Politics of Happiness: Connecting the Philosophical Ideas of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida to the Political Ideologies of Happiness 9781501301636, 9781441120816

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‘One may contemplate history from the point of view of happiness. But history is not the soil of happiness. The periods of happiness are blank pages in it.’ Hegel, The Philosophy of History ‘Philosophy divorced itself from science when it inquired which knowledge of the world and life could help man live most happily. This happened with the Socratic schools: out of a concern for happiness man tied off the veins of ­scientific investigation – and still does today.’ Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human ‘I am at war with myself, it is true; you cannot possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things that are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this way as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that that is life. I will find peace only in eternal rest.’ Derrida, Learning to Live Finally

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Introduction Elements of the Politics of Happiness Happiness and the modern subject Much of the ‘new science’ of happiness that has emerged over the last ten years or so, has been prompted by the discovery that, contrary to the expectations of classical economic theory, happiness has not increased with the sustained period of growth experienced by Western societies from the early 1990s until the onset of the global recession in 2007. Richard Layard’s Happiness: Lessons from a New Science and Robert E. Lane’s The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, for example, have responded to this by maintaining that the acquisitiveness that has been encouraged by the global market has become uncoupled from the basic needs of human beings for friendship, stable work relations, peer recognition, and familial love. National governments therefore, should seek to moderate the dream of absolute excess, and to bolster the fundamental sources of community life, in a global economy that demands the constant intensification of work and desire. This line of argument is also pursued in the large number of social psychological and neuropsychological works on ‘what makes us happy’. Studies such as Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis and Stefan Klein’s The Science of Happiness tend to reduce the question of happiness to an account of how social institutions produce or frustrate feelings of wellbeing, and how self-help techniques can be employed to aid those whose outlook on life tends towards the ‘glass half empty’. My position is not that these studies are without value, for it is clear that regulation of the relationship between intellect, libido, and satisfaction is an important factor in the economy of personal wellbeing. However, I will argue that their conceptualization of the individual as a unit that seeks to maximize its own wellbeing (and the pedagogical and therapeutic techniques that derive from it) has a tendency to tune out the ideological context within which the possibility of happiness is experienced, and to minimize the political questions that arise from the collective pursuit of the good life. The experience of happiness, I will argue, is essentially related to ideas of the good society and to the forms of individual life that are appropriate to it. This makes it both a philosophical and a political question: philosophical in

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the sense that it cannot be definitively decided, and political in the sense that it is constantly circulated through the ideologies that have shaped modern Western societies. It is also an infinitely recurrent question; for the experience of happiness (as impending, or departing, or absent) is something that always bears upon the constitution of the present and its orientation to the future. A proper investigation of the ideological forms through which happiness is experienced therefore, requires us to look beyond the reconfiguration of Utilitarianism presented by the ‘new science’. What I am proposing is to open up the question of happiness to a more general account of the formation of the individual subject within the evolution of modernity. So, my account of the politics of happiness begins with the task of defining the relationship between ‘subjectivity’, as a form that has been radically overdetermined in the discursive culture of Western societies, and the mass appeal of modernity’s epochal ideologies (Nazism, communism, socialism, liberalism, religious fundamentalism, and postmodernism). We are not, in other words, simply the products of our own will; and the satisfactions of the atomistic individuals who have emerged in late modernity should not be regarded as defining the moral parameters of happiness per se. My approach to the question of happiness therefore will be a genealogical one, in which the individual is understood as a category whose present disposition is the outcome of multifarious processes of historical formation. This does not mean that each of us is reducible to traces that have been laid down by the ideological powers of modernity, or that happiness is simply a matter of historical accident that bears no relation to the soul of each individual. For there is an essential vulnerability to the human subject which means its happiness is always touched by a sense of impending departure, and by the desire for satisfactions whose province is that of totality (wholeness, community, the collective) rather than pure singularity. Theodor Adorno once remarked that ‘to happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, one is in it’ (Adorno, 1996: 112). What I believe he meant by this is that there is a subjective element to happiness, an existential particularity and evanescence, which means that it cannot be directly reproduced by social structures, institutions, or economies. This particularity is bound up with the contingencies that make individuals what they are: personality, upbringing, life experience, physical constitution, psychical dispositions, and intellectual culture. Thus, the happiness experienced by each of us remains beyond quantification and independent of the social, economic, and political institutions we inhabit, even though we are all ‘products of society down to the

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Introduction 3

inmost fibre of our being’ (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2011: 112). This is one of the existential truths Adorno sought to articulate in his concept of negative dialectics; that the realization of happiness as a collective condition is impossible, and that the search for its realization remains one of the fundamental imperatives of social life. What emerges from this aporia is the distinctive sense in which Adorno conceived the idea of spirit as the apprehension of the finitude through which each human being experiences the temporality of his or her existence. One aspect of this experience is the damage particular individuals experience within the rationalized relations of social totality, and Adorno’s work is at pains to register the implicit harm that is done to each of us by the imposition of reified forms of identity. It is the other side of this relationship, however, that interests me, the ‘being in’ happiness that emerges spontaneously and unexpectedly within the negative identity of the social whole. Such happiness is, as I have said, irreducibly subjective; it is always an exaggeration of the moment, a partly conscious decision to overvalue the time, the place, the friend, or the lover who brings the moment of happiness with them. And so happiness, when it comes, is always a departure from the pure facticity of the social world, a brief transfiguration of the self which is always distinct from the experiences of collective ecstasy, worship, or love1. According to Adorno, this kind of happiness is distinctively modern, for it is only after the atomistic individual has emerged from the formative culture of the Enlightenment, that its psychical, aesthetic, and cognitive faculties can invest the subjective experience of delight with a spiritual, redemptive significance2. The Romantic configuration of happiness, in other words, arises from the increasingly rationalized relations of modernity: for it is the fate of each individual to inhabit a social world in which putative satisfactions are experienced as sources of anxiety (political affiliations, conformity to fashion), and to wish, at some level, for remission in the form of unique feelings of unity, connection, and love (Adorno, 1991: 121–3). Thus, what is still compelling in Adorno’s conception of modernity is his account of the vulnerable subject who, even in its performance of identity with the masses, retains a certain hope of happiness that cannot be reduced to the logic of socio-technological reproduction. This Adornian specification of the aporia of modernity (that the autonomous subject which emerged from the Enlightenment has lost its connection with the institutional life of its community) is close to the position from which I will begin my account of the politics of happiness. Being happy, as

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Adorno claimed, is subjective and un-reproducible, but this does not mean that it is politically irrelevant. Rather, it is the yearning of the subject for more than is offered by mass political ideologies and the aesthetic patterns of the culture industry, that lies at the core of the modern obsession with bringing happiness into being, and with killing the political impulse of the masses (Adorno and Horkheimer, 2011: 75–81). What is compelling about Adorno’s reflections on the fate of human happiness is the sense of the fragility of the post-Enlightenment individual who has been cut off from the satisfactions of God and ethical life, and subjected to a regime in which work and desire have been synthesized into modalities of the commodity form. Indeed, the premise of the culture industry thesis, which Adorno formulated with Max Horkheimer in the early 1940s, is that the hermetic relationship between capitalism and rationalization has produced a synthetic culture, the purpose of which is to erase the moment of existential reflection from our experience of pleasure. The forms of enjoyment offered by the culture industry aim to neutralize the particularity of each individual; they are devised to regulate the encounter between the self, as a point of unfathomable contingency, and the demotic pleasures which constitute the ego/personality of the universal consumer (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 120–67). It is possible therefore to discern the contours of a certain politics of happiness in the evolution of Adorno’s thought. If we begin with Dialectic of Enlightenment, there is a clear sense that what is being presented is the end of democracy; the culture industry has all but absorbed the reflexive faculties of the public, and so the pursuit of politics has become a question of how best to manipulate the fears and desires of ‘the masses’3. From this point on, the relationship Adorno presents between the synthetic happiness of the culture industry and the conduct of politics in late modernity is characterized, on the one hand, by the narrowing of the field of desire that is possible for each individual ego, and, on the other, by the narrowing of the range of demotic appeals it is possible for any ideology to make. In the end, the differentiation of ‘the political’ becomes a reflection of the reified life of civil society: the Marxist left has little chance of appealing to the ‘species being’ of individualized consumers (even in times of economic dislocation), and so it is through the kitsch aesthetics of love, freedom, piety, and sexuality that the different versions of ‘liberal democracy’ compete for control of the state. The account of modernity which Horkheimer and Adorno present in Dialectic of Enlightenment is simultaneously an account of the rationalization

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Introduction 5

of capitalism, the aestheticization of reality, and the fate of the human soul in the realm of appearances. The first section of the book develops a concept of Enlightenment as the perfection of a mythic version of control; the new scientific, mathematical, and philosophical paradigm presents the world as the repetition of irreducible laws that can allow no variation or anomaly (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 12). The fundamental telos of the Enlightenment project therefore, is the establishment of control of both nature and society through the perfection of our understanding of the laws governing their objective operations. This teleology, for Adorno, is inherently totalitarian; for the organization of society is based around purely instrumental principles that are concerned with maximizing the efficiency of production, rather than the happiness of particular individuals and the improvement of their moral culture. Indeed, his argument is that the organization of work, satisfaction, and desire that emerges from the Enlightenment paradigm, proceeds from a complete transformation of human subjectivity; the ‘language and perception’ of the soul has been appropriated by the administered life of the social totality, and each of us simply awaits what satisfactions may come from its productive machinery. The original ethos of Enlightenment philosophy, which was the emancipation of humanity from its subjection to the gods and to nature, is transformed into a regime of control in which every aspect of human particularity is expressed as a quantum of productive potential (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 38–42). Thus, for Adorno, the Enlightenment brought about a fatal degradation of the faculties of the soul (apprehension, articulation, recognition, and desire), which opened the way for ‘happiness’ to become a condition whose possibility is controlled by the standardized aesthetics of the culture industry. This account of Enlightenment, however, is too strongly teleological, for it seems as if its only possible outcome is the progressive enclosure of humanity within a bubble of synthetic-acquisitive desire. It is my contention that the reflexive self that emerged from the Enlightenment has been formed by a plurality of heterogeneous sources (cultural, religious, economic, aesthetic, and technological), and that it is this multiple formation that lies at the root of its relationship to the ideologies of happiness I will examine. However, before I turn to the politics of happiness as such, I want to look briefly at the three philosophies of postEnlightenment desire that will inform my study, and how they have theorized the affective formation of the modern subject.

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Three philosophies of desire In Adorno’s thought, the regime of social and economic rationalization that emerges after the Enlightenment threatens to engulf the modern subject in a system of reproducible happiness that, in the end, is not happiness at all. There is a sense then, in which Adorno’s work continues in the same vein as Schopenhauer’s account of the suffering of the world; for the constitution of the human subject (its physical being, perceptive apparatus, cognitive faculties) appears to predestine a life that moves between the two poles of pain and boredom. For Adorno, this condition is not metaphysically determined, as it is in Schopenhauer’s philosophy; it arises from an unfortunate susceptibility of human beings to the systems of rational control and representation that emerged from the Enlightenment. One of the most urgent questions to arise from Adorno’s account of the evolution of modernity therefore concerns the transformation that takes place during the Aufklarung, or, more precisely, the effect the Enlightenment has had on the knowledge, sensibility, and autonomy of the human subject. It is my contention that the politics of happiness that takes place in modernity is not simply a reflection of, or reaction to, the commodified desire that has come to dominate the social and political relations of modernity. Rather, this politics emerged and developed concomitantly with three different, opposed, but essentially related versions of what Enlightenment is, and what its moral, ethical, and political consequences have been. The first of these responses is most consistently articulated in Hegel’s philosophy, and is concerned with the fate of ethical life, or Sittlichkeit, after the emergence of the radically autonomous individual who is the subject of Enlightenment philosophy. The second approach is presented in Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics, and is concerned with the limits to human freedom that are perpetuated in Enlightenment ideas of art, morality, and community. The final approach to the concept of Aufklarung has become associated with Levinas’ and Derrida’s later ethical writings, and is concerned with the transformation of the relationship between ‘self ’ and ‘other’ that has arisen from Enlightenment ideals of transparency and calculability. Let me begin with some brief remarks on Hegel. The history of selfconsciousness set out in The Phenomenology of Mind develops an account of how each of the temporal forms, or ‘cultures’, in which the individual becomes certain of its self-identity, is related to the evolution of ethical life. In post-Socratic Greece, for example, the concept of happiness (eudaimõnia)

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was conceived as belonging to a realm of finalities, of discrete things that are intrinsically good and which have to be harmonized through the consistent exercise of reason. Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, argued that for rational beings, happiness is the ultimate end that lies behind all of their activities, for it is completely self-sufficient and ‘by itself makes life something desirable and deficient in nothing’ (Aristotle, 1962: 15). Some activities however have a closer, more essential, relationship to happiness than others, the highest of which is theõria, the disinterested contemplation of the unchanging forms that sustain the unity of man, nature, and society. The study of such eternal truths is, for Aristotle, an activity that is wholly self-sufficient, as it requires nothing else to complete it and can never lead the lover of knowledge into excess or immorality (Aristotle, 1962: 288–91). Those who know the satisfactions that come from pure contemplation are, by definition, the best of all citizens, for the balance of their souls has been shifted from the compulsions of appetitive desire (sex, greed, selfishness) towards the proportionality of friendship and civic duty. The happiness that comes from a life of contemplation therefore gives rise to the greatest possible virtue; it is the very form of self-possession and engenders the noble friendships that constitute the ethical substance of the state (Aristotle, 1962: 256–8). For Hegel, however, the moral unity of Polis as it is presented in post-Socratic philosophy, is deeply ambiguous. On the one hand it is the happiest time in human history, for the moral, aesthetic, and political faculties of individual citizens are turned towards the ‘objective spirit’ of Sittlichkeit. And yet on the other hand, this unity lacks a properly developed sense of the divided nature of knowledge, and of the ‘spiritual’ responsibility of each individual to the differentiation of ethical life into masters and slaves, subjects and objects of authority (Hegel, 1967a: 462–99; 1944: 275–7). In the expository structure of The Phenomenology of Mind, the post-Socratic order of the Polis sits on the cusp of modernity. It has already moved beyond the parochialism that is described in Sophocles’ Antigone, where the unquestionable authority of the king in matters of law and state comes into conflict with Antigone’s demand that her brother Polynices be properly interred after his death at the battle of Thebes (Hegel, 1967a: 477). And yet the ideals of justice, legality, and happiness that inform post-Socratic democracy still lack an articulate sense of the essence of human subjectivity. The constitution of the Polis is founded on the designation of hundreds of thousands of slaves and foreigners as ‘sub-political’ beings, who are deemed incapable of apprehending the ideals of Hellenic democracy. The eventual breakdown of Hellenic civilization comes

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through its inability to recognize the concept of subjectivity: its institutional structures seek to perfect a moral, aesthetic, and appetitive balance in the Greek citizen, whose telos is undisturbed by the diremption of knowledge which, for Hegel, is implicit in the historical evolution of self-consciousness. The freedom of divine propitiation and of property ownership that are the essence of the Roman state, is the initial form in which modern subjectivity emerges. For although there is a tendency to corruption on both sides (the individual and the state), it is in the Roman world that free subjectivity is first granted its right to self-determination (Hegel, 1967a: 501–6; 1944: 278–82). What follows from this movement of subjectivity into the sphere of abstract legal relations is a history of the work, satisfaction, and desire of subjects who have lost their concrete relationship to Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1967a: 500–6). Thus, from its depiction of the Roman epoch onwards, The Phenomenology of Mind presents the moral, aesthetic, religious, and philosophical cultures through which consciousness has determined its self-identity, in their contradictory relationships to the substance of ethical life. I will say more about Hegel’s account of the evolution of modernity in the chapters that follow, especially his expositions of the Enlightenment and the impact of its highly individuated forms of sovereignty on the constitution of the state and civil society. For the moment, however, I want to return to the more general issue of the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy to the politics of happiness. The question of how the autonomous individual, whose rights and desires have emerged as the telos of enlightened modernity, is to be reunified with the substance of ethical life, is, I believe, the primary question that should inform any account of the political organization of happiness. Indeed, it is this question that is taken up and articulated in the founding texts of the sociological canon – not just Marx, Durkheim and Weber, but also Comte and Spencer. In the present context, I have used Hegel’s characterization of modernity as the tension between the abstract rights of free individuals and the substantive good that is realized in the institutions of the state, to configure the economy of collective redemption and sacred community that is essential to every political expression of the good life. For, without the promise that the ‘self ’ that has emerged from the discursive resources of the Enlightenment (Kantian and Fichtean versions of subjective idealism, Rousseauist notions of ‘natural’ freedom, Utilitarian accounts of rational self-interest) can achieve some form of shared satisfaction, the ideological dynamics of happiness would lack the core around which it has always gathered. Thus, if we return to my original contention that happiness is

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Introduction 9

an evanescent state that cannot be reproduced as a social condition, it is clear that from a Hegelian perspective this evanescence is the outcome of a highly atomistic tendency that runs through Western society, in which ‘the self ’ has been cut adrift from the substance of ethical life. This rootless condition is the one we have come to know as ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity, and which both Marxists and neo-Hegelians have sought to characterize as the aesthetic overdetermination of bourgeois civil society. The bearing of Hegel’s thought on modern and postmodern ideologies of happiness therefore lies in the demand to reunite the errant forms of egoism with the substantive satisfactions of ethical community. For those who seek happiness through Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power, the ‘conservatism’ of Hegel’s concept of ethical life is easy to caricature. Hegel is presented as never having escaped the influence of the Greek ideal of Sittlichkeit, in the sense that he regards the contingent forms of autonomy that arise from the substance of man’s social being, as vehicles of the evolution of absolute spirit (Nietzsche, 1968: 225–6). Hegelianism, in its Marxist, functionalist, nationalist, and theological forms, always conceives happiness as a condition of unity with the universal, whose de facto absence is the result of an overvaluation of the contingent pleasures of individual existence. Nietzsche’s thought, on the other hand, is the active solicitation of just such contingency, of the joyful overcoming of the inertial forces he conceives as the essence of Hegel’s ‘Apollonian’ ideal of Sittlichkeit. Hegel’s concept of spirit, in other words, is the collective purification of suffering; the movement of history in which the greatest gestures of self-overcoming are reduced to the beneficial effects they may have for the life of ‘the herd’. This characterization of the relationship between Nietzsche and Hegel is, of course, something of a caricature. Indeed, Nietzsche’s discussion of German philosophical identity in The Gay Science acknowledges a debt to the radicalization of reality that is implicit in Hegel’s concept of dialectics: the transformation of both world and subject from a condition of stasis into one of flux and reciprocal transformation (Nietzsche, 1974: 304–10). Despite this ‘astonishing stroke of genius’ however, Nietzsche’s thought does mark a radical departure from what he conceives as the theological economy of Hegelian spirit. The essence of his materialism lies in a refusal to allow that unity is the telos of infinity; the world is a ‘monster of energy’ whose concrete determination as ‘species’, ‘genus’, ‘class’, or ‘society’ is simultaneously the chance of a bacchanalian performance where such categories are put at risk (Nietzsche, 1968: 360–1). And so it is in the fleeting, transformative joy of excess that we must seek the political significance of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

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The relationship between truth, virtue, and power in Nietzsche’s thought configures a complex economy that is still being worked through in contemporary critical theory. Thus, we have the Deleuzian version of Nietzsche, which presents the sheer transformative potential of capitalized desire as the way beyond the Oedipal satisfactions of ethical life; we have the Foucauldian version of Nietzsche, in which the play of reactive powers is configured as a rationaltechnological regime that creates, disciplines, and energizes the human subject; and we have the Lyotardian-Baudrillardian version of Nietzsche, in which the relativity of truth is configured as a play of heterogeneous narratives and simulacra, none of which is able to establish its claims to authority. Each of these reformulations attempts to bring Nietzsche’s critique of truth to bear on the categories of historical materialism: the contingent effects of flow, energy, and resistance through which he presents the relationship between ‘world’ and ‘man’, are used to reconfigure the Marxist dynamics of class, technology, and historical necessity. As we will see in Chapter 3, the question of an authentically collective happiness is central to this reconfiguration; for once the essence of man’s ‘species being’ has been dispersed into the technological flows of capital, the telos of socialized production is radically transformed. However, the influence of Nietzsche’s thought on modern ideologies is not restricted to its transformation of the culture of Marxism. What defines his philosophical style is its movement between aesthetic-poetic figurations of excess (heroism, masculinity, love, greatness) and detailed engagement with the origins of Western civilization. Thus, it is through his obsession with overcoming the limits imposed by morality, religion, and metaphysics, that Nietzsche has exerted a powerful influence on the ideology of happiness; for it is possible to discern an appeal to joyful empowerment in all of the political ideologies I will examine, even those that would seem constitutionally opposed to his thought. The question raised by Nietzsche’s idea of happiness as the joyful transfiguration of suffering (rather than Schopenhauerian endurance or Hegelian sublation) concerns its radical transformation of the individual’s relationship to the bonds of social existence (Nietzsche, 1974: 270). The association between Nietzsche and the performative demands of fascism and postmodernism has been carefully addressed by contemporary critical theory. Indeed, a common thread that runs through the work of Jürgen Habermas, David Harvey and Fredric Jameson is the idea that there is a relationship between the postmodernist demand for a multiplication of the sources of pleasure and the reversion of politics to the spectacle of charismatic leadership4. In a society dominated by

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Introduction 11

the media-technological staging of reality, the individual has been transformed into an egoistic consumer, whose engagement with ‘politics’ extends only to the mythologies of race, nation, faith, and heroism that are reactivated by charismatic personalities. The ghost of fascism, in other words, can return through postmodernism’s obsession with aesthetics and the drama of the spectacle. I will say more about the link between Nietzsche’s thought and the satisfactions promised by these two extreme cultures – fascism and postmodernism – in a moment. It is important to note, however, that Nietzsche’s influence on the political imagination of modernity is multiply determined, and has been played out in ideological contexts that would not appear to be receptive to his solicitations of joyful excess. I will argue that Marxism’s recognition of its difficulty with the concept of pleasure owes a great deal to Nietzsche’s critique of materialism, and that this is one of the crucial factors involved in the reformulation of its cultural and ideological agendas. At the other end of the political spectrum, neoliberalism has adopted a quasi-Nietzschean vocabulary of ceaseless overcoming and self-reliance, and has presented this as the only form in which ‘moral’ happiness can be attained. Ultimately, however, the rhetorical tropes of Nietzschean overcoming have their own political dangers, which emerge through their relative, or absolute, indifference to who lies outside the ecstatic autonomy of the self. Derrida’s engagement with Nietzsche is particularly concerned with the aesthetic modalities through which he dramatizes the encounter between ‘free’ and ‘bound’ spirits, or, more specifically, with the mythologies of seduction and death through which he describes the fatal attraction of ‘the feminine’ (Derrida, 1979: 43–7). According to Nietzsche, the happiness of man is related to his capacity for self-overcoming, and this means that his constitution as a volatile mixture of creative and reactive powers predestines him to ‘happy moments’ rather than peaceful epochs (Nietzsche, 1984: 222). The materiality of human desire always exceeds the legal, political, and cultural forms into which it is channelled; it retains a certain ressentiment towards those institutions that seek to determine its truth in the form of collective wellbeing. The experience of joy that accompanies self-overcoming has no intrinsically moral significance; it is simply the counterpart of individual acts of sovereignty, the greatest of which keep alive the hope of aristocratic order and the return of man’s transformative relationship to his own mortality. In Nietzsche’s thought therefore, the contingency of happiness is conceived as part of an economy of material desire, the truth of which always remains to be determined by the most actively

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transformative of all men. For Derrida, ‘the feminine’ occupies an ambiguous position in this economy. On the one hand, it is the very form of evil: the woman is the incomplete and unpredictable being who at any moment might strike at the well-constituted forms of masculine order. On the other hand, however, the evanescence of the feminine seems to configure the economy of chance that is essential to Nietzsche’s genealogy – the dangerous contingency that haunts every movement into substance, authority, and truth (Derrida, 1979: 47–54). Thus, in Nietzsche’s account of the feminine we have what Derrida conceives as the trace of an originary responsibility; an obligation to respond to the other who cannot be known, but whose presence is the condition of moral desire. Derrida’s thought stands close to that of Emanuel Levinas, for whom the whole epistemic, affective, and ontological structure of subjectivity is brought in to being through its proximity to the other. Each of us is originally obligated to the plight of those with whom we share the world, and whose suffering is revealed to us through the expressive capacity of the face (Levinas, 1994: 194–219). Thus, for Levinas, it is ethical obligation that is primary in human relationships, and which is the foundation of non-violent desire and the moral satisfaction that comes from helping others. Derrida’s later work owes much to Levinas’ account of the ethical demand, particularly his writing on the politics of friendship and hospitality. However, there is an important difference between their respective accounts of ethical obligation, which is determined through Derrida’s insistence that the alterity of the other belongs to an economy of representation, and that his or her appearance is always mediated through the aesthetic forms in which sexuality, gender, race, and culture are staged. Or, to put it in slightly different terms, the signifiers through which the social totality re-presents itself as law, production, and desire, are the essential conditions of an encounter between self and other that always remains undecidable (Derrida, 2007: 102–3). For Derrida, it is this uncertainty that both founds and disturbs the substance of social being; it reveals traces of the ‘others’ (xenoi) who mark the ontological boundary of the state, and whose re-presentation within the body of ethical life (as foreigners, asylum seekers, disease carriers) sustains the chance of hospitality and moral desire (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000: 83). In the chapters that follow, I will use Derrida’s thought to characterize the problematic nature of happiness in a social world that is increasingly virtual, and in which the production of information and the speed of social exchange is constantly increasing. One of the criticisms often levelled against deconstruction is that it offers no concept of community, and that there is no sense

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Introduction 13

of the ‘embeddedness’ of the subject in his or her particular lifeworld. This is to misconstrue the critical gesture of Derrida’s writing; for it is the increasingly insubstantial experience of the lifeworld, its dispersal into the networks of media and communications technologies that, for him, is the central question raised by the concept of postmodernity (Derrida, 2007: 102–3). Thus, if we proceed from Derrida’s critique of politics as the re-presentation of a hierarchy of presence (classes, religions, races, nations), it is possible to discern a relationship between the anxiety sustained by media-techno-scientific society, and the politics of ontological community. For, as the substance of Sittlichkeit floats away into the encoded exchange of global capitalism, so the hunger for submersion in the sacred, whatever form this may take, becomes ever more acute. From this perspective, the recrudescence of fascism and religious fundamentalism is an effect of the increasing instability of the global economy; it is the return of a deep, intractable desire to be at one with God or the Führer. Derrida’s thought therefore demands that we examine the logic of return that characterizes the politics of happiness in ‘postmodern’ times: the transformation of fascism into new forms of racial ontology and identification, the reversion of religious faith to a politics of unquestionable revelation, and the ideological processes through which Western democracies have supplemented their freedoms with racial and religious intolerance5. It is through such analyses that we might approach the question of how the cultures of fascism, and religious fundamentalism, provoke the spectre of a moral desire that haunts their mythologies from the beginning.

The politics of happiness So far then, I have set out the two central theses of my study. The first is that happiness is not a socially reproducible condition, and that it is essentially bound up with the events and singularities of individual existence. The second lies close to Adorno’s account of the coercive structure of social totality, and maintains that it is the very evanescence of happiness that has made it an obsession of post-Enlightenment philosophy. In the previous section I gave a brief account of how Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida have approached the relationship between happiness and the particular forms of work, satisfaction, and desire that are characteristic of Western modernity. I also made some provisional connections between the political ideologies I will examine in the following chapters, and the concepts of ethical life, self-overcoming, and moral desire presented

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in their respective philosophies. The nature of these connections, however, needs to be developed more fully, as all that seems to have emerged from the preceding sections is the rather unspecific claim that political ideologies are attempts to realize impossible regimes of happiness. In order to give this claim some historical substance therefore, it is necessary to change the angle of attack slightly. Instead of asserting that it is the fate of happiness to become an individuated state that lies outside the sphere of politics, I will argue that the egoism of the modern subject has been accompanied by an intensification of political narratives of wellbeing, self-fulfilment, and social obligation. After the loss of the Greek ideal of Sittlichkeit and the Enlightenment’s rationalization of the social world, in other words, it is ideological struggles over happiness that have come to determine the fate of politics in Western modernity. Before sketching the relationship between happiness and the ideologies that have shaped the political life of the West, however, I want to offer a very brief account of the difference between the practical and philosophical politics of happiness. Louis Althusser once claimed that there could not be a Hegelian politics because Hegel’s account of the state simply assumes that each of its ‘limbs’ (economy, civil society, family, judiciary) is a synchronous embodiment of the spirit’s historical evolution (Althusser, 1986: 101–4). This is, of course, an extremely tendentious reading of Hegel, designed to show how Marx’s analyses of law, state, and economy uncover the contradictory structure in dominance of capitalist society. However, while it true that Althusser’s critique ignores the complex relations of subjectivity and substance that underly his theory of the state, it does highlight an essential difference between practical and philosophical politics. Philosophical politics, as we have seen, is concerned with the fundamental questions that arise from ideologies that have evolved under the regime of modernity. (And here there certainly is a Hegelian politics.) These ideologies however, while they are related to philosophical narratives of freedom, collective life, democracy, and responsibility, are essentially representative regimes: they configure the life of the social totality through imaginary and aesthetic resources that are, from the beginning, demotic in their orientation. So, we come to my third thesis, which is that each of the political ideologies that have emerged in Western modernity, and which have shaped its history, is structured around a particular representation of happiness. Thus, the nucleus of Nazism and fascism is the aesthetic paraphernalia of the Aryan race and its promise of ecstatic unity with the Fatherland. The ideological appeals of Marxism and socialism have been configured around mythologies of the natural

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equality of men and the universal community of their productive labour. Liberalism, and its more extreme variant, postmodernism, presents the story of a free desire through which humanity is able to exceed all limitations to its happiness. And religious fundamentalism, in its various forms, promises the reward of eternal unity with God. I will say more about the internal dynamics of these ideologies in the chapters that follow. Before this, however, I want to make some brief remarks about the relations that exist among them. As I have said, the ideologies that have shaped modernity are representational regimes that seek to gather the masses to them with their respective promises of happiness. These regimes are transformative and antagonistic; each prescribes how social and political relations ought to be organized in order to maximize happiness, and each defines itself in opposition to the others. Thus, the fascist vision of hell is one in which Marx has imposed his vision of equality on all the races of the earth, and for Marxists, the secular form of evil is encapsulated in the massed ranks of the Volk destroying the last traces of workers’ solidarity. (It is possible to offer any number of further examples: Christianity’s hatred of Marxism, radical Islam’s detestation of liberalism, and the Marxist repudiation of ‘bourgeois’ postmodernism, to cite just a few.) This economy has an escalatory tendency, for the fact that each ideological regime draws power from its repudiation of the others, means that their antagonism has transformed ‘happiness’ into a condition that can always be made happier, more complete. Of course, this logic of escalation is essentially related to socio-economic dislocations produced by the global expansion of capital. So, the political dynamic I will set out does not portray a ‘postmodern’ economy of life choices, but rather the way in which political ideologies are implicated in violence through their respective prescriptions of the way to the good life. This brings me to my final thesis, which is that the pursuit of happiness provoked by the contestation of ideologies is the practical form in which the Enlightenment metaphysics of ‘man’ has come to bear on the politics of modernity. In the chapters that follow, I will argue that the escalatory pursuit of unity, individuation, and autonomy as the way to happiness has become increasingly detached from the ethical desire to reduce the suffering of humanity. There is a crucial difference between practical and philosophical politics: the former being an attempt to solicit the support of the masses through representational techniques, the latter a reflective consideration of the questions of freedom, solidarity, and wellbeing posed by the contestation of ideologies. Clearly the present study falls into the latter camp, but this does not mean it

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is of purely academic interest. Most of the conventional literature on Marxist, Utilitarian, fascist, and liberal ideologies has underplayed the importance of happiness both to their internal coherence, and to their demotic appeals. Thus, by showing how the ideal of collective life and enjoyment is represented in different movements, it will be possible to get a clearer sense of the antagonisms that exist among them. Also, having formulated a concept of how the ideal of happiness is distributed across the ideologies of Western modernity, it will be possible to evaluate how each has participated in the diverse and persistent violence of its recent history. Finally, there is the crucial question of the ‘transformability’ of political movements. Earlier, I referred to Levinas’ and Derrida’s work on the nature of ethical responsibility, and to the idea that happiness is essentially related to helping those spectral beings who fall outside conventional obligations. The demand that is sustained throughout the book therefore lies close to this idea of the ethical, for it is my contention that political ideologies can be differentiated in terms of their transformability, that is, their openness to transforming the particular vision of happiness on which they are founded. Fascism is a highly mutable ideology, in the sense that it is able to invest any form of difference with the weight of ontology, and yet it is not transformable; it cannot open itself to the experience of difference as a possible source of education or desire. The other movements I will examine are more ambiguous in their representation of happiness, for each has a history of vacillation between ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ ideals of community life. In the end therefore the ideological power of political doctrines lies in their formation of the subject as susceptible to the power of representation, and so the politics of happiness I will set out is an attempt to disclose what remains of the negative in each of them – the trace of desire for affective democracy.

Notes 1 This point is made, with a characteristic exaggeration of the solipsistic structure of intentionality, in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Sartre argues that all emotion, including joy and happiness, ‘is a phenomenon of belief ’ enacted by each of us quite separately from the ‘real’ conditions of its occurrence. This means that happiness is present only as an ecstatic anticipation of its reality; it is the bodily and psychical enjoyment of a possibility whose realization is always far more difficult than its imagination (Sartre, 1976: 76–8).

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Introduction 17 2 See, for example, the account of delight in the beautiful in Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1982: 50–60). 3 This point is made with particular force in the account of the social psychological dynamics of fascism set out in the final chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘Elements of Anti-Semitism’ (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 168–208). 4 See: Habermas, J. (1994), Chapter 7; Harvey, D. (1999), Chapter 27; and Jameson, F. (1995), Chapter 1. 5 See particularly Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (1994) and Acts of Religion (2002).

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Liberalism and the Uses of Desire The governance of pain and pleasure I want to begin by examining the relationship between pleasure and the wellbeing of humanity that lies at the foundation of Utilitarian philosophy. To put it rather too crudely, the Utilitarian position is that pleasure is the purpose of life, and that the conjunction of sensibility, intellect, and physical powers that make up the essence of the human species is, generally speaking, well suited to the fulfilment of that purpose. This solicitation of life is, of course, radically opposed to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, in which the physical constitution of the body appears as little more than a receptacle of pain, which, no matter how we may transform its sensibilities, always returns us to our original condition of suffering (Schopenhauer, 1970: 41). Schopenhauer’s thought stands as the last of the great philosophical rejections of modernity; for, as Lukács pointed out in The Destruction of Reason, his advocacy of quiet resignation to the trials of life aligned him to a patrician conservatism which would protect its intellectuals from the excesses of bourgeois culture and revolutionary socialism (Lukács, 1980: 199–200). Indeed, the implicit ‘politics’ of Schopenhauer’s philosophy lies closest to Thomas Hobbes’ lugubrious version of Utilitarianism, which makes the avoidance of death by revolutionary violence the constitutive function of civil authority1. Against this severe style of conservatism, however, the work of Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill on the capacity of human beings to transform and intensify their enjoyment of the world and its resources, has been immensely influential on liberal and neoliberal ideas of individualism, the free market, and the constitution of the state. And so I will begin by examining the moral economy of happiness that emerged and developed through Utilitarian philosophy. At the start of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham makes the assertion that: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well

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as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their thrown … The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that very system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and law (Bentham, 2007: 1–2, author’s italics).

This initial statement of the principle of utility involves four propositions that need to be made explicit: one ontological, one epistemological, one ethical, and one political. The first, the ontological, concerns the yoke of necessity that nature has placed upon human beings through what Bentham calls ‘the radical frame of the body’ (Bentham, 2007: 55–7). Bentham’s account of the possibility of happiness proceeds from the idea that the basic physiology of human beings cannot be so drastic a deviation from the principle of adaptive fitness that the normal condition of their lives is one of suffering. While it is certainly true that human beings are vulnerable to pain, the fact that their natural constitution is designed to perform the vital tasks of life means that there is a fundamental substrate of pleasure that belongs to the experience of living. Thus, the pursuit of physical satisfaction is both part of and more than the order of nature: it is the practical principle that is constantly extended through the activities of selfconscious individuals. This account of the foundation of human sensibility entails a movement away from the Classical concept of epistemology as the revelation of truth in the chaos of particular events and sensations. In his Principles, Bentham argues that the relationship between the external world and the act of cognition is determined by the expectation of pleasure or pain caused in discrete individuals by the presence of particular kinds of objects. Thus, the possibility of having knowledge of the world as differentially organized types of being, is dependent upon contingent formations of the will that arise from the affective sensibilities of particular individuals (Bentham, 2007: 47–8). Or, to put it slightly differently, the rational orientation of human beings to the world of objects, and to each other, is intrinsically tied to the principle of utility, that is, to the maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain that, for Bentham, is the essential fact of human existence. The very essence of reason, therefore, is tied to the happiness of the individual. Any practical, theoretical, or moral principle that violates the capacity of human beings for the enjoyment of pleasure is, by definition, perverse and sophistic (Bentham, 2007: 3). The fundamental question that arises from this account of the relationship between reason and the principle of utility is, of course, how the conflicting

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desires of individual pleasure seekers are to be integrated into a peaceful and law-abiding community. Bentham’s attempt to resolve this question, in the final part of Principles, constitutes what is perhaps the definitive statement of the Utilitarian position on the rights of individuals and the limits of state power. Thus, I propose to look at the detail of his account of the relationship between the spheres of ‘ethics and legislation’ (Bentham, 2007: 308–23). Bentham proposes that ethics is divisible into two branches. The first he calls private ethics, whose practical designation is the prudent pursuit of happiness that is the duty of each individual to himself. The second branch is that of legislation, or the art of framing laws whose purpose is the maximization of the sum of happiness that is possible for a given community of moral individuals. To return to the first principle, Bentham claims that, while it is true that the origin of ethical obligation lies in the duty each individual has to his own happiness, this does not exclude the possibility of a sense of obligation to others. The origin of this kind of solicitude lies in the general sense of sympathy that is habituated in civil society, and in the concern for reputation, love, and friendship that are part of the life of every moral individual. Thus, the sphere of private ethics exists as a substrate of moral feeling that can be expressed either in forbearing to diminish the happiness of one’s neighbour (‘probity’), or in actively promoting the sum of his happiness (‘beneficence’), or in expressing disapprobation at his wrongdoing (‘censure’). So, how is this sphere of private moral feeling related to the practice of legislation? The first thing to bear in mind is that, for Bentham, it is the happiness of those who belong to a particular state that is the proper object of the legislative process. Given that acts of criminal delinquency diminish the sum of happiness that is present in a given state at a given time, the enforcement of sanctions against those who break the law is justified by the principle of utility. Bentham’s argument, however, maintains that the enforcement of any legal sanction, even where it is demonstrably necessary for the overall happiness of society, always carries with it the possibility of unnecessary violence against the prudence and beneficence of private individuals. Thus, even though Bentham maintains that the probity of moral individualism depends on there being private property laws established by the state, once the sphere of private ethics has come into being, it becomes the wellspring of civic virtues that have to be protected from overbearing legislation. In practice, this means that certain kinds of morally reprehensible behaviour cannot be made the object of legal sanctions; for the powerful attraction that drunkenness, fornication, treachery and the like have

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for human beings means that to seek to punish their every occurrence would end up ‘tearing the bonds of sympathy asunder, and rooting out the influence of all the social motives’ (Bentham, 2007: 320). The true purpose of legislature therefore is not the constant extension of its powers, but rather to provide an exemplary formation of the general good, through which the ethics of beneficence, probity, and censure can take root in every private citizen (Bentham, 2007: 322). Bentham’s account of Utilitarianism is, I will argue, fundamentally important to the idea of happiness that has taken root in neoliberal ideologies of the state, individual rights, and civil society. This is because the question of happiness is addressed in a way that seeks to foreclose upon the aporias that arise from the pursuit of simple individual pleasure. For Bentham, ‘pleasure is in itself a good [and] pain is in itself an evil … or else the words good and evil have no meaning’ (Bentham, 2007: 102), which means that, in the end, it is the sheer immediacy of the physical sensation of pleasure that is the one true source of human happiness. This dictum of physical pleasure as the ultimate good for which all human beings exist is radical in the sense that Classical notions of fate, mortality, and community no longer regulate it. Rather, the good life ought to be orientated towards the pursuit of new kinds of pleasure, rather than the integration of enjoyment into the economy of sacrifice and deferral that is proper to the moral community of the Polis. The only caveat to this principle is the restraint upon individual action that is required by the principle of utility itself: that if the self-regarding action of person x causes harm to person y, then that action must, by definition, be the subject of sanctions issued by the legislature. Thus, every moral action, every act of care or beneficence, and every consideration of the necessity and severity of punishment ought, for Bentham, to be calculated in terms of their effect on the sum of physical pleasure that is present in society (Bentham, 2007: 152–68). John Stuart Mill’s attempt to reformulate the concept of Utilitarianism is significant because it bears upon Bentham’s identification of happiness with the physical sensation of pleasure. Mill begins his essay Utilitarianism by stating his broad agreement with Bentham’s definition of the principle of utility as the greatest happiness for the greatest possible number (Mill, 1980: 6). Mill also agrees that all systems of morality are, at least implicitly, aimed at the maximization of happiness, that the principle of utility arises out of the instinct for collective survival, and that it has exercised a democratizing influence on the institutional life of government and civil society (Mill, 1980: 29–31). What

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marks the essential difference between Bentham and Mill, however, is Mill’s insistence that not all pleasures are equal, and that the basis of this inequality consists in their particular relationship to the moral disposition of human beings. He claims that, while physical pleasures should not be discounted as a source of happiness, their contribution to the moral cohesiveness of society is always less than the complex sensibilities that arise from the study of art, poetry, philosophy, and literature. Such intellectual satisfactions may lack the immediacy of physical satisfaction, but the subtleties of the feelings and judgements they require, ‘tend to generate in each individual a feeling of unity with the rest, which, if perfect, would make him never desire any beneficial condition for himself, in the benefits of which they are not included’ (Mill, 1980: 30). Thus, for Mill, what saves the principle of utility from the promotion of simple contentment is the fact that the pleasures enjoyed by morally praiseworthy individuals, are not unmixed with the responsibilities that define the Enlightenment concept of free, self-determining intellect. The idea of democracy that Mill sets out in On Liberty, therefore, is an active solicitation of such responsibilities, as it is the free exchange of conflicting ideas throughout society that Mill regards as the proper condition of moral solidarity. In the section ‘Freedom of Thought and Discussion’, Mill defends a nominalistic conception of truth, and maintains that the clash of opinions encouraged by moral government is the form most likely to encourage independence of thought, the constant transformation of conventional opinions, and the provocation of the state to defend its appeals to divine right, human nature, or the weight of tradition. Thus, for Mill, the limitation of government powers on the actions of sovereign individuals is directly correlated with the maximization of human happiness. Where the uniqueness of any individual is subsumed under the strictures of human nature, religious authority, or tradition, his or her unique contribution to the sum of human knowledge and happiness is suppressed (Mill, 1987: 119–40). There is something unmistakably Kantian about this line of argument. For, despite the fact that Mill always seeks to refer the value of individual freedom to the general increase in human wellbeing it produces, the justifications for freedom of thought, action, and conscience he presents in On Liberty, refer beyond Bentham’s original designation of the principle of utility. The concept of individuality that Mill seeks to defend, in other words, is promised to an ideal community of self-creative individuals, each of whom has the right to express their dissension from established traditions of taste, belief, and morality (Mill, 1987: 136). What Mill seeks to defend through

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the principle of ‘definite damage’ in the last section of On Liberty therefore, is closer to the ideal of moral community that Kant sets out in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ than it is to Bentham’s account of rational utility2. For in the end, it is the sacrosanctity of individual freedom as a regulative idea, rather than as part of the productive assemblage of society, that takes precedence in Mill’s moral and political philosophy (Mill, 1987: 123). Mill’s and Bentham’s respective versions of Utilitarianism, and the persistence of their particular accounts of natural right, liberty, and justice, are important because they mark the point at which the possibility of happiness becomes irrevocably bound up with the economic relations of civil society. On the Benthamite side, the secret of happiness lies in paring down the powers of the legislature to those that are strictly necessary for the maintenance of order, and in allowing the maximum possible expansion of pleasure and beneficence. The advantages of this approach are clear. Once physical pleasure is made the standard by which all possible states of happiness are judged, it becomes a simple matter to determine the material goods that will most reliably increase the general sum of happiness. Thus, the founding principle of good governance lies in determining the point at which the productive organization of work, sex, consumption, and leisure has the greatest possible affinity with the mechanics of human pleasure. This is the issue Mill seeks to address in both Utilitarianism and On Liberty. His arguments seek to shift the principle of utility away from the maximal recuperation of pleasure within the legislative and administrative organization of society, towards a concern with the relationship between truth, freedom, and the concept of ethical life. And so, we need to determine the ideological significance of this divergence within the Utilitarian tradition. Bentham’s arguments in favour of minimal government and the right of individuals to decide what will bring them most happiness were profoundly influenced by Adam Smith’s account of the free market economy in The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s contention is that collective happiness is impossible as long as humanity is plagued by material scarcity, and that this can never be overcome as long as the economy is based on the agrarian system that is the foundation of the feudal regime (Smith, 1961: 351–71). The relations of mercantilism are the instrument through which human society begins to overcome the dead weight of feudalism: for the enlightened self-interest that is essential to the logic of free trade is a vitalizing force that serves to breakdown all external limits placed upon it (Smith, 1961: 450–73). Thus, it is the regime of mercantile innovation and emancipated labour that ultimately transforms the feudal order, and leads

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to the increase in productivity, personal wealth, and individual freedom that Smith equates with enlarging the sum of social happiness (Smith, 1961: 401–6). The logic of this equation is completed in Bentham’s account of the principle of utility. For, by anchoring the possibility of happiness in the physical frame of man, and by asserting the essential democracy of his pursuit of pleasure, Bentham’s version of civic virtue dispensed with the vestiges of moral and religious transcendence which appeared in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments3. Smith’s and Bentham’s versions of Utilitarianism, in other words, mark the beginning of a powerful ideology of individual rights, personal striving, and punitive law that, as we will see in the following sections, has been immensely influential on liberal and neoliberal theories of happiness. Mill’s essay on Utilitarianism however, begins with a question that immediately opens the principle of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ to forms of uncertainty that, for Bentham, could only serve to undermine the essence of material satisfaction. The question, which begins in Classical antiquity and is passed down to both the French and German versions of Enlightenment, concerns the designation of physical pleasure as the highest end that human beings can attain, and the link to the animal/appetitive element of the soul that this designation entails. Mill famously argues that ‘it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’ (Mill, 1980: 9). A community of contented fools, in other words, cannot be a community; for to live entirely for the individual pleasure afforded by food, sex, and consumption is, in the end, to live without honour or civic responsibility. It is in Mill’s political thought therefore that the tensions within Utilitarianism become most acute. The arguments presented in both On Liberty and Utilitarianism vacillate between complicity with the logics of exchange value, commodification, and rationalization that are established under mercantile capitalism, and the idea of a community of perfectible individuals that exceeds these logics and is irreducible to them. Indeed, Marx’s comments on ‘Principles of Political Economy’ in Grundrisse, criticize what he conceives as the idealism of Mill’s claim that the moral demand for distributive justice could transform the bourgeois mode of production (Marx, 1993: 832). The argument I will develop in the following sections is not that Mill’s Utilitarianism is simply a justification of bourgeois desires that have been depraved by the commodity form, and which are destined to disappear once the economy has been properly socialized. Rather, I will argue that Mill’s understanding of the social dynamics of pleasure gives implicit expression

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to philosophical questions about the nature of enjoyment, mortality, and community that continue to traverse the ideological terrain of neoliberal capitalism.

