Singularity: Politics and Poetics 9781517910372, 9781517910389, 2020048336

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SINGULARITY

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SINGULARITY Politics and Poetics Samuel Weber

University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London

The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance provided for the publication of this book by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University. Chapter 2 was originally published as “On the Militarization of Feeling,” boundary 2 44, no. 4 (2017): 33–­56; copyright 2017 Duke University Press; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission, www.dukeupress.edu. Chapter 3 was originally published as “Bare Life and Life in General,” Grey Room 46 (Winter 2012): 7–­24. Chapter 5 was originally published as “Towards a Politics of Singularity: Protection and Projection,” in Religion beyond a Concept, edited by Hent de Vries, 626–­44 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Chapter 6 was originally published as “Drawing—­The Single Trait: Towards a Politics of Singularity,” in Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism, edited by M. Vatter, 221–­49 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). Chapter 7 was originally published as “Money Is Time: Thoughts on Credit and Crisis,” in The Cultural Life of Money, edited by Isabel Gil, 23–­46 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2015). Chapter 9 was originally published as “Mind the Cap,” in Europe after Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality, edited by Agnes Czajka and Bora Isyar, 9–­29 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Chapter 10 was originally published as “West of Eden,” Tamking Review 45, no. 1 (December 2014): 9–­29. Chapter 13 was originally published as “The Future of Saussure,” Semiotica 217 ( July 2017). Chapter 14 was originally published as “Anxiety—­The Uncanny Borderline of Psychoanalysis,” in Konturen 3 (2010), http://konturen.uoregon.edu/vol3_Weber.html. Copyright 2021 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-­2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu ISBN 978-1-5179-1037-2 (hc) ISBN 978-1-5179-1038-9 (pb) Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048336 Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-­opportunity educator and employer. UMP BmB 2021

Contents Prefatory Note

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Resisting—­the Singular

Introduction

Singularity: An Aporetical Concept

1

1 Singularity, Individuality

13

2 On the Militarization of Feeling

33

3 Bare Life and Life in General

57

4 Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

77

5 Protection, Projection, Persecution

99

From Anxiety to Anger

The Question of “Concentration”

6 The Single Trait

125

7 Money Is Time

161

8 Global Inequality

189

9 Mind the Cap

209

10 West of Eden

243

11 After Its Kind

267

Thoughts on Credit and Crisis The Question of Birthright A Singular Approach to Europe After the Good Life The Biblical Origins of Economic Theology

12

Like—­Come Again?! 

279

13

The Future of Saussure

321

14

Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny

327

15

The Singularity of Literary Cognition

341

16

Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

363

17

Towers and Walls

385

18

Kafka’s Josephine, or How a Phrase Can Turn Out

401

19

Silencing the Sirens

417

Notes

429

Index

479

On Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence A Signifying Moment

Hölderlin Asks, Heidegger Answers Building the Wall of China

Prefatory Note

Resisting—­the Singular

The following essays were written over a period of some fifteen years, often responding to particular occasions. The main justification for gathering them into a book is their shared concern with something called “singularity,” or “the singular.” To write about “singularity” in this way is embarrassing for several reasons. First, because if it means anything at all—­concesso non dato, as Adorno might have said—­“singularity” tends to belie the effort to conceptualize it. If it is what it seems to designate, any attempt to generalize about it will inevitably betray its “uniqueness.” Adorno, who comes to mind in this context, preferred adjectives or adverbs to nouns when forming his key concepts: for instance, “the nonidentical” or “the non-­conceptual” rather than “nonidentity” or “nonconceptuality.” Their “ad-­verbial” or “ad-­jectival” status indicated that they could not be used independently of the things they designate, with which however they could never simply correspond. And yet, reference to concepts could not be avoided, however much their subsumptive tendencies had to be mistrusted, any more than a subject can avoid predication if it is to have any semantic distinction. This is however not the only reason for the embarrassment mentioned above. There are already a fairly large number of books dealing with this subject from various points of view, and adding yet another to their number risks adding insult to injury, as it were. Unless, that is, the newcomer has something to communicate that might not simply repeat its predecessors. That something new, to be sure, can only build on their work, and I am aware of the many debts this book has to the many writers who have already treated the topic. The writers who have most shaped my thinking on the subject include Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, Freud, and Derrida, but there are so many others that I despair of ever doing them all justice. If the essays in this volume can make any claim on vii

providing something “new,” it is in only in two ways. First, in clarifying as much as possible what I, following Derrida, call the “aporetic” structure of the notion of “singularity”—­the fact that it can only be thought conceptually, but can only be felt and experienced in that which resists conceptualization. And second, in trying to indicate how this elusive, enigmatic, and aporetic notion nevertheless is of the greatest importance in a variety of areas that are usually considered in isolation rather than in conjunction with one another. These include, as the title of the book indicates, above all politics and poetry, but also theology and economics, psychoanalysis and philosophy. This is by far not the first time a writer has had to overcome embarrassment in publishing a book. Kant, in the preface to the first edition of his Critique of the Power of Judgment, writes of a Verlegenheit—­an embarrassment or predicament—­that overcomes one when confronted with singular phenomena.1 If they are apprehended as singular, they must be distinguishable. But if they are to be distinguished, it must be with reference to others that they are not: they must be different, exceptional, unusual, but also by definition not as a member of a class but as what they are. For Kant, what such singularity defines itself in relation to is the stock of concepts that anyone has at his or her disposal at a given time. The objects of aesthetic judgments of taste, in other words, interested him not because of their artistic value, but insofar as they resist being subsumed under existing knowledge. In other words, if the singular is not to be lost in conceptualization and predication, then it can only be through an experience of the way it resists such efforts. The singular is a mode of resistance, whether in philosophy, politics, or poetics. It does not conform to the logic of identity but is not independent of it either. To translate and slightly modify the title of an important book in this regard by Jean-­Luc Nancy, the singular must be singularly plural in order to be unique.2 This singular plurality of the singular inscribes it in a net of relations that is intrinsically unending, but extrinsically and necessarily always “arrested,” to borrow the term put to such good use in Peter Fenves’s book Arresting Language.3 In short, if the essays in this volume can make any claim whatsoever, it can only be in terms of weaving a web of relations between texts, problems, and areas that are generally kept wide apart—­and trying to draw some consequences both from their separation and their convergence. My viii  Prefatory Note

hope is that these consequences may contribute to discussions both of the political—­where the relation of individual to collective requires, I am convinced, a radical rethinking of singularity in relation to generality—­and of the poetical and literary, where a process of reclassification is taking place that could be beneficial, but only if it reflects on the limits of categorization more generally and its relation to what I have called the singularity of literature. It is my hope that the singular might emerge from these readings as the point where what Adorno called “the non-­identical” and Derrida called différance converge, but without merging or eliminating the need for practical decisions. In reflecting on the conditions of such decision-­making, the aporetic notion of singularity requires more consideration than it has received. Such decision-­making will only be responsible by being responsive to the tension between the singular and the inescapable generalizations that betray it.

Prefatory Note   ix

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Acknowledgments Although the notion of singularity and the singular is widespread in contemporary criticism and philosophy, there have been relatively few studies devoted explicitly to it. Two notable exceptions can be found in the writings of Derek Attridge, in particular his book The Singularity of Literature, and Timothy Clark in his study The Poetics of Singularity: both recognized early on the significance of the notion for literary and critical studies and began to explore its consequences. Jean-­Luc Nancy’s book Being Singular Plural highlighted the paradoxical necessity of the singular to pluralize itself and the transformations that such pluralization entails for the very notion of “self ” and self-­identity. All of these works and countless others, too numerous to name, seek to develop impulses that have been decisive for my own thinking on the question. My greatest debt to be sure is to the work of Jacques Derrida, for whom the problem of the singular is so omnipresent that no single text can begin to exhaust its implications. The same applies in a different way to the writings of Theodor Adorno. The essays published in this volume bear witness to this “singularly plural” indebtedness. I am grateful also to Zakir Paul, whose careful and close reading of this text in its draft form enabled me to produce a more readable version for publication. Also, more than a word of thanks is due Scott Mueller, whose copyediting has also increased the readability of the book. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of both the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which enabled me to pursue research on this book through a summer grant, and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences of Northwestern University in contributing to the publication of this book.

xi

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INTRODUCTION Singularity

An Aporetical Concept

For many people today, the word “singularity” serves as a synonym for “individuality.” And although the two terms are historically intertwined, and perhaps inseparable from one another, their usage, in both nontechnical language and scientific discourse, separates them significantly. Whereas the individual, if taken literally, suggests indivisibility, and thus a certain elementary self-­identity, what is “singular” is not just unique—­ that is, separate and different—­but also odd. What is “singular” does not just stand out: it does not fit in, and in this it recalls the kind of experience that Immanuel Kant in his Critique of the Power to Judge associated with “reflective judgment,” provoked by the encounter with phenomena that cannot be comprehended or subsumed under existing general concepts. A reflective judgment—­whether as an aesthetic judgment of beauty or of the sublime—­therefore for Kant can have no conceptual content, and in a traditional sense therefore is not a judgment at all. I will note, in passing—­we can come back to this perhaps in the discussion—­that this so-­called “reflective judgment” marks a point where traditional cognitive judgments begin to move toward what later will be called “decisions,” which entail, for Kant at least, not so much cognitions as communicable feelings of pleasure and pain. In the case of aesthetic judgments of taste, however, such feelings are held to be communicable, although they can never be directly communicated or shared in any actual, present moment. They are, as Kant puts it, mitteilbar, impart-­able. Following in this Kantian tradition, but also radicalizing it, Walter Benjamin from his earliest writings on—­that is, from his Program of the Coming Philosophy—­emphasized the need to rethink the notion of experience (Erfahrung) by no longer simply equating it with cognition of general, 1

timeless objects, but rather emphasizing its temporal and singular dimension. In German the word for “singular”—­Einzeln—­can in no way be confused with that for individual, Individuum. If the singular must be construed as “that which does not fit in”—­as the “odd”—­it stands in a necessary relation to that into which it does not “fit.” In short, what is “singular” can only be conceived or experienced as an event that quite literally comes out (ex-­venire) of that which it follows and exceeds. In this respect, the singular event—­the event as singular—­is, in contrast to the in-­dividual, eminently divisible. It can only be acceded to through a process that seems to be its direct contradiction: a process of repetition. But it is a repetition that is composed not just of similarity, but of irreducible difference. For the Benjamin of the Origin of the German Mourning Play, singularity so understood is at the origin of history. From his “Epistemo-­critical Introduction”: Origin . . . an entirely historical category . . . is accessible only to a dual insight. It needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and reestablishment on the one hand, and on the other, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. . . . The principles of philosophical reflection are recorded in the dialectic that is inherent in origin. This dialectic shows singularity and repetition to be conditioned by one another in all essentials.1

Singularity, accordingly, emerges only through a process of repetition that seeks a certain restoration or reproduction, but cannot attain it. This implies that singularity can only be experienced negatively, through a feeling of resistance or of loss—­but also as one of anticipation and hope. This has four consequences. First, one never experiences “singularity” as such, but only “through” a feeling of something that resists or is lacking. Second, this feeling has to be linked not to singularity in general but to singularities. Third, a singularity is therefore never simply identical with itself. Rather it is significant: it signifies something other than what it appears to be. Fourth, that “other” is never attainable as such; not because it is absolute, but precisely because it is irreducibly relative; it can therefore be experienced mainly as a movement of transfer or of transformation. Another reason to translate Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch not as super-­or over-­man, but as transhuman—­the human in transition: not toward a defi2  Introduction

nite goal but on its way elsewhere. Since, however, a movement can never be represented without a direction if not a goal, the experience of a movement elsewhere in the sense described comes always as something of a shock, a surprise. A performative instance of this surprise can be found in the title of a book by Pascal Quignard and of the film of the same name directed by Alain Corneau: Tous les matins du monde (in English: “All the mornings in the world”).2 The title, for those who have neither read the book nor seen the film, would probably evoke the expectation of a proposition based on the subsumption of the singular under the general: all the mornings in the world, it seems to say, share certain attributes, which once and for all define them as instantiations of a single fixed essence—­of morning. In view of this expectation, what follows this phrase, in the film as in the book, can only come as a jolting surprise: Tous les matins du monde sont sans retour (All the mornings in the world never return). What all the mornings in the world have in common is that their “all” consists in their uniqueness: each and every one of them never come again. In short, what they all share is their differential singularity, the fact that they are different not just from other mornings, but in a certain sense from themselves. For to be themselves, they would have to be rememberable as such. They can of course be remembered, but never as that which they once were. In the book and film, this phrase immediately follows, and comments on, the suicide of a young woman: all the mornings she spent with her father, sister, and above all, with the lover who has forsaken her, will never return. And in taking her life, she only underscores what for her is the intolerability of this nonreturn. The morning, beginning of the day, which looks out and forward to what is to come, itself will never come again. This can be lived as a reason for despair, as in the film and book, or as a sign of hope. But whether it is experienced as the one or the other or as both, it is nothing more nor less than this sans retour that makes all the mornings in the world singular. Two points should be stressed here. First, that the original morning was never and could never be experienced as such, as perfectly self-­ identical. It was happening, and in happening subject to change. Its unity and self-­identity, paradoxically, can only be thought retrospectively, when that unity is no longer there. Such unity then is a fata morgana that hides the desire for a return of the same while confirming that the same never Introduction  3

could be experienced as such. Second, such singular moments are only accessible in a recollection that transforms what is remembered. Without memory, and hence without its absence, we would never know anything about what is unique and singular. But to know something “about” the singular does not imply either identity or direct contact. All the mornings in the world can return as representations, reproductions, repetitions: but they will never return as they were.3 This nonidentical reproducibility of all the world’s mornings reflects a similar characteristic of the living beings that populate and re-­create those mornings. All the mornings in the world are as unique and as finite as the lives of those beings are mortal. They are all unrepeatable—­but as such tied inseparably to the possibility of repetition. I turn now to another mourning, homonym of the first, in which the dawn of the day resonates, albeit not identically. It is the “mourning” that can be used to translate the title of Benjamin’s study “The Origin of the German Mourning Play.” It is this relation between singularity, repetition and “the living”—­a phrase that Benjamin often prefers to use instead of the more familiar noun, “Life”—­that Benjamin places at the historical origin of the German mourning play. Whereas many discussions of singularity, in philosophy and in science, tend to treat it almost as a logical figure,4 the great merit of Benjamin’s study of the German baroque theater is that his notion of an irreducibly singular origin is also resolutely historicized. It is not simply treated as a universal, but rather tied to an enormous but still temporally and spatially limited historical phenomenon: the emergence and aftereffects of the Protestant Reformation, and in particular of its Lutheran version in and on European history. Benjamin focuses on the reaction to this movement, for which he adopts the well-­known notion of Counter-­ Reformation while substantially transforming it. For Benjamin insists that it should not be identified with or limited to any one religion, such as Catholicism. The authors of the German mourning plays were all Lutherans, Benjamin emphasizes, but their writings were guided by profoundly conservative and indeed restorative intentions. Western European modernity, Benjamin implies, is indelibly marked by this restorative tendency, which acknowledges the challenge of the Reformation to universal authority, but primarily in order to neutralize and absorb it. Elaborating on the theory of modernity implicit in his account of the 4  Introduction

German baroque mourning play, I want to suggest that Carl Schmitt’s theory of political sovereignty, to which Benjamin refers while modifying it as well, can stand as an exemplary modern product of this Counter-­ Reformational striving. Not for nothing does Schmitt conclude the first chapter of his Political Theology by praising and quoting an “unnamed Protestant theologian”—­Kierkegaard—­for having insisted on the importance of the exception with respect to the rule. Schmitt seeks to give a concrete definition of political sovereignty by linking it to the constitutional possibility of someone—­anyone as long as it is one and the same—­“deciding on the state of exception.” Political sovereignty consists in the power to take exception to positive law by rooting it not just in an exceptional situ­ ation, but in what in German he describes as an Ausnahmezustand—­a state (Zustand) of exception. The German word implies the arresting of movement: a standstill. Exceptionality is thus transformed into the basis of juridical and political order, in the spirit of the Counter-­Reformation. The rule of the general over the particular is thus to be secured through the decisive intervention of an exceptional individual who brings to a halt the normal movement of government, while making the exception to this movement the basis of a new order. For Schmitt, the singularity of the exception is valid only insofar as it can be subsumed under and identified with the self-­identity of a sovereign individual. This explains why in 1934, following Hitler’s public justification of the massacre of Ernst Rohm and the leading figures of the SA, Schmitt had no problem legitimating the National Socialist Führerprinzip in his famous and infamous article, “Der Führer schützt das Recht” (“The Führer Protects the Law”). Citing Hitler’s pronouncement that “in this hour I was responsible for the destiny of the German nation and hence the German people’s supreme judge [oberster Gerichtsherr],” Schmitt goes on to conclude that “the true Leader is always also a Judge. From the Leader derives the Judge.” But the judgment only becomes the basis for a decision involving a practical act insofar as it is exceptional: it does not involve the application of existing laws to a particular case but rather the recognition that the particular case is singular enough to escape such application. Order can thus only be restored or maintained through a decision and act that knows itself to be exceptional. The only basis for this order, then, is the singularity of the decision-­maker. But this singularity is construed as Introduction  5

self-­identical, and hence as more individual than singular. It is a unique embodiment of a more general principle—­but without inner contradiction, much less aporetic character. Its model is the individuality of the supreme being qua Creator. The source of this legitimacy is thus theological, or more exactly mono-­theological.5 In short, the exceptional leader is the source of all general and universally binding laws, which derive precisely from his exceptionality. But in this notion of exceptionality, the heterogeneity of the singular disappears behind the self-­identity of the individual. It is not for nothing that Schmitt calls the essay in which he unfolds this conception of sovereignty Political Theology. However, he might have added a further qualification: not just political theology, but political mono-­theology. For no doubt one of the earliest and most powerful paradigms of such a notion of exceptional sovereignty is to be found in Genesis 1, which recounts how a single and yet universal deity qua supreme being is at the origin of the world itself, and in particular, of all life. In this mono-­theological deity can be found, I will argue, the paradigm of what until today has remained the dominant form in which identity, whether individual or collective, personal or institutional, is construed. I therefore will call it the mono-­theological identity paradigm. It is this paradigm that both responds to and seeks to absorb the heterogeneous existence of singular living beings—­which is to say, of beings whose lives are constitutively defined by alterity and mortality. That the notion of a divine and immortal Creator-­God in the book of Genesis is designed to support a conception of Life as eternal and unbounded is evident. That this Creator-­God should be unique and at the same time universal places Him in relation to singular living beings who are neither universal nor immortal. The relation, however, is problematic or ambivalent, since it is precisely the difference between human and divine that enables the latter to function as an ideal. And perhaps as a defensive one. An ideal that defends against the idea that death is inseparable from life lived in the singular. Death only enters the world as a result of the transgression of Adam and Eve, who, in eating of the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, defy the prohibition that has been pronounced by God. But what is less obvious and yet no less significant is the way in which the creation of such prelapsarian life is recounted. God does not create individuals as such, but only as representative of a species, as species-­beings.6 6  Introduction

