgon in the face. He would greet the widespread if often not fully explicit contemporary assumption that we have overcome or are somehow getting beyond history with disbelief. Like Yeats’s, too, though his orientation is very different, Thomas’s politics comes out of and remains rooted in a local focus. It all begins in, and remains sunk in, Wales. Thomas’s poetry smoulders with rage at the age-­old history of the invasion of Wales, of English depredations, military, political, administrative – ‘the barbed sting/Of English law’ (‘The Tree’, TCP, p.  32) – and, progressively, cultural and above all linguistic. As Justin Wintle puts the point, for Welsh nationalists and radicals of Thomas’s description, both history and democracy stand condemned and cannot help. ‘When, they asked themselves, would it ever be right? When had it ever been right?’67 Thomas cannot conceivably brush aside or mitigate the sense of enduring wrong. Indeed, he feels that it is his duty as a poet to bear and testify to it for a people otherwise ignorant or heedless of it; in other words, to transmit it, unpalliated. His is, again, ‘a voice in the wilderness’, in more ways than one.68 Not surprisingly, given its history, the condition of Wales, ‘this country of failure’, is grievous (A, p. 58; cf. ‘The Bush’, TCP, p. 422). For centuries, Wales has been embattled, repeatedly defeated – ‘We fought, and were always in retreat’ (‘Welsh History’, TCP, p.  36) – driven to the edge, adulterated. The Welsh have been crushed, become ‘an impotent people,/Sick with inbreeding’, with only a ‘waste of thought/Forming from mind erosion’ (‘The Village’, ‘A Welshman to Any Tourist’, TCP, pp. 57, 65). By now, the horizons are closed. The people lack any will to independence and proud self-­assertion. They betray each other and themselves. They ‘come obediently as a dog/To the pound’s

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whistle’ (‘Too Late’, TCP, p. 108). They truckle to the superior power of English culture, and reproduce it in lame and second-­hand forms. One sees the Welsh failure everywhere in the peasantry, in Welsh villages and rural life, with their ‘bad feeling’, ‘their callousness and hate’ (A, pp.  13, 63, 94), their resentment and dirty quarrelling, ‘the same old suspicion alive as ever’ (A, p.  13). The creatures who populate Thomas’s poems are ‘unhallowed’ (‘A Priest to his People’, TCP, p. 13), blasted in their humanities, ‘stripped of love/And thought and grace’ (‘The Hill Farmer Speaks’, TCP, p.  31). His great, representative figure, fictional Welsh hill-­farmer Iago Prytherch, is afflicted with sheer ‘vacancy’, his heart ‘dry as a dead leaf ’ (‘A Peasant’, ‘Lament for Prytherch’, TCP, pp.  4, 58). The poet does not lift himself above his people, quite the reverse, hence the title ‘Affinity’ (TCP, p. 8). If ‘This hate’s for my own kind’ (Hyddgen’, TCP, p. 113), it is so in a sense that includes himself. But he knows who his people are. This ‘inert people/. . . have never known either freedom or love’ (‘Saraband’, TCP, p. 377). Thomas’s poems offer a very exact statement as to what the pre-­political consists in. But the longer Thomas kept on writing, the more regularly he expanded his despair to encompass a world beyond Wales. Ours is ‘the new world, ugly and evil’ (‘No Through Road’, TCP, p. 68), in which the implacable English are just the type of the destructive reign of ‘The cold brain of the machine’ (‘Too Late’, TCP, p. 108). The ‘good news of the kingdom’ and its ‘guns and bombs’ (‘Gospel’, TCP, p. 431), its endless ‘buying and selling and mortgaging’ (‘Fair Day’, TCP, p. 380), is merely the ‘good news’ everywhere. Don’t be cheated, he tells us: ‘Democracy is the tip/the rich and the well-­born give/for your homage’ (‘His Condescensions Are Short-Lived’, TCP, p. 259). But above all, simply, to Thomas the pacifist, Mostly it was wars With their justification Of the surrender of values For which they fought. Between Them they laid their plans For the next. . . . ‘Digest’, TCP, p. 217

Throw into the mix the huge over-­population of ‘this shrinking planet’ (‘The Small Country’, TCP, p. 335), its vast pollution, the extinction of so many of its species, its huge imbalances of power and wealth, its proliferation of nuclear stockpiles and its sporadic threat of Armageddon, and one is apparently left only with a historical dead-­end. So Wales becomes the type of Thomas’s remainder. Human beings, it would seem, have ‘paused/now for lack of the oxygen/of the spirit’ (‘Relay’, TCP, p. 269). What can one think, other than that ‘the black dog/Cracking his fleas in the hot sun/Is history’ (‘The Village’, TCP, p. 57)? And what, then, can be said of God? Thomas’s answer is multifaceted, complex and shifting, powerfully expressed, but almost always bleak. Brooding on a millennium shortly to come, he writes of a God ‘eclipsed/totally by our planet, by the shadow/cast on him by the contemporary mind’ (‘A D 2000’, TCP, p. 495). All the historical evidence suggests that God must indeed have absented himself, or ceased to exist, given injustice, political horror, or that he is extraordinarily remote,

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difficult, a faint promise at best. His ‘abstruse geometry’ proceeds eternally ‘in the silence beyond right and wrong’ (‘At It’, TCP, p. 331). Perhaps he is indifferent, eternally letting ‘our prayers break on him’ (‘The Other’, TCP, p. 457). Or perhaps he is aghast at his error: ‘And God thought: Pray away,/Creatures: I’m going to destroy/It. The mistake’s mine’ (‘Soliloquy’, TCP, p. 230). Perhaps he just lacks love, and ‘in the darkness, curs[es] himself ’ for it (‘Barn Owl’, TCP, p. 319). He doesn’t speak, or speaks at moments when we aren’t listening. How can he be other than ‘Janus-­faced’ (‘A D 2000’, TCP, p. 495), given that he ‘formed’ both ‘the roses/In the delicate flesh’ and ‘the tooth that bruises’ (‘Places’, TCP, p. 63)? But God is also ‘the live God’ (‘Ann Griffith’, TCP, p. 281; cf. ‘Alive’, TCP, p. 296). He is wonderfully reflected in ‘live fibre’ (‘Cones’, TCP, p. 478). Many have heaped praise on Thomas as a nature poet. But this seems to me to detract from even as it pays tribute to him (a master of poetic description, a superb local colourist). Thomas’s relation to nature is inseparable from both his theology and his politics. What his immediate surroundings teach him is that nature is a scintillating play of differences, rapidity of motion: ‘the weather’, he writes is ‘everything in Holyhead’ (A, p.  4).69 As celandines ‘glitter like quickgold’ (A, p. 126), nature does not stay still. It flashes, springs, ‘never loiters’ (A, p. 148). Hence the importance of ‘suddenness’ in Thomas. The word ‘sudden’ and the title ‘Suddenly’ recur: In Wales there are jewels To gather, but with the eye Only. A hill lights up Suddenly; a field trembles With colour and goes out In its turn; in one day You can witness the extent Of the spectrum and grow rich With looking. . . . ‘The Small Window’, TCP, p. 202

‘Tremendum et fascinans’ (A, p.  132),70 the Northern Lights are the very image of God in nature. In this manner, nature is a principle, not only of creativity, but of final indeterminacy. ‘All through history/The great brush has not rested,/Nor the paint dried’ (‘The View from the Window’, TCP, p. 81; cf ‘Praise’, TCP, p. 318). Thus nature can always teach ‘beauty/And grace’, together, if only as ‘cold splendour’ (a Yeatsian phrase; ‘Valediction’, ‘Song at the Year’s Turning’, TCP, pp. 38, 59). That it does so is altogether crucial to the thinking subject, in that he or she may always experience ‘the glimmer of sunshine that comes to cheer the twilight’ of his or her prison (A, p. 120), find that ‘sunlight surprise[s] the mind/Groping on its cloudy path’ (‘Poetry for Supper’, TCP, p. 86). Of course, Thomas’s response to nature is not naive: he knows that, historically, ‘spilled blood’ dyes ‘the immaculate rivers/In all their courses’ (TCP, p.  37). The innocent newness of each dawn repeatedly collides with the ‘work’ of ‘humankind’ (A, p. 80). One can therefore only think in terms of a gulf between God in his creation,

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and an ‘unmanageable’ people to whom ‘the life of the spirit’ is foreign (A, p. 52). But the gulf is not absolute. Finally, Thomas’s God is a God of occasional, trembling illuminations, ‘here a moment, then/not here’ (‘Moorland’, TCP, p.  513). There must be at least a ‘bright ore/That seams our history’ (‘A Welshman to Any Tourist’, TCP, p. 65). God, like poetry, happens, ‘if only after a long period on your knees’ (A, p. 166). The principle both of poetry and of the divine in nature is capable of breaking into and fissuring the political domain. ‘Spring’s/restlessness among dry/leaves’ may serve as a prelude to Lazarus’s rising from the grave (‘Covenanters’, TCP, p.  405). As the poem ‘The Bright Field’ superlatively says, pursuing the relevant logic, in a historical framework, the rare event is that which matters and alone matters, alone requires major attention (TCP, p.  302). It is on this basis that God, nature and a minimalist politics come together. In Thomas’s version of him, the great rebel Owain Glyn Dŵr recalls that, in ‘the face of the grim world’, for ‘one brief hour the summer came/To the tree’s branches and we heard/In the green shade Rhiannon’s birds’ (‘The Tree’, TCP, p. 33). As the Welsh have their place for an ‘ultimate stand/In the thick woods’ (‘Welsh History’, TCP, p. 36), so of a gaoled nationalist, Thomas writes that     . . . poetry In this small plot Of manhood opens Its rich petals. . . ‘A Lecturer’, TCP, p. 138

People do experience an unappeasable hunger for grace, ‘the uncouth soul’ as much as others (‘The Dark Well’, TCP, p.  96). In a world of inequity, ‘[t]he possibility of judgement is clear on the horizon’ (A, p. 108). Any dream of ‘the new community’ must be very faint (‘Iago Prytherch’, TCP, p. 16). It is nonetheless not extinguishable. Hence Thomas’s version of Welsh hiraeth. The word commonly betokens grief for the departed, homesickness for an unavailable home, nostalgia for a vanished if not an idyllic past (‘I have thought often/. . .of the fountain of my people/that played beautifully here’, ‘The Bush’, TCP, p. 422). But beyond that, in Thomas at least, it indicates a longing for a world that is supernal and also real, yet almost invariably fails to materialize. The founding disposition of the political subject is rooted in hiraeth. On the basis of that disposition, he or she grows aware of the ‘crown of light’, the ‘splendour’ that can ‘fall upon’ persons (A, p. 78). Then love may find ‘a crack in their hearts’, cry ‘momentarily in their hearts’ manger’ (‘The Mill’, ‘Hill Christmas’, TCP, pp. 144, 290). Anyone at all can know an ‘April day/of the heart’ (‘The Tree’, TCP, p. 417), a becoming voluble ‘after long silence’ (‘Suddenly’, TCP, p. 426). The mind may be dipped in a ‘spring of thought’ from which, ‘emerging but/once in ten thousand times’, it may undergo a cure (‘Cures’, CP, p. 529). Note, again, the emphasis on infrequency: in the general way of things, ‘we wait for the/withheld answer to an insoluble/problem’ as ‘on some peninsula/of the spirit’ (‘Fishing’, Emerging’, TCP, pp. 327, 355; cf. ‘Waiting’, TCP, p. 376). All the same, with great simplicity, in the poem he chose to close the Collected Poems, Thomas places his marriage, ‘love’s moment/in a world in/servitude to time’ (‘A Marriage’, p. 533) as the supreme instance of his personal and, implicitly, his political creed.

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The sporadic occurrence is also that of inspiration: . . . here once on an evening like this, In the darkness that was about his hearers, a preacher caught fire and burned steadily before them with a strange light. . . . ‘The Chapel’, TCP, p. 276

For the most part, however, the poet who ‘would spurt like a flame of fire’ into his people knows that his fire will abruptly be quenched (‘A Priest to his People’, TCP, p. 13). The minister’s sermons go unheard, his congregation untaught, spiritually and politically, since the two kinds of concern are inseparable. Hence Thomas identifies, not with the ‘popular’ element in Christianity (A, p.  107) – though the people are not to be discounted, they are ‘[t]he source of all poetry’ (‘A Priest to his People’, TCP, p. 13) – but with two traditions, that of the great theologians, notably, as here, Augustine, Pascal and above all Kierkegaard, to whom Thomas also adds St Paul and Aquinas, and that of ‘the priestly writers in the Welsh church’, the ‘priest-­poets’ (FI, p. 178). These are the few who can transmit obscure events of poetic vision (as in ‘In a Country Church’, TCP, p. 67), pass on the precious metal, if not without dross, as the poet does, to ‘my friends, my countrymen’ who ‘may still sift a little gold out of what I have wrought’.71 They are the ones who can still break ‘Like sun crumbling the gold air/The live bread for the starved folk’ (‘Bread’, TCP, p. 93). If we can subscribe ‘to Shelley’s description of the poet as unacknowledged legislator, then it is only by upholding such an ideal in poetry that we can at long last change the people’.72 Thomas is a paradigm of my political theology and the example par excellence of its being most appropriately expressed in modern literature. He combines a negative theology with political minimalism. They are inseparable from, indeed inconceivable without one another. Together, they are born of learning, deep knowledge, harsh realism, historical experience and a present context. Thomas’s understanding of God is rooted in his understanding of the historical and political condition of Wales. What he has to say about the first is everywhere determined by the second. Thomas certainly had a constituency. He went out and laboured in it day after day. He had no illusions about its potential for any revolution – and that is how he knows his God for what he takes him to be. Shelley asserted that ‘it is not through lack of counsel and knowledge that the world went astray’.73 Political thought is marked from the start by a near-­ certainty that it will prove ineffectual. Yet there is also political hope, if only in (for Thomas) divine openness, the great unresting brush. The picture has never congealed into a finally hardened form. Literature and art are there to provide us with versions of that melancholic-­ecstatic truth, as Thomas so powerfully does, to communicate it to us, as a form of thought; a form of political thought, a political theology, that belongs to literature above all, because it is not to be extricated from questions of nuance, mood and tone. Nicholson takes this thought a small but decisive stage further, and one is almost tempted to think that it might be precisely because of this that he is so largely overlooked.