The science of wellbeing Jeremy Bentham’s thought is, in essence, an attempt to determine the greatest possible sovereignty of pleasure in the affairs of human beings. In the pursuit of this enterprise, he sets out principles of legislation and morality that are bound strictly to the principle of utility; for any public, private, or governmental action that does not increase the overall sum of happiness should be regarded as materially wrong. Thus, there is a programme of dismissal that runs through Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation, in which abstract morality, religious worship, and votive politics are presented as impediments to the natural desire of human beings to live happily. The effect of this is to marginalize the philosophical and existential questions that arise from the designation of pleasure as the ultimate end of human life. So, we might ask how it would be possible for a strictly Utilitarian approach to theorize the concept of ethical community, or, more precisely, the relationship between formal economic freedoms, the achievement of collective social goals, and the constitution of moral solidarity. It is this question that lies at the heart of Hegel’s critique of Utilitarianism, and so we need to look at the detail of his arguments. In both the Encyclopaedia Logic and the Science of Logic, Hegel situates the origin of Utilitarianism in the Doctrine of Being. His argument turns upon the relationship between the finite and the infinite, the mortal and the eternal, that runs through the designation of any particular thing as a self-identical being. Thus, if a particular object is considered merely in terms of the boundary it presents between itself and other objects (‘determinate being’), its existence is determined as a punctual unit, or ‘atom’, that is constantly transformed through its contingent encounters with the world (Hegel, 1982: 137). If man is conceived from this perspective, he presents no more than the insatiable demand for the withdrawal of restraint on the immediacy of his desire. The others whom he encounters in the world are viewed entirely instrumentally; they either help him realize his desire, in which case they are determined as good, or they impede it, in which case they are determined as evil (Hegel, 1982: 136). The logic of this process is transformative, for the atomistic determination

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of man moves beyond the crude antagonism of the Hobbesian model towards the transformation of subjective mind through purposive forms of reason and desire (‘being-for-self ’). Each individual, in other words, attains a concept of identity that is both constitutive, in the sense that the ‘I’ knows itself through its motivating pleasures, desires, and predilections, and negative, in the sense that such pleasures and predilections are essentially antagonistic (Hegel, 1982: 143). For Hegel therefore, the Utilitarian claim that happiness is rooted in the organic pleasures of the body, and that the art of good government consists in allowing maximum enjoyment of those pleasures to each individual, is to confuse the culture of abstract individualism that arose from the historical differentiation of social life with its original condition (Hegel, 1982: 143–4; 1969: 137–8). And so, the fundamental question that emerges from Hegel’s critique of ‘modern atomism’ concerns the relationship between the universal satisfactions of ethical community (Sittlichkeit), and the individualized forms of pleasure, desire and inclination through which those satisfactions are represented. The history of this relationship is set out in the second part of the section on ‘Reason’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. As I said in the introduction, the early Greek Polis is characterized by the identity of religion, state, and individual: each knows himself only as part of a whole that is the embodiment of the divine ordination of human affairs. This happy sense of identity of ethical life, however, is the origin of an immanent desire which forms the freedom of self-consciousness, and which is constantly transformed through its relationship to the constitution of ethical life as law, family, property, and state. Under the Romans, the world is stripped of this religious unity; the state and its citizens are reduced to the status of bearers of property rights, and the world is recognized only as a realm of ‘things’ to be appropriated. It is this transformation of subject-object relations that lies at the core of Hegel’s exposition of ‘Pleasure and Necessity’ in The Phenomenology of Mind. He argues that once the world is determined for consciousness simply as a means to the achievement of pleasure, it loses its substance; every object passes away with the evanescent experience of satisfaction it has made possible. The contemplative attitude of the Greek citizen therefore is displaced by the Roman desire for appropriation; the world is cut up into legal and practical categories relating to the fulfilment or frustration of individual desire (Hegel, 1967a: 386). These categories, however, remain entirely instrumental: they constitute an objective fate in which each ‘one’ recognizes only its particular desires, and nothing of its immanent universality. Thus, the hedonic consciousness learns that its certainty of itself as ‘life’ alienates it from

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the substantive community of others: it knows itself only in the intimations of death that accompany the frustration of its boundless desire (Hegel, 1967a: 387). The experience of the world as a hard necessity that frustrates human desire is the origin of the Romantic consciousness that Hegel describes in ‘The Law of the Heart and the Frenzy of Self-Conceit’. This consciousness, which emerges from the frustration of its isolated desire, attempts to take pleasure in vicariously experiencing the suffering of others and dedicating itself to the reformation of the world. And yet the pathos that marks the experience of the Romantic self-consciousness turns out to be violent and tyrannical, for it treats others not as ends in themselves, but as material for its unfeasible projects (Hegel, 1967a: 392). The formal virtue that arises from this perversion of human relations therefore, pursues the labour of abnegation: it turns away from the actual sources of violence that have afflicted its activity in the world, and attempts to find satisfaction in the closed circle of its private morality (Hegel, 1967a: 402–3). At its worst, this virtuous consciousness is pure hypocrisy, for its pronouncements on the evil of the world are no more than words without meaning or purpose. Hegel argues that it is this withdrawal of virtuous individuality into itself that determines the abstract forms of work, satisfaction, and desire that are presented in Utilitarian philosophy. The only standard of judgement that this monadic consciousness can employ is that of its own individuality, and so its every act of self-realization is understood as intrinsically honest and good (Hegel, 1967a: 424–5). Thus, the freedom that is characteristic of this association of individuals remains purely fortuitous: it arises spontaneously from their particular physiologies, is given objective form in the public sphere, and determines a state of perpetual conflict among the ‘community’ of independent persons (Hegel, 1967a: 431). Ultimately, therefore, the principle of utility is a hypostatization of this abstract freedom, the form in which antagonistic cultures of pleasure, irony, and luxury constantly return to the substance of ethical life. The concept of civil society that Hegel presents in The Philosophy of Right is essentially related to this account of the dynamics of individual pleasure. His argument is that the formal-legal relationships that constitute civil society are essential to the modern order of ethical life; for, without the modes of reflection that are characteristic of the bourgeois individual, the state would be unable to accomplish the movement into subjective recognition that is demanded by its concept (Hegel, 1967b: 122–56). However, the pursuit of happiness in civil society is always haunted by spectres of excess and mortality. The development

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of technical means for the satisfaction of need, and the proliferation of egoistic desires that accompanies this development, inevitably gives rise to the distortions of subjective desire, moral will, and legal recognition that belong to the concept of modernity. Thus, the question posed in The Philosophy of Right concerns the possibility of bringing the moral, legal, and political configurations of individualism that have come to dominate civil society back into the universality of the state (Hegel, 1967b: 126–34). And so, Hegel’s account of the institutions that crystallize within civil society (‘Right as Law’, ‘Law Determinately Existent’, ‘Court of Justice’) describes the movement of self-consciousness from the ‘external’ relationships that Utilitarian philosophy conceived as the absolute principle of civil association, towards an explicit recognition of the state as the substance of work, satisfaction, and desire. The essential question that arises here concerns the relationship between the atomistic experience of pleasure and the hard necessity of death. In Hegel’s account of the modern form of ethical life, it is through their work that self-conscious individuals transform the objective world, and also moderate the experience of mortality through their participation in the universality of the state (Hegel, 1967b: 123). Thus, the methodical practice of work and the relations that arise from it (family, sexual difference, property, respect, conscience) are essentially related to the experience of the infinite that is made actual in the body of the state. And yet the pleasures of abstract individualism retain an excessive intensity, for the fact of their separation from the substance of ethical life is what gives them their particular jouissance. Thus, for Hegel, the defining problem of modernity lies in the formation of the ‘self ’ as an abstract ego that takes its own actions and desires to be the origin of the state and its institutions (Hegel, 1967b: 127–8). In the section that follows, I will examine the most extreme form this cult of individualism has taken, that is, the quasiNietzschean account of self-overcoming, daring innovation, hard necessity, and sovereign excess that is the core of neoliberal economics. Before turning to this particular account of the political economy of happiness however, I want to look at the rather more conservative reading of Utilitarian thought that has formed the basis of the ‘new science’ of wellbeing. Richard Layard begins his book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science with a rejection of one of the axioms of modern economics: that greater GDP, more wealth, and higher rates of consumption always increase the sum of human happiness (Layard, 2005: ix). He argues that the recent history of developed Western societies has proved this beyond doubt. For, despite the fact that the

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general level of affluence in most Western nations increased continuously between 1993 and 2002, the World Health Authority found that depression had become the most common form of disability in both the European Union and the United States (Layard, 2005: 181–4). This, according to Layard, is because the economist’s equation of higher purchasing power with more happiness is simply wrong. It is wrong because the enjoyment we get from consumption diminishes as our ability to consume increases. Material consumption per se cannot make us happy, for its logic is always one of diminishing returns, which culminates in satiety and loss of meaning. For Layard, Bentham’s account of happiness as the outcome of physical pleasure is still the best approach to the issue of what kind of society we should strive to create. His new science develops Bentham’s account of the ethics of corporeal affection through a neurophysiological model of the relationship between brain function and the social formation of each individual subject (Layard, 2005: 17–20). Or, to put it slightly differently, Bentham’s approach to happiness maintains that neuroscience provides a description of the basic structures and chemical processes that constitute the foundation of cognition, motivation, and sociality. This insight, according to Layard, adds three crucial elements to Bentham’s version of Utilitarianism. First, it provides the basis of an evolutionary account of human society in which the pleasures of friendship, physical contact, and family groups are taken as reducible to the functionality of social cooperation. Second, it supplies a theory of how social, economic, and political institutions are related to the fundamental desires of human beings; of how, for example, they exaggerate acquisitive tendencies while suppressing the moral satisfactions of cooperation and care for others. Finally, it enables us to make properly scientific judgements about how society ought to be organized in order to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number. For, if we know what the primordial sources of pain and pleasure are, it should be possible to devise a more open and democratic system of collective wellbeing. Thus, the fundamental question Layard seeks to answer is this: given the specific neurophysiological constitution of human beings, what is the happiest kind of society? Layard approaches this question by deducing a set of socio-political principles from the neuropsychological model of human motivation (Layard, 2005: 6–8). This deduction can be briefly summarized. The neuropsychological constitution of human beings is the outcome of genetic modifications that have proved positive for the evolution of the species. Once this evolution

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has produced the basic institutions of civilization, it is the social, economic, and political organization of human life that has the greatest influence on the sum of happiness. Given that pleasure is the ultimate good for human beings, the best type of society is the one that maximizes their pleasure and minimizes their suffering. Such a society would be one in which certain kinds of pleasure naturally predominate; for excessive egoism, infidelity, and acquisitiveness always lead to increasing levels of unhappiness. Thus, for Layard, the good society is one in which the pleasures and obligations of sociality are constantly reinforced by their public performance, and in which friendship, trust, and stable community are valued more highly than material wealth and status. According to Layard’s analysis the closest approximation to this ideal is Western-style liberal democracy4, but with a much less acquisitive economy, a much more responsible state (which would utilize the science of human motivation for a more effective promotion of happiness), and a greater determination to perfect the wellbeing of all individuals (Layard, 2005: 149–65). And so, while it is true that human desire always retains the potential for excess, it is possible to organize it into a functional totality whose evolution would sustain the highest possible level of social satisfaction. Stated in this way it is difficult to argue against Layard’s formulation of the new science of happiness. His account of the connection between the fundamental feelings of pleasure that make human life worthwhile, and the institutional forms in which these feelings are best able to flourish seems to provide a watertight account of how the scientific, technological, and economic resources of modernity could be most humanely deployed. The moral conservatism that Layard sets against neoliberal economics, therefore, is sanctioned by the affective catastrophe the latter has produced in the West. We have, in other words, been made profoundly unhappy by the subjection of work, family, and religion to standards of efficiency that have destroyed their power to regulate the social life of human beings (Layard, 2005: 127–48). However, the emergence of a new science, especially one that seems to take us back to what we already knew about the good life, demands to be treated with a certain level of scepticism. There is a tendency in much of the recent work on the science of happiness, to treat the neurological pathways of the brain as if they were sentient processes that experience pleasure or pain5. They are presented as the material foundation of self-consciousness, and their maximal satisfaction becomes the essential purpose of family, civil society, and state. What Hegel’s account of the evolution of Sittlichkeit teaches us however, is that any attempt to ground the experience of

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self-consciousness in the ‘facts’ of its material being, are always complicated by the economy of representation and recognition through which the experience of truth and objective necessity is mediated. So, we need to look more closely at the concept of affective integration that is at the core of the new science of happiness. Layard’s appeal to the sensations that are hardwired into our self-consciousness pays almost no attention to the categories, relations, and ideas through which pleasure is experienced within the totality of modern life. There is no doubt that the positive psychology and pharmaceutical interventions that are essential to the new science of happiness have a certain kind of effectiveness, and much of the evidential support that is presented by Layard and others concentrates on how individual lives have been transformed by the manipulation of chronic neuropsychological dysfunctions. However, it is the leap from this therapeutic regime to the claim that we should treat society as a mechanism for the equilibration of pleasure that is problematic. As we have seen, the neo-Utilitarian position refers to a conception of somatic pleasure that lies at the origin of human society, and which is threatened by the increasing ‘abstraction’ of work, satisfaction, and desire characteristic of late modernity. In Layard’s thought, it is the neoliberal determination constantly to accelerate growth and consumption that is the greatest danger to community life and happiness. This postulation of the shape and temporality of ethical life, however, is essentially problematic; for the gift of cathexis (Eros) is always conditional, always becoming impossible in the shifting terrain of atomistic modernity, and can never be made good by simply restoring the old estate (Rose, 2008: 208). Thus, in the final section of the chapter, I will argue that the ‘new science’ is a deeply conservative approach to the question of happiness; for it stands opposed to networks of innovation, autonomy, and simulation that have facilitated the spread of global capital, without the means or desire to transform them. Or, putting it another way, the neo-Utilitarian approach is turned away from the vast dimensions of suffering to which the global frenzy of consumerism has given rise, and is dedicated, as Hegel said, to ‘the shape of life grown old’ that is still traceable in the ideology of the nation state (Hegel, 1967b: 13). Before turning to the possibility of ethical desire in the time of globalization however, we need to examine the particular seductions of neoliberal ideology, and how they have taken hold of the Western imagination of happiness.

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Life beyond contentment In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche remarked that ‘from lack of rest our civilization is ending in a new barbarism. Never have the active, that is to say the restless people, been prized more’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 172). On the following page, he claimed that ‘without stable lines on the horizon of his life’, the soul of a man becomes ‘restless, distracted, and covetous: he knows no happiness and gives none’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 173). This is very close to the warning about abstract individualism with which Hegel begins the section on civil society in The Philosophy of Right. Hegel, as we have seen, argues that, once the individual ego becomes divided from the substance of the Polis, the sheer particularity of its desire threatens to destroy the chance of self-recognition that arises from its original moment of separation (Hegel, 1967b: 123). If the ‘I’ of selfconsciousness lacks the possibility of reflecting on its own desire, in other words, it cannot return to the unity of Sittlichkeit. Thus, for both Nietzsche and Hegel, the ‘spiritual’ vocation of humanity is threatened by the proliferation of desires that takes place through the modern market economy. Both maintain that such desires are ways of avoiding, forgetting, or compensating for the fact of mortality – but ways which, in the end, determine an experience of death that is all the more unhappy. For, if the activity of consumption is made into the ultimate end of life, then the negation of such an existence confronts the pleasure-seeker as an unbearable fact that he can neither change nor accommodate (Tubbs, 2008: 30–3). Yet Hegel is not Nietzsche, and their respective accounts of the relationship between pleasure, mortality, and the purpose of life, mark a radical divergence within the philosophy of spirit. The nature of this divergence is difficult to specify without lapsing into caricature, but it seems to me that the best way to understand it is in terms of the idea of ‘the Pharisees’ that Nietzsche presents in part three of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 1984: 214–32)6. Nietzsche’s argument is that the spirit of religiosity always clings to idealist thought; for the concepts to which it reduces the contingency of the world are, in the end, expressions of a deeply held wish for divine order and stability in human life. This designation of the truth, no matter how sophisticated its mediation of ‘the particular’, is constantly retraced in the form of the Pharisees: the body of men who keep the moral conscience of Sittlichkeit, and who ‘crucify him who devises his own virtue’. This punitive function of the Pharisees is inevitable: insofar as they are charged with preserving the integrity of divine revelation, they must

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be seen to enforce the sacred order of the law (Nietzsche, 1984: 229). And so, if we read Hegel’s account of civil society through Nietzsche’s designation of the complicity between idealism and religion, it is possible to discern a movement from the particularity of desire to the secular administration of justice, through to the intuitive, quasi-familial body of the corporation (Hegel, 1967b: 122–55). The ethico-religious root of the state, in other words, is immanent in material desires that seem to promise little more than chaotic individualism. The question that arises from this reading of Hegel, which is rather different from the one presented in the previous section, concerns the intensity of the desire that is constituted in civil society. For, if it is the case, as Nietzsche maintains, that the productive-acquisitive constitution of man should be understood as a particular modification of the will to power, then our analyses of civil society should aim to illuminate the effects of Homo economicus on the power of humanity to overcome the limits of its present existence. However, simply to assume that the relationships constituted in civil society function only to degrade the spiritual life of human beings, would not be true to Nietzsche’s account of the satisfactions of economic activity. In Human, All Too Human he makes a distinction between the cold rationality of science and the ‘illusions, biases and passions’ that sustain the affective bonds of everyday existence (Nietzsche, 1994: 154). The latter are essential to the constitution of society, for without the pleasures of consumption, popular art, and ordinary taste, the common run of life would lose the moral stability that is essential to the work of civilization. Yet this ‘work’ has a tendency to become overheated. On the one hand, the pleasures of consumption are multiplied to the point where the masses are constantly distracted by capricious desires, and on the other, ceaseless productivity becomes the only way in which the intellect can justify itself. This overheated condition is, for Nietzsche, endemic in modernity: the obsession with production and consumption that has come to dominate Western societies is the result of a historical process in which ‘science’ has been made into the instrument of human need. Thus, if there is to be a modern form of civilization in which the economy no longer determines the progress of culture, science must emerge as a distinct form of rationality that is able to transform the cycle of work, consumption, and desire. Such a science will always have departed from the utilitarian logic that is inscribed in civil society, and will be responsible to futures whose approach cannot be expressed in the terms of economic recuperation, distributive justice, or collective happiness (Nietzsche, 1994: 154; 1974: 253).

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How then is neoliberal ideology related to Nietzsche’s philosophy? It seems to me that there are two elements in Nietzsche’s thought that are crucial to this relationship. The first is the concept of overcoming itself. The virtue of the ‘Fearless Ones’ that Nietzsche commends in The Gay Science is one of ‘happiness, exhilaration and encouragement’: an ethic of absolute individualism that exceeds every form of pity and seeks only to solicit the highest independence of man (Nietzsche, 1974: 280). This notion of virtuous selfishness has become a fundamental constituent of neoliberal ideology: the idea that the state is a drag on the power of each individual to exceed his limitations and to galvanize the lives of others, is transformed into what Benjamin called the religion of ‘explosive and discontinuous’ innovation (Benjamin, 1997b: 289). The virtues of this religion, as we will see, take shape in the radical individualism expounded by Nozick, Friedman, and Hayek. The second element is the demand for action that originates in Nietzsche’s account of the responsibilities of knowledge. True knowledge, for Nietzsche, lies closer to death than to the contentments of ethical life (work, family, church); and so the responsibility of ‘knowing’ lies in always soliciting what is possible, what might come, the monstrosity of the future (Nietzsche, 1984: 311–13). This demand cannot be discharged in the order of civil society, as even the most sublimely calculated deferral of profit is still a conduit through which man’s power is channelled into the traps of hedonism. And yet, in neoliberal ideology, the imperative to ‘act’ has acquired a quasi-Nietzschean imperative; for the demands for flexibility, daring entrepreneurialism, and resistance to the reactionary power of the state, stand radically opposed to the exhausted desire of Utilitarian man (Nietzsche, 1984: 39–53). Thus it is that Nietzsche’s claim that it is only through remorseless striving and self-sacrifice that true happiness can be achieved, has become the axiom of neoliberal ideology. We have seen that in Nietzsche’s thought, the concepts of chance and overcoming are closely related: if there is to be any virtue that is worthy of the name, it has to endure the unforeseen hardships that afflict each individual life. Virtuous overcoming is virtuous precisely because it is not based upon moral prescription or pious withdrawal from the world; it is fearlessness towards the future and whatever contingencies it may bring. It is a particular version of this idea of the relationship between radical contingency and individual striving that marks the break between Utilitarian and ‘neoliberal’ thought. Milton Friedman, in his Capitalism and Freedom, expresses this succinctly. He argues that the basic principle on which the market economy is founded is ‘voluntary

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bi-lateral exchange’, or, ‘to each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces’ (Friedman, 1962: 161–2). The conventional objection to this is that, historically, the realization of the principle of free exchange has been compromised by the emergence of a class hierarchy in which the unequal distribution of wealth has all but destroyed equality of opportunity. Friedman’s position, however, is that to view the de facto existence of inequality as the outcome of economic laws governing the evolution of capitalism is to begin by ignoring the vital principle that instituted the market economy in the first place. That principle, according to Friedman, is chance; for if the investigation were to go back far enough, it would be possible to trace the origin of all inequalities to contingent transactions that took place between individuals in the state of nature (Friedman, 1962: 163). Friedrich Hayek, in his essay ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, makes a similar point: he talks of the ‘marvel’ of the price system, where fluctuations produce a spontaneous adaptation of businesses to new circumstances that could not possibly be achieved by a centralized planning authority (Hayek, 1945: 9). Thus, if the market is to function as a stimulus to individual striving, it is essential that this sense of chance, of possibility, be maintained. For without it, the individual becomes little more than a cipher of the political forces and powers that control economic life, and finds himself locked into a regime that robs him of dignity and self-reliance (Friedman, 1962: 165). Nietzsche’s account of virtue constitutes a demand for action that risks everything, even life itself, for the sake of conviction. In neoliberal thought, this absolute demand is represented through the regime of rational choice, natural rights, and the heroism of the entrepreneur. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, for example, begins from Locke’s account of a state of nature in which individuals are bearers of natural rights of possession and self-protection (Locke, 1988: 118–20; Nozick, 1974: 26–8). He argues that the kind of state that emerges from the incipient protective associations that arise among men in the state of nature is ‘ultraminimal’; its sole function is to stabilize relations among warring factions and to determine a table of retributive law and penal sanctions. Thus, for Nozick, the fundamental question of political philosophy is: if there are natural rights, and if the state emerges as an agency whose essential purpose is to protect those rights, then what is the proper balance between the regulative function of the state (its determination of who merits what) and the spontaneous order of action (the market) that springs from individual freedoms (Nozick, 1974: 82–3)?

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Nozick’s answer to this question is to argue that, although the ultraminimal state is insufficient to guarantee the best possible life for each individual citizen, the extension of its powers of intervention into the life of civil society ought to be strictly limited by the principle of individual rights. In practice this means that the range of moral legislations that are open to the state is extremely limited. For, if political morality is defined strictly in relation to individual freedom of action, then the function of the minimal state is essentially that of determining when violations of the ‘moral space around an individual’ have occurred (Nozick, 1974: 57). If the bar is set too low, and each individual is made subject to random violations of his liberty on the basis of universal compensability, the state fails in its duty to protect the natural rights of each individual. However, if the bar is set too high, the state becomes responsible for recompensing each individual who claims that his position in the economic hierarchy is the result of ‘natural’ disadvantages that are beyond his control (Nozick, 1974: 223). Thus, the state should tolerate entrepreneurial activities that risk the violation of individual sovereignty, and so the maximum extent of its obligation to compensate is determined by the particular cases of damage that arise from the free exchange of the market (Nozick, 1974: 78–84). According to Nozick, therefore, the aim of wealth redistribution, in the form of taxation to fund state pensions, welfare benefits, and public housing, is completely at odds with the principle of self-reliance: the way to happiness lies not in increasing the weight of social responsibilities assumed by the state and its citizens, but in allowing each individual to live ‘experimentally’ in spontaneous productive associations (Nozick, 1974: 331–3). I argued above that the difference between liberalism and neoliberalism is marked by the latter’s movement towards a kind of quasi-Nietzschean vitalism that gives unconditional priority to adaptation, innovation, and selfovercoming. Nietzsche’s demand for a ‘bestowing virtue’ however is touched by the spectre of death; for those who live in absolute independence of the morality of the herd, must constantly risk the comfort and enjoyment of their lives, in order to become exemplary beings that point the way to the future (Nietzsche, 1984: 26–38). The experience of death, as that which belongs to the ecstasy of overcoming, however, is fundamentally altered by the ideology of economic freedom. Man is captured by the mechanism of production: his pleasures are those of immediate gratification, his friendships are always touched by the cynicism of the market, and his risks are dispersed into the statistical probabilities of heart attack, cancer, or suicide that arise from the pressures of the economy. The liberal ideology of happiness therefore is balanced between an

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evolutionary concept of desire as the ‘natural’ ground of human community, and a conditional welcome to new forms of socially generated pleasure. Neoliberalism, however, is essentially related to the transformation of the global economy that took place towards the end of the twentieth century, the principal factors of which were the virtualization of exchange value and the aestheticization of mass desire. Under these conditions, ‘happiness’, as Layard et al have pointed out, is identified with the constant expansion of desire beyond the qualitative and quantitative limits that were thought to define it, and with the ‘hit’ that is made possible by such transgressive innovation. In the radically individualistic version of liberalism that has become hegemonic in Western economies therefore, the Nietzschean demand for self-overcoming has been transformed into an empty pursuit of pleasure, which is obsessed with the avoidance of death and the constant revitalization of failing desire. I will come to the consequences of this aestheticization of desire in Chapter Two, on the postmodernist dream of unlimited possibility. Before the question of happiness in postmodern times can be addressed, however, we need to look at the older philosophical question of what moral desire is, where it originates, and how it might realize itself in the world. For, if we are to criticize the postmodern regime of synthetic pleasure, we must have a sense of the moral satisfactions it has succeeded in erasing from the map of subjective experience. This, for me, is the question raised by the apologists for the New World Order, who view the demise of the Soviet Union and the liberalization of the Chinese economy, as the ‘end of history’, or, more specifically, the triumph of liberal capitalism over the forces of political repression. For it is in the ideology of liberal exchange, legal rights, personal freedom, and moral self-determination, that the neoliberal attempt to transfigure the violence of pure egoism reveals its aporetic structure. In the final section therefore, I will argue that it is in the inscription of such rights as the hegemonic form of freedom, happiness, and democracy that we can determine the satisfactions of a certain political ethics, whose original form Derrida designates as hospitality.

Life, death and the new world order Emmanuel Levinas once remarked of love that it is ‘the possibility of the Other appearing as an object of need, or, again, the possibility of enjoying the Other, placing oneself … beneath and beyond discourse’ (Levinas, 1994:

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255). The erotic relationship, in other words, is not fixed in the Other as pure concupiscence; it is drawn beyond his or her immediacy to the incalculable fact that Others will always come, and to the infinite horizon of care to which moral desire is responsible. Thus, for Levinas, the erotic is ‘the equivocal par excellence’, the uncontainable chance of moral desire. I began this chapter by examining the basic claims of Utilitarianism: that happiness arises primarily from the physical frame of the body; that moral culture is essentially related to the regular experience of pleasure; and that the fundamental principle of human society lies in the reproducibility of somatic enjoyment. Clearly then, there is a contradiction between these two approaches to the question of happiness. Classical Utilitarianism begins with the assumption that happiness is grounded in a state of corporeal wellbeing, which can be steadily augmented by the rational-technological progress of human society. Even the more subtle versions of this position, like J. S. Mill’s account of higher pleasures, remain committed to this fundamental principle. For Levinas, however, the Utilitarian assumption of pleasure as an unmediated state is simply wrong. In its very origin, our sense of identity (ego, ipseity) emerges from the primordial experience of sharing a certain vulnerability with those we encounter; and it is this experience which, for both Levinas and Derrida, is the origin of the moral desire that springs, without precedent, from the system of utilitarian production. In this section, therefore, I will examine the mutation of Liberal and Utilitarian ideologies that has taken place in response to the globalization of capital, and the possibility of forming a cosmopolitan ethics that exceeds the compulsions of technologically reproducible desire. I want to begin by examining Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, as it is here that the idea of a capitalist ‘New World Order’ is given its most celebratory expression. The theoretical foundation of Fukuyama’s book is a reading of Hegel that is taken from Alexander Kojève. What Fukuyama found attractive in Kojève’s account of The Phenomenology of Mind was his concentration on the dialectics of recognition, particularly in the extended discussion of the master-slave dialectic that comprises the first chapter of his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Essentially, Kojève’s account of the master-slave dialectic attempts to show how the absolute domination of the master institutes the history of social recognition that is played out in Hegel’s philosophy. The life or death struggle in the state of nature produces a form of social organization in which the master exists as a subject absorbed in his own desires, and the slave, as the self-consciousness that mediates between nature and the desire of the

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master, is transformed by the continuous demands of work performed under threat of death (Hegel, 1967a: 228–40). Kojève understands Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as the origin of the concrete forms of social life in which the work of self-consciousness is denied proper recognition. He presents the ideal form of their relationship as a type of universal transparency, in which the activity of each individual transforms itself, its other, and the mutual experience of the world (Kojève, 1969: 27–30). For Kojève, however, the realization of this ideal is problematic. In a footnote to his lecture on the final section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, he remarked that, from a certain perspective, the consumer capitalism of 1960s America had already achieved the universal availability of things that is characteristic of Marx’s ‘classless society’ (Kojève, 1969: 161). And yet this virtual simultaneity of desire and satisfaction is what solicits a return of the Hegelian question of spirit: the contentment of post-historical man is such that it threatens to reduce him to a condition of complacency that is without opposition to the play of utilitarian desire (Kojève, 1969: 162). The reading of Hegel presented in The End of History and the Last Man, however, ends up postulating the rational subjectivity of the French Enlightenment as the model of free citizenship. The essence of man, in other words, appears in Fukuyama’s historiography as a free intelligence, which, when it is deprived of the right to express itself, is made subject to a fundamental violation of its dignity. Indeed, the defining characteristic of political violence is the denial of basic rights of physical and spiritual recognition (thymos) to any self-conscious individual (Fukuyama, 1992: 162–5). Yet the ethical position that Fukuyama derives from Kojève’s reading of Hegel is conjoined with a libertarian concept of the value of free subjectivity. Fukuyama argues that the generally higher levels of prosperity achieved by liberal democratic societies are not accidental, and that these societies’ recognition of the diverse and unequal abilities of each individual citizen has been the decisive factor in their domination of the world economy (Fukuyama, 1992: 235–44). So, while it is true that religious conflicts, wealth inequalities, and political repression continue to distort the ideal functioning of the global market, it is also the case, according to Fukuyama, that the unity of freedom and happiness established in liberal democratic societies will, in the long run, overcome the perverse satisfactions of all other political regimes. Once the last enclaves of fascism, socialism, and theocracy succumb to the rational satisfactions of the market, man will settle into the happy complacency that Fukuyama calls the end of history. The technological networks through which money, knowledge, and information are

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distributed will attain their maximum efficiency, every individual will be able to realize his or her productive potential, and all the technological resources of the world will be dedicated to the happiness of man as such (Fukuyama, 1992: 314). This reduction of humanity to a post-historical species whose every need is satisfied, and whose happiness has become the guiding principle of liberal democracy, is not, for Fukuyama, an entirely desirable state of affairs. According to his reading of Hegel, the history of spirit that is presented in The Phenomenology of Mind is the history of the great political events that have transformed human society. The truth of humanity, in other words, has arisen from conflicts that are essentially ‘thymotic’, that is, concerned with the conditions of ethical, political, and moral recognition. And so, by the time Western liberal democracies have developed into the happiness machines they have become, the dynamics of this thymotic struggle have begun to wane. For the risks that are essential to the movement of Hegelian spirit are beginning to recede into the past, and man is becoming the passive consumer of repetitive utilitarian pleasures. The impending completion of history, therefore, gives rise to a fundamental problem: if the totality of satisfactions offered by technologically advanced liberal democratic societies fundamentally threatens the thymotic vocation of man, how will it be possible to maintain the transformative will that is essential to the spirit of humanity? Fukuyama’s answer is to suggest that it is already possible to discern a new economy of thymotic activity in the most developed liberal democracies. Once the problem of need has been overcome by the technological development of forces of production, the ideal of eliminating substantial differences of individual happiness emerges as political programme (Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, welfare capitalism). Such attempts to make isothymia, or material equality, the principle of social organization, however, are doomed to failure. For the infinite number of differences obtaining among discrete individuals will always render impossible the effort to suppress their expression as innovative activity. It is nature, in other words, that restores thymotic striving to post-historical man, as the sheer spontaneity of individual difference will always return to the totality of the planned society. The desire for recognition therefore is a natural desire that belongs to the essence of humanity, and when this has become uncoupled from the struggle for subsistence, ‘thymotic individuals begin to search for other kinds of contentless activities that can win them recognition’ (Fukuyama, 1992: 319). These activities include scientific and technological innovation, business entrepreneurialism, and all the ways in which social status and respect are

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gained. Beyond this, however, the pursuit of excellence in diverse activities like mountaineering, skydiving, language learning, and music, are also ways in which the ‘Nietzschean’ demand for recognition of excellence (megalothymia) is expressed (Fukuyama, 1992: 313–15)7. Thus, the stultifying tendencies that arise from the technological organization of happiness (as rational consumption, regimented leisure time) are counteracted by the thymotic innovation that is implicit in the form of liberal capitalism. But there is something missing here. Fukuyama’s account of the end of history, or rather the historical evolution that brings us to the point at which history is about to end, is careful to present the rise of liberal democracy and the free market as a process led by man’s natural desire for spiritual recognition. The concept of capitalism is never allowed to crystallize into the complex play of mastery and slavery, freedom and determinism that arises from the interrelations of labour power, commodities, technology, and scientific knowledge. Thus, Fukuyama’s appropriation of the Hegelian concept of spirit maintains that the external relations of civil society constitute the realization of free subjectivity, and that post-historical man will live out his life as a happy thymotic individualist. However, it is difficult to see how the logic of this historiography can escape the accusation of complicity with the economic and technological conditions that have shaped the evolution of global capitalism. The critiques of civil society that Hegel and Nietzsche develop in their work, as we have seen, focus on the illusory forms of sovereignty, moral self-determination, and aesthetic sensibility that arise within the sphere of abstract individualism. And so, despite the fact that their respective philosophies lead in radically different directions, it is the infringement of functional-utilitarian rationality on man’s unrealized potential, or spirit, that each presents as the negative power of modernity. The secret of Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ is that it conceals the modes of violence and subjection through which global-technological capitalism operates, and consigns the activity of spirit to the play of ‘contentless’ striving. The line of argument I have pursued in this chapter is that happiness, both as a concept and a form of experience, is originally bound up with the idea of spirit. There is, in other words, no true sense of happiness that does not arise from responsibilities that exceed the Utilitarian designation of contentment. The idea of spirit, however, is not fixed, and the philosophies I have chosen as exemplary of the relationship between modernity and spirit are marked by fundamental differences of style, emphasis, and political significance. What these differences reflect, I believe, are transformations of the way in which

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spirit, as a responsibility that is not programmatically determined by existing productive relations, inhabits the technological body of capital. In Hegel’s thought, particularly The Philosophy of Right, there is an anticipation of the forms of abstract freedom that have come to dominate civil society (aesthetic distraction, Romanticism, irony), and to jeopardize the reformation of atomistic self-consciousness within the substance of ethical life (Hegel, 1967b: 122–34). In Nietzsche’s work, the modern nexus of technology, productivity, and democracy is made the subject of a radical critique of Utilitarian contentment: if man is to go beyond his animal nature, it must be done through the transformative vigour that springs from the satiety of the most noble spirits (Nietzsche, 1974: 240–4; 1994: 171–3). I am certainly not claiming that Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s respective configurations of spirit are simply reflections of the atomistic culture of capital. What I am suggesting is that the engagement of the self in the mediatic, technological, and scientific production of happiness, has transformed the way in which spirit inhabits the totality of capitalist relations. And so I will conclude by examining the fate of ‘substance’ and ‘overcoming’, as forms of non-utilitarian satisfaction, within the networks of the global market. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida presents the question of ‘spirit’ as one that belongs to the economy of presence and absence, substance and dissemination, which is essential to the constitution of human society (Derrida, 1994: xvii–xx). The fundamental significance of Marx’s work therefore, lies in his recognition of the impact of capital on the temporality of this experience: as the demands of rational-technological production are brought to bear on the whole social and individual life, so the dynamics of community, identity, and self-recognition are fundamentally altered. This process is not static, and the argument Derrida pursues in Spectres of Marx is that there has been a fundamental shift in the mode of exploitation: the psychical constitution of the self is deeply entangled in the virtual networks of media technologies, the dominant regime of work is transformed from physical/manual to technical/conceptual, the body is made a possible object of technological prosthesis, and consumption has become the implicit necessity underlying every form of social exchange8. The evolution of this regime does, of course, beg the question of spirit; for if the reality of subjective mind (a la Hegel) and corporeal existence (a la Nietzsche) has merged into the matrices of the biopolitical production, then the question of ethical and political agency becomes urgent. Clearly, the extent to which this homogenization of experience has actually taken place is not an uncontentious issue, for both conventional Marxists and neoliberals have sought to maintain

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the idea of a ‘public reason’ that collectively resists the integrative powers of capital. However, it is incontestably true that the conditions under which ethical and political responsibilities can be recognized and acted upon have been transformed, and that this transformation requires us to re-examine the concepts of substance, spirit, and moral desire. If the aim of the technological manipulation of ‘man’ is the constant reproduction of his happiness, then the question we must address concerns the violence that is implicit in the perfection of this regime. Derrida’s reading of Marx is important here because of the relationship he seeks to establish between the ideology of happiness that is perpetuated by neoliberalism (work, striving, consumption, flexibility) and the logics of exclusion, homogenization, and silencing that are co-present with the networks of biopolitical production. The spatial and temporal dynamics of this relationship are extremely complex, for the totality of ‘capital’ extends into the internal organization of developed economies, the relationships between those economies and Second and Third World nations, and the international systems of policing and cooperation that have come into being with the spread of the global economy (Derrida, 1994: 77–88). In order to understand the fate of ethico-political responsibility, therefore, we need to understand the relationships between those who are able to participate in the ‘managed playground’ of consumer capitalism, and those who occupy the marginal positions that service the developed economies of the world market. The former do not, of course, constitute a homogenous body, as they are fragmented across national, economic, and political lines. However, it is possible to identify a fundamental difference in the fate of those on the geopolitical margins of the system, for the fact of the divide between ‘Third’ and ‘First’ worlds is inexplicable without reference to the systems of technological mediation/exploitation that have come to dominate the global economy. The logic of mastery and slavery, in other words, is re-inscribed in the international relationships that emerge from the totality of biopolitical production. And so, for Derrida, if we are to form a proper understanding of the play of narcissism, friendship, and subjection through which the chance of ethico-political responsibility is determined, it is essential to attend to the contingent encounters that occur between the margin and the centre of the world economy (Derrida, 1994: 96–9). In an interview that was published as ‘There is No One Narcissism’, Derrida returned to the economy of desire and representation he first addressed in Of Grammatology. His original claim was that Rousseau’s discussion of the danger of excessive sexual desire in modern society has a paradoxical structure.

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The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (see Rousseau, 1988) postulates a ‘natural’ hierarchy that predestines men and women to occupy their respective positions of domination and subservience in the moral order of society. And yet, for Rousseau, the condition of this order are the supplementary forms of inscription through which human society has been corrupted (literature, painting, theatre). Derrida’s point is that there is nothing outside this economy of supplementation, and that desire is always already affected by the inscription of the other in the soul of the self (Derrida, 1976: 175–9). So, to return to the essay on narcissism, Derrida maintains that the very condition of self-identity is the ‘movement of narcissistic appropriation’, and that this movement is haunted in advance by spectres that are provoked by the performative certainties of race, gender, and nation (Derrida, 1995: 199). The engagement of the self in the relations that constitute ‘the social’, in other words, is always done on the basis of a certain self-love, for, without this auto-affection there could be no chance of moral desire. This is not to say, however, that the modes of selfidentity that have accompanied the development of biopolitical capitalism are inherently cosmopolitan, as they are formed within an economy that constantly alters the dynamics of acquisitive desire. Yet this regime cannot complete itself, as the patterns of satisfaction that determine the possibility of being happy, are haunted by a sense of contingency that is inscribed in the structure of each individual ego. This contingency is not itself contingent; it is the sense of mortality that arises from the performance of freedom and consumption, the ghostly presence of those others who attend the spectacle of a life they cannot share (Derrida, 2000: 77). Such encounters are a practical necessity that belongs to the neoliberal representation of life as heroic self-overcoming; and so, for Derrida, the more the sphere of abstract right is dominated by the labile freedoms of the neoliberal self, the more it becomes a place of spectres who reopen the chance of moral desire, of hospitality (Derrida, 2000: 55). Derrida presents the ‘spirit’ of Marxism as that which constantly re-emerges from the mutations through which the productive regime of capital evolves: One must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its living part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, and the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition of life and death (Derrida, 1994: 54).

The spirit of Marxism, in other words, is immanent from the sheer mutability of the money-commodity-money (M-C-M) relation; it is the demand for practical

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responsibility that arises from the physical, psychical, and cultural damage that is done to the other by the exploitative regime of capital. This demand is messianic rather than dialectical, for the arrival of the other, as other, is always unforeseen: it is the alterity whose weakness undermines the fundamental structures through which the ego identifies with itself. Thus, the experience of happiness belongs to the organization of the ego as narcissism, for it is only in so far is the ‘I’ is able to identify itself as a subject with specific kinds of desire, that happiness is possible at all. And yet for Derrida this possibility is simultaneously impossible, as the condition of its being experienced is the presence of others (spectres) within the protentive structure of feeling/knowing that constitutes the experience of happiness. It is this fragility of happiness that makes it essentially spiritual and political, for it is the sense of its impending loss, and the hope of its return, that opens the possibility of being responsible for the suffering (life or death) of the other. Or, to change the emphasis slightly, it is the unknowability of the arrivant that transforms the immediate experience of responsibility, and opens the chance of altering the modes of representation, resistance, and hospitality through which politics is enacted in the biopolitical systems of capital (Derrida, 1994: xx). What I have attempted to do in this chapter is to give a sense of how the economy (work, productivity, wages, and consumption) has come to dominate the ideological register of happiness. The origin of this process, I have argued, lies in the relationship between the Utilitarian construction of physical pleasure as the source of all true satisfaction, and the rationality of efficient production, sovereign consumption, and individual rights that is essential to the evolution of capitalism. The Utilitarian account of civil society as the place of greatest enjoyment, in other words, is essential to the formation of the neoliberal ideology of happiness. For it is through the reduction of all satisfactions to analogical forms of physical pleasure that Utilitarianism lays the ground for the neoliberal demand for limitless productivity, limitless consumption, and limitless freedom. This demand for the constant expansion of the market, however, has become completely uncoupled from the moral economy of collective wellbeing, and I have argued that the ‘new science’ of happiness is a response to the failure of modern economics to address the paradox of rising prosperity and falling levels of social satisfaction. My own position is that this approach fails to engage with the ethical questions that are implicit in the concept of happiness, particularly those arising from the compulsions of the sovereign consumer and his capacity for reflection on the plight of the Other.

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I have expounded these questions through the modifications of spirit that are present in the work of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida, and I have shown how each conceives the problem of how Homo economicus might transform the repetitive cycle of production, consumption, and demoralization. This exposition however is far from complete, as the potential that ‘postmodern’ capitalism has opened up for flights of self-love and the aesthetic transformation of the real, demands to be investigated much more fully.

Notes 1 See especially Chapter 13 of Leviathan. 2 Kant remarks: ‘In so far as this or that individual … considers himself as a member of a complete commonwealth, or even of cosmopolitan society, and thence as a man of learning who may through his writings address a public in the truest sense of the word, he may indeed argue without harming the affairs in which he is employed for some of the time in a passive capacity’ (Kant, 1991: 56). 3 See especially Chapters 2 and 3 of Section Three. 4 The rationality of Layard’s affirmation of liberal democracy is close to Mill’s argument that the principle of utility, while it is not naturally determined, is the most functional for the evolutionary development of the human species. For the freedom to pursue one’s own desires, within the limits prescribed by the moral demand of respect for the rights of others, is essential to the idea of a happy society. The Marxist attempt to ‘socialize’ desire is therefore guaranteed to kill the uniqueness of every particular pleasure, and thereby to destroy the possibility of individual happiness (Layard, 2005: 121). 5 Stefan Klein, in The Science of Happiness, for example, conceives the true purpose of philosophy as the study of how we can come to a proper accommodation with our passions (Klein, 2006: 82–4). Reason, in other words, should occupy a subservient relationship to ontogenetic desire, and its moral pronouncements should always accord with what will maximize our happiness as a social species. The distinction between ‘control’ and ‘automatic’ processes that forms the basis of Jonathan Haidt’s The Happiness Hypothesis offers a slightly more subtle account of the relationship between reason and desire. His argument is that the secret of happiness consists in finding an appropriate balance between the sensations of fear, elation, and disgust associated with the automatic functions of the organism, and the higher functions of control exercised by the rational self. Such a balance requires a complex mediation of work, social attachment, and affective relations. And yet even here, the relationship that self-consciousness has to its ontogenetic desire is one in which

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the latter is presented as the determining condition of all positive moral and social evolution (Haidt, 2006:13–22). 6 Nietzsche’s intention here is to use the Pharisaic demand for patient suffering, respect for the laws of the Torah, and faith in God’s ordination of his chosen people as exemplary of the power of religious orthodoxy. 7 Fukuyama’s reference to the ‘last man’ is in fact a reference to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. What comes after the ‘end of history’ is not a lapsing of humanity into the contentment of animalistic desire, but rather the fulfilment of man’s capacity for self-overcoming (but within the limits of Judeo-Christian morality) (Fukuyama, 1992: 313–21). 8 One of the main foci of the concept of biopolitical production that Hardt and Negri present in Empire is the capitalization/commodification of emotional wellbeing. Psychical health, in other words, has become an industry, and more and more people have become involved in the labour of promoting happiness (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 292–3). Thus it is not, I think, unreasonable to suggest that one of the motivations behind the ‘new science’ of happiness is the smoothing out of social space, and the emotional integration of production and consumption.