At least this is so for the King James version of the Bible, where the creation of living beings is repeatedly qualified as that of individuals “after their kind.” What is significant is that this phrase, which can be found seventeen times in Genesis, occurs only where living beings are concerned. In Genesis, all such beings are created only “after their kind”—­since the “kind” alone can survive the test of time, which measures the finitude of individual living beings. Only in the case of man is this not explicit. But it is, of course, implied in the name given to man, “Adam,” “man.” Thus, Adam names not so much an individual as a genre: humankind. Despite this generality, Adam—­mankind—­suffers from solitude; eternity is not enough, something else is required, something like society. And so “Eve” is created, be it out of the earth or from Adam’s rib. However that may be, gendering splits the genre “man,” making it irreducibly divisible and marking it as mortal. Creation from Adam’s rib suggests the incompletion and vulnerability of the human body; creation from the earth suggests the “dust” to which all mortals will return. In this context, it is significant that the Hebrew word for Eve, Hawwah or Khavah, signifies “the living one” or the “source of life”—­although according to recent scholarship, “the name might also suggest ivya, the Aramaic word for serpent.”7 Again the serpent is associated intimately with the earth. What is perhaps most important is that the advent of Eve is not a creation ex nihilo: God is compelled to use existing materials, the human body or the earth, to create her. If Eve names Life, then her arrival suggests that life is no longer directly and exclusively derived from God, which is to say, from a supreme and immortal being, but from the earth or the body, both of which are at a far remove from the spirituality of Immortality. If Genesis is a composite text and a highly contradictory one, nowhere are its contradictions more significant than in relation to the creation of man. And there is good reason to think that such contradictions are themselves significant: myths, like dreams, are devised in order to articulate what cannot be expressed in logical language. The tension between man as generic and as singular is palpable in the account of the creation. If man is said to have been created “in the image of God”—­then the God that created him must be sufficiently individuated in order to be imageable. At the same time, He must not be so similar to the human so as to suffer the same fate as the individual living being. This conundrum becomes particularly evident when, in Exodus 3:13,8 Moses asks God to tell him His name, so Introduction  7

that he can convey it to “the sons of Israel.” God responds, “I AM THAT I AM” (Ehyeh-­Asher-­Ehyeh) and adds, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” Hebrew specialists have suggested that a better rendition of this name of God would be “I AM WHO I WILL BE,” thus asserting the self-­identity of a first-­person that is independent of temporal alteration. In the context of the approaching Exodus, it seems as if this “name” is meant to assure Moses and his people that the support of their God will stand the test of time. But a God who can say “I” places himself in a powerful and ambiguous relation to the I of human beings, which are not impervious to the passage of time, although they depend upon it to establish the self-­identity of a “first person.” If the “I” of man is conceived in the image of the “I” of God, and if this I is what and who it will be, without limit, then this defines both the proximity and distance through which the Creator-­God is construed with respect to human life. The dignity and superiority of man in the creation is based on this resemblance to the Creator. But when humans—­understandably—­seek to reduce the distance and difference that separate them from their divine origin, they threaten the very ideal they seek to emulate, and thus their own existence. The image of a divine and immortal God only retains its power as an image—­but it also leads inevitably to idolatry. The image is there to provide a basis for an identification that is both desired and impossible. The desire of this impossible because self-­destructive identification informs the prohibition to acquire the knowledge of good and evil as well as its transgression, just as it motivates the plan to approach the heavens by constructing the Tower of Babel. What is perhaps decisive is that this self-­destructive dynamic is inherent in the creation myth itself: in particular, in its construction of an original supreme being above and beyond the limits of time and space. The myth posits a supreme being as object of an identification that if accomplished would destroy what is perhaps its primary function, that of imagining an alternative to the mortal life of singular beings. This self-­destructive impulse is inherent in all imaginary identification, insofar as the ideal must be kept at a distance in order to be ideal, whereas the imaginary acquisition of those qualities presupposes the elimination of the very distance that distinguishes the ideal from its other. Taking its place means replacing it, supplanting it, which destroys the distance required for idealization. This self-­ destructive tendency is described by Jacques Lacan as the “mirror-­phase” 8  Introduction

in which the ego emerges out of identification with an idealized other. But it is already at work in what is appropriately called “the Fall”—­appropriate insofar as it emphasizes the inability of human beings to stand on their own, to resist the vicissitudes of time and of space, to stay the same in their self-­identity.9 At the same time this tendency is precisely what seems to inform the biblical myth of the Fall and loss of an original paradise on earth. The anxieties associated with finitude inform the monotheistic creation myth, which portrays mortality as the epiphenomenal result of a human act, a transgression that can in the future potentially be undone. It is significant that Genesis links not just the Fall but an initial act of murderous violence with the construction of cities and society. These are born of fratricide, which is the response of Cain to the refusal of his sacrifice by God. The failure of his sacrifice is followed by the success of a nonsacrificial violence against his brother. After having killed Abel, whose blood sacrifice had been accepted by God, while Cain’s “vegan” offering was rejected,10 Cain begs God to punish him by putting an end to his life. But as with Adam and Eve, God commutes their death sentence to a form of life imprisonment on earth. He thus marks Cain with a sign that is also designed to protect him from for lethal revenge. For Cain’s life will serve a very different purpose, and a surprising one, since it involves nothing less than the founding both of a family and simultaneously of the first cities. Indeed, the first city is named after Cain’s son, Enoch, as though to stress that the violence of the farmer against his cattle-­raising brother becomes the origin of the founding of cities through bloodlines. Although Cain’s progeny exercise the most diverse professions—­cattle-­raisers and nomads, musicians and metal workers—­his descendance is nonetheless marked by the continuation of lethal violence, in the figure of Lamech (Gen. 4:23–­24). Thus, the book of Genesis prepares us for a history of civil, urban, and technical society that is founded in fratricidal violence and that perpetrates it. As if such violence, as a response to the unreciprocated relation of humans to the divine, might be the force that is responsible for social and political life. For it will be a life that continues the urge to mimic the divine quality of transcending time and space, without ever attaining that end—­a futile endeavor born in fratricidal violence and destined to perpetuate it. Not eternal life, therefore, but ongoing killing would be the result, thus fulfilling the Creator’s words to Adam following the Fall: “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and Introduction  9

her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen. 3:15). Except that the enmity was not to be restricted to the relation of man to woman, even if it found there perhaps its most intense manifestation. It can be argued that what will later be known as Individualism can be retraced back to God’s self-­naming in Exodus 3:13, and in any case has a much longer and more complex history than is often assumed. In the chapters that follow, I will be pursuing a few strands of that history. Here at the outset I will just mention two further moments in the history of what I am calling the mono-­theological identity paradigm. The paradigm is based on the model of a being that can say of itself, I am that I am—­implying that I will be the same in the future as I am now. According to this paradigm, the phrase “The Lord is One” must be understood as meaning “one and the same.” With the rise of Christianity, a powerful attempt is made to bridge the gap between the transcendence of this first (person) singular and the finitude proper to earthborn first persons. In the Old Testament, this gap is bridged never individually but collectively, through the fact that it involves a specific group of persons, a single people claiming allegiance to a no less single but universal God, creator and all-­powerful lord of the universe. With Christianity this situation changes radically. In place of the alliance of a universal and exclusive God with an equally exclusive but nonuniversal people we discover by a special relationship between the divine and mankind in general, made equal not just through their divine descendance but through their shared sin and guilt. Sin and guilt come to define the relationship of human beings to their creator, to the world, and to themselves. The gap between human and divine is now bridged through the birth, life, and death of Christ, as son of God the creator. With the sacrificial death of Jesus, inherited guilt changes character: it is no longer primarily a punishment for lack of obedience, but also an opportunity, a pathway through grace to eternal life. The Fall becomes “fortunate,” at least potentially.11 Eternal Life is now linked more clearly than before with individual self-­consciousness (although this was already implicit in God’s use of the first-­person pronoun, I, in naming himself). God can take the form of a “son,” thus making Him the father in a more “natural” way than in the Old Testament; divine being participates directly in the earthly process of reproduction, and it is this participation that enables the son to redeem the guilt of his brothers and sisters through his own death. Christian hu10  Introduction

manism is thus construed on the model of the individual living person. “Man” in the first-­person singular once again refers to the name of the species rather than to the member of a specific clan or tribe. Faith rather than bloodlines determines the possibility of grace, although the participation of the divine in the reproductive process also provides a basis for “valorizing” human bloodlines as well. Collective identity tends thereby to be construed as homogeneous and to be modeled upon individual identity, harking back to the Edenic status of man as a generically individualized being. The second moment comes with the Reformation. It both exacerbates and problematizes the link between immanence and transcendence, between the human and the divine, by emphasizing the singular importance of the individual in relation to God. This is especially true of the Reformation in its Lutheran form, which bars generalization from the individual to the universal by rejecting any phenomenal continuity between good works and grace. Instead it emphasizes “faith alone” as the path to grace and situates its experience in the deepest depths of the individual: in his or her “heart” rather than “head.” But faith is so deeply buried in the soul of the individual and is so profoundly severed from all voluntary activity, that it becomes difficult to identify.12 It is this crisis of Christian Heilsgeschichte that Benjamin takes to be the “origin” not just of the German Baroque Mourning Play but of Western modernity in general, providing a dark background to its claims to progress through science and technology, and returning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the form of politically restorative and counter-­revolutionary tendencies. This somber conception of Western (European) modernity could also be extended to the current century as well.13 I conclude this introduction by referring to a poet and thinker who is fully aware of this crisis and who searches for an alternative—­not just to the loss of grace, but to the destructive effects of what I am calling the mono-­theological identity paradigm. Interestingly enough, it is in his Remarks on Sophocles’ Antigone, a tragedy that is precisely not part of the mono-­theological universe, that Friedrich Hölderlin glimpses both the same problem, as well as a possible alternative response to it.14 Although he develops the problem with respect to Greek tragedy, Hölderlin is aware that his translation and interpretation of these tragedies cannot be separated from their relation to his contemporary situation—­that is, Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The problem he describes as Introduction  11

the point of departure of Greek tragedy is not unrelated to the messianic hopes of his time: that of humans seeking to become one with God. The Theban tragedies, and in particular Oedipus tyrannos and Antigone, have the task of demonstrating how “limitless unification purges itself through limitless separation.”15 Such striving to abolish all limits—­finitude—­results in precisely what it is seeking to escape, namely the idealization of those limits in a death drive. Hölderlin justifies translating the proper name of the god, Zeus, by “father of time” or “father of earth,”16 “because his character is pitted against the eternal tendency, to strive out of this world into the other and to turn it into a striving out of another world into this one.” In this sense— and I will return to these remarks later—­Hölderlin can conclude his extremely elliptical Remarks by noting that “the form of reason that here constructs itself tragically, is political, and namely republican.” Hölderlin, writing at a time and in a place where Republican ideas were sufficient to cost one one’s liberty and even one’s life, asserts that Sophocles was “right” for his time and his fatherland, but that today the traditions of the time and culture must be equally respected. Such caveats notwithstanding, Hölderlin still has the courage to conclude: “For us such a form is still useful, because the infinite, the Spirit of Nations and of the world, in any event can only be grasped as from a point of view that is gauche.” Hölderlin’s German here, which I am struggling to render into English, is actually more complex and more concrete than my previous translation can suggest: in German he speaks of a point of view that is linkisch: literally “leftish,” but more commonly, “clumsy” or “awkward.” In English, therefore we might say “gauche.” This admission acknowledges that any effort to grasp that which surpasses the finite and which Hölderlin here calls “the Spirit of Nations and of the World” can only be successful to the extent that it accepts its finite limitations—­its singularity—­and consequently has the courage to assume the risk of being adroitly gauche. The English phrase used here seeks to render a German word that plays a decisive if not unambiguous role in Hölderlin’s prose and his poetry—­and to which I will return in a later chapter—­geschick(t).17 In other words, this would be a politics without sovereignty, in all senses of that word, but one that nevertheless takes responsibility for decisions that while informed do not claim anything like absolute knowledge. A singular kind of politics, no doubt, and one that can draw support for a no less singular poetics. 12  Introduction

1

Singularity, Individuality From Anxiety to Anger

One of the first moves to be made in rethinking the notion of “singularity” is to take seriously its relational character. For despite the connotations associated with the word in English, “singularity” cannot be studied or construed in isolation. Despite much recent discourse using the term, singularity can never be absolute.1 Like the notions of “other” and “event,” with which it has close ties, it must always be thought in relation to that which it seems to oppose, which is to say, generality or “universality.” However, it must also be clearly distinguished from a word often regarded as its synonym: individuality. The singular is neither the individual nor the general (or universal). Nevertheless, it also cannot be separated from them.2 If the notion of “individual” is taken literally (as that which cannot be divided, as an “atom”), then nothing could be further from the singular, which is also a synonym for “odd” or “queer”—­for what doesn’t fit in. This indicates that the singular is, in this sense at least, an intrinsically relational notion, albeit in a differential sense. As we will see, unlike the “individual,” it is eminently divisible. This being said, it is also important to consider that the notion remains tied to “the individual” historically, if not necessarily logically. In the history of the West—­and “West” is used here and in the following chapters to emphasize that this history is not universal but concerns a specific if very large-­scale geopolitical complex—­ both Christianity and the Reformation have valorized the individual, while at the same time retaining certain of its singular aspects as well. Here the religious and cultural schism marked by the Reformation emphasized the gap between the individual human being qua singular and the universal (but also singular) deity upon which the human individual’s fate depends. However, not just historically or even theologically, but also logically, the notion of singularity necessarily entails a relation to the general or the universal, whether that relation is construed as one of 13

continuity or of disjunction, homogeneity or heterogeneity, similarity or dissimilarity. In discussing the relation of the singular to the general or universal, I am more comfortable using the first term, “generality,” than I am with the second: to determine anything as “universal” seems to me to presuppose a knowledge that—­outside of mathematics—­no finite human being can have. The universal in this sense is more a question of belief than of knowledge. It is perfectly legitimate to believe in a universal God, but it is far more problematic to assert that one can have full knowledge of that deity. And can knowledge of a universal that is not “full” be considered knowledge at all? This of course was one of the problems to which Kant sought to respond with his distinction between “theoretical” and “practical” philosophy, and in particular with his distinction between phenomenal and noumenal. We are all constrained by our bodily existence to assume delimited positions in time and space, whereas “universality” presupposes a perspective that is unaffected by such limitations. Applied to things of this world, this is perhaps why the “universal” is often associated with the “divine” or with the “metaphysical”—­whether conceived as a mono-­theological Creator-­God, or as a plurality of gods, or, in a more secular manner, as “ideas” or “values,” the validity of which is held to transcend any particular cultural, historical, social, political, or economic limitation. In an increasingly “globalized” world, the tendency to think in terms of universality has in some ways increased, as has the reactive temptation to emphasize particularity and diversity. Neither of these two conceptions of the infinite, as homogeneous or as heterogeneous, however, can resolve what I will be calling the aporetical structure of the singular. To construe the characteristics of this structure, there is no better place to start than with so-­called ordinary—­that is nontechnical—­language-­use and if possible to compare such usage in different languages. As already mentioned, in English, as in French and German, the word “singular” is often used as though it were synonymous with “individual.” But other common uses of the word show that this is not at all true. In his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Lacan finds an instance of his theory of the “symbolic” operation of the “signifier”: the stolen letter, which is exposed prominently and yet as such is virtually invisible, serves 14  Singularity, Individuality

as an exemplification of the signifier, which is also there for all to see and yet precisely, qua signifier, eludes any simple comprehension or grasp. Here is how Lacan describes this situation (in my translation): Here then we have something simple and odd, as it is announced in the very first pages reduced to its simplest expression: the singularity of the letter, which, as the title indicates, is the true subject of the story.3 (40)

Lacan emphasizes that “the singularity of the letter” is described by Poe as being both “simple and odd.” It is not surprising, he observes, for the singular to be described as “simple”; but to designate it as being “simple and odd” is another matter. And yet, “oddness” is precisely one of the meanings of “singularity,” and this points up its difference, in French but also in English, from “individual.” The individual, whether as noun or as adjective, is generally not considered to be “odd.” That is reserved for the “idiosyncratic.” An individual can be idiosyncratic but certainly need not be. And yet, this is why “the singular” should never simply be equated with “the individual.” In French, the word for “odd” is impair, which could also be translated more literally as “unequal.” I take this meaning of “singular” to be decisive: first, in demarcating it from the tendency to be equated with “individual”; and second, in problematizing its relation to itself, and thus to the notion of identity and selfhood in general. The “singular” is odd, impair, unequal not only to others but to itself. This is why the definition that Lacan gives of it in his “Seminar on the Purloined Letter” requires critical commentary: If we have above all insisted on the materiality of the signifier, [it is because] this materiality is singular in many points, of which the primary one is that it does not support division [partition]. (33)

To the traditional notion of the signifier, which for Ferdinand de Saussure is defined by its purely differential character—­that is, not through what it represents but through its distinctions from other signifiers4—­ Lacan here adds its material quality, which, however, he defines as essentially singular. But among the many aspects of singularity, the one he Singularity, Individuality   15

emphasizes in the passage quoted is its indivisibility: it cannot be divided or partitioned. At the same time, in this essay as elsewhere, Lacan emphasizes the process of repetition as that through which signifiers function. How can the signifier, then, be both singular and yet essentially constituted through repetition? The question is one that Benjamin addresses in his 1924 “Epistemic-­critical Preface” to his study of The Origins of the German Mourning Play (Trauerspiel). Benjamin insists that the notion of “origin” must be understood historically rather than logically. Here is how he describes its structure: “The origin, then, does not arise from factual findings but concerns their pre-­and post-­history. The guidelines of a philosophical consideration are inscribed in the dialectic intrinsic to origin. From it, singularity and repetition [Einmaligkeit und Wiederholung] reveal themselves to be essentially interdependent.”5 Benjamin’s notion of origin, like Lacan’s signifier, is thus irreducibly singular; and yet this singularity does not enclose it in its immediate or actual manifestation or existence. Rather, what I have just referred to as its “actual manifestation”—­what Benjamin calls “factual findings”—­is in turn only accessible in its “pre-­and post-­history,” which is to say, through rehearsal and repetition. But it is a form of repetition that, as Kierkegaard writes in his book of that name,6 combines identity with difference: it must be recognizable as the “same,” but this sameness includes its difference from that to which it is being compared. Singularity, then, which seems simple enough if we think of it only as the “unique,” much less as the “individual,” is in this account intrinsically split—­split off from itself by being accessible not directly but only through a certain repetition that at the same time changes it while reproducing it. Thus, what is absolutely unique and singular is precisely never “absolute” in the literal sense at least of being detached or freed from connections and interdependencies. Rather, it is always tied to a network of repetitions, both past and to come, actual and virtual. It is Derrida who, to my knowledge, has conceptualized this paradoxical situation most radically. For it is a paradox, even if both Kierkegaard and Benjamin use the word “dialectic” to describe it. Their dialectic, however, is closer to the Kantian notion than to the Hegelian, for it does not result in a greater, more comprehensive conceptual unity. Derrida sought to think this process by using the notion of “iterability,” which he develops for the first time in his essay “Limited Inc.,” and to which he returns 16  Singularity, Individuality