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If the circumstances of his poetry are deeply unpromising, this is even more the case given what he makes of them. Quoting cultural geographer David Matless, David Cooper has evoked the treasured Lake District as a ‘social-­spiritual space. . .a topography in which the mystical rubs shoulders with the legislative’.74 If this description holds good, then Nicholson’s Millom, south-­west Cumbria, Western coastal strip and Western fells are the antitype, not only of that topography, but the way in which it thinks a theology and a politics together. The small, rundown, neglected industrial town of Millom, at the very south-­western coastal tip of Cumbria, in particular, seemingly exists as a kind of hole in theological and political space, forgotten of God and man, a dead zone, off the radar, inexistent for the larger culture. As Nicholson tells us in Greater Lakeland, it was and effectively still is ‘a decaying Victorian settlement’ that began in the mid-­nineteenth century as ‘a miserable encampment of huts and sheds’ struggling up out of ‘a waste of dune, salt-­marsh and swampy fields’.75 The discovery of a valuable haematite ore in the 1850s meant that immigrant labour had flooded in, and the village grown rapidly. The Millom and Askam Hematite Iron Company Limited formed in 1890. Millom saw a few decades of expansion and at least some prosperity. After the First World War, however, there was a sharp downturn in the iron market, and economic constraints dictated that the Company begin to close sites. Any seeds of recovery were crushed by the economic slump, and Millom never effectively recovered. It has frequently if not almost always given the impression of being what the Mayor of Copeland called it, ‘a place of despair’.76 But as Benjamin thought that truth lies with the historically defeated, and Christ puts his faith in ‘the least of all seeds’ (Mt 14.32), in Nicholson’s verse, from Millom, something special springs. Millom was fairly typical of the mining communities of the eastern coasts of the Irish and Celtic seas (Welsh, Scottish, Cornish). They were not at all deeply and stably rooted in their worlds, but frequently made up of incomers who remained itinerant and transient, moving (or being moved) where the work moved. As Nicholson is well aware, in this case, there can be no historical narrative of a community, let alone a vibrant political one; nor, in larger terms, can he credit or produce any coherent, greater narrative of the history of the Cumbrian coast. Its history is fragmentary, piecemeal, episodic. It is a sporadic history; that is, only intermittently does history happen here at all. From the incursions of the Romans to those of the Vikings, Picts, Scots and English, to the effects of the Industrial revolution, the discovery of the iron seams, the rise, brisk decline and eclipse of mines and iron and steel works to the nuclear installation at Sellafield, it is a history of invasion, domination, exploitation, of the rapacity of industrialists, entrepreneurs and indeed governments, and the necessary consequence of all three, damage, on the historical traces of which Nicholson intently broods. The very image of betrayal, in ‘Windscale’, Nicholson’s fine poem about it – according to his biographer David Boyd, it was written after ‘the 1957 reactor fire and catastrophic radiation leak’77 – is the demonism of the nuclear site: The toadstool towers infest the shore: Stink-­horns that propagate and spore   Wherever the wind blows. Scafell looks down from the bracken band,

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And sees hell in a grain of sand,   And feels the canker itch between his toes. This is a land where dirt is clean And poison pasture, quick and green,   And storm sky, bright and bare; Where sewers flow with milk, and meat Is carved up for the fire to eat   And children suffocate in God’s fresh air.78

Nicholson’s most arresting response to this condition is a messianic vision. The poet sends the Atlantic spilling over its edge into the coastal wasteland, sets the tops of the coastal mountains alight, not only or even chiefly destructively or in wrath, but as a messianic image of radical justice. I have his early poetry in mind in the first instance; but his comparatively early novel The Fire of the Lord (1944), in which Benjamin Fell calls upon the fire as an instrument of messianic purification, is also indicative. Nicholson conceives of the Atlantic edge on which Millom stands as either the point of entry for a divinely vengeful ocean, or of an absolute boundary that forces the mind to think the impossible, vertical transaction, of which the idea of justice is a principal manifestation. See for instance the evocation of dawn over west Cumbria which opens ‘The Holy Mountain’ (NCP, p. 92); or, later in the poem, the invocation of the refining fire: The earth shall burn to the sky; like the six Candles before the altar shall burn the six peaks      To the glory of the Lord: Everest, Sinai, and the seven-­fold hill of Rome,      The tripod of creeds, Helvellyn, megalithic Gable, and Wetherlam,      Burning above the orchards. NCP, p. 101

So a disintegrative history on the one hand, a messianic counterblast on the other.79 But here I want to end with geology. Nicholson knew a lot about the geology of the Cumbrian coast, and incorporated it thematically into his writings, perhaps notably in the immediately postwar period, specifically, 1948–54, in the two volumes of poems Rock Face (1948) and The Pot Geranium (1954) and the prose works contemporary with them, especially the chapters on geology in Cumberland and Westmoreland, published in 1949. All the major geological phenomena that interest him are, first, Cumbrian and, second, visible as western or coastward-­facing formations. One witnesses Cumbrian geology as a whole just by following the coast, if not exactly sequentially. Nicholson is resistant to the idea that geology is about studying ‘the layers of a huge liquorice all-­sort’ (in the geologists’ more technical term, a stratigraphic column). On the coast, precisely, it is possible to experience geological formations, not as a series of strata, but as a line or track, one where stratigraphic order has been ‘broken up by cracks and buckling in the

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rind of the earth’, ‘faults and landslides and earthquakes’, ‘rain, rivers, erosion’ and the ‘geological rheumatism’ of ice that freezes in the joints of rock.80 Furthermore, as Nicholson states, ‘the rock is harder and more lasting than history’ (CW, p. 19). Certainly, there is what Nicholson himself calls a ‘geological time’; but the geological line or track is achronic, in the sense that one’s experience or knowledge of it is not an experience or knowledge of temporal sequence or historical development, but is rather patchy, disconnected, disorderly and complex. Something like the same indifference to any supposed historical concatenation or progressive time is evident in Nicholson’s geological reading, from Thomas Robinson’s An Essay Towards a Natural History of Westmoreland and Cumberland of 1709, to Jonathan Otley’s Descriptive Guide to the English Lakes (1849), to Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), one of the founders of modern geology, to John Bolton’s Geological Fragments (1869), to works with more claim to modern authority, J.E. Marr’s The Geology of the Lake District (1916) and Tom Eastwood’s British Regional Geology: Northern England (1946). For Nicholson, only by understanding the rock do you understand the Cumbrian coast: ‘the meaning is in the rock’ (CW, p.  10). But what meaning, exactly? Here Robinson’s book is particularly interesting, since it is, not just a piece of natural history, but a providential theory of geology. Robinson even appends to it an attempt at ‘A Vindication of the Philosophical Theological Paraphrase of the Mosaick System of the Creation’. For Robinson, geology is grandly portentous. Indeed, British geology pretty much was so until the advent of Lyell: initially, at least, Sedgwick for example was a catastrophist, who sought to reconcile his geological discoveries with the biblical tale of the Flood. Nicholson rightly takes Robinson’s arguments to be ‘wild’ (CW, p. 12), but nonetheless maintains Robinson’s portentous drive. The poet, however, does not present us with geological time as, in contrast to the vagaries of human history, characterized by a reassuring timelessness, let alone a providential purpose. Nor is geological time identifiable with gradualism. Rather, if geological time is patchy and complex, it is also at one and the same time both tumultuous and slow. On the one hand, the time that created Wasdale granite has left it able to take ‘bombings and blasting and dynamiting as if they were flea-­bites’ (CW, p.  19). On the other hand, Nicholson repeatedly imagines rock as though it were living: the Yewdale Crags are ‘[f]anged like a tiger’ (CW, p. 24), Great Gable is always ready ‘to show its teeth’ (CW, p. 22); ‘tamed or fierce’, he says, of the Skiddaw Slate mountains, ‘they are always animal and alive’ (CW, p. 15). Nicholson’s coastal rock is both immemorial and at the same time volatile. The Wasdale screes, for instance, exist in an ‘unstable equilibrium’ (CW, p. 19). Geological time is dynamic. ‘Because of the immense ages of what we might call geological time’, writes Nicholson, ‘we are inclined to think the formulative forces belong to the past. But except for the ice they are still at work today’ (CW, p. 48). Geological time is uneven, its condition one of continuity, rest and turmoil together (ibid.). Within geological time, the centuries form, reform and dissolve like sand-­dunes (CW, p. 49). Certainly, Nicholson is in some degree concerned to imagine human time or chronos as nested within geological time. But geological time is also the time of the event. In Nicholson’s radically de-­anthropomorphized landscapes, in which the rock even appears to take over the people and their creations, their churches and houses, the paradox is that,

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the rockier they are, the closer men and women are to unprecedented if very rare, indeed quite exceptional transformations, to new possibilities of being. For in rock one sees the traces of vast, unforeseen, inexplicable convulsions and upheavals whose consequences were enduring. Messianic possibility is secreted in geological time. Immediately after 1945, Nicholson in his isolation was drawn to think this way, not just by his historical vision of his coastal strip, but by the war, which the poems show afflicted him with horror. In ‘The Seven Rocks’, thinking geological time is Nicholson’s task. For Nicholson, any kind of scientific discrimination between periods fades and fails in the face of the paradoxical co-­existence of great, solid, unbudgeable entities, mountains, cliffs, outcrops, with a principle of protean life. Indeed, coastal poetry insists on that principle, grasps it, absorbs it, makes it happen. Hence Nicholson’s inspired prefatory quotation to the poem, from Purgatorio, Canto X, in which Dante evokes climbing in an intensely mobile landscape, ‘per una pietra fossa/che si moveva d’una e d’altra parte’, through a cloven rock which seemed to bend on one side or another. Furthermore, it does so as though it had become one with the sea, ‘come l’onde che fugge e s’appressa’, like the wave that ebbs and flows (NCP, p. 242); all this, significantly, in a Canto where power crumbles, where the proud are humbled, where vainglory is purged, but where, Dante tells us, ‘noi siam vermi’, we are worms, whom spectacular and unprecedented grace may nonetheless save as ‘l’angelica farfalla’, the ‘angelic butterfly’.81 In ‘The Seven Rocks’, the rocks ‘solidify’, but also come apart. ‘Time’ can be ‘frozen/To a long, shining icicle of light’. Land turns to sea, sea-­creatures turn to stone, stone to secretive sea-­beast. ‘The rock un-­knows itself ’. This is the coastal world as witnessed by God and the poet, together, by ‘The un-­closed eye/That learns (still staring)/Never to see’ (NCP, pp. 243–4, 250), the eye that refuses and rejects even the most drastic forms of what appears to be self-­evidence. All that is solid can indeed melt into air, or into the sea, or into other forms of being, including that antithesis of paradise, the ‘place of despair’. That recognition is the foundation of Nicholson’s political theology. For Nicholson as for Thomas, God never quite goes away, persists, if only as, the barest minimum, an enigmatic hole in the given. The enigmatic hole in the given is always ours, too. There is always, and forever, historicity. The future is always a blank canvas waiting to be filled. To come back finally to Jambet: this is what he means when he says of Kant that he understood that the thought of the Idea determined the ‘suprasensible’ destination of man. What, Jambet asks, does the suprasensible, the metahistorical, the Real, that which I cannot confine within my particular historical purview, give me to hope? Nicholson’s answer is, look at that seemingly most resistant, immobile and changeless of entities, rock. In rock, to quote Jambet, ‘the effective reality’ of the Real is finally identifiable ‘with the spontaneity of liberty’.82 On that foundation, I think, a political theology adequate to the current state of our knowledge and experience can be founded. It is a political theology befitting if not necessitated by our inexorable and almost certainly unstoppable movement towards the condition of ‘Hothouse Earth’, a political thought commensurate with that truth.83 At the very least, it is one way, a major and significant way, however minimal, of finally thinking beyond modern irony and what sometimes seems like the interminable recurrence of modern discouragement.

Notes Introduction: Modernity and the Political Fix 1 Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 12–15. 2 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 457. 3 Daniel Dorling, Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists (Bristol: Policy, 2010). 4 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), pp. 119–37. 5 See Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, Why Equality is Better for Everyone (London: Penguin, p. 2010); and also, among others, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014); and Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality (London: Penguin, 2013). 6 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), pp. 140–1. 7 See Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), 2014. 8 Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Penguin, 2015), pp. 165, 169–70. 9 For all the (admirable) brilliance of his analyses of neoliberalism, Harvey’s conviction that we are witnessing a ‘stunning’ emergence and growth of progressive forces which give us abundant grounds for optimism surely makes him a case of chronic wishful thinking. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 200. 10 In a public declaration in Athens in 2009: ‘Fini le gauche!’ 11 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1977 [1962]), hereafter cited in the text as AR; pp. 43–4. 12 Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986 [1925]), hereafter cited in the text as PR; pp. 52, 56. 13 Quoted in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 2010 [1982]), hereafter cited in the text as ATS; p. 62. 14 For the full account of this, see ATS, pp. 37–86. 15 Jacques Derrida, ‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, trans. Joshua Wilner, in Aris Fioretos (ed.), Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 3–72. 16 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, foreword Andreas Huyssen (London: Verso, 1988), p. 484. 17 See Alain Badiou, Second manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Fayard, 2009), p. 106. 18 Karl Mannheim, Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. David Keller, Volker Meja and Nico Stehr (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982 [1925]), hereafter cited in the text as C; p. 51. 19 Albert O. Hirschman, The Rhetoric of Reaction (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1991), hereafter cited in the text as RR; p. 3.

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20 George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ed. A. Hamilton Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as CHP; 2.31. All references are to this edition. 21 Jerome J. McGann, ‘Introduction’, George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. xi–xxiii, p. xxi. 22 Though Byron plays some small tricks with chronology in the poem, it is clear that he means it as a commentary on the years of his first travels. 23 The Spanish term is surely preferable to the English one, certainly in this context. Byron would have thought so. 24 Cf. also CHP, 1.23. 25 See Hamilton Thompson’s note on line 37, CHP, p. 205. 26 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Defence of Poetry’, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), pp. 510–35, p. 535. 27 Byron, Selected Poems, ed. with introd. Susan J. Wolfson and Peter J. Manning (London: Penguin, 2005), hereafter cited in the text as BSP; p. 176. 28 Byron, ‘Don Juan’, Complete Poetical Works, vol. V, ed. Jerome McGann (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 1.132. 29 See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 164. For a singularly brilliant account of Benjamin that emphasizes both terms, see Françoise Proust, L’histoire à contretemps: Le temps historique chez Walter Benjamin (Paris: Cerf, 1994). 30 Proust, L’Histoire à contretemps, p. 58. 31 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 37. 32 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 50. 33 Proust, L’Histoire à contretemps, pp. 71–98. 34 Marvell, ‘The Coronet’, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, 2003), p. 49. 35 Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–38, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 385. 36 Jacques Rancière, La Parole muette: Essais sur les contradictions de la littérature (Paris: Hachette, 1998), hereafter cited in the text as PM ; pp. 47–8. 37 Rancière, La chair des mots: Politiques de l’écriture (Paris: Galilée, 1998), hereafter cited in the text as CM; pp. 20, 33. The word sensible is in italics throughout the chapter, marking it as French and properly untranslatable, or translatable only with (too much) wordage. 38 Phrases like ‘depuis deux siècles’ and ‘depuis le XVIIIe siècle’ recur in his work. See e.g. Rancière, Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués: Entretiens (Paris: Amsterdam: 2009), hereafter cited in the text as TP; p. 210; and Aisthesis: Scènes du regime esthétique de l’art (Paris: Galilée, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as AI; p. 9. 39 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. with introd. Gabriel Rockhill, afterword Slavoj Žižek (London: Continuum, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as PA; p. 65. 40 Rancière, La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), p. 9. 41 I introduce the term sous rature, ‘under erasure’, from Heidegger and Derrida. To my knowledge, Rancière does not employ it. 42 Rancière, Le Fil perdu: Essais sur la fiction moderne (Paris: La Fabrique, 2014), hereafter cited in the text as FP; p. 75. 43 Rancière, Courts voyages au pays du peuple (Paris: Seuil, 1981), p. 25.

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44 Rancière, Malaise dans l’esthétique (Paris: Galilée, 2004), p. 130. 45 In a different manner, this book operates that very suspension. Compare my remarks on the utopian or, better, the Kantian-­speculative, and the empirical, in my Conclusion, pp. 161, 174. 46 Rancière, La Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007), p. 159. Cf. Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. with introd. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana/Collins, 1979), pp. 83–109. 47 Rancière, Le partage sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris: La Fabrique, 2000), p. 63. 48 Quoted in Violet Plincke, ‘Novalis: A Sketch’, Anthroposophy: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science, vol. 3, no. 3 (Michaelmas, 1928), p. 1. 49 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), p. 716. 50 Bob Dylan surely deserved his candidature for a Nobel Prize, but a new one, for Popular Culture. 51 Rancière, Les Noms de l’histoire (Paris: Seuil, 1994), hereafter cited in the text as NH; pp. 54–5. 52 See Rancière, FP, p. 89. 53 See Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (London: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 591. 54 Badiou, Le Séminaire: Parménide: L’être: figure ontologique, 1985–6 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), p. 17. 55 George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, Critical Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 1946), p. 104. 56 Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. xii.