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Postmodernism, or The Dream of Limitless Possibility Aesthetic consolations T. S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets, recounts the story of man’s admission to Eden, and the vulnerability of his soul to the pain and privation of the world. Nature, in the guise of the thrush, enjoins man to enter, ‘as human kind cannot bear very much reality’ (Eliot, 1980: 190). One obvious implication of this is that, after the Fall, art and the mythologies it perpetuates are an essential part of the civilizing process, and that, without the comforting figuration of life through the familiar themes of love, redemption, and belonging, the world would confront us as an alien place, refractory to all human purposes and desires. Thus, if we accept this designation of the origin of aesthetic representation, a particular kind of relationship emerges between art and happiness; a relationship in which the veil of mysticism that poetry, drama, painting, and music cast over the world is seen as offering relief from life as rational action performed in the service of material need. It is this account of aesthetic experience that lies at the core of the postmodern ideal of happiness as the pursuit of infinite possibility. And so, the present chapter will examine the dissemination of this ideal of individual striving, and its influence on the affective economy of global capitalism. Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as we have seen, argued that the world has no underlying purpose, and that the brute fact of the suffering it causes to most of us for most of the time should lead us to conclude that it is the outcome of an unhappy and accidental conjunction of circumstances. The primary cause of human suffering is the exercise of individual will, for in attempting to pursue a particular purpose, any given human being will inevitably experience the frustration of his desire by external circumstances or by the contrary desires of others. Action, in other words, is always implicated in suffering, either through the failure of the agent to achieve his goal, or through the harm that his action does to the wellbeing of others. The only moral position to adopt in this world of conflicting wills is to keep one’s desires under strict control, and to behave

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with forbearance towards one’s fellow sufferers, as not to do so will only increase the sum of violence in the world. Yet even this possibility is limited by the fact that the constitution of each particular individual is the expression of an unchangeable will that forms his character and determines his capacity for selfcontrol (Schopenhauer, 1970: 143). The one possibility of remission that exists within this remorseless mechanism is the feeling of happiness that accompanies aesthetic transfigurations of the world. According to Schopenhauer, ‘it is quite obvious that the beautiful as such excites pleasure in us without having any kind of connection with our personal aims, that is to say, our will’ (Schopenhauer, 1970: 155). Aesthetic experience, in other words, is contemplation without appetite; it is the disinterested penetration of the mind into the essence of the object as Idea, and the absence of the particular desires from which the suffering of each individual being derives (Schopenhauer, 1970: 156). For Schopenhauer, therefore, the purpose of a work of art is to provoke this ‘intrinsically painless’ state of aesthetic abstraction from the world of temporal causality. The plastic arts of sculpture and painting should seek to configure the timeless essence of what they depict, that is, the Idea which is embodied in an individual being or object, considered as the expression of a pure act of will. Thus, the genius of the artist consists in his ability to manipulate the content of the object he is depicting in such a way that the universal Idea shows through, for it is in this manipulation that the viewer is momentarily snatched away from the suffering of the temporal realm (Schopenhauer, 1970: 159). According to Schopenhauer, however, it is music that allows the most direct experience of the essence of the world. In The World as Will and Idea, he argues that there is ‘an analogy … between music and the Ideas whose manifestation in plurality and incompleteness, is the visible world’ (Schopenhauer, 1996: 164). The harmonies that are made possible by the physical resonance of high and low notes, in other words, reflect the inner constitution of the world as will; they are the phonic solicitation of the essence of things in the soul of man, the momentary ecstasy of transcendence. Experience of the phenomenal world is governed, as we have seen, by need and the principle of sufficient reason; so, under the yoke of this material necessity, human beings are destined to suffer from the constant frustration of their desires. In the presence of music, however, they may experience sublime gratification; for in the return of each separate modulation to the keynote of the melody, the soul’s desire for completion is constantly aroused and satisfied within the totality of the movement. Serious music therefore, produces a completely non-appetitive apprehension of the world; it

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is the provocation of the purest emotions, and the release of the soul from its tragic attachment to the phenomenal world (Schopenhauer, 1996: 167–8). Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic experience is, of course, explicitly Classical in its orientation, for it depicts the elevation of humanity beyond the sufferings of the temporal realm and into a state of sublime unity with the essence of things. The remission that human beings can achieve through the experience of the beautiful is a timeless experience, whose possibility is given in the power of the soul to intuit the essence of the world through its affective faculties (Schopenhauer, 1996: 166–7). As I argued in Chapter One, however, Schopenhauer’s philosophy tends to transform the entire range of human feelings and capacities into reflections of his concept of ontological will; and so, the relationship between happiness and aesthetic experience that he postulates in The World as Will and Idea, is determined by the fundamental creative force that sustains the order of existence (Schopenhauer, 1996: 171–2). This Classical conception of the aesthetic, however, misses two fundamental things about the fate of representation: first, the fact that its modalities are essentially related to the order and complexity of the mode of production (as Marx pointed out); and second, the fact that the relationship between representation and happiness has become the province of technological artifice. In the three philosophies of spirit I have expounded (Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida), the fate of representation within the rational-purposive structure of modernity is an explicit concern. So, I propose to begin this chapter by expounding the place of aesthetic representation in each of these philosophies, and by examining their relationship to the form of social life that has become known as ‘late’, or ‘postmodern’ capitalism. In order to understand the relationship between modernity and representation properly, it is necessary to begin with the materialist thesis that Marx developed in The German Ideology. Marx begins his exposition by claiming that ruling ideas never come into conflict with the particular interests of the ruling class, whatever these interests might be. His claim is that, although the ideas set out by bourgeois philosophers, jurists, aesthetes, and economists do attain a certain level of autonomy, and although they may seem to come into conflict with conventional forms of political hegemony, this conflict is no more than a ‘semblance’ that dissolves in the inevitable reassertion of class interests. Thus, although the shift from the feudalistic ideas of poverty, chastity, and obedience to those of equality and individual rights does mark a certain level of progress in the realization of human freedom, the increase in self-consciousness that is brought about by the refinement of the bourgeois regime, is significant only

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insofar as it sharpens the contradiction between the ideological forms in which subjective freedom is represented, and the material deprivations under which the mass of humanity is forced to live. Thus, for Marx, the granting of formal equality before the law and the right to sell one’s labour on the open market is not a transcendental differentiation of ethical life; its true significance lies in the fact that it produces a class of workers whose ‘free’ activity is characterized by the experience of loss and physical compulsion (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 176–82). The important issue here is the economy of power, representation, and truth that is implicit in Marx’s concept of ideology. The first thing to notice is that the exemplary forms he presents in The German Ideology are discursive rather than aesthetic; they are inscriptions of the moral, legal, normative, and religious knowledge that constitutes the public sphere of bourgeois society. The second thing is that these inscriptions, despite the fact that they form the substance of social life under capitalism, are essentially false; they are misrepresentations of the truth of work, satisfaction, and desire, and as such, perpetuate a system of exploitative social relations. Finally, the dissimulating power of bourgeois ideology is historically contingent, for the particular inversion of reality that is produced by conventional forms of law, morality, art, and ethics, is grounded in processes of exploitation that progressively impoverish the ‘species being’ of humanity (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 176). Crucially therefore, Marx’s account of ideology gives precedence to the institutional power of reason; for it is in the negative experience of work, satisfaction, and desire as it is constituted in civil society, that he locates the revolutionary immanence of capitalism. The figurative-affective power of art therefore is given little consideration in Marx’s thought, and he seems to regard its ‘bourgeois’ form as perpetuating a cult of originality that ruptures the essential unity of human labour (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 189–90). However, we can at least infer that the marginal role that Marx gives to aesthetic representation is an inherently reactionary one. For, if it is the case that the core of bourgeois sovereignty is the enjoyment of mastery over both men and things, then the ‘happiness’ produced by the ideals of heroism, romantic love, freedom, and redemption that have come to dominate the artistic imagination, can be no more than an illusion imposed upon the actual experience of alienation. However, and this is really the central point I will explore in this chapter, the three philosophies through which I have attempted to expound the question of happiness, attach a much greater importance to the aesthetic dimension of modernity than Marx. So, I want to look

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briefly at the relationships between modernity and aesthetic representation that are configured in the work of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida. In his Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel makes the following general definition of the work of art: It is addressed to sensuous feeling, outer and inner, to sensuous perception and imagination … [However] the work of art is not only for the sensuous apprehension as sensuous object, but its position is of such a kind that as sensuousness it is at the same time essentially addressed to the mind, that the mind is meant to be affected by it, and to find some satisfaction in it (Hegel, 1993: 40, author’s italics).

The work of art, in other words, is a sensuous configuration of spirit; it is a form in which the imagination (Vorstellung) takes hold of the concept of ethical life, and is able to apprehend it through the aesthetic figurations that are put into play by the artist. The formation of self-consciousness through aesthetic representation is something that, in Hegel’s thought, is essentially related to the complexity of the social relations that make up the substance of social existence. And so, the kind of artistic representation that is characteristic of primitive societies is the symbolic, in which nature, encountered as an overwhelming power, is crudely re-fashioned through cultic devices designed to intensify the experience of transcendence (Hegel, 1993: 83). It is in the Classical art of the Greek Polis however, that the formative power of the aesthetic emerges as essential to the politics of happiness. In symbolic art, the Idea is expressed in cultic objects and embellishments that invoke a sublime absolute, which is beyond the secular world. In Classical art, this deficiency is overcome; its object is man as the physical embodiment of subjective mind, and, as such, it seeks to present the unity between the institutional life of the Polis and the ideal of a spiritually ennobled humanity. Thus for Hegel, art, as a socially formative practice, reaches its highest point in Classical Greece. For, in Hellenic culture, the relationship between the idealized representation of humanity and the ethical order of the state is experienced as the eternal unity of the secular and the divine (Hegel, 1993: 85). The Classical unity of ethical substance and the aesthetic forms through which it is represented, occupies what Gillian Rose called an ‘impossible position’ in Hegel’s philosophy (Rose, 1981: 113). Citizens of the Athenian state experience its institutions as the embodiment of the goddess Athene: she is immediately present in the legal, economic, and political relations of the Polis,

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which she infuses with the aura of divinity. Classical Greek art therefore is the expression of this happy community of feeling, intellect, and religiosity; it is the form in which the substance of ethical life is made present to the citizen, and in which he re-experiences the immediate satisfactions of his citizenship through the ideals of aesthetic representation. This then, is the high point of artistic practice as Vorstellung, or the sensuous imaginary; for it is only insofar as the unity of the Polis is without the subjective reflection of the ego, that it is possible for Classical art to represent the unity of Sittlichkeit ‘in an immediate and sensuous mode’ (Hegel, 1993: 40). For Hegel therefore, the very possibility of this representation marks both the particular deficiency of the Classical Greek society and ‘the defect in art as a whole’ (Hegel, 1993: 85–6). The fact that ethical life is experienced by Greek citizens as the unity of the secular and the divine means that the happiness of the people is without reflection: no individual can be a ‘subject’, for each lacks the experience of suffering that results from the differentiation of spirit into subject and object, universal and particular (Rose, 1981: 113). Thus, the history of Western civilization since the Greeks, is the history of this experience of separation; and so, if we are to understand the significance of art in the affective constitution of modernity, we will need to examine its relationship to the free subjectivity that has formed the sphere of civil society. I will come back to this in the following section. The economy of truth and aesthetic representation is a fundamental concern of Nietzsche’s philosophy from the very beginning. In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, he sets out the relationship between art, truth, and the experience of being that is configured in the pre-Socratic form of Greek drama. Rather than pre-empt the discussion of Nietzsche in the third section of this chapter, I will confine myself at this point to a brief indication of the relationship between aesthetics and modernity that emerges from his thought. Put very simply, Nietzsche’s account of Hellenic culture maintains that its highest point comes before the emergence of the Socratic philosophy; for once the demands of absolute clarity and rational justification are established as the model of Sittlichkeit, the transformative experience of tragedy is forced to the margins of the Polis. Nietzsche conceives the pre-Socratic epoch of Greek culture in terms of the antagonism between Apollo and Dionysus: Apollo is the god of light and prophecy who gives form (eidos) to all that is chaotic, and Dionysus is the god of the life force (physis) which overflows every restriction that is placed upon it. Thus, with the importation of pagan elements into Greek culture, the Apollonian and the Dionysian come to exist in an antagonistic unity that is the apotheosis

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of both: the Dionysian outpouring of voice/music is given formal structure in the chorus, dialogue, and plot of tragic theatre; and the Apollonian demand for order is constantly provoked beyond the reproduction of its own formalism (Nietzsche, 1990: 28). After Socrates, however, it is the Apollonian ideal of lucidity that achieves cultural dominance, and so the collective experience of submersion in the unity of being is lost to the rational demands for justice, morality, and equality that become established in the ethical life of the Polis. This displacement of Dionysus by Apollo is, for Nietzsche, the founding moment of modernity. In Greek tragedy, the artifice of the Apollonian ideal is driven to its limits by the Dionysian power of the chorus; and so the audience experiences something akin to the sublime, or the inability of the intellect to supply concepts for what is literally overwhelming in the spectacle of nature (Nietzsche, 1990: 133). The tragic form, therefore, is the mystical revelation of the beauty of existence, and inevitably gives rise to powerful affects of pathos and catharsis that are inexpressible in the discursive concepts of language. But, in the Enlightenment culture that has taken Apollonian ideals of lucidity and rational justification as its model, these affects are displaced, and it is the moral education of the free individual that becomes the guiding principle of modernity. Modern culture becomes sterile, as it is no longer the medium through which the tragic necessity of being is constantly impressed upon the civic constitution of ‘the people’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 136). There are, I think, two fundamental questions that arise from this construction of the relationship between aesthetic experience and the genealogy of modernity. The first concerns the aestheticization of the political that Walter Benjamin conceived as the essence of fascism, and I will examine the tragic forms of enjoyment that arise from authoritarian politics in Chapter Five. The second question concerns the fate of the Apollonian ideal of lucidity, or more precisely, the bathos of representation that, for Nietzsche, is a consequence of the mass communications that have come to dominate the public sphere (newspapers, pamphlets, magazines). Thus, in section three of this chapter, I will trace the possibility of there being ‘Nietzschean’ interventions in the postmodern world of fluid identities, ambiguous sexualities, and hybrid ethnicities. Or, to change the emphasis slightly, I will explore the possibility of configuring gestures of transformative excess that are not simply absorbed into the simulacra of difference and happiness that dominate the representation of social life. In his book Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Derrida presents an unusual thesis: that it is the figure of ‘woman’ who, as a spectral absence that haunts the

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plenitude of man’s ethical life, represents the infinitely ungraspable nature of truth in Nietzsche’s thought (Nietzsche, 1979: 53–4). Thus, the figuration of the feminine as a labile and dangerous indeterminacy is expounded by Derrida as the presence of death within the stylistic economy of Nietzsche’s writing; for it is only insofar as this threat is present in every configuration of truth that an existential responsibility to what one believes to be true is possible (Nietzsche, 1979: 137). The economy of Nietzsche’s writing is such that his demand for overcoming constantly slips into aesthetic figurations which occupy a different register from the true convictions arising from the rigour of materialist science. Thus, the rhetorical passages of Nietzsche’s philosophy are part of a general economy of aesthetic figuration that, for Derrida, is both the solicitation of an exorbitant desire for the particular (the non-universal event), and of political mythologies of race, religion, sex, and culture (Derrida, 1979: 81–3; 1997: 82–4). The critique of the philosophy of representation that Derrida has developed in Dissemination, The Truth in Painting, and ‘Envoi’, however, attempts to trace the logic of supplementarity that is always put into play by the image. Representation, in other words, constantly provokes linguistic, psychoanalytic, political, and textual effects that exceed the geometrical reduction of the real, and keep open the chance of unforeseen events of love, sacrifice, and hospitality. This concept of aesthetic contingency, as we will see, is essential to Derrida’s attempt to reconfigure the temporal economy of postmodern desire. In the final section of the chapter, therefore, I will look at the chance of the political as it is configured in Derrida’s work on the fate of representation in the media-technological systems of capital. His account of the possibility of political transformation, as presented in Of Hospitality, Rogues and Spectres of Marx, articulates a deep and original involvement of representation in the economy of social exchange. Both Marx’s and Schopenhauer’s attempts to separate the aesthetic from the ‘material’ violence of the world, and to present it as the sphere of illusory happiness, is fundamentally to miss the economy of affects and possibilities it distributes into the economy of the social. It is in Spectres of Marx, as we will see, that Derrida develops the relationship between the concepts of hospitality, democracy to come, and the media-technological staging of the real that has come to dominate the experience of social life. Thus, I will examine Derrida’s account of the co-presence of aesthetic representation and ethical responsibility that is sustained within the virtual networks of the global economy. I will explore the modalities in which the spectre of the other is

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disseminated, and the possibility of its infringing on the postmodern experience of happiness as consumption, lifestyle, and aesthetic conformity.

Art, irony and romanticism I want to begin this section by returning briefly to the general definition of the work of art that Hegel presents in Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics. As we have seen, Hegel states that a work of art ‘is not only for sensuous apprehension … the mind is meant to be affected by it, and to find some satisfaction in it’ (Hegel, 1993: 40). Thus, there is an essential relationship between the satisfaction that self-consciousness as such finds in the aesthetic mode of experience, and the happiness that particular human beings derive from sensory apprehension of the Absolute in the temporal world. It is in the Greek Polis that this unity of form and content achieves its highest expression; state and religion are experienced in Classical aesthetic forms that configure the infusion of social and political life with the divine unity of creation. The happiness of the Polis therefore is that of a state which is as yet undisturbed by the formation of abstract subjectivity: it is a reflection of the fact that ‘the citizen’, who is recognized as the bearer of rights and responsibilities that are inapplicable to slaves, foreigners, women, and children, is entirely at home in the milieu of Sittlichkeit (Rose, 1981: 130). Thus, the Classical artworks of the Greek world are ‘auratic’ in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term; for they hold the divinity of nature, the genius of the artist, and the moral and intellectual sensibilities of man together within the symbolic universe of the culture they embody (Benjamin, 1992: 217–18). The aesthetic configuration of ethical life in the Polis, even though it is always threatened by the retribution of divine law, is, for Hegel, the most substantive experience of happiness that humanity will ever have. This is because the ‘I’ of self-consciousness has not yet become detached from the unity of religious and political life, and remains embedded in the concrete totality of the Polis. This state of happiness, and its configuration in the forms of Classical art, is essential to the hierarchy of recognition that, I will argue, is implicit in Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit. As we have seen, the artwork is by definition inadequate to represent the reflective unity of social life: the differentiation of Sittlichkeit into the abstract relations of free subjectivity, and the complexity of the political forms through which they are mediated, cannot be adequately configured in the sensuous medium of ‘picture thinking’, or Vorstellung (Hegel, 1993: 43).

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Thus, if art is destined to come to an end because it is unable to represent the unity of social and economic life, then perhaps the ‘end of art’ that is the underlying thesis of Hegel’s aesthetics is not its termination, but rather its differentiation into a religious iconography that would support the contentment of the masses, and a labile Romanticism that is constantly reformed through the activity of bourgeois individuals. It is the loss of aesthetic unity, and the end of the Classical configuration of fate, ethics, and happiness within the substance of Sittlichkeit, that, for Hegel, is the tragedy of modernity. And so, we need to examine the history of this dislocation, and its consequences for the moral and affective constitution of modern life. After the collapse of the aesthetic unity of the Polis, the status of art is fundamentally altered. In Classical art, the substance of ethical life is perfectly expressed; for the artworks that embody the divine ordination of man capture the aura of the Polis as monumental, tragic, glorious, ethical, and heroic. Art, in other words, is the sensory expression of social relations in which nature and humanity, concept and intuition, exist in a state of concrete unity (Rose, 1981: 126–7). However, once the substance of Sittlichkeit lost its immediacy (a process that began with Socrates’ determination to subject the entire fabric of Greek society to the method of rational scepticism), Classical art was no longer able to configure the presence of the divine in the institutional structures of the state. Sittlichkeit, in other words, comes to express the inward differentiation of the Idea into contingent particularities of the subjective mind; and so the dialectic of representation that is essential to Hegel’s phenomenology of ethical life, is transformed by the emergence of rational religion as the mode in which the Idea recognizes itself. The old Greek Titans, whose monstrous power was presented in the pre-Socratic tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, cede place to the ideals of truth and justice that are watched over by the Olympian gods. The origin of Western modernity, therefore, lies in this tragic breakdown of ethical substance: with the proliferation of different spheres of knowledge and activity, the unity of ethical life can only be conceived through the ‘conflict and collision’ of abstract freedoms (Rose, 1981: 135). Thus, the emergence of the modern citizen is afflicted by a certain absence of contentment, an absence that is determined by the inevitable loss of sensory-aesthetic unity in the relations of the Polis. The question of the relationship between happiness, morality, and the aesthetic in Hegel is fundamental to the hierarchy of recognition that is implicit in the idea of Sittlichkeit. As we have seen, the experience of art, as a mode

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of subjective recognition, is inadequate to represent the complex unity of the state. For Hegel, the end of the Greek state is determined by the acute contradiction between reason and representation that emerged in the later stages of Classical antiquity. The Socratic ideal of light and reason in all things is brought to bear on the traditional beliefs which founded the state; and so the flowering of Hellenic culture and philosophy is also the precursor of its destruction as ethical life, and the break up of Greek civilization into competing states whose disparate interests come into conflict with Athens/Athene. This break up calls down destruction upon itself, for it is the ‘crushing Destiny’ of the Roman war machine that ultimately puts an end to the remains of Athenian democracy (Hegel, 1944: 276–7). The social order that comes to replace the Greek form of Sittlichkeit, therefore, is Roman property law, in which the world is divided up according to the principle of abstract rights of ownership. In the Roman state, the law becomes totally separate from ‘disposition and sentiment’, and operates as an unyielding principle to which every citizen is made subject (Hegel, 1944: 289). Thus, the citizen of Rome knows the world only as an external and determining object, and so ‘his covenants, political relations, obligations, family relations etc’ have no properly religious content, merely the formal power of a legal obligation (Hegel, 1944: 290–1). The pantheon of Roman gods therefore becomes an array of ‘frigid allegories’ who are appealed to only on the basis of individual desires, and whose influence is mediated through a state that is the instrument of a rapacious aristocracy. Thus, under Roman law, the universal principle of ethical life is determined as agonistic utility, and egoistic desire becomes the ruthless condition of all public and private relations (Hegel, 1944: 295). For Hegel, the Roman differentiation of state and religion through the principle of abstract reason is the founding principle of modern individualism (although he maintains that at this stage the law takes the form of an objective necessity which serves to dominate, rather than enable, the realization of rational ends). So, the question we need to address at this point concerns the fate of art after the dissolution of the Greek world. It is the loss of the aesthetic unity of the Polis that forms the background to Hegel’s exposition of Romantic art. In Roman society, the ‘mechanical side of Art has been brought to perfection’: it has become a technical exercise designed to produce what is pleasing to the senses without expressing any spiritual content that would appeal to the intellect (Hegel, 1944: 289). It is through Christianity’s sublime suffering under Roman law that corrupt aesthetics are given the form of

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infinite yearning, which, for Hegel, is the essence of the Romantic aesthetic. For, insofar as the secular world is dominated by the Roman sanctification of acquisitiveness, Christian representations of God and ethical life fixate on themes of martyrdom and otherworldly salvation. Thus, it is the iconography of early Christianity that forms the basis of Romanticism; the themes that come to predominate (human feeling, emotion, and the sublime transcendence of God) represent the victory of the ‘beautiful soul’ over the secular world it is forced to inhabit. Romantic art, through its exaggerations of the inward life of humanity, repeats the contradiction of symbolic art; it falls into a kind of grotesquery that takes emotions, thoughts, and imaginings to be ‘things in themselves’ that have no determinate relationship to the actuality of ethical life (Hegel, 1993: 87). Art, in other words, begins the process of its own transcendence. For, once it ceases to express the unity of state and religion as an aesthetic experience, its representation of subjective ideals of happiness, redemption, and love, becomes complicit with the conflictual relations of mastery and coercion through which ethical life develops as an objective totality (Rose, 1981: 144). In the final sections of The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel works through the distinctions between the three modes in which spirit is apprehended by finite consciousness: Art, Revealed Religion, and Absolute Knowledge (Hegel, 1967a: 680–808). There is a sense in which art, as Hegel conceives it, is the least adequate of these modes of apprehension, for there is a close relationship between primitive forms of religious experience (pantheism, polytheism) and the symbolic figures through which the divine is represented. Religion, for Hegel, is implicitly a mode of representation of inner life, and as such, is capable of evolving towards an apprehension of the Absolute that is more than imagination (Vorstellung), and which illuminates the relationship of finite selfconsciousness to the presence of the infinite. We have seen that Hegel conceives Romanticism as the form in which Vorstellung transcends itself as a medium of ethical recognition; for the flights of aesthetic fancy depicted by Romantic art are a refusal to recognize the real conditions of mastery and slavery that are inscribed in the objective relations of Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1993: 88). Indeed, what Romantic art encourages is a kind of ironic attitude towards these relations, which are seen simply as impediments to the pursuit of heroic adventures beyond the prosaic responsibilities of work, family, and communal life. There is then, an essential relationship in Hegel’s thought between aesthetic representation and a pernicious irony that haunts the inner life of the morally autonomous citizen. In his exposition of ‘The Good and Conscience’ in The

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Philosophy of Right, Hegel expounds the relationship between the bourgeois citizen, whose pursuit of particular desires is supposedly regulated by the formal consistency of the moral law, and the emergence of an ironic subjectivity that regards itself as ‘the arbiter and judge of truth, right, and duty’ (Hegel, 1967b: 102). The Kantian moral will, in other words, merely gives legitimacy to the labile desires that arise in civil society: its demand for formal consistency can be extended to encompass any action that is taken in pursuit of egoism and self-love. As such, Kant’s moral imperative ends up legitimizing the dominance of pure subjectivity over the objective forms in which the Absolute is expressed. Now, although the formal demand of the moral will is presented in The Philosophy of Right as a precursor of the objective Gemeinschaft of the state, this does not mean that Hegel regarded the abstract sovereignty and subjective desires of civil society as destined to disappear in the movement of history. Rather, civil society is the sphere in which the contingencies of subjective freedom are played out; contingencies that are an essential part of the concept of ethical substance (Hegel, 1967b: 122–3). Thus, the aesthetic configurations of Romanticism and the formal morality of the bourgeois individual are part of a sphere of abstract rights that is constantly haunted by a sense of solipsistic irony. It is not the world that is regarded as excellent, but the individual ego that ‘lets the highest perish and merely hugs himself at the thought’ (Hegel, 1967b: 122). The relationship between art, irony, and abstract morality is important because it opens up the question of the fate of art in modernity. Hegel, as we have seen, implicates Romantic art in the emergence of civil society as a ‘totality of wants and a mixture of caprice and physical necessity’ (Hegel, 1967b: 122). Thus, it is possible to read Hegel’s claim that Romanticism marks the ‘end of art’ as a designation of the tragedy of modernity, or as the complicity of the aesthetic with the contradictory relationship between state and civil society. This, in fact, is the way that Gillian Rose understands the telos of Hegel’s aesthetics. She argues that the development from Symbolic to Classical and from Classical to Romantic styles is not simply a movement that concludes with the expulsion of aesthetic representation from the substance of Sittlichkeit. Rather, she argues that the abstract relations of bourgeois subjectivity are too complex for art to represent their implicit universality, and that the significance of aesthetic representation in modernity is its capacity to configure cultures of religious zeal, nationalistic fervour, and romantic ecstasy within the formal-legal relations of civil society (Rose, 1981: 141–2). Thus, on Rose’s reading, the concept of

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representation is understood as essential to the formation of civil society, and as essentially part of a universal determination of modernity in which the institutions of Sittlichkeit are always vulnerable to the transformative power of the negative (the fatal unhappiness of finite subjects who are caught up in the violence of abstract individualism). My own position is slightly different from this. While I agree with Rose that the concept of subjective autonomy both threatens and perpetuates the telos of modernity, it seems that the idea of ethical life that crystallizes in The Philosophy of Right, is inconceivable apart from certain ontological categories of identity. Spirit undergoes a process of objectification that is expressed in the legal, economic, and corporate institutions that reflect its own essential unity; and so the movement of spirit through the aporias of abstract individualism is, in the end, animated by a certain conservatism that always returns to the transcendental necessity of the Idea. This conservatism can be traced in the relationship between happiness, representation, and ethical life that is implicit in Hegel’s account of modernity. As we have seen, Hegel conceives the bourgeois subject that emerges in civil society as prone to dissemblance of the crude utility of its existence; it seeks remission from its permanent striving after particular desires, through Romantic fantasies and its ironic relationship to the totality of Sittlichkeit. However, the bourgeois personality is not the exclusive principle of ethical life, and Hegel maintains that the corporate bodies that arise for the mutual benefit of those who practise a particular craft or trade, have an integrity that is closer to religious feeling than to the reflexive self-consciousness of Homo economicus. Thus, for Hegel, family and the corporations sit between the state and civil society: they are the ‘two fixed points round which the unorganized atoms of civil society revolve’ (Hegel, 1967b: 154). Or, to put it another way, the Classical tradition of art and the feelings of religious awe and primordial community that are associated with it remain essential to the constitution of Sittlichkeit, for, without its formative influence on the corporations, civil society would collapse into a lawless play of individual desires. There is, therefore, a kind of double play in Hegel’s concept of modernity that is particularly acute in his exposition of art and the aesthetic. On the one hand, there is a clear recognition of the power of the aesthetic to transform both the individual subject and the objective constitution of its social relationships. On the other hand, the Hegelian economy of representation is haunted by the relationship between religion and Classical iconography that gave substance to the Polis. For, while it is true that Hegel gives priority to the rational relations

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that constitute the life of the modern state, he also maintains that religion expresses the same content qua the aesthetic-intuitive form which infuses the corporate life of Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1967a: 171). Hegel’s distrust of Romantic art therefore stems from his concern about the subjective culture of civil society, and its importation of radical individualism into every sphere of ethical life. The old fear of idolatry, in other words, is played out in Hegel’s aesthetics; for the multitude of subjective ideals that are expressed in the Romantic style are conceived as malign simulacra that can bring neither happiness nor unity to ethical life. The recuperative movement that is determined within the substance of the state therefore always carries the weight of the origin: it expresses a differentiation of spirit into appearance and particularity that, for Hegel, determines the return of the image to the substantive intuition of the corporate body. This begs the question of whether such a spiritual-religious recuperation of the aesthetic is still possible under the conditions of modernity, and, if not, what the significance of this would be for the politics of happiness. In the following section, I will examine Nietzsche’s account of the relationship between truth, power, and the aesthetic, and how this bears on the ‘pure culture’ of postmodern societies.

The tragedy of pure culture In the opening section of the chapter, I argued that Marx’s ideology thesis crucially underplays the role of the aesthetic in the formation of bourgeois subjectivity and the relations of civil society. I also argued that Hegelian philosophy gives a much more sophisticated account of the relationship between art, subjectivity, and the state; an account that conceives the ‘objectivity’ of economic relations as both constituted by, and constitutive of, the individual dispositions that animate bourgeois economic life. And yet, the concept of spirit that Hegel deploys does, I believe, lead to a certain conservatism in his assessment of the trajectory of modernity. Ultimately, what protects the substance of ethical life from collapse into the anarchy of egoistic desire is the fact that the corporate structures of civil society provide an intuitive sense of community, which grounds the excesses of abstract individualism. Thus, the question that Marx’s ideology thesis raises is rather more complex than the simple ‘inversion’ of Hegelian philosophy he presents in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. His attempt to show that the economic base of capitalism determines the shape of its ideological life is,

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in the end, an attempt to show that the truth dissimulated in that life is the historical antagonism of the bourgeois and labouring classes. If, however, we allow that Hegel has theorized the relationship between representation and objectivity in a way that destabilizes Marx’s theory of the political teleology of economic forces, then it follows that a post-Hegelian philosophy of spirit must give a radically non-dialectical account of the desires and satisfactions that arise from the aestheticization of truth which is characteristic of modernity. This is what Nietzsche’s account of the relationship between truth, power, and the aesthetic attempts to do – and so we need to examine the detail of his arguments. We have already seen that Nietzsche’s philosophy begins with an examination of the relationship between art and the ethical formation of humanity. In The Birth of Tragedy, he affirms Schopenhauer’s thesis that the essence of aesthetic experience is the physical affect it has upon the material being of the subject (Nietzsche, 1990: 96–102). Schopenhauer’s argument is that the essence of creation is will, and that each phenomenal being is the expression of the particular kind of willing that lies at the foundation of all its temporal existence. Thus, the fundamental cause of human unhappiness is the frustration of the will, for even the most successful life has been curtailed by the accidents of its temporal unfolding. According to Schopenhauer, however, aesthetic experience offers the possibility of remission from these frustrations; the feelings that are produced by music, as the primordial form of aesthetic experience, resonate with the essence of things, and produce a sense of unity with the transcendental conditions of existence. Music and the plastic arts, in other words, ‘are merely different expressions of the same inner nature of the world’ (Schopenhauer, 1996: 171). Nietzsche’s affirmation of Schopenhauer’s thesis, however, does not extend to his conclusion that the truth of the aesthetic is the contemplative relief it provides for the tortured souls who inhabit the world. Indeed, The Birth of Tragedy describes the processes through which pagan and Classical ideals are combined in pre-Socratic Greek tragedy, and the constitutive effects this combination had on the affective solidarity of the Polis. Nietzsche’s contention is that the choral accompaniment to the drama provokes feelings of ecstatic unity with those tragic individuals who have tested the authority of the gods. And so the transformative power of the tragic arises from a feeling of sublime unity with the primordial force of creation: it is that which exceeds the formal organization of artistic style, and which constantly returns to rupture the unity of each artistic genre (Nietzsche, 1990: 97). Despite Nietzsche’s post-hoc deprecation of The Birth of Tragedy for ‘all the

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hoariness of its topic and every conceivable fault of adolescence’, the question of the relationship between truth and the aesthetic is one to which he returns in all of his subsequent writings (Nietzsche, 1990: 5). What, for me, is most significant in Nietzsche’s first book is his introduction of the idea that the truth cannot be presented in a form that is free from stylistic configuration. ‘Being’, in other words, has no objective existence that can be expressed independently of the mythological powers of Dionysus and Apollo; for it is that which can be known only through the conflicts of light and darkness, knowledge and mystery, masculine and feminine, through which it is constantly re-encountered (Nietzsche, 1990: 28). In early Greek society, the relationship between Apollo, the god of light and prophecy, and Dionysus, the god of the life force itself, is one in which there is a rough equality between form and power. The tragic drama of pre-Socratic Greece still aims to draw the audience into a state of ecstatic unity with the life force of nature, yet the rule of Dionysus is tempered by the discipline of Apollo, who demands clarity of form and representation. It is this unstable proximity of opposites that, for Nietzsche, is the highpoint of Greek civilization, for the alliance of reason and lucidity that came to dominate post-Socratic Greece had yet to exclude the ecstasy of nature from the life of humanity. But there is in the figure of Apollo a seductiveness that beguiles the power of Dionysus and prepares the way for Classical Greek art and philosophy. The demand for lucidity that Apollo represents is, for Nietzsche, the formal condition of the concepts through which the world is cut up into particular kinds of being, each of which has a particular ethical significance within the substance of Sittlichkeit (Nietzsche, 1990: 128–9). It is through this process of rationalization that the experience of fate ceases to be the determining condition of human life, and happiness (eudaimõnia) becomes a condition whose possibility is defined by the relationship of the soul to the substance of the Polis. Classical Greek society becomes a work of art in itself, and its artworks present the aesthetic form of the ethical principles that should take possession of the soul of each citizen. However, the ideals of lucidity expounded by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle are, for Nietzsche, haunted by the ghost of Dionysus; for the perfection of rational order provokes a spirit of resistance that acts against the powers of repetition, integration, and containment (Nietzsche, 1990: 130). Thus, the incipient dilemma of modernity that Nietzsche identifies in The Birth of Tragedy can be briefly stated. If the Apollonian alliance of reason and aesthetics that is the essence of Classical Greek civilization is lost to the principles of utility and technological

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reproduction, then the fundamental question that arises from the persistence of art is how it has functioned to represent the ideals of truth, beauty, and communal life. For, while it is true that art can engender a sense of the tragic confrontation of will and necessity, it is also the form in which modernity, in its insipid way, has sought to retrieve the presence of God (Nietzsche, 1983: 40–1). Yet, beyond this perpetuation of divinity in the auratic tradition of art, modernity opens up a new configuration of the aesthetic, one that transforms the economy of truth and desire. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche remarks that ‘we belong to a time in which culture is in danger of being destroyed by the means of culture’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 239), by which he meant that the means of cultural dissemination had all but stripped the aesthetic of its relationship to the tragedy of ethical life, and transformed it into the medium of homogeneous desire. To put it slightly differently, technological means of representation have facilitated a reduction in the gap between the feeling of desire and its satisfaction in the array of trivialities offered to the masses. And so, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Utilitarian demand for ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ is essentially related to the representation of happiness as private gratification. This configuration of the aesthetic has certain similarities with Marx’s ideology thesis. Both Marx and Nietzsche regard the relationships that arise from ‘bourgeois’ subjectivity as profoundly limiting, for they confine the human species to a cycle of desire and satiation that comes to dominate the entire sphere of cultural production. However, Marx’s thesis is separated from Nietzsche’s by his insistence that the relationship between truth and illusion is underpinned by the founding experience of productive activity. In both Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, Marx argues that human self-consciousness develops through its direct interaction with the ‘inorganic body of nature’, and that it is this original determination of productive relations that constitutes the place from which he pursues his critique of ideology (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 81). Thus the proto-society of hunter-gatherers that Marx designates as ‘primitive communism’ is originally non-representative; man’s relationship to nature is essentially unmediated and gives rise only to the most basic inscriptions on the surface of the natural world. Thus, for Marx, the very idea of representation is untrustworthy, as the emergence of art is essentially related to the power of religion that comes after the most primitive community, and to the ideological illusions that have justified the history of class domination (Marx, in McLellan, 1977: 107).

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For Nietzsche, however, to claim that the originary form of sociality emerges as a cooperative organization, and that it should be regarded as an ideal possibility that is immanent in the history of all social conflicts, is anti-materialist. In The Genealogy of Morals, he insists that to postulate the origin of the social in the cooperative satisfaction of need is a ‘piece of sentimentalism’ that refuses to accept the violent contingencies in which human society originated. The austere truth to which true materialism must respond is the violence of events, the pure exigencies through which the will to power brings the future into being (Nietzsche, 1990: 211). Human history therefore emerges from the ‘terrible despotism’ imposed by the strongest of the species, whose violent strictures transform the animality of formless pre-hominids into a life of disciplined servitude (Nietzsche, 1990: 219). This austere materialism, for Nietzsche, marks the possibility of liberating man from the limitations of his essence as a social animal. According to the argument he develops in Human, All Too Human, the socialist version of man’s original unity with nature is the logical conclusion of Western democratic thought. For, insofar as the principles of equal rights, moral obligation, and civic duty have become incorporated into a theory of the universal conditions of happiness, the highest end of humanity becomes the alleviation of all contingency in the mode of production (Nietzsche: 1994: 145). Socialism, in other words, aims to reduce the gap between desire and its fulfilment to a minimum, and to give each individual the chance to participate in the self-consciously ethical production of the means of subsistence. Now, for Marx, a society of this kind would by definition have overcome the need for ideology, as human beings would no longer suffer from the pernicious individuation through which capital has colonized their being. The sphere of representation, in other words, would survive only as a reflection of the social and technological organization of production, whose ‘truth’ would be validated in the universal flourishing of humanity1. According to Nietzsche, however, socialism’s remorseless pursuit of the alleviation of suffering is also the end of the possibility of happiness. For the weight of this project is such that it reduces the violence of events, and the extremity of the ethical and aesthetic self-determination it provokes, to a programmatic demand for more production, more organization, and more technology. If there is to be happiness, this can only come through the exposure of the greatest of all humanity to the infinite risk and suffering that arises from unforeseen confrontations of will and necessity. So, the idea of socialism should be understood not as the revelation of the truth of human history, but as a

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particular nexus of power that arises from within the pleasures and privations of bourgeois culture (Nietzsche, 1994: 213–14). Nietzsche’s genealogies of socialism and bourgeois culture are, I believe, fundamental to understanding the Frankfurt School critique of mass culture. As we have seen, there is an implicit assumption in Nietzsche’s thought that the ‘public sphere’ is a bourgeois invention, whose development is facilitated by technological advances in the dissemination of information, images, and texts. What Nietzsche discerns in this evolution is the end of culture: the constant dilution of the forms of virtue, ethics, and religious faith that have sustained the spiritual life of humanity from the beginning of history. It is the image that is instrumental in this destruction. For, insofar as the highest possibilities of self-overcoming are provoked by the sheer unpredictability of events, the generic configuration of reality through technological means of representation is, by definition, a reduction of this contingency to a paralysing repetition of the familiarity (Nietzsche, 1994: 239). The issue here, of course, concerns the possibility of not simply inhabiting this sphere of generic figuration, but of overcoming its totalizing powers. In Nietzsche’s thought, the happiness that arises from demotic culture is part of an economy of risk and stability that is in constant flux: the distribution of happiness that takes place through the means of culture always includes the experience of mortality and satiation that is produced in those ‘higher natures’, whose excessive will disrupts the technological reproduction of the social totality. Horkheimer and Adorno’s original formulation of the culture industry thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment, however, maintains that the influence of media technologies has become so pervasive, that they have colonized the conditions under which the formation of will and subjectivity takes place. The image has become the very form of ideological management, for it constantly reconfigures the labile, but ultimately repetitive, desires of each individual consumer (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 124–31). So, is it the case that Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of reified totality marks the point at which every act of excessive will, and the transformative joy to which this gives rise, is anticipated by the synthetic-aesthetic organization of reality? In the dedication that begins Minima Moralia, Adorno introduces his exposition of modernity as a ‘melancholy science’ that seeks the good life in the traces of its erasure from the reified networks of capital (Adorno, 1996: 15). His writing pursues the insinuation of functional codes into the very fabric of human experience, and configures a speculative vision that would ‘contemplate

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all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’ (Adorno, 1996: 247). Thus, the moral purpose of Adorno’s critique lies close to Schopenhauer’s demand for restraint within the irrational violence of the world. For it is in the glimpses of peaceful totality that occasionally emerge from the logic of reification, that the utopian imagination of alternative forms of existence is kept alive (Adorno, 1996: 224–5). From a Nietzschean perspective, of course, this melancholic critique of the evil of the world is entirely inadequate, for it ends up positing the ruins of divine transcendence as the ultimate ground on which the future can be imagined. The visions of destruction through which Adorno configures the moral demand that inhabits the corpus of humanity, and the responsibility of art to that demand, can be no more than the perpetuation of hopeless pity (Adorno, 1990: 361–408). What Nietzsche’s materialism demands, on the other hand, is not the morbid return of the imagination to the vulnerability of the flesh, but an aesthetics that would solicit the careless power of great individuals, and a science that would lead them deeper into the contingency of the world (Nietzsche, 1974: 327–33). The power of Horkheimer and Adorno’s thesis lies in their account of how civil society becomes the sphere in which the influence of the commodity form on human happiness becomes absolute. As we have seen, the culture industry is the reduction of reality to its image; every social relationship is reduced to a play of ‘aesthetic semblance’ that conceals its relationship to the totality of commodified life (Adorno, 1991: 61). This, for Adorno, is the tragedy of pure culture, for the culture industry’s complete aestheticization of experience forms all of us into distracted consumers who know the world only as the object of our particular desires. Such is the ideological power of the pleasures that are essential to this culture, that even the spectacle of war, terrorism, and loss of democracy that are their inevitable cost is insufficient to educate us, and we begin to take a despairing pleasure in the destruction of our humanity (Adorno, 1990: 398; Tubbs, 2008: 91–3). The difference between Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s theories of the tragedy of culture lies in their respective approaches to the relationship between aesthetic affection and the presence of the real in the soul of humanity. In Nietzsche’s philosophy, the mass degradation of aesthetic experience carries within it the possibility of a transgressive ressentiment, which would put the boredom of industrialized culture to flight. The cautious precision of Adorno’s negative dialectics, however, remains suspicious of such solicitations of individual will and creative conflict; for it seems as if the ruination of culture is so complete

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that even the greatest acts of sacrifice, or love, could not be received by the mass of humanity. The question we are left with therefore, concerns the form and possibility of transgression within the totality of reified life. And so, in the final section, I will examine the hyper-aesthetic culture that has come to define the epoch of ‘postmodernity’, and the chance of moral desire within the networks of synthetic happiness.