throughout his subsequent writings.7 Iterability for Derrida designates the possibility of being repeated as both the same and other; it is required in every process of recognition or identification, and this makes it prior to the Saussurean notion of “difference” (much less that of “opposition”). This is one reason why Derrida prefers to write of “marks” rather than of “signifiers”: the materiality of the signifier, for him, is not limited to what is called language, be it speech or writing. In order for any “mark” to function, it must be “re-­marked” and through this re-­marking every mark is constituted by a virtual iterability that qua virtual never comes full circle. This is why it is misleading to insist, as Lacan does, that the material singularity of the signifier is defined above all by the fact that it does not “suffer being partitioned.” For this is only the one side of the coin, and singularity, like a coin, always has at least two sides. The other side is that its uniqueness can only be experienced post facto, as it were, through a certain partitioning or, as we have seen, repetition: it can be experienced only with reference to the possibility of its being repeated, but never as the same, never as anything that could be immediately present. Paradoxically, it is the fact that the singular is never directly accessible as such that renders it irreducible to the notion of object, much less that of an object of cognition. This suggests that the singular can only be accessed and experienced through its resistance to what is knowable. As with the Kantian aesthetic judgment of beauty or the sublime, this paradoxically places it in an inexpungable relation to the knowable from which it is excluded. It consists not in the negation of what has been or can be known, but in a certain exceeding of its limits, as a kind of negative excess that remains linked to the body and that is experienced as feeling: in the case of Kant’s aesthetic judgment, through the feelings of pleasure or displeasure. Feelings of the resistance of the singular can take different forms: love, hate, hope, despair, and so on. But whatever their form, they do not involve either the simple negation of knowledge nor its simple surpassing. Without being simply materialistic or corporeal, the singular returns “knowledge” to the physicality and materiality that is its condition. I prefer physicality here to materiality, because corporeality always involves a distinct and singular positionality, which it necessarily entails but to which it can never be reduced, whereas materiality can be thought of in a vacuum, as it were, as a metaphysical principle or mode of being. By contrast, the singular is always situated, but its situation can never be exhaustively described or Singularity, Individuality   17

determined. Even linguistically, “the singular” is a substantivized adjective or adverb: like Adorno’s “non-­identical” or “non-­conceptual” but without the determining negativity, it is not in itself a substance but a relation. A singular event, for instance, never involves an absolute break with the past—­in the sense of annulling all relation to it—­but rather its radical alteration and transformation. The attacks of September 11, 2001, did not, according to Derrida, constitute an “event” in the strict sense, because they were predictable (and indeed predicted), and therefore did not mark a radical break with the past.8 Alteration and transformation are not identical, for not every change involves the constitution of something essentially new. But in any experience of radical singularity, alteration inevitably implies a kind of entropy: the singular must depart from itself in order to become itself; but in so doing it ceases to be authentically singular. Strictly speaking, one cannot even say “ceases”—­since it never was authentically self-­present. The singular must necessarily take leave of what it might have been in order to become what it (never) was; but what it then becomes is no longer purely singular but merely signifies a certain tension between what it might have been and what it could not be. The singular can never be “pure.” But its effects can and are felt, sensed; and if they are never simply meaningful, they are also never entirely arbitrary or accidental. There are two primary ways in which cognition, which implies a certain generality, seeks to appropriate the singular—­or one could also say, in which the singular invites cognitive appropriation. This is either as the particular individual or as the generalized singular. These two terms designate two sides of the same coin, but they can have very different effects. The “generalized singular” (as Derrida calls it, in “The Animal That Therefore I Am Following”),9 is surely the more pernicious of the two forms of appropriation, because while it retains the grammatical form of singularity, it eliminates the differences that constitute the singular by absorbing them into the homogeneity of an entire genus or group. It provides the matrix of racisms of all sorts: The noun, “the Jew,” for instance, with its defining “definite article,” is distinct from the adjective, Jewish. “Naming,” Nietzsche once observed, is Herrenrecht: the prerogative of the Lord and Master.10 In Genesis, the Creator-­God calls upon Adam to name all living creatures (Gen. 2:19) and at the same time “to have dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). It is of the nature of language that 18  Singularity, Individuality

names are never entirely proper, never entirely singular: like all linguistic entities, they designate not individuals but groups; and according to the King James Version, at least, this accords with the fact that the universal Creator-­God created all living beings “after their kind,” that is, generically.11 This tendency to generalization that is intrinsic to language allows for the misuse of so-­called proper names or nouns to designate not simply persons and things in the singular but persons and things qua members of a group: beginning in 1939, “Sarah” and “Israel” were the names that the Nazis forced Jews to use in official documents to make them recognizable as Jews and simultaneously to deprive them of their singularity. The use of the definite article, “the,” can also function to establish a collective—­ national or ethnic—­identification: The American, The German, The Chinese, and so on. Instead of respecting the distinctive heterogeneity of singularity, the latter is transformed into the basis for the subsumption of distinctive living beings under the normative homogeneity ascribed to a collective. The second form from which the singular in the strict sense should be distinguished is the one mentioned at the outset, namely, “the individual.” “The individual” uses the definite article once again to define the essential indivisibility and homogeneity of individuality. Qua indivisible, “the individual” can be considered to compose the constitutive element of society and the source of all value and wealth, and indeed, via contractual relations, of social order itself. If it is to be truly indivisible, this notion of the individual must also be thought of as being self-­contained and self-­referential. Its privileged expression must therefore be the first-­person singular, “I,” because the utterance of this word implies precisely a certain self-­reference, most emphatically expressed in the French moi—­quite different in its reflexive character from the English “me.” The moi is an object of a je, whereas the “me” is an object of something entirely external to it (as in the recent “me too” movement,” quite different from its French equivalent, balancer ton porc—­“get rid of your swine”).12 Since, however, there are many individuals in a society, and since they are manifestly unequal in all sorts of ways, “the individual” tends to acknowledge its relation to others as addressing first and foremost only other individuals—­alter egos—­and second, therefore as a tendentially agonistic one. The highly touted and increasingly globalized value of “excellence,” critically analyzed many years ago by Bill Readings in his “excellent” study Singularity, Individuality   19

of the university,13 has become the name for the criterion used in the allocation of resources—­in Germany the term Exzellenz-­Universitäten is used to designate superior research universities that merit (and receive) preferential funding from the State. But to ex-­cell is merely to go “further” than others, without any room being left to evaluate the particular direction being taken. Uniformity here is the corollary of homogeneity: to ex-­cell is to be better than one’s competitors. “Many are called, few are chosen” (Matt. 22:14), is one of the classical formulations for the “elect” in Protestantism (fondly quoted by Matthew Arnold). The family name of former U.S. president Donald Trump sums up this agonistic ethic. To “trump” is to outbid, “outdo,” outplay, outmaneuver, and all of that quite accurately describes the aim governing the behavior not only of this president, but also of much of the society of which he is only an extreme and revealing manifestation. So much for singularity in the abstract. But it has an origin, or many origins, and they are, as Benjamin asserted of all origins, eminently historical: “The category of origin is not, as Cohen believes, a purely logical one, but historical.”14 For an origin, as Benjamin knew, was something quite different from a simple beginning. Rather, it involved the ongoing effort to reinstate what could not be reproduced identically and was therefore obliged to repeat and transform itself. This is no less true of the historicity of singularity in what can be called a distinctively “Western” tradition. It is a tradition that is extremely broad and widespread, and that has succeeded in imposing its dominant socioeconomic system on much of the world—­but that nevertheless does not deserve to be considered universal. As discussed in the introduction, a hypothesis explored in this book is that one of the determining elements of this tradition derives from the “mono-­ theological” conception of the origin of the world and of the nature of life that informs the Bible in general, and the book of Genesis in particular. By “mono-­theological” I mean simply the notion of a single, universal, and exclusive Creator-­God. Although I have just used the word “singular” in describing this conception, the singularity of such a God is at the antipodes of the differential singularity that interests me. It is an instance of that “generalized singular” to which I have already referred. “The Lord is One” (Deut. 6:4) suggests two things: first, that God is not just God but “the Lord” (Yahve), that is, supremely Sovereign; and two, that this Sovereign 20  Singularity, Individuality

is not only different from others, but that he is one-­and-­the-­same: that is, self-­identical. His “one-­ness” implies therefore sovereignty, homogeneity, and unity, and these will serve as the model for identity—­political, social, individual—­for much of the tradition informed by the Bible. To avoid misunderstandings: I do not argue that this is the only way the biblical God can be interpreted and has been interpreted. Rather, what I want to suggest is that this particular interpretation of the universe is not only possible but that it has provided a model that continues even today to influence contemporary reality far beyond its directly religious manifestations. The “mono-­theological identity paradigm” is religious in origin but its effects are also profoundly secular. As already mentioned, one of the earliest and most influential expressions of this paradigm can be found in the first chapter of Genesis. The notion of a single, universal supreme being preexisting the articulated world, which is then conceived as his “creation,” informs a conception of identity, subjective and objective, in which A=A, in which the first-­person singular is construed as homogeneous and self-­identical. This first and supreme being is held to stand above and beyond the limitations of space and time, which is to say, the limitations of bodily existence. It provides the basis for construing the world as a “creation,” and moreover of construing all life on the model of a supreme being and intelligence standing above and beyond the limitations of space and time, which is to say, the limitations of bodily existence. What we call the world, the universe, and life itself, is thus the result of an intelligent speech act; secular “reality” can then be construed upon this same model. What are the forces that inform such a notion of a universal, preexistent Creator-­God and above all that give it its power to inspire belief over centuries? In response to this question I offer the following as a working hypothesis: such a notion allows Life to be conceived with a capital L, that is, as no less self-­identical than its creator. This then relegates death to a secondary, inessential position. Life initially and essentially can be understood as existing independently of death. This stands in sharp contrast to the experience of human beings, who, qua singular, are corporeally finite and mortal. The monotheistic identity paradigm and the creation myth that sustains it thus can be considered to function as a defense against the anxiety of a finitude that is difficult to assimilate to representational thinking. Death, as Paul de Man observed, Singularity, Individuality   21

“is the displaced name of a linguistic predicament.”15 The predicament, however, is the result of a conception of language as functioning primarily through representation. Via language this conception also affects consciousness and cognition. Accordingly, death can only be conceived from a point of view that is separated from it—­in which case the death that one imagines is rigorously speaking never one’s own but always that of someone else. The “predicament” is that mortality cannot be simply denied, but neither can it be simply cognized or experienced directly. Anxiety, as Freud argues, involves the reaction of the I to a perceived “danger.” The danger here is the necessity of “imagining” the unimaginable. The notion of a supreme being named “I”—­“I am who I will be”—­which would be at the origin of all life thus can serve as a defense against the anxiety resulting from the inability to acknowledge mortality as a constitutive dimension of life—­which is to say, of life-­lived-­in-­the singular. Such anxiety can probably never be entirely eliminated, but it can be temporarily alleviated, attenuated, to the extent that life “itself ” can be construed as essentially unlimited—­which is to say, as self-­identical. It is this that the myth of a universal Creator-­God strives to make imaginable. It constitutes a powerful attempt to allay anxiety, and this may well be why it has retained its force in certain parts of the world for thousands of years. In Western history, this notion of God as eternal life is greatly reinforced and indeed made explicit by the rise of Christianity. Death is initially described in Genesis as the result of sin, which is to say, of a human act of transgression. Christianity reinterprets the significance of this transgression by linking it to the sacrificial death of Christ. As a result of this death, mortality can be transcended and overcome: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (1 Cor. 15:22). The words of Jesus provide the basis for this interpretation: “I am the way and the truth and the life” ( John 14:6). “The way” death becomes a “way” of transcending itself is through the intentional and divine self-­sacrifice of the son of God. Christianity thus acknowledges the importance of the individual, guilty, mortal human being, but at the same time subsumes its individuality under the generality of the species, which qua created stands in a continuum with the universality of its creator. The individual guilty human being can therefore, not just de-

22  Singularity, Individuality

spite guilt but because of it, hope for salvation, understood to entail continuation of the person—­the soul, if not the body—­in eternal life. Such a narrative, however reductive and schematic, can help to elucidate many aspects of contemporary society, economics and politics, both at the individual and at the collective level. For instance, it can help to explain why people are relatively easily moved to act contrary to their own immediate and long-­term interests, and indeed in a self-­destructive manner; the mechanism is familiar by now: anxieties are distracted from the dangers they respond to and focused upon new ostensible threats—­terror and terrorism, immigration, and so on—­which are associated with easily imaginable objects against which aggressivity can be directed. Anxiety transformed into aggressivity and then redirected against imaginary objects becomes the mechanism by which political decisions and policies acquire “democratic” or “popular” sanction and legitimacy. The important fact in this attempt at attenuating the anxiety of being singularly mortal is not, as Nietzsche wrote, that “God is dead,” but rather the idea that death itself has become divine; which is to say, that it no longer signifies the pure and simple extinction of the individual living being, but rather a pathway of the person to eternal life. Already the mere fact that God can father a son, as distinct from creating the universe, suggests a revalorization of the process by which life reproduces itself, thus recalling the initial divine admonition “to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it” (Gen. 1:28).16 Through the voluntary sacrifice of the son of God, human beings are given the chance of escaping from what the Bible portrays as the cause of their mortality, namely their sin and guilt. But it is important not to overlook that the latter is the result of their taking too seriously the notion of being “created . . . in his own image, in the image of God”—­a phrase whose repetition only emphasizes its irreducible ambivalence. Human beings become mortal for wanting to become too much like their creator.17 With the advent of Christianity, this difference between creator and created is reduced: the divine becomes quasi-­human in Christ. But if God becomes man by fathering a son, this suggests that man can become (like unto) God the Father, and thus quasi-­ divine. The words of Christ cited previously include an important second sentence: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” ( John 14:6).

Singularity, Individuality   23

The promise here—­or is it also a threat?—­is that of a return that would help man to become like God. But this was precisely the temptation that in Genesis led to all the trouble in the first place. The serpent tempted Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil by promising her that “your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be like God” (Gen. 3:5). Seeing, having one’s eyes “opened,” seems to be related to the desire to “be like God.” This desire repeats itself, although this time collectively and politically, in the story of the Tower of Babel, which materializes the aspiration of the peoples of the earth to attain to the same unity as their creator. To which God responds: And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men bilded. And the Lord said: Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. (Gen. 11:6–­8)

The Lord “came down to see,” we are told. Apparently, He had to descend in order to see what was going on down below. Be that as it may, seeing and power seem already here closely related. A tower also provides a viewpoint from which to see one’s surroundings. It is to limit such a panoptic overview, perhaps, as well as its correlative, a single, universal language, that God intervenes. What could be called the “antithetic” of identification comes into play here. To speak a single language and thus to acquire universal understanding thus signifies a lack of limitation that both mirrors and endangers the exclusive prerogative of the divine creator. In the Garden of Eden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is placed next to the tree of life. The desire to transcend the lack of limitation in knowledge and understanding thus can be seen as a metonymy for the desire to transcend the same lack with respect to life itself. It is this desire to achieve a time and space–­transcending unity, which implies permanence if not ubiquity, that constitutes the mono-­theological identity paradigm and perpetuates its power to fascinate the faithful. Some of its effects can be seen at work today in what is called “globalization”—­ 24  Singularity, Individuality

especially insofar as this word is associated with homogenization rather than with diversification. But as powerful as it may be, bridging the divide between “religious” and “secular” histories, such a process is marked by contradiction and instability. For the identity-­paradigm that informs globalization is intrinsically unsustainable. Singular living beings and collectivities cannot shake off or overcome the finite conditions of their individuation: which means that, regarding the mono-­theological identity-­ paradigm, they can never attain full in-­dividuality. At least not directly. But they can hope to participate in this ideal indirectly. The Kantian sublime is one such articulation of this hope. Through hearing and heeding (to hear is to heed) “the voice of reason,” human finitude becomes aware of a certain relation to, if not participation in, that which transcends corporeal boundaries. Another instance, less philosophical than political or social, is furnished by the possibility of identifying with a collective—­political, ethnic, cultural, national.18 And yet another possibility is offered by the prospect of unlimited accumulation of wealth and power through financial speculation. The identification with money, wealth, and value as signs and instruments of “power” remains “imaginary” to the extent that it is informed by a self-­identical individual “I” as owner or proprietor. But such an I can also flaunt its ability to deny its constitutive limitations in a dialectic that ultimately reinforces the identity of the identical and the non-­ identical. This is an I whose power and sovereignty are based strictly on the irreducibility of its own self-­identity, despite the constant exchanges that constitute the dynamics of financial transactions today. Indeed, there are good reasons to think that capital—­and in particular, finance capital—­is itself one of the most potent avatars today of the mono-­ theological dream of life producing ever more life without end, “replenishing and subduing the earth”—­a surplus life that would not be constitutively limited by death, as is the case with every singular living being.19 The model here is money producing more money, value producing surplus value, debt and credit (creo) producing interest. In conformity with the notion of a Garden of Eden before the Fall, value is created to produce more value just as life was originally created to produce more life, without any intrinsic end in sight.20 Karl Marx, however, adapting the labor-­theory of value of David Ricardo, argued that the self-­aggrandizing tendency of capital—­value producing surplus-­value—­was in fact only the external Singularity, Individuality   25

façade of a more sinister process of the exploitation of social labor, which he compared often enough to that of a vampire sucking the blood of society. Marx thus developed the link between on the one hand the religious-­ Trinitarian dimension of capitalistic accumulation—­money exchanged for commodities producing more money (M-­C-­M)—­with the reality of life being exchanged for death in order to produce more life, whereby survival tends to take the form of the enrichment of the few at the expense of the impoverishment of the many. Marx’s account of capital reinforces this view: “Capital is dead labor that vivifies itself only by sucking up living labor like a vampire: the more it can suck, the more life it has. . . . But Capital has only a single life-­drive, the drive to produce value [sich zu verwerten], to create surplus-­value.”21 One of the historical conditions that promotes the spread of capitalism, as is well-­known, was the spread of Calvinism as one of the major components of the Protestant Reformation. But there is another branch of the Reformation that is perhaps more “original,” at least in the Benjaminian sense, and which Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and Benjamin, in the Origins of the German Mourning Play, both emphasize: namely, the radical antinomianism of Martin Luther. According to Weber, had there been no Calvin, no Reformed Church, but only Lutheranism, the Protestant ethic would never have provided the support it did for the spread of capitalism. Why not? Because for Luther—­and this is what Benjamin also insists on—­it was not “good works” but “faith alone”—­sola fide—­that could lead sinful mortal life to divine grace and salvation. This devaluation of good works, Benjamin emphasizes, was not limited to the Catholic sacraments, which Luther largely rejected, but was extended to cover all intentional, goal-­directed human activity. This would then include economic activity and, above all, economic success. It is at this point, then, that the history of singularity in the West takes a decisive turn. Prior to the Reformation, one can argue, however simplistically, that the path that led from the single, fallen, guilty human being to eternal life was in part at least accessible to human action, especially under the guidance and auspices of a church that declared itself “universal.” The path between fallen earthly immanence and resurrection could thus be considered to be more or less open and transparent. With the Reformation, especially in its “original,” Lutheran form, this way becomes considerably less accessible, since once “faith alone” is radically distin26  Singularity, Individuality