1.  The Implosion of Modernity 1 Including me, notably in a book that includes some useful literary criticism but whose position I stopped identifying with long ago, Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel. 2 See Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, foreword Fredric Jameson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 71–82, pp. 79–82. 3 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), trans. with introd. Jon R. Snyder, p. 172. 4 See Henri Lefebvre, Introduction to Modernity, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2011), passim. 5 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, After the Future, ed. Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thorburn, trans. Arianna Bove, Melinda Cooper, Erik Empson, Enrico, Giuseppina Mecchia and Tiziana Terranova (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as AF; p. 44. 6 Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, foreword by Andreas Huyssen (London: Verso, 1983), hereafter cited in the text as CCR; p. 98. Cf. Berardi, p. 141. 7 For more details of this sublime example, see https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/ business/international/tony-­blair-has-­used-his-­connections-to-­change-the-­worldand-­to-get-­rich.html/ (accessed 12 January 2018).

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8 See Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End: Essays on a Failing System (London: Verso, 2016), hereafter cited in the text as HW; p.32. 9 Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land: A Treatise on Our Present Discontents (London: Penguin, 2010), hereafter cited in the text as IF; p. 107. 10 See John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (London: Penguin, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as SM; p. 162. 11 See Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (London: Penguin, 2015), hereafter cited in the text as TCE; p. 194. 12 Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as PS; pp. 69, 96–8 and passim. 13 Among numerous relevant accounts, see https://www.refinery29.uk/2018/04/197022/ child-­labor-fashion-­checklist (accessed 30 July 2018). 14 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­us-canada-43066082 (accessed 3 March 2018). 15 See Owen Jones, The Establishment, and How They Got Away With It (London: Penguin, 2015), hereafter cited in the text as TE; p. xi. 16 See Howard Hotson, ‘Big Business at the Heart of the System: Understanding the Global University Crisis’, at http://www.srhe.ac.uk/conference2012/; and the home page of the World Economic Forum at http://www.weforum.org/ (both accessed 1 March 2018). 17 Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), p. 6. 18 David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Democracy (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), hereafter cited in the text as UR; p. 141. 19 Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), hereafter cited in the text as PC; p. 92. 20 Benjamin Noys, Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism (Alresford: Zero Books, 2014), pp. 7, 10. 21 Daniel Dorling, Injustice: Why Social Inequality Persists (Bristol: Policy, 2010), hereafter cited in the text as I; p. 3. 22 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Introduction: The Return of Diogenes as Postmodern Intellectual’, Sloterdijk, CCR, pp. ix–xxv, p. xii. 23 See CCR, p. 88. 24 Sloterdijk, Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews, 1993–2012, ed. Bernard Klein, trans. Karen Margolies (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), hereafter cited in the text as SE; p. 183. 25 See Judt, IF, pp. 36, 164 and passim. 26 Jacques Lacan, Seminar Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 34, 291–3. In the first quotation, Lacan is citing himself. 27 See Jones, TE, pp. xvi, 169. 28 In one of the intertitles in Masculin-Féminin. 29 Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 219. 30 See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), pp. 31–8 and passim. 31 See https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/planning-­to-retire/2008/11/21/3reasons-­baby-boomers-­are-the-­richest-generation-­in-history; and news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/uk_news/magazine/8593210.stm (both accessed 16 February 2017).

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32 See http://www.theecologist.org/Interviews/1999043/sir_richard_branson_ championing_the_green_ economy.html (accessed 15 February 2017). 33 Berardi disagrees, arguing ‘the media colonization of the social mind’ as an even more important cause of ‘implosion’ (a word he uses himself, AF, pp. 88, 127). But could the homogenization and self-­enclosure which I describe above, and which the media in large part effected, have been so drastic and complete without the end of Communism? 34 See e.g. Klein, TCE, p. 62. 35 For an excellent account of this as conspicuously the case with neoliberalism, free market economics and the pervasive domination of the culture by the private sector, see Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (London: Granta, 1999), passim. 36 George Monbiot, How Did We Get Into This Mess? Politics, Equality and Nature (London: Verso, 2016), hereafter cited in the text as HD; p. 16. 37 Cf. Jones, TE, p. 71. 38 Compare and contrast Immanuel Wallerstein, who thinks we are in for a long period of disintegration – but asserts that socialism must eventually prevail. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 111, 203. 39 Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Edizione critica dell’Istituto Gramsci a cura di V. Gerratana (4 vols., Torino: Einaudi, 1975), vol. 1, p. 311; quoted in Streeck, HW, p. 36. 40 See Streeck, HW, pp. 36n57, 57, 64. 41 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 7. 42 For an account of this, see Peter Pál Pebart, ‘The Thought of the Outside, The Outside of Thought’, Angelaki vol. 5 no. 5 (2001), pp. 201–9. 43 Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (London: Allen Lane, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as DP; p. 4. 44 Nicklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 1097. 45 Luhmann, ‘Beyond Barbarism’, in Hans-Georg Moeller (ed.), Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), pp. 261–72, p. 269. 46 Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence, pref. Alain Badiou (Paris: Seuil, 2006), p. 70. 47 Quoted in Klein, TCE, p. 120. 48 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. with an introd. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), p. 35. 49 Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1990), p. 4. 50 See Davis, PS, pp. 115–16. The term ‘off worlds’ derives from the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner. 51 For a discussion of ‘remedial interventions in tertiary education’ with ample suggestions for further reading, see Clémentine van Effenterre, ‘Post 16 Remedial Policies: A Literature Review’, Centre for Vocational Education Research, 2017, http://cver.lse.ac.uk/textonly/cver/pubs/cverdp005.pdf (accessed 18 August 2018). 52 See Thomas Docherty, Complicity: Criticism Between Collaboration and Commitment (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), hereafter cited in the text as C; p. 68. 53 On which see Nicolas Chapuis, ‘Macron et les mots choisis de la réforme’, Le Monde, 24 March 2018, p. 8.

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54 Cécile Alduy, ‘Camoufler la violence sociale sous des expressions abstraites’, hereafter CVS, Le Monde, 24 March 2018, p. 9. 55 Luhmann, ‘Beyond Barbarism’, p. 113. 56 See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/archbishop-­justin-welby-­admits-doubt-­ over-gods-­presence-after-­paris-attacks-­a6743846.html (accessed 12 January 2018). 57 For a more extended account of Sartre on scarcity, see my Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 15–16. 58 Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. II, The Intelligibility of History, ed. Arlette Elkaim-Sartre, trans. Quintin Hoare, foreword Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 2006 [1985]), p. 24. 59 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992). 60 See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-38557838 (accessed 1 March 2017). 61 See The Observer, 21 August 2016, p. 11. 62 See Docherty, C, p. 19. 63 See Graeber, UR, p. 72, and Klein, TCE, p. 53. 64 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 47. 65 See Klein, TCE, pp. 51–2. 66 See e.g. TCE, p. 48. 67 See Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 3; and cf. Berardi’s equivalent, ‘mandatory feigned happiness’, AF, p. 43. 68 See TE, p. 29. 69 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 42. 70 Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence (London: Allen Lane, 2017). 71 Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity (London: Penguin, 2012). 72 See for instance Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy, with pref. and new chapter by Ian Shapiro (2nd edn, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), especially at p. 58. 73 See Adam Przeworski, ‘Minimalist Conception of Democracy: A Defense’, in Ian Shapiro and Casiani Hacker-Cordón (eds.), Democracy’s Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 23–55. 74 See https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/05/02/world-­healthorganization-­air-pollution-­affects-90-population/572825002/ (accessed 26 May, 2018) 75 Misha Glenny, McMafia: Seriously Organized Crime (London: Vintage, 2017). 76 See e.g. Docherty, C, p. 49. 77 The best account of this subject is Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 78 See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/29/earth-­lost-50-wildlife-­ in-40-years-­wwf; and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3317690/Vegetable-­ varieties-down-98-per-­cent.html (both accessed 8 March 2017). 79 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 192. 80 For examples of this growing field, see Steve Fuller, ‘Dark Ecology as the Higher Misanthropy’, http://slowlorisblog.wordpress.com/2014/05/20/dark-­ecology-as-­thehigher-­misanthropy/, Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, http://www.

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thedarkenlightenment.com/the-­dark-enlightenment-­by-nick-­land/ (both accessed 1 February 2018); and Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Ray Brassier and Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011); Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); and the anti-­natalists: Sarah Perry, Every Cradle Is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide (Charleston: Nine-Banded Books, 2014); David Benatar, e.g. Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror, foreword Ray Brassier (New York: Hippocampus, 2011). 81 See Gray, SM, pp. 8–19. 82 Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. with introd. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), p. 8. 83 Gottfried Leibniz, Monadology: A New Translation and Guide, ed. and trans. with notes Lloyd Strickland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), hereafter cited in the text as MO; pp. 57, 121. 84 Quoted in Richard T.W. Arthur, Leibniz (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), hereafter cited in the text as L; p. 37. 85 On the vinculum substantiale, see in particular Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz (London: Routledge, 2005), hereafter cited in the text as LE; pp. 82ff. 86 Quoted in Arthur, L, p. 115. 87 Leibniz, Theodicy, ed. with introd. Austin Farrer, trans. E.M. Huggard (Milton Keynes: Amazon, 2015), hereafter cited in the text as TH; p. 39. 88 Quoted in Arthur, L, p. 119. 89 Quoted in Jolley, LE, p. 105. 90 Quoted in Arthur, L, p. 136. 91 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy and Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Allen & Unwin, 1967), p. 563. 92 Quoted in Russell, History, p. 563. 93 For a satirical article that makes exactly this point, effectively if rather crudely, see https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/blogs/tim-­blair/the-­new-american-­resistance/ news-­story/319a48f49ac4a0cec1903e960a346739 (accessed 3 March 2018). The photos above all are piquant. 94 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 515, 572. 95 See e.g. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2015). 96 See e.g. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 61. 97 Vladimir Lenin, ‘What is to Be Done?’, in Essential Works of Lenin: ‘What is to Be Done?’ and Other Writings, ed. with introd. Henry M. Christman (New York: Dover, 1987), pp. 53–175, p. 87, pp. 148–9. 98 See for example Hallward, ‘The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism’, Radical Philosophy 155 (May/June 2009), pp. 17–29. 99 Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels), ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, The German Ideology, with Theses on Feuerbach and the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy (New York: Prometheus, 1998), pp. 569–71, p. 571. 100 Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1951), p. 5.

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101 Badiou, ‘L’Être, l’événement et la militance’, interview with Nicole-Édith Thévenin, Futur antérieur, no. 8 (1991), pp. 13–23, p. 20. 102 For this concept, see Guy Lardreau, ‘The Problem of Great Politics in the Light of Obviously Deficient Modes of Subjectivation’, in Peter Hallward (ed.), The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today, Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2 (2003), pp. 90–6. 103 In giving up on activism, he rather asserts that ‘we should prefer a withdrawal into inactivity, silence, and passive sabotage’, AF, p. 37. 104 Simon During, Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), hereafter cited in the text as AD; p. 8. 105 See During, Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 57–94.

2.  Absolute Historicity 1 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), hereafter cited in the text as BT; 5, p. 39. 2 Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and ‘Being and Time’ (London: Routledge, 1996), hereafter cited in the text as HBT; p. 20. My account of Being and Time is substantially indebted to this exemplary commentary. 3 Heidegger’s preferred term is ‘das nichts’, ‘the nothing’, which his commentators also use (or, less often, ‘nothingness’). I use ‘void’ throughout my book, partly because it more precisely indicates that the subject (or Dasein) has no access to nothingness, that the void is always marked with a signifier. 4 The translators of Being and Time give the frequently occurring term ‘Geschlichtlichkeit’ as ‘historicality’. I use ‘historicity’ throughout this essay, since I have discourses other than the Heideggerian also in mind. The translators reserve ‘historicity’ for the very infrequent ‘Historizität’. See BT 3, p. 31, fn. 2. 5 Heidegger, ‘What is Metaphysics’, trans. David Farrell Krell, in Pathmarks, ed. and trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 82–96, p. 90. 6 Bret Davis, Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to ‘Gelassenheit’ (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 209–10. 7 See Steven Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 12, 180, 182. 8 Connor, Beckett, p. 6; Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting for Godot’, Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), p. 84. 9 Critchley, Very Little . . . Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy and Literature (2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2004), p. 83. 10 For the Heideggerian roots of this, see for example Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger, Thought and Historicity (rev. edn, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 23, 28. 11 Fynsk, Heidegger, pp. 23, 28. 12 Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 9. 13 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), p. 35. 14 Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 176. See the whole of the essay, ‘The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy’, pp. 175–96.

Notes 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23

24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

207

Ibid., p. 198. Connor, Beckett, p. 175. Hägglund, Radical Atheism, pp. 171, 176. Ibid., p. 166. Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 3, 13. Quoted in James Alford, ‘We Make Meaning: Politics of Resistance and the Work of Simon Critchley in “Impossible Objects” ’, https://www.popmatters.com/154525impossible-­objects-interviews-­by-simon-­critchley-2495885372.html (accessed 24 October 2018). For a distinguished and influential account of the Fascist Heidegger, see Victor Farias, Heidegger et le Nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987). For an excellent engagement with ‘the Heidegger problem’ that does much to explain the split in the Heideggerian legacy with which this chapter is concerned, see Fynsk, Heidegger, pp. 230–49. Michel Foucault, ‘Final Interview’, Raritan, vol. 5, no. 1 (Summer, 1985), pp. 1–13, p. 8. See François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), in particular pp. xiii, 141, 214, 279–81. On ‘historicality’, see fn. 4. See Foucault, ‘Introduction’, Ludwig Binswanger, Le rêve et l’existence, trans. Jacqueline Verdeaux (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1954), in Dits et Écrits: I, 1954–75, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, with Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), hereafter cited in the text as DE; pp. 93–147, p. 94. Foucault, ‘Préface à la transgression’, Critique nos. 195–6, Hommage à Georges Bataille (August-September 1963), pp. 751–69; in DE, pp. 261–78, at pp. 263–4. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A.M. Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), hereafter cited in the text as BC; p. 65. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1991), hereafter cited in the text as AK; p. 174. See AK, pp. 22–5. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. from the French (London: Tavistock, 1974), hereafter cited in the text as OT; p. 89. See Hubert Dreyfus, ‘Foreword’, Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), hereafter cited in the text as MI; pp. vii–xliii, xxvii. ‘Preface’, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. William Sock, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York; Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 334. Foucault, new preface, Histoire de la folie à l’age classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), hereafter cited in the text as HF; pp. 9–11, p. 9. See OT, pp. xv–xviii. See for instance HF, pp. 68, 83, 94. See for instance ibid., pp. 68, 98. See for instance ibid., pp. 68, 94. See e.g. ibid., pp. 97, 107. See e.g. ibid., pp. 82, 97–8, 102. See ibid., pp. 110–12. See Foucault, MI, p. 69. See OT, pp. 46–50.