Simulacra of happiness We need to pause here for a moment to take stock of where we are. So far, I have set out the relationship between happiness and representation as part of a speculative history in which representation has become the condition on which sensations of pleasure, restraint, responsibility, passion, and love can be experienced as happiness. In Hegel’s thought the concept of Vorstellung is conceived as a medium that, even in its highest aesthetic manifestations, is inadequate to reveal the truth of spirit. And so it is destined to occupy a subordinate place in the hierarchy of ethical life, one whose proper function is to configure the absolute within the practical-intuitive life of civil society. Romantic art, however, carries the medium of representation beyond this proportionality, and the chimerical figures it presents to the senses are implicated in the formation of subjective cultures that threaten the integrity of Sittlichkeit. For, although Romanticism is a rejection of bourgeois economic life, its elevation of each individual to the defender of his own particular faith and happiness, can only increase the egoism that is present in civil society. So, despite the fact that the substance of ethical life includes the moment of aesthetic affection, the concept of the state demands that this is made subject to the institutional forms in which its authority is realized (family, police, judiciary, and corporation). If there is to be a virtuous happiness that does not constantly redetermine the aporias of luxury, irony, and self-aggrandizement therefore, this can only arise from the intuitive forms of good sense that have crystallized in the corporations, and which serve to restrain the overactive imaginary of bourgeois Romanticism (Hegel, 1967b: 152–5). This account of the aesthetic configuration of the individual ego is important because it exemplifies a particular concept of modernity. For Hegel, the relationship between the institutions of ethical life and their representation as Vorstellung is such that the latter appears as the medium of possibility. The

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lived experience of self-consciousness always misrecognizes the aporias of work, satisfaction, and desire that arise in its particular epoch; and yet this misrecognition is the precursor to the more adequate expressions of subjectivity that mark the historical progress of spirit. What is important here is Hegel’s designation of modernity as the point at which the relationship between representation and the substance of ethical life becomes acutely problematic. For, as the sphere of representation begins to float free of concrete social relations, so its configuration of experience is consigned to an arbitrary play of images that is inadequate to the truth of the Idea (Hegel, 1993: 87). This designation of the aesthetic is distinctively modern in the sense that it gives priority to less ambiguous modes of apprehension, and subjects ‘picture thinking’ to a logic of restraint and prohibition within the totality of ethical life. In Nietzsche’s thought, on the other hand, the relationship between truth and representation is such that the objective relations of Sittlichkeit are originally co-present with the figurative power of the aesthetic – to the point that it is impossible to disentangle the unity of the Idea from the sensory-intuitive figures of Vorstellung. Thus, the concept of ‘subjective culture’ that Hegel uses to designate the effects of the modern aesthetic, cannot be confined to the forms of luxury, servitude, and domination that arise in civil society. If there is such a culture, it entails the possibility of an excess of individual will that is irreducible to the movement of self-consciousness towards a universally mediated state of satisfaction. The aesthetic, in other words, is the form through which subjectivity differentiates itself as will to power and bestowing virtue, even though this process always obscures itself in the misunderstanding, trivialization, and distraction that is co-present with all truly creative activity (Nietzsche, 1984: 99–104). The relationship between truth, power, and the aesthetic is, as we have seen, the initial concern of Nietzsche’s philosophy. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is an account of how Greek drama was able to unify ethical life through its staging of the clash between the eternal laws of the gods and the wilfulness of man. Within this pre-Socratic epoch, the aesthetic maintains a sublime balance between the Dionysian excess of nature/instinct and the Apollonian regime of form and image. For perhaps the only time in history, ‘the masses’, or, to use Nietzsche’s term, ‘the herd’, are spiritualized by their experience of the conflict between human culture and the divine and unfathomable contingency of nature. What comes after the Classical epoch is a degradation of this conflict: the domination of the Apollonian ideal produces a world in which ‘non-sensuality assumes the rank of perfection, in which the brutal, the animal,

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the proximate must be avoided’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 187). Thus it would not be unfair to say that, for Nietzsche, the defining problem of modernity is that of representation. Insofar as the history of Western art has been narrated from the point of view of an Apollonian teleology, Nietzsche’s fundamental concern is with the possibility of an instinctual intellect (or an intellectual instinct) that could rupture the aura of harmonious ethical life. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the possibility of such a transformative power is conceived as radical solitude; for it is only insofar as the superman is able to wrench himself free of the utilitarian pleasures of the eye and the stomach, that his virtue can disturb the demotic happiness of the marketplace (Nietzsche, 1984: 78–81). And so, Zarathustra’s songs and the poetry of his words are addressed to the traces of the future that live in the most powerful souls, those who anticipate the ‘free spirits’ for whom the world will be the source of joyful overcoming (Nietzsche, 1984: 99–104). There is, then, a secret economy that Nietzsche puts into play with his concept of the aesthetic – a play of power, illusion, and autonomy whose logic Derrida interrogates in Spurs. One of Nietzsche’s most famous maxims is that when one ‘gazes long into an abyss’, one is not confronted by something that leaves the structures of one’s identity undisturbed. The abyss is a monstrous absence, a total lack of determination that looks back into the individual and shakes the very substance of his desires and satisfactions (Nietzsche 1979: 84). The question that arises here, of course, concerns the chance of man’s encounter with this annihilating absence; of how he is drawn towards the destructive power of the abyss and of the effects it has upon his being in the world. For Nietzsche, the possibility of this encounter is ever present in human experience. For, insofar as the truth of the world is revealed through the contingent figurations of the aesthetic, the possibility of glimpsing the nothingness that underlies the dissimulations of the image is an essential element of human experience. It is this ‘absence’ that lies at the core of Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche in Spurs. His argument is that Nietzsche’s references to ‘woman’ as lack and caprice are not simply the philosophical apotheosis of man as universal creator. Rather, the capricious woman that Nietzsche presents in Human, All Too Human and The Gay Science is, for Derrida, the expression of a ‘spiritualized sensuality’ that arises from Christianity’s attempt to castrate the life of the passions. It is the fact of such an unpredictable resistance within the regime of acetic Enlightenment that reveals the contingency of all truth; for the gesture/style of alterity that Derrida calls ‘the feminine’ is always dispersed into the aesthetic conventions of ethical life (Derrida, 1979: 92). Thus, if there is to be a self-overcoming that is

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worthy of the superman, it is essentially related to the conjunction of strength, weakness, and duplicity that is configured in woman’s strange departure from the life of the totality – her encounter with the abyss (Derrida, 1979: 101). I will return to this in moment. We come now to the politics of representation that Derrida traces in his work on the aesthetic, and particularly the reconfiguration of Nietzsche this entails. In his essay ‘Envoi’, Derrida presents a theory of how language, representation, and philosophy are related to each other, and of how the Platonic-Socratic understanding of this relationship has come to dominate the ethics and politics of representation2. The essay begins by addressing the question of the origin of this Socratic hegemony, that is, the claim that the fundamental concepts deployed by philosophy as such, are unaffected by the languages in which they are expressed, and that the idiomatic meanings that constitute the identity of these languages can be filtered out by sufficiently rigorous processes of translation. What this entails is that ‘representation’ appears as a neutral space that, even though it is divided into different regions by the idiomatic forms of language, is able to sustain the possibility of a cross-cultural transparency of concepts (Derrida, 2007: 100). It is this idea of remainderless translation that, for Derrida, lies at the origin of Western philosophies of representation (epistemology, aesthetics, and politics). The Socratic idea of representation, as we have seen, entails that the idiomatic diversity of language determines a universal field of meaning constituted for the revelation of the object. And so, the sense of security we derive from the objective forms of social life, moral identity, law and order, and political authority, can be traced to the idea that the presence of the signifier to the mind of the subject is, if all the proper precautions are followed, adequate to the being of the object (Derrida, 2007a: 103). According to Derrida, however, this account of representation is pre-philosophical, in that it begins by eliding the economy of representation, which stages reality through analytical processes of synthesis, reintegration, and deferral, with the concept of presence, through which the operations of representation are gathered into categories of being. Derrida’s strategy of treating the conventional idea of representation as the outcome of a phenomenological ontology that runs throughout Western philosophy, therefore, is an attempt to show that the ‘reality’ which presents itself as present is, from the beginning, haunted by the ghosts of ‘others’ who are excluded from the protocols of representational thinking. Thus, the critique of representation that Derrida pursues in ‘Envoi’, is an attempt to disclose the objectifying processes through which Enlightenment

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philosophy has pursued the disclosure of being, and the complicity of these processes with the exclusion of all that is ‘unrepresentable’ within the regime of ethics, legality, and value (Derrida, 2007a: 107–8). Heidegger’s essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’ (see Heidegger, 1996) is important here, as it introduces a sense of the historical contingency through which the modern regime of representation came into being. Heidegger argues that although the origin of this regime can be traced to the Greek idea of Anwesenheit, that is, to the proximity of being and its apprehension that is given in the aesthetic unity of the Polis, this relationship is not the same as the one in which the modern subject imposes the synthetic categories of the intellect on the disorder of the world. Thus, the relationship between the Socratic concept of representation and the one that has come to define modernity is not one of strict teleology. Rather, the Ancient Greek world is conceived by Heidegger as the epoch of man’s closest proximity to being, and the modern epoch of representation that follows it, as a regime of distantiation in which man’s ethical, political, and aesthetic experience has become increasingly inauthentic. What is sent as an envoi from the Greek world, in other words, is the ghost of Anwesenheit that casts ontological doubt on modern representative institutions: abstract art, representative democracy, and procedural moralities. None of these subjective forms can possibly be a source of true happiness for they all deepen the sense of man’s alienation from himself. Derrida’s reading of ‘The Age of the World Picture’, however, maintains that Heidegger’s critique of the representational regime of modernity ends up as an act of mourning for the greatness of the Polis. For the fact that he maintains that this regime is the outcome of an envoi from the Greek world, means that his account of the dangers of the aesthetic imagination (loss of authenticity, hiding from mortality, the distractions of idle chatter) presupposes an originary unity of being and representation in the life of the Classical Greek state (Derrida, 2007a: 122). Yet, for Derrida, the logic of this presupposition is such that it ruptures the unity from which it proceeds; for the criteria through which Heidegger evaluates the community of the Anwesenheit are precisely those which are supplied by the modern epoch’s regime of abstract representation (adequacy, deducibility, and legality). Thus, the idea of pre-Socratic presence that informs Heidegger’s critique of modernity is originally contaminated by the abstract categories through which it is presented. The envoi of being can never arrive at its destination without bringing with it the sense that its unity was, from the beginning, displaced into the abstract regime of the law (Derrida, 2007a: 122).

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So, by maintaining that man’s relationship to Being has degenerated into a crisis of authenticity, Heidegger’s thought functions to determine the proper place of representation within the modern order of law, religion and ethics (Sittlichkeit), and to designate it as a mode of affection whose purpose is to rejuvenate the being of nation, home, and people (Derrida, 2007a: 126–7; 1990a: 73–82). This brings me finally to the concept of postmodernism and its relationship to the politics of happiness. Derrida remarked in ‘Envoi’, ‘If there has been representation, it is perhaps, precisely, because the envoi of Being was originally menaced in its being-together’ (Derrida, 2007a: 122). The temporal economy of representation, in other words, gives rise to a complex logic of dissemination even within the ethical substance of the Polis; for the play of figuration, deferral, and remainder that is implicit in the Apollonian aesthetic is the originary condition of their being a community of responsible citizens. So, if this is the case, the technological intensification of the image sphere that culminates in the virtual networks that have come to saturate contemporary society, should be understood as part of a history of representation that constantly provokes ‘the political’ beyond the programmatic contestation of the public sphere. What is important in Derrida’s analysis is his insistence that the tragedy of culture, which is essentially the collapse of the real into its aesthetic representation, cannot stage itself without disseminating traces of the ‘outside’ it constantly seeks to appropriate. Thus, Baudrillard’s account of fourth-order simulation, in which the technologically reproducible image has completely broken away from the real, is never quite able to escape from the trace of alterity that is both its condition and its impossibility (Baudrillard, 2000: 3–7). For, even though the happiness of the postmodern individual is constantly transformed by the evanescence of its objects (gender reassignment, sexless reproduction, body prosthesis), such virtual desires always carry within them the spectre of unforeseen suffering and responsibility. So, while there is certainly some truth in Baudrillard’s contention that ‘the masses’ have been transformed by the virtual technologies which have replaced the old devices of the culture industry, it is, I believe, their intensification of love, sex, war, and consumption beyond all limits, that provokes the return of a certain ethical desire (for the other). I have argued elsewhere that the essence of Baudrillard’s hyperreality thesis is the claim that media technologies have become such efficient fabricators of the real that they have all but erased the experience of death from the realm of the social3. The postmodern world, in other words, becomes a ‘managed playground’ in which ethics, politics, and happiness are reduced to stylistic

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affects of simulation, and the experience of death – in the destitution of the other, the violence of the law, or the strange attraction of the feminine – is erased. As we have seen, the genealogy of the image Derrida presents in ‘Envoi’ calls the possibility of such an erasure into question. If the solicitation of remainders is the essence of representation, and if the technological intensification of this process constantly reconfigures our experience of the relationship between pleasure, mortality, and responsibility, then the chance of unforeseen acts of transgression is always retraced within the system of hyperreality. The encounter between Third and First World nations, for example, could never be completely co-opted by the faux cosmopolitanism of debt management and global charity spectaculars (Baudrillard, 1994: 26–35; 1995: 67): as Derrida argues in Rogues, the processes of representation through which these interventions appear as the epitome of human compassion would simultaneously configure the effects of passivity, silencing, and loss that are the fragile trace of the political within the regime of global accumulation (Derrida, 2005: 157). There is therefore something of the sublime in the virtual systems of the network society; something ghostly and disturbing that plays around the aesthetic codes that transform the destitution of others into a source of moral desire. Perhaps then, it is possible to offer a slightly different take on the conjunction of practical, aesthetic, and economic affects that have become known as ‘postmodernity’. Marxist analyses have tended towards the idea that postmodernity is the ideological reflex of global capitalism, in which traditional, nationally based forms of social solidarity have been displaced by the phantasmagoria of consumer desire (Jameson, 1995; Harvey, 1999). However, if we conceive the experience of postmodernity as the outcome of fundamental shifts in the relationship between aesthetic representation and the constitution of ethical life (as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida have done), then the feelings of displacement that have accompanied the postmodern regime of excess signify rather more than the strategic capture of desire by global capitalism. Considered as a technoaesthetic culture, the postmodern epoch is the point at which the relationship between ideology and the experience of solidarity has become one of performance; the satisfactions of class, race, religion, and sex, have become part of the play of technological representation (Bennington and Derrida, 1993: 349; Derrida and Stiegler, 2002: 1–29). This technological staging of ethical life is one of constant transformation, for the proliferation of signs through which political solidarities are experienced is without limit or reserve: fascism re-emerges as the good defender of the homeland against immigration; socialism becomes

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the reactionary voice of the white working class; and religious fundamentalism emerges as the only alternative to the disenchantment of postmodern life. The politics of happiness that has emerged from the media-saturated world, in other words, is a politics of purity; for the appeals to collective life that have emerged from the labile patterns of postmodern aesthetics are attempts to conjure an experience of unity from an illimitable play of difference. Thus, in the chapters that follow, I will trace the dynamic of this politics; its infinite re-presentation of the state of happiness, and the economy of hope and violence this opens up.

Notes 1 In his Epilogue to ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin pointed to the politicization of art that had emerged with the Bolshevik revolution. He saw the essence of socialist realism as its constant re-presentation of the great revolutionary moment, and its depiction of the happy simplicity with which all classes worked towards goals of collective life (Benjamin, 1992: 141). 2 The essay was originally presented by Derrida as the opening address at the 18th Annual Congress of the Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française at the University of Strasbourg. 3 See ‘The Spectre and the Simulacrum: History After Baudrillard’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 25, No. 6 November 2008.

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Marxism, Socialism and the Beautiful Object of Labour Organic labour and species being In his book The Destruction of Reason, the Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács expounds a history of philosophy in which the relationship between reason and the evolution of capital is traced through the various phases of bourgeois Idealism, Empiricism, and Utilitarianism. In the course of this history, Lukács presents Schopenhauer’s thought as a kind of hopeless Romanticism, in which the increasingly reified relations of human culture are conceived as the metaphysical condition of human suffering. Thus, Schopenhauer’s claim that the only ‘moral’ response to this condition is a kind of monadic quietism is indicted with leading philosophy into a blind acceptance of the suffering of the world that lacks any concept of revolutionary transformation (Lukács, 1980: 200–1). I would suggest, however, that the question raised by Schopenhauer’s philosophy is rather more subtle and persistent than Lukács maintains, as it concerns the nature of the economic necessity that historical materialism seeks to describe, and the expectation of happiness that it is reasonable to invest in Marxism as a political philosophy. It is these two issues that inform the expository structure of the present chapter. The anthropology that Marx presents in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is, in essence, the disclosure of a possibility: of a mode of production in which the creative labour of the human species becomes the explicit meaning, purpose, and object of social existence (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 91–2). The question that emerges from this original designation of human labour concerns the relationship between the form of economic necessity embodied in the mode of production, and the subjective recognition of that necessity which Marx calls class-consciousness1. What has become known as ‘voluntarist Marxism’ tends to give more weight to the latter in its description of political praxis, as it situates the transformative power of the revolution in the collective forms of subjectivity that emerge from within the proletarian movement itself. Rosa Luxemburg, for

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example, maintained that the event of the revolution was inconceivable without the collective satisfaction constituted through heterogeneous forms of resistance and cooperation (Luxemburg, 1961: 10–26). Lenin’s appeal to the strategic organization of the masses by the revolutionary vanguard of the Party, on the other hand, was rather more sceptical about the formative power of local agency. For although he demanded the destruction of the ‘special apparatus’ through which the capitalist state maintains control of the working class, he also maintained that the necessity of the revolution was such that it could not be left to the chance that spontaneous solidarity will triumph over the organized interests of bourgeois society (Lenin, 1976: 44–68). Thus, as we will see, the place of happiness in Marx’s thought is essentially bound up with the disparate history of Marxism, and particularly the relationship of Marxist politics to the questions of suffering, agency, and responsibility that constitute the philosophy of spirit. Louis Althusser’s essay ‘On the Young Marx’ highlights an issue that inevitably complicates the discussion of the place of happiness in Marx’s thought. Famously, he claims that there is a definitive break between the young Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the mature Marx of Capital, and that this break is characterized by an epistemological departure from Hegel necessitated by the social, economic, and ideological evolution of capitalism (Althusser, 1986: 62–3). Marx’s materialism, in other words, is conceived as emerging from his consistent refusal to allow the return of the categories of Geist through the political representations of left-Hegelians like Bruno Bauer, David Strauss and Arnold Ruge (Althusser, 1986: 60). Their respective configurations of ‘spirit’ are conceived by Althusser as determining the cultural field into which Marxism originally enters: for each perpetuates the uniquely German sphere of ideology in which the ideals of freedom, morality, and democracy appear to float free of the limits which capitalism imposes on their realization. Thus, insofar as there is a teleological movement in Marx’s thought, it develops through his articulation of the structural causality that, for Althusser, becomes the exclusive basis of his critique of capital. Or, to change the emphasis slightly, Marx’s break from the Hegelianism of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts begins with The German Ideology’s attempt to specify the relationship between the economic base (forces of production) and the bourgeois ideals through which the mode of exploitation is represented (ideological superstructure) (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 160–8). According to Althusser’s reading, the revival of interest in Marx’s early writings in the 1950s and 1960s had a political significance that can be traced

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beyond the boundaries of pure intellectual history. From the perspective of scientific materialism, the exhumation of Marx’s early writings prefigured the re-emergence of a certain left-Hegelianism (or Socialist-Humanism) that attempted to situate the critique of estranged labour within the historical dialectics of Hegelian spirit. For Althusser, this ideological conjunction demanded a materialist response that would specify whether or not the young ‘Hegelian’ Marx should be regarded as integral to Marxist science; for, in the absence of such a theoretical determination, there would remain a risk that historical materialism would become contaminated with ideals of human nature, spontaneous autonomy, and subjective feeling that, strictly speaking, belong to Hegelian philosophy (Althusser, 1986: 53). This question of contamination is crucial to understanding Marxism’s relationship to the concept of happiness. As we saw in the previous chapter, Marx’s critique of ideology is an attempt to disentangle the illusory forms through which religion and philosophy configure the essence of capital from the everyday experience of exploitation that arises from the class position of the proletariat. The account of the subjective and institutional life of civil society begun in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and developed through The German Ideology, is presented by Althusser as a critique of the accumulation of idealist culture around the expanding regime of commodification. So, for example, the moral individual who knows himself as the subject of self-regarding rights and duties is seen as a fundamentally ‘bourgeois’ construction whose autonomy is inconceivable apart from the regime of private appropriation. Thus, the mode of production to come after capitalism would sustain neither the strictures of such a morality nor the satisfactions that are part of its economy of denial: its fundamental premise is the abolition of the antagonistic relationships that maintain the sphere of bourgeois economic activity (Jay, 1984: 412–13). According to Althusser, the danger of fetishizing Marx’s early work is that of transforming Marxism into a revisionist project that would seek to purify the ideals of bourgeois political philosophy of their complicity with class exploitation (Althusser, 1986: 60). What is required, therefore, is a new vocabulary that would capture the forms of community, cooperation, and responsibility that arise from the practical relations of socialized production and which expresses the collective labour of the totality. The difficulty here, of course, is that of uncoupling this new vocabulary from the archive of ‘ruling ideas’ that have dominated the ideological life of class-based societies. There are, I think, two ways of understanding this demand for purification. The first is the line that

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Althusser inherits from Lenin: that the proletarian democracy that is to come from the revolutionary condensation of the masses will give rise to fundamental rules of community that become ingrained in every sphere of social, economic and political life (Lenin, 1976: 115–24). The second anticipates something of the deconstructive reading of Marx I will develop in the final section of the chapter. This line of argument maintains that it is impossible to disentangle the fundamental rules of social life from the ruling ideas, and that the attempt to do it is not only futile, but betrays the revolutionary gesture that is made in Marx’s thought. For, by making the concepts of proletarian democracy and socialized production into legislative demands determined through the strategic organization of the proletariat, Marxist politics becomes detached from the critique of bourgeois subjectivity, technological development, and commodification that, at least for Derrida, is the essence of Marxist critique. From the latter perspective, Althusser’s demand that the science of historical materialism should be purified of the Hegelian inheritance of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is based on a misunderstanding of the persistence of Marxism, both as a political ideology and a mode of critical exposition. The persistence of Marxism is, I would contend, based upon five related elements: 1) the critique of the economics of waste, 2) the promise of the overthrow of the bourgeois state, 3) the theory of the immanent purpose of human history (the end of class exploitation), 4) the theory of radical democracy and distributive justice, and 5) the theory of human flourishing. The first four elements are what, for Althusser, constitute the core of a scientific Marxism, whose development proceeds through the exclusion of the metaphysics of human labour presented in Marx’s early writing. Derrida’s disagreement with Althusser’s reading of Marx is that it assumes that the realm of bourgeois ideology will pass quietly into the history of obsolete ideas, never to return to the exigencies of the present (Derrida in Sprinker, 1999: 182–231). The materialist science that Althusser sought to expound, in other words, would supposedly break free of the ideological categories of bourgeois political economy, and determine the conditions under which the necessities of social being would become the core of individual identity formation. In Derrida’s reading, however, this project is always haunted by the return of unquiet ghosts: if it is the case that the capitalism persists through its determination of affects and contingencies that exceed its structural organization as class society (virtual realities, technological prosthesis, genetic recoding), then the return of ‘bourgeois’ concepts of law, morality, ethics, and religion is part of a far more complex logic of recurrence

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than the one entailed in the Marxist concept of revisionism. The return of these concepts, in other words, gives rise to a plurality of contestations through which the fate of Marxism is constantly redetermined; for it is the fundamental satisfactions of labour, community, and autonomy postulated at the beginning of Marx’s philosophy, and their transformation in response to the media-technoscientific evolution of capitalism, that keeps open the political project of Marxism. The three sections that follow therefore are concerned with the relationship of Marx’s ideas of labour, self-fulfilment, and socialized production to the philosophies of desire presented by Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida. In order to expound this relationship, however, I need to begin by setting out the detail of Marx’s account of the transformative potential of human labour, as it is here that it is possible to discern the outline of his concept of human happiness. Marx’s idea of happiness is embedded in a theory of human labour developed as part of his critique of idealist philosophy. As is well known, the first of his Theses on Feuerbach maintained that: The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism … is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectivity. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such (Marx in McLellan 1977: 156).

Materialist philosophy, and particularly that of Feuerbach, begins with the bare fact of being, which is conceived as an object of contemplation independent of the human capacity for practical action. Idealism, on the other hand, develops the ‘active side’ of human existence in the form of abstract faculties, categorical imperatives, and speculative anthropologies that fail to comprehend the dialectical relationship of self-consciousness to the material world it inhabits. Thus, for Marx, the truth of man’s being in the world is the mediation of his selfconsciousness through ‘sensuous activity’ (labour): the categories through which he knows the world are constantly transformed in the encounter between practical intelligence and what Marx called ‘the inorganic body of nature’. It is important to recognize however, that the aphoristic style of the Theses on Feuerbach tends to obscure the fact that, in Marx’s thought, the relationship of self-consciousness to the sensuous world is essentially social; for the encounter between man and nature, which founds the productive organization of human

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society, is grounded in primitive forms of cooperation which emerge from the violent necessity of the state of nature. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx configures the relationship between self-consciousness and sensuous activity through the concept of ‘species-being’, that is, the dual determination of man as the being whose activity contributes simultaneously to his physical and spiritual life (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 82–3). Nature, in other words, is the ‘inorganic body’ of humanity; it is the means both of their physical subsistence and of their spiritual development through the practical activities of art, science, and productive technique. And yet, the history of humanity’s social labour is one of progressive estrangement. For, although the development of the forces of production that takes place in the transitions from primitive to feudalist to capitalist societies increases the potential to satisfy the totality of human needs, the persistence of private property relations means that access to the means of subsistence (commodified nature) is monopolized by the bourgeois class. In fact, the M-C-M relation, which reduces labour to a commodity that can be bought and sold on the open market, constitutes the highest point of human estrangement; for the transformation of the worker into a calculable element in the production of commodities determines a constant and methodical corruption of the faculties that constitute his or her humanity. Marx’s description of estranged labour specifies four elements in this process of dehumanization: estrangement from the product of labour, estrangement from the productive process, estrangement of ‘man from man’, and estrangement from ‘species-being’. So, the fact of the appropriation of the product of labour by the capitalist for sale on the market, means that the more the worker produces, the more impoverished he becomes. The outcome of this process is that each individual encounters his fellow producers only as the means to his own instrumental labour. Thus, the overall effect of capital on the labour process is the estrangement of humanity from its species-being, that is, from the vocation of man to perfect himself through the perfection of the organic body of nature (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 84–7). In both Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, the primal scene from which humanity emerges into language and cooperation is presented as the communal labour of hunter-gatherer tribes, in which the activity of each individual is subsumed under the needs of the group. What emerges from this primitive condition is the very possibility of human civilization: once the production of the means of subsistence has been made subject

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to principles of strategy and protentive imagination, no matter how primitive, man has distinguished himself from the instinctual life of the animal. So, the simple imitation of hunting or gathering techniques practised by other species passes over into practical activities that involve higher cognitive functions of judgement, innovation, and technique. Having broken the link between instinct and the satisfaction need therefore, the species-being of humanity is no longer limited to the simple satisfaction of its material needs: the emergence of reason and judgement initiates a relationship in which humanity becomes responsible both to its own perfectibility and to that of nature. As Marx puts it, ‘man knows how to apply everywhere the inherent standard of the object [he] therefore also forms objects in accordance with the laws of beauty’ (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 82). There are two important points that emerge from this account of the origin of human self-consciousness. The first is that it is haunted by a concept of originary community that Engels refers to as the ‘primitive communism’ of the consanguine family (Engels, 2010: 66–8). The fundamental idea is that, at the beginning of history, the organization of human society is such that the law springs from the immediate needs of humanity, and that relationships among men are such that their unity (with one another and with the subordinate presence of women and children) springs from their common experience of work, satisfaction, and desire. For, even though the division of labour in such primitive societies eventually gives rise to the violence of private appropriation, it is this originary form of cooperative labour that underlies the revolutionary promise of Marx’s work. It is, I will argue, impossible to disentangle this promise from a particular concept of collective being which is implicit in the expository structure of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: a concept which is, from the beginning, distinguished from the regime of bourgeois acquisitiveness that is the absolute negation of man’s creative autonomy (Marx in McLellan 1977: 77–8). Yet this is not a concept of happiness, for the doctrine of subjective feeling and aesthetic taste that defines bourgeois satisfaction belongs explicitly to the egoism of civil society. Rather, the utopian hope of Marx’s theory of labour is for a collective flourishing which will come after the regime of commodification; a system in which productive activity regains its cooperative essence, and the life of the individual is given back its concrete relationship to both Man and Nature (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 168–71). This brings me to my second point. In Marx’s early writing, autonomous labour is presented as the simultaneous realization of creative spirit, alleviation

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of suffering, and substantive purpose of human community; it is that which has the capacity to transform both the world and the being of humanity. Althusser’s account of the development of Marx’s theory, as we have seen, maintains that there is an epistemic break in Marx’s work, and that consequently, this ‘Hegelian’ notion of human nature and all its attendant ideas of happiness, fulfilment, and morality, has to be rejected in favour of the structural analysis of capitalism implicit in his later writing. This claim is, it seems to me, unsustainable. Not for the reasons put forward by humanist critics of Althusser (that Marx’s early writings on creative labour are the real truth of his thought2), but because the ‘scientific’ method he developed in his later writings on capitalism remains entangled with the metaphysics of labour set out in his early work. Indeed, the labour theory of value originates in the ‘pre-scientific’ phase of Marx’s thought: it is only insofar as the ‘organic labour’ of the proletariat is conceived as creating value ‘throughout every instant it is in motion’, and as the antithesis of ‘fixed capital’ that can only increase the speed of production, that Marx is able to derive the self-destructive tendency of capitalism from its historical development (Marx, 1990: 316). Towards the end of Grundrisse, Marx argues that, under the regime of industrial capitalism, machine technologies have become the ‘objective power’ that dictates the temporality of the labour process (Marx, 1993: 692). He understands this deployment of machinery as essential to the development of the mode of production: insofar as it is true that machines can achieve their potential for increasing relative surplus value only if they are run almost without cessation, the consequence for those workers who remain in employment is that they are made to perform ever-more repetitive tasks for an ever-larger proportion of the day (Marx, 1993: 822). Considered from the perspective of the worker, therefore, the tendency to increase expenditure on machinery results in the ‘real subsumption’ of his creative labour under the objective power of capital (Marx, 1993: 694). Considered from a historical perspective, however, this tendency is immanently social. Even though the accelerated temporality of the labour process arises from the demands of private appropriation, its overall effect is to reduce the time necessary for the production of use values. Thus, for Marx, the historical evolution of capitalism is determined by a contradiction: on the one hand it increases the efficiency with which human labour can produce the means of subsistence (and thereby opens the possibility of a social form of production in which labour would be freed from the yoke of physical compulsion), while on the other hand it channels this intensified labour power into the production

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of superfluous commodities, the process of whose manufacture is the concrete fact of human unhappiness (Marx, 1993: 824). Marx expresses this contradictory determination of capital’s pursuit of organic labour in two different registers. In the first of these, his aim is to set out the different shapes which fixed and organic capital assume under large-scale industry, and to map out the crises of over-production and underconsumption which are entailed in the technological intensification of labour power (Marx, 1990: 435). Even in Capital, however, this ‘scientific’ register is interwoven with the ethico-aesthetic demand that originates in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts – that the productive desire and general intellect of humanity should regain its right of access to the inorganic body of nature. The systematic alienation of human beings from their productive essence therefore begins with the M-C-M relation; it is brought into existence through capital’s first moment of self-valorization and made increasingly acute by its transformation of the technological means of labour. According to Marx, the dialectics of historical necessity and human emancipation are intrinsically related. While it is true that his theory of ideology discloses a powerful movement of displacement among the forms of religion and citizenship, the practical experience of alienation always haunts the illusory happiness of bourgeois society. Thus, the end of capitalism is determined by its concentration of three essentially related effects: the over-representation of fixed capital in the M-C-M relation, the socialization of labour under technological systems, and the practical and affective composition of the working class as a revolutionary subject (Marx, 1990: 926). In the sections that follow, I will examine the possibility of this revolutionary condensation of the masses, and the questions of freedom, responsibility, and happiness to which it gives rise. For, despite his claims to the contrary, Marx’s account of human labour takes place within the logos of the philosophy of spirit, so I will trace some of the major themes that have arisen from Marxism’s encounter with neo-Hegelianism, neo-Nietzscheanism, and deconstruction.

The promise of revolutionary materialism In this section, I will examine the terms of a radical shift in the concept of modernity announced in Marx’s writing. This is most clearly expressed at the start of The Communist Manifesto where Marx presents the impact of bourgeois

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economic relations on traditional forms of social, religious, and political life in the following way: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all previous ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of venerable prejudices are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 224).

What Marx is describing here is the transformation of feudalist society through the formal structure of the M-C-M relation: all of the old values that supported the ancien régime are made subject to an accumulative demand that transforms the totality of social life into a medium of economic exchange. The production of surplus value becomes the universal imperative that determines social action; and so the existence of every non-economic institution depends on its ability to facilitate the turnover of capital. Marx’s assertion that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ therefore, announces a radically new form of individualism; one in which each person comes to see himself as both the source of his own freedom and as morally independent of the heteronomous authority of state and religion. It is this conjunction of radical individualism and economic necessity that, for Marx, cannot be sublated within the metaphysical unity of Sittlichkeit. He maintains that capitalism performs the historical destruction of Hegelian spirit, that is, its reduction to ideological figures of authority and religiosity whose ‘substance’ belongs to pre-capitalist modes of production (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 300). So, even if it is the case that Marx and Hegel share a concern with the transient nature of bourgeois satisfaction, the question of the possibility of happiness within the totality of market relations is posed in fundamentally different ways. My contention is not that Hegel is simply wrong about the relationship between happiness and social totality, or that Marx’s analysis of capital has succeeded in banishing the spectre of philosophy from the question of human flourishing. What Marx does do is radically alter the terms of this question. His analysis of the revolutionary effects of capital on the political, religious, and technological organization of society is such that the recuperative powers of bourgeois economic relations have been fundamentally undermined. Thus, while it is true that certain ‘Hegelian’ questions do re-emerge from Marx’s

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account of revolutionary praxis and the social organization of labour, these questions arise from the dynamics of fetishized production and consumption that are the core of his critique of capitalism. Any neo-Hegelian politics of happiness must therefore begin with Marx’s characterization of the bourgeois epoch as ‘everlasting agitation’: if there is to be a return to something like the mediated totality of the Greek Polis, this must arise out of the dispersal of abstract individuals across radically heterogeneous regimes of pleasure, utility, and servitude. In its more right-leaning forms, this politics maintains that capital is merely one component of civil society, and that the history of modernity cannot be adequately understood without reference to the autonomy of the spheres of law, morality, and ethics that regulate the relationship between state and economy3. The key to happiness therefore, is to defend the objective morality of ethical life (the spheres of law, justice, conscience, and religion) against the reductive powers of both socialism and market economics. A more interesting engagement with Marx’s account of bourgeois economic relations, however, is presented in Gillian Rose’s Hegel Contra Sociology. Put rather too simply, her argument is that Hegelian philosophy is not ‘dialectical’ but ‘speculative’, and that the transformations of subjective feeling, aesthetic taste, and legal recognition which constitute ethical life, sustain a history of violence and misrecognition that reaches its height in bourgeois modernity. Marx’s error was to proceed from a concept of a ‘pure sensuous activity’ (collective labour) that initiates human history; for in doing so, his concepts of class and capital emerge as deterministic powers whose necessity operates throughout the totality of bourgeois ethical life. In this section, therefore I will examine Rose’s account of historical materialism, and the consequences that arise from its formation, and re-formation, as a political ‘culture’ (Rose, 1981: 214–20). Happiness is a difficult thing to specify in Hegelian thought. On the one hand, Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit has been read as providing the foundation of a substantive community that offers the possibility of mediating demotic forms of subjectivity in the explicitly rational organization of the state. Happiness, therefore, would take the form of the movement of desire through the institutional forms of work and satisfaction that are realized in civil society, towards intuitive recognition of a universal authority that is neither external nor coercive. The left-Hegelian approach taken by Rose, on the other hand, presents a kind of phenomenological messianism. For her, to advocate the possibility of universal mediation within the complex differentiation of commodified society

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is to fundamentally misunderstand the history of spirit as Sittlichkeit. The atomistic subjectivities that have developed in civil society are essentially related to bourgeois economic relations, and as such, they are forms of misrecognition that cannot express the idea of the state. Historical time, in other words, is not the unfolding of objective and subjective spirit as identity in difference; it is the constant redetermination of a phenomenology of misrecognition, in which subjective cultures (of desire, religiosity, consumption, and aesthetic taste) stand in opposition to the concept of ethical substance. On this reading of Hegel, the happiness that arises from work, consumption, religiosity, or political zeal is always complicit with the violence of exclusion; for the subjective cultures constituted through these modes of desire are always formed through an imperfect apprehension of the ethical substance from which they arise. To live within the totality of Sittlichkeit is to bear responsibility for the lack of recognition implicit in every form of self-satisfaction, no matter how demotic or apparently inclusive. It is this wisdom of the negative that, for Rose, is the key to understanding the relationship between the cultures of illusory happiness formed within the relations of bourgeois modernity, and a messianic politics that remains responsible to the concept of ethical life (Rose, 1981: 204–14). So, to return to Marx, Rose maintains that the problem with his approach to the negativity of capitalism (and to the regime of socialized production that is to come after it), is that his account of the formation of self-consciousness in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, presents the ‘sensuous activity’ of labour as an original mode of feeling, praxis, and recognition that suffers estrangement in the evolution of private property relations. History, in other words, is progressive in the sense that the flourishing of the human spirit that Marx described as primitive communism is what is promised by the immanent potential of capitalism to satisfy the needs of all. The problem with this, according to Rose, is that it proceeds from an ideal of practical labour that predates, determines, and concludes the evolution of human society. To postulate this originary trace of flourishing in the activity of social production is, for Rose, to fail to apprehend the complex phenomenology of experience that has produced the bourgeois form of modernity. She argues that Hegel’s account of the origin of self-consciousness in the egoistic desire of nature, and of its primary formation through the fear of death that underlies the master-slave relationship, initiates a history in which subjective spirit is constantly formed and re-formed within the substance of Sittlichkeit. The ‘culture of Marxism’ that Rose sets out in Hegel Contra Sociology, therefore, fails to apprehend the

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contradictory relations of work, religion, morality, and love that constitute ethical life, as always having mediated the ideal of socialized production from which historical materialism begins. The complex dynamic of subjective autonomy, in other words, goes practically unrecognized in Marx’s account of the ideological satisfactions of civil society; so the expressive totality of socialized production, which is the aim of his revolutionary materialism, is given absolute priority over the actual relations in which sensibility, intellect, and desire have been constituted in ethical life (Rose, 1981: 214–20). So, what the culture of Marxism fails to recognize is that ‘reality is ethical’; that the historical forms in which spirit is realized express more than the simple estrangement of humanity from its creative essence, or ‘species being’ (Rose, 1981: 198). Rose argues that ‘capitalism’ should be understood as a self-perpetuating culture that constantly transforms both the experience of work, satisfaction, and desire, and the legal-institutional relations in which the bourgeois subject determines its autonomy. This perpetual transformation, however, is not a ‘melting into air’ that destroys it own illusory substance; for, according to Rose, the abstract economic relations of civil society are essentially related to cultures of subjective excess (aesthetic distraction, sacred revelation, utilitarian morality) which have also framed the modern individual as an ethical subject. Thus, the transformative demand of politics should be informed by a historical-phenomenological account of how the bourgeois individual represents itself in civil society, and of the contradictions to which these representations have given rise within the substance of Sittlichkeit. For Rose, the violence that has accompanied the political history of Marxism is essentially bound up with a mythology of natural happiness, in which man’s sensuous activity is related without mediation to that of his fellows, and where the inorganic body of nature has yet to be appropriated by the regime of law and private property. The culture of Marxism that Rose describes, therefore, proceeds from an ‘unsatisfied’ form of materialism which identifies happiness purely with the satisfactions of collective labour, and which regards the reality of bourgeois society as the object of an absolute revolutionary demand (Rose, 1981: 163–74). Rose’s argument that it is the fate of Marxism to become a culture of revolutionary activity without limitation, and that the origin of this culture lies in its perpetuation of a mythology of natural happiness that is utterly without substance, is both compelling and problematic. Clearly, there is a connection between the political cultures that came after the Second International (Maoism, Leninism,

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and Stalinism) and Marx’s utopian promise. The programmatic liquidation of classes deemed to be reactionary elements of the old order makes no sense unless it is understood as an attempt to purify society of everything that could be considered acquisitive, individualistic, or bourgeois. Rose compares the destructive trajectory of these Marxist cultures to the logic of ethical degradation that Hegel identified in the descent of the French Revolution into the Jacobin Terror. Hegel argued that the French Enlightenment’s critique of the ancien régime as the absolute frustration of universal rights and subjective autonomy produced a violent revolutionary movement in which ‘universal will goes into itself and becomes individual will, to which the universal will and work stand opposed’ (Hegel, 1967a: 602). Freedom, in other words, becomes utterly idealized and utterly destructive: the lawlessness of feudal aristocracy which the revolutionary movement set out to reform is simply reaffirmed, and the substance of ethical life is ever-more deeply disrupted by the loss of its objective structures. Now, there is a recognition in Rose’s work of Marx’s contribution to the critique of bourgeois property relations, and of the durability of his account of the socially transformative power of the M-C-M relation. Indeed, the demand with which she concludes Hegel Contra Sociology is for a critical Marxism that would seek to trace the effects of that power throughout the moral, legal, and aesthetic constitution of Sittlichkeit. However, this demand raises fundamental questions about Rose’s Hegelian concept of modernity, and about the relationship to Marxism this determines. Rose and Derrida share the idea that The Phenomenology of Mind is a ‘book of death’: that it presents the evolution of self-consciousness as haunted by mortality, and that it is this sense of the finitude that is co-present within the dialectics of recognition-misrecognition that takes place in the substance of Sittlichkeit (Derrida, 1990b: 254–62; Rose, 1981: 159–63). The question here is that of the passage into and out of Hegel’s philosophy, or, to put it slightly differently, the question of the mediating power of spirit as it is expressed in the objective relations of state and civil society. In Derrida’s thought, as we will see in a moment, the passage into the philosophy of spirit is the precondition of ethical reflection; for the possibility of transforming the powers of totality is opened by the categories through which ‘the social’ is constituted as ‘substance’, ‘beauty’, and ‘sacred love’. This opening of the possibility of ethics is central to the fate of spirit in the technological space of modernity. For if, as Derrida maintains, Hegel’s account of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, ‘beautiful soul’, ‘unworldly virtue’, and ‘abstract morality’ traces the elements through which the modern subject has learned of its unity with the historical relations of ethical

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life, then simply to redeploy these categories as marking the falsity of happiness, morality, and feeling within the technological organization of capital is to miss the uniqueness of the ethical demands that arise from that organization. Rose’s reading of Marx is transformative in that it demonstrates his neglect of representation in the dynamics of the commodity form, and specifies the implications of his idea of material labour as the pure antithesis of bourgeois excess. However, her attempt to determine a critical space from which to expound the complicities of capital with the atomistic cultures of modernity is caught between the dynamical elements of Hegel’s critique of identity thinking in The Phenomenology of Mind, and the movement of return and recuperation that is traced in The Philosophy of Right. For Rose, of course, the latter is always messianic; it always raises the existential questions of identity, otherness, and violence that haunt The Phenomenology. And yet this begs the question of repetition which lies at the root of Marx’s critique of Hegelian dialectic: the question of whether the socio-technological relations that arise from the pursuit of surplus value can be conceived as part of the history of redemptive misrecognition through which Hegel expounds the evolution of modern ethical life (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 26–7). Rose’s reading of Hegel is very far from being a search for the ultimate condition of happiness in his account of the struggles of subjective spirit with its own finitude. Her exposition of the relations of bourgeois modernity is characterized by a concentration on the negative: the loss of substance and satisfaction that arises from the commodification of reality. And yet, there is a certain reserve in this exposition. For, while it is true that her tracing of the negative is always concerned with the aporetic forms of experience that arise within the social whole, we might perhaps be right to suspect that the structure of these aporias refers the dissatisfaction of each individual subject to the possibility of redemption within the substance of Sittlichkeit (Rose, 2008: 208). Rose’s reading of Marx therefore tends to reduce the political import of his materialism to a kind of Rousseauist gesture that simultaneously determines ‘capitalism’ as the absolute negative of creative labour, and the suffering of ‘the proletariat’ as the unifying principle of social transformation. Yet, Rose’s appeal to the substance of Sittlichkeit implicitly validates the forms of bourgeois life whose exploitative violence Marx seeks to expound. Marx’s critique of surplus value is inherently unsatisfied, and the possibility of happiness to which it gestures does exceed the hierarchies of intuition, contemplation, and religiosity that organize the differentiation of ethical life. What his critique of surplus value opens up, in

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other words, is the subjection of humanity to technological forces that have fundamentally transformed the conditions under which the dynamics of recognition can take place within the relations of civil society. Thus, the readings of Hegel that Rose derides as lacking insight into the destabilizing presence of the negative reveal something essential about the fate of his philosophy: that the prescriptive style of The Philosophy of Right would have a profound influence on the systemic forms of modernism (functionalism, structuralism, systems theory, analytical Marxism) through which the ‘spiritual’ element of happiness is expelled from Sittlichkeit (Rose, 1981: 211–14; Abbinnett, 1998: 9–37). Ultimately, the question of unsatisfied materialism and its relationship to happiness cannot be erased from the political culture of Marxism. If I were to put this crudely, the recurrent question of the relationship of the left to pleasure – and of whether it is possible to be a happy socialist – indicate a doctrinal difficulty that Marxism has always had with enjoyment that is not won through the conduct of revolutionary struggle or through the strictures of collective work. In Marx’s thought, as we have seen, there is a tension between the ultimate satisfaction of man’s species-being under the conditions of socialized production and the power of capital constantly to transform the intellect, sensibility, and desire of human beings. Socialized production, as Marx conceives it, is the universal satisfaction of need through collective work, and the realization of the human spirit through its release from the constraints of forced labour. Yet, might it not be the case that Marx’s dissatisfaction with the content of bourgeois life is not dissatisfied enough, and that the effects that the regime of capital accumulation introduces into the relations of Sittlichkeit (massive accumulations of wealth and power, colonial enslavement, the despoliation of nature) fundamentally transform the chance of human happiness? Perhaps, in other words, what has been released by the capitalist mode of production cannot be understood as part of a historical teleology in which it is man’s increased capacity to satisfy his material needs that determines the ultimate end of human civilization. In Nietzsche’s thought, bourgeois modernity is conceived as an accumulation of power in which the interests of ‘the herd’ have already achieved moral dominance; and so the demands for distributive equality that are organized in the political apparatus of socialism are, in reality, the fulfilment of the Utilitarian obsession with production. Nietzsche’s insistence on the impossibility of deriving happiness from the satisfaction of material need therefore, is related to a concept of ‘spirit’ that arises out of the existential boredom that haunts the collective wellbeing of the species. Thus, if there is an encounter

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between Marx and Nietzsche that goes beyond the repetition of orthodoxies, this is played out through the possibility of transforming the ethics of distributive justice and collective labour that Nietzsche disparages in his critique of socialism. What these reconfigurations might be, and how they are related to the politics of happiness, I will examine in the following sections.