guished from “works,” including “laws,” it becomes difficult to be certain of where it obtains. It is lodged in the unfathomable depths of the “heart,” and is in principle no less amenable to the perception of the individual subject than is the outside world. In short, one can never be entirely certain that one “has faith,” that the faith one believes one has is authentic, that it is genuinely true to the Word of Christ. Hence, the importance of the individual pastor or preacher—­and ultimately the Leader—­in many versions of Protestantism. The uncertainties of spatial-­temporal-­corporeal existence return to plague the faith that seeks to transcend those limitations and uncertainties. Everything depends on the faith of the individual, but that faith in turn does not depend ultimately on individual action or volition. A sense of uncertainty seems to haunt the individual, while increasing its need for comfort, reassurance, authority. Uncertainty in relation to time, which is experienced as an increasingly unpredictable medium of change, is perhaps compensated, on a collective level at least, by the imperial and colonial ambitions of dominating and assimilating space. The contradiction between inner uncertainty and outer control is perhaps expressed in the politics of nation-­states that seek to extend and reinforce their sovereignty, which, however, can never achieve the universality of its mono-­theological model. The process continues unabated, although flexible in the forms it assumes, to this day. Everything I have been describing about singularity and its assimilation to individualism through the Protestant Reformation and its aftereffects I take to be supported by the identity-­model of a single, supreme, exclusive, Creator-­God and its secular offspring and, above all, by the contradictions that this model produces when applied to a “secular” world. What Benjamin attributed to the world of the German Baroque could be applied to Western secular modernity more generally: it is faced with a religious problem without being able to come up with a religious answer.22 The religious genealogy of the notion of the “secular” is not just an irrelevant etymological fact. The frequency with which in English (at least) today the word “creative” is used is symptomatic of the continuing power of this religious sense of self as an identity that is fundamentally independent of the alterations and limitations of time and space. It is this precarious and conflictual sense of self, together with the very real economic and social dispossession that is growing in many parts of the world, that provides the basis for the obsession with “security” that plays such a Singularity, Individuality   27

decisive role in political discourse and political policies. Not that there are not legitimate concerns about security; but such concerns, tied to specific, situational factors, often produced by the very systems that then use them to regiment their populaces, are all the more easily insulated from reflection upon their actual causes by being presented as the work of an easily identifiable “enemy” that must either be eliminated or, at the very least, “neutralized.”23 The widespread conviction in the United States that all individuals qua individuals have the right to bear arms, often of the deadliest sort, which contradicts the explicit wording of the Second Amendment upon which it claims to be based,24 is just one indication of how such anxieties can be exploited to distract from consideration of measures that might affect the causes of social unrest. This constitutional right to bear arms exists only in three countries today, the United States, Mexico, and Guatemala, all of whose dominant cultures can be identified as Christian. Despite their differences, all three display a level of violence in civil and domestic life that is among the highest in the world. There are many other countries, with predominantly Christian heritages or of other cultural and religious traditions that do not display the same level of physical violence in their political lives. Conversely, the propensity to violence can be found to differing extents in all societies and nations, in all communities and groups, and surely also in all individuals. The question I want to raise, however, is whether the specific religious-­cultural tradition that I have been discussing, deriving from biblical monotheism, provides such propensities with powerful support, even if it is never the only factor involved. As soon as it is necessary to construe autonomy along the model of a divine and unique Creator-­God, a moment of heterogeneity becomes both necessary and threatening, since only a being other than oneself can provide the basis for the claim of that self to be autonomous. Autonomy is thus inseparable from heteronomy, but wherever the self (subject, soul, I) seeks to transcend time and space, it has difficulty in acknowledging this. Or even negotiating with it. This unresolvable tension between imaginary identification and its actualization in finite individuals is exacerbated in the Lutheran conception of the individual, which places the latter both closest and furthest from its model—­and hence virtually from itself. On the one hand, the individual is made the unalterable cornerstone in the relation of the mortal to the immortal, the human to the divine: a relation that operates through “faith” 28  Singularity, Individuality

and grace. But on the other, this individual is anything but autonomous: it is not considered to be the proprietor of faith, which, Luther insists, has to be understood as a “gift” from God that stands in no calculable connection to anything the individual can do or not do. In short, the individual cannot actively guarantee his or her salvation, which is entirely the product of the incommensurable gift of faith.25 There is then a strong tension if not contradiction between the individual as the site of redemption, and the inability of the individual to determine his or her destiny. Omnipotence and impotence have never been more closely allied than here. The “individual” is thus structurally divided and can therefore be all the more easily tempted to project its internal division onto an external opposition with an enemy: the devil, the axis of evil, the terrorist. There is, however, another aspect to this contradiction that is potentially more promising and less self-­destructive. It can be seen in the limitation of individual autonomy through the emphasis on the individual as recipient of the “gift” of “grace”: a gift that cannot be commanded, deserved, or even acknowledged. Since Luther emphasizes that this gift goes to the “heart,” even if it does not come from the heart,26 he thereby suggests that what seems most intimate to the calculating, self-­conscious individual must not be considered as its private property over which it can dispose as it sees fit. Rather, what is most important to the individual is a “gift” that comes from elsewhere. In this sense “faith” entails the possibility of being open to the other—­not just to external others, but also and simultaneously to the traces of alterity that compose one’s personal history, which, as the result of many interactions, constitute it in its distinctive and singular heterogeneity. In other words, the heterogeneity of history impels every individual toward what Novalis once and Gilles Deleuze more recently h­ ave called a “dividual”:27 a being that is constitutively and singularly divided. This begins perhaps with one’s name, which is never just one’s exclusive private property but public and private, singular and collective at once.28 Let me conclude with a question that will haunt these pages (and perhaps beyond): What I have been describing applies to a large-­scale but nevertheless far from universal mono-­theological tradition. And indeed, it is particularly prevalent in a specific branch of that tradition, namely the one growing out of the Protestant Reformation, specifically its Lutheran Singularity, Individuality   29

(not Calvinist) theology. One working hypothesis of this book is that what I have designated as the “mono-­theological identity paradigm”—­which is to say, the imaginary identification with a single, universal, and self-­ contained Creator-­God—­continues to inform the way identity in general is conceived and experienced, whether subjective or objective, individual or collective, private or public. I further suggest that the continuity of this tradition, even in the face of a scientific and technical world that at first sight seems inhospitable to it, is symptomatic of a continuing inability to acknowledge life as something that is necessarily and structurally limited in duration. This is tantamount to subordinating the perspective and experience of singular, living beings to a concept of Life written with a capital L, which typographically and conceptually seeks to raise “life,” as in essence unbounded and eternal, above “the living” as singular, finite, and heterogeneous. This subordination is not always conscious or deliberate, but it can for that very reason be all the more powerful and sweeping. It draws its power from the ability to assuage, more or less temporarily, the anxiety produced by a future death that is unimaginable in the present—­which is to say, unthinkable in terms of the representational schema that dominates thought, at least in the West.29 In times of shifting power relations, redistribution of wealth, and increasing precariousness, this anxiety can and has been mobilized to reinforce a highly problematic and self-­destructive past rather than to apprehend an uncertain future. One particularly menacing result is a socioeconomic, political, and technical system that increasingly threatens the conditions under which all forms of life can reproduce themselves on earth. Another related result is what can be called the militarization of politics, which tries to resolve all problems, disputes, and uncertainties through the application of military force. This, as we have seen in the past decades, generally augments destructive forces in the process of trying to destroy them. Legitimate need for “security” is thereby confused and conflated with the project of defending a self that is inherently indefensible, because in conflict with its enabling conditions. This conflict is what fuels the intrinsically unlimited and self-­destructive “War on Terror.” In short, as long as societies are not able or willing to distinguish between the anxieties that arise from the unrepresentability of mortality as it affects singular living beings and the fear-­producing degradation of social, politi30  Singularity, Individuality

cal, and economic living conditions, they will be tempted to resort to ever more destructive means of trying to resolve such problems. The result is a proliferation of unending and unwinnable “wars”: on “drugs,” on “terror,” and often enough, on the poor, at the same time as the accumulation of wealth by a minute fraction of society attempts to provide a positive image to assuage the fears and tensions that its increasingly unequal redistribution produces. Which is why drug addiction is probably as rampant among the rich and successful as among the impoverished and desperate. It is also why never-­ending wars themselves serve as drugs that anesthetize thinking by offering anxiety an ostensible enemy upon which to focus and from which it can distance itself, through protective walls and in the name of Homeland Security, and which it can also hope to destroy through ever-­ more destructive weaponry. But the danger to the “homeland” cannot be banished by walls and barriers, even if it can thereby be temporarily reduced. As long as the heterogeneity of what I am calling “life in the singular” is not accepted and legitimized, the anxieties it entails will continue to fuel the self-­destructive tendencies of societies. Derrida sought to deconstruct this dangerous tendency in his later writings as the phenomenon of “auto-­immunity,” which in attempting to protect the same from the different, the self from the other, winds up attacking and debilitating itself. He saw this as a tremendous danger, but also, in its weakening of the protective, immunizing systems, as a potential opportunity for nondestructive change. Perhaps one small possibility of such a change can be glimpsed in the fact that, for the first time in recent history, especially in “peacetime,” the “enemy” that justifies such militarization is, if taken literally, not a state but a “feeling”—­namely, terror. To be sure, such feeling is in the media and public discourses instantly directed against an enemy. But the gap remains between the feeling and its putative cause, between anxiety and anger. And it is this gap that we should try to “mind.”

Singularity, Individuality   31

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2

On the Militarization of Feeling

“VIOLENCE” IN QUESTION The question of militarization should not be separated from that of violence more generally. In so-­called liberal–­democratic societies, violence is structurally omnipresent, although often in concealed and depersonalized forms. It is present first and foremost in the ideology that both informs and shapes its ruling institutions and practices. The cornerstone of that ideology remains today, no less than in the past, the notion of an autonomous individual, considered to be the source of all value, both moral and material, and hence also of all wealth and power. This in turn derives, in part at least, from what I am calling the mono-­theological identity paradigm, which portrays the creation of the world, all beings animate and inanimate, as the work of a single, universal, and exclusive Creator-­God.1 Hence, this identity-­paradigm is by no means limited to individual human beings, since it also informs more collective groupings, insofar as they are construed as essentially homogeneous, sovereign, and self-­contained. Notions such as “nation,” “people,” “community,” “race,” “gender,” and so on, are often (not always!) conceived of as extended “individuals,” which is to say, as in-­divisibly self-­same and self-­generating. It is this notion of an essentially homogeneous self-­identity that serves, more often implicitly than explicitly, to identify instances of “violence,” which accordingly are regarded as externally generated violations of an anterior, original, internally produced self-­identity. It is interesting to note that the etymology of “violence,” which relates it to violation, derives it from the Latin violentia, meaning “vehement, forcible.” This suggests that in its origins, at least, the word designated a quantitative relationship to “force” rather than a qualitative one. The tendency today to regard violence as qualitatively distinct from the exercise of force in general can serve to obscure its character as excess or as deriving from an external source. 33

Such a “qualitative” conception of violence necessarily presupposes the existence of a primordial nonviolent interior against which the exercise of force can be determined as exterior. Physical violence—­as used in torture, for instance—­is therefore an exemplary instance of such violence, insofar as it can be considered to attack the integrity and cohesion of individual bodies from without. But there are other forms of violence, which can be all the more powerful and pervasive for being less easy to discern—­since they can be the product of processes that are generally not considered to be violent: for instance, certain economic or social policies. By affecting the conditions of life, rather than the bodies of the living directly, they can deprive the latter of the ability to live in a peaceful manner. This is why a blockade, such as that of Gaza by the Israeli government, is generally considered an act of war. An embargo on certain products vital to a country can be considered an act of violence, whether or not it is deemed an act of war. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 can be considered a response to the U.S. embargo placed on all oil imports to Japan starting in August 1941—­which in turn was a response to the Japanese attempt in 1940 to place an embargo on U.S. imports to China. Policies that encourage poverty alongside of a development that benefits relatively small segments of the population, can also be considered as responsible for violent conflict and thus themselves be deemed a form of violence. In short, violence cannot be limited to deliberate acts of individuals but can be the result of processes degrading the conditions of life for large segments of the population, while enriching small groups. It is legitimate, therefore, to speak of the violence not just of persons but of conditions, institutions, and procedures. Such depersonalized “structural” or “procedural” forms of violence can have corporeal as well as mental consequences as great or greater than any individual act of violence, but since these consequences often manifest themselves at a certain distance—­ spatial as well as temporal—­from the factors that have provoked them, they are generally not recognized as being “violent.” This suggests that the notion of violence tends to be associated with deliberate acts that have immediate effects rather than with long-­term processes. There are also many borderline cases involving “natural” catastrophes, such as the tsunami that provoked the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, where “intentions” and “acts”—­such as inadequate planning or subterfuge in the nondissemination of data—­contributed to the destruction wrought by the “natural” 34   On the Militarization of Feeling

phenomenon of the tsunami. Where nature stops and society begins is increasingly difficult to determine today, when manmade processes affect increasingly natural phenomena, as in global warming. The notion of “Anthropocene” suggests a new geological era marked by a quantitatively and qualitatively new effect of human behavior on the environment. But already, on a much smaller scale, the notion of “culture” deriving from the agricultural cultivation of the earth signified a less menacing and often beneficial transformation of nature by man. The latter, however, was held to enhance the conditions of life on Earth, whereas the former suggests that these are threatened by human intervention. In sum, the general tendency seems to be to identify “violence” with the deliberate actions of individuals upon other individuals, rather than with the effects of technical processes or of socioeconomic structures, which may be less direct but of far greater destructive force. It therefore makes a difference if the question of militarism and militarization is approached from the perspective of an unquestioned identification of violence with deliberate, individual acts, or whether it is seen in the context of a violence that is structural, procedural, often impersonal, and therefore more difficult to discern. The latter kinds of violence are also less amenable to the audiovisual media, which for technical but also for economic reasons concentrate on the spectacular: wars, forest fires, inundations, and the like. To understand the context in which militarism and militarization function and flourish it will therefore be important to retain a notion of violence that is not restricted to acts or even processes and structures but will also take into account the manner in which destructive effects are experienced. Until very recently such experience has been largely determined by the audiovisual media, and particularly television. However, with the advent of the internet and its relative democratization through the large-­scale accessibility of mobile communicators—­so-­called “smart phones” that today gather and indeed create audiovisual data and immediately transmit it—­this situation is changing. At the same time, the ways in which such transmitted data are “processed” (that is, received, interpreted, and transformed) is beginning to call the very notion of “data” itself into question, directing attention at times at least to the manner in which information is “given” and becomes “a given datum”—­both made available, processed, and communicated. This includes authorized and unauthorized uses of language, selection, and transmission of “data,” “big” On the Militarization of Feeling   35

or little, encryption and decryption, inculcation of habits of perception and of reflection—­and these are just some of the changing conditions to which “militarism” and “militarization” responds. In liberal–­democratic societies, and in particular in the neoliberal form that has developed over the past few decades, violence in all of these manifestations is ubiquitous, and indeed, in certain forms, often glorified. A liberal conception of society and of the economy is based on “competitiveness,” and this is often associated with aggressivity, if not ruthlessness. To the extent that they are associated with private, autonomous individuals—­ whether persons or organizations such as corporations—­traditional regulations and governing principles tend to lose their authority. Ultimately, in a neoliberal view, there is no “law” other than the ability of private individuals to impose their aims and goals on other, equally private individuals (this notion of individual can include nation-­states as well as multinational corporations: the decisive fact is that they be considered as autonomous and self-­contained). In its more sublimated, academic form, the key word to which competitiveness is sublimated—­as Bill Readings acutely observed almost twenty years ago—­is “excellence.”2 To “ex-­cel” means, not just to stand out from the rest, but to be superior to them: literally, “to rise above” everyone else, to tower over and trump most if not all others. In the United States, this then animates the ideal of being “Number 1.” All of this presupposes a common denominator, a bottom line, a standard of value that can be used to “compare and contrast”—­and above all, to rank—­competitors. Differences between them are thus reduced to measurable quantities. A “universal equivalent” is presupposed, and indeed desired, in order to simplify the apprehension of manifold differences and distinctions. To inculcate and endorse this way of thinking, three institutional complexes have emerged, especially in the United States, as exemplary factors. First, the world of business—­which over the past century has seen its center of gravity shift from the more directly productive branches, agriculture and manufacturing, to services, and increasingly, since 1980, to the banking and financial sector. Second, and perhaps most emblematic, the institutions of competitive sports, aided and abetted by the spread of the audiovisual media, have come to provide a barely sublimated form of that aggressive competition that marks the business environment but also increasingly political processes as well. What is decisive about competitive 36   On the Militarization of Feeling

sports—­and more generally about competition in capitalist societies—­is that it should result in clear-­cut winners and losers, thus providing its “public” with imaginary objects of identification. “Globalization” has certainly contributed both to extending and intensifying this environment: competition is now immediately transmissible to millions of viewers all over the world. Globalization also reinforces the belief in objective and universal standards of measurement and judgment, which qua universal leave little room for alternatives. Record-­breaking consists in augmentation, not in qualitative change. And third, last but definitely not least, the military, whose rising importance reflects its importance today in the resolution of conflicts, between and within nations. These three factors are of course mutually dependent and interact with one another. One basis for this interaction is a common attitude toward conflict resolution, which tends to stress the binary perspective most obvious in competitive sports: the result is that of winning or losing, tertium non datur. The last phrase indicates how closely aligned this perspective is with the basic principle of Western philosophy, the principle of identity or of noncontradiction. The winner is the form that being takes in capitalist society today, whereas the loser is relegated to nonbeing, or at least to a lesser form of being.3 From an ideological point of view, professional, competitive sports is probably the most influential, at least in the United States, where the (counter-­) weight of noncompetitive, more cooperative traditions tends to be more limited than elsewhere. In the United States, sports can and does serve as a relay between the more exotic forms of business and financial adversarial behavior and attitudes, and the ostensibly more concrete forms of everyday life, in which “events” are generally experienced as “media events,” of which the “sporting match” is perhaps the most common and exemplary instantiation. This experience then provides a widely shared framework for viewing the world, thereby “cutting all problems down to size”: the size here being that of an individual observer, seeing things with his (or her) own two eyes, and easily resolving problems into relations between winners and losers—­whereby the mediating influence of the media is all the more easily forgotten (I discuss this somewhat more thoroughly in chapter 5). Competitive sports thus offers a temporary relief from the strains produced by a socioeconomic system that has tended in the past few decades to increase the disparity between rich and poor exponentially, both within On the Militarization of Feeling   37

nations and between them, while removing the production and acquisition of wealth ever further from its traditional source, work, and more generally, intentional activities. But since such respite is largely imaginary, in the Lacanian sense, it tends to further not only outright hostility but also depression. The militarization of ever-­larger areas of social life can be seen as a response to this situation, which, however, only aggravates the spiral rather than resolving it. The militarization of thinking thus presupposes the identification of the other as an enemy to be subdued and, if necessary, destroyed. Militarization of feeling supports this process by turning anxiety into aggression focused on readily identifiable persons, groups, or countries. It tends toward ethnocentrism and racism since these presuppose the subordination of singular complexities and differences under a generalized self-­identity that is (made) familiar and therefore easily recognizable. All antecedents and complicating factors are forgotten or ignored—­or, as that distinctively American expression would have it, are dismissed as mere “history.” The United States as a country has always tried to look forward to a better future—­to “move forward,” as the buzzword goes—­but its compulsion not to look back has never been as obvious as it is today. It is, indeed, precisely a “compulsion,” which as we will see, impels and informs militarism in all of its forms, but above all, in and as the militarization of feeling.