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43 See Foucault, BC, p. 244. 44 See DE, pp. 278–9. 45 See Joyce, Dubliners, with ed. introd. and notes Terence Brown (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 1. 46 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with ed. introd. and notes Seamus Deane (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 3. 47 Joyce, Poems and Exiles, ed. with introd. and notes J.C.C. Mays (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 114. For a full account of the play along these lines, see my The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writings of James Joyce 1898–1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 209–34. 48 For one coherent and articulate account of which, see Karen Lawrence, The Odyssey of Style in ‘Ulysses’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 49 Cf. Jean-Michel Rabaté, Joyce Upon the Void: The Genesis of Doubt (London: Macmillan, 1991), passim. 50 Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, afterword by Michael Groden (London: Bodley Head, 1993), hereafter cited in the text as U, followed by page and line number; 9.840–2. 51 Joyce, Finnegans Wake, with introd. and notes Len Platt (Ware: Wordsworth, 2012), 229.26–8. 52 On English enslavement of the Irish in the seventeenth century, see T.C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 44, 74. On the transported convicts, see Con Costello, Botany Bay: The Story of the Convicts Transported from Ireland to Australia 1791–1852 (Cork and Dublin: Mercier, 1982). 53 See, to take a single instance, Clive Hart, ‘Wandering Rocks’, in Clive Hart and David Hayman (eds.), James Joyce’s Ulysses: Critical Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 181–216. 54 For the last, see inter al. Matthew Hayward, ‘To Arrest Involuntary Attention: Advertising and Street-Selling in Ulysses’, in John Nash (ed.), James Joyce in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 113–27; and ‘Ireland at War in Peace: Commodities, Consumers and Ideology in James Joyce’s Ulysses’, Alison O’Malley-Younger and John Strachan (eds.), Ireland at War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), pp. 71–89. 55 On which see inter al. Dermot Keogh and Andrew McCarthy, Limerick Boycott 1904: Anti-Semitism in Ireland (Dublin: Mercier Press, 2005). 56 I am summarizing a case I made in far greater detail in Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in ‘Ulysses’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See pp. 103–251. 57 On the last, see for instance Michael Worboys, ‘The British Association and Empire: Science and Social Imperialism 1880–1940’, in Roy Macleod and Peter Collins (eds.), The Parliament of Science: The British Academy for the Advancement of Science 1831–1981 (Northwood: Science Reviews, 1981), pp. 170–87. 58 On Joyce’s use of his sources see inter al. Robert Janusko, The Sources and Structures of James Joyce’s ‘Oxen’ (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983). 59 W. Peacock (ed.), English Prose from Mandeville to Ruskin (London: Grant Richards, 1903). 60 For details, see Janusko, Sources and Structures, p. 110. 61 For details, see Hugh Kenner, Joyce’s Voices (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), pp. 106–8. 62 George Saintsbury, A History of English Prose Rhythm (London: Macmillan & Co, 1912).

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63 See Douglas Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, in Sir Charles Gavan Duffy et al., The Revival of Irish Literature (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894), pp. 115–61, p. 135. 64 See Janusko, Sources and Structures, p. 138. 65 See ibid., p. 141. 66 J.S. Atherton, ‘The Oxen of the Sun’, in Clive Hart and David Hayman (eds.), James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: Critical Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 313–39, p. 323. 67 See in particular H.W. and F.G. Fowler, The King’s English (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906); and H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924). For a full account of Chapter 16 in the light of the Fowlers’ work, see my ‘Joyce and the Fowlers: “Eumaeus”, The King’s English and Modern English Usage’, in Brandon R. Kershner and Tekla Mecsnóber (eds.), Joycean Unions: Post-Millennial Essays from East to West (European Joyce Studies 22, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 225–44. 68 H.W. and F.G. Fowler, The King’s English, p. 3. 69 H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, p. 236.

3.  Event 1 Alain Badiou, Le Séminaire: Heidegger, L’être 3 – Figure du retrait 1986–1987 (Paris: Fayard, 2015), hereafter cited in the text as HE; p. 144. 2 Quoted in Richard Polt, ‘Meaning, Excess and Event’, in Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual, vol. 1 (2011), pp. 26–53, p. 41. 3 Badiou, L’Être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), hereafter cited in the text as EE; p. 218. 4 See in particular Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 1–142; and Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 24–67. 5 Badiou, ‘Silence, solipsisme, sainteté: l’anti-­philosophie de Wittgenstein’, BARCA!: Poésie, politique, psychanalyse, no. 3 (November 1994), pp. 13–53, p. 38. 6 Badiou, with Fabien Tarby, La Philosophie et l’événement (Paris: Germina, 2010), p. 19. 7 Only two of these would be examples for Badiou. 8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 65, p. 338. 9 See Heinrich von Kleist, letter to Wilhelmine von Zenge, 22 March 1801, in Sämtliche Werke, Brandenburger Ausgabe, ed. Roland Reuß, Peter Staengle et al., IV.I, Briefe I (Basle: Stroemfeld, 1996), p. 506; and Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes I, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 1373. 10 Badiou, Le Séminaire: Lacan, L’antiphilosophie 3 1994–1995 (Paris: Fayard, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as LA; p. 37. See also passim. 11 See Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. with introd. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), pp. 71–7. 12 For ‘affirmationism’, not for me one of the more impressive aspects of Badiou’s thought, see for example ‘Troisième esquisse d’un manifeste de l’affirmationisme’, Circonstances, 2: Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France, pp. 81–105. 13 See for instance Ed Pluth, Badiou: A Philosophy of the New (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). In spite of everything Badiou says, Pluth thinks truths in Badiou are not rare at all, but ‘already factors for every situation’, p. 84.

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14 Badiou, Logiques des Mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as LM; p. 12. 15 Badiou, Abrégé de métapolitique (Paris: Seuil, 1998), hereafter cited in the text as AB; p. 109. 16 See my Beckett and Badiou, pp. 78–9, for a more detailed account. 17 See Steven Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 5–6. 18 Quoted in e.g. Alain Badiou and Elisabeth Rodinesco, Jacques Lacan: Past and Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 56. 19 The relevant Seminar here is XIX. See Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XIX, . . . ou pire (Paris: Seuil, 2011), especially at pp. 137–48. 20 Badiou, Le Séminaire: Parmenide, L’être 1 – Figure ontologique 1985–1986 (Paris: Fayard, 2014), hereafter cited in the text as PA; p. 157. 21 See HE, pp. 279–86. 22 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 20; quoted in Michael Sayeau, Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as AE; p. 25. 23 See Watkin, Badiou and Indifferent Being: A Critical Introduction to ‘Being and the Event’ (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 80–1. 24 Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (London: Penguin, 2002), p. xix. 25 Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (Paris: Librairie Garnier Frères, 1928), p. 360. 26 Mark Neocleous, Critique of Security (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 144. 27 Ibid. 28 See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992 [1986]). 29 Florian Sprenger, ‘A Theory of Media as a History of Electricity: How McLuhan’s Thoughts about Mediation are Thwarted by their Negation’, in Matteo Ciastellardi and Emanuela Patti (eds.), Understanding Media, Today: McLuhan in the Era of Convergence Culture (Barcelona: Editorial Universidad Oberta de Catalunya, 2011), pp. 71–6, p. 75. 30 For a superb critique of the contemporary valuation of transparency, see Thomas Docherty, Confessions: The Philosophy of Transparency (London: Bloomsbury, 2012). 31 See e.g. Terje Aven and Ortwin Renn, ‘On Risk Defined as An Event Where the Outcome is Uncertain’, Journal of Risk Research, 12.1 (2009), pp. 1–11. 32 See Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), hereafter cited in the text as QT; pp. 3–35. 33 Bryony Randall, Modernism, Daily Time and Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 39. 34 Connor, Beckett, p. 5. 35 Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, Maximes, pensées, caractères et anecdotes, with ‘Une notice sur sa vie’ by Pierre-Louis Ginguené (Paris and London: J. Deboffe, 1796), hereafter cited in the text as MP; p. 136. 36 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception, Recent Critical Essays, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M.H. Abrams and Stephen Gill (London and New York: Norton, 1979), hereafter cited in the text as P; 1850, XI.255–7.

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37 George Orwell, review, An Age Like This: 1920–1940: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 1, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: Nonpareil, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as EJL1; pp. 276–8, p. 277. 38 Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 [1938]), hereafter cited in the text as HC; pp. 232, 287. 39 As documented in Richard Stitles, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), hereafter cited in the text as WLM, among other sources. 40 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, introd. Howard Caygill, bibliog. Gary Banham (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), hereafter cited in the text as CPR; pp. 409, 411. 41 Guy Lardreau, La véracité: essai d’une philosophie negative (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993), pp. 166, 170. 42 Kant, On History, ed. with introd. Lewis White Beck, trans. Lewis White Beck, Robert E. Anchor and Emil L. Fackenheim (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), hereafter cited in the text as OH; pp. 137–54. 43 Kant, OH, pp. 3–10, at pp. 3, 7. 44 Kant, OH, pp. 85–136, p. 103. 45 Kant, OH, pp. 11–26. 46 Virginia Woolf, Letter to Ethel Smyth, 26 Nov. 1935, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (6 vols., London: Hogarth Press, 1975–80), vol. 5, The Sickle Side of the Moon, hereafter cited in the text as SS; p. 152. 47 Leonard Woolf, Downhill all the Way (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), p. 250. 48 Virginia Woolf, Letter to Sibyl Colefax, 6 May 1936, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 6, Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead, hereafter cited in the text as LL; p. 247. 49 Virginia Woolf, Diaries, ed. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie (5 vols., London: Hogarth, 1977–84), vol. 5, p. 234. 50 Ibid. 51 See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 737. 52 Julia Briggs, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 398. 53 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Being Extracts from the Diaries of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Triad, 1978), hereafter cited in the text as WD; 25 May 1932, p. 224. 54 Virginia Woolf, The Years, ed. with introd. Hermione Lee, notes by Sue Asbee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), hereafter TY; p. 110.

4.  Remainder 1 Quoted in Terisio Pignatti, Carpaccio (Lausanne: Skira, 1958), p. 9. 2 Patricia Fortini Brown, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 164. 3 W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p. 146. 4 Michel Serres, Esthétiques sur Carpaccio (Paris: Hermann, 1975), pp. 13–16. 5 Stefania Mason, Carpaccio: The Major Pictorial Cycles, trans. Andrew Ellis (Milan: Skira, 2000), p. 13. 6 See e.g. Steven Connor, Beckett, Modernism and the Material Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 146.

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7 Badiou, Circonstances 3: Portées du mot “Juif ”, followed by Cécile Winter, ‘Signifiant-­ maître des nouveaux aryens’ (Paris: Lignes et Manifeste, 2005), p. 23; and Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), p. 197.The Mallarmé quotation is unsourced. Cf. Badiou’s presentation of Joan of Arc as an exception to a ‘miserable epoch’, in ‘L’Insoumission de Jeanne’, Esprit, no. 8 (1997), pp. 26–33, p. 28. 8 Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as LM; pp. 442–5. 9 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, Being Extracts from the Diaries of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Triad, 1978), 11 July 1937, p. 343. 10 Badiou, L’Anti-­philosophie de Wittgenstein (Besançon: Nous, 2009), p. 23. 11 Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. with an introd. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), hereafter cited in the text as ET; p. 50. 12 See Badiou, Circonstances 1: Kosovo, 11 Septembre, Chirac/Le Pen (Paris: Lignes et Manifeste, 2003), hereafter cited in the text as CI; p. 8; ‘Manifesto of Affirmationism’, trans. Barbara P. Fuchs. lacanian ink, no. 24 (2005), n.p; and ‘Troisième esquisse d’un manifeste de l’affirmationisme’, Circonstances 2: Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France (Paris: Lignes et Manifeste, 2004), pp. 81–105. 13 Badiou, with Nicolas Truong, Éloge de l’amour (Paris: Flammarion, 2009), hereafter cited in the text as EA; pp. 50, 55. 14 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Of the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott, introd. Richard S. Peters (New York: Collier, 1978), hereafter cited in the text as L; p. 158. 15 Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, introd. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), hereafter cited in the text as OC; pp. 79–80. 16 Quoted in A.P. Martinich, Hobbes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 2. 17 Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), p. 541. 18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l’éducation, Œuvres complètes, vol. IV, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), hereafter cited in the text as E; p. 583. 19 Rousseau, Du contrat social ou principes du droit politique, Œuvres complètes, vol. III, ed. Bernard Gagnebin, Marcel Raymond et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), hereafter cited in the text as DCS; p. 351. 20 Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloise, ed. with introd., chronology and notes René Pomeau (Paris: Bordas, 1988), hereafter cited in the text as J; pp. 169, 199, 221. 21 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (2 vols., New York: Dover, 1969), hereafter cited in the text as WW1 and 2; vol. 2, p. 171. 22 The original runs thus: ‘Even in this short space of life, no man is so blessed by fortune that he would not many times desire to die rather than cling on to life’. Herodotus, Histories, Books VII–IX, trans. G. Woudrouffe Harris (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1907), 7.6.46, p. 19. 23 See Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1952), and Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966); and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures de Wagner (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2007). For a longer argument detailing and extending whilst also substantially modifying Badiou’s case, see my ‘Badiou pro Wagner’, Texture (2018), at http://barjournal.online/jagat_files/1.pdf.

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24 For an excellent biographical account, see Joachim Kohler, Richard Wagner: The Last of the Titans, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), passim. 25 See Badiou, Cinq leçons sur le ‘cas’ Wagner (Besançon: Nous, 2010), hereafter cited in the text as CLW. 26 With regard to Badiou’s writings on literature, Jean-Jacques Lecercle entertains a certain misgiving: he ‘seems to find something in the text only because he sought it, and what he finds is always philosophical propositions, and always the propositions of his own philosophy’ (Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, p. 138). For Lecercle’s own defence of this as a practice of ‘strong reading’, see pp. 114–16. It very much applies to Badiou’s account of Wagner. 27 Richard Wagner, Die Walküre, hereafter cited in the text as DW, The Authentic Librettos of the Wagner Operas (New York: Crown Publishers, 1938), pp. 143–87, p. 152. All Wagner quotations are from this text. Translations are my own. 28 Badiou, Saint-Paul et la fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997), p. 92. 29 Wagner, Der Fliegender Hollander, hereafter cited in the text as FH, Authentic Librettos, pp. 1–32, p. 23. 30 Badiou, with Fabien Tarby, La Philosophie et l’événement (Paris: Germina, 2010), p. 54; and EA, p. 29. 31 Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1677]), p. 171. For Badiou on the conatus, see for instance ET, pp. 46, 53. 32 For more details of this and the Italian algebraists responsible for the mathematical development in question, see Badiou, Second manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Fayard, 2009), pp. 73–4. 33 Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, hereafter cited in the text as TI, Authentic Librettos, pp. 309–47, p. 315. 34 Wagner, Das Rheingold, hereafter cited in the text as DR, Authentic Librettos, pp. 89–142, p. 105. 35 George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite (Fairfield, IA: 1stWorld Publishing, 2004 [1898]), p. 11. 36 See WW1, pp. 200–7. 37 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings vol. 4, 1938–40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 164. 38 See Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (rev. edn, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2001), passim. 39 Badiou, L’Être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), p. 110. 40 Badiou, Second manifeste, p. 106. 41 Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, 1965), p. 288, ll. 85–6. 42 Wagner, Parsifal, Authentic Librettos, pp. 429–70, p. 447. 43 Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden, introd. Erich Heller (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), hereafter cited in the text as PCW; p. 146. 44 I haven’t considered what is ostensibly Badiou’s major purpose in the Wagner book, which is to challenge and overturn Adorno and Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of ‘great art’, and Wagner’s place within it. But no argument of this kind seems central to the book, and so the term lacks definition. Great art, or grand art? If the second, then Badiou’s cultural history is open to question. He thinks that grandeur died after 1945,

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when it surely rather migrated elsewhere, above all, to the serious cinema – Rossellini, Visconti, Coppola, Herzog, others – only, from the early 1980s onwards, to mutate again into a travesty of itself, as it ‘went pop-­cultural’: rock mega-­concerts, increasingly reactionary Hollywood schlockbusters, etc. etc. It was surely at this juncture above all that major art withdrew into modesty and smallness (Coetzee, Sebald), with Beckett as its paragon and great example. If, however, Badiou means great art in the sense that he himself is usually concerned with it, a select canon in his own definition that is systematized as a structure of thought, then Wagner clearly fits under the rubric alongside Beckett, Mallarmé, Celan, etc. 45 This is to be at odds with Badiou, who sees Die Meistersinger as vitally affirming a synthesis of innovation and tradition, rupture and rule, the refounding of identity within itself, which alone can underwrite the thought of a people and nation. But Rancière’s sharper and more disabused reading is, I think, more persuasive, and, above all, closer to the music of Die Meistersinger: after 1849, Die Meistersinger signals above all that ‘the game is over’, even if it gives defeat a positive spin. ‘The insurrection of the shoemakers is finished’: Wagner both grants the profound significance of the popular genius (Hans’s) and immediately cedes it back to power, alienating it from itself in a simulation. For Rancière’s full case, see The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 57–63. For my own extrapolation from it, see Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 217–19.