Work, servitude and ressentiment I began this chapter by making a connection between Althusser’s structuralist reading of Marx and Schopenhauer’s account of the limits of human happiness. Althusser argues that to maintain that the key to Marx’s thought is his early speculations on the relationship between productive labour and the perfectibility of man is to ignore the epistemological break between the ‘young’ Marx and the ‘scientific’ materialist who emerged from these Hegelian beginnings. An essential part of Althusser’s specification of this break is his claim that the structural dynamics of capitalism that Marx expounded in Capital, reveal certain inescapable necessities of production, consumption, and integration to which a socialist society would have to attend. The difference between capitalism and socialism, therefore, is not the absence of estrangement, but rather that the integration of the social totality is organized around a rational distribution of resources possible only in the absence of class exploitation. This reading of Capital maintains an austere sobriety in relation to the revolutionary ideals of Marxism: the equitable distribution of resources that, for Althusser, is the ultimate aim of communism cannot be given over to such metaphysical notions as perfectibility or happiness. It is in this sense that Althusser’s Marxism shares something of Schopenhauer’s moral conservatism. For, insofar as he conceives the purpose of socialism as the removal of structural antagonisms from the mode of production, Althusser transforms the revolutionary promise of Marxism into a demand for the maximum satisfaction of need compatible with equal distribution of the means of subsistence. This ‘Schopenhauerian’ reading of Marx is close to the way in which Nietzsche understands the historical dynamics of socialism, that is, as the threat of an unbearable weight of productive necessity that the masses might one day impose on every act of spontaneous self-determination. Thus, Nietzsche maintains that if we are to understand the influence of socialism on the historical unfolding of the will to power, we must look at the forms of conflict, repression, and destruction that

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the revolutionary body of the masses has put into play, and at the events of transgression that this economy are likely to produce (Nietzsche, 1994: 214–15). In The Gay Science, Nietzsche remarked on the frugality of modern society in its attitude towards joy: ‘More and more work enlists all good conscience on its side; and the desire for joy already calls itself a “need to recuperate” and is beginning to be ashamed of itself ’ (Nietzsche, 1974: 259). We can divine from these remarks that, for Nietzsche, constant productive activity has something ignoble about it, and that it is the opposite of his demand for the joyful pursuit of an infinitely elusive truth. We have already seen how this critique of compulsive productivity is developed in Nietzsche’s critique of Utilitarianism. He argues that the attempt to reduce happiness to a function of the average level of satisfaction of material needs abstracts humanity from the primordial history of affects that have formed its desire. The sensations of pleasure and pain that belong to the organic life of each individual, in other words, are presented by the Utilitarians as both absolutely fixed and as designating the true conditions of human happiness (Bentham, 2007: 1–2; Mill, 1980: 5–7). For Nietzsche, the ‘wisdom’ that such an attitude to life would bring to mankind, is no more than the mathematical calculation of how best to realize the conditions of universal contentment. And so from this perspective, Marx’s claim that communism would overcome the symbolic economy of love, religiosity, and sacrifice that clings to bourgeois society, can be seen as the highest expression of this utilitarian logic. For the materialist historiography through which Marx presents the evolution of productive forces entails a progressive disenchantment of the world, in which every social relationship is made subject to the demands of relentless productivity. One of the dangers in constructing a Nietzschean critique of Marx is that of presenting his aphorisms on socialism as a celebration of ‘symbolic ambiguity’ against the demands of communal obligation (Baudrillard, 1990: 131–53; 1975: 43). Socialism, in other words, is bad because it denies the unforeseen intensities that arise from life lived to excess, and where the essence of virtue lies in confronting the danger of what or whoever may come. There is, of course, some truth in this assessment of Nietzsche’s attitude towards socialism; and yet such a simplistic formulation misses the deeper significance of his encounter with its demands for social justice and universal equality. We need therefore to return to the concepts of history and materialism that are put into play by Marx and Nietzsche. In the second essay of his Unfashionable Observations, ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life’, Nietzsche remarked that ‘only by means of the power to utilize the past for life and to reshape past events into history once

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more … does the human become a human being’ (Nietzsche, 1995: 91). The movement into modernity, in other words, should not be regarded as a process of decay from the ideals of Greco-Roman civilization, or as the re-articulation of a universal spirit in which it is possible to discern the truth of ethical life. Rather, the purpose of history is always yet to be determined, and as such, ought to be regarded as a demand for which each successive generation has to take responsibility. (We will see in the following section that this generational responsibility is a complex one.) This relationship to the past reopens the question of spirit, or, more precisely, the question of the value of the metaphysical categories through which the worldly struggles of humanity are represented. In Nietzsche’s thought, these concepts are, in a fundamental sense, unavoidable; they are the medium through which the truth of the world is articulated by living humanity. However, the value of the forms in which the moral, aesthetic, and religious substance of Sittlichkeit is expressed lies not in the happiness they may bestow, but in the provocation to overcoming which is inherent in the weight of their organization. Thus, the concepts of ‘spirit’ and ‘materialism’ are closely related in Nietzsche’s thought. For, while it is true that he maintains that idealism proceeds by reducing the dangerous contingency of events to the recuperative logic of universal spirit, it is the profound seriousness of this process of spiritualization that gives rise to the ‘refined cynicism’ of materialist science (Nietzsche, 1979: 39–40). And so we need to look briefly at the dynamics of this relationship and how it is played out in the social and political relations of modernity. For Nietzsche, idealism begins with the warnings of Classical antiquity against overbearing passions. The ideals of justice, virtue, love, and honour that are expounded by Plato and Aristotle, however, are not simply repressive systems that stifle the freedom of humanity; they gave rise to intensities of desire that are radically different from the utilitarian forms that have come to dominate bourgeois modernity. Conceived genealogically, the original strictures that idealism placed on the excessiveness of human vitality were an intervention that produced profound transformations of the economy of love and desire, privation and suffering (Nietzsche, 1974: 333). And yet, the history of the metaphysical world that is woven into Nietzsche’s thought, sets out the decline of idealist philosophy into an inertial force that has gathered in the flesh and culture of humanity. An important point emerges here. It is clear from Nietzsche’s remarks on the ‘prejudice of science’, that he has come to regard the ‘materialism’ expressed in the laws of Newtonian physics as the most devitalized form of idealism (Nietzsche, 1974: 332–41). The notion that all the

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extensive and intensive dimensions of the universe are susceptible to a unitary regime of mathematical calculation assumes that the truth of all phenomena is expressible in the formulae of mathematical physics, and that this objectivity is unaffected by the proliferation of its regimes, the diversity of its applications, and the reactions provoked by its dominance. It is this calculative materialism that, for Nietzsche, lies at the core of both Socialism and Utilitarianism; both are obsessed with the quantification of conditions that would bring about the maximum level of happiness and the minimum level of suffering. If we look at historical materialism from a genealogical perspective therefore, the categories through which Marx expounds the transition from ancient communal to feudalist to capitalist societies (forces of production, class relations, the means of exchange), derive from his belief that it is quantitative differences in powers of material production that determine the evolution of human society. So, as the productive power of industrial capitalism increases, it eventually gives rise to the revolutionary conditions that allow the fulfilment of its historical destiny, which is the provision of the maximum means of subsistence for the maximum number of people. The problem with this, if we follow Nietzsche’s line of argument, is that it repeats the Hegelian law of the transformation of quantity into quality. Marx’s doctrine of communism, in other words, maintains that the more physical need is eradicated from human society, the more complete our sense of happiness will be. This happiness will be strictly incomparable to the Romantic forms of bourgeois ideology. It will, according to Marx, be a simultaneous recognition of self and other, and of how the needs of all are best satisfied through the activity of the one (Marx and Engels in McLellan, 1977: 168–71). For Nietzsche, this prescription for the way to happiness is premised on a misunderstanding of the relationship between truth and materiality. The materiality of the world, as Nietzsche conceives it, is illimitable; it arises from within the metaphysical categories through which ‘the real’ is configured as truth, harmony, and order. In the sphere of morality, for example, Nietzsche maintains that the origin of bourgeois ‘good will’ should be sought in the dynamics of pleasure and pain which form primitive society, and that the possibility of its dissolution is given in the intensities it distributes into the life of ‘the herd’ and the austere community of ‘noble spirits’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 194–5). This materiality, which Nietzsche characterizes through the concept of will to power, is an infinite provocation; it constantly opens up new realms of unexplored necessity, responsibility and virtue that exceed the calculative economy of socialized production.

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This brings me to the pivotal question that Nietzsche’s thought poses for the doctrine of socialism. Nietzsche’s concept of materialism discloses an aporia in Marx’s work, the same aporia that Althusser attempted to negotiate in his account of the epistemological break between the young and the mature Marx. As we have seen, Marx’s early writing, especially the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, gives an account of communism as the simultaneity of desire and creativity, or, to put it slightly differently, as the practical abolition of the rupture that private property creates between the ‘inorganic body of nature’ and the freely creative labour of mankind. Thus, the abolition of private property is understood as the only way to achieve a creative/aesthetic relationship between the harmonious presence of nature and the perfectible essence of humanity. In Marx’s later economic writings, however, the nature of this promise changes. The future that capitalism opens up is a rationalized form of the productive necessity it has already achieved, and so the transition to communism is understood as the instalment of a planned economy, state culture, and equal access to the means of subsistence. On the one hand therefore, we have a concept of flourishing that appeals to the unity of nature as the goal of human creativity, and, on the other, we have the weight of social production as the shared responsibility of all human labour (see Lenin, 1976 and Luxemburg, 1961). Conceived genealogically therefore, it is this aporia that configures the history of socialism: the constant vacillation of workers’ movements between the utopian promise of universal creativity and the Sisyphean labour of equalizing the shares of all in the means of subsistence. So, if we return to Nietzsche’s remarks on the power of socialism in Human, All Too Human, it is clear that the convergence of these two paths would be the work of the party apparatus: for it is in the designation of how the masses are to be formed into a revolutionary body, and of how they are to determine the regime of socialized production, that the messianic power of socialism is constituted (Nietzsche, 1994: 213–14). Thus, to say that for Nietzsche there is no truth in socialism, or that it is the total abandonment of spirit, would be wrong. It is better to say that it is a risk that emerges with modernity; a risk that is the counterpart of the petty acquisitiveness of bourgeois culture, and which demands that we understand ‘in which of its modifications it can still be used as a mighty lever in the current political power game’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 215). There may be times, in other words, when it is necessary to encourage the commitments and virtues of socialism against the utilitarian values and Romanticism of the bourgeoisie. Yet this is always a gamble. What socialism threatens is that the soul of each man should become

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utterly overburdened with the weight of responsibility; that it should become the soul of the camel, the ‘weight-bearing spirit’ that subjects itself to all and sundry rather than reveal what is fine or noble about itself (Nietzsche, 1984: 54). Such a spirit carries the burden of a deep unspoken anger; for it cannot entirely reconcile itself to living under the yoke of social need and the endless repetitive duties of communal production. So, the concept of socialism, if it is fashioned into the exclusive truth by which human beings represent themselves and their destiny, becomes an economy of perfect resentment: it frustrates the power of those ‘free spirits’ for whom the harmony of nature constantly slips away into the madness of profane possibility, and whose happiness can come only through the virtues of hardship, endurance, and loneliness. For Nietzsche, the experience of excess that inhabits the materiality of being is closer to the dread of Schopenhauer’s world than to the edenic mythologies from which socialism is descended. This, of course, is not to say that Nietzsche commends the quietism of Schopenhauer’s philosophy any more than he does the obsessive labour of socialism. Rather, his argument is that the pure accidentality of the world that Schopenhauer presents as the eternal suffering of mankind opens the possibility of a joyful and excessive happiness that is inconceivable under the conditions of socialized production. What socialism is, according to Nietzsche, is a modern form of herd morality that attempts to enlist the whole of mankind in the task of removing need and suffering from the world. This task, however, is neither achievable nor beneficial, for, conceived genealogically, Marx’s thought remains tied to an idealist account of the relationship between the perfectibility of man and the inorganic body of nature. What Marx’s version of this dialectical history does is to make the creative activity of man into a kind of immanence that underlies the practical estrangement it suffers in different regimes of private appropriation (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 160–8). Thus, the periodization through which humanity progresses towards the non-alienated transformation of nature (communism), assumes an underlying identity of the human species which, for Nietzsche, is the outcome of contingent strategies of entrapment, periods of inertia, excesses of violence, and surfeits of pity that are essential to the substance of social life. Nietzsche’s concept of spirit, therefore, arises from the vertiginous sense of possibility that haunts this substance. It is the proximity of life, death, and becoming which transforms the soul from a camel into a lion that cannot accept the strictures of laborious contentment. And yet, beyond this act of ferocious refusal there is the childlike ‘yes’; the

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welcome to all that may come from the infinite depths of the world, and the careless dance that creates its own virtue from the trembling of the real (Nietzsche, 1984: 54–6). What Nietzsche’s thought opens up, therefore, is the possibility that socialism, as a politics of happiness, takes place within a general economy of effects (the will to power) that both precedes and exceeds its dialectical representation of history. For Nietzsche, human society is an experiment; the outcome of acts of will whose antagonisms have always already diffracted the collective pursuit of peace and distributive justice (Nietzsche, 1984: 229). This idea of an excessive contingency that underlies the formation of life into a coherent order of production, consumption, and obligation, and which keeps open the responsibility of ‘free spirits’ to what is beyond the utilitarian happiness of the masses, raises the crucial question of what the aims of socialist politics can be ‘after Nietzsche’. For, if we accept that Nietzsche’s critique of idealist teleologies has fundamentally undermined the appeals to collective creativity that are inscribed in the Marxist ideal of socialized production, then the responsibility of a contemporary socialist politics/critique would be to reconfigure the vocabularies of class, exploitation, silencing, and exclusion that have arisen out of historical materialism. This, of course, would mean effecting a total transformation of what ‘socialism’ means, particularly the terms of its promise to provide universal happiness for all humanity. So, it is the transformation of this possibility that I will examine in the final section.

Socialism and the messianic Nietzsche once remarked that man ‘is the will to power and nothing else besides’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 364). This statement begs one of the most basic questions of his philosophy: if it is the case that ‘man’ is nothing but the will to selfovercoming, why is it that the genealogies of religion, morality, and philosophy that Nietzsche develops in his later writing, present a history of reactive powers with which creative will has colluded? How is it possible that the transformative cruelty which brought human culture into being (the brutal discipline imposed by the most powerful wills on the instinctual life of the weak), has become so enmeshed in systems of guilt and self-attrition that it is no longer able to transform the conditions of its own subjection? In this section, therefore, I will examine the forms of mastery, servitude, and desire that Nietzsche’s concept of

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genealogy seeks to illuminate, and their relationship to what Derrida has called the ‘spectre’ of socialism. The most comprehensive answer Nietzsche gives to the question of reactive powers comes in The Genealogy of Morals. His argument is that the origin of human culture lies not in the peaceful transformation of nature through collective labour (as with the ‘idealist’ Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), but in the power of those who have disciplined the chaos of their own organic nature to impose order on the formlessness of ‘the herd’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 192). ‘Culture’, in other words, originates in those ‘free spirits’ who are capable of enacting their desires; for, insofar as they are able to suppress, defer, or intensify their reactive impulses, they are able to exercise a certain degree of sovereignty over their instinctual lives. It is this assertion of the will to power that, for Nietzsche, is the origin of spirit. For it is, as Deleuze has pointed out, the spontaneous enactment of desire, and the psychological economy of deferral, projection, and memory to which this gives rise, that constitutes the first appearance of ‘the human’ (Deleuze, 1983: 133–5). To put this in a slightly different register, the collective achievements of ‘spirit’ cannot be separated from the ‘blood and horror’ of the discipline that brought human society into being. Thus, if human consciousness is capable of exercising sovereignty, this power is not ‘given’ to it through an act of divine grace. Rather, man is his own creation: his will, satisfaction, and desire are the outcome of what the contingency of the earth has brought into being; the free spirits whose brutality lies at the origin of ‘all good things’ (Nietzsche, 1990: 193–4). And yet, for Nietzsche, this original dominion of powerful men over the weak and dependent remains vulnerable to the reactive forces of ‘the herd’. The concept of herd existence that Nietzsche presents in The Genealogy of Morals has often been misconstrued as referring to a natural state of contented ignorance from which the greater part of humanity has yet to emerge. This, however, is to misunderstand the concept of culture that informs Nietzsche’s genealogy. Insofar as it is the inculcation of the basic strictures of social existence that brings ‘the herd’ into existence, its relationship to the active powers that have formed the primitive economy of punishment, requital, barter, and justice is one of primordial vulnerability. The weakest are subject to a regime of discipline and caprice that forms them into a thoroughly reactive body dedicated to the easing of their collective sufferings. The three distinctive forms in which this reactivity is expressed are religion, ressentiment, and bad conscience. The first two stand close to each other in the moral constitution of the herd. Human culture begins

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with the exercise of terrible physical strictures, and it is this that constitutes a fundamental desire for vengeance within the mass of humanity. This desire is essentially reactive: it arises from the existential frustration felt by the weak, and manifests itself in a religious inversion that makes God the unique source of happiness beyond the sufferings of the temporal world. The ressentiment that animates the life of the herd, in other words, is given a transcendental justification; their misery becomes the ‘sign of their election by God’, and their desire to avenge themselves on the strong is transformed into the Christian doctrine of ‘faith, love and hope’. The satisfactions of this redemptive doctrine are powerful and pervasive; they transform the reactive desire for blissful obedience into an active pursuit of the glory of God against the excesses of the godless (Nietzsche, 1990: 182–3). It is this transformation that lies at the root of what Nietzsche calls bad conscience. Once the divinely sanctioned mission of universal love has demonized the world of sensory desire, the life of spirit is turned against its attachment to the world of sense, and the power of the strong is trapped in ecstasies of guilt and denial (Nietzsche, 1990: 194–6). Socialism, according to Nietzsche, is inextricably linked to the reactive economy of religion. Indeed, he locates the basis of its power over the masses in the fact that its fundamental concepts of community, brotherhood, and happiness are related genealogically to religious ideals of sacrifice and redemption (Nietzsche, 1994: 90). Thus, to understand the place of socialism in the history of human culture, we have to understand its relationship to the sense of loss that the Enlightenment produced in European civilization, and to the painful death of religion that is announced in The Gay Science (Nietzsche, 1974: 181–2). So, to bring the issue back to Marx, we need to determine how far the concept of ‘species being’ he presents in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts is shot through with a ‘theology’ of transformative labour, and the extent to which this theology has animated the disputes among the different political factions of the left. For Nietzsche, such disputes disclose a vicious circle of ressentiment that is made all the more intense by the inability of any faction to transform conventional norms of desire. Socialism intensifies what it professes to overthrow: the domination of productivity over the creative life of body/ spirit, and the transformation of labour into a regime of hopeless repetition. As such, socialist ideology is the counterpart of nihilistic tendencies that are essential to the project of modernity: the disenchantment of life, the loss of symbolic meaning, and the calculability of social relationships. The assemblages of universal cooperation that Marxism would build against the contingencies

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of the world are, for Nietzsche, always haunted by a ‘passive nihilism’ that threatens the end of the will to transformation (Nietzsche, 1994: 145; Deleuze, 1992: 152–6). So, can this Nietzschean genealogy of socialism be mapped onto the ethical, political, and epistemic assemblage of Marxism? This is a complex question, and one that is fundamental to the difference between Marx’s and Nietzsche’s respective accounts of the possibility of human happiness. It seems to me that the concept of materialism that Nietzsche developed in his genealogical writings (the idea that man is thrown into the chaos of the world and must give form to what threatens to overwhelm him) is essentially a provocation to overcoming; it is a demand constantly to go beyond the philosophical theologies that have configured the world as the immanence of love, happiness, or redemption. What is fundamentally restrictive about the dialectical mode of thought that Marx inherits from Hegel is the fact that it attempts to unify each of these moments: the convergence of sense, reason, and religiosity that is played out in the concrete relations of Sittlichkeit is recapitulated in Marx’s notion of labour as both the essence of man and the original purpose of human social relations. All that it is possible for his critique of capitalism to engender therefore is the equalization of passivity – the severing of spirit from ‘the heart of the earth’ and the final deification of the state (Nietzsche, 1984: 152–5). Yet there is something in Marx’s analysis of the economy of commodity production that communicates with the dangerous infinity of Nietzsche’s materialism. For, insofar as the M-C-M relation expresses an infinitely flexible system of production-consumptionexchange, it gives rise to intensities that are constantly transformed by the mutability of the commodity form (Baudrillard, 1981: 101). Thus, the importance of Marx’s critique lies in the fact that it registers the absolute extremity of living in the technological body of capitalism: the precipitation of new intensities of happiness, suffering, cooperation, and love from which the possibility of the political arises. And so it is here that we encounter what Walter Benjamin conceived as the ‘messianic’ responsibility that inhabits the strictures of historical materialism: the possibility of a radical transvaluation of the social covenant that comes with each new generation (Benjamin, 1992: 246). Benjamin’s account of the messianic responsibility that haunts Marx’s theory of history has a strange ambiguity about it. On the one hand, he invokes the messiah as a figure who may come at any time to mend the fractured bonds of humanity, and on the other, this figuration is also the spectral form of what is owed by every generation to the dead of past conflicts and to the liberty

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of those who are not yet born (Benjamin, 1992: 255). This dual determination of the messianic is important because it has configured two radically different, although related, approaches to the relationship between happiness and the political potential that is immanent in the evolution of capitalism. In Deleuze and Guattari’s work on capitalism and schizophrenia, it is the theme of making good what is suppressed within the territorialized space of capital that is pre-eminent. I should point out that, in this context, ‘making good’ does not mean the restoration of a happier archaic past, but rather the liberation of possibilities that live in the body, mind, and imagination of the Oedipal subject. Derrida’s later work on the political responsibilities that arise from the media-techno-scientific regime of capital, on the other hand, is orientated towards the unconditional law of the messiah: the transformation of the present through a moral desire (hospitality) that is without limit or reserve (Derrida, 2000: 75–83). This distinction needs to be explored more fully. In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari retrace Nietzsche’s history of reactive forces as the emergence and development of three kinds of productive machine: ‘the primitive’, ‘the despotic’, and the ‘civilized capitalist’. Their analysis of the first of these social machines presents the transition from nature to society as the capturing of primitive flows of desire (that are not so very different from the simian) within a particular kind of territoriality. The flows through which social production is sustained – ‘flows of women and children, flows of herds and seed, sperm flows, flows of shit, menstrual flows’ – are inscribed on the surface of the earth and the bodies of the tribe. And so, the inorganic body of nature emerges as the object of desire and the source of repression; it becomes the ‘mega machine’ that encodes the animality of the human organism (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 140–2). The emergence of the despotic state is not an evolutionary process: its possibility depends on 1) the departure of a reactive asceticism from the economy of the primitive machine, 2) its constitution as a religious alliance in which the despot becomes the focus of spiritual desire, and 3) the return of this asceticism to the primitive machine as ‘a terror without precedent’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 192). Thus, the anthropological event described here is the invasion of a labile economy of flows and conflicts by the reactive organization of spirit: the intensities of mimetic unity are colonized by the religious inscription of sovereignty, and the nomadic occupation of space (as a boundless possibility of flight) is displaced by a theology of creation. And so, if there is a trace of primordial happiness at the origin of Deleuze and Guattari’s history of machinic desire, this is sustained in the labile assemblage of the

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nomad; for it is that which returns, as a kind of unpredictable drive (conatus), to each subsequent mode of political capture and territorialization (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 440–1). At the start of Section Three of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari remark that capitalism ‘has haunted all forms of society as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude all of their codes’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 140). The history of primitive, despotic, and capitalist territorialities set out in Capitalism and Schizophrenia therefore does not present a diachronic progression; it traces a play of immanence, repression, and departure through which ‘progress’ is displaced by the unpredictable affects of machinic desire. It is in this sense that ‘capitalism’ has haunted all forms of society. For what is named here is not a historically specific mode of production (in Marx’s sense), but the very condition of history: the excessive flows of desire that are put into play by every territorial machine and against which every machine determines its strategies of capture. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is a disturbing homology between the infinite mutability of ‘capitalism’ (as the unrestricted flow of knowledge, capital, sex, and money) and the general economy of excess immanent in each system of territoriality. Even in the primitive territorial machine, for example, intensities arose that exceeded the dominant system of encoding and gave rise to the despotic regime (Deleuze and Guattari: 2000: 194). Thus, capitalism is the ‘dark precursor’ of freedom; it is a randomness that redistributes the possibility of joyful encounters across the networks of political sovereignty, or, to put it slightly differently, an immanent power whose affects are played out in the emergence of spontaneous ‘essences’ which transgress the Oedipal relations of the state (Deleuze, 1988: 104; Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 465). Rosi Braidotti, for example, maintains that the Deleuzian concept of essence, as it is applied to the ontological constitution of the feminine, introduces a radical conditionality into the economy of sexual difference. The historical present is conceived as the dispersal of archaic forms of gender identity through the flows of desire put into play by civilized capitalist machines. The ‘essence’ to which feminist politics is responsible, therefore, is an evolving reality that emerges through the contingent forms that subjective desire has taken, and which becomes the object of an ‘ethical passion’ for new forms of representation and community (Braidotti, 1994: 186–90). So, if we are to discern the difference between Derrida’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts of capitalism, happiness, and revolutionary desire, the best strategy is perhaps to return to the distinction between representation

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and affect that distinguishes their respective modes of thought. As we saw in the previous chapter, Derrida’s account of representation coheres around the Classical ideal of the image as an ‘envoi’ whose arrival is supposed to bring the truth of being with it. His argument, which I will have to abridge here, is that this pursuit of pure representational adequacy is one of the founding ideals of Western metaphysics, and that as such, it is inscribed in the ideals of truth, justice, and recognition that constitute Western democracy (Derrida: 2007: 109). However, the crucial point is that the image, as envoi, is always haunted by what it cannot bring: even the most intense feelings of happiness and identity that are provoked by its regime, are ‘menaced by divisibility’ and the return of the unrepresentable (Derrida, 2007: 122). It is this logic of return that informs the expository strategy of Spectres of Marx. Derrida’s argument is that the media-techno-scientific networks that have given rise to the global fluidity of capital have fundamentally transformed the conatus of revolutionary politics; its possibility, if there is one, is dispersed across virtual systems that constantly defer the immediacy of machinic desire and its affects. Capitalism can only be what it is through its power to manipulate the structure of the real. Its ability to transgress borders, to condense space and time, and radically to accelerate the formation and dissolution of experience occurs through virtual networks that have radically transformed the social, economic, and political effects of commodification (Derrida, 1994: 77–94). Thus, if we proceed from Derrida’s analysis of the image as envoi, this transformation of capitalism’s political superstructure is neither the absolute loss of the aesthetic nor the complete dispersal of affect into an infinite refraction of signs. Rather, it becomes the condition of affects that are solicited by the total re-presentation of reality: the disturbance of the present by others who come to us as the ‘paradoxical immediacy’ of hatred and desire, and who always reopen the possibility of unconditional acts of hospitality (Derrida, 1994: 7; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000: 16–18). For Derrida as well as Deleuze and Guattari, the concept of ‘capitalism’ by which Marx designated the universality of economic exploitation has mutated into an assemblage of media-techno-scientific relations whose future is always uncertain. In order to capture something of this uncertainty, new categories are required to understand both the experiences of suffering and exploitation that arise from the global networks of capitalism, and the technological integration of mind, organism, body, and life into the expanded regime commodification. Thus, the demand for universal happiness that inhabits Marx’s work from its beginnings is precisely the ‘spirit’ of socialism maintained in historical struggles

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between totality and particularity, alterity and legality. This is not to say that all struggles for happiness have an ethical significance; we saw in the previous chapter, for example, how postmodern capitalism has succeeded in transforming ‘socialism’ into the struggle for lifestyle and personal identity choices that Marx would not have recognized as part of the historical struggle of the oppressed. It should be clear, however, from Derrida’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to anticipate moments of resistance within the most extreme effects of silencing, exclusion, and denial, that their respective critiques are intended constantly to reopen the possibility of transformative activity on the part of ‘the oppressed’ (even if ‘the oppressed’ have now become a spectral body that no longer has the substantive presence of Marx’s proletariat). The politics of happiness inherited by Derrida and Deleuze, therefore, is genealogically related to Benjamin’s notion of messianic return: although they both depart from the totalizing powers of historical materialism, they both return to the spectral possibility of a happiness that can never be entirely coincident with the somatic pleasures, legal freedoms, or economic rights that constitute the ideological experience of the present (Derrida, 1994: 66; Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 263). The doctrine of socialism therefore retraces the messianic notion of happiness as the horizon of every new generation; it is reborn as a political movement not just from the most abject poverty and suffering, but also out of the elusive part of the soul that goes unsatisfied in the most extreme experiences of consumption, domination, and pleasure. According to Hardt and Negri, this persistence of the soul within the systems of technological capitalism can lead either to the fulfilment of Marx’s promise of shared satisfaction, or to a kind of theology of the negative. For, if we begin from the premise of a spectral freedom that can respond only to the damage caused by the technological development of capital, then the happiness of humanity is lost forever in the multiplication of transcendental responsibilities. Thus, they maintain that it is only if we proceed from a particular version of Deleuzian materialism, which conceives ‘the human’ as a collective essence immanent in the technological evolution of labour, that it is possible to remain true to the Marxist promise of the practical flourishing of humanity (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 25). In the end, the immanence of what Hardt and Negri call ‘the multitude’ is there to be found in the technoscientific relations of capital, and so the responsibility of Marxist critique is to the coming of a singularity, the point at which the implicitly cooperative regime of labour overcomes the atomistic relations of accumulation (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 392). What is at stake in Hardt and Negri’s reworking of the concept of

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materialism is the question of moral desire and its relationship to the political. In Derrida’s reading of Marx’s work, it is the very complexity of capitalism that sustains its messianic promise; for, as the technological systems appropriate more and more of the conditions of life, so there arise new forms of suffering which demand practical transformation of the idea of revolutionary community (Derrida, 1994: 89–94). This, for me, is the chiasmic power of socialism: the fact that its pursuit of universal happiness can neither be realized nor, as an inherently ethical demand, given up. And it is this ambiguity, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, which brings it into an inescapably provocative relationship with the affective dynamics of fascism and religion (Benjamin, 1992: 234–50).

Notes 1 It was the general decline in the ability of capitalist enterprise to transform commodities into surplus value, and the crises of overproduction and unemployment that emerged in the most developed economies at the turn of the twentieth century that gave impetus to the political, economic, and theoretical debates of the Second International (1889–1913). And it was here that the conflict between Lenin and Luxemburg’s ideas on the dynamics of the workers’ revolution took shape. 2 See, for example, Lewis, J. (1972), The Marxism of Marx. London: Lawrence and Wishart. 3 Richard Dien Winfield, for example, maintains that Hegel’s analysis of modernity reveals that capital ‘is but a component rather than the unifying structure of commodity relations’, and that the different spheres of civil society (exchange, individuation, morality, contract) constitute an organic whole that expresses the substance of just economy (Dien Winfield, 1988: 131).

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Fascism and the Pleasure of Self-Annihilation The essence of fascism In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, it is the fact of corporeal suffering that places an irreducible restriction on the happiness it is possible for human beings to attain. There is a fundamental conservatism in his thought, which, despite the redemptive element he identifies in aesthetic experience, demands careful sobriety in the legal and political administration of desire. Unless the affective life of each individual is kept within the boundaries of a sovereign law that protects everyone from persecution, the potential for violence and harm spirals out of control (Schopenhauer, 1970: 149). Despite its conservatism, this account of the danger of excessive desire does, I think, identify something essential about the ideology of fascism: that its appeal is an aesthetic solicitation of suprahuman powers which exceed the commonality of human suffering, and that this solicitation arises as a destructive culture from within the relations of post-traditional society. In this chapter, I will set out the processes through which this essence has emerged from the rationalizing trajectory of Western societies, its intensification of symbolic economies of race, community and identity, and its relationship to certain philosophical notions of will, overcoming, and authenticity. For it is, I believe, in such a genealogy of fascism’s militant solicitation of happiness, that it is possible to discern the depth of its involvement with the structures and relations of modernity. Before proceeding to examine the nature of this genealogy, however, I want to look more generally at the kind of happiness promised by fascist ideology, and at the relationship between this promise and the organizational apparatus through which fascist movements have sought to attract political support. It seems clear that any theory of fascism that lacks an account of the constitutive instability of modern identity structures, and of what fascist parties have to offer those who have lost their sense of status, community, and hope, is incapable of shedding light on the emergence, persistence, and fascination of fascist politics.

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The preliminary issue I want to address in this section is that of the relationship between fascism and Nazism, as I will argue throughout the chapter that Nazism has certain essential characteristics that mark it out as the exemplary form of fascist politics. So, what are these characteristics? In the first place, while it is certainly true that there were organizational and ideological similarities between Mussolini’s National Fascists and Hitler’s National Socialists1, it is only in the latter that a decisive break with the corporatist authority of church and monarchy took place (Laqueur, 1978: 180–1). Nazism, despite its strategic appeals to the piety of small rural constituencies, was characterized by its deeprooted antipathy to both of the established religions in Germany (Catholicism and Lutheran Protestantism), and by a determination to colonize the feelings of sacred devotion that were inspired by the church. Second, this anti-corporatist, anti-clerical ideology allowed the party apparatus to develop what Walter Mommsen called a ‘Machiavellian technique’ that constantly transformed itself in relation to the class and status groups whose support it was attempting to solicit (Mommsen in Laqueur, 1978: 180). Thus, the demotic power of Nazism took the form of a volkish militancy in which the appeals to race, nation, and religion that were made by local groups became a matter of strategic necessity rather than dogmatic ideological commitment (Hamilton, 1982: 310–27). Third, this ‘perpetual campaigning’ was crucial to the emergence of Nazism as a political movement that functioned through its use of technological means of representation. For the speed and flexibility with which local groups were able to respond to the changing circumstances of diverse political constituencies, were the context in which the mass aesthetics of broadcast technologies became a politically transformative power. Thus, it was the combination of organizational flexibility, ideological opportunism, and the deployment of a new technological aesthetic that differentiated Nazism from the more socially conservative forms of authoritarianism that took control in Spain and Italy between the Wars. This, however, still leaves open the question of how the National Socialists were able to mobilize the level of support they achieved in the presidential election of 1932, where they took 37.3 per cent of the vote. The Nazi party cadres could not have achieved this kind of success without ‘some relatively attractive political content to offer’ (Hamilton, 1982: 359, author’s italic). Or, to put it another way, Nazi appeals to the unity of the Volk, the culpability of the Jews and the communists in the breakdown of the German economy, and the urgent need for the restoration of the Germanic spirit, must have found some level of resonance in all the social strata of the Weimar Republic (Goodrick-Clarke,

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2005: 5–6). Richard Hamilton’s account of this process of ideological solicitation gives a clear sense of the diversity of Nazism’s appeals, and of the strategic modifications to party ideology that were made in different types of community. Put very briefly, his argument is that the primary factor which determined the success of the NSDAP in the 1932 election, was the party’s recognition that its best chance lay in appealing to the ‘small rural’ and ‘middle sized’ communities where religious affiliation remained a powerful influence on community life. Thus, the local Nazi activists presented themselves in Protestant communities as solidly against the liberal and conservative parties who had traditionally aligned themselves with Catholicism. In Catholic communities, on the other hand, the NSDAP presented itself as the natural enemy of Zentrum, the centrist party aligned with the Protestant Church. In large cities, the Nazis had much less success due to the increasing influence of class divisions in urban populations. The dynamics of political allegiance that had developed among the working, bourgeois, and middle classes made the electoral task of the NSDAP much more difficult in the cities than in rural communities. Such limited support as they were able to garner from the working class came largely from deferential conservatives who respected the old regime and who were fearful of the rise of organized labour associations. The meagre support that the Nazis drew from the bourgeois classes was based largely on the fear of communism and disillusionment with the economic policies pursued by the incumbent parties. Finally, the support for the Nazi party from the urban middle classes was starkly fractured along economic lines. The upper-middle classes contributed least of all the urban socio-economic groups to the NSDAP’s support in the 1932 election (although some of the most vulnerable individuals did vote for Hitler), while the lower-middle classes, who were under threat of financial ruin, proved to be most amenable to the Nazis’ promise to smash the evils of Communism and ‘Jewish capital’ (Hamilton, 1982: 361–419). In his account of the inadequacy of ‘mass-society’ theory to explain the success of the NSDAP in Germany, Hamilton claims that theories which invoke generalized concepts of urbanization, anomie, competition, and isolation to describe the condition of the masses, and then proceed to deduce the appeal of Nazi ideology from this description, fail to grasp the complex distribution of support gained by the NSDAP. Indeed, such an approach has been the source of the most durable myth about Nazism’s rise to power: that it was made possible primarily by the urban lower-middle classes who, because of their acute sense of economic vulnerability, alienation, and loss of status, were most

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easily seduced by Nazi propaganda (Hamilton, 1982: 433). Hamilton’s research points to rural Protestant populations as providing the Nazis with the most significant numbers of electoral converts in the 1932 election – numbers that far outstripped those from the urban lower-middle classes. And yet there is something crucial missing from this analysis; something that it would perhaps have been impossible to include within its terms of reference, but without which the social and political effects of Nazism cannot be properly understood. While it is true that the cruder forms of mass-society theory have given rise to certain misapprehensions about the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany, the concept of mass society itself is something that works at a more fundamental level than Hamilton suggests, and is essential to understanding the transformative relationship between fascism, happiness, and modernity. There is a sense in which rational choice analyses of the kind undertaken by Hamilton present the Nazi seizure of power as something that, through an unlikely concatenation of circumstances, arose from the perceived self-interest of specific socio-economic groups. However, if we are to formulate a proper understanding of how the NSDAP was able to take over a third of votes in the 1932 election (as well as how they were able to press ahead with racist legislation and eugenicist programmes once in power), it is essential to determine why such a large percentage of the population were prepared to engage with Nazism’s cult of Aryan nationalism, and to internalize it as the one way to happiness in a time of absolute uncertainty. In order to do this, it is necessary to revisit Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s account of the connection between rationalization and the reification of the symbolic order of the social. In Dialectic of Enlightenment they set out the complexities of the relationship between capitalist relations of production and the regime of instrumental reason that emerged from European Enlightenment philosophy. Their argument is a reversal of the Marxist claim that scientific innovation in the organization of the economy follows on from the establishment of capitalism as the dominant mode of production. They claim that the rational-technological organization of capital is inconceivable without the developments in physics, mathematics, and engineering that had already begun to transform society before the emergence of a fully industrialized capitalist regime (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 3–42). Thus, the relationship between capital and instrumental reason is one in which the latter constantly transforms the mode of exploitation; technological innovations refine the process of production to the point where labour is stripped of its symbolic meaning, and both public and private lives are experienced through

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stereotypical images circulated by the culture industry. Horkheimer and Adorno refer to this process as reification: the transformation of meaningful social relationships into thing-like processes from which all human significance has been evacuated. And it is this progressive and pervasive evacuation of meaning from the social totality that, for them, is essentially related to the psychological potency of Nazi ideology (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 168–208). The fundamental question that emerges from Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of fascism is that of the relationship between ‘critical’ theorists who pursue the monstrous reversions of subjectivity that fascist parties are sometimes able to effect, and ‘analytical’ theorists who see the periodic success of fascism as resulting from the maladjustment of self-interest that results from acute disruption of social and economic order. These two kinds of theory are not separated by an absolute gulf, for both of them are concerned with the strategies and techniques through which fascism is able to gather support from different social strata. However, the real difference is that analytical approaches of the kind propounded by Hamilton have a tendency to regard categories such as ‘rural populations’, ‘religious affiliation’ and ‘urban classes’ as remaining substantially unchanged both by the dislocation of the social order and by the impact of Nazi ideology. They explain the success of Nazism through the survival of a basic self-interest/self-identity that defines how these groups will act under even the most extraordinary of circumstances. Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the other hand, attempts a radical questioning of this kind of social affiliation. This is not to say that Horkheimer and Adorno simply disregard the historical constitution of social, economic, and religious groups in their analysis of Nazism, rather that their account of modernity demands that they conceive such identity structures as having already been affected by its processes of rationalization. Thus, for example, the concept of a ‘rural population’ would become something much more hybrid than Hamilton’s analysis would allow; for the working practices, religious affiliations, and familial ties that comprise its substance have already been significantly affected by the technological networks of mass society. Also, the symbolic order of class identity through which the urban population of Weimar Germany was differentiated had undoubtedly been destabilized by the economic crisis and by the Nazis’ manipulation of the mass media. So, if it is true that analytical-comparative theories tend to ‘read in’ a level of rational affiliation that may distract us from the state of emergency which fascism precipitates, how should their analyses be reinterpreted? Well, to return to Hamilton’s findings, might it not be the case that the support for the NSDAP

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in rural populations, both Protestant and Catholic, is at least partly attributable to a profound sense of loss – that of having been expropriated from the ethically substantive position of the Bauerstande to little more than rural functionaries? This is not to say that the normative traditions of the rural population of Germany did not persist, but that their influence on electoral support for the NSDAP was mediated through new forms of anxiety and disaffection that were essentially related to the pervasive rationality of capitalism. Among the urban population, the effects of spiralling inflation and the dissemination of Nazi ideology transformed the symbolic order of class much more directly. In the cities, the perpetual threat of unemployment was something that had already begun to fracture traditional working class associations. Even though support for the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KDP) remained relatively high among the working class, there were, as Hamilton points out, significant numbers of the urban proletariat who voted for the Nazis. This should lead us to question whether the working class Nazi vote can be explained simply by a shift in the allegiances of the most conservative labour aristocracies (Hamilton, 1982: 386–90), and to consider how the constitutive experience of working-class solidarity was transformed by the German economic collapse. Finally, and most importantly, there is the question of lower-middle class support for the NSDAP. It is undoubtedly true that Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis of the rise of Nazism tends to implicate the lower-middle classes: for the combination of economic vulnerability, status anxiety, and semi-intellectual culture that delimits the lower boundary of middle-class life is something they conceive as the essential form of Nazi sensibility (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 195–7). This can be read in two ways. The first is that their analysis of the middle class’s susceptibility to the appeals of Nazism is simply wrong. For insofar as it fails to give an account of the persistence of specific normative satisfactions among the lower-middle classes, neglects to analyse the actual reasons why so many of them voted for the NSDAP, and presents this typification of the alienated middle class life as having contaminated every other social stratum, it can only obscure the real political dynamics of Nazism (Hamilton, 1982: 433–7). Another way of reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s analysis is to allow that their account of the connection between fascism, subjectivity, and economy is an attempt to question the concept of ‘rational choice’ that empirical approaches read into the dynamics of Nazism in the Weimar Republic. Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of the rise of fascism in Germany is focused on the sense of mourning that haunts modern life, and its relationship

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to the anti-Semitic essence of Nazi ideology. Put briefly, their argument is that rational society replaces the enactment of life as mimesis (family, sacrifice, love) with a regime of pre-programmed repetitive activity (work, innovation, consumption). Any expression of instinctual life is made subject to a regime of rational strictures that determines the difference between the human and the animal; and so these strictures stake out the moral boundaries of bourgeois society and define what is to count as civilized behaviour (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 181–2). For Horkheimer and Adorno, Nazism’s reversion to a politics of unreflective action is a response to the loss inflicted on every individual who is subject to the reifying strictures of Enlightenment culture. As such, Nazism is essentially a politics of scapegoating; it is the expression of a demand that someone should be held responsible for the lack of satisfaction afflicting every aspect of social existence. The anti-Semitism that forms the core of Nazi ideology is found ready to hand in the attitude of Christianity towards the Jews: for insofar as they have traditionally been conceived as living outside the sacred bonds that attach secular life to the divine, they are represented as a devious and acquisitive animality that has slowly dissipated the reserves of the Aryan spirit (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 183–5). The potency of Nazism’s appeal therefore is rooted in the fundamental contradiction of bourgeois economic rationality; it arises from the ‘half-educated’ sense of loss that pervades the totality of social existence, and from the projection of universal blame onto the Jews that this provokes (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 194–7). As I said at the start of the section, I believe that the key to understanding the dynamics of fascism as a distinct political movement is its expression of an ideology that promises happiness through the complete rejection of modernity, and the return to an archaic community of ‘blood and soil’. Horkheimer and Adorno’s argument captures something of the madness that animated the ‘Fascist spectacle’ of power, mastery, and self-sacrifice, and of the mass transformation of the public sphere that this spectacle was able to bring about (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1986: 185). This is not to say that historical analyses of the kind presented by Hamilton are simply distractions from the racial and aesthetic dynamics of fascism. To ignore such findings would be to allow critical theory to become uncoupled from the historical reality it seeks to describe, and to postulate the emergence of new ‘universal’ tendencies without attending to the inertial effects of the established order. Yet there is something in the rationality of such historical accounts of fascism that tends to underplay the

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transformative power of its relationship to the German economic crisis, and to assume that the motivations for supporting the NSDAP were, in the crucial period between 1938 and 1939, still largely unchanged by the Nazis’ occultation of the Volk and its enemies. Horkheimer and Adorno’s concept of the relationship between Nazism and modernity gestures towards the constitution of a paranoid ‘conscience’, whose roots lie in the instrumental organization of the world as matter to be transformed, and which inhabits each social stratum as an implicit yearning for violence and the destruction of the ‘Other’. Hamilton makes it clear that, for him, such conjectures have no place in academic discussions of fascism, and that the motivations for voting for the NSDAP were so diverse, even within the lower-middle classes, that they cannot be explained by generalizations of the kind set out by ‘mass society theory’ (Hamilton, 1982: 453–74). But the fact remains of what happened after Hitler’s eventual seizure of power: the Nuremberg race laws, the persecution of the Jews, and the Holocaust. The extremity of such measures, it seems clear, requires a deeper explanation of the transformations of desire, objectivity, and the good that were precipitated by Nazi mythology than any version of rational choice theory could give. I will go on to examine the relationship between fascism and the development of modernity as an assemblage of normative, instrumental, and aesthetic institutions. Section two will look at the origins of the particular kind of happiness sought in submission to an unquestionable, unchangeable, and archaic authority. Specifically, I will examine the connection between fascism and Hegel’s account of Jacobin Terror in The Phenomenology of Mind. Section three will examine the dynamics of the Nazi politics of will: the demand for absolute submission to the leader (Führer) and the impact of this on the legal, normative, and aesthetic structures of the public sphere. In particular, I will concentrate on the metaphorical structure of Nietzsche’s philosophy of power, and its assimilation into the Nazi ideology of happiness through strength. The final section will examine Derrida’s account of the persistence of this politics of the will and the unconditional happiness it promises. If the essence of fascism is its uniquely virulent representation of the racial origins of culture, then the question of its persistence is really that of the politics of memory: of how fascism can be ‘enjoyed’ after the Holocaust, of how it simulates itself as the true alternative to democracy, and of how its violence towards representative institutions is related to the chance of democracy to come. It is the recurrence of these

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questions in times of crisis that makes the essence of fascism both dangerously unpredictable and tragically messianic.

Anxiety and modern desire At the beginning of the last section, I claimed that the question of the relationship between fascism and happiness is, in the end, the question of the essence of fascism as a political movement. In this section, I will begin to flesh out the nature of this claim, and to give some sense of how this ‘essence’ is related to the evolution of modernity. For it is only insofar as an intrinsic relationship can be shown to exist between the constitutive elements of bourgeois society (abstract autonomy, personal rights, moral individualism) and a desire for absolute obedience, that it is possible to defend the idea of a fascist assemblage whose ‘return’ is implicit in the transformations of modernity. I will look at Hegel’s reflections on the French Revolution and its relationship to the form of bourgeois subjectivity that emerged after the descent of the First Republic into the Jacobin Terror. Specifically, I will examine his account of the concepts of happiness, individualism, and utility that emerged from the French Enlightenment, and their relationship to the traditional structures of ethical life. For it is here, I believe, that it is possible to discern the origin of a particular compulsion that accompanies the rationalizing tendency of modernity, and which is essential to the political assemblage of fascism. In Hegelian philosophy, the idea of happiness is consistently distinguished from the kinds of satisfaction through which spirit determines itself in the relations of ethical life. Indeed, Hegel once remarked that periods of sustained happiness and stability in the course of human history are ‘blank pages’ that contribute little to the evolution of self-consciousness and its relationship to absolute spirit (Hegel, 1944: 31). In the pre-Socratic period of the Greek Polis, art, religion, and politics attained an actual unity that, for Hegel, sustained the happiest epoch in human history. Each element in this form of Sittlichkeit was a reflection of the others, and so the experience of individual citizens remained largely undisturbed by a sense of autonomous selfhood determined against the relations of the state. Such contentment however is possible only at a unique point in historical time where the three modalities of absolute knowledge – art, religion, and philosophy – are configured as reciprocal elements of the state’s authority. What emerges from Socrates’ heretical questioning of the laws of the Polis is spirit’s loss of immediate

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communication with itself in the institutional relations of Sittlichkeit. This is the point at which self-consciousness begins its evolution into an abstract form of identity, whose satisfactions are transformed through relations of mastery and subjection that issue from the breakdown of the Polis. Thus, the concept of satisfaction that Hegel deploys throughout The Phenomenology of Mind is crucially different from that of happiness. The latter is a modality of satisfaction: it is the formation of self-consciousness into a particular unity of intellect and sensibility whose aim is the reproduction of the feeling of happiness itself. (This self-perpetuating circuit of pleasure is what Utilitarian philosophy seeks to maintain.) Satisfaction, on the other hand, is a dialectical concept that includes not just the immediate reproduction of happiness essential to the constitution of the state, but also the disturbing sense of uncertainty and loss that prefigures the death and reconstitution of spirit as ethical community (Hegel, 1967a: 142–5). After the dissolution of the Greek Polis and the Roman Empire, Hegel’s account of the historical evolution of spirit proceeds through the relations of mastery and servitude that developed under feudalism. These relations are founded on the principle of divine election and, as such, are the explicit denial of universality to the work of those whom God has created to serve the master. Thus, the fundamental satisfactions of self-consciousness, its expressive work and worship of God, are vitiated; they become the sources of inveterate suffering implicated in the formation of the Unhappy Consciousness. This lack of recognition in ethical life is what gives rise to the demand for reformation of the relationship between Religion and State: it is the universal unhappiness of self-consciousness that leads it to seek divine grace beyond the corrupt conventions of the church (Hegel, 1967a: 251–67). Hegel’s analyses of the relationships between self-consciousness and the regime of feudal absolutism are complex, and give a profound sense of how the dissatisfaction of the Unhappy Consciousness is played out in the Enlightenment’s struggle with superstition, its attempts to rationalize religious worship, and its reduction of the world to matter and utility. The practical form assumed by the French Enlightenment is that of the utilitarian consciousness which knows itself only through its power to transform the external world. So, for Hegel, the association of individuals that is envisioned by this particular worldview is brutally mechanistic: each confronts the other as an object possessing a certain level of usefulness for its particular purposes, and the concept of ethical life is reduced to the level of matter to be re-formed by the will and activity of man (Hegel, 1967a: 590–8).