THE COMPULSION TO USE FORCE Writing shortly after the end of World War I, Benjamin defined “militarism” in the following terse sentence: Militarism is the compulsion [der Zwang] to apply force [Gewalt] generally as the means of the State to accomplish its ends.4

This definition, being short, is also sweeping. Nevertheless, taken at its word, it can serve, both positively and negatively, as a point of departure for a discussion of militarism today, and in particular of its relation to thinking and to feeling. The essay from which this remark is abstracted is called, in German, Zur Kritik der Gewalt—­and I retain the German title provisionally, since the published translations, Critique of Violence, can be 38   On the Militarization of Feeling

misleading, as I will try to show in a moment. The essay was written in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. It was part of a group of essays that were to compose a comprehensive theory of politics. The other essays were either lost or never written. The one that has survived seeks to analyze the conditions under which Gewalt operates in both politics and political theory. It also seeks to discuss other ways of conceiving Gewalt, as well as pointing out alternatives to its use in the resolution of political conflicts. Although here is not the place to discuss this fascinating, difficult, and immensely complicated essay in its entirety, I do want to dwell on a few lexical problems, beginning with the key word of its title, Gewalt. Although it is usually translated as “violence,” this misses some of its most important connotations (and denotations) in German. The word is formed from the verb walten, a word that Benjamin invokes at the very end of his essay, as an adjective, to distinguish what he calls “divine Gewalt” as waltende from its human forms, related to the establishing or maintaining of laws, and which he calls schaltende.5 Schalten suggests “switching” between available paths or circuits (a “circuit board” is a Schaltbrett), whereas waltend suggests prevailing, implying the exercise of power in order to perpetuate a certain constancy of rule. Benjamin’s use of the present participle to form the adjective suggests that the temporal dimension, involving a certain duration, is not indifferent to this notion. Gewalt is formed as the past participle of the verb walten, to preside or to prevail, and in this sense, it includes the reference that was mentioned at the outset with respect to “violence,” namely, a reference to a relatively stable, self-­identical being or state of things. This refers to an order, be it one of human law (which Benjamin in this essay assigns to the realm of “myth”), or one of divine intervention, upsetting all previously existing order, but still the act of a being that transcends all imaginable human order. There are thus at least three English words that could be associated with Gewalt, and “violence” is surely one of them. But it leaves out the very important uses of the word in German that refer to the maintenance of a previously existing order, and which in English would be rendered rather by the word “force” rather than by “violence”: police force, armed forces, law enforcement—­all of these in German would be associated with the word Gewalt as well. Benjamin’s Critique thus addresses the question not just of violence but of its relation to social and natural forces of all kinds. In discussing militarism, we would do well to keep in mind the slippery On the Militarization of Feeling   39

semantic field in which the words “violence” and “force” are situated, since this determines the indispensable framework in which anything like the “militarization of thought” should be examined. This semantic field is complicated by the fourth word in Benjamin’s definitional phrase, the word Zwang—­usually translated as compulsion or constraint.6 What is curious and suggestive in this definition is the use of “compulsion” to describe the generalized “application” (Anwendung) of force as a means of accomplishing the ends of the state. “Militarism” is thus defined as the “forced” application of “force.” If this is not entirely tautological, it is not just because Zwang and Gewalt are not identical—­ the former being generally considered to be the result of the latter—­but because there is a suggestion that the result of this Zwang is militarism itself. This in turn raises the question of what exactly is involved in defining “militarism” as the “compulsive” or constrained use of force, used to accomplish the purposes of the state. It is precisely here that the idea of violence, by virtue of its ubiquity, goes largely unperceived, and takes on a new aspect. Militarism in this sense is not simply violence exercised by the state to pursue its policies, but rather involves a constraint or compulsion to implement those policies through the exercise of force. In other words, militarism would entail not just force, but its compulsive use to attain the ends of the state. The United States today is doubtless the most striking instance of such a compulsion, which of course is not limited to any one country: recent acts of Saudi Arabia and its allies against Yemen and Qatar or long-­standing policies of Israel against the Palestinians are other examples, of which many more could be cited. It can be argued however that the United States today stands in a particular relationship to militarism. Its military budget for 2019, $716 billion, described as “one of the biggest defense budgets in modern American history,” was passed with the massive support of both parties in the U.S. Senate by a vote of 85–­10, despite concerns about its effect on a federal deficit that is estimated to exceed $1 trillion by 2020.7 “America spends more on its military than the next 11 countries combined,” the same Washington Post story states. The fact that there is so little dissent or criticism concerning this allocation of resources reflects something like a popular consensus on the importance of military force to the defense of American interests worldwide. The spectacular threats uttered by President Trump against

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North Korea and Iran resonate in a country where there is a widespread conviction that American citizens have a constitutional right to bear arms, including the most militarized, despite the proliferation of lethal shootings in schools and elsewhere that such a “right” makes possible. It is characteristic of the individualist perspective described here that the Second Amendment phrase, according the right to bear arms to a “well-­regulated militia,” has been interpreted by the Supreme Court as giving that right to private individuals.8 Such a disposition to resort to armed force in the name of “security”—­national or individual—­has also recently produced such laws such as the “Stand Your Ground” legislation in Florida, justifying the use of lethal force when a “person reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another,” thereby eliminating the previous ‘duty of retreat’ imposed by common law in cases of danger.9 Thus, in private or public life, extending up to the highest governmental institutions and policy makers, there seems to be an increasing tendency to legitimate the use of lethal force as not just a necessary but as the preferred means of conflict resolution. There is also surely an intimate connection between the laws of engagement that govern the police use of weaponry in the United States and the percentage of suspects killed by police in this country. This contrasts with the tendencies in other “developed” countries to try to capture suspects rather than to kill them, not primarily out of humane considerations, but out of the desire to acquire information that might be useful in future conflicts. Of course, in countries other than the United States, people are far less likely to possess guns, which allows less lethal rules of engagement.10 The compulsion to use force to resolve conflict is indeed a compulsion, although not exclusively a psychological one. Like most compulsions it may also respond to convictions and desires, conscious or unconscious. What distinguishes a compulsive response from a noncompulsive one is the degree to which it escapes conscious control. If “violence” is considered exclusively to be the result of the deliberate actions of individuals, and if the individuals concerned are held to be fully responsible for their destructive effects, then the elimination of such individuals—­like the elimination of the enemy—­is a “logical” consequence. This “logic,” driven by the need to convert anxiety into aggression, explains the persistent and widespread call for even greater use of

On the Militarization of Feeling   41

lethal weapons after each new massacre and explains perhaps why there is relatively little (though growing) support for a widespread interdiction of private arms. Existing research is not conclusive about the influence of single-­shooter video games (and the portrayal of violence in Hollywood films) on the rise of gun crimes, which among economically wealthy countries is unique to the United States.11 In any event, the spread of audiovisual reporting through the widespread use of smart “phones” tends to call into question the previous tendency of official discourse to portray everyday reality as basically nonviolent, and consequently, to legitimate the exercise of lethal violence by the police as exceptional and therefore justified. Whether or not Hollywood “action films” lead to violent acts, there can be little doubt that their portrayal of violence tends to glorify it by blending technological innovations with individual prowess. There are of course exceptions, but they tend not to have the same mass audience as “blockbuster”—­the term itself is already eloquent12—­films. To call the resulting hiatus between official and ordinary discourse schizophrenic is hardly to exaggerate: on the one hand, a public discourse, exemplified by former president Barack Obama, who often tended to justify police violence in the name of preserving “law and order,” while only occasionally acknowledging “excessive violence” on the part of the forces of order; on the other, the discourse of a Donald Trump, encouraging the police to be violent (for instance while pushing suspects by their heads into police cars)—­and who generally exalts violence by threatening to resolve international conflicts by military means. An either-­or logic that reduces complexities to a simple choice itself does violence to reality and, implicitly if not explicitly, advocates violence as the most direct way to resolve conflict.13 President George Bush’s declaration “Mission Accomplished” after the invasion of Iraq can stand as a classic example of how simplification serves to legitimate military force. For simple solutions require the reduction of complexities to something that—­or someone who—­can be easily named and identified as the enemy: whether “Saddam Hussein,” “weapons of mass destruction,” or more abstractly, “radical Islam,” “migrants,” or simply “terror.”14 However effective the simplistic discourse of Trump has shown itself to be,15 similar phenomena can be observed worldwide, wherever established institutional processes not only fail to resolve social problems but 42   On the Militarization of Feeling

generally make them worse while proclaiming that they are serving the general welfare. In the “West,” official discourse is dominated by what can be called a “humanist universalism,” whose roots are clearly Christian, although by no means limited to that religion. By asserting the universal and inalienable rights of human beings considered as individuals, while in reality exploiting the mobility of capital to degrade the living conditions of large segments of the population, both in developed and so-­called developing countries, such policies and the institutions that implement them impose—­in the name of a “free market”—­ever more brutally the law of the stronger on those who are weaker. This then evokes a counterviolence that generally lacks the sophisticated means and technology required to sublimate its effects into forms considered by this same exploitative culture to be morally acceptable. The perpetrators of such counterviolence therefore use whatever means are at their disposal to display proudly and provocatively on a scale hitherto unthinkable for nonstate actors—­thanks to the internet—­their ability to disrupt and to destroy, often indiscriminately. But of course, the officially sanctioned violence of the state is often no less indiscriminate, although this aspect is generally ignored by the mainstream media. Both systemic and sublimated socioeconomic violence, backed up by police and military power wherever necessary, as well as the counterviolence they produce, only reinforce what can be called the militarization not only of thinking, but of feeling. If such militarization is characterized by a Zwang, it is the compulsion to view the world in terms of mutually exclusive adversaries, us-­against-­them. In the Western tradition, this binarism continues a mode of reasoning that has existed at least since the Bible and the Greeks.16 The affective-­emotional correlative of this adversarial mode of perception requires the identification of an “enemy” in order to be able to reduce complex feelings to a single, noncontradictory emotion that can then be channeled and directed against the identified object, which can be a person, group, country, ideology, or even another “feeling.” The “war against terror” exemplifies this militarization of feeling: the enemy is defined as terror, which as a form of extreme anxiety is both self-­referential and object-­oriented. Since this feeling itself is difficult to combat, “terror” is personalized and externalized in “terrorists,” who can be attacked if not eliminated. “Terror” as the work of “terrorists” can be used to mobilize force against the supposedly external enemy. This mobilizing force On the Militarization of Feeling   43

encourages individuals and groups to overlook domestic problems, except where these can be attributed to foreigners—­migrants, or persons whose foreign origins prevails over their allegiance to the “homeland.” Thus, “militarization” in its more traditional forms, serves to identify—­ that is, to name and to localize—­the other as “enemy” to be combated, “neutralized,” and if possible, destroyed, once and for all. This latter phrase suggests that one of the most disturbing aspects of this process is that it construes the resolution of conflict increasingly in terms of a “final solution”—­what the Nazis called an Endlösung17—­whether this means the permanent suppression of the enemy or the end of the world, or possibly both. Of course, from a biblical (especially New Testament) point of view, the end of the world, like the end of its individuals, can be welcomed as the beginning of a new, better form of existence for true believers, who will accede to a blessed and “eternal life,” while the others will be damned. Hence the end of the world is seen as well worth the sacrifices and losses that such a transition would inevitably entail. The development of weapons of mass destruction, and in particular the atom bomb, has played an important role in encouraging apocalyptic thinking, both in general (understandable) and in evangelical terms.18 Thus the word “compulsion” or “constraint,” used apparently tautologically by Benjamin in his definition of militarism, allows us to see the process not just as the exercise of force or violence, but as already a product of it. We can even go a step further and suggest that what characterizes the militaristic response to Zwang is the effort to disambiguate and disentangle complexities that allow no simple unification or identification, nor even proper naming. Conflicts are thus brought into line with identity-­based thinking. For Freud, the distinguishing character of feeling or affect under the aspect of the unconscious was its ambivalence: that is, the conjunction of two or more logically incompatible and nonunifiable tendencies or strivings, such as love and hate of the same object or person. Freud was also well aware that the norms and habits of “rational thinking” were by no means unrelated to this Zwang, which is to say, to the compulsion to separate and to isolate in order better to identify and to control. He identified an important “defense mechanism” of the “ego,” which he called “isolating,” with the more familiar thought-­form of “concentration,” using in German, by the way, a word that was soon to be put into practice as the name of 44   On the Militarization of Feeling

a lethal political institution.19 Today, given the prevalence of visuality in our culture, an often-­used synonym for concentration is focusing. “Our culture” here designates not just those based in the English language. Werner Heisenberg designated what in English is called the “uncertainty principle” by using the German word unscharf: Unschärferelation—­literally, unsharp relation. The word “unsharp” refers to the focusing of a lens in an optical mechanism. The visual dimension of “uncertainty” carries over into English in the phrase “fuzzy logic,” although most discussion of this and related concepts simply take the role of visuality in determining the “vagueness” or “variableness”—­the ambiguity or ambivalence—­of concepts for granted.20

DRONING OUT DEATH If “ambivalence” is anathema to cultures and traditions based on the notion of an unambiguously sovereign “ego” or individual, it is because this complexity of thought and feeling problematizes what such societies generally take to be their supreme goal: that of controlling the other and the future by construing both as functions of a sovereign self. A key battleground in this project has always been the bodily existence of singular living beings, since it is in corporeal existence that identity and alterity, singularity and generality, inseparably converge. The traditional military response—­in the West at least—­to anxieties connected to the vulnerability of bodies has been to attempt to establish a regime of discipline designed in some ways to extend that developed by Christian asceticism: control of the body as a means of purging the soul of its sinful mortality and preparing it for its resurrection in an eternal life. It is precisely this desire for physical control, informed by a strong and long theological history, that makes “militarization” so powerful and so durable. The disciplined, hierarchical, highly structured unity of the military corps thus embodies on a collective level its mission of controlling and transcending the vulnerabilities of bodies qua singular living entities. Training bodies both to be interchangeable and either to be or to control lethal weapons in “neutralizing” the bodies of the enemy are essential parts of this military attempt to transcend the physical limitations of singular bodies qua mortal and vulnerable. This explains part of the power of militarism to appeal to societies marked by conflicts and fragmentation of all sorts, On the Militarization of Feeling   45

and also its ability to serve as both a model for and an instrument of a collective that seeks to conceive of itself as “one nation, indivisible, under God”21: the country, the nation, and ideals held to be unambiguous (“freedom,” “democracy,” etc.). This also explains the leadership principle in military hierarchy, where the unity of the corps is secured and embodied in the individuals that head it. Horizontal coherence is assured by a vertical hierarchy. This appeal becomes all the greater the more vulnerable large segments of a given population feel themselves to be; the fact that what they feel corresponds to the degradation of their conditions of life of course reinforces this sense of victimization. The development and spread of what Derrida has called “tele-­technologies”22 has tended to increase this sense of vulnerability, at the same time that it also creates new forms of “empowerment.” However, the ever-­greater control of the internet and communication networks by oligarchical groups whose interests are generally (although not always) short-­term profit maximization contributes to the sense of insecurity and instability, while also tending to delegitimate authorities and institutions traditionally associated with the media and politics. This makes the appeal of so-­called outsiders, and the wealthy, who usually are entirely integrated in the existing power structures, all the greater. There is, however, one particular tele-­technological transformation that has over the past decades vastly altered not only the ways in which the military and militarization function but also the very nature of that functioning itself. I am referring here to drone warfare: the emergence of a tele-­technology that enables killing and destruction to be imposed at a distance and without any direct physical risk to those operating the weaponry. In addition to the obvious military advantage of being able to kill at a distance without being threatened oneself, this new weaponry also tends to reduce resistance at home that previously was provoked by domestic loss of life. This resistance became particularly important during the U.S. war against Vietnam. One response was to abolish “compulsory” universal conscription, the “draft,” in 1973, thus leaving it to economic constraints—­Zwänge—­to motivate young people to join the military. War was thus “removed”—­or at least, distanced—­from the everyday lives of the younger generation, which outside of the Vietnamese themselves (and the Cambodians and Laotians) had the most to lose in the conflict

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and therefore were prone to developing a mass resistance movement. At the same time, Hollywood action films, together with the emerging video-­ game industry, contributed to giving the exercise of lethal violence a more desirable image with which to identify. The development of military-­ inspired video games helped at the same time to represent lethal violence as something that could be manipulated and mastered, above all as a technique that imposes death upon others, but never upon oneself. Unless, of course, dropping out of the game could be considered such an imposition. But the last line of David Cronenberg’s film Ex-­istenz, when the Chinese waiter who is threatened with a gun asks if “we are still in the game,” leaves it to the viewer to determine the relationship between the game world and the outside world.23 Where does the game start and end? The spread of “reality shows,” which have very real social and political effects, belies the traditional distinction between fiction and reality. Fiction has always had its distinctive reality; but only now are we becoming aware of the extent to which social and political reality also have their part of fiction. Hence, perhaps, the shock of 9/11 in the United States, which brought home the realization that “the towering inferno” could not always be held at distance by movie “block-­busters,” but could one day engulf the heartland itself. To be sure, the fear that this might happen is what made horror films of all sorts into entertainment in the first place. They entertained by both indulging the fears of their viewers, while at the same time consoling them with the traditional aesthetic-­fictional alibi that the spectator is safe as long as he or she remains mere spectator. The emergency signalized by the appellation, the “nickname,” “9/11,” thus became the decontextualized cipher of the loss of this illusion—­which here meant the loss of the sense of being protected from spectacularly destructive acts of violence. Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, announced by antiphrasis and negation what then could and did happen on American soil. The official political response was to declare a “War on Terror,” a name that has the singular virtue of designating quite precisely its unusual object: not simply some sort of external enemy, but rather the feeling of “terror” itself. The “Axis of Evil” was brought home as “terror”—­not the terror of the French Revolution, but the terror felt by a people that had deemed itself untouchable and invulnerable, beyond the reach of its adversaries, who of course had to be foreign. Almost forgotten was the bombing of Oklahoma City

On the Militarization of Feeling   47

six years before by Timothy McVeigh, aided by a group of accomplices, all U.S-­born citizens. Those whose memory could reach back some forty years earlier might have recalled a similar state of shock when an American pilot, Gary Francis Powers, flying a U2 spy plane over the Soviet Union, was brought down by a missile on May 1, 1960. With this event it was not only the confidence of his employers, the CIA, that was shaken—­they were convinced that the U2, reflecting the superiority of American technology, could fly high enough to be out of range of all existing Soviet missile systems. The American public was by and large also shocked to find out that Americans were spying on a foreign country, even one that was their official enemy. But given that there was no loss of life, and given that the event took place far away from the homeland, the loss of a sense of invulnerability—­already shaken by Sputnik and the Soviet acquisition of atomic weaponry—­was still not nearly as traumatic as in 2001. Above all, the shooting down of the U2 did not take place before the eyes of the television cameras and in the “host country,” but only became known to the general public days after it happened, and with no audiovisual “live” programming. However precarious the security of the spectator had thus been rendered by these and other events, the desire for such security still played and plays a decisive role in the ability of militarism to impose itself as the primary means of conflict resolution. This is where the rise of drone warfare comes in. In 1972, an article was published in Science for the People, a critical journal published out of Berkeley, whose title, “Toys against the People, or Remote Warfare,” announced that a new kind of war was being prepared: Warfare was to be waged “remotely,” at a distance, via “toys”—­the American nickname for the products of the new technology.24 The use of the word “drone” to designate “pilotless aircraft” has been retraced to 1946, when an article in the magazine Popular Science noted that drones, as the radio-­controlled craft are called, have many potentialities, civilian and military. Someday huge mother ships may guide fleets of long-­distance, cargo-­carrying airplanes across continents and oceans. Long-­range drones armed with atomic bombs could be flown by accompanying mother ships to their targets and home in for perfect hits.25 48   On the Militarization of Feeling