5.  The People Untransformed 1 Peter Sloterdijk, Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews 1993–2012, ed. Bernhard Klein, trans. Karen Margolis (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), p. 137. 2 See David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, A Crisis, A Movement (London: Allen Lane, 2013), p. 4. 3 Quoted in Fearghal McGarry, The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 274. 4 Quoted in Annie Ryan, Witnesses Inside the Easter Rising, introd. Margaret MacCurtain (Dublin: Dublin Liberties Press, 2005), p. 136. 5 See Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor, trans. Andrew Parker (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 113; and ‘Althusser, Don Quichotte et la scène du texte’, in La Chair des mots: Politique de l’écriture (Paris: Galilée, 1998), pp. 157–77. 6 See Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. I, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 1976), pp. 256–69. 7 See Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, foreword Andreas Huyssen (London: Verso, 1983), for instance at pp. 385, 389, 390. 8 Alfred D. White, ‘Weimar Republic’, in Matthias Konzett (ed.), Encyclopaedia of German Literature (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), vol. 2, pp. 989–93, p. 991. 9 See David Midgeley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in Weimar Literature 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), passim; and ‘Radical Realism and Historical Fantasy: Alfred Döblin’, in Karl Leydecker (ed.), German Novelists of the Weimar Republic: Intersections of Literature and Politics (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), pp. 211–27.

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10 Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 96. 11 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, ed. and introd. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1979), pp. 253–64, p. 258. 12 Fiona Sutton, ‘Weimar’s Forgotten Cassandra: The Writings of Gabriele Tergit in the Weimar Republic’, in Leydecker (ed.), German Novelists, pp. 193–209, p. 193. 13 See Sutton, ‘Weimar’s Forgotten Cassandra’, p. 200. 14 See Heather Valencia, ‘Vicki Baum: “A First-Rate Second-Rate Writer?” ’, in Leydecker (ed.), German Novelists, pp. 230–49, p. 229. 15 Intellectual, highly cultivated and much admired Jewish socialist, appointed foreign minister of the Weimar Republic in 1922, only to be subsequently assassinated by the ultra-­nationalist Organisation Consul. 16 Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: Die Geschichte vom Franz Biberkopf (München: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1991), hereafter cited in the text as BA; p. 6. 17 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Crisis of the Novel’, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–34, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 299–304. 18 My own translation rather than the one at fn. 17, which in this instance I find a little peculiar. For the original see Benjamin, ‘Krisis des Romans: Zu Döblins Berlin Alexanderplatz, Kritiken und Rezensionen 1912–1931’, Kapitel 95, at http://gutenberg. spiegel.de/buch/kritiken-­und-rezensionen-1912-1931-2981/95 (accessed 10 January 2018). 19 Joseph Roth, The White Cities: Reports from France 1925–39, trans. and introd. Michael Hoffmann (London, Granta, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as WC; p. 69. 20 Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–33, trans. and introd. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as WIS; p. 56. 21 See epigraph to the chapter. Rainer Maria Rilke to Dorothea, Baroness von Ledebour, Briefe aus den Jahren 1914 bis 1921, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1937), p. 214. 22 See Gay, Weimar Culture, p. 23. 23 See WIS, p. 211. 24 Joseph Roth, On the End of the World, trans. and introd. Will Stone (London: Hesperus, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as EW, p. 46; and WIS, p. 134. 25 The spelling is of course deliberate, reflecting Berliners’ mispronunciation of Frederick the Great’s beloved French (unflatteringly). 26 See Midgeley, Writing Weimar, pp. 322–27; and ‘Radical Realism’, pp. 218–19. 27 Will Stone, ‘Introduction’, EW, pp. vii–xv, xi, xiii; cf. pp. 20–1. 28 For a single choice example, see ‘Exchange of Children’, EW, pp. 6–8. 29 ‘Though the responsibility for the crime of the murder of the entire Jewish nation rests above all upon the perpetrators, indirect blame must be borne by humanity itself ’. Quoted in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2015), p. 292. 30 For Roth’s indictment of the policy of ‘non-­intervention’, see in particular EW, pp. 20–3. 31 See EW, p. 21. Roth may well have derived the metaphor from Döblin, though he was critical of his work. 32 Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hoffmann, with a comment by Elie Wiesel (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 5–23. 33 Roth, Job: The Story of a Simple Man, trans. Dorothy Thompson (London: Granta, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as J; p. 31.

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34 Roth, The Spider’s Web, trans. John Hoare (London: Granta, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as SW; p. 6. 35 Roth, Hotel Savoy, trans. Jonathan Katz (London: Hesperus, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as HS; p. 30. 36 Roth, Rebellion, trans. with an introd. Michael Hoffmann (New York: Picador, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as R; p. 42. 37 Andreas Kilcher, ‘The Cold Order and the Eros of Storytelling: Joseph Roth’s “Exotic Jews” ’, in Gabriella Safran and Andreas Kilchner (eds.), Writing Jewish Culture: Paradoxes in Ethnography (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 68–93, p. 71. 38 See Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary, ed. Gary Smith, trans. Richard Sieburth, pref. Gershom Scholem (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 29. 39 Roth, Right and Left, trans. Michael Hoffman (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993), p. 29. 40 Roth, Flight Without End, trans. David le Vay (London: Peter Owen, 1977), hereafter cited in the text as FEW; p. 23. 41 See Steve Fuller, ‘Dark Ecology as the Higher Misanthropy’, http://slowlorisblog. wordpress.com /2014/05/20/ dark-­ecology-as-­the-higher-­misanthropy/. Cf. Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, http://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/ the-­dark-enlightenment-­by-nick-­land/ (both accessed 1 February 2018). 42 Roth, Tarabas: A Guest on Earth, trans. Winifred Katzin (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1983), hereafter cited in the text as T; p. 3. 43 Roth, Confession of a Murderer, trans. Desmond I. Vesey (London: Granta, 2003), hereafter cited in the text as CM; p. 117. 44 See EW, p. 11. 45 Roth, The Radetsky March, trans. Michael Hoffmann (London: Granta, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as RM; pp. 346–9. 46 See e.g. WC, p. 86. 47 Roth, The Emperor’s Tomb, trans. Michael Hoffmann (London: Granta, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as ET; p. 24. 48 Elias Canetti, Auto da Fé, trans. C.V. Wedgewood (London: Vintage, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as AF; p. 71. 49 See amongst many instances Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Penguin, 2001), e.g. p. 59. 50 See Rancière, Le Maître ignorant: Cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle (Paris: Fayard, 1981). 51 Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor, p. 203. 52 Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as HD; p. 68. 53 But compare Marx’s subsequent The Civil War in France. The Commune is a ‘completely new historical creation’, the Communards worker who have become proletarians. See Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, introd. Friedrich Engels (London: Martin Lawrence, 1933 [1871]), p. 42. 54 Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1984 [1852]), p. 65. 55 Rancière, The Philosopher and his Poor, p. 96. 56 George Orwell, An Age Like This: 1920–1940: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 1, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: Nonpareil, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as EJL1; pp. 9, 65, 74. 57 Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 75.

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58 Orwell, My Country Right or Left: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Boston: Nonpareil, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as EJL2; p. 57. 59 Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 72. 60 Rancière, Courts voyages au pays du peuple (Paris: Seuil, 1981), hereafter cited in the text as CV; p. 10. 61 See Rancière, La mésentente: Politique et philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1995), hereafter cited in the text as ME. 62 Rancière, La Politique de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2007), hereafter cited in the text as PL; pp. 113–43. 63 Rancière is quoting Brecht’s Journal du travail, trans. Philippe Ivernel (Paris: L’Arche, 1976), 27 May, 1943. See PI, p. 139. 64 Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso Books, 1998), hereafter cited in the text as SP; p. 28. 65 Badiou, ‘L’Être, l’événement et la militance’, interview with Nicole-Édith Thévenin, Futur antérieur (1991), no. 8, pp. 13–23, p. 20. 66 J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), p. 18.

6.  Transmission 1 On the philosophical method, see Christian Jambet, ‘Avant-­propos’, Le gouvernement divin: Islam et conception politique du monde (Paris: CNRS, 2016), hereafter cited in the text as GD; pp. 7–19, especially at pp. 18–19. Gnosis not Gnosticism, for reasons given at GD, p. 64. 2 Jambet, ‘Presentation’, hereafter cited in the text as PRE, Itinéraire d’un enseignement: Résumé des conferences à L’École pratique des hautes études (Section des sciences religieuses) 1955–79: Henri Corbin (Tehran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 1990), pp. 13–30, p. 14. 3 For this argument, see ‘L’Islam se réduit-­il à l’islamisme?’, Revue des deux mondes, 4 (2003), pp. 97–103; and ‘Les conditions réligieuses et philosophiques de la révolution Islamique’, Rue Descartes, no. 4 (1992), pp. 121–39, especially at p. 133. For a brilliant essay intermittently addressing the relevant issues with an erudition, obliquity and subtlety quite beyond most Western commentators, see ‘Le Pape Benoît XVI et l’unité spirituelle de l’Europe au temps où l’Islam décide de son destin’, in Jean Bollack, Christian Jambet and Abdelwahab Meddeb, La conférence de Ratisbonne: Enjeux et controverses (Paris: Bayard, 2007), pp. 33–60. 4 For a list of the terms of reference for a politique divine, see GD, p. 63. They are not esoteric and not mine. For Sadra’s critique specifically of Sufism, see GD, p. 302. In privileging Sadra, unhappily in my view, Jambet opens up a gap with Massignon and Corbin, whose first ties were to the illuminism of al-Hallaj (Massignon) and Suhravardi (Corbin). See Jambet, ‘L’intérieur’, in Henri Corbin, Suhrawardi d’Alep (Paris: Fata Morgana, 2001), pp. 9–16, p. 9. 5 This in spite of the fact that it is the later Jambet who turns increasingly to Sadra and a politique divine, because I’ve written on the early Jambet at length already. For a relevant and substantial account focused on Jambet’s earlier work, see Chapter 3 of my Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 112–56.

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6 For a brief, clear account of Islamic ontology see Jambet, Qu’est-­ce que la philosophie islamique? (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as QPI; pp. 17–18. For its history and the key figures in it see pp. 25–52. 7 I use ‘principle’ here in a sense that is not Jambet’s. On, specifically, being as expansion, see AE, pp. 81–87. 8 Jambet, ‘Lire le Coran au présent?’, Revue des deux mondes (May, 1991), pp. 171–8, p. 174. 9 The influence of Lacan that I mention later in the chapter is clear, here; Lacan and not Heidegger or existentialism, from which Jambet is at pains to separate his Islamic tradition. Sadra’s ontology is a doctrine of the Real not existence. See AE, p. 64 and note. 10 Jambet, ‘La pensée fondatrice de L’Islam’, hereafter cited in the text as PFI, in Jacqueline Russ (ed.), Histoire de la philosophie, tome 1: Les pensées fondatrices (Paris: Armand Colin, 1993), pp. 163–85, p. 176. 11 Jambet, ‘Se rendre immortel’, hereafter cited in the text as SRI, followed by Mulla Sadra Shirazi, Traité de la resurrection (Saint Clément-­de-Rivière: Fata Morgana, 2000), pp. 7–117, p. 63. 12 On the difference between Sadra and Deleuze’s use of the term, their ‘common foundation’ and its explication by Bergson, see AE, pp. 142–3, fn. 13 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (2 vols., New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 2, p. 171. 14 Jambet, ‘Philosophical Commentary’, hereafter cited in the text as PC, trans. Hafiz Karmali, in Nasir al-Din Tusi, Paradise of Submission: A Mediaeval Treatise on Ismaili Thought, trans. S.J. Badakhani, introd. Hermann Landolt (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 178–242, p. 187. 15 Jambet, ‘L’expérience de la terreur’, in Roger-Pol Droit (ed.), Présences de Schopenhauer (Paris: Grasset, 1989), pp. 124–34, p. 128. 16 On the concept of intensity see also AE, pp. 87–90. 17 Jambet, ‘Les conditions réligieuses et philosophiques de la révolution Islamique’, Rue Descartes, no. 4 (1992), pp. 121–39, pp. 125, 127. 18 See GD, p. 65. 19 Jambet, ‘Introduction’, hereafter SORI, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Soleil du reel: Poémes d’amour mystique, ed. and trans. Jambet (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1999), pp. 7–52, p. 7. That Rumi’s poetry should focus on loss is hardly surprising: he was writing in the twilight of a dying civilization soon to be transformed by the Mongol invasion. 20 Jambet, ‘Préface’, Forough Farrokhzad, La conquête du jardin, trans. Jalal Alavinia and Thérèse Marini (Paris: Lettres Persanes, 2005), pp. 9–14, pp. 10, 13. 21 Jambet, ‘Heureux les étrangers!’: Variations sur une tradition islamique’, hereafter cited in the text as HE, in Roger-Pol Droit (ed.), Figures de l’alterité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014), pp. 201–37, p. 202. This is a major recent essay on the theme of spiritual exile. 22 See SRI, pp. 28, 48. 23 For helpful earlier accounts of Jambet, Corbin and metahistory, see Gibson, Intermittency, pp. 6–9, 121–3. 24 Jambet, La logique des orientaux: Henri Corbin et la science des formes (Paris: Seuil, 1983), p. 253. 25 See AE, p. 395. 26 E.g. Jambet, ‘L’Islam et ses philosophes’, interview, Esprit 8–9, pp. 186–201, p. 198. 27 Jambet, with Mohammad-Ali Amir Moezzi, Qu’est ce que le shî-isme?, hereafter cited in the text as QQS (Paris: Fayard, 2004), p. 55.

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28 See https://www.pressreader.com/france/le-­figaro/20080424/282694747886465 (accessed 4 March 2018). 29 For an earlier discussion of this, see Gibson, Intermittency, pp. 6–9, 112–24. 30 Jambet, La grande resurrection d’Alamût: Les formes de la liberté dans la shî-isme Ismaélien (Paris: Lagrasse, 1990), hereafter cited in the text as GR; p. 30. 31 1164 not 1167, as Jambet gives it elsewhere (GR, p. 75). 32 Jambet, ‘Introduction’, hereafter cited in the text as LSOI, Shihab Al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi, Le livre de la sagesse orientale, ed. and trans. Henri Corbin (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), pp. 8–74, p. 30. 33 Jambet, ‘La grande résurrection d’Alamût d’après quelques texts Ismaéliens’, in Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron and Stella Corbin (eds.), Apocalypse et sens de l’histoire (Paris: Berg, 1983), pp. 113–27, p. 125. 34 Jambet, ‘Préface’, hereafter cited in the text as PTI, Trilogie Ismaélienne, trans. with commentary Henry Corbin (Paris: Verdier, 1994), pp. vii–xiv, p. xii. 35 Compare my critique of contemporary presentism in Chapter 1, pp. 23–49. 36 Jambet, ‘Suhrawardi Shihaboddin Yahya (1155–1191)’, Encyclopaedia Universalis: Dictionnaire de l’Islam: Religion et civilisation (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997), pp. 782–90, p. 789. 37 Jambet, ‘Préface: Pour Massignon’, hereafter cited in the text as PPM, Louis Massignon, Écrits memorables, vol. 1, ed. Christian Jambet, François Angelier, François L’Yvonnet and Souâd Ayada (Paris: Laffont, 2009), pp. vii–xv, pp. ix–x. 38 Jambet, ‘Préface’, hereafter cited in the text as PRK, Élodie Mailliet, Kant entre désespoir et espérance (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 7–13, p. 10. 39 Jambet, ‘L’autre est-­il pensable?’, on Emmanuel Levinas, Entre nous: Essais sur le penser de l’autre, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Lévy, L’esprit maintenant: Les entretiens de 1980, Revue des deux mondes (June, 1991), pp. 146–52, p. 152. 40 Jambet, ‘Préface’, Fahrad Daftary, Légendes des assassins: Mythes sur les Ismaéliens, trans. Zarien Rajan-Badouraly (Paris: J. Vrin, 2007), pp. 7–11, p. 8. 41 For Foucault’s writings on Islam, see the appendix to Janet Avary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 42 See PFI, p. 164. I extrapolate the Cambridge Platonists from Jambet’s brief reference to them, PTI, p. 103. 43 For which see Avary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, and reviews of it. 44 The term ‘subjectivité en attente’ is Badiou’s not Jambet’s. See for instance Alain Badiou, Le Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), p. 39; and my own development of the concept in Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 90–116, 164–5, 263–4. But Jambet is clearly concerned with a very similar concept, for instance at GR, p. 334. 45 Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XIX (Paris: Seuil, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as SXIX; p. 11. 46 Lacan, Séminaire XVIII, D’un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2007), hereafter cited in the text as SXVIII; p. 35. 47 Lacan, Seminar Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans, with notes Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1999), hereafter cited in the text as SVII; p. 84. 48 Lacan, Séminaire XXI, Les Non-­dupes errent (Paris: n.p., 1981), hereafter cited in the text as SXXI; p. 15.