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This utilitarian self-consciousness, however, is not the unmediated enjoyment of the object, for it knows that ‘essential being and concrete actuality consist in the knowledge consciousness has of itself ’ (Hegel, 1967a: 600). This is the form in which Absolute Freedom comes on the scene: the individual who is assured of his freedom as a pure negativity opposed to the differentiation of spirit into the objective relations of work, satisfaction, and desire. The precondition of this self-consciousness is what Hegel called the ‘unsatisfied Enlightenment’ of the French philosophes (Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau), who saw the freedom of man as an original essence that preceded the emergence of human society. Of particular importance here is Rousseau’s concept of the ‘general will’ as the pure emanation of natural freedom. Insofar as his writings on the goodness of man postulate the original conditions of peace and equality, his account of the inclusiveness of democratic deliberation is, in the end, a demand that the will of each individual should accord exactly with the essence of natural freedom (Rousseau, 1988: 181–200). As such, Rousseau’s general will is always formed as an appeal to the heart of each individual citizen; a demand that he should listen to the voice of nature that remains independent of the corruptible institutions of society. Through this reconnection with its essence, the individual ego can claim to be the executor of the only laws that are proper to free men. For Hegel, however, this expression of Absolute Freedom can accomplish nothing positive within the substance of ethical life, for it is merely a destructive idealism set against the actual relations of the state and civil society (Hegel, 1967a: 601–5). It is this absolute liberation of the individual ego that lay at the root of the Revolutionary Terror. According to Hegel, the ‘unsatisfied materialism’ of the French Enlightenment is directly related to the fact that the Catholic Church in France retained its traditional ties with the feudal aristocracy (Rose, 1981: 117–18). And so, the social institutions into which Enlightenment philosophy emerged were inveterately corrupt: the church, state, and aristocracy triumvirate retained a monopoly on power that was exercised largely for the aggrandisement of those who were rich enough to belong to the cartel. The revolutionary consciousness that arose from the French Enlightenment was radically atomistic; each individual confronts his fellows as an absolutely free will whose purposefulness is without mediation. Under these circumstances, the only kind of government that is possible springs from the strategic constitution of a particular faction as the dominant force within the chaos of the state. Self-consciousness, in other words, encounters itself not as spirit but as ‘matter’, and as such, it becomes a disposable element in the struggle for the kingdom

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of Absolute Freedom (Hegel, 1967a: 605). According to Hegel, therefore, the essence of the French Revolutionary Terror lay in the extremity of its vocation to purify the world – to rid it of the corrupting influence of church and aristocracy, and to destroy any group who aligned themselves with their interests. Human life, in other words, became the experience of an impending annihilation whose enactment would have no more significance for the executioner than ‘cleaving the head of a cabbage or swallowing a draught of water’ (Hegel, 1967a: 207). This first appearance of an annihilationist movement whose strategic, ideological, and political assemblage is organized around the achievement of unconditional happiness is, of course, momentously important. It is the first time that death, which is universally present in the dialectics of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, becomes a programmatic end pursued by selfconsciousness against itself (Hegel, 1967a: 607). But it would be wrong to consider the Jacobin Terror as the archetype on which fascism was founded. While it is true that the political assemblage that emerged from the Revolution was constituted for the radical purification of society, it could be argued that its political ideals were still grounded in the Enlightenment demand for universal equality, and that these ideals did eventually become the foundation of European democracy. Kant and Hegel pursue two different versions of this argument. In Kant’s version, the contribution which the French Revolution makes to the progress of human freedom, is revealed to those who witness it from outside the theatre of violence: it appears as a ‘sign’ (Begebenheit) of the rational form of democracy that is to come (Kant, 1991: 182–5). For Hegel, the Jacobin transformation of the ideals of liberty into a destructive creed that recognized only its own definition of freedom ultimately gave rise to the idealist forms of morality (exemplified in the philosophies of Kant and Fichte) through which the search for personal happiness was able to configure itself as the truth of civil society (Hegel, 1967a: 610). Thus, the most pressing questions to have emerged from Hegel’s account of Absolute Freedom concern the evolution of the relationship between instrumental reason and the substance of ethical life, the susceptibility of atomistic self-consciousness to the mythologies of primal freedom, and the evolution of the relationship between aesthetic representation and political power. In Hegel’s thought, the sphere of civil society is the place of an unstable confluence of atomistic desire and moral autonomy. Civil society makes each individual responsible for his own happiness, while at the same time determining the objective-legal forms in which the spontaneity of conscience is

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realized. The bourgeois individual is therefore caught between the strict application of religious principles of charity and obedience, the moral determination of free will as disinterested restraint, and the pursuit of his own material selfinterest. The importance of this account of the bourgeois subject lies in Hegel’s identification of the volatility of its relationship to the networks of free exchange that have come to dominate civil society (Hegel, 1967b: 122–6). His account of the predominance of possessive individualism in The Philosophy of Right is articulated as the constant loss of happiness; for the intrinsic principle of civil society is the remorseless exposure of the ego to heteronomous desires that destabilize its sense of worth and dignity. Thus, from the very beginning, the constitution of the bourgeois individual is highly problematic: the evanescence of its formation, the vulnerability of its status, and the contingency of its affiliations have always already affected its essence. This is crucially different from Marx’s analysis of civil society, which treats the ‘middle class’ as an entity whose desires and interests are largely homogenous and whose political potential is limited to joining the proletarian revolution or forming an unholy alliance with the reactionary powers of the feudal state (church, aristocracy, and monarchy). In Hegel’s thought, there is a sense of the labile adaptability of bourgeois selfconsciousness to extreme situations, which complicates the historic choice between socialized production and the return to feudal barbarism. And so, we need to examine the relationship of this adaptability to the essence of fascism. Hegel’s Aesthetics, as we saw in Chapter 2, presents Romantic art as the form in which representation becomes radically detached from the objective institutions of law and justice that constitute ethical life. In the Romantic art the knight of faith is presented as seeking to redeem the world through the essential purity of his soul; his trials are depicted as eternal struggles between good and evil that have become uncoupled from actual social relations. Romanticism is the aesthetic form in which art finally loses its formative relationship to Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1993: 87). Once its figurations of heroic service become engrained in the bourgeois imagination, Romantic art becomes the mode in which atomistic individuals conceive themselves and their travails in the world. The sturm und drang movement, for example, urged salvation through the direct experience of Nature, whose magnitude could inspire the artist to feats of creativity that communicate with a transcendental sublime. This kind of art intensifies the moral corruption against which it sets itself. The individuals in whom it becomes a formative power seek only to escape the contradictions of ethical life and to pursue the law of their own existence. It is this aesthetic tendency that

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Gillian Rose identifies as essential to Hegel’s concept of tragic modernity, that is, the enactment of the individual will through representations that lack any substantive relationship to the substance of ethical life (Rose, 1981: 209). For, insofar as individual persons live ‘together-apart’ in the sphere of civil society, their representations of community, morality, and the good life become increasingly susceptible to flights of aesthetic distraction. This, of course, is not to say that Hegel’s account of the aesthetic culture to which bourgeois individualism is prone is a direct anticipation of the fascist assemblage that took shape in Europe between the Wars. As we saw in the previous section, the form and distribution of bourgeois sensibility had been fundamentally altered by the industrialization of European society; so the dynamics of fascism’s appeal cannot be understood simply as a perversion of the Romance aesthetic into monstrous figurations of original conflict and final overcoming. There is, however, a sense in which Hegel’s account of the instability of bourgeois satisfaction, and of the contingency of the happiness that is possible within the sphere of civil society, anticipates the weakness of functionalized man for the politics of primal belonging. If we are to understand the evolution of fascism, it is important to understand its relationship to the evolution of bourgeois subjectivity. Hegel’s account of this mode of self-consciousness is important because it begins to determine the fundamental contradiction of modern subjectivity: that the formal freedom of the self, which is the endemic condition of life in civil society, gives rise to a profound sense of anxiety which haunts the experience of work, satisfaction, and desire. The question that arises from Hegel’s analysis of modernity therefore concerns the fate of this labile form of individualism. Given that the Nazi assemblage was able to provoke the desire for primal belonging to the point where it fatally ruptured the normative consensus of Weimar, we must ask whether its powers of aesthetic and ideological transformation exceed the possibility of dialectical recuperation. Or, to put it another way, whether modernity ‘after Auschwitz’ is still haunted by the recurrent threat of monstrous satisfactions that endanger everything ethical in the constitution of social life. Thus, in the following section, I will examine the dynamical power of the fascist assemblage – its illimitable commitment to salvaging the unity of the Volk from the insidious influence of the Jews and Judaism – as an effect of the reactive powers that, for Nietzsche, have constituted the soul of the bourgeois subject. It is in Nietzsche’s determination to open modernity to effects of joy, suffering, and violence that cannot be recuperated in the ‘normal’ organization of desire, that we must follow the multiple and persistent ‘happiness’ of fascist excess.

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Reactionary love and ‘the people’ The question with which I will begin this section is a Hegelian one, that is, the question of whether Nietzsche’s solicitation of the joy of overcoming, and the aesthetic of death, destruction, and aristocracy he deploys in this solicitation, is complicit with the emergence of fascism as an aesthetico-political culture. Is it the case that Nietzsche’s solicitation of the ecstatic dance performed above the infinite depths of the world also determines a particular kind of violence essential to the fascist politics of will and overcoming? In Nietzsche’s philosophy, as we have seen, the formation of human society is dependent on the emergence of a primordial hierarchy in which ‘the strong’, who have been able to discipline their instincts, perform the task of disciplining ‘the weak’, who know only the life of animal instinct. This hierarchy is founded on suffering and brutality; for, without the constant reinforcement of pain, the weak could never acquire the basic forms of civilized behaviour that differentiate humanity from the animal (Nietzsche, 1990: 192–8). The primitive mechanisms of domination from which the laws of human society emerge are founded on a distribution of pain in which the suffering of the weak is a legitimate source of pleasure to the strong; for it is they who provide the active force that sustains the integrity of law and culture. From the beginning of human history, there has been an essential relationship between the transformative exercise of power and the self-overcoming of the human. All the possibilities that humanity might attain depend on the power of the formative/active will to determine its action independently of those forces that would restrain it. So, if we are to understand Nietzsche’s relationship to the fascist assemblage, we need to look at the question of his complicity with its politics of overcoming: of how, and indeed whether, the vocabulary of force through which he expounds the doctrine of radical overcoming, affected the formation and trajectory of fascist politics. Nietzsche’s break with idealism is crucial here. Like all philosophical antagonisms, the clash between Nietzschean and Hegelian thought really comes down to a difference of emphasis that is spread and intensified through infinitely subtle mechanisms of representation. In Hegel’s philosophy, ‘the object’ is something that is always part of a phenomenology of experience in which its ‘objectivity’ is determined in relation to the structures, categories, and relations of ethical life. Thus, for example, the moral utilitarianism that arose from Enlightenment philosophy is directly related to the atomistic concept of matter that emerged from the New Science of nature. Happiness is conceived as a life

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lived within a system of harmoniously related atoms/individuals who have been brought into conformity with abstract laws of civil association. Hegel’s phenomenology turns on the contradictions that arise from the present determination of truth/objectivity within ethical life: the absolute authority of the feudal master, the unquestionable edicts of the church, and the abstract laws of matter each produce a specific differentiation of consciousness into practical self-recognition. History therefore proceeds through the immanent power of rational subjects to recognize the ‘truth’ of the objective relationships in which they are embedded, and to redeem the contradictions of Sittlichkeit through the transformative experience of the negative (Hegel, 1967a: 114–15). In Nietzsche’s critique of idealism, it is the dynamics of this experience that is questioned, or, more precisely, what he takes to be the theological unity that is implicit in Hegelian dialectics of truth, feeling, and intellect. In the ‘history of moral feelings’ that Nietzsche sets out in Human, All Too Human he remarks that: Everything is necessity: this is the new knowledge, and this knowledge is itself necessary. Everything is innocence; and knowledge is the way into this innocence (Nietzsche, 1994: 76).

So, if ‘everything is necessity’, including the forms of recognition through which self-consciousness recognizes itself as a spiritual essence, and if the economy of Sittlichkeit is reducible to the logic of biological preservation, to what kind of ‘innocence’ can the science of necessity lead us? We must recognize that, for Nietzsche, this innocence is essentially related to the material existence of the body. In Christian doctrine, God is conceived as utterly selfless; and so the aspiration of every Christian should be to overcome those instincts that would lead him to pursue secular pleasure at the expense of his responsibilities to God and his fellow man. Thus, it is in ‘selfless’ acts of charity towards others and in abasement before God that the moral conscience determines its morality: it is the reactive power in which the transformative potential of the body, as an assemblage of feeling, apprehension, intellect, and passion, is captured within the mild satisfactions of human society. However, the ‘innocence’ to which knowledge of the necessity that reigns in the world gives rise is innocent precisely because it is not selfless, not originally promised to the happiness of all. According to Nietzsche, to know the truth of material necessity is to have encountered the abyss of its infinite dispersion: for the world is constantly reconfigured into possibilities that can only come

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into being through encounters with the dynamic assemblage of the body. The innocence of such encounters lies in the fact that, whatever the scene of their arrival, they solicit the noble generosity of he who is summoned to respond; they are the solicitation of self-mastery by pure overcoming rather than repression and guilt (Nietzsche, 1984: 279–83). The concept of innocence that Nietzsche presents in Human, All Too Human is a precursor of the idea of the dance he develops in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science. The Nietzschean dancer is innocent because his encounters with the world are always open; he is without prejudice against the strangeness he may stumble upon, even if this appears as an obscene transgression of the principles of taste and morality. The jouissance of the encounter with the obscene is what marks its obscenity; and as such, it is only the innocent, the dancer, who refuses the denunciation of the monstrous, who may carry something of the truth of this encounter away with him. This is not the innocence of the ingénue who ‘sees the good’ in everyone and everything, but a visceral apprehension whose transformation of the body’s assemblage of intellect and passion threatens the order of bourgeois taste (Nietzsche, 1974: 174). For, insofar as encounters between ‘the innocent’ and ‘the obscene’ occur as unpredictable possibilities, their distribution of effects always introduces an element of dangerous contingency into the constitution of ethical life. The innocence of the dance therefore, is the tour de force of mortality: it is maintained by the dancer’s will to outplay the seductive forms into which the old order of life will transform itself, and to impose his own ‘style’ on the encounters he solicits (Nietzsche, 1984: 241–4; 1974: 231–2). So, if there is a moral demand in Nietzsche’s thought, this is configured in the joyfulness of the dance – the provocative encounter with the obscene that gives rise to the dangerous/innocent knowledge of how that obscenity has been constituted (Nietzsche, 1974: 247–53). The joyfulness of the Nietzschean dancer is not enacted as a miraculous revelation; its possibility arises from the moral, aesthetic, religious, and political relations that constitute the substance of ethical life. The dance transforms the conditions of its performance. However, the relationship of the dance to the concrete relations of Sittlichkeit is constantly changing; the representation of ‘life’ in the sphere of culture takes place as an economy of reactive powers able to assume an infinite number of forms that would seduce the dancer. As Nietzsche put in it Thus Spoke Zarathustra, moral life is the ‘accursed, nimble, subtle snake and slippery witch’, whose touch is delicious poison to the dancer who would push beyond the moral composition of the humanity (Nietzsche, 1984:

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242). This mutual solicitation of ‘life’ and ‘dance’ is fundamentally important to Nietzsche’s critique of modernity. The innocence of the dance is, as we have seen, increasingly distant from the social life of humanity, for the Dionysian power of the tragic is expunged from the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of bourgeois culture. The simple necessity of organic life attains a position of reactive dominance, in which mind and body are reduced to nodal points in the circle of utilitarian happiness. This economy of capture, however, is not static: it depends on the constant transformation of the legal, economic, and aesthetic relations through which the integrity of social life is maintained. What separates Nietzsche’s philosophy from Hegel’s therefore, is the former’s insistence that the tragedy of history cannot be redeemed through the dialectics of re-cognition: insofar as life and the vitality of the dance reciprocally provoke one another, the violence of their relationship exceeds the ‘theological’ dialectics of Sittlichkeit. For Nietzsche, the effects produced by the contending powers of socialism and religion are essential to the unfolding of modernity. Religion is the original form in which the desire for abiding happiness is invested: it is the configuration of the world as the creation of a selfless God whose ultimate purpose is the redemption of humanity. Socialism is a derivative form of the religious impulse in which this selfless God is replaced by the self-creative power of the human, and the idea of redemption is made over to the science of socialized production. These two regimes, despite their common genealogical root, are brought into conflict by the evolution of modernity. Religion is one of the mainstays of bourgeois life and pervades its concepts of morality and conscience. It also goes deep into the class and status divisions that have opened in modern societies, and as such, the socialist apparatus constantly has to fight the power of religion to ‘theologize’ its materialist ideals and to return the masses to the bonds of poverty and obedience (Nietzsche, 1994: 213–14). The historical conflicts that were played out among the landed aristocracy, bourgeois citizens, and proletarian organizations at the beginning of the modern epoch gave rise to an economy of ressentiment that both precedes and exceeds the mediating resources of civil society. And so, from a genealogical perspective, the old appeals that were restaged by the Communists (KDP), Social Democrats (SPD), Catholic People’s Party (KVP), and Zentrum during the breakup of Weimar Germany were fatally vulnerable to the dynamic culture of Nazism. The question that emerges from this genealogical account of the violence that consumed the political space of the Weimar Republic concerns the power of the Nazi assemblage to transform the economy of ressentiment that had begun to

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undermine established forms of bourgeois, religious, and proletarian life. Walter Kaufmann has argued that the ‘Nietzsche legend’ on which the Nazi ideologists drew was, at least in part, the product of his sister Elizabeth’s tendentious editing of his work (Kaufmann, 1974: 8)2. However, the question of Nietzsche’s relationship to Nazism is more complex than this analysis would suggest. It is certainly true that any attempt to reduce Nietzsche’s thought to a celebration of Aryan anti-Semitism misses the destabilizing power his philosophy exerts on the securities of race, nationality, and tradition. Yet there remains something in his configuration of the power of overcoming that cannot be discharged in the precision of textual analysis; something which, inevitably and necessarily, lends itself to the intensification of life through the spectacle of violence. This ‘something’ is perhaps best understood as a kind of reversion, or the return to certain tropes that, for Nietzsche, most poignantly configure the dance and its relationship to the theological/idealist constitution of life. The question of Nietzsche’s complicity with fascism therefore boils down to the repetitive structure of his critique, or, more specifically, to his reversion to certain archetypes – the dangerous mercurial woman, the clever resilient Jew, the heroically suffering übermensch – that became essential to the reactive powers of Nazism. Perhaps the aesthetic provocations of Nietzsche’s philosophy are haunted from the beginning by the possibility of mass political caricature, and perhaps the chance of the Nazi seizure of power was made greater by the dissemination of such ‘Nietzschean’ mythologies. Nietzsche’s account of ressentiment is compelling because it demands that we conceptualize fascism not as a historical aberration, but as a movement that reveals the non-dialectical economy of reactive powers that have formed modernity. The Nazi seizure of power was accomplished through a promise of happiness that was constantly snatched away; a happiness that could only be approached in the ever-more barbarous tests of loyalty to the Volk that were demanded by the Führer. Within the Nazi assemblage, the existential determination of the will is surrendered to a movement that aims to destroy who or whatever its constitutive regime excludes from the Aryan Volksgemeinschaft. Nietzsche’s genealogy of reactive power, however, gestures towards the fragility of such an assemblage. The fact that it can only sustain itself through an unregulated violence that constantly transforms the malediction of the ‘other’ (the Jew, the homosexual, the cripple, the mental defective, the intellectual), reveals a tendency to self-destruction that is essential to the political organization of fascism. The force with which the fascist assemblage is able to demand

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submission to the collective will of the Volk, and with which it is able to solicit mass participation in millennial projects of purification and rebuilding, depends on the condensation of historical time into the heat of the event. Thus, the destructive evanescence of the fascist regime – its constitution as a movement whose violence keeps everything in a state of flux and uncertainty – is what determines the messianic structure of its relationship to the substance of ethical life. For it is insofar as the experience of dutiful responsibility that constitutes the public sphere is the outcome of a constant sublation of ‘life’, the power of fascism to excite mind and body into a frenzy of unrealizable overcoming is reborn from the ‘reactive’ constitution of democracy. I will say more about this theme of recurrence in the concluding section. For the moment, however, I want to return to the idea that the evolution of modernity has been guided by the attempt to stabilize the system of reactive powers through which the utilitarian ends of political economy are pursued. At the start of the chapter I looked briefly at Horkheimer and Adorno’s theory of the relationship between capitalism and the administration of desire by the culture industry. I argued that their account of the connection between rational capitalism and fascist anti-Semitism is important because it outlines a mutual provocation between the drive for maximal economic utility and the return of an archaic desire for belonging. If one were a Nietzschean, however, one might suspect that Horkheimer and Adorno’s concern with the power of the technological aesthetic to induce feelings of undifferentiated happiness in the masses is little more than a new form of the ‘antiquarian history’ that Nietzsche condemned in his essay ‘On the Utility and Liability of History for Life’ (Nietzsche, 1995: 102–8). The break with Hegelian dialectics, in other words, has simply led back to a repudiation of the present as the place of reification and violent distraction. A Nietzschean riposte to this melancholic description of the world must, of course, seek the possibility of a break with the nameless damage of reified life, and solicit the contingencies that are opened by the systemic organization of production and desire. Thus, Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to shift the conceptual frame of critical theory from technologies of capture to the unregulated flows through which capital expands its productive regime, is an attempt to remain true to the possibility of a joyful overcoming that is without compulsion or resentment. In his preface to Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault remarks that what Deleuze and Guattari were attempting was to answer the question, ‘How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of fascism?’ The fascism to

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which Foucault refers here is not just that of the ‘historical fascism’ of Hitler and Mussolini, but also ‘the fascism in us all … that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: xii). This distinction between the historical fascism that seized power in Germany, Italy, and Spain in the 1930s and the Oedipal colonization of desire that has emerged as the reproductive system of late capitalism, is important because it bears on the idea of the fascist assemblage I have expounded in this chapter. From Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, the successful fascist movements of the mid-twentieth century developed as internecine war machines: their organizational evolution was such as to produce unpredictable combinations of aesthetic spectacle, Oedipal reversion, and mimetic violence within the destabilized constitution of the nation state. The operational networks of the NSDAP functioned to precipitate events in which the sufferings of historical time could be miraculously transformed into the happiness of primal community and redemption in the will of the Führer (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 102–4). Fascism’s effectiveness within the social and economic degradation of Weimar arose from a particular transformation of desire: the conservatism of the most socially conservative classes was radicalized by the imminence of their destruction, and the organizational power of working class movements was fatally weakened by the degradation of their experience of work and collective desire. Thus, the Oedipal figure of the Führer was able to precipitate the love and violence of ‘the Volk’ at any time or place in the fractured relations of the state. There is a certain homology between Foucault’s history of the disciplinary organization of capitalist societies and Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the Oedipal structures through which subjective desire is channelled into obsessive production. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault maintains that the evolution of the relationship between penality, surveillance, and capital that is characteristic of control society, is determined by the demand for efficiency that is essential to the reproduction of surplus value. Capitalism, in other words, requires a regime of penal control that reduces conflict and facilitates the flows of labour power, information, and knowledge on which the production of surplus value depends (Foucault, 1979: 221). Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the historical development of ‘civilized capitalist machines’ outlines a similar teleology. They argue that the Oedipal structures that have colonized subjective desire are governed by the demand for productive forms of mastery, or, the ‘axiomatics’ of the capitalist state are always concerned with capturing desire within the deep structures of Oedipal

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representation (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 260–2). This implies that the success of ‘classical’ fascism is bound to a particular historical epoch. Insofar as it emerged from a volatile conjunction of active, reactive, and destructive desires, the violence of fascism’s restaging of despotic power is something the state had to reintegrate into its economy of representation. The disciplinary fascism of the Oedipal regime, in other words, becomes the mise-en-scène in which unpredictable desires both intensify and destabilize the metrical formations of functionality and servitude (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 543–4). It is their determination to retain the transformative relationship of desire to the Oedipal structures of the state, therefore, that place Deleuze and Guattari in an unexpectedly ‘Hegelian’ position on the fate of fascism. For, insofar as they maintain that classical fascism is too brutal to function as a durable mode of political cathexis, there is a sense in which they conceive the state as having (all but) sublated the possibility of the fascist war machine returning to the space of capitalist production. Its mobile violence, in other words, turns out to be an operational strategy that is perfectible within the order of representation and which is reducible to the axiomatics of pacification and economy. Thus, the fascist parties that re-emerged in Western democracies after the War, and those that have become active since the collapse of the Soviet Bloc are, from this perspective, little more than simulacra; their political effects are limited to the scattered intensities of paramilitary demonstrations and the mobilization of protest votes against the conspiracies of the state. The real battle against fascism, therefore, has become the battle against the expanding networks through which Oedipal desire has been able to extend its grip on the contingent desires that inhabit the networks’ capital. In the section that follows, I will develop the argument that the affective and representational assemblage of fascism has a messianic essence, and that its return to the productive order of late capitalism repeats and reconfigures the ‘classical’ assemblage of racism, narcissism, and ecstatic violence.

Spectres of fascism Let me begin by saying something about Derrida’s idea of the spectre. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida presents it as something that hangs between life and death; a thing that ‘looks at us, concerns us, comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy (Derrida, 1994: 6). The context of this

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definition is, of course, Derrida’s concern with the fate of Marxism after the fall of the Soviet Union, or, with Marx as a revenant who points to the exploitation, silencing, and wastage that has accompanied the unrestricted spread of globaltechnological capitalism. This spectral presence is originally configured in the constitution of ‘Europe’ as the place of Enlightenment; it is that which haunts the antagonism that develops between the technological mechanism of capital and the democratic rights that have evolved in the public sphere. Thus, the ‘event’ of Marx’s intervention is anticipated by this primary haunting: insofar as he gave expression to the unnamed suffering implicit in the evolution of capital, he devised the body of concepts, representations, and strategies that became the assemblage, or, to use Derrida’s term, ‘technical prosthesis’, of Marxism. The ‘spectres’ that Derrida conjures from the body of Marx’s work, however, are not simply nuanced repetitions of his critique of capital; indeed, a substantial part of Derrida’s book is occupied with Marx and Engel’s failure to demonstrate conclusively the independence of historical materialism from idealist categories of freedom and ego (Derrida, 1994: 120–37). If we accept Derrida’s proposition that the iteration of every truth is an act which contaminates its original unity, then the ‘spectrality’ of Marx’s work lies in the multiple figurations of the idea of democracy that have arisen from his critique of capital. The idea of the spectre is related to the messianic structure of time that is intrinsic to Derrida’s later writing. For Derrida, political ideologies are essentially spectral. The ideas, representations, and strategies through which they configure the experience of the present are never simply ‘of the moment’: they arise as ambiguous modulations of the structural crises of modernity, and as such, are fated to return to the crises entailed in its scientific, technological, and economic unfolding. The promise of happiness is essential to this temporal structure of politics; for it is in the nature of political spectrality that the symbolic forms with which it invests the experience of life will return as new possibilities of hope to each succeeding generation. Thus, Marxism is messianic in the sense that its figurations of a community of collective labour oriented to the perfection of the human species is embedded in the techno-scientific regime of industrial capitalism (Derrida, 1994: 1–10). However, the logic of spectrality that Derrida presents in Spectres of Marx is not originally dedicated to the return of radical politics – and is perfectly compatible with the return of reactionary ghosts whose power is bound to mythologies of primordial sacrifice. It has, of course, been argued that Nazism, as the exemplary form of classical fascism, has exhausted its political power: for its racial ideology is based on the myth of

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the insidious Jew, its sacrificial demand rooted in the cult of the Fatherland, and its social programme inextricably bound up with the mythologies of Aryanism and primordial dwelling. All that remains of fascism are specific forms of racist and nationalist mimesis, whose extremity returns them to the politics of simulation they seek to overcome (Baudrillard, 1995: 89–99). I will argue, following a particular reading of Derrida’s Of Spirit, that fascism is grounded in a reactionary turn, or ‘inspiration’, that haunts the rationality of Enlightenment, and that its promise of sacrificial happiness persists as a mobilizing force within the mediatic networks that stage the experience of time, place, dwelling, and responsibility. In the previous section, I examined Deleuze and Guattari’s account of fascism as a reactivation of Oedipal-despotic desire, and its relationship to the dislocations of late capitalist modernity. Thus, in Weimar Germany the conjunction of economic catastrophe and the powerlessness of every social class to sustain its particular mode of existence, led to an aestheticization of politics in which the spectacle of the Volk appeared to be the only way to recapture the basic satisfactions of life. The question of the future of fascism that emerges from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, therefore, is essentially related to the total administration of capital and desire that has taken place since the Second World War. Insofar as they conceived fascism as a ‘modern archaism’ that was, in the end, destructive of the productivity of Oedipal desire, its horrific excesses became the stimulus for a fundamental restructuring of capitalism’s striated space (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 104). From this perspective, America’s commitment to the European Recovery Plan between 1947 and 1951 was based on its recognition of the need to restart flows of capital throughout the world economy, and to re-establish democratic forms of representation in those states that had fallen to fascism. This then is the non-messianic end of classical fascism: put down by the military action of the Allies and neutralized as a political ideology by commodified desires that outplayed its excessively destructive satisfactions. However, I will argue that to approach the subject of fascism as if it had already been absorbed into the networks of Oedipal happiness is to underplay something fundamental to the dynamics of its relationship to modernity. The spectre of fascism is not simply the reflection of an archaic regime of desire that has been neutralized by the networks of democratic consumption. Rather, it occupies a disturbing position within the unfolding of this regime: it is the figure of bad infinity, or sacrificial excess, that returns to the representation of life as happy responsibility and the pursuit of Oedipal perfection.

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There is a split among critical theorists concerning the sporadic outbreaks of fascism that continue to afflict Western democracies. On one side, there are those such as Derrida, Rose, and Lyotard who maintain that the fascist assemblage has a messianic essence that has been able to intensify the conflicts inherent in ‘late’ or ‘post’ modernity, and that it continues to threaten the institutions of liberal democracy. (I will return to this somewhat beleaguered group in a moment.) On the other side, there are those who argue that the revolutionary power of fascism belongs to an experience of modernization that was peculiar to Europe in the middle part of the twentieth century. This experience was characterized by the loss of nature, tradition, and religiosity that accompanied the rapid expansion of technological capitalism, and which became particularly acute during the global economic crisis of the early 1930s. From this perspective, the success of Nazism in Weimar Germany is seen as the outcome of a set of historically unique circumstances: the weakness of the economy after the Versailles treaty, the payment of war reparations, the sense of national humiliation, and the rapid destruction of existing class and status hierarchies. Thus, the account of classical fascism that Deleuze and Guattari set out in Anti-Oedipus, presents its militancy as a response to the unprecedented dislocation of life and death within the productive assemblage of bourgeois society. The conventional investments of the petit bourgeoisie in the trappings of their respectability, of the capitalists who force a profit out of their workforce, and of the proletariat who menace the system with their great somatic power, are suddenly turned upside-down: and it is at this point that Hitler and the NSDAP stepped in to offer a new sexualization of life that radicalized the old Oedipal relations. For Deleuze and Guattari, the transformative power of Nazism arose from the unprecedented speed with which the social hierarchy collapsed; and it was this uniquely catastrophic temporality that allowed the fascist aesthetics of desire to colonize the moral order of the nation state (Deleuze and Guattari, 2000: 293). This argument does perhaps allow that fascism could return to the system of postmodern happiness; but such a return could only take the form of an atavistic masochism whose perversion of ‘healthy’ desire is all too easy to outplay. It is in Baudrillard’s theory of simulation that the fascist assemblage finally loses every trace of its messianic danger, and is transformed into a ‘deterrence mechanism’ through which the simulacra of democracy re-establish their connection with ‘the real’. In one of his later works, The Transparency of Evil, he argues that the return of fascism to the theatre of Western democracy should

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be understood as an effect of the collapse of politics into the play of media simulation (Baudrillard, 1995: 72–7). If we follow Baudrillard’s contention that political debate has been reduced to the aesthetic codes of celebrity culture (its hyper-sexuality, hyper-sincerity, and hyper-conformity), then we must acknowledge that the possibility of soliciting the events of mass assembly on which the success of fascism depends, has come to an end. Thus, the sporadic recurrence of fascist activity in Western democracies is attributed to an endemic feeling that it offers the last chance of enacting something primordially real, something that is fast disappearing into the indifference of media politics (Baudrillard, 1995: 90). For Baudrillard, this feeling persists as a strange attractor whose effects are dispersed across the networks of virtual democracy and commodified desire. And so, the xenophobia that fascist movements are sometimes able to provoke in the masses is conceived as a mode of simulation destined to be transformed into new codes of demotic opposition. The politics of fascism that Baudrillard describes, therefore, is one of return, but a return that re-establishes the veracity of those simulacra through which the democratic responsibilities of the West have become ever-more insubstantial. Thus, while there may be sporadic violence and protofascist outrage at the fundamentalist other who would destroy the values of Enlightenment, in the end this is part of a mechanism through which the simulacra of democracy have retained the last remnants of the real. So, is it possible that classical fascism was the last eruption of the symbolic economy of death and sacrificial ecstasy into the ever-expanding system of representation? In Heidegger and “the jews”, Lyotard maintains that such an erasure is impossible. If we begin from the Freudian-Lacanian assumption that the happiness of self-conscious beings depends on their ability to re-present the original trauma of their subjection to the law, then the system of representation through which that happiness is sustained is always open to the return of the repressed, to the unrepresentable pain of the real (Lyotard, 1988: 16–17). This account of the present as a solicitation of what cannot be incorporated into synthetic modifications of happiness is what marks the break between those who see fascism as having become ‘endemic’ in the state’s representations of work, satisfaction, and desire, and those who see it as perpetually threatening a new seizure of power (Rose, 1996: 59). From the latter perspective, the return of fascism as a political movement is not blocked by the event of the Holocaust; indeed, there would seem to

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be a sense in which Nazism’s power over life and death has become part of the ‘messianic’ appeal that fascism has been able to maintain. However, the formation of fascist groups is not just a re-enactment of the past, a simulation in which mimetic performance has the frisson of a return to the absolute evil of Nazism. And neither has fascism been reduced to a deterrence function, in which the media’s re-staging of the Nazi catastrophe becomes a warning of what can happen if faith is lost in the endless performance of happiness, desire, and consumption. While it is certainly true that fascism ‘after Auschwitz’ is partly constituted through ironic denials of complicity with the exterminatory programme of Nazism, its intrusions into the crises of the present are not just solicitations of opportunistic violence. The spectre of fascism appears as an ideological-organizational assemblage that returns to provoke new configurations of the Volk and its others. And so, if we are to understand the danger of its return, we have to understand its relationship to the conflicts and desires that are staged, and restaged, in the global-technological theatre of capital. In the last chapter, I argued that the spirit of socialism consists in the possibility of its always being reopened through the aesthetic, economic, and political crises of the present. This concept of socialism has a particular relationship to the idea of democracy – one in which the demand for justice and equality, following Marx’s version of materialism, is identified with the labour of coordinating the primacy of human need with the discursive categories in which that primacy is represented. So, what emerges from the event of Marx’s intervention is a crucial transformation of the structure of democracy. Once the exorbitance of his demand enters into the economy of political life (through the lexicon of capital, class, and exploitation), it becomes a demand against which bourgeois social democracy defines and defends its categories of formal freedom, legal rights, and individual happiness. So, it is ‘between’ these two regimes that Derrida traces the evolution of social democracy, that is, between the eschatology of socialist materialism and the abstract freedoms propounded by bourgeois political economy (Derrida, 1994: 97). This aporetic constitution of democracy is, from the beginning, haunted by the spectre of reversion to a militancy whose demands for self-overcoming are without limit. Fascism, in other words, defines itself against both wings of modernist ideology: the promiscuous tolerance of laissez faire liberalism and the proletarian utility of Marxism (Jameson, 2008: 1–23). Such a definition ought to remind us of Hegel’s reaction to the Jacobin Terror, and of his warnings about the destructive powers of a representational

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apparatus that has become completely detached from the actual relations of democracy. For, where there is no limit to the mutations a political culture is capable of performing, it becomes a despotic faction whose mimicking of justice and ethical life is the very form of evil (Hegel, 1967a: 599–610). Perhaps then, in the media-techno-scientific networks of the global economy, the spectre of fascism exists as the ineradicable chance of this evil: the return of mythologies of the Volk, who stand against the unregulated flows of humanity that penetrate the borders of the nation. Derrida explores the topology of this new fascism in the fourth essay of Politics of Friendship: ‘The Phantom Friend Returning (In the Name of “Democracy”)’. The crisis of modernity that Nietzsche sought to dramatize is, to put it crudely, the loss of the symbolic order of conflict through which the power of overcoming and the virtues of self-transformation are brought into existence. Thus, the effects of morality and religion are insidious, precisely because they absorb the friend-enemy distinction into a universalistic idea of love that must be applied to all men all the time (Derrida, 1997: 81–2). The result of this is the end of violence, or at least the end of a certain kind of ‘noble violence’ that forms the virtue both of myself and my enemy. The way of the world has become the way of pale forgiveness: nations speak to one another not as respected enemies or trusted friends, but as trading partners, coalition members, or peacekeepers whose mutual interests are never far from dissolution into petty malevolence. What this situation threatens, therefore, is the collapse of the political; a chaos of indifferent desires in the face of which, ‘war, conflict, enmity, cruelty, even hatred, would regain reassuring contours’ (Derrida, 1997: 83). This Nietzschean spectre is taken up in Carl Schmitt’s political philosophy. He argues that the friend-enemy distinction is what founds the body of the nation state: for it is only insofar as the fraternal association of citizens is constituted through real or possible conflicts with identifiable enemies, that the state can be said to exist as a substantive entity. And so, politics as such is defined by its reproduction of a regulated economy of enmity; the mutual solicitation of a sacrificial violence that entails no personal hatred of the enemy, and no xenophobic desire to wipe him from the face of the earth (Derrida, 1997: 86–7; Schmitt, 1996: 27–37). The deep conservatism that Derrida identifies in Schmitt’s work therefore – a conservatism close to the essence of fascism, both classical and contemporary – lies in his determination to protect the ontology of the political; to sustain the conflict between nations with properly identifiable borders and, what amounts to the same thing, between enemies who could respect each other as good men.

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The position Schmitt develops in The Concept of the Political retains a certain kind of classicism. For insofar as he makes sacrificial responsibility to the nation the condition of a noble life, and maintains that the purity of this relationship has to be defended against all mitigating influences, his thought echoes the founding principle of the Polis: that the origin of the state is a blood kinship formally expressed in the laws which constitute its fraternal bonds. War and its commemoration are essential to this constitution, for, without them, the kinship of brothers would become fatally attenuated and lose the power to unite them against the incursions of their enemies (Derrida, 1997: 94–5). The enemies of the political are those who encourage belief in the cosmopolitan democracy of ‘the human’: the beautiful souls who would welcome those who come neither as enemies nor as friends, but as strangers without states and who have nothing but their nameless abjection. What Derrida finds in Schmitt’s reflections on the political therefore, is a determination to defend the borders that have separated friends and enemies against the various cosmopolitan influences that threaten the integrity of their conflicts. His work ‘walls itself up, reconstructs itself unendingly against what is to come; it struggles against the future with a prophetic and pathetic energy’ (Derrida, 1997: 88). Thus, the fact of Schmitt’s complicity with the Nazi regime, and particularly his holding of the presidency of the Union of National Socialist Jurists between 1933 and 1936, is somewhat less than accidental. It marks a deep conservatism that views ‘what is to come’ as nothing less than monstrous; the destruction of the order of political life by the adulterous mixing of races, cultures, and peoples that is entailed in the liberal idea of democracy. Schmitt’s approbation of Nazism therefore, is derived from a sense that the loss of the political, as the regulated violence of the friend-enemy distinction, is the loss of the order through which human beings maintain their satisfaction and dignity. It is this sense of fear about who and what is to come, and about the chaos into which the political order of the world is descending, that constantly provokes the spectre of fascism. The global organization of the world economy is now such that the effectiveness of borders has been radically compromised. The unrestricted flow of labour and capital has become a hegemonic principle that operates most effectively when all reference to ‘archaic’ forms of enmity are dropped from the practice of free trade. And so, the mechanism of global capital, which constantly ruptures the political and economic integrity of nation states, provokes a reactionary force within their increasingly fragile sovereignties (Bauman, 1993: 159–65).

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This force, the spectre of fascism, whose labile essence I have tried to adumbrate, tends to crystallize into mythologies of the homeland and ideological versions of race and eugenics. The political movements that arise from these representations are multiple and contingent, and their success will vary in relation to the political culture established in particular states. However, between the ‘managed playground’ of postmodern happiness, the waning of class affiliations, and the culture of neo-liberalism, the spectre of fascism is retraced as ‘a risk as terrifying as it is inevitable – the risk of the day, more than ever’ (Derrida, 1997: 106). The essence of fascism, therefore, is spectral rather than dialectical: its relationship to the historical violence it has solicited does not destroy the promise of happiness it offers in the present. In fact, its return is intrinsically related to the powers of anamnesis and deception it is able to deploy in relation to its own catastrophic history. Who the vulnerable constituencies will be in the future cannot be known in advance, for there is a sense in which it is the return of the spectre that creates their vulnerability. What is certain, however, is that fascism’s representational ingenuity has always managed to configure the ‘others’ of its programme in terms that are both innovative and depressingly familiar. We might draw attention here to Simon Watney’s work on the spectacle of HIV/AIDS, particularly the way in which the language of biopolitics has been used by the media to mark the boundary between the normal and the perverse, the clean and the unclean (Watney, 1993: 202–11). It is with such crises that the spectre of fascism returns to invest what is strange and unprecedented with the power of evil: HIV becomes an ontological condition that renders the sufferer liable to medical sequestration, the immigrant becomes part of a flood of parasitic subhumanity to be corralled into transit camps, and the Muslim becomes a fanatic whose rights of residence are placed under permanent review. I have tried to show in this chapter that the spectre of fascism haunts the institutions of civil society as the promise of a more satisfying life that exceeds the arduous responsibilities of democracy. The appeal of this promise, however, is not unchanging, and it is during periods of social dislocation that its essence coheres into the specific networks of desire and representation through which the concept of humanity is forcibly divided. From this perspective, the accusations of fascism made against those governments that have recently attempted to intern or deport their Roma populations are far from being unfounded. They draw attention to the fact that states are again presenting inhuman acts perpetrated against specific populations as a public health issue that can only be

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resolved through tough political action. It is such incidents that draw attention to the cycle of return characteristic of the fascist assemblage: its provocation of the state of emergency through the rapid transposition of biopolitical categories (race, evolution, selection) into the affective mythologies of blood and nation. So, while it is true that the ‘endemic’ fascism of the global economy continues to intensify its powers of representation and control of mass desire, the possibility of a ‘radical’ fascism that threatens to seize power in the most destabilized economies in Europe cannot be discounted (Rose, 1996: 59). The organizational forms of such local fascisms are already starting to appear in Europe with the onset of the global recession. And, while the time may not yet be upon us when fascist groups are able to seize power in the worst affected nations, it may well be that such groups are able to exercise disproportionate influence on the institutions of public democracy throughout the European Union. To conclude then, if we approach the question of fascism’s persistence from the point of view of spectrality, it is clear that the cycle of its return is intrinsically related to the mechanisms of representation and rationalization that have constituted the global economy. The accelerated rhythm of crisis and response through which this economy continues to function is such that its traces of cosmopolitan democracy are always accompanied by the spectre of retreat into the sacrificial mythologies of race and nation. In one of his last books, Rogues, Derrida remarked that the epoch of the ‘rogue state’, in which the rogue was the irritating exception, is now over; for every unaligned nation has become a cause for concern within the networks of power, disciplinarity, and desire which constitute the global domain of capital. Perhaps this is the final convergence of endemic fascism and empire, where the entire economy of difference is absorbed into the heterophobic codes of the market (Derrida, 2005: 106; Hardt and Negri, 2000: 39–40). Derrida does not think so; for the channels of representation he identifies as the media of such a power-play, also defer the possibility of its completion. The chance of a politics of moral desire, in other words, springs from the dynamical economy of closure. That the world has not become inhospitable to the ecstasies of fascism, however, and that their haunting of the state is implicit in the global liquidity of capital, means that this politics must begin from the contemporary mutations of fascist desire. Ever since the break up of the Soviet bloc, the proliferation of racist and ultra-nationalist movements has destabilized the processes of integration through which the ‘empire’ of capital has expanded. The impact of the global recession on the European Union has led to a revitalization of racist

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and ultra-nationalist factions, especially in those nations who have incurred economic strictures imposed in return for financial aid. So, we come back to the relationship between fascism and the threat of annihilation that Benjamin identified in his account of German inflation in the 1930s – that the abyss which opens up within the ‘rational’ relations of ethical life will drive the dispossessed into insane flights of sacrificial devotion (Benjamin, 1997a: 54–60). It is this sense of impending annihilation, which can come at any time, that will always threaten to revitalize the mythologies of blood and soil within the matrix of commodified happiness. It is this endemic crisis of modern ethical life that brings us finally to the crossroads of religion and politics. For, despite everything fascism does to stage the ubiquitous presence of the leader and the community of the race, its frantic performance lacks the scriptural power of religion to unify the community of the sacred. In the final chapter, therefore, I will examine what Derrida has called the ‘return of religion’ to the sphere of politics, both as an alternative to neoliberal individualism and as the focus of a fundamental antagonism between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ civilization.

Notes 1 I will use the term National Socialist party throughout the chapter as the common abbreviation of the party’s official name: the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP). 2 Kaufmann maintains that while those who attempted to turn Nietzsche’s thought into a Germanist ideology (principally Oehler, Bäumler and Härtle) were familiar with his philosophy, they inherited the mythologies of ‘will to power’, ‘blonde beast’, and ‘master morality’ from a caricature that was nurtured by his famously anti-Semitic sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche (Kaufmann, 1974: 289–90).