The word itself probably derives from the sound of airplane engines, and emphasizes a dull, repetitive, mechanical “tone” that already prefigures the unchangeable state its lethal weaponry is designed to bring about. You don’t argue or discuss with a “drone” any more than with someone who “drones on.”26 But for all of its technological novelty, the drone can be seen as fulfilling the aim already ascribed to militarization, namely that of transcending the limits of the human body—­and hence, up to a point, over the mind associated with it—­by establishing control over physical existence. In this case, however, the control is not just over the body, but over the space-­ time continuum in which bodies traditionally are situated. To understand the complex manner in which drone warfare both continues and changes the traditional mission of militarization, it may be useful to turn briefly to one of the most prescient works of literature in this respect as in others—­one that although classified as a work of fiction still touches the nerve of this issue. I am referring to Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy. It dates from the middle of the eighteenth century, and in it we can read the following: An eye for all the world is exactly like a cannon, in this respect: That it is not so much the eye or the cannon, in themselves, as it is the carriage of the eye—­and the carriage of the cannon, by which both the one and the other are enabled to do so much execution.27

Neither things, nor organs themselves, are decisive, but the vehicles and manner in which they are situated and move: their “carriage.” What in the eighteenth century was still unthinkable has in the twenty-­first become banal: the separation of the organs by which data are received, processed, and controlled, from the body that carries out the surveillance and destruction. Cannon, eye, and carriage have been fused into one vehicle, which in turn is controlled remotely by electronic impulses and code, transmitted via satellite all over the world (and beyond). Unmanned, remotely controlled weapons, and in particular aircraft, developed out of surveillance systems. And surveillance, it should be noted, is not just visual today but also acoustical, thermic, and indeed, multisensory. What has changed, to be sure, with respect to eighteenth-­century warfare of the sort that Tristram Shandy was concerned with, relates precisely On the Militarization of Feeling   49

to what in the passage quoted is called “the carriage”—­which in the context of the novel itself is of decisive importance. There it refers first to the eyes or indeed the pupils of the Widow Wadman, who has her heart set on making Tristram’s Uncle Toby her husband, here by inviting him to search deep within her eyes for “a mote—­or sand—­or something,” which, as she insists, “is not in the white.” Narrator Tristram thus, in comparing an eye to a cannon, simultaneously urges his reader to attend not only to the organ of sight itself but even more to its “carriage”—­for it is this that enables the eye, like the cannon, “to do so much execution.” It is not in what is bright that power and fascination inhere, but in the dark.28 To be sure, few texts might seem as far removed from questions of contemporary militarism as Tristram Shandy, whose nine volumes were published serially from 1759 to 1767. However, as remote as the novel may seem from many of the considerations of present-­day “militarism” and militarization, its staging of the experience and consequences of war as they affect that most singular figure, Captain Toby Shandy (and his loyal comrade in arms, Corporal Trim) highlight questions that even and perhaps especially today are anything but obsolete. However, since not all readers can be expected to have Tristram Shandy present to mind, a short and selective résumé may be useful. Although warfare, as a metaphor at least, is everywhere present in this novel, its initial entry takes place before the novel begins, as it were—­which is to say, before the stories it recounts take place. It arrives in the form of an artillery shell that wounds Captain Toby Shandy, brother of Walter Shandy and uncle of the title figure of the novel, Tristram, during the battle of Namur, in Flanders, during the War of the Grand Alliance, when in 1695 the Allies were able to retake the town of Namur in Flanders, which had fallen to the French in 1692. But as with most events in this novel, the manner in which the event occurs is not simple. It is not the artillery shell itself that directly wounds Uncle Toby: rather, it is a fragment from the protective wall or parapet near where Captain Shandy was posted. The shell strikes the wall and in so doing dislodges a stone from it, which at reduced although still considerable speed then strikes Captain Shandy on or about his groin.29 As a result of this initially quite painful wound, Captain Shandy’s military career is brought to a premature close, and he is obliged to retire to the English countryside, where, at the invitation of his brother, Walter—­the putative father of Tristram—­he, accompanied by his servant, 50   On the Militarization of Feeling

Corporal Trim, finally move into Shandy Castle and become long-­term residents there. During the initial phase of his long and difficult convalescence, Captain Shandy seeks to assuage the curiosity of his well-­meaning visitors while at the same time soothing the pain of his wound by trying to communicate to them the exact conditions under which he incurred it. The question that arises and resonates throughout the novel, is simply: “Where did [Uncle Toby] receive his wound?” Although Uncle Toby would love to respond with an equally simple answer, he is constantly at a loss to communicate the “exact [or “identical”] spot of ground” where he was standing when he was struck by the splintered piece of wall. Language alone does not suffice to communicate this place with exactitude : “T’was not by ideas,—­by heaven! his life was put in jeopardy by words.” (II, 2). It therefore forces Toby to change his medium; he tries to depict the spot precisely by drawing a map of the area of Namur where he was wounded. But this graphic medium turns out to be no more capable of relieving the former solder from what today might be called “post-­traumatic stress.” And so at the suggestion of his loyal adjutant and valet, Corporal Trim, who had also been compelled to retire from the military due to a knee injury, he comes upon the expedient of reconstructing the battle in miniature on the “bowling green” of Shandy Castle. This place has the advantage of not only being conveniently available for such a reenactment but also remaining out of the sight of prying, unwanted eyes. The question, however, that continues to haunt the novel, as well as Uncle Toby himself, derives from the ambiguity of the word “where”: “Where did Uncle Toby receive his wound?” applies of course to the site of the battle, Namur, but can also refer to the place on his body where the wound was inflicted. This parallelism between the singular body and the general sites of military action and politics more generally—­the “body politic”—­runs throughout Tristram Shandy and indeed constitutes one of its distinctive traits. The relation of the singular to the general passes by way of the convergent and divergent experiences of these different but interdependent bodies. In the case of Uncle Toby, the exact whereabouts of his wound can have decisive consequences for his future life, affecting his capacity to father a progeny, as well as to sexually satisfy a possible spouse. Toby himself seems for the most part unaware of this ambiguity, “concentrating” instead only on its “extensive” dimension—­the field On the Militarization of Feeling   51

of battle—­and ignoring its intensive, corporeal one. This could, from a Freudian perspective, be easily assimilated to a gesture of “isolation,” if not of “disavowal.” In the latter parts of the novel, where Tristram recounts the courtship of his uncle by the Widow Wadman, nomen est omen, the lack of an unambiguous answer to this question—­or rather, the impossibility of Toby facing up to the question at all—­causes him to withdraw and the courtship to collapse. With the outlines of this story of Captain Toby Shandy in mind, we can more easily interpret one of its more dramatic moments, which arrives following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which deprives Toby and Trim, at least temporarily, of the material of their “hobbyhorse,” the military conflicts being waged on the Continent. In their reenactment, which is now temporarily suspended, it should be remembered that the only “bodies” present, apart from those of Toby and Trim, are those of inanimate things: the weaponry being used, and the objects representing in miniature the towns and cities being attacked or defended. In other words, the vulnerable bodies of living participants have already been “transcended” in this reenactment, which in this respect can be seen as a defensive aestheticization of military defense—­and attack.30 With the cessation of hostilities, Toby not only sees himself threatened by the loss of his “hobbyhorse.” He also finds himself confronted with the ironic accusations of his brother, Walter, who does not miss the opportunity of reminding Toby of the moral dubiousness of his activities: Never mind, brother Toby . . . by God’s blessing we shall have another war break out again some of these days; and when it does,—­the belligerent powers, if they would hang themselves, cannot keep us out of play. (VI, xxxi)

Upon hearing this, Captain Toby feels compelled to launch a formal defense of his hobbyhorse, and beyond that, of his fascination with war more generally—­a fascination that depends in large part on a decisive distinction, which he draws as follows: —­’Tis one thing, brother Shandy, for a soldier to hazard his own life—­to leap first down into the trench, where he is sure to be cut to pieces. . . . And tis another thing to reflect on the miseries of war;—­to 52   On the Militarization of Feeling

reflect on the desolation of whole countries, and consider the intolerable fatigues and hardships which the soldier himself, the instrument who works them, is forced (for six-­pence a day, if he can get it) to undergo. (VI, xxxi)

Toby, whose response displays a surprising awareness of the destructive aspects of war—­“the desolation of whole countries”—­as well as of “the intolerable fatigues and hardships” imposed on the “instrument” of that desolation, the soldier, “(for six-­pence a day, if he can get it)”—­Toby also insists on the legitimacy of his fascination with this same activity over and beyond the destruction it involves in reality: For what is war [. . .] when fought as ours has been, upon principles of liberty, and upon principles of honour—­what is it but the getting together of quiet and harmless people, with their swords in their hands, to keep the ambitious and the turbulent within bounds? And heaven is my witness, brother Shandy, that the pleasure I have taken in these things,—­and that infinite delight in particular, which has attended my sieges in my bowling green, has arose within me, and I hope in the Corporal too, from the consciousness we both had that in carrying them on, we were answering the great ends of our creation. (VI, xxxi)

Captain Shandy, who is also the beloved, kindly, totally unaggressive uncle of Tristram, provides us with insight into some of the essential elements responsible for the continuing appeal of “militarism.” To affirm the value of war without denying its destructive elements is made possible by the mission of “keeping the turbulent in bounds” and thereby answering to “the great ends of our creation.” But within what bounds exactly—­and to what end? And how does the affirmation relate to the different sort of pleasure—­“that infinite delight . . . which has attended my sieges in my bowling green”? If the very next two chapters of the novel both begin by an apostrophe of “the Christian reader” (“I told the Christian reader—­I say Christian—­ hoping he is one”)—­to make allowances for “the strange way” Tristram “is obliged” to tell his story, with “so many breaks and gaps in it” (VI, xxxiii)—­ and indeed if this apostrophe seems to be utterly discontinuous with what has come before, Toby’s apology of war and Tristram’s discontinuous, On the Militarization of Feeling   53

digressive-­progressive way of telling his stories are not entirely unrelated. For both are responses to a single world, or rather, Earth. They stand, as it were, on the same ground (which it should be added, is eminently historical). An initial account of the specific terrain on which Uncle Toby found himself prior to being wounded also is relevant to understanding the discontinuities that mark Tristram’s narrative style: What rendered the account of this affair the more intricate to my uncle Toby was this,—that in the attack of the counterscarp . . .—­the ground was cut and cross-­cut with such a multitude of dykes, drains, rivulets, and sluices, on all sides—­ . . . that frequently he could neither get backwards or forwards to save his life. (64)

That the setting in which Toby was wounded is thus described as one in which a total loss of control is imposed by the nature of grounds on which it is impossible to take a stand, much less move about—­this cut-­up ground returns persistently throughout the novel, and not least of all to characterize the act of writing itself, which also can be described as constantly cutting up. Tristram as narrator has the same problems in using language as though it were unambiguous and could describe things exactly. But he understands the reason why this is so. “But need I tell you, Sir, that the circumstances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape” (III.2, 119). In short, “things in the world,” like signifiers in language, only get their “size and shape” from their relationships to what is outside themselves—­to “the circumstances with which everything in this world is begirt”—­which is to say clothed and surrounded. But there is no intrinsic limit to these surroundings: this holds for Saussure, and Sterne, who neither could nor needed to read the linguist, was well aware of it. As Tristram’s father consequently observes, “The life of a writer, whatever he might fancy to the contrary, [is] not so much a state of composition as a state of warfare” (V, 26). This is already a very Nietzschean way of conceiving the world and the language that determines it: not just as neutral networks but as relations of forces and of conflicts. In short, as war. The difference between Tristram Shandy and his two antecedents, Walter and Toby, is that they constantly struggle to win this war in a definitive manner—­a military victory, as it were—­whereas Tristram under54   On the Militarization of Feeling

stands that the war can be waged, negotiated, but never won once and for all. Walter and Toby try to accomplish this, but the more they exert themselves, the more they lose control over what they are doing. But for Tristram Shandy, the novel and the narrator, there is no simple or definitive, no final solution to this problem, and this is demonstrated most clearly in the figure who perhaps represents the author most closely, Parson Yorick, under whose name Sterne published his sermons. At the same time, this name is clearly fictional and literary, referring to the dead jester in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who in a famous graveyard scene comes upon the skull of Yorick. Like the king who has been murdered, Yorick’s namesake is long since gone, and Yorick “himself,” in the fictional world of Tristram Shandy, will also be the victim of a kind of war and murder, precisely because he was unwilling to take the world as seriously as it wanted, tended to make jokes at everyone’s expense—­and ultimately at his own. Yorick was a debtor, a mortgagee, who refused to pay back his debts in full—­or at all. This is a dark comment on the frictional nature of fiction, which although “unreal,” can provoke and suffer very real and deadly consequences. Yorick, and his descendant, Tristram, thus articulate an attitude at the antipodes of the politically dominant tendencies of the world in which they live—­and ours as well: namely, one that seeks to sustain order and self-­identity at all costs, even at the cost of exacerbating the wounds they are trying to heal. It is the order of the signifier, which is very uneasy with signifying.

EPIGRAPH: DRONING ON . . . If Uncle Toby, with the help of Trim, was able to assume the role of a re-­ active observer by reenacting in miniature the sieges of a remote war on the peaceful green of Shandy Hall, that position has today devolved on those who remotely control drones observing and destroying targets half a world away. Unlike Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, such pilots and their commanders however remain physically unscathed. But this is not always true of their mental condition; nor is it true of the society they are ostensibly defending, but which finds itself increasingly under siege, from without but also from within. The sight of body bags has been replaced by puffs of smoke on a computer or television screen, in which black-­and-­ white stick figures are first targeted, placed between crosshairs, and then On the Militarization of Feeling   55

shortly thereafter simply volatilized in bursts of smoke. Or so it seems, on the screen at least. The spectacle appears as one of total control, defying the distances of space and time. But the scenario runs on, and the mission is rarely accomplished. Space and time tend to return with a vengeance, albeit in the most unexpected forms. That the expansion of drone weaponry could thus presuppose a digitalization of the phenomenal world appears to reconcile two biblical injunctions that apparently contradict each other: the first prohibits humans from making graven images,31 while the second describes man himself as created “in the image” of God. In the digitalized tracking and targeting of drone pilots, the image on the screen is both affirmed and negated at once: the target is located as an image, and then effaced. The image that remains is that of the destruction of images and of what they represent. Thus, the mono-­theological origin of the notion of absolute sovereignty as the right over life and death on a global scale today finds a certain culmination in the process of drone warfare, as well as in its audiovisual aftereffects, through which militarism seeks to make good finally on its mission of transcending corporeal vulnerability precisely by demonstrating its ability to destroy everything in bodily form that is deemed to be the enemy. In this sense, drone warfare presents itself as a new and invulnerable protective wall, securing those who are behind it from the force of what is outside. But there are signs that this protective wall may well turn out to be as porous and as menacing as the parapet whose stone struck Toby Shandy. Just as the defensive wall became the source of the projectile that wounded Captain Shandy, so the effects of drones seem to be ricocheting against their operators in an ongoing cycle of destruction. And as long as feeling and thinking insist on focusing on clearly identifiable objects, faces, and names in order to alleviate anxieties before what cannot simply be clearly cut—­as long as they insist on privileging the signified over signifying, life in general over life in the singular, mankind over the odd man out, insider over outsider—­there is little hope that this self-­destructive cycle will be broken.

56   On the Militarization of Feeling

3

Bare Life and Life in General The Question of “Concentration”

It is reassuring to think that it is possible to make distinctions that are clear-­ cut, especially where violence is concerned. It is reassuring because we like to believe that we can clearly and unequivocally distinguish violence from nonviolence, destruction from construction, killing from vivifying, death from life. It is reassuring not least of all because such clear-­cut distinctions seem to give us a hold on whatever is being distinguished while keeping us at a safe distance from it. In his much discussed but highly controversial essay, “What Is a Camp?”1 Giorgio Agamben proposes an unusual but ostensibly clear-­cut definition of modern politics, that in turn reposes on a no less clear-­cut definition of what he calls “the camp.” Up to now, he argues, “the camp” has been seen strictly as “the place where the most absolute conditio inhumana that ever existed on earth has been realized; in the final analysis it’s the facts that count, for the victims as for their posterity” (47). In contrast to this approach, Agamben proposes to define the camp not on the basis “of the events that took place there” but rather “by asking: What is a camp? What is its legal and political structure such that such events could have happened there?” (47). And he concludes: “This will lead us to consider the camp not as an historical fact and as an anomaly belonging to the past, but as the secret matrix, the nomos of the political space in which we still live.” I first heard Agamben’s text in 1995 when he presented it at a conference organized by Hent de Vries and myself in Amsterdam, on the relation of violence, identity, and self-­determination, the title under which two years later a volume of papers presented at the conference was published that contained Agamben’s talk, translated by Daniel Heller-­Roazen.2 I mention this not merely to recount the ancient history of this highly controversial essay, but because that history, perhaps like “the camp” itself, continues to bear on the present. At the time, Agamben’s talk was bitterly criticized in 57

the discussion that followed, and I remember being one of the few who defended it—­not necessarily the theory in its entirety, to be sure, but the questions it sought to raise, and to answer. I still feel that those questions are very much worth raising, even if, as will become clear from this chapter, certain of the answers that Agamben supplied seemed to me then as now to require considerable elaboration, if not revision. What at the time, and surely for many readers ever since, appeared particularly scandalous in Agamben’s theory of “the camp”—­a phrase I am putting in quotes, for reasons that will soon appear—­was precisely the point on which he insisted at the outset: namely, his assertion that the essence or nature of “the camps” could not be derived from the “events” that took place in them. I note here that Agamben begins his essay by referring to “the camps” in the plural—­a usage that inevitably connotes not simply “camps” in general, but rather the Nazi extermination camps in particular. However, as his argument unfolds, it becomes clear that the use of “camps” in the plural refers for him, theoretically at least, mainly to the empirical diversity of “camps” rather than to their “essence,” which he designates almost always in the singular, using the definite article: “the” camp. In the question that serves as title of the essay: “What Is a Camp”—­the indefinite article therefore stands as an implicit announcement of the unitary “essence” that for him will characterize “the camp” as the hidden nomos of contemporary politics qua biopolitics. The “singularity” of “the camp,” then, has to be sharply distinguished from the view of the camp that he combats, and that construes its uniqueness as a historical “anomaly.” This is an important distinction, which, however, I will go on to interpret in a somewhat different way from that of Agamben. The singularity of “the camps” then, for Agamben, is not anomalous but rather inscribed in a historical continuity—­one that affects not only the past but also the present and the future. This in turn presupposes that, despite the vast variety of camps, there is a single structure, a single condition of possibility that unifies and underlies them all and therefore makes it possible to see them, in their unitary singularity, as the “secret matrix” of politics today. A short remark on the use of this term, “condition of possibility.” Agamben does not use it explicitly, but as the passage quoted indicates, he seeks to discover the “political-­juridical structure such that such events could have been possible.” This working hypothesis makes two assump58   Bare Life and Life in General