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49 Lacan, Séminaire X: L’angoisse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as SX; p. 159. 50 Lacan, Séminaire XVI: D’un autre à l’autre, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as SXVI; p. 297. 51 Lacan, Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (London: W.W. Norton and Co, 1998), hereafter cited in the text as SXX; p. 121. 52 See Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, passé present (Paris, Seuil, 2012), p. 32; and Lacan, SXXI, p. 1. Cf. Lacan’s account of the relationship between the Aristotelean automaton and tuché, the network of signifiers versus the encounter with the Real, SXI, pp. 53–64. 53 Badiou and Roudinesco, Lacan, p. 47. 54 Ibid., p. 34. 55 See for instance Badiou, Lacan: L’antiphilosophie 3, 1994–1995 (Paris: Fayard, 2013), p. 10 and passim. 56 See e.g. Slavov Žižek, How To Read Lacan (London: Granta, 2006). 57 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: W.W. Norton and Co, 1998), hereafter cited in the text as SXI; p. 135. 58 See SVII, pp. 183–4. 59 See SX, p. 35; and The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (London: W.W. Norton and Co, 2007), hereafter cited in the text as SXVII; p. 171. Lacan is clearly reacting specifically against the Kojèvian account of the master–slave relation. His Hegel is in large measure Kojève’s. 60 See SXVII, p. 92. 61 This is a vastly simplified version of Lacan’s superb discussion of das Ding in chapter IV of Seminar VII, particularly the closing pages. See SVII, pp. 43–56, especially pp. 52–6. 62 See SVII, p. 18. 63 For an instance of this repudiation, see SXX, pp. 45–7. 64 See also the discussion of the emergence of the ‘new social link, analytic discourse’, SXX, p. 48. 65 See SVII, p. 4. 66 See SXVI, p. 152. 67 See SVII, p. 273, SXVI, pp. 46, 332–3. 68 See e.g. SXVII, passim, especially at pp. 147–8. 69 See e.g. the discussion of interpreters of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Lacan, Séminaire XIX: . . .ou pire, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2011), hereafter cited in the text as SXIX; p. 28. 70 See SXVIII, pp. 11, 41, 163. 71 See SVII, p. 61. 72 See SVII, pp. 60–1 for an extended account of this argument. 73 The woman’s being, not always but quite characteristically, the ‘masquerade’; on which see SX, p. 308. 74 SX, p. 311. See pp. 297–311 for a full version of this argument. 75 Lacan, Encore: Le séminaire, livre XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Le Seuil, 1999), p. 50. 76 For one example of this declaration, see SXXI, p. 134.

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77 Lacan, Je parle aux murs: Entretiens de La Chapelle de Saint-Anne (Paris: Seuil, 2011). There is a pun on ‘aux murs’ and ‘amour’. 78 See SXIX, pp. 81–92. 79 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, Collected Poems 1909–1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 1941), p. 90. 80 See Lacan’s exchange with Jacques-Alain Miller, Seminar XI, 13 May 1964, where transmission is precisely at issue; SXI, p. 186. 81 See SXVI, p. 278. 82 Compare Jambet’s account of the subject vis-à-vis the truth of the matheme and romantic truth in ‘Y a-­t-il une philosophie française?’, Annales de philosophie de l’Université Saint-Joseph (1989), pp. 85–97, p. 95. 83 Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 64. 84 Waugh, When the Going was Good (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 85. 85 Quoted Waugh, The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 294. 86 Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece, ed. with an appendix by Richard Jacobs (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 9. 87 See Paolo Lollo, ‘Psychoanalysis and Transmission of the Knowledge’, at http://www. apres-­coup.org/mt/miscellaneous/Psychoanalysis%20and%20transmission%20of%20 the%20knowledge%20-%20Paolo%20Lollo.pdf (accessed 26 January 2018). 88 Lacan, Séminaire XXIII, Le Sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 2005), p. 95. 89 Samuel Beckett, Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk van Hulle (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 93. 90 Jambet, ‘Postface’, Nezami, Les Sept Portraits, trans. Isabella de Gastines (Paris: Fayard, 2000), pp. 341–60, pp. 341, 345. 91 For a more detailed account of the concept of the mundus imaginalis see Gibson, Intermittency, pp. 136–41. 92 Jambet is quoting from Suhrawardi, Kitab Hitmat al-­ishraq, Book IV, Chapter 8. 93 ‘Préface’, hereafter cited in the text as PHC, Henri Corbin, ed. Jambet (Paris: Herne, 1981), pp. 11–14, p. 12. 94 Simon During, Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Age of Emancipations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 75. 95 See PA, p. 98. 96 Jambet, ‘Postface: Pour un portrait de Sébastien Melmoth’, Oscar Wilde, La ballade de la Geôle de Reading, ed. and trans. Jambet (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1994), pp. 59–105, p. 76. 97 See SXVII, pp. 191–3. 98 Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours, ed. with notes and appendices Daniel Grojnowski (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), hereafter cited in the text as AR; p. 247.

Conclusion: A Political Theology 1 Judith Balso, ‘To Present Oneself to the Present: Communism: A Possible Hypothesis for Philosophy, An Impossible Name for Politics?’, in Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas (eds.) The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 15–32, pp. 16, 21. 2 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne, introd. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 173.

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3 Christian Jambet, L’acte d’être: La philosophie de la révélation chez Molla Sadra (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 10–11. 4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Of the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott, introd. Richard S. Peters (New York: Collier, 1978), pp. 58, 109. 5 Simon During, Against Democracy: Literary Experience in the Era of Emancipations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 15. 6 Jambet and Guy Lardreau, L’Ange: pour une cynégétique du semblant (Paris: Grasset, 1976). Though Jambet’s concern with esoteric Islam is only very seldom evident in his contribution to this early work, its political theology is consistent with his later one (as is its Lacanianism). 7 Alberto Toscano, ‘Religion and Revolt’, http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/001/004/ articles/4-atoscano/index.php (accessed 11 October 2017). 8 Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XXI, Les Non-­dupes errent (Paris: n.p., 1981), p. 84. 9 Quoted in Toscano, ‘Religion and Revolt’. 10 Balso, ‘To Present Oneself to the Present’, p. 27. 11 Toscano, ‘Divine Management: Economy and Secularization in Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory’ (accessed 26 January 2018). 12 Jambet, ‘Pour Louis Althusser’, Revue des deux mondes (January 1991), pp. 103–10. 13 Jacques Rancière, La Leçon d’Althusser (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 239. 14 Balso, ‘To Present Oneself to the Present’, p. 28. 15 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 44, 227. 16 Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), p. 56. 17 Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, vol. 1: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), hereafter cited in the text as OFP; p. 178. 18 Johnston, ‘Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux?’, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), pp. 92–113, p. 93. 19 Quentin Meillassoux, Après la finitude: Essais sur la nécessité de la contingence, pref. Alain Badiou (Paris: Seuil, 2006). 20 Johnston, ‘Hume’s Revenge’, p. 97. 21 Beckett, Endgame (London: Faber & Faber, 1958), p. 38. 22 Johnston, ‘Hume’s Revenge’, p. 95. 23 Graham Harman, ‘Johnston’s Critique of Meillassoux’, in Tom Eyers, Graham Harman et al., Umbr(a): The Object (Buffalo, NY: Centre for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture, 2014), pp. 29–48, p. 33. 24 Johnston, ‘Hume’s Revenge’, p. 94. 25 Ibid., p. 93. 26 Radical happiness at length reveals itself to be just another version of Bubble happiness, happiness in the comfort zone. See Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy (London: Verso, 2017). This is not to say that there are no moments of ‘collective joy’. I’ve noted a few. 27 See William Davies, The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (London: Verso, 2016), passim. 28 J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 248.

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29 Svenska Akademien, press release, 2 October 2003, The Nobel Prize in Literature 2003, John Maxwell Coetzee, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/2003/press.html (accessed 27 March, 2018). 30 I am grateful to Arthur Bradley for alerting me to this. 31 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, foreword Tracy B. Strong (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), hereafter cited in the text as PT; p. 36. 32 Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), p. 25. 33 Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966), hereafter LM; p. 60. 34 Schmitt, Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. and introd. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), hereafter cited in the text as PT2; p. 117. 35 The point being that theology is or should fall silent on a critical historical ‘threshold’. See PT2, p. 118. 36 When Blumenberg says that Schmitt cannot see that modernity ‘founds legitimacy on historical discontinuity’, he seems to me to miss the point. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), hereafter cited in the text as LMA; p. 95. Schmitt is saying that, if we care about it enough, it must be made to, since it has scarcely done so yet. Hence the dry, abstract mode of his presentation. 37 Claude Lefort, ‘Permanence of the Theological-Political?’, hereafter cited in the text as PTP, Democracy and Political Theory , trans. David Macey (Oxford: Polity, 1988), pp. 213–55, p. 213. 38 Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. with afterword Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), hereafter cited in the text as PM; p. 21. 39 Savage, ‘Afterword’, PM, pp. 134–46, hereafter cited in the text as AF, p. 138. 40 Quoted in James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, afterword by Michael Groden (New York: Garland Publishing, 1984, 1986), 3.466. 41 George Herbert, ‘Redemption’, The Complete English Poems, ed. with introd. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 35. 42 John Milton, ‘When I consider how my light is spent’, Sonnet XVI, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (2nd edn, London: Longman, 2006), p. 332. 43 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. with introd. and notes Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), hereafter cited in the text as C; pp. 146, 152. 44 The quotation is from Rom 12.2. 45 For an excellent collection of these writings see Augustine, Anti-Pelagian Writings, ed. and trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, revd. and introd. Benjamin B. Warfield (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004). 46 See e.g. Augustine, Treatise against Two Letters of the Pelagians, I.iii 7, in Anti-Pelagian Writings, pp. 373–434. 47 Augustine, Against the Academicians, trans. with an introd. Sister Mary Patricia Garvey (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2000), p. 81. 48 Badiou, ‘L’Être, l’événement et la militance’, interview with Nicole-Édith Thévenin, Futur antérieur, no. 8 (1991), pp 13–23, p. 20.

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49 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Gérard Ferreyrolles (Paris: Livres de Poche, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as P; p. 442. There are wide variations in the content of editions of the Pensées; hence my use of two editions here. 50 Pascal, Pensées, trans. with an introd. A.J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), hereafter cited in the text as PE; p. 170. 51 William Doyle, Jansenism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 4. 52 Quoted in ibid., p. 39. 53 Quoted in ibid., p. 30. 54 Guy Lardreau, ‘The Problem of Great Politics in the Light of Obviously Deficient Modes of Subjectivation’, hereafter cited in the text as GP, Peter Hallward (ed.), The One or the Other: French Philosophy Today, Angelaki 8.2 (2003), pp. 90–6, p. 90. 55 Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, pp. 85–6. 56 A concept that, as Lardreau notes himself, he develops in his La Véracité (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993). 57 Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), hereafter cited in the text as FT; p. 71. 58 Compare Badiou on apagogic reason, reasoning that the law declares is absurd, but which it will finally be absurd not to have believed, Peut-­on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), pp. 112–13. Cf. also Badiou on Kierkegaard, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), pp. 447–57. 59 See Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Part II, ed. and trans. with an introd. and notes Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), hereafter cited in the text as EO; p. 141. 60 See FT, p. 44. 61 Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, trans. with introd. Douglas Steere (London: Collins, 1966), p. 50. 62 See David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). I am grateful to Anthony Ossa Richardson for drawing my attention to Benatar. See also Jonathan Dollimore, Desire: A Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 101–2. He is quoting Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001). 63 Kahn, The Future of Illusion, p. 22. 64 For one account of this relationship, see William V. Davis, R.S. Thomas: Poetry and Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press 2007), Chapter 9, ‘R.S. Thomas and Søren Kierkegaard’, pp. 123–42. Cf. e.g. Thomas’s poem ‘Kierkegaard’, Collected Poems 1945–1990 (London: Phoenix, 1993), hereafter cited in the text as TCP; p. 162. 65 Christian Jambet, ‘Pour un portrait de Sébastien Melmoth’, postface, Oscar Wilde, La Ballade de la Geôle de Reading, ed. and trans. Jambet (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1994), pp. 59–105, p. 94. 66 For some time, Thomas regarded himself as ‘of a pacifist and rather left tendency’. Letter to Gwyn Jones, 1939, quoted in Rory Waterman, Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R.S. Thomas and Charles Causley (London: Routledge, 1975), p. 17. Waterman rightly observes that Thomas’s fervent Welsh nationalism tends to eclipse any tendency to socialism, not least because the substantial presence in Wales of the English-­centred Labour Party was a major hindrance to the nationalist cause. But Thomas’s nationalism repeatedly sounds egalitarian and involves a major

Notes

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83

225

critique of wealth and power. In today’s terms, he was ‘anti-­capitalist’. Nicholson was for a while, he tells us, a socialist ‘in the Trevelyan-Macaulayan tradition’ (though he also convicts himself of ‘pure adolescent romanticism’). See his autobiography, Wednesday Early Closing (London: Faber and Faber, 1975, p. 176). Both, in effect, were leftists but not party men. Justin Wintle, Furious Interiors: Wales, R.S. Thomas and God (London: HarperCollins, 1996), hereafter cited in the text as FI; p. 213. This is an engrossing biography. R.S. Thomas, Autobiographies, trans. from the Welsh with introd. and notes Jason Walford Davies (London: Dent, 1997), hereafter cited in the text as A; p. 67. As Wintle points out, extremely changeable; the Welsh coast is in general ‘a place of dramatically quick contrasts’ (FI, pp. 101, 165). The phrase is most often associated with Rudolf Otto’s conception of the luminous. Quoted in Wintle, FI, p. 220. Quoted in ibid., p. 224. Quoted in Thomas, A, p. 76. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 1998), p. 84; and David Cooper, ‘The Poetics of Place and Space: Wordsworth, Norman Nicholson and the Lake District’, Literature Compass (2008), pp. 807–21, p. 815. Norman Nicholson, Greater Lakeland (London: Robert Hale, 1969), pp. 15, 17, 20. Alan Atkinson, Millom: A Cumberland Iron Town and Its Railways (Pinner: Cumbrian Railways Association, 2012), p. 5. David Boyd, Norman Nicholson: A Critical Biography (Seascale: Seascale Press, 2014), p. 100. Nicholson, Collected Poems, ed. with an introd. Neil Curry (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), hereafter cited in the text as NCP; p. 282. For an extended account of this point, see my ‘ “At the Dying Atlantic’s Edge”: Norman Nicholson and the Cumbrian Coast’, in Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom and Jos Smith (eds.), Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 77–92. Nicholson, Cumberland and Westmoreland (London: Robert Hales, 1949), hereafter cited in the text as CW; pp. 13, 19. Dante, Purgatorio, ed. with trans. and commentary John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), Canto X, 7–9, 124–5, pp. 130, 136. Christian Jambet, ‘Preface’, Élodie Mailliet, Kant entre désespoir et espérance (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 7–13, p. 7. See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-­environment-45084144 (accessed 7 August 2018).