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5

Religion and the Love of the Sacred Religion in the disenchanted world In order to approach the relationship between religion, politics, and happiness, it is first necessary to situate the concept of religion – religious faith, religious experience, the being of God, and the constitution of the church – in relation to the evolution of modernity. My discussion will be concerned initially with the fate of religion in Western societies, the course of whose development has been determined by the rational-scientific manipulation of man and nature. This, of course, is a familiar theme in the classical sociologies of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, and I will come to their respective accounts of the disenchantment of the world in a moment. Before proceeding to examine their arguments, however, I want to return briefly to Schopenhauer’s work, for his thoughts on the place of religious belief in the general scheme of human suffering give a sense of what is at stake in the clash between faith and knowledge. Schopenhauer maintains that the value of religion, if it has any, lies in its ability to satisfy a ‘metaphysical need’ common to all men, no matter what their rank or intelligence. Religion is the form in which the need to have some sense of where we came from, where we are going, and why we should behave morally towards others, is satisfied; it is the appearance of truth in allegorical forms that imbues human life with a sense of higher meaning and purpose (Schopenhauer, 1970: 105). This representation of truth as an object of faith is entirely distinct from the ideals of clarity that should inform philosophical investigations. The practical question of whether the sense of wellbeing that is derived from religious community has contributed to man’s subjective happiness is not one that should occupy the philosopher. He should only be concerned with the truth senso proprio, that is, with clarifying the nature of the world as it is, including the role that religious experience has played in sustaining the childishness of mankind and intensifying the violence of the world (Schopenhauer, 1970: 103). So, the theological question that emerges from Schopenhauer’s philosophy is that of the possibility of a human society which has been freed from the mysteries of religious conviction, and

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which functions exclusively through rational principles of truth and utility (Schopenhauer, 1970: 108–9). In Schopenhauer’s ‘Dialogue’ on religion, this question is presented in a way that suggests that religious belief, even though it is defined in opposition to the rational standards of philosophy, is the necessary counterpart of man’s attempt to fathom the mysteries of his existence by the use of reason alone. At the end of the ‘Dialogue’, the two antagonists, Demopheles and Philalethes, agree that religion is Janus faced: despite the undeniable fact that it has been used to justify barbaric abuses of power, it has also been the matrix that has sustained human society under the most extreme privations (Schopenhauer, 1970: 114). So, there appears to be a necessary relationship between faith and knowledge: a relationship in which the demands of philosophical reason, which are, by definition, particularizing, hierarchical, and divorced from practical considerations of wellbeing, constantly provoke the return of the religious allegories through which the lives of the masses are made bearable. This account of the affiliation between religion and philosophy is important, as it registers a tension within the concept of Enlightenment that has guided Western civilization since the end of the eighteenth century. This tension is determined by the fundamental belief that philosophy, as the light of reason, will be able to supplant the satisfactions of religious mythology. Such a conviction however, fails to recognize that religious faith and philosophical knowledge are categorically distinct, and that the practical necessities met by the former (provision of a sense of belonging, purpose, and community) cannot be directly translated into rationalistic principles of organization and utility. It is this tension between Enlightenment reason and the allegorical ‘truths’ of religion that is inherited by the classical sociologies of modernity. There is an assumption common to Marx, Weber and Durkheim’s work on religion: that the primary restraint on the emergence of modernity was the influence of the church on the economic and political institutions of feudal societies. In the introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx described religion as ‘the general theory of this world … its logic and popular form, its moral sanction … and its universal basis of consolation and justification’ (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 63). Under the conditions of feudal absolutism, this experience of the world as an expression of the will of God, and its sanctification in the edicts of the Catholic Church, functioned to hold back the evolution of the mode of production. Insofar as the development of money, taxation, and technological means were tied to a social hierarchy in

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which poverty and obedience were the way to divine grace, the emergence of new forms of mercantile activity and their attendant political freedoms were, for Marx, very slow in coming. However, to maintain that the ‘inverted’ world of religious allegory is, as Schopenhauer claimed, the consequence of the ontological necessity of suffering, is to surrender to the idea that human happiness is an unattainable ideal and that the best philosophy can offer is the consolation of reflective quietude. For Marx, religion is the product of human suffering. But what Schopenhauer failed to grasp was that this suffering is not the outcome of a malign conjunction of circumstances that cursed the world from its inception, but rather an effect of man’s contrivance of exploitative systems that have intensified his experience of impoverishment and alienation. The emergence of capitalism marks the point at which human unhappiness reaches its absolute; for not only are the physical resources of the body stretched to breaking point by the production of surplus value, the religious forms through which that suffering is represented become monstrous caricatures of alienated humanity (the Unmensch) (Marx in McLellan, 1977: 63). Thus, if there is hope for a society that is dedicated to man’s capacity for autonomous selfcreation, this consists in the final disenchantment of the proletariat with all the illusions of the sacred. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx famously presents the triumph of bourgeois capitalism over the feudal order of church and state, as a moment of liberation that has ‘drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egoistical calculation’ (Marx and Engels in McLellan 1977: 223). So, the question that emerges from the sacrilegious trajectory of bourgeois capitalism (and this despite its marriage of convenience to the worldly faith of Protestantism) concerns the possibility of a mode of production that is without religious belief, and of the enhancement of human existence that would be possible within it. Marx’s faith in the transition from capitalism to communism is founded on the idea that the egoistic desire, through which the bourgeois mode of production perpetuates itself, is the fundamental source of suffering for the human species. And so, the necessity of transition described in the Manifesto arises from the apophatic vision of free, non-alienated relations that Marx set out in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology (Marx and Engels in McLellan 1977: 87–96; 190–1). If we were to venture a distinction between Marx’s and Weber’s accounts of the relationship between religion and modernity, therefore, it might be that the

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latter attempts to remove the last traces of Marx’s humanism from the method of historical explanation. In his ‘Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions’, Weber maintains that religion, as an ethic of brotherly love orientated towards the salvation of the faithful, has withdrawn from the sinful, or at least morally neutral, spheres of worldly activity (Weber in Gerth and Mills, 1997: 327–8). This is particularly important in the economic sphere, as the Catholic doctrine of salvation through poverty and obedience was instrumental in sustaining an attitude of fatalism towards worldly activity, and a reverence for the ancient regime of the feudal estates. Thus, it was not until the emergence of Puritanism, which ‘accepted the routinization of the economic cosmos’ as part of the telos of the created world, that the movement began towards the highly rationalized activity through which ‘capital’ became the universal object of volition (Weber in Gerth and Mills, 1997: 332–3). The more variegated account of religion that Weber offers in his approach to the evolution of modernity points to a rejection of the essentialism implicit in Marx’s early writings. In Weber’s theory of the development of capitalism in Europe, the dynamics of the transition are instituted through changes in systems of religious belief that had retained a significant degree of independence from the economic relations of feudalism. Thus, the transformative power of the entrepreneurial spirit is not presented as part of a dynamic of frustrated creativity that promises the eventual overcoming of human alienation, but as a practical outcome of the shift in the balance of power between Protestant and Catholic theologies. Capitalism could only emerge once the eschatological significance of worldly activity had been transformed by the Protestant doctrine of individual responsibility before God. Once this transformation has happened, however, the social economy of the sacred is changed forever; for, as religious meaning is eroded by the rational calculation that the Protestant ethic has implicitly sanctified, so the practical relations of state, economy, and politics have become increasingly instrumental. This, then, is the contradiction of modernity that Weber identified at the end of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: that the regime of instrumental reason which has come to dominate human society is incapable of standing in for the symbolic meanings that the old systems of religious belief had provided. Weber’s tracing of the disenchantment of modernity, therefore, is radically opposed not only to the theological trajectory of Marxism (the belief in man’s capacity to move beyond the dominance of instrumental reason), but also to Durkheim’s attempt, in The Division of Labour in Society, to extrapolate

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a new form of the ‘conscience collective’ from the interdependent networks of legal, economic, and political reason (Durkheim, 1964: 222–9). Both Marx and Durkheim, in other words, commit the sin of returning to the sacred via the critique of religion, and thereby stray beyond a properly nominalist evaluation of the happiness that secular-instrumental modernity is likely to bring. Nothing, however, is definitively resolved in Marx’s, Weber’s, or Durkheim’s formulations of the crises of social solidarity that the decline of religion has caused in Western societies. Weber’s theory of total disenchantment is, in the end, just as speculative as Marx’s and Durkheim’s attempts to conjure authentic community from the dysfunctional abstractions of market capitalism. Weber’s claim is that all possibilities of recognition, representation, and transcendence are being swallowed up by the instrumental logic of modernity, and that this process is a kind of radical evil that ‘petrifies’ the human soul and deprives it of meaning and spontaneity (Weber, 1978: 182). The very postulation of such a process, however, is a solicitation of the possibility of transcendence, that is, something akin to the possibilities of cooperative action, self-recognition, and affective community that Marx and Durkheim attempted to trace in their quasireligious histories of modernity. Now, it might be argued that the reflexive modernization thesis developed by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, is, at least in part, an attempt to respond to the question of what a democratically organized, post-religious form of social solidarity might look like (Beck, 1996; 2008; Giddens 1997a; 1997b). The foundation of Beck and Giddens’ thesis is a particular conception of modernity in which the rationalization process determines not only the normative crisis which characterized the expansion of industrial production, but also an onto-ecological crisis in the relationship between man, technology, and nature. Modernity, in other words, has entered a ‘catastrophic’ phase in which human beings are brought face to face with the fact that the productive mechanism they have devised (global-industrial-technological capitalism) is also the regime that is rapidly destroying the natural environment. For Beck and Giddens, this realization is the basis of an emergent cosmopolitan democracy, one in which consensus and cooperation are underpinned by universal recognition of impending, but avoidable, catastrophe. I will argue, however, that this crisis has produced a new economy of fear, unhappiness, and reactionary love of the sacred that constantly disrupts the movement towards a cosmopolitan politics. This chapter will examine the religious dynamics of this situation.

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In Hegel’s philosophy, religion is an essential modality of spirit: it is the sensory-aesthetic form in which self-consciousness initially conceives and expresses its relationship to the Absolute Idea. Through the course of human history, spirit emerges from the religious imagination of the world and the ethical life of man. It becomes a revealed religion, the truth of whose presence in the abstract relations of modernity lies in its mediation of their tendency to provoke egoistic excess and lawless domination. Christianity is the exemplary form of this revealed religion as, for Hegel, it is the only system of belief whose concept of the sacred has been formulated through the history of its mediation with the temporal world. The crucifixion of Christ, when it is represented as the death of a ‘mediator’ whose existence illuminates the infinite movement of spirit, is what gives human subjectivity to the presence of the sacred (Hegel, 1967a: 781–2). The Passion of Christ determines itself as a practical form of love whose object is the sacred communion of God and Man. This movement away from the aesthetic representation of God, however, does not mark the final reconciliation of the secular and the divine, for the degradation of religious imagination gives rise to the question of how Christianity can sustain a spirit of brotherliness without lapsing into obscurantism and idolatry. For Hegel, revealed religion should act as an allegorical expression of spirit within the relations of civil society; it should give those whose work is abstract and technically differentiated a sense of their participation in, and reproduction of, the unity of ethical life. Thus we encounter, at the end of The Phenomenology of Mind, a reconfiguration of Christian mythology: although the essential being of the world has fallen into the violence of finitude (abstract modernity), this violence brings with it the practical formation of love in the work of civil society, and the revelation of spirit as the infinite horizon through which the truth of God, man, and nature is revealed. This figuration of love and redemption in the tragic history of modernity is, I believe, essential to the reflexive modernization thesis, for, without a certain faith in the satisfactions of rational belief, there can be no hope for cosmopolitan ethics (Beck, 2008: 197–200). As I have said, my principal concern in this final chapter is the return of religion to the increasingly abstract, disenchanted, and antagonistic relations of modernity. In Hegel’s philosophy, this return takes place through the Aufhebung; it is the outcome of spirit’s preservation of the ‘concept’ of the sacred and overcoming of the irrationalism that is inherent in aesthetic representations of God. (I will examine the political implications of this preservation of religion in the following section.) In Nietzsche’s thought however, the kenotic

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movement that is presented by Hegel is given a far more radical determination: it is presented as modernity’s incremental destruction of the symbolic order of religion, and the horrified realization that God has been killed by the sacrilegious endeavour to know everything of ‘material’ existence. The experience of this catastrophe is felt all the more acutely because of the abstraction of the bonds that form society: after the Enlightenment, the world becomes ever-more disenchanted, and it is this process of rationalization that increases humanity’s sense of existential despair (Nietzsche, 1974: 181–2). Hegel’s revealed religion marks the point at which the Enlightenment project is stretched to destruction; its promise of balanced, rational, moderated happiness is ruptured by a confrontation with catastrophe that demands absolute risk and absolute sacrifice in the face of the void. For Nietzsche, there can be no ‘politics’ of this confrontation; it cannot be mediated through categories that configure the epochal crises of existence as elements in the dialectical history of God, man, and nature. And so it is Weber – who, at the end of The Protestant Ethic, prophesied ‘a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals’ from the mechanism of modernity – who lies closest to a certain suspicion that Nietzsche harbours from the beginning of his philosophy: that the Christian mythos will return at moments of crisis, and that Western humanity will come back to the life of the Saviour through his charismatic representatives (Weber in Gerth and Mills, 1997: 328–9; Nietzsche, 1984: 89–90). It is from this Nietzschean-Weberian perspective, therefore, that I will examine the political implications of what has become known as radical orthodoxy: the return to the founding mythologies of the Christian faith and the critiques of democracy, representation, and egoism this has inspired. In the final section, I will address the questions of mystical revelation, holy texts, ancient homelands, and sacred communities that have been provoked by the constant expansion of the global economy. From a Nietzschean perspective, these points arise from the essentially tragic history of modernity. For, as the world becomes increasingly abstract and technocratic, so the yearning for the experience of the sacred grows stronger. The return of religion, therefore, is characterized by an antagonism of ancient faiths that, once it has precipitated fundamentalist readings of sacred texts, transforms the secular-cosmopolitan trajectory of capital and Enlightenment culture. While it would be simplistic to argue that Nietzsche’s critique of religion gestures towards an irresolvable conflict between ‘enlightened’ Christianity and ‘fanatic’ Islam and Judaism, there are traces of this trajectory in his thought, particularly in The Anti-Christ. The underlying force of the will to power is what

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precipitates the conflicts that take place among religious communities, and, as such, their ultimate reference point is always the redistributions of power precipitated by the intensity of the experience of the sacred. Thus, it seems that the secularizing movement of modernity has become embroiled in an economy of violence that is escalatory rather than dialectical: the imposition of ChristianEuropean law becomes the basis of a clash of fundamentalisms (Christian, Islamic, and Judaic) the outcome of which is simply the intensification of conflicts pursued in the name of God (Nietzsche, 1983: 183–4). And so it is at this point, today, that we must ask if the happiness of humanity will always depend on the power of sacrificial violence and the hope of transcendental unity with the divine. These questions lie at the core of Derrida’s last books, particularly Acts of Religion and Of Hospitality, and I will conclude by examining his account of a certain messianic faith (in the Other) that is co-present with the ecstasies of sacred devotion.

Faith and Enlightenment At first glance, it would seem that Hegel’s philosophy offers little insight into the fate of religion under the conditions of late modernity. Read formalistically, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion sets out the history of religious experience as an immanently universal development that culminates in the revealed religion of modern Christianity. The sensory-aesthetic figurations through which Islam, Judaism, and early Christianity express the presence of the divine are expounded as mythological formations of the relationship between man, God, and the temporal world of nature and society. These mythologies are an essential part of the process by which self-consciousness differentiates itself from inorganic nature, and yet they also institute a realm of law and desire that does violence to the concept of God and to the essential freedom of humanity. Both Islam and Judaism, according to Hegel’s typology, set God apart from man as ‘the One’ whose majesty is without mediation, and whose presence is revealed either in the ‘fanatical’ inspiration of subjective consciousness (Islam), or in the tyrannical necessity of divine law (Judaism). It is in the evolution of the Christian mythos, therefore, that the possibility of reconciling God, man, and love is made actual: for the doctrinal significance of Christ shifts from his simply being a historical figure who founded the ethical precepts of the church, to his being the embodiment of God’s essence come to redeem the world (Hegel,

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1987: 435). Thus, what the life and teachings of Christ reveal is the presence of the divine in man and nature: human beings, as finite spirit, are not foreign to God, and Christ shows how it is possible to live a life that constantly rededicates itself to the realization of Christian love in the institutions of Sittlichkeit (Hegel, 1987: 469). Hegel concludes the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion by rendering this ‘kenosis of Christ’, his simultaneous divinity and non-divinity, as the ‘end of religion’: for it is at this point that the satisfactions of religious community (selfless love, messianic hope, and the veneration of each individual soul) are recognized as substantive ends in themselves, without the need of figurative representation (Vorstellung). Revealed religion sublates itself in the philosophical apprehension of spirit (Hegel, 1987: 487). This apparently happy ending to the history of humanity, however, is rather less clear-cut than it seems. Religion, for Hegel, occupies a particular place in the history of spirit: it is simultaneously an autonomous form of recognition in which the essential freedom of the soul takes shape, the source of universal love within the objective relations of Sittlichkeit, and the provocation of irrational cultures that deform the concept of human freedom. Thus, as Gillian Rose points out in her exposition of Hegel’s Philosophy of History, the evolution of spirit is essentially tragic: the transformative power of religious representations of the sacred constantly conflict with the objective institutional relations of the state (Rose, 1981: 112–20). This tragic figuration of history begins with the break up of the Greek Polis. For, despite the fact that the state and religion are united through the identity of Athene with the life of the city, the presence of the goddess in all of the economic, political, and aesthetic institutions of Athens is the denial of subjectivity to both man and deity. The happiness of the Polis eventually succumbs to the higher necessity of spirit’s self-diremption, even though the historical form in which this manifests itself, the Roman state, gives rise to a thoroughly corruptible individualism in which each citizen is legally free to propitiate any god he chooses. Thus, for Hegel, the truth of Roman polytheism lies in its justification of the usury, slavery, and poverty that the state perpetuates through its own venality. It is into this condition that the figure of Christ comes as a transformative energy, as the Other of the Roman state and its corrupt religion (Hegel, 1987: 462). He is the pure outpouring of the Holy Spirit whose demand for discipleship is absolute; he will accept only complete fidelity to his teaching of God’s word, and the utter rejection of the Roman state and its institutions. As we have seen, this outpouring of spirit marks the origin of Christianity, and of its movement towards substantive realization as

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Sittlichkeit. However, Christ’s originary revelation of the truth takes the form of pure passion that is without a properly ethical constitution. And so, Christianity, in both the Roman world and under feudalism, determines itself as a passionate hope of redemption that is complicit with the very forms of servitude it purports to abhor (Rose, 1981: 117). This evolution of religion continues through both the French and German Enlightenments. In the former case, there is no reformation of the church, and so the transformation of ethical life becomes a barbarous destruction of every ‘sacred’ institution of the ancien régime, while in the latter there is a reformation, but without any substantial transformation of ethical and political life. So, for Hegel, modernity emerges from this profoundly unhappy formation of self-consciousness, in which the work of civil society is stripped of its sacred significance and becomes the abstract activity of the utilitarian ego (Hegel, 1967a: 598–627; Rose, 1981: 118). It is this violent transformation of Christian self-consciousness that forms the basis of Hegel’s account of the fate of religion. While it is true that he regards the formal rights that emerge in civil society as essential to the freedom of the individual subject, these always remain inadequate to the concept of universal love and ethical community. The totality of Sittlichkeit cannot be thought or represented through the ideology of the atomistic individual (Utilitarianism), and so the return of religion to the instrumental relations that have come to dominate the state is something that Hegel conceives as essential to the unity of modern society. This return, however, is not the final subsumption of religious experience under the rational cognition of Christian ethics, for, as Rose puts it, Hegel’s thesis ‘implies the cessation of religion as formative experience, but it does not imply the end of representation’ (Rose, 1981: 120). The constant reconfiguration of poverty and excess, autocracy and obeisance, love and hatred that is characteristic of modern social relations, in other words, solicits an aesthetics of otherworldly salvation and sublime unity with the sacred One. For Hegel, this cycle of return is essentially tragic, for, as the relations of civil society become increasingly instrumental, so the power of revealed religion to sustain itself within the corporate structures of Sittlichkeit is diminished. There is a tendency for the acquisitive souls who emerge from this organization of ethical life to lose the sense of practical love and community that comes from the allegorical forms of the Christian mythos. Religion retreats from its mediating function, and instead of revealing the purpose of man (his transformation of nature and society through the idea of free, self-engendering unity), breaks

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down into an unholy chaos of subjective beliefs. The antagonisms of modernity are exacerbated by the proliferation of religious sects; each ‘community’ of believers seeks meaning through the imaginary bonds of subjective revelation. The outcome of this return of religion is tragic, as it distorts the unity of God, man, and nature that, for Hegel, is the substance of ethical life. Actual social relations become increasingly atomistic, and God’s name becomes a cipher, an empty form of legitimacy (Rose, 1981: 120). Yet there is a sense of providence, or perhaps redemption, that runs through Hegel’s concept of tragic modernity. It is true that religious experience tends to multiply its ‘unrevealed’ forms within the abstract relations of modern society, but its relationship to God, as spirit, is such that it must return again to the unifying power of Christianity. The world is without end; for the triune relationship of God, man, and nature is the underlying condition that mediates the violence of subjective belief, re-forms the substance of ethical life, and re-establishes the equilibrium between man and nature (Hegel, 1987: 435–6). It is also the condition on which ‘the Christian world’ is given primacy over the other religions. I will return to this hierarchy of world religions in a moment. For now, however, I want to look at the way in which modern social theory has sought to transform this Hegelian economy of religion and modernity. Perhaps the most important insight of Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion lies in its configuration of the relationship between imagination, the subjective experience of work and desire, and the objective rationality of civil society. Put simply, the persistence of religion as a modality of spirit is down to its ability to infuse the formal necessities of ethical life (keeping the law, participation in the political institutions of the state) with a sense of transcendent satisfaction. The labour of society must be collectively meaningful, or the whole edifice is held together only by the contingent relations of economic exchange, individual morality, and the stricture of the law (Hegel, 1967b: 122–6). This is what Hegel understands as the inadequacy of the ‘formal’ culture of Enlightenment: its inability to bring a sense of love (Eros) to the collective life of civil society. As we have seen, the German version of this culture achieves its highest expression in the philosophical systems of subjective idealism, which present the individual ego as the unique source of moral self-determination. In Kant’s thought, for example, there is a radical distinction between the theoretical reason (Verstand) through which the objective relations of the external world are apprehended, and the practical reason (Vernunft) through which the moral self-determination of the individual is made possible. This Kantian distinction

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between practical and theoretical reason is important, as it marks the emergence of a concept of ethical life in which it is the reflexive capacity of the individual that is central to the unfolding of human freedom. The ‘material’ desires of individual existence, which Hegel saw as implicit in the religiosity of finite spirit, are opposed to the ends of practical reason. So, the progress of human society is marked not by the labour of mediating the particularity of desire, but by the articulation of laws and institutions which protect the freedom of individual will, and maximize its capacity for spontaneous self-determination. Thus, for Kant, if there is to be a happy reconciliation of God and man, this can only take place in the hereafter; for in the temporal order of history, each Christian soul must dedicate himself to the impossible task of perfecting the moral culture and institutions of his nation state (Kant, 1993: 130–8). It is in Kant’s separation of theoretical and practical reason that ‘bourgeois’ sociology (Weber, Durkheim, Adorno, Habermas, Beck, Giddens) found its inspiration for the idea of catastrophic modernity. Insofar as Kant understood nature as governed by external causes, and the material relations of society as subject to violence and contingency, his concept of rational will has become the motif of contemporary debates about secularization, disenchantment, and the possibility of non-theologically grounded democracy. One of the defining characteristics of modern materialism, or what Habermas has called ‘post­metaphysical thinking’ (see Habermas, 1995), is its rejection of Hegelian dialectics: nature and society are understood as subject to contingent effects that cannot be subsumed under an ethico-teleology, and which resist sublation into the higher categories of absolute knowledge. From this perspective, the world is conceived as a mechanism within which humanity must, as a matter of fact, provide for its survival and, as a matter of reflexive cognition, determine the optimal conditions of its freedom and happiness. The idea of catastrophic modernity takes shape in a post-Weberian world, where the autonomous individual has become subject to the necessities of techno-scientific reason, and the spontaneity of its thought has been pre-empted by the repetitive codes of mass culture. The dynamics of this catastrophic turn have, as I have said, been variously configured as anomie, reification, and technocratic necessity. What I am interested in however, is the concept of civilization-risks developed by Ulrich Beck in Risk Society, and the neo-Kantian concept of religion that he sets out in A God of One’s Own. It is in Beck’s configuration of the relationships between anthropogenic risk, existential anxiety, and the search for collective sources of hope, that the question of religious experience returns with extreme urgency.

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At the conclusion of his essay ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, Albert Camus enjoins us to ‘imagine Sisyphus happy’ in the endless labour to which he has been condemned (Camus, 2005: 119). This act of imagination is perhaps what is at stake in the account of religion that Beck presents in his book A God of One’s Own. What modernity has revealed to us, according to Beck’s conception of risk society, is the fact that the technological regime that has facilitated the alleviation of human want (at least in the industrialized regions of the world), simultaneously produces catastrophic environmental effects which threaten the future of humanity (Beck, 1996: 36–46). For, as these effects begin to infringe on the conventional ideology of modernization (economic growth funds scientific innovation; scientific innovation produces more wealth; more wealth increases consumption; which produces more happiness, and so on), so there emerges a ‘critical science’ which seeks to articulate the damage done to nature and humanity by the unregulated use of technology (Beck, 1996: 172–3). Technological civilization therefore is confronted by the catastrophic potential of its own evolutionary trajectory; for the bio-systems that make up the natural environment are vulnerable to damages that could, potentially, cause the extinction of all life on the planet. The politics of this threat are extremely complex, and are dispersed across a plurality of different discourses: those that maintain the necessity of technological solutions, those that demand a return to our original unity with nature (deep ecology), and those that deny that industrial modernity has had any significant impact on nature at all (the American Petroleum Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, for example). What impact has this threat of impending annihilation had on the existential condition of humanity, or, more specifically, on the religious imagination of the world and our place within it? If, as Beck contends, we must undertake the Sisyphean labour of transforming every aspect of our ‘being in the world’, then we need to understand how, and indeed if, religion can give hope and happiness to that labour. The account of the cosmopolitan potential of religion that Beck presents in A God of One’s Own is essentially Kantian. His argument turns on the idea that Kant presented in Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason, which is that there is a rational core to religious belief, and that this can be articulated as a doctrine of universal respect for the humanity of others. One worships God, in other words, by keeping his moral law and by challenging religious dogma that stands only on the ecstatic or miraculous revelation of the sacred (Kant, 1998: 79–102). Beck, however, works hard to sustain a critical distance between his

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own version of revealed religion and Kant’s speculations on the relative merits of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity as vehicles of moral culture. The core of Beck’s thesis is that, under the conditions of global capitalism, all of the monotheisms are revitalized as sources of identity: as the world becomes increasingly secularized, so religion re-emerges as an alternative to the conflicts and pressures of technological modernity. The ‘paradox of secularization’, therefore, is that once Enlightenment science forces religion to give up its determination to explain every element of the material world, it is able to become what it has always been implicitly: the sphere in which the concepts of humanity, respect, and love achieve their practical articulation (Beck, 2008: 24–6). This transformation of religion has two consequences. The first is that individuals are no longer situated as passive subjects within the orthodoxy of the church; they have become active interpreters who take inspiration from religious teachings, but who modify these in relation to the exigencies of their own particular lifeworld (Beck, 2008: 104–9). The second consequence is that, in a globalized world, reflexive faith is immediately connected to the ethnic and religious diversity of the nation state, and to the religious conflicts and negotiations that are played out in the sphere of international politics. Thus, the solipsistic implications of having ‘a God of one’s own’ are overcome through the everyday practice of one’s beliefs: each reflexive soul, no matter what her religious denomination, encounters ‘others’ whom she must regard as both different and valuable in themselves (Beck, 2008: 178). In the end, and despite the apparent intensification of conflicts caused by ‘anti-modern fundamentalism’, there is a discernible shift from the religiosity of truth to the religiosity of peace – a shift which Beck regards as a crucial supplement to the cosmopolitan possibilities of global risk society (Beck, 2008: 197–200). The geopolitical economy of Hegel’s lectures on religion does, of course, return us to the question of the Eurocentric origin of his concepts of man, God, and spirit. And it is certainly true that A God of One’s Own is dedicated to the coming of a cosmopolitan religiosity, which is free of the Orientalist representations that have been perpetuated in Western thought – including Hegel’s philosophy of spirit. This is a crucial question, and I will return to it at the end of the chapter. In the meantime, there is something disturbing in Hegel’s accounts of truth and religion that is never properly discharged in Beck’s discourse on the evolution of post-doctrinal faith. Despite the kenotic implications of his philosophy, Hegel maintains that religious representations of love and affective community are essential to the constitution of modern ethical life, for, without

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them, ‘society’ is reduced to the utilitarian projects of atomistic individuals. And yet, religious experience, even in its Christian form, remains inadequate to stabilize the relations of civil society. The faculty of imagination, or Vorstellung, in which God is made present, is an infinitely changeable medium whose redemptive promise tends to intensify the antagonism of knowledge, belief, and individual happiness characteristic of modernity. So, for Hegel, the crucial fact about religion is that it cannot be formalized in the sense that Kant suggests in Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason (the pursuit of moral happiness as the divine purpose of human life), or, by extension, in the practical principles that Beck argues are the essence of religious faith. The happiness offered by religion is, by its very nature, maintained by eschatological figurations of the world; and so the schisms within and among the monotheisms that have characterized the modern era are perhaps less amenable to the logic of cosmopolitan recognition than Beck’s analysis would suggest. Thus, if we are to understand the relationship between faith and happiness in our time of impending catastrophe, we need to look more carefully at the distinctive satisfactions that form the economy of the sacred.

Orthodoxy and the death of God The term ‘nihilist’ is one that has, in recent years, returned to philosophical, theological, and social scientific debates through the provocations of the postmodernist movement. As we have seen, it is difficult to determine what this movement stands for and who belongs to it; however, the putative concern with deconstructing the foundations of knowledge and questioning the ‘metanarratives’ through which most of us orientate our lives, has given rise to the suspicion that whoever they are, postmodernists have a dangerous fascination for the nihilistic. In the Anglo-American response to this style of critique, the genesis of postmodernism is usually traced to Nietzsche’s determination to undermine the normative foundations of modernity by exposing their inertial effects on the vitality of human will and its capacity for self-overcoming. Thus, the argument runs, postmodernism is a kind of domesticated Nietzscheanism: the critique of authoritarian presence that forms the core of the movement is essentially a picking away at the established satisfactions of social life, which ends up as nothing more than the solicitation of the negative for its own sake. I will return to this in the final section, where I will look at Derrida’s account of

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the ethical possibilities that arise from the economy of religious inscription. For the moment, however, I want to consider the genesis of the opposition between Western analytical philosophy, in which the concept of transcendence remains essential to the constitution of ethical life, and Nietzsche’s attempt to make the performativity of the will into the exclusive standard of truth and value. For it is only by attending to this opposition that we can understand the significance of Nietzsche’s critique of Western metaphysics as a critique of the categories of God, soul, love, and redemption which form the essence of Christianity. In the first section of Human, All Too Human, ‘Of First and Last Things’, Nietzsche admitted that, as pure possibility, the existence of the metaphysical world cannot be refuted. For Nietzsche, this world is a spectre that materialist science can never exorcise, simply because every new connection made between particular events and the laws of cause and effect re-engenders the hope that the signature of divine agency has finally been revealed (Nietzsche, 1994: 17–18). The origin of this hope is perhaps as old as man, and we may even think of it as one of the fundamental structures of his existence. In the terms of Nietzsche’s genealogy, it is the Apollonian construction of the good as a characteristic of both nature (physis) and human society (koinõnia) in the Greek world, which marks the beginning of the onto-theological tradition that has come to dominate Western thought. After the decline of the Dionysian aesthetic, which sought to expose the Polis to the radical contingency of the gods and their capricious manipulation of nature, the axis of the Greek world shifted away from the experience of tragic fate towards the Apollonian ideals of rational and harmonious life presented in Socratic philosophy (Nietzsche, 1990: 76–83). The aesthetic culture of the Polis ceased deliberately to solicit the violence of fate, and so the constitution of ethical life, or koinõnia, is transformed from one in which the people are deliberately exposed to the unknowable power of the gods, into the expression of a deeper necessity (the logos) in whose harmonious differentiation the ultimate good of humanity is to be found. Socratic philosophy, as Nietzsche saw it, ‘divorced itself from science when it enquired which knowledge of the world and life could help man live most happily’ (Nietzsche, 1994: 17). Thus, the idea of a world beyond the violence of opposing forces is born with the Socratic logos: it is at this point that ‘man’ is envisioned as part of a rational-ontological order that distributes his moral, practical, and aesthetic faculties as gifts consecrated to the preservation of the good (agathos). In Nietzsche’s thought, therefore, the articulation of Socratic philosophy in the work of Plato and Aristotle marks the founding victory of the Apollonian

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aesthetic over the tragic culture that was the vitality of early Greek society. In its pre-Socratic form, the Polis exemplified what Nietzsche understood as the original form of religiosity: the worship of gods who express the power of the tribe to resist the threat of annihilation, and to be more than the simple process of reproduction. Such primitive religions are the embodiment of a collective existence in which ‘man’ is constantly exposed to his own finitude; his work and familial satisfactions are performed within a social space shot through with the capricious desire of the gods, and it is this desire that pushes human culture beyond stagnation and moral involution. In pre-Socratic Greece, the Dionysian aesthetic was still a reflection of this primitive vitality: the culture of music and performance is animated by the presence of the divine in the world, and by the danger this poses to the human transgressor. For Nietzsche, the greatness and happiness of Greek culture lies in the paganism of its origins, that is, in the contingency of fate to which a suitably powerful humanity ought to be exposed (Nietzsche, 1990: 46–53). This aesthetic of joyful suffering, however, cannot reproduce itself as pure excess; its performativity requires the light and figuration of Apollonian technique in order to sustain itself as the substance of the Polis. It is the Apollonian concept of a harmonious order that underlies the chaos of material existence, therefore, which is the origin of Socrates’ determination to expound the essential conditions of human virtue and happiness. Or, to put it in rather more Nietzschean terms, the Apollonian ideal is the origin of the logos in which human spirit is taken from its existential relationship to the material world, and placed within a sphere of metaphysical ideas (form, soul, intellect, highest good) that determine the proper limits of its power of self-determination. So, what emerges from the Greek world is the ground of Christian theology: the concept of a higher good whose apprehension underlies the responsible friendship, moral self-regard, and civilizing restraint that forms the substance of ethical life. Yet there is a trace, faint though it may be, of pagan contingency in Aristotelian thought; for the unequal distribution of noble attributes that forms the basis of Greek democracy is still conceived as the outcome of a physis that it is not the concern of the state to correct. The happiness of the Polis, in other words, depends on the bravery, diligence, and intellectual love of the good that is practised by its greatest men: it is through their ‘greatness of soul’ (magalopsychia) that every sphere of ethical life (work, family, sexuality) is given its most noble end, or telos (Aristotle, 1962: 93–9). In Nietzsche’s genealogy, the last trace of this pagan ‘health’ is corrupted by the Christian transformation of the good into the one omnipotent God by

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whose will the whole of creation is brought into existence. God becomes the unknowable mystery through which the world is gifted to man; he is the transcendent unity to whom every soul is indebted, and who created the world so that man should come to know the Kingdom of God. The crucifixion of Christ is the point at which man comes to recognize himself as part of a world created for redemption: his suffering shows us that every finite soul is infused with a responsibility to God (poverty, chastity, obedience, and unconditional love) that is opposed to the selfishness dominating the world of law, politics, and economy. True happiness therefore, can be achieved only through a life of self-abnegation that withdraws from the agonism of existence in the hope of blessed reconciliation with the Creator. So, for Nietzsche, everything noble and good is sacrificed to an empty abstraction, a false promise (Nietzsche, 1983: 126–9). In Book Three of The Gay Science, Nietzsche, in the guise of the Madman, announces man’s killing of God (Nietzsche, 1974: 181–2). This announcement, however, is ambiguous, as the event of God’s death cannot ‘occur’ without the willing participation of all humanity. This means that everyone must recognize the truth of materialist science (that the created world is simply the happiest of happy accidents), and forego the ‘festivals of atonement’ by which humanity might conceal the death of God from itself. This is the tragic space of modernity; the hiatus to which Christianity returns to claim those that cannot face the death of the last deity, and who seek happiness in redemption rather than what Nietzsche called the heights of joyful overcoming. Thus, the agonism of our historical present is played out through opposing claims about the ‘nihilism’ that results either from belief in God, or from belief in the power of human will to overcome every limitation imposed on it. From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, Nietzschean materialism is nihilistic because pure will, freed from its responsibilities to a transcendent God, has no concrete relation either to other human beings or to its own essence as a created form. From a Nietzschean perspective, on the other hand, Christianity is nihilistic because of its denial of the creative forces that brought form and vitality to human civilization. For Nietzsche, the depth of the material world is infinite: its different levels of cause and effect cannot be understood simply in terms of the calculative model of Enlightenment science, for each new sphere of causality arises from, and opens up, the risks that offer the chance of joyful overcoming (Nietzsche 1974: 92). A study of the kind I am attempting cannot, of course, attempt to provide an answer to the question of whether it is Nietzsche or Saint Paul who is the nihilist, and which of them points the way to the happiness of humanity.

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However, it is possible, I think, to make a genealogical assessment of the return of Christian orthodoxy to the space of modernity, without simply affirming the entire complex of Nietzsche’s critique of religion. One of the common themes that runs through the Catholic theological movement that has become known as radical orthodoxy is the idea that Western metaphysics has, since Socrates, been obsessed with cutting up the world into different kinds of being, and with arranging each generic form into hierarchical systems that designate their relative importance. The paradigmatic expression of this worldview is René Descartes’ distinction between ‘thinking’ and ‘extended’ substance. The aporetic relationship between body and mind that occupies The Passions of the Soul is the original expression of one of the founding problems of modernity: the objectification of the human subject and its relationship to a world that is regarded as entirely open to rational-mathematical explanations (Descartes, 1989: 18–49). Thus, from the point of view of radical orthodoxy, European Enlightenment has a deeply ambivalent significance. While it is true that it was instrumental in sweeping away the pernicious superstitions that clung to the institutional body of the church, it also marginalized the works of Christian revelation through which God, before the rationalistic turn of Enlightenment philosophy, had revealed the nature of the soul and its capacity to receive his truth. As I have said, adherents of this radical Christian orthodoxy consider Nietzsche’s thought to be the culmination of the secularizing movement of the Enlightenment, in the sense that the aporetic division of the subject into faculties of intuition, apprehension, reason, and desire, is breeched by his account of the joyful self-creativity of individual will1. All that remains after this radical break with idealism is the will to nothingness, the annihilation of substance, love, happiness, and of the expectation of something better to come. Pure abstract will begets nothing – and so ‘the death of God’ immediately precipitates the necessity of His return. It is this return, and its impact on the institutional life of modernity, that brings us back to the politics of happiness, and, more specifically, to a certain persistence of Nietzsche’s critique of the Christian ecclesia. Michael Handby’s reading of Augustine’s concept of desire is exemplary of radical orthodoxy’s attempt to reform modernity by returning to the founding insights of Catholic theology (Handby in Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, 1998: 109–42). Handby’s essay begins by setting out the detail of Augustine’s disquisition on the nature of the soul in De Trinitate. God is plenitude: his love, goodness, and will are discrete and yet absolutely unitary, and it is this unity that is embodied in his

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creation of the world. Christ the Son is brought forth from the Father as the necessity of his mediating the sinful desire, or concupiscence, of finite souls. And so, Christ’s destiny as the mediator of sin is never foreign to his essence; he is, and wills, everything he must suffer in order to bring about the salvation of man, including his own crucifixion. The souls of human beings therefore, as creations of God, are in essence this Christ-like participation in the goodness of the world: they are capable of giving thanks, and of being happy with one another, through their autonomous willing of the destiny which God has given to them (Handby in Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, 1998: 121). And yet, this divine desire is susceptible to perversion; the discrete elements of the soul (knowing, willing, loving) are vulnerable to being split into abstract representations in which the ego/subject appears as the autonomous condition of its own existence. Radical orthodoxy therefore conceives the institutional relations of modernity as fundamentally opposed to the substance of the good (what John Milbank has called the ‘transcendent materiality of God’2), as it originates in a ‘Pelagian’ metaphysics that can only encourage the divided soul to celebrate as power the condition of its unhappy isolation (Handby in Milbank, Pickstock and Ward, 1998: 116). And yet, this still leaves open the Nietzschean question of how this return of Christian theology is to transform the ethical life of man – the state, the economy, international law, and other religions. Nietzsche’s work is the solicitation of excess; it always seeks to exhort ‘man’ beyond the sacred relations of love, faith, and charity that the Christian God has bequeathed through his putative act of creation (Nietzsche, 1983: 118–19). The happiness that comes from these relations, according to Nietzsche, is a stultifying contentment that finds no need to question its existence or its destiny, for the presence of God in the world has already been revealed in the life of Christ. What Nietzsche demands is the joy of excess; the virtue of acts that overcome religious piety, and whose power transforms the quasi-theological subjection that still clings to modernity. Thus, if there is hope in the time of catastrophe, it can only come from confronting the eschatological illusions that have been revitalized by the turn to radical orthodoxy. In Nietzsche’s thought, the final confrontation between religion and the unfettered will of man is to come at the point of man’s annihilation. It is not until God is seen to have finally abandoned the world that the inertial power of religion is overcome. In our present state of uncertainty, we remain susceptible to the promise of redemptive happiness held out by ‘ascetic priests’, and so, the return of orthodox belief is, for Nietzsche, the counterpart of the loss of divine grace from the institutional

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life of modernity (Nietzsche, 1984: 114–17). The compelling insight here is that the disenchantment of the world must, by its very nature, bring about a resurgence of religious belief that cannot be subsumed under the logic of progress and reflexive recognition. In Beck’s work, as we have seen, the globalization of economy and culture presages a movement towards interfaith recognition; for, as different religions are brought into more frequent contact, so the reflexivity of belief comes to moderate adherence to sacred texts, sites, and traditions. What this Kantian figuration of religiosity fails to grasp, however, is the ecstatic power of religious orthodoxy, or more precisely, the logic of revelation through which the movement into plurality is drawn back to the sacred origin. So, what can we learn from Nietzsche’s genealogy of religion? What does his prophecy of its protracted death tell us about the satisfactions and anxieties of our own historical present? There are, I think, three things. First, we are forced to reckon with the necessary involvement of religion with the secular forces that have formed the regime of domination that is peculiar to each different culture. There is no ‘pure’ theological necessity that can transform the life of man without involving itself in the violence of the world: the politics of religion is essentially bound up with satisfactions that are constituted in opposition to the scandalous beliefs of the infidel. Second, the death of religion that Nietzsche envisages in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Gay Science is likely to be played out through a history of reformation, secularization, and reversion to orthodoxy, in which religion, or religious affiliation, becomes a potent source of ecstatic belief within the globalized relations of modernity. The conventional wisdom in the West, of course, is that Islam is an idolatrous religion that demands a fanatical worship of God and solicits violence against the unbeliever. Yet there are numerous examples of the same fanatical worship of the sacred and despisal of the other in those who profess a certain Christian orthodoxy. We have, for example, the recent cases of pastor Harold Camping, who predicted the end of the world and the redemption of the righteous on 21 May 2011, and pastor Terry Jones, who tried to organize an ‘International Burn a Koran Day’ to coincide with the ninth anniversary of 9/11. Finally, although such conflicts are not strictly reducible to the antagonism of different faiths, religion has been a crucial factor in determining the relationship between ‘Oriental’ and ‘Occidental’ cultures. While it is true, particularly in the West, that religiosity has been dispersed into a matrix of subjective beliefs and movements, the mediatic confrontation with the other (the infidel, the unbeliever) exerts a powerful ‘gathering’ effect within that matrix. The satisfactions of Christian, Judaic, and Islamic beliefs, in other

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words, are intensified by the spectacle of their antagonism, the effect of which has been to destabilize established affiliations between state and religion (in both East and West), and to open up a new economy in which fundamentalism is an increasingly powerful force. Thus, what Nietzsche has bequeathed to the politics of religion is, first, the concept of an economy of ressentiment in which every faith must determine itself as a uniquely reformative authority; and second, the question of whether such agonistic experience of faith can offer remission from the violence of modernity. It is the latter question, which is ultimately that of the relationship of religion and happiness, which will occupy us in the final section.

The ecstasy of the sacred I want to begin this section by returning briefly to the subject of nihilism. The new Christian orthodoxy that has emerged from Cambridge in the last decade or so, is essentially a return to the idea that ‘the logos’, as it has been articulated in Western philosophy, has succeeded only in dividing the world into abstract categories of being, understanding, and imagination which lack substantive unity. Without the presence of God in the world, which is vouchsafed by the life and crucifixion of Christ, there can be no true community of man: all there is, is the scepticism that arises from the reduction of the created world to mind and matter, and the impossibility of configuring the immanent experience of love that defines the human soul in terms of abstract legality, authority, and morality. Without Christian theology, in other words, the movement of philosophy is simply that of a ‘double shuttle’, in which ethics, epistemology, and ontology attempt to give substance to the apparent contingency of the world, and then find that the ‘substance’ they have determined has no ultimate principle with which to unify its different modalities (Milbank in Davis, Milbank and Zizek, 2005: 415). It is the atheistic trajectory of philosophy, therefore, that has led to the ‘Nietzschean’ turn in Western culture: the constant pursuit of egoistic pleasure, the lack of sexual continence, and the breakdown in family life and religious community. Once human beings lose their sense of gratitude to God, their powers of self-overcoming are lost; they become arbitrarily violent and hedonistic, and deliberately will the nothingness that is generated by their own activity. In the previous section, I was concerned with the Nietzschean claim that such theological constructions of the indebtedness of the soul are essentially political,

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in the sense that the profession of Christ and the Kingdom of God determines itself as a reactive power within the secular organization of state, economy, and law. The question I will address in this section concerns the possible survival of sacred responsibility and the happiness of unconditional love after the death of God. Let me take stock of where we are. For both Hegel and Nietzsche, the question of the persistence of religion is essentially bound up with the project of modernization pursued in the West following the Enlightenment. In Hegel’s thought, the allegorical forms through which Christianity gives meaning to the finite constitution of Sittlichkeit are as close as it is possible for religious sensibility to come to rational apprehension of the legal, economic, and political dynamics of modernity. The fact of the lacuna between imagination (Vorstellung) and reason (Vernunft) means that although Christian mythology still gives a formative sense of the diremption of spirit (of how the soul of man is created through the movement of universal reason in history), it cannot apprehend the ‘truth’ of this diremption, which is only possible through the application of dialectical thought to the relations of law, state, and civil society (Hegel, 1967a: 751–85). The relationship between the abstract institutions of modernity and the symbolic order of religion, therefore, becomes acutely contradictory. As the Christian religion is placed under the demand to rationalize the apprehension of the sacred, so its confession tends to return to ‘unrevealed’ forms of worship that engender pure affective satisfaction. The immanent demand that arises from this tendency is for the return of religious representation to its proper place in the hierarchy of thought, feeling, and desire that is implicit in ethical life. However, what has emerged from the secularizing movement identified by Hegel in the history of Christianity, is the impossibility of this mediation, and the emergence of a ‘politics of religion’ that is about the necessity of recalling the most unstable forms of demotic faith to the substance of Sittlichkeit. This, as we have seen, is the historical context into which Nietzsche’s philosophy emerges. His account of the desperate madness through which modern man confronts his killing of God is the point from which the power of Christianity, as the happy suffering of life, begins to undermine everything that is ‘well-constituted’ in Western civilization. So we are left with an aporia: either the Christian religion does retain a certain originary relationship to a just community of created souls (in which case the dialectical movement of Hegelian philosophy seems to have been unable to separate itself from the beneficence of the Creator), or it is a reactive force whose true expression is the

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cycle of sectarian ressentiment (in which case every act of ‘faith’ must violate the moral principles it espouses). As with all aporias, this one cannot be resolved purely in its own terms. One can go either with a Hegelian understanding of religion as a necessary supplement to ethical life, or with Nietzsche’s genealogical approach, which solicits a radical opposition to the false happiness of religious life. However, if we return to the Nietzschean assertion of the death of God, it is possible to reconfigure the concept of the sacred through a certain phenomenological exposition of the subject who dwells within the world. Clearly, the origin of this phenomenology lies with Heidegger, whose primary concern is to expound the existence of man as Dasein, or the being that is defined by its concern for the authenticity of its own existence. In Levinas’ thought, however, this relationship of self-affection is radically transformed: the relation between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ becomes the very source of the world, for the objects encountered by the I are given significance by the original presence of the Other in the selfconsciousness of ego. Thus the I encounters the world not just through its utility, but also in the possibility that he may alleviate the suffering of the Other through the giving of the object as a gift. This originary responsibility, which is solicited by the face of the Other whom the I can never truly never know, is the essence of the sacred; for it is in the resemblance of every suffering face to God, that we are given the chance to break out of the repetitive egoism that has become the determining principle of social totality. This resemblance, however, is not intended to situate the subject in a relationship of indebtedness to a transcendent deity, but rather to make each of us responsible to the Other as an infinite demand through which our lives can be redeemed in the here and now. And so, as Levinas puts it in the concluding paragraph of Otherwise Than Being, ‘after the death of a certain god inhabiting the world behind the scenes, the substitution of the hostage discovers the trace … of what … does not enter into any present, [and] to which are suited none of the nouns designating beings’ (Levinas, 1998: 185). Thus it is the Other itself who is sacred, and the labour of care which her presence in the world demands. Levinas’ ethical phenomenology is important because it responds to the Nietzschean claim that ‘the sacred’ is a category of experience that can only be sustained within a religious eschatology, and that as such it leads to the stultifying asceticism he associates with religion in general and Christianity in particular. For Levinas, as Silvia Benso has pointed out, the Other is a provocation to excess, to an expenditure of the self that is conceivable only in relation

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to an object of absolute and originary value (Stauffer and Bergo, 2009: 228–31). In the presence of this ‘object’, all someone’s particular desires are subordinated to the desire for the Other disclosed in the experiences of love, care, eroticism, and fecundity. Thus, the sacredness of the Other is the only way to happiness, for outside the intra-human relations that arise from the alterity of the self, there is only the violent egoism that is both punished and encouraged in the relations of social totality. However, if we are to be fair to Nietzsche’s assertion that the killing of God is a deed to which humanity has yet to live up, and that the sphere of representation after God’s death becomes a kind of posthumous iconography, then we are compelled to engage with the problem of revelation that runs throughout Levinas’ work. As we have seen, the killing of God does not mark the end of religious representation, but the intensification and proliferation of God’s image within the techno-scientific relations of modernity. The ethical demand of the Other, which is received as a voice that interrupts the homogenizing power of the image, must determine its necessity within a sphere of media-technological images which compete to render the truth of God. Thus, if we are to give an account of how the sacredness of the Other arises as a transformative power in the economy of simulation, we must begin by setting out the fate of religious experience within that economy. There is, to paraphrase Derrida, nothing outside the networks of technological representation through which the global economy functions. Or, to put it in a slightly different way, every form of experience – love, eroticism, desire, obligation, and religiosity – is presented through visual-aesthetic codes that constantly transform its meaning. In Baudrillard’s work, this economy is conceived as completely hermetic: the relationship between simulation and desire is mapped onto statistical models that allow the latter to be intensified constantly by the technological manipulation of the image. The global regime of capital therefore reproduces itself through the total manipulation of experience, or what Baudrillard conceives as the limitless expansion of ‘the hyperreal’ (Baudrillard, 2000: 1–42). The fate of religion within this regime is to become a simulation of itself, for, once the experience of the sacred has ceased to be embodied in the symbolic economy of the social, it is endlessly refracted through the technological means of representation characteristic of each particular epoch. Baudrillard’s account of the evolution of the image into a pure technological code begins with the ‘machinery of icons’ through which God is made present in the performance of Christian religious ceremony. The Catholic fixation with representing God immediately raises the question of idolatry, of whether it is

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God’s ineffable transcendence that is being worshipped, or simply an imaginary Patriarch whose kingship can only degrade the Christian virtues of selfless love and service (Baudrillard, 2000: 7–11). For Baudrillard, the complicity of the Christian Church with the power of the icon is a moment of fatality for the West; for in the end, every expression of work, satisfaction, and desire, including those that arise from the experience of the sacred, is formed within the technological economy of the image. Thus, the presence of God is dispersed into an endless refraction of signs (gentle-handsome-peaceful-vengeful-loving-warrior Jesus, for example), whose ‘reality’ is sustained only in their opposition to the idolatrous beliefs of non-Christian faiths. The importance of Baudrillard’s account of religion lies in its disclosure of a radical escalation of signs. God is no longer revealed to a community of faithful souls who have lived patiently in his service; rather, he is made present through a global economy of images in which ‘faith’ becomes a matter of sectarian antagonism. Thus, the radicalization of Christianity through its attachment to ‘white mythologies’ of racial election, Oriental excess, and the mission of Enlightenment, has its counterpart in the fundamentalist mythologies of Islam, which radicalize the body of original faith that arose from the teachings of Mohammad (Baudrillard, 2010: 27–8). There is, of course, a certain Nietzscheanism in this economy of faith, for the religious antagonisms determined in the globalized world spring from a network of representation from which all reserve and exegetical hesitation has been expunged. Derrida’s essay ‘Faith and Knowledge’ is, on one level at least, a sustained interrogation of the possibility of such a Nietzschean-Baudrillardian economy of ecstatic antagonism. Derrida argues that there are two sources of the word religion, both of which are irreducible, and each of which is contaminated by the other. These sources, which are etymologically combined in the Latin word religio, are: a) religiere, which comes from the word for gathering, or harvest (legere), and b) religare, which comes from the verb ‘to tie, bind’ (ligare) (Derrida, 2002: 70). This duality at the origin of religion is, for Derrida, its universal characteristic: religious belief as such is defined by the co-presence of a blind faith in the sacred ‘One’ whose satisfactions are essentially mythological (religare), with a discursive community of the book (religiere), whose demands are exegetic, and which hesitates before the repetition of orthodoxy. The survival of this hesitation, this moment of reflection within the economy of religious antagonism, is what is at stake in Derrida’s essay, and so I will conclude by examining the detail of his argument.