tions: first, that the conditions under which the events of the camp took place were essentially “political-­juridical” in character. Second, that such conditions were not just necessary but also sufficient to produce the events that took place in the camp. Both of these assumptions, and above all their connection, which suggests that the political-­juridical constitutes the necessary and sufficient condition of the “camps,” can and should be contested. I want to suggest that they may be necessary, but that they are not sufficient to describe the reality of the camps—­which remains diverse enough to resist assimilation to any single, unitary essence or cause. At the outset I want to make two introductory remarks regarding this double assumption or assertion of Agamben’s, whose argument in “What Is a Camp?” should be read in connection with Homo Sacer, published in the same year, 1995. First, I want to make clear that what I find important in Agamben’s approach is his effort to de-­quarantine “the camps” by seeing their connection to a larger historical context and tradition; he thereby refuses to construe them primarily as an extreme manifestation of human evil. This is not to diminish the terrible singularity of “the camps” qua institutions of genocidal extermination. Rather, it is to argue that singularity in general, and that of the camps in particular, remains a relational category, and that it must be interpreted therefore with respect to long-­ standing traditions and tendencies. To relate evil to phenomena that are often thought of as neutral or even as good is not to trivialize it, but to take full measure of the complexities of its genealogy, without which it could never have acquired the force to impose itself. In short, the uniqueness of the camps should not be treated as something essentially isolated from other, more widespread phenomena. Agamben’s effort to locate the principle or essence of the camps in a biopolitical and juridical structure, whatever its merits and demerits, constitutes one such effort. Such an approach is indispensable, if one hopes to learn anything at all from the past that might enable one to avoid recurrences in the future. However—­and this is my second point—­it is not enough to merely describe a series of historical developments, however significant they may be, such as the elevation of birth to a biopolitical determinant of citizenship (implicit in the use of the word “nation” to designate the primary political entity), in order to account for “the camps.” Such factors may well have contributed to those conditions, may even have been “necessary” conditions of their emergence, but their mere factual existence is not sufficient Bare Life and Life in General   59

to account for what was essential to them. More than a mere description of “juridical-­political” institutions seems required in order to explain the force that in turn made the incredible violence of those camps a reality. But I am getting ahead of myself, so let me slow down and first summarize what I take to be Agamben’s argument in this essay. Here are his three main points: (1) “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception begins to become the rule” (49). Which is to say, the camp is designed to make durable a state that is initially conceived as temporary—­ the suspension of normal legal procedures in the face of a situation of “exception.” More abstractly, a particular organization of space is designed to control time as a medium of change. But the organization is highly unusual, since it is based negatively on the suspension of otherwise existing legal restraints and guarantees. This situation of nonlaw makes the camp a place where, to quote Hannah Arendt’s famous characteristic of the camps, echoing the words of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, “anything is possible.” What Agamben does not discuss, however, is the introductory part of the famous utterance of the Grand Inquisitor. The entire phrase is: “If God is dead, then anything is possible.” In what way a certain experience of the death of God could be a condition of possibility of the camps is a question to which I will later seek to respond. (2) Since the camp is a place where the usual legal restraints are no longer operative, it can be said to constitute a certain exteriority that is placed within the scope and power of a system: it marks the inclusion of exclusion. (3) “Through the fact that its inmates have previously been stripped of all political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space ever realized, where the powers-­that-­be confront pure life without any mediation” (51). It is this convergence of the juridical-­political “state of exception” with the “biopolitical” reduction of life (bios) to “pure” or “bare life” (zoe)3 that, according to Agamben, finds its institutional expression in “the camp,” a space in which “anything is possible.” (I note in passing that the power of fascination of this often-­quoted assertion appears to be in direct proportion to its vagueness and inappropriateness: in the camps it is obviously not true that “anything was possible,” unless, that is, “anything” is understood to mean “any act of violence.” I take the readiness to equate “anything” with “any act of violence” to be symptomatic of the fascination 60   Bare Life and Life in General

exercised by the extreme and lethal cruelty of “the camps”—­a symptom that merits further reflection, which I cannot develop here.) In any case, the phrase “anything is possible” takes on a special significance for Agamben. Whereas for Arendt it was indissolubly linked to the death camps, Agamben expands it to apply to camps that, outwardly at least, have little to do with concentration camps. Agamben—­and this of course was what provoked indignation when he gave the paper as a talk in Amsterdam, and since—­sees the essence of the camps as comprehending not just their genocidal operation but also, more recently, the detention camps established in international airports, where stateless or paperless persons are held incommunicado for indefinite periods; or internment camps, such as those established by the French Government and then taken over by Vichy;4 or even the “gated communities” in the United States. Presumably he would also include refugee camps for displaced persons in the general category. In all of these cases, the rule of law is suspended indefinitely (although it is not quite clear to me how this would apply to “gated communities”—­or for that matter, whether a confined space is necessary to have the rule of law suspended).5 However, this extension of the notion of the “camp” makes clear Agamben’s main point, which is that the decisive quality that defines the camps is that its inmates, or residents, should be stripped of all legal protection and thereby accorded the status of “bare life.” To understand the implications of this argument it is helpful to recall its more fully developed discussion in Homo Sacer.6 The homo sacer is a person who can be killed without incurring punishment, and whose death cannot be understood as a “sacrifice” (81–­84). The significance of this figure for Agamben derives from the fact that it exemplifies “the originary ‘political’ relation” (95) insofar as the homo sacer embodies a sort of “inclusive exclusion” that allows it to “serve as referent of the sovereign decision.” Agamben thus adopts and adapts the notion of sovereignty elaborated by Schmitt in his essay “Political Theology,” in which the sovereign is defined as “he who decides on the state of exception.” Sovereignty defines itself as the power to decide when the constitution is to be suspended in order to cope with a state of exception that the generalities of positive law cannot accommodate. This notion of exceptionality reflects Schmitt’s antinomian conception of law as such. Law is antinomian insofar as it must seek to reconcile the general—­upon which positive law depends—­with Bare Life and Life in General   61

the singular, qua “case.” This is required in order not just for law to be applicable or enforceable, but for it to function as law. From this point of view, a law that cannot be “enforced”—­that is, effectively “applied” to singular “cases,” is not a law. This implies that its necessary applicability to singular events inserts a gap within the explicit formulation of the law that the law itself cannot bridge. In short, in order for laws to function, cases must be submitted to verdicts or judgments (the German word, Urteil, signifies both). In order to bridge the gap between the intrinsic generality of positive law and its singular application or enforcement, Schmitt introduces the necessity of a “decision” that is no longer based wholly on cognitive judgment but rather contains something like a leap of faith. It is this leap that makes law both intrinsically political and intrinsically transcendent (theological, in certain interpretations)—­precisely by virtue of its lack of immanence.7 Between Political Theology (1922), which defines sovereignty as the power to decide the state of exception, and The Concept of the Political (1932), which defines the political as the effect of the “friend-­enemy grouping,” Schmitt implicitly introduces an element that will be decisive for Agamben’s later revision and elaboration of Schmittian doctrine. That element is the act of killing. For if Schmitt understands the “political” in his 1932 book as a result of the “friend-­enemy grouping,” the notion of the “enemy” entails the legitimacy of the act of killing. The enemy is not (yet) the homo sacer, but it does share with him certain properties: he is alive, and as enemy, it is legitimate to kill him. The possibility of such legitimate killing, which also does not involve a sacrifice, is for Schmitt the prerequisite of the formation and maintenance of a political entity. It should be noted that this does not mean that the enemy should be exterminated: enemies are required for the political to exist. Therefore, the extermination of enemies in general would equate with the end of the political. Conversely, this does not mean that individual enemies could not be exterminated, at least in part: the enemy in general, however, remains essential in Schmittian doctrine to the survival of the political. If we combine Schmitt’s earlier notion of sovereignty with his later notion of the political, we see that political sovereignty entails the legitimacy of killing, not as an end in itself, but in order that a greater life—­that of the polity—­can be protected and maintained. The Schmittian “enemy” is thus theoretically a forerunner of Agamben’s homo sacer, insofar as it con62   Bare Life and Life in General

stitutes the “external” element that is “internal” to the polity insofar as it allows it to constitute and perpetuate itself. This is why Schmitt’s formulation, “friend-­enemy grouping,” is precise although often neglected. Politics is a result of this grouping, not simply of the “enemy” per se. From this, two consequences can be drawn that bear on the question of the “camps.” First, one of the key moves made by Agamben, already anticipated by Schmitt (and surely by many others in different forms, since it is at the heart of Western political thinking at least since Hobbes), is the introduction of the grouping of “life” and “death” as a decisive constituent of the political. What is implicit in Schmitt, however, becomes explicit in Agamben. Borrowing the term from Benjamin, Agamben’s biopolitics will redefine Schmitt’s friend-­enemy grouping as the grouping of “bare life” with death. As Agamben puts it, “The originary political element is therefore not simply natural life, but life exposed to death (naked life or sacred life)” (98). To become “political,” however, qua “sovereign,” this “exposure” must be transformed from a state experienced passively or merely endured, to an act: “The primary foundation of political power is a life absolutely exposed to murder, which is politicized through the possibility of being put to death” (99). If putting-­to-­death can thus be said to constitute the “primary foundation” of political power, one can see how death camps could come to exemplify political power in an age of biopolitics. However, as we have seen, it is not this aspect of the camps—­their exterminatory function—­that Agamben sees as decisive for their biopolitical exemplarity, but rather the way in which they contribute to making the state of exception the rule, by treating their inmates as instances of “bare life,” stripped of all individuating legal and political status and protection. The death camp, then, would be the exemplary case of the biopolitical camp, since it not only “exposes” life to death but organizes its collective extermination. Thus, in terms of Agamben’s general theory, biopolitics, and indeed politics in general, entail legitimate killing as the exemplary act of sovereignty. But the constitution of “the camp” cannot be reduced to the act of killing, and hence to the organized extermination practiced in the Nazi (and other) death camps. That extermination was not the killing of bare life, but rather of socially, racially, ethnically determined groups that were considered to be inimical to life in general, as exemplified in the life of the German people. In short, there were general principles of selection Bare Life and Life in General   63

that functioned as “law” in determining the construction and operation of the Nazi death camps. Its choice was not between an unqualified zoe and a qualified bios, but between different forms of social, racial, ethnic, and political forms of life. The extermination was aimed not primarily at individuals but at groups: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists. This is the first consequence to be drawn from our brief review of the theoretical context in which Agamben develops his theory of “the camp.” But there is a second consequence that emerges when one reads the short essay in conjunction with the theory elaborated in Homo Sacer. The notion of political sovereignty that Agamben develops there is drawn from the experience of Roman law, and hence has the Roman Empire as its primary political referent. But as an empire, the structure of political space seems quite different from anything like the confined space of a “camp.” Agamben himself appears to say as much in the following observation: “The founding act of the city does not consist in the establishment of frontiers but rather in their effacement or their negation (as the myth of the foundation of Rome says in its own way, but also very clearly)” (95). In other words, to the extent that the political can be derived from Roman models, its political space will tend to be expansive, imperial, and universalizing, rather than limited and concentrationary, as with the camps. Put differently, the homo sacer could be killed with impunity, but he was not interned. In the Roman Empire this was not necessary: in the modern political world according to Agamben, it is. To be sure, Agamben conceives the modern function of the camps to be that of providing a more durable institutional form to the state of exception. But why should this have become necessary today?8 And above all, can a biopolitical–­ legal conception provide a satisfactory account either of the history of the camps or of their contemporary reality? Before pursuing this question, it may be helpful to recall something of that history. In their origins at least, the camps were more diverse than the image of death camps would suggest—­but from the start they were linked to killing. The term itself arose in connection not just with military conflicts, but with colonial ones. The first concentration camps appeared during the wars waged by the Spanish in Cuba from 1868 to 1878. Like the fortified villages later imposed by the French in the Algerian War and the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies during the Vietnam War, the reconcentrados were designed to group the civilian population in order 64   Bare Life and Life in General

to control them more effectively. Although designed initially as internment camps, hundreds of thousands of inmates perished in the reconcentrados, dying from starvation, sickness, or malnutrition. The killing was indirect but nonetheless systematic, since the conditions of life imposed by the Spanish in the camps were incompatible with long-­term survival. Photos of the victims and survivors show emaciated and cadaver-­like figures that closely resemble those of survivors of the death camps of World War II. The institution was then adopted by the United States in its war in the Philippines (1899–­1902) and by the British during the Second Boer War (1899–­1902). In short, the first concentration camps were instruments of European and American colonialism. Notwithstanding the high death rate in these camps due to impossible living conditions and brutal treatment, the camps were not yet organized as instruments of systematic, genocidal extermination. In other words, there could still be a distinction drawn between concentration camps as such and death camps. These early instances of concentration camps suggest that they developed not just as an elaboration of the “state of exception,” as Agamben argues, but more specifically as instruments in military conflicts promoting colonial expansion. Recent research has shown the colonial dimension to have been decisive in the later elaboration of Nazi genocide and its use of camps as the primary instrument of extermination. During its colonization of South West Africa, as later in the Second World War, Germany legitimated its war of annihilation by invoking the need for “living space” (Lebensraum), a term introduced in 1901 by the political geographer Friedrich Ratzel. German colonial policies were also justified by a rhetoric that treated Africans as subhumans who had to be exterminated in order to free up the “living space” needed by German settlers. Military operations against indigenous peoples systematically disregarded international rules of war and often deliberately aimed at the annihilation of the enemy rather than at mere conquest. Similar policies were then put into practice by the Nazis a half century later in Europe, this time with Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and communists as the primary victims. In addition to ideology and military policies, there also existed strong personal connections between the genocidal colonial warfare of Wilhelmine Germany and National Socialism. The most prominent link was no doubt that involving Dr. Heinrich Göring, who served as first Reichskommissar for Bare Life and Life in General   65

German South West Africa, and who was venerated by his son, Hermann; a no less influential figure was Franz Ritter von Epp, who played an active role in the annihilation of the Herero people (1904–­8), and then, after World War I, founded the Freikorps Epp, which helped to crush the short-­lived Munich Soviet Republic (1919). From 1919 to 1928 he served in Munich as commander of the newly formed Epp-­Battalion of the Reichswehr, in which capacity he directly employed future leaders of the Nazi party such as Gregor Strasser, Walther Schultze, and Hitler, before himself joining the party in 1928. Subsequently, Hitler assigned him the task of planning the colonial policies of the Reich, to be put into practice after the victorious end of the Second World War. In German South West Africa, concentration camps were created that in many respects anticipated those later established in Europe: they included what has been described as “the twentieth century’s first death camp,” namely, the Shark Island Camp (referred to at the time by German troops as the Todesinsel, Death Island), which operated from 1905 to 1907.9 In addition, internment and forced labor camps were also established, in which inmates were killed indirectly, through unlivable living conditions. In both cases, genocide served the purpose of creating Lebensraum. More generally, a pattern emerged in which not just death, but rather organized and systematic killing directed at ethnic groups was practiced and justified as a means of creating a higher and better life. We will return to the implications of this shortly. But first I want to suggest that precisely this conjunction of military and colonial conflict should encourage us to rethink the model of the homo sacer and of “bare life” advanced by Agamben as sufficient to account for—­or rather, designate—­the distinctive reality of the camps—­a term that should be used in the plural and never simply in the singular. For a purely biopolitical perspective seems unable to account for the selective process by which certain groups and not others were designated to be victims of the colonial, and then of the Nazi killing machine. The biopolitical mechanism based on “bare life” may have constituted a necessary condition for this process, but it remains to be shown that it was a sufficient one. For even though colonized peoples, in Africa and then in Europe, were denied the legal protection normally accorded to citizens, their exclusion from such protection went far beyond that of the homo sacer, who presumably still remained a Roman citizen even while being singled out as ca66   Bare Life and Life in General

pable of being killed without penalty or punishment. Rather, the colonial and racist criteria on which such victimization was based seems difficult to derive from the concept of “bare life,” inasmuch as it involves precisely a hierarchy not so much of life itself but of the living. It was this hierarchization of the living which enabled or even required certain groups to be put to death so that other groups, deemed better on the value-­scale, could survive and flourish. The existence of this kind of value system argues against the notion of “bare life” as an explanatory or enabling principle, especially if, as Agamben’s argument implies, such “bare life” is understood as the simple opposite to qualified, differentiated forms of life proper to different groups of people. Rather, the notion of “bare life”—­in the sense of “mere life”—­as opposed to a qualified life, seems to reflect more the conscious ideology of the killers than the actual logic that informed their acts and through which they justified their choice of victims. The African, and then European, groups selected for annihilation by the Nazis were not chosen as representatives or embodiments of “bare life,” but rather because they were deemed to embody inferior forms of life—­or indeed, forms of life that were inimical to the thriving of life in general. Such thriving was identified with races and peoples deemed to be not just biologically but also culturally superior. It seems, therefore, that the opposition between bios (qualified life) and zoe (bare life) that Agamben invokes does not really help to understand the specific forces driving the extermination policies that were implemented by the camps. It is instructive, therefore, to go back to Agamben’s main source for the notion of “bare life,” namely to Benjamin’s use of the term in his essay “Toward a Critique of Force” (Zur Kritik der Gewalt). The concluding pages of this essay, where Benjamin introduces and discusses the notion of “bare” or “mere life,” are among the most difficult that he wrote—­and those who have read Benjamin extensively will have had ample occasion to measure just what such difficulty can entail. Unfortunately, this complexity prevents me from discussing the arguments developed by Benjamin in any detail. Instead, I will, for the purposes of the argument that concerns me here, limit myself to commenting briefly one short but dense passage: Human being [Der Mensch] is in no way equivalent to the mere life [bloßen Leben] of man, no more than the mere life in him is [equivalent Bare Life and Life in General   67

to] any one of his situations [Zustände] and qualities, indeed not even to the uniqueness of his physical person. As sacred as the human is (or also that life in him, which consists identically in earthly life, death and outliving [Fortleben]), so little [sacred] are his situations, his physical, humanly vulnerable life. . . . It would surely be worthwhile investigating the origin of the dogma of the sacredness of Life. Possibly, indeed probably it is recent, the last aberration of a weakened Western tradition in search of its lost saint.10