Index act of being 136–40, 143, 150, 158 Adorno, Theodor W. 3, 19, 98, 100, 104, 105, 213 n.44 advertising 37, 39, 43, 44 affirmationism 92, 98, 209 n.12, 212 n.12 Agamben, Giorgio 3, 40, 141, 164, 165–6 age of expendability, the 40 Alamut 139–40, 142–5, 148 Alduy, Cécile 34 Al-haqq 139 al-Suhrawardi, Abu al-Najib 136, 139, 141, 157 Althusser, Louis 112, 166 al-Tusi, Nasir al-Din 136–7, 140–1 Ambrose, St 180 anthropomorphosis 140 anti-dialectics 6, 22, 100, 105, 131, 133, 165, 167 anti-modernity 6–7, 21, 27, 33, 111–12 antinomies, the 81–2 Aquinas, St Thomas 163, 194 Arabi, Ibn 136 Arendt, Hannah 2, 27, 46 Ariosto, Ludovico 12 Aristotle 43, 138, 145, 150, 155, 174, 220 n.52, n.69 Arnauld, Antoine 42 Arnold, Matthew 106 Atherton, J.S. 67 atomization 4, 41, 74, 89–92, 181 Auden, W,H. (Wystan Hugh) 92 Augustine of Hippo, St 177, 184–5, 194 Auschwitz 168 Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 136–7, 139 Ayatollahs, the 144 Bachelard, Gaston 176 Bacon, Francis 175 Badiou, Alain 4, 7, 19, 21, 32, 35, 41, 47, 53, 69–75, 76, 77, 81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 91–2, 98–100, 104, 106–8, 116, 132, 136, 146,

165, 167–8, 170, 185, 212 n.23, 213 n.26, 213–14 n.44, 214 n.45, 219 n.44, 224 n.58 Ballanche, Pierre-Simon 173 Balso, Judith 161, 163, 165–7 banal infinity 71, 162 Banville, John 98 Bastiano, Lazzaro 90 Bataille, Georges 58 Baudelaire, Charles 14, 15, 21, 27, 97, 159, 160 Baum, Vicki 113, 115, 123 Bebel, August 79 Beck, Ulrich 77 Beckett, Samuel 13, 19, 21, 53, 58, 71, 72, 89, 92, 98, 107, 141, 147, 154, 156, 168, 214 n.44 Being 21, 52–5, 60, 62, 69–71, 74–6, 85–7, 96, 137–41, 143, 167–8 Bell, Timothy 39 Bellini, Gentile 90 Benatar, David 189, 224 n.62 Benjamin, Walter 3, 13–15, 18, 38, 48, 103, 109, 114, 115–16, 120, 132, 172, 190, 195, 200 n.29 Bentham, Jeremy 164 Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 29, 33, 38, 40, 45–7, 161, 165, 203 n.33, 204 n.67 Berger, John 32 Bergson, Henri 218 n.12 Berlin, Isaiah 2 Berman, Marshall 6, 14 Bible, the 94, 162, 176–80 Binswanger, Ludwig 56, 60 Blair, Tony 24, 28, 29, 36, 48, 201 n.7 Blake, William 104 Blanchot, Maurice 31, 49, 58 Blumenberg, Hans 169–76, 184, 223 n.36 Boccaccio, Giovanni 12 Bockman, Johanna 29 Bolton, John 197

228

Index

Bonaparte, Napoleon 10–12, 139 Bonnivard, François de 13 Borges, Jorge Luis 19, 58 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne 165 Bowen, Elizabeth 97 Boyd, David 195 Bradley, F.H. 44 Branson, Richard 29 Brassier, Ray 205f n.80 Brecht, Bertolt 116, 129–30, 131, 133 Briggs, Julia 86 Broch, Hermann 58 Büchner, Georg 128 Burke, Edmund 7 Byron, Lord George Gordon 8–14, 19, 21, 48, 85, 97, 176, 200f n.22 Cambridge Platonists 144 Cameron, David 36 Campanella, Tommaso 174 Canetti, Elias 113, 124–5, 129, 132, 133, 181 capitalism 6, 25, 27, 28–33, 35, 37–8, 40, 41, 45–6, 48–9, 77, 103, 121, 130, 147, 163, 167 Carey, John 36 Carpaccio, Vittore 89–93, 181 casuistry 186–7 catastrophe in permanence 14–15, 38, 48, 103–4 Catherine the Great 158 Cavell, Stanley 19 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de 61, 125 Chamfort (Sébastien-Roch Nicolas) 69, 79–80, 82 Chapuis, Nicolas 203 n.53 Chateaubriand, François-René, vicomte de 7, 8, 97, 173 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai 35 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 12 climate change 37, 40, 164, 198 Clinton, Bill 28, 36 Coetzee, J.M. 3, 19, 98, 111, 133, 169, 214 n.44 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 8, 11, 97 colonialism 25, 66 Communism 29, 79, 115, 161, 203 n.33 community 2–3, 25, 119, 139, 140, 143, 181, 189, 193, 195

complicity 15, 25, 37, 41, 45, 53, 55, 77, 95, 118, 133, 178 conatus essendi 99, 213 n.31 Congreve, William, second Baronet 13 Connolly, Cyril 79 Connor, Steven 52–3, 73, 77–9, 86, 88 Conrad, Joseph 78 Constant, Benjamin 7 contemporary culture 1–2, 21, 23–49, 52–5, 58, 76–9, 98, 126–7, 129, 141, 144, 161, 163–4, 167, 185, 190 contemporary democracy 2, 3, 24, 26, 31, 35–7, 39, 44–9, 53, 54, 72, 76, 126, 129, 163–4, 167, 169, 191 Cooper, David 195 Copernican revolution 71, 76, 83, 144 Coppola, Francis Ford 214 n.44 Corbière, Tristan 160 Corbin, Henry 136, 141, 142, 160, 217 n.4, 218 n.3 cosmetic morality 35, 169 counterdemocracy 48–9 Cromwell, Oliver 186 Critchley, Simon 19, 52–4 Dante Alighieri 12, 156, 163, 198 Davies, William 169 Davis, Bret 52 Davis, Mike 33, 40 Davy, Sir Humphrey 13 Dean, Jodi 29 Debord, Guy 32 Defoe, Daniel 66 Delacroix, Eugène 13 deconstruction 21, 27, 29, 76 Deleuze, Gilles 25, 137 depression 38, 189 Derrida, Jacques 6, 31, 52, 76 Descartes, René 43, 72, 126, 175 deus absconditus 88, 183, 186 dialectics 6, 36, 73, 82, 100, 144, 165, 168 Dickinson, Emily 97 Diderot, Denis 51, 60, 63 Disraeli, Benjamin 49 Dix, Otto 114 Döblin, Alfred 113, 115–16, 117, 118, 120, 133 Docherty, Thomas 29, 34, 37, 210 n.30 Dollimore, Jonathan 189

Index Donne, John 156 Dorling, Daniel 1, 2, 26, 29, 47, 146 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 21, 121, 131, 154 Douglas, Lord Alfred 158 Dresden uprising ( 1849) 108 Dürer, Albrecht 61 During, Simon 29, 48–9, 158, 160, 163 Eagleton, Terry 22 Eastwood, Tom 197 egalitarianism 33, 111 Einstein, Albert 72 Elgin, Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of 10–11 Eliot, George 27 Eliot, T.S. (Thomas Stearns) 49, 107, 145 Engels, Friedrich 165 entropy, social 30, 46 equality 2, 3, 17–18, 48, 79–80, 94, 112, 126, 129, 132, 139–40, 144, 181, 189 esoteric Islam 48, 52, 135–44, 152, 157, 217 n.4, 222 n.6; see also Islamic Gnosticism Evangel, the 68, 184 événementialité 70–1, 86–7, 103, 104, 136, 184 event 7, 16, 21, 31, 43, 47, 57, 61, 62, 69–88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 98–102, 104, 106, 108, 114, 116, 131–3, 135, 137–44, 146, 152, 156–8, 163, 165, 167, 172, 180, 182, 184–6, 188, 193, 194, 197 exceptionalism 45, 49, 68, 73, 78, 95, 97, 107, 118, 126, 141–2, 146, 170–1, 178–9, 184, 198, 212 n.7 exoteric Islam 139–40, 142, 144 fallen world, the 140, 190 Farage, Nigel 36 Farias, Victor 207 n.21 Farrokhzad, Forough 138 Ferry, Luc 127 Flaubert, Gustave 17, 21, 27, 78, 107, 112, 160 Foucault, Michel 22, 31, 55–64, 65, 67, 68, 144, 153, 164, 166, 176 freedom 1–2, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 36, 41–4, 46, 54, 81–3, 95, 97, 121, 123, 126, 129, 139, 140, 144, 154, 157–8, 167, 181, 191; see also liberty

229

Fowler, Francis 67–8 Fowler, Henry 67–8 Frederick the Great 215 n.25 French revolution (1789) 1, 4, 7, 8, 11, 16, 71, 76, 79, 84–5, 111, 171, 173 French revolution (1848) 21, 109 Freud, Sigmund 86, 141, 145, 146, 148, 152, 153, 154, 155 frissons, political 44 Frondes, the 187 Fuller, Steve 121 Fynsk, Christopher 53 Galilei, Galileo 144 Gandhi, Mahatma 71 Ganjavi, Nezami 156 general solipsism 32, 124–5 Gentile, Alberico 171 geological time 161, 196–8 Gibbon, Edward 67 Glass, Philip 107 Glenney, Misha 39 Glyn Dŵr, Owain 193 Godard, Jean-Luc 25, 28 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5, 6, 158 Goncourt, Edmond de 160 good, the 1–4, 17, 22, 26, 27–8, 29, 36, 42, 45, 82–3, 109, 118–19, 147–8, 151, 157, 178, 180, 181, 189 Goya y Lucentes, Francisco José de 9–10, 176 grace (charis) 89, 161, 178, 182, 184–7, 191, 192, 193; see also disgrace 3 Graeber, David 25, 29, 31, 37, 44 Gramsci, Antonio 31 Gray, John 33, 39, 40, 41, 48, 203 n.35 Grayling, A.C. 36–7 Great Resurrection, the (1164) 137, 140–2 Greene, Graham 13 Grosz, George 114, 115 Guillotin, Joseph-Ignace 13 hadith 137 Hägglund, Martin 52–4 Halberstam, Judith (Jack) 38 half-saying (mi-dire) 150 Hallward, Peter 45, 166 Hannon, Theodore 160

230 happiness 2, 28, 30, 38, 46, 146, 169, 204 n.67, 222 n.26 haqiqa 142 Harman, Graham 168 Harvey, David 3, 199 n.9 Hauser, Caspar 115 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 8, 23, 39, 46, 68, 74, 100, 105, 138, 144, 146, 164, 170, 173–4, 188–9 Heller, Agnes 1 Herbert, George 180 Herodotus 97 Herzog, Werner 214 n.44 Heidegger, Martin 23, 27, 51–7, 63, 64, 69–70, 74, 78, 206 n.3, 207 n.21 hetero-temporality 59, 61 hierohistory 142–3, 157–8, 160 Hindenburg, Paul von 114, 117 hiraeth 193 Hirschman, Albert O. 8 historical irony 6, 20, 63, 77, 114, 163 historical materialism 63–8, 164–6 historical reason 177 historicity 7, 21–2, 51–70, 73, 74, 80, 103, 112, 116, 133, 148, 153, 159, 162, 166, 177, 184, 198, 206 n.4 Hitler, Adolf 86, 118, 123, 130, 131 Hobbes, Thomas 1, 5, 19, 72, 85, 93–4, 139, 162–3, 174 Hobsbawm, Eric 4–5, 16, 24 Hölderlin, Friedrich 92, 97, 104 Holland, Robert 112 Holocaust, the 1, 6, 40, 118 Hotson, Howard 25, 29 hubris, modern 14 Hugo, Gustav 7 Hume, David 1, 72, 81, 83, 167 hupolepton, the 155 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 158–60 Hyde, Douglas 66 imaginal world (alam al-mithal) 157–9, 221 n.91 imaginaries 58, 82, 148, 153, 174 Imams 137, 140–2, 144 implosion (of modernity) 24–41 inductive thought 2. 161 inexistence 3, 33, 35, 72, 99, 101, 152

Index intermittency 13, 36, 62, 71, 92, 130, 131, 133, 142, 155, 182, 195 Iranian revolution (1979) 143–4 Irigaray, Luce 72 ironical modernity 3–8, 9, 11–17, 19–22, 23–4, 27, 48, 107, 112, 115, 121, 124, 125, 130, 131, 141, 145, 147, 151, 154, 159, 170, 172, 173, 189, 198 Islamic Gnosticism 48, 138–9, 141–3, 152, 157–8, 172, 182 Ismailism 139–41 Jacotot, Joseph 126 Jambet, Christian 48, 135–45, 152, 155, 156–8, 160, 162, 164–5, 166, 173, 182, 190, 198, 218 n.7, n.9, 219 n.44, 221 n.82, 222 n.6 Jansenism 187 Johnston, Adrian 167–8 Johnson, Samuel 69, 70, 72 Jones, Colin 76–8 Jones, Owen 29–30, 32, 34, 39, 45 Joyce, James 22, 63–8, 78, 87, 153, 154–6, 163 Judt, Tony 24, 27, 28, 29, 38, 47 July revolution (Barcelona, 1936) 79–80, 132 July revolution (France, 1830) 132 justice 1–4, 12, 14, 17, 22, 26, 27–8, 35, 38, 43, 45, 47, 48, 54, 71, 73, 80, 82, 85, 93–4, 95, 109, 112, 118–21, 132, 139–40, 157, 162, 168, 170, 171, 174, 178–9, 181–2, 185, 186, 187, 188–9, 191, 196 Kafka, Franz 58, 60, 78 Kahn, Victoria 22, 170, 190 Kant, Immanuel 5, 17, 27, 41, 68, 69, 72, 81–6, 88, 95, 112, 132, 141, 154, 165, 174, 188, 198 Keats, John 11, 17, 92 Keltner, Dacher 39, 40 Kenner, Hugh 66 Kierkegaard, Søren 23, 48, 75, 177, 187–9, 190, 194 Kilcher, Andreas 120 King, Martin Luther 71 Klein, Naomi 3, 29, 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45 Kleist, Heinrich von 8, 72, 97

Index Knox, Ronald 154 Kojève, Alexandre 250 n.59 Kollontai, Alexandra 80 Kollwitz, Käthe 114 Lacan, Jacques 28, 31, 38, 72, 74, 135, 144–56, 158, 160, 165, 167, 168, 218 n.9, 220 n.52, n.59, n.61, 222 n.6 lack, the 149–51, 153, 157, 167, 168 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 98, 100, 213 n.44 Laforgue, Jules 97 la Harpe, Jean-François de 15 Lamartine, Alphonse de 97 Land, Nick 204 n.80 language, contemporary corruption of 33–4 Lardreau, Guy 47, 83, 164, 165, 167, 187–8, 189 law 35, 60, 93, 95, 98–9, 139–44, 146, 170–1, 175, 183, 187, 190, 224 n.58 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 213 n.26 Lefebvre, Henri 24 Lefort, Claude 173–4 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 41–4, 74–5, 83, 181, 188 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 45 Leroux, Pierre 174 Leskov, Nikolai 18 Levinas, Emmanuel 25 Levy, Benny 127 Lewis, Harry Sinclair 37 liberty 2–3, 10, 94, 112, 143, 144, 181, 198; see also freedom Liebknecht, Karl 115 Livy (Titus Livius Patavinus) 12 Locke, John 170 Lollo, Paolo 154 Louis XIV 186–7 Lowell, Robert 23, 190 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) 186 Ludendorff, Erich 114 Luhmann, Niklas 31–2, 33, 45, 46 Lukács, György 22 Luther, Martin 96, 97 Luxemburg, Rosa 114, 115 Lyell, Charles 197 Lyotard, Jean-François 23, 31