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Let me start by looking at the happiness that is promised by religion in terms of the binding, unconditional love that is expressed in the concept of religare. Derrida’s analysis of the ‘return of religion’ is premised on the dematerialization of the world that has taken place through the mediatic networks of the global economy. His claim is that the dissemination of being into immaterial flows of labour, money, information, and knowledge, is what has precipitated the return of religious fundamentalism – Christian, Judaic, and Islamic. The threat posed by global capitalism to the cultural and geopolitical spaces in which religious faith has been constituted is that of virtual disintegration; for the community of symbolic belief is constantly penetrated by solicitations of desire that endanger its original unity. Thus, the return to ‘all forms of originary physis’ that Derrida conceives as the defining characteristic of religious fundamentalism is an attempt to reconstitute a body of belief that includes holy sites, relics, homelands, traditions, and laws (Derrida, 2002: 82). It is here that fascism and religion come closest to each other, for, insofar as religious fundamentalism determines itself as an ecstatic demand for the reappropriation of sacred origins, its community is organized around the destruction of a ‘radical evil’ that threatens its existence. The Christian infidel, the Muslim terrorist, and the Jewish zealot are refracted in a plurality of fundamentalist mythologies, each of which solicits the purity of its own confession and the violence of holy war. Yet this logic of refraction, which is the essence of the religious violence that has returned to the secular regime of modernity, is not hermetic; it cannot rid itself of the hesitation that comes from the demand to kill in the name of God, or to mutilate the body of he who would violate the laws of sacred community (Derrida, 2002: 90). Each of the religions of the book, in other words, maintain the original promise of religiere; that the faithful should gather in the spirit of the scriptures, and that they should seek the truth of God in whatever, or whomever, confronts the sacred community (Derrida, 2002: 99). This, for Derrida, is the essence of all religious faith, and is what distinguishes it from the nihilistic culture of fascism. If there is a concept of happiness that is sustained in Derrida’s thought, it lies close to the unexpected satisfactions that arise from whoever comes to us demanding our care. The chance of this happiness emerges from the mutability of the evil that afflicts the world, for it is only insofar as the ‘other’ is distributed, and redistributed, through the technological representation of being, that the demand for sacrificial love is made possible. Thus, there is a certain religiosity in Derrida’s thought, but one that always defers the arrival of the Messiah. If there is redemption in the world, it can only come through the moments of epiphany

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that arrive with those who are beyond our conventional self-understanding; and for Derrida, the ethical demand of such events has always contaminated the recuperative resources of the sacred. The blessedness of peace, therefore, is not given in the experience of sacred unity, no matter how this is conceived; for such experience remains complicit with an essential sectarianism that cannot accept the alterity of the other. In the West, it is Islam that has been identified as the source of religious violence, the faith that has been unable to overcome its dependence on thaumaturgy and ecstatic subjection to the will of God. So the holy war of conversion is seen as implicit in the actions of every Muslim state (Derrida, 2005: 78–94). This presumption of Christian Enlightenment, however, is also part of the global economy of religious antagonism, for there is no purely peaceful commitment to the glory of God. Thus, if we look across the spectrum from the folksy community of the local church, which seems to possess the imagination of the neo-Utilitarians3, to the complex re-articulation of Catholic theology presented in the radical orthodoxy movement, there persists a proselytizing demand that is never quite discharged from the happiness of the faithful. This is what Derrida refers to as the ‘autoimmunitary response’ that is part of all religious doctrine, the reversion to a politics of self-defence that always gathers around the community of the sacred (Derrida, 2002: 71). Perhaps then, we can detect an echo of Schopenhauer in Derrida’s account of faith and knowledge; for it is the fact that the Messiah can never arrive to redeem the agonism of the world that makes the ethical satisfactions of religiere all the more fragile and all the more sacred. I will return to this in the conclusion.

Notes 1 See the Kantian and Fichtean versions of subjective idealism: Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgement, and Fichte’s System of Ethics. 2 See John Milbank’s essay ‘Materialism and Transcendence’ in Theology and the Political: New Debates (2005. Durham, NC: Duke University Press). 3 See, for example, Robert E. Lane (2000), The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 134–5, and Richard Layard (2005), Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane: 71–2.

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Conclusion Happiness in the Time of Catastrophe I I began the book by suggesting that happiness, as we experience it, is not a realizable condition. Each of us experiences our own particular moments of joy, love, and ecstasy as events whose intensity derives from their being contingent and unsustainable. I also suggested that the politics of happiness is essentially related to this sense of contingency, as the promises of collective satisfaction made by the ideologies I have examined are couched in terms of the conditions that will maximize the chances of happiness for each individual. The normative demands constitutive of fascist, liberal, socialist, postmodernist, and religious ideologies are eschatologically discrete; they present ‘world pictures’, in which the relationships between God, nature, and humanity are invoked in relation to the contingencies of individual life. Thus, at a very basic level, the politics of happiness I have sketched in the preceding chapters, is a complex mediation of the experience of modernity – of the loss of religious meaning, symbolic order, fate, community, love, and sacrifice that has resulted from the progress of rational, techno-scientific, civilization. This mediation has a very long history, for none of the ideologies I have looked at emerged from nowhere at the dawn of Enlightenment. Each has philosophical and religious antecedents that stretch back to the origins of ‘the West’, and each has developed in relation to the suffering and dislocation that has accompanied the liberation of the modern individual. I want to present, therefore, a short genealogy of this liberation (its contradictions, aporias, compulsions, anxieties, and demands), whose brevity is hopefully justified by its contextualization of the current state of emergency in which we find ourselves. The political ideologies I have examined are eschatological regimes; they present the best way to happiness within the rational-systemic organization of modernity. This, as we have seen, may involve ‘dethroning God and destroying capitalism’, surrendering to the will of God, or giving oneself over to the pleasure of postmodern hedonism. The fundamental point, however, is that these strategies for the salvation and happiness of humanity are the outcome

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of a history of social and individual formation that begins in Greek antiquity, and which continues to unfold in our own epoch. As we saw in the thoughts of both Hegel and Nietzsche, the history of the Classical world is marked by a shift from the pre-eminence of Dionysus, the god of fate and nature, to Apollo, the god of light and prophecy. In the former period, the Polis is made over to the principle of amor fati, or the love of fate. The role of drama in the original city-state was to show the suffering of man under the tyranny of the gods; for without the tragic consequences of divine violence in the affairs of humanity, there could be fortitude, no virtue, and no true happiness. Thus, in Sophocles’ Theban trilogy, the fate that befalls Oedipus, Jocasta and Antigone has no happy resolution: all are destroyed by the caprice of the Olympian gods, and are left as examples of the tragic fate through which man attains the greatness appropriate to his being (Hegel, 1967a: 484–99; Nietzsche, 1990: 46–52). In the Hellenic period of Greek civilization, however, this exposure of the Polis to the uncontrollable contingencies of fate is fundamentally changed. What Nietzsche saw as the invigorating influence of tragedy on the life of the city-state, is displaced by the power of Apollo, the ‘lucent one’, who demands the revelation of all mysteries, and the harmonious unity of ethical life (Nietzsche, 1990: 46–52). Thus, Hellenic civilization is driven by the Apollonian demand for sufficient reason; the philosophies of Socrates and Plato emerge as the constant return to eternal truth through the show of contingency (fate), and the aesthetic culture of the Polis becomes the subordination of Dionysian excess to the principles of good taste and integrity. Hegel conceived the Hellenic phase of the Greek world as the happiest epoch in human history, in which work, satisfaction, and desire were concretely mediated in the body of the Polis, but also as a fundamental frustration of the principle of subjective freedom. In the end, the Apollonian form of Sittlichkeit, which culminated in Aristotle’s notion of the good life as a balance of the rational and appetitive faculties of the soul, could not admit the radically democratic demand of self-consciousness: that its formal freedom should be universally recognized. The release of this demand from the beautiful restraint of the Hellenic culture, as we have seen, is the release of a particular kind of violence into the world. Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s analyses of the Roman world focus on the atomism of Roman law, culture, and politics; for, once that state has ceased to be the embodiment of divine truth and virtue, and has become an instrument of expropriation, ethical life begins its long descent into the violence and superstition of feudalism (Hegel, 1967a: 484–99; Nietzsche, 1990: 185–7). The legacy

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of the Roman Empire, therefore, is the irrational, capricious rule of kings and princes over a peasantry who are bewitched by the spectacle of sovereignty and the mystical pronouncements of the church. This is the time of Hegel’s Unhappy Consciousness, for, under feudalism, the work of each individual is deprived of all satisfaction; it is performed purely in the service of the sovereign master, who, for the servant, is the arbiter of life and death (Hegel, 1967a: 251–67). What emerges from this unstable kind of sovereignty is a form of Utilitarian philosophy that regards the world as an essentially violent place, radically opposed to the happiness of human beings. Thus, in Hobbes’ thought, nature, as it has been created by God, takes the form of an irreducible ‘war of all against all’, whose destructive consequences can be curtailed only by the implacable application of the law (Hobbes, 1985: 183–8). This construction of human life as the self-conscious desire to avoid pain, and of the state as the instrument through which that desire is given practical form, is a persistent theme in the history of Western thought (Machiavelli, de Maistre, Schopenhauer, Freud). However, if we are to understand the political economy of desire that has emerged from the rational-scientific apprehension of catastrophe that haunts our own time, we need to look at the transition from the feudal worldview to that of industrialized modernity. The feudal form of sovereignty is not static, and contains the seeds of its own dissolution. In Hegel’s thought, the determining contradiction that brings about the overthrow of the feudal regime arises from the fact that the work performed by the servant is utterly without satisfaction. Thus, the formation of the Unhappy Consciousness through the pursuit of transformative labour that brings no material or spiritual satisfaction is what underlies the emergence of the Enlightenment. For Hegel, the revolt of free self-consciousness against the feudal regime takes two distinct forms: the subjective idealism of Kantian and Fichtean philosophies (which conceived freedom as a formal attribute of the ego) and the materialism of the French philosophes (who saw the entire edifice of Sittlichkeit as opposed to the originary rights of humanity). This dynamic of suffering and autonomy is, for Hegel, the precursor of modern civil society. What is revealed in the contradictions of pure reason and pure revolutionary feeing are the limits of the radical individualism that emerged from Enlightenment philosophy (Hegel, 1967a: 599–610). The forms of justice, representation, and economy set out in the Philosophy of Right, therefore, embody both an ethical and an existential necessity; they are the substantial relations in which the free individuals that have been released from the feudal regime, are able to recognize the satisfactions

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of Sittlichkeit as their own (Hegel, 1967b: 134–45). However, even in Hegel’s thought, this mediation of the atomistic ego is problematic; for the sphere of civil society is increasingly traversed by aesthetic, economic, and religious cultures that undermine the formative power of spirit within ethical life. So, one of the defining questions of modernity concerns the relationship of individual happiness to the expanding regime of rationalized-industrialized production. As we saw in Chapter One, the Utilitarian philosophies of Bentham, Mill and Smith mark the emergence of a particular kind of bourgeois optimism, in that the constant expansion of productivity and the alleviation of need are presented as the way to ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. This view of the world as a resource is the foundation of an ideology in which the pleasure enjoyed by individuals in their acts of consumption or creation is seen as the ultimate end for which human society is created. Thus, the best way to increase the sum of human happiness is a) to encourage as much individual innovation in civil society as possible, and b) to curtail radically the powers of the state to reduce the pleasure of its citizens in the pursuit of their particular desires. From this viewpoint, the state is viewed simply as an instrument of national protection and law enforcement – beyond that, its interventions into civil society (particularly through taxation and excessive legislation) can only serve to limit the productivity and happiness of its citizens. What is of particular importance here is the fact that the world appears as ‘ready to hand’, as a resource that has been created for the benefit of humanity, and which is the foundation of man’s capacity for creation, self-realization, and satisfaction. Indeed, we have seen that there are Nietzschean arguments suggesting that Marx’s critique of capital, and the pleasures of bourgeois individualism, remains bewitched by the ideology of production (Adorno, 1998; Baudrillard, 1981). While it is true that Marx’s account of ruling ideas is radically opposed to individual rights of expropriation, his categories of use-value, alienation, and the ‘inorganic body of nature’, gesture towards the perfection of human labour under the conditions of a fully socialized mode of production. Thus, the political and philosophical experience of modernity has evolved primarily through three eschatologies: the liberal worldview, in which atomistic desire is presented as the driving force that initiates all positive change; the Marxist worldview, in which the immanent community of labour is the telos of political agency; and the Nietzschean-Weberian position, in which it is the effects of instrumental reason on subjective desire that become the condition of ethical and political possibility.

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The evolution of modernity as a regime of desire is shot through with contradictions. From the beginning, the accelerated pace at which scientific knowledge is articulated into new technological systems leads to a disorientation of the subject, and to a feeling of permanent instability that is radically different from the feudal regime (Benjamin, 1997b: 288–91; Lyotard, 1991: 71–82). The defining characteristic of ‘late’, or ‘post’, modernity is the fact that this process accelerates exponentially; the traces of the real that it was possible to discern in the politics of race, class, and gender, have been dispersed into a regime of aesthetic simulation, cybernetic efficiency, and distracted consumption which refers only to itself. In its most extreme form, the postmodernist thesis maintains that all that is left after the end of modernity is what Baudrillard calls the melodrama of difference; the obsession with staging, and restaging, the rights of groups and individuals whose identity has become a matter of performance (Baudrillard, 2000: 124–38). As I said in the introduction, this economy of aesthetic equivalence is the condition that gives rise to the postmodern preoccupation with happiness: as the dislocated subject becomes increasingly concerned with the value of his or her choices, so the old ideologies of belonging, community, and the sacred are revitalized. The formal freedom of postmodern capitalism, in other words, is what gives rise to the demand for eschatological regimes that provide meaning beyond the immediacy of consumption. So, if we allow that the politics of happiness is inscribed in this unstable relationship between individual freedom and the desire for meaning, the possibility of our confronting the catastrophic affects of technological modernity must be evaluated in terms of our attachments to the ideological forms through which we understand our place in the world. So, to bring things back to the original question, the politics of catastrophe that has taken shape in the work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens must present its own account of how to be happy, proactive, and ethical while staring into the abyss created by modern civilization.

II At the beginning of Risk Society, Beck introduces a periodization, in which he claims that it is possible to make out the emergence of a new political consciousness, which has begun to supersede the ideologies that have dominated twentieth-century modernity. He argues that the concept of postmodernity is,

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in fact, the last gasp of ideological politics; for, insofar as it has allowed the return of left- and right-wing tribalism under the erasure of universal irony, it is complicit with the preservation of political categories that no longer reflect the changing dynamics of technological civilization (Beck, 1996: 9). The essence of this transformation, according to Beck, is the shift from ‘industrial’ to ‘risk’ society. The former is characterized by the utilitarian demand for increased productivity and the constant improvement of efficiency; and so the theories of technology that emerged in both bourgeois and radical thought tended to regard machinery as the ultimate means of improving the lot of humanity. Even Marx, who, in early writings, connected the experience of alienation with the regime of technological production, regarded machines as a liberating power that had been corrupted by the acquisitive relations of capital. In risk society, however, the logic of production is complicated by the risks that are distributed by the use of industrial technologies (Beck, 1996: 20–4). Nuclear power and nuclear weapons, for example, bring with them the possibility of extinction-level events that could put an end to organic life on the planet. (The case against genetic and biotechnologies is perhaps less certain, but, for Beck, they are emergent factors in the dynamics of risk.) Beck’s thesis therefore, is that the conditions of a new reflexive politics are beginning to develop. For, insofar as this ‘catastrophic’ phase of modernity is starting to emerge into public consciousness, we are faced with the fact that the political eschatologies through which we have understood the world cannot represent the new ethical demands that have been placed on us. Thus, before I examine the detail of Beck’s thesis, I want to look briefly at the difference between his construction of reflexive risk awareness, and the one that has been developed by Anthony Giddens. According to Beck, the damages that are continually being done to the environment by technological systems have fundamentally undermined our experience of security. Indeed, he argues that it is still unclear how the perpetual confrontation with catastrophe will operate as a ‘binding force’, and that we cannot be sure that the critical-scientific construction of risk will be sufficient to hold the forces of irrationalism, extremism, and fanaticism at bay (Beck, 1996: 49–50). Giddens’ account of the influence of risk, on the other hand, is mainly concerned with the practice of ‘self-reflexivity’: the personal transformations made possible by the disembedding of social relations and the containment of risks within the filtering mechanisms of the life world. Thus, the question of ‘how existence itself should be grasped and lived’ presupposes a functional reduction

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of risk: a ‘bracketing out’ of the anxiety that would paralyse both the expressive resources of the self and the political life of the public sphere (Giddens, 1997a: 224). For Beck, however, the impact of civilization risks on the experience of security is such that the whole concept of ‘the personal’ upon which Giddens’ account of reflexion depends, is called into question. The notions of ‘life style’ and ‘life choice’, through which Giddens characterizes the transformative potential of the reflexive self, are made subordinate to the absolute demand of civilization risks. While Beck certainly agrees with Giddens’ contention that the social and economic organization of modernity is increasingly reflexive, he would also maintain that the heterogeneous forms of risk evaluation that arise from different spheres of activity (employment and economy, family and intimacy, gender and sexuality), can have no legitimate independence from the imperatives of risk. Ultimately, our ethical responsibility as human beings is to the ‘natural whole’ of which each of us is a fragile and contingent part (Beck, 1996: 74). Beck’s thesis maintains that, as the industrial revolution increased the productivity of Western capitalism, the relationship between scientific knowledge, technological innovation, and economic growth became ever closer. Under the conditions of what he called ‘primary industrialization’, capital emerged as the key determinant of scientific research: unless a particular branch of knowledge could hold out the possibility of technological innovation in the production process, it would remain largely undeveloped. This relationship between science and economy marks the emergence of a transactional logic, in which science, contrary to its practice of methodological scepticism, is forced to present its findings as infallible knowledge that awaits conversion into greater efficiency and higher profits. What is important here, according to Beck, is the tension that develops between the method and the ideology of science, or, more precisely, between the self-critical procedures through which the testing of hypotheses is carried out and the rhetoric of certainty through which results are presented to the economic and political agents of industrialization (Beck, 1996: 164). Thus, by presenting itself as the true foundation on which industrial modernity could solve the problems of humankind (poverty, scarcity, disease, war), science entered into a fatal complicity with the ideology of the market. Civil society, as the legally sanctioned sphere of human rights and economic freedom, assumed exclusive responsibility for the use of scientific knowledge, and for the progress of the human species towards technological liberation from poverty and need. According to Beck, however, the danger inherent in this subordination

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of science is that the political authority of the state is reduced to approving technological developments in medicine, agriculture, industry, and warfare, as inescapable modalities of progress. For Beck, the primacy of ‘ideological’ over ‘critical’ science and the dominance of capital in the determination of human progress are not immutable characteristics of modernization. His contention is that science, considered as an instrument of critical inquiry, becomes increasingly self-reflexive in its research practices, while at the same time being forced to hold on to the institutionalized fiction of its infallibility. What is important here, is that the proliferation of technogenic ‘side effects’, whose consequences are not spatially, temporally, or generationally limitable, is what gives rise to a critical politics of risk. As genetically mutable, biologically contaminable beings, we are all susceptible to the effects of radiation and chemical poisoning; and it is such shared vulnerability that, for Beck, becomes the basis of a reflexive resistance to economic powers that have, until very recently, monopolized the use and development of technology. There are however, structural and ideological impediments to the realization of this politics. Most of the damage done by radiation leaks or chemical discharges does not occur in one-off events like Chernobyl, Bhopal, or Fukushima; rather, it tends to spread as a pernicious build up of contaminants in natural systems and human communities. Given the institutional power of the corporations who have invested in nuclear, agrichemical, and biotechnological futures, and allowing for their ability to present ‘infallible’ scientific evidence in support of such futures, it is unsurprising that evidence of contamination submitted by affected communities, has tended to be dismissed by official agencies as anecdotal and unscientific (Beck, 1996: 63–4). In Beck’s account of risk society, the kind of damages incurred by human beings through the accelerated development of technology (genetic mutations, the accumulation of toxins in the body’s organic structures, environmental degradation), require scientific quantification before they can be adequately represented as risks. In primary industrial societies, the colonization of science by those enterprises which control the generation and distribution of capital (industrial corporations, finance capital, the military), gave rise to a general indifference to the negative consequences of technology, which allowed human and environmental damages to be defined as ‘side effects’. However, with the increasing frequency and extent of such harm, the power of science to enforce its official assignment of particular exposures, contaminations, and irradiations to this politically de-activating category, begins to be challenged. Within what

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Beck conceives as the emergent ‘sub-politics’ of risk, critical science comes forward as the facilitator of reflexive dialogue among different societal interests (Beck, 1996: 172–3). The ideologies that emerged in the primary phase of industrialization are revealed as complicit with regimes of exploitation and control that enclose ‘the political’ within the very antagonisms that the sub-politics of risk has begun to undermine. Marxism, for example, constantly revitalizes the categories of class and commodification as the underlying conditions of suffering that are concealed by the democratic culture of modernity (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 205). For Beck, however, such ideological politics are coming to an end, for, as different branches of knowledge begin to break free from their attachments to ‘system necessities’ and ‘objective economic constraints’, they open up non-ideological practices of identity formation and global cooperation (Beck, 1996: 231–5). The idea of politics that runs throughout Risk Society is therefore informed by a particular notion of science and its relationship to the future of humanity. Clearly, the concept of a global community of risk can sustain its political force only for as long as the future has not already been determined as humanity’s self-attrition and ultimate destruction. Thus, Beck presents the imperative of determining the biological, genetic, and environmental impact of technological interventions as the basis of an emergent dialogue between the natural and social sciences (Beck, 1996: 28). The emergence of this dialogue, which he describes as a ‘still undeveloped symbiosis’, performs two crucial functions in his account of the politics of risk. First, it opens up the possibility of a public awareness of risk, in which the critical resources of science are brought to bear on the collective experience of harm and anxiety. Second, it is this dialogue on the present level of risk that rejuvenates the public sphere, which has been progressively disempowered by the independence of corporate capital and professional organizations from the political authority of the state. For Beck, the emergence of such a pervasive risk consciousness brings about a crucial change in the orientation of social democracy: the rights enshrined in the state evolve from simple guarantees that allow non-political organizations to press on with the labour of technological progress, into an ethical framework through which citizens are able to protest against the damage this labour has done to nature and the human community (Beck, 1996: 193). Thus, for Beck, the ‘implicit ethics’ that has come to haunt the autonomy of capital, the natural sciences, and the technical disciplines is in the process of transforming the public sphere: its axis is shifting from the ideological obsessions of culture industries, class conflicts,

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sectarianism, and nationalism towards a global concern with the effects of technological civilization (Beck, 1996: 235). A few years ago, I wrote a piece on Risk Society which suggested a connection between Adorno’s idea of the incarnated individual and the concepts of damage and implicit ethics that Beck presents as underlying the transformation of industrial modernity. I argued that there is a certain homology between the suffering of the Adornian subject, who is exposed to the caprice of functional-bureaucratic modernity, and the individuated beings that, for Beck, are confronted with the impending destruction of their species (Abbinnett, 2000: 112–13). An intense feeling of anxiety constitutes the identity of both these beings; they are radically at odds with the world, for neither is able to overcome the threat of annihilation that haunts every facet of their work, satisfaction, and desire. The crucial difference between Beck’s and Adorno’s versions of the fate of modern subjectivity, however, lies in their respective accounts of the materiality of human beings, and how this has impacted on the way in which they confront the threat of catastrophe. In Adorno’s work, the violence endemic in capitalist society is potentially limitless: as the connections between individual beings become increasingly reified, so the frustrations that arise from the rationalization of the commodity form begin to undermine the ephemeral satisfactions of mass culture. Thus, there is a profound desire for mimetic politics that underlies the evolution of modernity; and so the rise of Nazism, fascism, and the authoritarian versions of Marxism are viewed by Adorno as demanding a critique of the relationship between the aestheticization of politics and the mutability of mass desire (Adorno, 1990: 398). For Beck, on the other hand, the vulnerability of human beings to the risks that arise from technological systems is the foundation of a shared sense of responsibility for the natural environment on which humankind is dependent (Beck. 1996: 74). Ultimately, it is this deep, existential sense of dependency that underlies the transformation of politics that Beck describes in Risk Society: the shift away from the ideological obsessions of aesthetic identity towards a rationalscientific engagement with the future of the human species. And so, it is to the possibility of this shift, and its implications for the politics of desire, that we must now turn.

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III Beck’s account of Risk Society is a strongly eschatological intervention, which, as we have seen, makes a series of radical claims about the ethical and political transformations to which technological modernity has given rise. The most important of these is that a fundamental shift has occurred in man’s relationship to nature. Industrial society, as Heidegger has pointed out, has tended to treat nature as the ‘ready to hand’ resource to be utilized in the ever-expanding mechanism of production (Heidegger, 1996: 308–41). With the emergence of risk society however, this relationship is called into question: as the industrial regime reveals the extent of its destructive effects on the natural environment, so humanity’s connection to nature becomes central to the ongoing project of modernization. The question of how we wish to live, in other words, is implicit in every deployment of technology: for each intrusion into the deep structures of organic life, gives rise to a feeling that ‘the human quality of the human, and the natural quality of nature’, is what is at stake for all of us in the evolution of modernity (Beck, 1996: 28). There emerges what Beck calls a ‘solidarity of living things’, in which the higher faculties of reflexion are transformed from expressions of transcendental subjectivity into practical forms of communication through which nature becomes a constitutive concern for each individual subject (Beck, 1996: 74). If we are to find happiness in the time of catastrophe, therefore, we must respond to this sense of unity with life as such; we must seek constantly to re-harmonize our relationships with nature through the evolving systems of science, representation, and communication that make up the technological edifice of modernity. For it is only insofar as we pursue this project as post-ideological subjects that the labour of living can become the labour of ethical recognition (Beck, 1996: 41–8). What Beck discerns in the emergence of risk society, is the possibility of humanity’s confronting the future without recourse to the religious, aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical illusions that have always accompanied the anxiety of the new. Indeed, the account of post-orthodox religion that Beck sets out in A God of One’s Own, is concerned to show that, in Western societies, religiosity has changed from being a dogmatic assertion of particular articles of belief into a source of reflexive engagement with the sacraments of other faiths. Religion, in other words, is becoming an ethical practice, which serves to facilitate a culture of mutual recognition in the public sphere (Beck, 2008: 24–6). However, if we look back at the evolution of Western modernity, we can see that the ideological

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forms, in which the dislocated subjects of industrial society have sought satisfaction, have done no more than increase the sum of human suffering. The radical demands of Marxism, fascism, and religious fundamentalism have all, in the long run, been unable to secure the cooperative endeavour that is the foundation of practical happiness. For Beck, these ideologies are dead – for, even though they refuse to stop haunting the evolution of reflexive modernity, their obsessive appeals to race, class, and divine revelation can only confirm the hopelessness of their respective worldviews (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 203–5). And yet, Beck’s claim that the time of dogmatic ideology is at an end, and with it the intense and divisive ecstasies of the atomistic personality, is highly problematic. What I have tried to show in the preceding chapters is that the enduring value of the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida, lies in their disclosure of the economy of subjection, overcoming, and responsibility through which the politics of happiness is played out. The specific appeals of the ideologies I have looked at are therefore infinitely mutable: they are essentially ways of coming to terms with the presence of death in the relations of ethical life, and as such, their ‘return’ has a much more significant effect on the present state of emergency than Beck suggests. According to Beck’s thesis, it is the growing awareness of civilization risks that will eventually disperse the compulsive satisfactions of political ideology. For, as the consequences of climate change, global pandemics, nuclear contamination, and economic crises become an established part of the public sphere, so the contours of a world risk society begin to emerge, in which the old antagonisms between capitalism and socialism, Third and First Worlds, begin to break down (Beck, 1986: 24). What Beck’s postulation of this movement towards global cooperation reveals, however, is the implicit eschatology in his thought; for his claim is that, in the long run, the modes of religious, aesthetic, and political representation through which human happiness is experienced, converge on a reflexive awareness of the solidarity of all living things. It is my contention, however, that the experience of catastrophe which has come to define our historical epoch is much more unstable than Beck’s account of risk society would suggest. Happiness, as we have seen in Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida, is an increasingly labile experience for the modern individual, which exceeds the practical-ideological relations through which it is represented. Thus, the threat of catastrophe that has emerged in the midst of technological utopia cannot be made completely tractable within the fail-safe systems, cooperative relations,

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and cosmopolitan bodies that are the goal of Beck’s reflexive modernization thesis. The return of fascist, socialist, neoliberal, and fundamentalist ideologies is provoked, at least in part, by the sense of imminent disaster that has come to pervade the culture of late modernity. So, our experience of being close to the end, of having been shaken out of our complacency by the presence of death, is infinitely refracted through political eschatologies that seek to give hope in the time of impending catastrophe. So, where does this leave us? Are we now at the point where the frantic desire of the modern subject to be happy is in danger of overwhelming the science of risk? Is the radical over-determination of ‘the real’ through the powers of technological representation driving us into ever-more distracted flights of consumption, egoism, and political submission? There are those who believe this to be the case. In Zygmunt Bauman’s reflections on the concept of ‘liquid modernity’, for example, the world appears as ravaged by unregulated flows of virtual capital that have lost all connection with nature, humanity, and the ethical life of the state. All that Western societies are left with, after the collapse of the old securities of class and nation, is the desperate desire to have fun in the ‘managed playground’ of postmodern consumerism, and to make sure they keep out those ‘others’ who would ruin the party (Bauman, 2000: 53–90; 1993: 174–81). However, if what I have said in the preceding chapters has an ethical point, it is this: the ideological regimes through which the way to happiness is prescribed are shifting and unstable economies; they are constantly transformed within the technological space of modernity, and yet are still able to reconfigure that space through mythologies of freedom, belonging, and ethical community. These mythologies, as we have seen, are originally implicated in the violence that defined the history of the twentieth century; and yet they are also the condition on which an untimely haunting of the obsessions of political identity can take place. To put it in the terms of Derrida’s concept of hospitality, there is a spectre of moral desire that haunts the performance of happiness; a desire which disturbs the pure narcissistic enjoyment of the Oedipal self and its familiars, and which reaches towards the absolute demand of the other (Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000: 151). If there is a common theme that runs through Hegel, Nietzsche and Derrida’s philosophies of desire, it is that happiness can only be approached through a sacrificial relationship of the self to its own life and satisfactions, and that this is essentially related to the disturbing presence of the stranger. (Perhaps

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this is the condition of every kind of love and community?) In the end, it is this transformative desire for the other that haunts every political configuration of happiness, and returns us to the demand to offer help, even if that help is performed against the terrible conviction that it may be of no avail. Beyond the rationality of catastrophe avoidance, therefore, there remains a desire (for the other) that is beyond all reasonable satisfaction, and without which there is only the technocratic reduction of humanity, in its various forms.

IV As I am finishing these concluding remarks, I notice that Yahoo has flashed up the OECD’s1 latest league table of the happiest countries. As of May 2012, the top ten are: Denmark Norway Netherlands Switzerland Austria Israel Finland Australia Canada Sweden.

In a sense, who has gone up and who has gone down is not of any particular interest: the top ten countries tend to stay the same, and simply swap places. Rather, what is important is the OECD’s choice of criteria by which to determine the conditions that best promote human happiness. There is, of course, some recognition of contingency – why Denmark is that little bit happier than Norway is hard to pin down – but, in the end, happiness is understood as arising directly from relatively high disposable income, a good work-life balance, high educational attainment, and good health care. It would, of course, be absurd to maintain that these factors have nothing to do with being happy, as they clearly are related to the sense of personal and collective wellbeing that comes from living in a stable, well-organized, and efficient economy. But this attempt to determine the perfect balance of productivity and wellbeing is wilfully blind to the global conditions on which the happiness of the happiest countries is

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founded. In the end, the OECD’s publication of the top ten presents an ideal that is unattainable by all but the richest nations on the planet. And as such, it remains complicit with the neoliberal ideals of growth, productivity, and capitalization that have colonized the political understanding of happiness. The OECD’s report also assumes that the happiest countries will be the most democratic and tolerant, due to the experience of peace and security in which their citizens have been brought up. This, however, is a highly questionable assumption. As I have shown, the constitution of ethical life in any particular country is always bound up with mythologies of belonging and identity. These mythologies are essential to the experience of happiness and cannot be erased from the sense of collective being that is performed within the nation state. Thus, it is perfectly possible for a nation that exhibits high levels of happiness among its citizens to sustain a culture of xenophobic insularity which is extremely allergic to the presence of strangers. A cursory look at the immigration policies and political movements that have emerged in some of the OECD’s happiest countries since the onset of the recession does nothing to refute this claim. The point therefore, is that the politics of happiness is always bound up with the ideological representations through which we understand our place in the world and, as such, is originally implicated in the violence and opportunities for recognition to which these representations give rise. If we are to move beyond the neoliberal economy of pleasure (which is perhaps the most powerful determinant of the religious, aesthetic, geopolitical, and ethical antagonisms of globalization), we must recognize that happiness is a moral experience that can only be approached through the presence of others, both familiar and unfamiliar, to whom we must respond without the expectation of requital. This then is the aporetic fate of humanity: to live between ideological regimes that offer the shelter of collective happiness and the possibility of receiving the spectres that haunt the experience of belonging, plenitude, and love.

Note 1 The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

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190 Bibliography Fichte, J. G. (2005), The System of Ethics, trans. Günter Zöller and Daniel Breazeale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1979), Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vantage. Friedman, M. (1962), Capitalism and Freedom. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fukuyama, F. (1992), The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gerth, H. H. and C. Wright Mills (eds) (1997), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge. Giddens, A. (1997a), The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. —(1997b), Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Goodrick-Clarke, N. (2005), The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazism. London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks. Habermas, J. (1994), The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity Press. —(1995), Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. W. M. Hohengarten. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haidt, J. (2006), The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science. London: Arrow Books. Hamilton, R. (1982), Who Voted For Hitler?. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000), Empire. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (1999), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell. Hayek, F. (1945), ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, American Economic Review, XXXV, No. 4: 519–30. Heidegger, M. (1996), Basic Writings, D. Krell (ed.). London: Routledge. Hobbes, T. (1985), Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Horkheimer, M. and T. W. Adorno (1986), Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum. Jameson, F. (1995), Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. —(2000), Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of Dialectic. London: Verso. —(2008), Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, The Modernist as Fascist. London: Verso. Jay, M. (1984), Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kant, I. (1982), The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1983), The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp-Smith. London: Macmillan.

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—(1991), Kant: Political Writings, H. Reiss (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. —(1993), The Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck. New York: Macmillan. —(1998), Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaufmann, W. (1974), Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klein, S. (2006), The Science of Happiness: How Our Brains Make Us Happy – and What We Can Do to Get Happier, trans. Stephen Lehmann. New York: Marlowe and Company. Kojève (1969), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. Ithaca, London and New York: Cornell University Press. Lane, R. E. (2000), The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Laqueur, W. (ed.) (1978), Fascsim: A Reader’s Guide: Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lash, S. (1993), ‘Reflexive Modernization: Aesthetic Dimension’, Theory, Culture and Society, Dec 1993, vol. 10: 1–23. Layard, R. (2005), Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Allen Lane. Lenin, V. I. (1976), State and Revolution: The Marxist Teaching on the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution. Peking: Foreign Languages Press. Levinas, E. (1994), Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis. The Hague: Martinus Nijhof. —(1998), Otherwise Than Being, or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press. Locke, J. (1988), Two Treatises on Government. London: J. M. Dent. Lukács, G. (1980), The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer. London: Merlin Press. Luxemburg, R. (1961), The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism, trans. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Lyotard, J-F. (1988), Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andrea Michel. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.—(1991), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brain Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, K. (1990), Capital Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —(1993), Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus. Harmondsworth: Penguin. McLellan, D. (ed.) (1977), Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milbank, J., C. Pickstock and G. Ward (eds) (1998), Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. London: Routledge.

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192 Bibliography Mill, J. S. (1980), Utilitarianism, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government. London: J. M. Dent. —(1987), On Liberty. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nozick, R. (1974), Anarchy, State and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell. Rose, G. (1981), Hegel Contra Sociology. London: Athlone Press. —(1993), Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell. —(1996), Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —(2008), ‘An Interview with Gillian Rose’, Vincent Lloyd (ed.), Theory, Culture and Society, December 2008, vol. 25: 201–18. Rousseau, J-J. (1988), The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole. London: J. M. Dent. Sartre, J. P. (1976), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet. London: Methuen. Schmitt, C. (1996), The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schopenhauer, A. (1970), Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin. —(1996), The World as Will and Idea, trans. Jill Berman. London: J. M. Dent. Smith, A. (1961), An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Edwin Cannan (ed.). London: Methuen. —(1976), The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics. Sprinker, M. (1999), Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. London: Verso. Stauffer, J. and B. Bergo (2009), Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God”. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press. Tubbs, N. (2008), Education in Hegel. London and New York: Continuum. Watney, S. (1993), ‘The Spectacle of AIDS’, in Henry Abelove (ed.) The Gay and Lesbian Studies Reader. London: Routledge. Weber, M. (1978), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons. London: George, Allen and Unwin.

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Index Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory 174 The Culture Industry 3, 69 Dialectic of Enlightenment 3–5, 68–9, 114–19, 130 Minima Moralia 2, 68–9 Negative Dialectics 69–70 aesthetics Derrida on 73–7 Hegel on 57–63 Nietzsche on 63–70 Althusser, L.: For Marx 14, 80–1 anxiety 3, 13, 119–25, 177–81 Apollonian Ideal 9, 54–5, 65–6, 71–5, 158–60 Aristotle: Nicomahean 7–8, 159, 172 art classical 54–63 postmodern 75–7 romantic 4, 28, 58–63, 70–1, 123–4 Aryanism 134 Athene 53, 60, 152 autonomy 81–92 Baudrillard, J. on hyperreality 75–6 on simulation 75–6, 134–7, 167, 175 Bauman, Z. 183 Beck, U. A God of One’s Own 147–8, 156, 181 Risk Society 182–3 Benjamin, W. 37, 55, 104–5, 108–9, 142, 175 Bentham, J.: An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 20–3 Braidotti, R. 106 Camus, A. 155 capitalism, and alienation 52, 87, 145–6, 174–5

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and commodification 81–5, 93, 107–8 catastrophe 32, 135–7, 147–9, 173–84 Catholicism 112–13, 144–6, 161, 167, 170 Christianity 59–60, 72, 117, 149–68 Deleuze, G. Anti-Oedipus 105–6, 109, 131, 135 A Thousand Plateaus 106, 132–4 Nietzsche and Philosophy 106 Derrida, J. Acts of Religion 168–70 Grammatology 45 Of Hospitality 12, 45, 107, 183 Spectres of Marx 43–6, 132–7 Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles 11–12, 56, 72–3 depression 30 desire 6–13, 181–4 Dionysus 54–5, 65, 172 disenchantment 77, 103–4, 143–7 Durkheim, E. 9, 143–7, 154 Eliot, T. S. 49 Enlightenment 3–9, 24–6, 55, 114–18, 120–5, 150–7 Engels, F.: The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State 52–3 Eros 33, 127, 153 fascism 111–19 Fichte, J. G. 8, 173 French Revolution 93, 120–2 Friedman, M. 35–6 friendship 1, 12, 22, 30–1, 44, 160 Foucault, M. 130–1 Freud, S. 136, 174 Feudal Society 121–6, 144–6, 173–5 fundamentalism, 13, 77, 164, 169, 182 Fukuyama, F. 39–42

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194 Index Giddens, A. 147, 154, 176–7 God Derrida on 168–70 Hegel on 143–50 Nietzsche on 157–64 good life 158–62, 172–3 Habermas, J. 154 Haidt, J. 4n. 5 Hamilton, R. 113–19 Hardt, M. and Negri, M.: Empire 48n. 8, 108–9, 141 Harvey, D. 76, 86 Hegel, G. W. F. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics 53–4, 57, 60 Logic 26–7 Phenomenology of Mind 7–8, 27–8, 40, 120–6, 172–3 Philosophy of History 7–8, 59, 119 Philosophy of Religion 151–3 Science of Logic 27 Heidegger, M. 74–5, 166, 181 Hellenic Culture 7–8, 53–4, 60, 172 Heyek, F. 36 Horkheimer, M. see Adorno hospitality 12, 38, 45–6, 57, 105, 107, 150, 183 hope 183–4 idealism 8, 34, 83, 97, 125–6, 161, 173 ideology, Marx on 51–2, 63–7, 80–7, 111–19 irony 60–1, 70, 176 Islam 25, 150–1, 156, 163, 168–70 Jameson, F.: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 10, 77, 137 Jay, M. 82 Judaism 150–6 Kant, I. Critique of Aesthetic Judgement 17n. 2 Critique of Practical Reason 154 Political Writings 47n. 2, 122 Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason 155

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Klein, S. 1, 47n. 5 Kojeve, A. 40 Lane, R. E.: The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies 1–2 Layard, R.: Happiness: Lessons from a New Science 29–31, 47n. 4 Lenin, V. I. 41, 80–2, 91 Levinas, E. Otherwise Than Being 166 Totality and Infinite 12, 38 Locke, J. 37 love see Eros Lukács, G. 20, 79 Luxemburg, R., 79–80, 109n. 1 Lyotard, J.-F. Heidegger and ‘the jews’ 136 The Postmodern Condition 175 Marx, K., Capital, Volume One 86–7 The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 80–7, 90–103 The German Ideology 80–5 The Grundrisse 25, 86 materialism, Marx on 80–1, 133–7 Nietzsche on 67–9, 104, 160 Mill, J.S. 22–5 Milbank, J.: Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology 161–2 mortality 11, 22, 26, 28–9, 34, 45, 74–6, 92, 127 music 42, 49–50, 55, 64, 160 Neoliberalism, 11, 37–8, 44 Nazism see fascism Nietzsche, F. The Anti-Christ 66, 150, 160–2 Beyond Good and Evil 97 The Birth of Tragedy 54, 64–5, 71 The Gay Science 9, 35, 72, 96, 103, 127, 160, 163 Genealogy of Morals 67, 102 Human, All Too Human 33–5, 66–8, 96–9, 103–4, 126–9, 158 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 11, 33–7, 71–2, 100–2, 104, 127, 149, 163

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Index Nozick, R.: Anarchy, State, and Utopia 36–8 ‘The Other’ 12, 26, 28, 39, 45–7, 73, 109, 144, 155–6, 184–5 Protestantism 112, 146 reification 69, 114–15, 130, 154 Rose, G. Hegel Contra-Sociology 90–4, 124, 151–3 Mourning Becomes the Law 136, 142 Rousseau, J.-J.: Discourse on the Origin of Inequality 121 Sartre, J.-P.: Sketch For a Theory of the Emotions 16n. 1

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Schmitt, C. 138–93 Schopenhauer, A. on art 49–51 on religion 143–5 on suffering 6 The World as Will and Idea 50–1, 64 Smith, A. The Theory of Moral Sentiments 25 The Wealth of Nation 24–5 the sublime 50, 53–5, 64, 71, 123, 152 tragedy 54–8, 61–70, 75, 128, 172 Weber, M. 143–50, 154, 174

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