231

McGann, Jerome 9 Machiavelli, Niccolò 39, 45, 133, 174 Macron, Emmanuel 34 Mahler, Gustav 107 Maistre, Joseph de 170 major literature 19, 87, 156 Mallarmé, Stéphane 70, 71, 72, 91, 97, 160, 214 n.44 Mallin, Thomas 112 managerialism 25, 34, 151, 163, 164 Mandela, Nelson 71 Mandeville, Bernard 30 Manichaeism 36, 41, 165, 185 Mann, Thomas 14, 108–9 Mannheim, Karl 6–8 Mansueti, Giovanni 90 Mao Tse-Tung 28, 139 Marceau, François-Séverin 11 Marcuse, Ludwig 27 Marr, J.E. 197 Marvell, Andrew 14 Marx, Karl 6, 8, 21, 24, 46, 71, 127, 132, 164, 167, 216 n.53 Marxism 25, 28, 127, 147, 164–8, 170 mass destruction, weapons of 13 mass movements 22, 28, 44, 45, 112 masses, the 21, 22, 25, 33–7, 112, 116, 126–30, 146–7, 165 Massignon, Louis 136, 140, 141, 160, 217 n.4 materialism 52, 56, 63–8, 73, 76, 78, 98, 117–18, 126, 128, 131, 133, 137, 146, 158, 166–8 Matless, David 195 Meillassoux, Quentin 32, 167, 168, 181 melancholic-ecstatic (conception of history) 135–42, 144, 147–8, 156–8, 163, 179, 182, 194; see also intermittency Melville, Herman 27 Meryon, Charles 14 messianism 48, 138–44, 156–7, 181, 183, 186, 196–8; see also melancholicecstatic metahistory 130, 140, 173, 218 n.23 metaphorics 176 Michelet, Jules 173, 174 Midgeley, David 114, 117 Mill, John Stuart 2, 164

232

Index

Millom 190, 195–6 Milner, Jean-Claude 127 Milton, John 156, 182 minor modernity 20, 44–5, 70 modern fate 14–15, 65, 102–3, 116 modern literature (functions of) 8, 15–22, 49, 60, 62, 72, 85–6, 87, 92, 107, 112, 114, 117, 129, 135, 141, 145, 153–60, 176, 184, 190–8 modern melancholy 9, 11, 19, 22, 48, 69, 87, 90–1, 92, 100, 109, 112, 118, 123 modern technology 32–3, 38, 45–6, 77–8 modernity see ironical modernity monde atone 91–7, 166 Monbiot, George 29, 30, 32, 38 Moreau, Gustave 159 Morrison, Toni 98 Möser, Justus 7 Muller, Adam 7 Mulhall, Stephen 19, 52–5, 206 n.2 Neocleous, Mark 77 neoliberalism 25, 29, 31–41, 43, 45, 77, 167, 169, 199 n.9, 203 n.35 Neoplatonism 144 Nero 12, 189 Nerval, Gérard de 158 Neue Sachlichkeit 113, 114–17, 123 Nicholson, Norman 48, 161, 190, 194–8 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6, 14, 19, 31, 71, 72, 92, 103, 158, 166 nihilism 31, 58, 103–4 Nin, Anaïs 97 Nizaris 139–40 noumenon 81 Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) 18 Noys, Benjamin 25, 29 Obama, Barack 24, 36 objet a 151, 158 occultation 22, 47, 135, 137–8, 142–4, 156, 157, 182 O’Connell, Daniel 71 Ollier, Claude 58 One, the 32–3, 37, 41, 73–5, 130, 153, 157 ontic instability 64–5, 73 ontology 13, 41, 52, 56, 58, 63, 69–71, 74, 96, 136–42, 157, 158, 162, 167, 168

Orwell, George (Eric Blair) 22, 24, 69, 79–80, 82, 113, 125–33, 165 O’Shea, Katharine (Kitty) 87 Otley, Jonathan 197 Paris Commune 216 n.53 Parmenides 74 Parnell, Charles Stewart 63, 71, 87, 153 parousia 141 Pascal, Blaise 48, 177, 186–7, 196 Pascal, Jacqueline 187 Pasha of Ioannina, Ali 10 Peacock, William 66 Pelagianism 185 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 12 Pettit, Philip 29 phenomenon 96, 136 phenomenology 96 Philippe, Édouard 34 ‘philosophy’ 19, 25, 28, 35, 112, 127 Pickett, Kate 2 Picketty, Thomas 29, 45 Pinker, Steven 96 Plath, Sylvia 104 Plato 71, 83, 128, 158 Platonism 81, 83, 92, 144 plenitude 35–6, 72 Plutarch 135 Pluth, Ed 209 n.13 Poe, Edgar Allan 154, 160 Pokrovskaya, Maria 80 political fix, the 3–4, 5–15, 16, 164 political minimalism 21, 27, 31, 39, 146, 193–4, 198, 204 n.73 political theology 2, 4, 16, 21, 22, 30, 31, 44–9, 51–2, 68–70, 77, 88, 91, 109, 113, 114, 133, 136, 146, 153, 156, 160–98 popular recalcitrance 10, 11, 22, 36, 38, 45–6, 87, 95, 111–33, 146–7, 180–1, 184, 190–3 postcolonialism 25, 65–6 postmodernism 23–4, 25, 40, 53 ‘post-truth culture’ 36–7 pragmatism 2, 3, 31, 161 prehistory (contemporary culture as) 132 pre-political condition, the 46, 119, 147, 166, 169, 191 presentism 32, 53, 55–6, 162, 174

Index progressivisms 6, 14, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24–5, 35, 39–40, 46, 48, 51–7, 70, 73, 84–5, 94, 111, 125, 128, 141–2, 144, 146, 151, 161–2, 163, 168, 171, 199 n.9 proletariat, the 112, 125, 127, 129, 146, 161, 216 n.53 Proust, Françoise 14, 200 n.29 Proust, Marcel 145 Przeworski, Adam 39 psychic reassurance (of the political subject) 22, 146, 169 quiddity 138–9 Quinet, Edgar 174 radical finitude 51–6, 60–1 radical Quixotism 80, 112, 124, 125, 189 Raleigh, Sir Walter 66 Rancière, Jacques 15–20, 22, 25, 49, 112, 113, 125–33, 157, 160, 166, 200 n.38 Randall, Bryony 78 rarity 13, 20, 21, 27, 36, 71–5, 83, 89, 93, 95, 97, 100, 103, 108–9, 126, 132–3, 135, 138–9, 141–2, 145–6, 156, 158, 159, 165, 169, 171, 178, 184, 186–8, 190, 193, 198, 209 n.13 Rathenau, Walter 115, 123–4 Reagan, Ronald 28 Real, the 146, 148–55, 167, 188 Redon, Odilon 159 remainder, the 44, 47, 73, 89–109, 118, 131, 133, 135, 140, 142, 145, 156, 159, 162, 165, 167, 172, 178, 184–6, 188, 191 Rembrantsz, Dirk 126 revelation 7, 41, 62, 84, 89–90, 136–9, 143 156, 162, 186 revolution 4–5, 7, 8–17, 20, 21, 25, 28, 44–7, 71, 76, 78–80, 84–5, 94, 108–9, 111–12, 114, 117, 119, 120–2, 126–8, 132, 136, 137, 140–2, 146–7, 158–60, 165, 166, 173, 194 Rhys, Jean 97 Ricœur, Paul 34 Rienzi (Rienzo, Cola di) 12 Rilke, Rainer Maria 111, 116, 128–9 Rimbaud, Arthur 97, 104 risk 77–8 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 58 Robinson, Thomas 197

233

romantic irony 5 romanticism 5, 159, 173 romantic fragment, the 18 Rorty, Richard 31, 40, 52–4 Rossellini, Roberto 214 n.44 Roth, Joseph 113, 116–24, 129, 131, 132, 133, 215 n.30, n.31 Rousseau, Achille 128 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 6, 11, 17, 19, 94–6 Roussel, Raymond 58 Rumi, Jalal ad-Din 138, 158, 218 n.19 Russell, Bertrand 19, 93 Russian revolution 71, 79–80, 112, 118–22 Sabbah, Hassan-I 139–40 Sacrifice zones 3, 147 Sadra, Mulla 136–41, 157, 217 n.4, n.5, 218 n.9, n.12 St Paul 194 Saint-Simon, Louis de Rouvroy, duc de 186 Saintsbury, George 66 Sarraute, Nathalie 19 Sartre, Jean-Paul 36, 113, 204 n.57 Sassen, Saskia 3, 29, 33, 40 satanic modernity 3, 13–15, 20, 24, 172 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von 7 Sayeau, Michael 76–9, 88 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 158 Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von 17, 158 Schlegel, Friedrich 5, 18 Schmitt, Carl 5, 14, 169–76, 184, 223 n.36 Schopenhauer, Arthur 21, 72, 96–7, 103, 107–9, 137 Sebald, W.G. 98, 214 n.44 secularism 2, 39, 41, 47–8, 70, 103, 104, 162, 164, 170–5, 185 security 77 Sedgwick, Adam 197 Segal, Lynne 169, 222 n.26 Sellafield 195–6 semblance 74, 145, 148, 157 sensibility 2–3, 58, 61, 96, 173, 176 Serres, Michel 91 sexual relations 6, 94, 139, 145–6, 149 Shakespeare, William 23, 155 Sharia law 138, 140, 143 Shaw, George Bernard 103

234

Index

Shelley, Percy Bysshe 48, 97, 194 Simon, Claude 58 Singer, Peter 19 Sloterdijk, Peter 1, 6, 24–7, 33, 35, 36, 38, 46–7, 91, 111, 113 Smith, Adam 37, 164 Smyth, Ethel 87 social democracy 2, 3, 24, 26, 35, 45, 47, 53, 76, 109, 114, 115, 117, 133, 164, 167, 169, 170 Socrates 149 Sollers, Philippe 58, 59 Sophocles 148, 151, 154–5 Southey, Robert 8 Soutine, Chaim 104 Spanish Civil War 71, 79–80, 132 speculative reason 81–5, 95, 112, 165, 166, 174, 201 n.45 Spinoza, Baruch de 97, 99, 130; see also conatus essendi Spiridinova, Mariya 80 spirit 9, 13, 15, 18, 79, 100, 138, 140, 142–4, 157, 160, 183, 186, 188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 218 n.21 Sprenger, Florian 76 Srnicek, Nick 25, 29, 39 Stahl, Friedrich Julius 7 Stalin, Joseph 6, 49 State, the 28, 43, 48–9, 73–4, 77, 80, 85, 90, 92, 94, 95, 98, 101, 106, 120, 126 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle) 77 Sterne, Laurence 19, 66 Stevens, Wallace 19, 155 Streeck, Wolfgang 30–1, 37–8, 40, 45–6, 161, 165 strong reading 213 n.26 subject, the 4, 28, 55, 56, 59, 91, 98, 104, 119, 122, 27, 135, 179, 185, 192; contemporary 25–6, 46, 53, 78, 189; of knowledge 97, 148, 157; lifeless 91; mass 22, 45, 121, 179; messianic 138–9, 142–4, 157; modern 5, 7–8, 11–13, 20–2, 78–80, 83, 92, 105–7; political 4, 22, 146, 166–9, 187–8, 193; psychoanalytic 92, 145–53; reactive 7, 119; of truth 71–2, 73–80, 87–8, 98, 101, 106, 116, 188; waiting 107, 133, 138, 140–4, 162, 182, 184, 219 n.44

subjectivism 5 Suffragism 71, 80, 87 Suhrawardi, Shahab al-Din 157, 217 n.4 Swift, Jonathan 1, 66 Tabrizi, Shams 158 Tarantino, Quentin 26 teleology 85, 107 tense worlds 91 testament, the 79, 182, 184 Tergit, Gabriele 113–15, 130 Thatcher, Margaret 25, 28, 29, 44, 112 theodicy 39–40, 42–3, 49, 53, 56 theology 22, 92, 98, 136, 185–90 theoreticism 26, 166, 168 third antinomy 81–2 Thomas, R.S. 48, 190–4, 198, 224–5 n.66 Toller, Ernst 112 Toscano, Alberto 164–8 toxic positivity 14, 16, 21, 22, 24, 38–40, 42, 43, 72, 146, 168–9 Trägheit des Herzens, die (indolence of the heart) 3, 115, 119 Trajan 12 transmission 4, 11, 12, 18, 22, 52, 63, 69–79, 135–60, 183–4, 221 n.80 Trump, Donald 36, 37, 111 truth 103, 162, 165, 169, 177, 187; of the contemporary 33, 35, 37–8; esoteric 52, 138–44, 152, 157–8; event-based 68, 71–5, 78–84, 91–3, 97–9, 101, 106, 138–40; modern 10, 13, 14, 19, 47, 113, 141, 144, 154, 159, 174; political 22, 45, 47–8, 57, 63, 64, 116–17, 120, 132, 141–4, 145, 148, 156, 163, 171, 194, 198; popular 113, 129; prophetic 68, 98, 103–4, 118, 137, 142, 157, 162, 164, 178–86; psychoanalytic 144–50, 152–3; of the remainder 97, 190, 195; specious 34; of the void 112, 154 truth-procedure 71–5, 80–1, 91, 98–9, 101, 106 Turgenev, Ivan 21, 27 Umbesetzung 173–6 Umschlag, the 100–1, 181 universals 37, 39, 43, 44, 74, 85, 95, 112, 139, 153, 165, 171, 188 unregenerate man 111–33, 178–81

Index utilitarianism 158 utopianism 2, 45, 88, 165, 173, 201 n.45 Valéry, Paul 135, 145 Velázquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y 60–1 Verlaine, Paul 160 Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Auguste 160 violence 13, 34, 36, 40, 71, 94, 99, 109, 115, 118, 122, 123, 124–5, 161 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) 12 Visconti, Luchino 214 n.44 void, the 8, 13, 31, 41, 52, 57, 60, 64, 69–72, 98, 101, 106, 119, 121, 122, 130, 142, 154, 159, 162 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 44 Wagner, Richard 22, 87, 92, 97–109, 153, 154, 212 n.23, 213–14 n.44 Wales 190–4, 224 n.66 Wallerstein, Immanuel 1, 203 n.38 War of Independence, Spanish 9 Wasserman, Jakob 3, 113, 115 Watkin, William 76 Waugh, Evelyn 154 Weimar Republic 22, 27, 113, 116–25, 127, 130, 215 n.15

235

Welby, Justin (Archbishop of Canterbury) 35 Wells, H.G. 78 Wilde, Oscar 158, 190 Wilkinson, Richard 2 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 17 Wintle, Justin 190, 225 n.67,n 69 Witt, Johan de 36, 130 Witt, Cornelis de 36, 130 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 71 Wollstonecraft, Mary 2, 19 Woolf, Leonard 86 Woolf, Virginia 69, 78, 85–8, 91, 97, 104, 141 Wordsworth, William 6, 8, 11, 15, 17, 69, 79–80, 82, 128–9, 141, 156, 187 worldedness 78, 86, 88 writing historicity 55–68 Xanthippe 148 Yeats, W.B. 190, 192 Zanetti, Anton Maria 89 Zetkin, Clara 79 Žižek, Slavov 164, 167, 168 Zola, Emile 160 Zygielbojm, Shmuel 118