“Mere life,” which Benjamin in this essay also identifies with “natural” and “physical” life, he derives from what he calls “mythical violence,” which he places at the origin of law, and which he sees epitomized in the punishment meted out to Niobe; a punishment Benjamin describes as “culpabilizing and penitent at the same time” (verschuldend und sühnend zugleich). He contrasts it with the divine violence that destroys the clan of Korah in the Bible, which he calls “absolving” (entsühnend): whereas “mythical violence is blood-­violence over mere Life for the sake of itself, divine, pure violence aims at pure Life for the sake of the Living” (199–­200). Like Agamben, Benjamin contrasts the notion of “pure life” with “mere life” in a discussion of violence, relating the latter to juridical systems. But unlike Agamben, the determining “other” of “bare life” is nothing that could be identified with bios, whether as forms of life or as qualified life. Rather, it is named by two words that are both difficult to translate into English. First, the word Entsühnend is opposed in the passage quoted to Sühne. The latter word derives from legal language and is associated with penance or penalty for something done. (In German, Dostoyevsky’s novel that in English is known as Crime and Punishment is generally translated as Schuld und Sühne, literally “Guilt and Penance.”) The word Entsühnen, by contrast, seems to aim at relieving human beings from the legal couple of guilt and penance: it can be translated as “absolving,” if one thinks of that word as freeing one from guilt and penance. I will return to that later. The second word on which Benjamin’s argument depends is equally difficult to render in English: it is the word das Lebendige. It is difficult to translate, not just because the corresponding words in both English and French collapse a distinction that exists in German and that is decisive for Benjamin’s argument, even if he does not explicitly insist on it. In English, the translation would have to be “the living,” in French, le vivant. But these words 68   Bare Life and Life in General

efface the tension between this word and another one, which is also used by Benjamin to determine a certain mode of life, namely die Lebenden—­ which would also have to be translated as “the living.” The difference between the two, however, is that the latter designates living beings whereas the former signifies the vital state of being alive. Mythical violence, and hence the legal and political system, has power over “the living”(die Lebenden) insofar as individual living beings are understood as imperfect instantiations of natural or “bare Life”—­which is to say, of life in general, of life taken in its generative generality. As bearers of “bare life,” individual living beings are naturally and inevitably mortal. But this is not enough to explain the connection between “the living” as individual living beings and “guilt” and “penance.” To understand this one must recall another “myth” that Benjamin does not mention here, but that informs his argument, precisely in remaining unmentionable. According to this myth, which Benjamin displaces onto Greek tragedy, human mortality is the fault of human pride, hubris: that of Niobe, for instance, who vaunted her progeny and lost all her sons as punishment. But it is another myth that informs Benjamin’s notion of mythic violence, even if he rarely names it explicitly. For if the “guilt” of pure or bare life is deemed the origin of mythic violence, its most powerful articulation resides in the Christian notion of “original sin.” What original sin implies is, dialectically, that which it negates: the original sacredness of life as such, which is held to emanate directly from the divine Creator. Life as originally created—­pure but not yet bare—­is without death. Death only manifests itself as the divine punishment for man’s transgression of the prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In his 1916 essay on “Language in General and the Language of Man in Particular,” Benjamin interprets the “fall” as the fall from the immediacy of the divine name and into the mediacy of ethical and cognitive judgment—­that is, a judgment that subordinates the singularity of what is, to the generality what should be. As Benjamin points out, in the Garden of Eden there is no evil, and hence the knowledge of its difference from the good has no object or basis. By contrast, “judgment,” in German as in English, designates both a cognitive and judicial act or process, and this is the true “mythical origin” of right and law. By right—­ divine right—­life is exempt from death. But such “right” only appears as such when it is lost—­which is, in the “fall” from the divinely sanctioned Bare Life and Life in General   69

process of naming—­Adam naming all creatures—­into the cognitive-­ legal process of judging: that is, of knowing the difference between good and evil. Benjamin’s discussion in his 1916 essay allows for further elaboration. In the biblical account in the first chapter of Genesis, life is originally without death. It is without death because it pertains not to individual living beings, but to instantiations of genres. Initially God creates everything living “after its kind,”11 and man then is called upon to give each kind its proper name. With the Fall, each proper generic name falls to the level of the language of judgment, distinguishing good from evil, life from death. The “linguistic fall” from the language of naming to that of judgment can therefore also be understood as the fall from a language reflecting the generic singularity of the divine creation into one that seeks to articulate the relation between the singular and the general as one of properties—­and of punishment. Such punishment is already described in Genesis, although Benjamin does not take up this aspect. For Adam and Eve do not die as God first promises when he pronounces the ban on eating from the tree of knowledge: instead, they are punished by being expelled from Eden and condemned to a life of toil, suffering, and above all, mortality. Similarly, the first murderer, Cain, is also not immediately killed for his deed: he too lives on, under divine protection, as it were, in order to found a city and father a family. The Bible thus recognizes the social and political function of human mortality. But it also portrays this mortality as punishment for a guilty transgression. Politics, in Genesis, can thus be said to emerge as the result of guilt—­and of killing. In the perspective of Genesis, then, life is originally pure, homogeneous, bare of all relation to others, except to its Creator, from which it emanates and which it resembles. But death only becomes a reality—­only imposes itself upon life—­as the result of human action, and more particularly of human transgression. Human beings become guilty for wanting to be too much like God, their Creator—­whom nevertheless they are said to resemble, created in his image. Wanting to become like God, by eating of the tree of knowledge, is wanting to become universal and singular at the same time, temporal and eternal. This suggests that the perspective of a nongeneric singular and mortal living being, who is not just like but also unlike God, only emerges with the expulsion from Eden. Initially man—­ 70   Bare Life and Life in General

“Adam,” “Eve” (Life)—­is generic, pure, and immortal; afterward they are singular, vulnerable, and mortal, outliving themselves only through families, dynasties, traditions, and polities. With the advent of Christianity, however, the desire to undo what has been done invents the possibility of restoring fallen, mortal life to its original essence. This sheds new light perhaps on what Agamben calls “bare life” and what I would call “life in general.” The following words of Paul are cited by Hobbes in the Leviathan, one of the founding texts of modern political theory: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”12 The function of the state, according to Hobbes, resides in the protection it affords to its citizens. But protection from what? If the modern European nation-­state develops in the aftermath of the war of religions, by which European Christianity was on the way of decimating itself in internecine strife—­strife ultimately perhaps about the nature of salvation—­ then the concern with public “safety” and security that legitimates the existence of the State is tendentially at least oriented by the task of anticipating on Earth what can only be fully realized with the Second Coming. Public Safety anticipates individual salvation. In French the two words are joined in the word salut.13 Salvation here means, above all, redemption from fatal guilt, sin, and mortality and thus resurrection to eternal life. The so-­called secular politics of the nation-­state could thus be considered to constitute a collective attempt to incarnate and preserve the promise of the Nativity while awaiting the Second Coming. The bare life of biopolitics would form the inner armature of politics in this sense—­the politics of protection as I have called it, following Hobbes.14 Singular mortal beings could thus hope to be protected from their fate by subordinating themselves to a political collective that would be capable of preserving them through its survival, which in turn would serve as a worldly guarantee of future redemption and resurrection. “Protection” is also one of the key notions in justifying the state of exception that for Agamben constitutes one of the indispensable conditions of the “camps.” The establishment of the first Nazi camp at Dachau was designed to implement “protective custody”—­Schutzhaft—­a legal institution that, as Agamben recalls in “What Is a Camp?” was originally Bare Life and Life in General   71

instituted in the 1850s in Prussia (48). Such “protective custody” departs radically from traditional penal law, since it imprisons persons not because of acts they have committed but rather in view of acts they might commit. Protective custody thus is based on an evaluation of an existential condition and as such is structurally linked to the extermination camps, since it judges persons in terms of what it takes to be their entire being rather than with regard to specific acts committed.15 But the real and ultimate goal of protection in general and of protective custody in particular is nothing less than establishing maximum control over time—­of time and the future. This is of course an age-­old project, which can be retraced once again at least back to the book of Genesis. In this perspective, time as a destructive medium is not original. It only enters the picture with the Fall, with original sin, with guilt—­and above all, with its consequence, mortality. Time then reveals its double face. It serves as the medium by which human beings realize themselves, individually and collectively, constructively and destructively—­first fully epitomized in the figure and destiny of Cain. But it also stands as the medium of perdition. Time is the medium of life, but also of death. The balance of power, one could say, between these two facets, or faces, of time, shifts radically with the Christian perspective of redemption and resurrection. Time, the medium of perdition, labor, and loss, now becomes emphatically also the medium of future salvation—­of the Second Coming, and thus the medium through which mortality is to be overcome. Protection, and protective custody, and perhaps politics in general, seek to parry the destructive menace of an (as yet) unredeemed future by confining it in the present. The recent emphasis on the “short-­term”—­especially in terms of profit maximization of finance capital—­can also be seen in this context.16 The notion of “bare life” is therefore unable to explain adequately how the idea of salvation through protection could develop the force to become a factor in the development of techniques and institutions of mass destruction and extermination, through the establishment of death camps as well as by other means. From the early “concentration camps” set up by the Nazis immediately after assuming power, to the death camps, the victims were annihilated because they were deemed to pose a threat to life in general, epitomized in the racial purity of the Aryan people as the culmination of a homogeneous and unified body politic. This was the convic72   Bare Life and Life in General

tion that moved both the policy makers and their executants to devise and carry out ever more efficient programs of mass extermination, directed first against political opponents (communists, socialists, and unionists) and then against other groups deemed dangerous simply by virtue of their mere existence—­not as individuals but as members of a group considered to be an inferior and corrosive “race.” Through such mass extermination, organized and executed deliberately and systematically, the perpetrators could believe themselves to be protecting life in general from the forces of death—­paradoxically by mobilizing these very forces themselves. Mobilized and militarized, death was thus “administered” in the service of life. The killing of peoples and groups in concentration camps (but also elsewhere) thus sought to put death to death—­a formula of St. Paul to which Alain Badiou rightly calls attention in his discussion of the Pauline conception of resurrection.17 In this context it is useful to recall that the death of Christ, through which the guilt of man is potentially redeemed, is the result of a violent act of human beings. Unlike the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, it does not take place in a context of war. But it can be interpreted as the prelude to a war: that of the unbelievers against the son of God. As Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ (2004) reminds its viewers, the true murderers of Christ were not the Romans—­who made it possible—­but the Jews, who carried it out. In thus killing Christ and denying his message of redemption and resurrection, the Jews thus could subsequently be identified with forces affirming the priority of death (the law) over life (the spirit) and grace. The Pauline project of putting death to death would thus logically involve annihilating the Jews. This is the thread that links the Passion of Christ to the Holocaust as it did to the various pogroms that preceeded it, although there is nothing inevitable about the link. But it is questionable whether the Shoah can be viewed independently of it. Between the protective–­salvational function of the camps in general, and the genocidal death camps in particular, there is thus a continuity based on this political–­(mono)theological tradition. The Jews had to be eliminated as a people, at least from Europe, because they had long since been identified as the agents—­the perverse incarnation—­of the forces opposing the restoration of life in general, and in this particular historical situation, opposing the embodiment of that general life in the Third Reich. This threat assumed a particularly acute form for the Nazis in World Bare Life and Life in General   73

War II, as their military fortunes began to wane and the strength of their opponents became ever more evident. But the attitude has its roots in a more abstract and more distant past. Nazi policies of extermination thus can be seen as continuing—­and modernizing—­a much older tradition of Christian anti-­Semitism. For instance, the ghettoization of the Jews, and in particular the construction of walls separating them from the Christian population, was motivated in part through the fear of contagious epidemics, especially typhus, which was traditionally associated with Jews. Jews of course were also associated with vermin and parasites, all of whom were felt to prey on healthy organisms. The policy of containment and then of extermination was thus construed by its perpetrators as above all a sanitary policy, as an issue of public health as much as a political one. The walls of the ghettos were but another attempt to fulfill the protective function of modern politics. Today we have different walls, but with similar aims and effects. If the notion of “bare life” could become, as Agamben argues, a lethal machine, it was to purge life as lived by singular living beings—­which entails the constitutive relation of life to death—­by subordinating life in the singular to life in general. Life in general can be seen to generate and perpetuate itself prior to and independently of death. Life in the singular cannot. But life in general is only life insofar as it assumes a particular, nameable, identifiable form. The name that this form tends to assume in the modern period is that of the “nation” or the “people.” And in particular, of a people unified by ties of blood and soil—­the biopolitical version of the criteria of modern citizenship, birth and territory. But a “people”—­whether understood as the Jewish people bound through a covenant with the Lord, or as the German Volk, unified by racially transmitted qualities—­is inevitably particular and always more or less heterogeneous. The question, therefore, emerges as to what sort of “people” is to be regarded as the decisive embodiment of life in general? If the essence of such life in general is its capacity to kill death—­that is, to expunge death from life by eliminating all those who embody its irreducibility—­then the notion of a people will have to be measured by its ability to subdue, “neutralize,” and ultimately destroy its enemies, starting with its rivals, who by definition can be considered as the enemies of life. This is why the militarization of all aspects of political life in Germany under the Nazis and the exercise of military power ultimately to annihilate 74   Bare Life and Life in General

enemies emerged as decisive criteria of what was held to be a historical destiny. And it is also why the camp emerged as one of its signature institutions. The camp concentrated in order to exterminate, just as the forces of life-­in-­general sought to concentrate what they took to be exterior to life itself—­namely the forces of death—­in order then to annihilate them. In order in short “to put death to death.” The camps were thus the institution that sought to quarantine the forces of death in order to exterminate them—­and thereby to protect life against the living. But what, if anything, links those death camps to the camps today—­ refugee camps for instance, or internment camps? If these involve the establishment of a permanent state of exception, it must still be asked what such protective measures seek to accomplish and also from where they gather the forces to impose themselves. A possible response can be found in the ambivalent attitude to death that marks the political culture of the West. The establishment of places of confinement, whether voluntary or imposed, mirrors the defensive–­protective theological–­political project that has long dominated the Western political tradition. It is no accident that a key word in the description of modern politics—­bürgerlich in German, “bourgeois” in French and English—­is formed from the word for a fortified village: Burg in German, bourg in French. Perhaps one of the most symptomatic uses of that word is to be found in the Lutheran hymn that sums up much of the temper of the Reformation, and the legacy of modern politics: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (Ein fester Burg ist unser Gott). In the aftermath of the Protestant attack on the universalist pretentions of the Catholic Church, the task of assuring access to salvation with purely earthly means has tended to articulate itself through reference to the fortified structure of the Burg, the fortress: seeking to protect itself against dangers from without in order—­like Oedipus, or even Wagner’s Wotan—­to avoid recognizing that the danger comes from within.18 The camp is an attempt to both distance and concentrate this impossible site of salvational politics. Perhaps one of the best and surely one of the most poignant descriptions of this attempt is to be found in Kafka’s story Der Bau, written in the year of his death. This story, usually translated in English as “The Burrow”—­a more literal rendering would be “The Building”—­has a first-­ person narrator telling the story of his attempts to construct and fortify his Bare Life and Life in General   75

burrow, constantly threatened from without, above all by what the narrator calls das Tier, “the animal,” but which is often identified with the illness that claimed Kafka’s life and that gradually took over his life and breath and produced sounds very distant from those associated with human beings. The association of “animal” with mortality is not peculiar to Kafka’s story. In the Western tradition, animal life has often been regarded as a lower form of life than human insofar as it lacks the ability to outlive—­or even experience—­its relation to death. The merely animal has thus often been understood as akin to the “mere” of “bare life”—­which is to say, life that has been stripped of everything that makes it other than merely mortal. In lieu of a conclusion, here is a short reflection on the relation of “the animal” to the life of the speaker, who is presumably no less of an animal; it is life in the singular reflecting on its own limitations, its anxieties, and its ways of dealing with them: For the rest, I try to decipher the animal’s plan. Is it merely wandering around or is it working on its own building? If it were wandering, an arrangement with it might be possible. If it really breaks through to me, I can give it some of my reserves and it will move on. Surely, it will move on. In my heap of earth I can naturally dream of everything, even of coming to an understanding, although I know full well that something of the sort does not exist and that the minute we see each other, indeed even sense the other approaching, we would, as though out of our senses—­neither sooner nor later, with a new and different hunger, and even if we are full,—­bare our claws and teeth against each other.19

Bare life bares its “claws and teeth” again the animal other that follows it—­ l’animal que donc je suis20—­against the animal other that is itself.

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4

Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

In democratic societies, nothing is more significant than the role played by what we call “media,” which explains why we use this word so often without being very certain of what exactly it means or involves. In order for democracies to function, the demos must be able to determine and articulate its needs, wishes, and concerns in a world that increasingly eludes direct perception. What we call “media”—­a word to be used in the plural, given the diversity of the institutions it designates, which also makes the use of the definite article problematic—­function increasingly as the extended eyes and ears of those who rely upon them for their contact to and interaction with the world beyond their immediate reach. This is true not only of citizens comprising the electorate of a nation, but also of its leaders and policy makers. All of this is so well known that it would be superfluous to mention it here, were it not for the fact that the enormous power of media can at the same time obscure or even efface the question of just how they frame our view of the world, in private as well as in public. Part of this obfuscation has to do with the way media tend to reframe if not obviate the difference between public and private. From the “selfie” to the “reality show,” media often reframe the public sphere as a mere extension or prolongation of the private, even while the bases of privacy are being reduced steadily in the name of national security and commercial efficiency. I will of course not be able to deal with all aspects of this reframing in this chapter, since this would take a book of its own even to begin to deal with. Rather, I will limit myself to a discussion of how the social and political significance of media can be approached from a psychoanalytic viewpoint. The reverse would no doubt also be possible and instructive—­to approach psychoanalysis from a medial viewpoint—­but that is not what I will be concentrating on here. In writing of media, I have in mind particularly the audiovisual media as well as the internet and “smartphones.” 77

This choice is dictated by my conviction that visuality remains the most influential sense when it comes to the way media function in society. This is reflected in the choice of the word “television” to describe a medium that involves audio as much as vision. The same could be said for the use of the word “video” to describe recordings, with smartphones, for instance, in which audio is generally included. The internet is in part an exception to this, given the importance of writing in it. But one can argue—­and I will have occasion to return to this—­that the kind of writing used, say, in Twitter, is in many ways shaped by a certain experience of visual images: short, self-­contained, declarative, “clear.” The media and psychoanalysis both involve practices, attitudes, and institutions. To consider how they interact with one another is first of all to become aware of what in military jargon could be called a profoundly asymmetrical relationship. The military discourse is not inappropriate here, since we are dealing with a relation of forces that is often highly conflicted. The reference to the military is also appropriate given its influence on the evolution of “media,” and in particular the audiovisual media. It is also appropriate given the importance of “video games,” the development of which has been largely influenced by the military, both in terms of research as well as usage and design, commercial sales of which have now surpassed sales of traditional computers.1 Such video games, and the audiovisual media more generally, including both television and smartphones, increasingly frame the way the vast majority of persons in our societies conceive of themselves and of the world. The relationship that President Trump had on the one hand to Fox News and his use of Twitter on the other, indicates how television and “social media” work to influence society. One of their most striking characteristics, which is also at the core of the power and attraction they exert, has to do with their ability to mask mediating complexities and create a facade of direct, unmediated communication. This had already begun with radio: President Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” used that medium to create the illusion of private, domestic communication between individuals.2 Today, television and video programming imposes its authority by labeling itself “live” or “direct.” Those old enough to remember will recall a radio (and then television) program from the 1950s called You Are There and moderated by the well-­known newscaster Walter Cronkite, which transmitted 78   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

radio reports of historical events as though they were happening at the time—­or as one says today, “in real time.” These events varied from “The Death of Socrates,” with John Cassavetes as Plato, to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The program used the ability of radio and television to communicate over vast distances as a means of giving its audience the impression of being direct witnesses to momentous historical events. Differences of time and space, language and culture—­in short, history itself—­are minimized or obliterated in the sense of a false presence instilled by the media. In short, the media gain in power and prestige to the extent that they obscure their own mediality or “mediation,” thus creating the illusion of direct access by individuals to history and the world, thereby rendering any reflection on significant historical distinctions superfluous. It is a cliché but not necessarily wrong to affirm that media simplify the “information” they provide. The degree of simplification varies from country to country and within countries as well. To assume that this is an inherent tendency of media as such presupposes that there is such a thing as media as such. Such a supposition abstracts from the real and important shaping of media technology by specific social and economic relations of the societies in which they are developed and used. Although this shaping is massive and has been studied for many years,3 the tendency to “ontologize” media by ascribing to them an essence independent of all historical, cultural, and social differences, remains dominant. This tendency does not persist by accident. It is rooted in the way language is used and treated. For instances, words, names, nouns. The use of the definite article, “the media,” can suggest a certain unity over and above the diversity of different media. In common usage, however, there seems to be a degree of uncertainty about whether to treat this word as a singular or as a plural noun. To anyone familiar with contemporary discussions of the notion of “singularity,” this confusion will be both familiar and significant. Since 1996, when Jean-­Luc Nancy published his book Être singulier pluriel (Being Singular(ly) Plural) (2000),4 which in turn builds on work done by Derrida and others, the notion of singularity does not exclude diversity or plurality but depends on it. In contrast to the principle of identity, which holds that A cannot be both A and -­A (where -­A is other than A), the notion of singularity depends on the coexistence of A and -­A , of the singular and the plural. What is singular or unique can only be apprehended in what is no longer Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   79

singular or unique, but which refers back to what it is not. In other words, identity is thereby conceived as heterogeneous—­or what in Freudian discourse can be called ambivalent. To be sure, the Freudian notion makes explicit what in traditional philosophical discourse was kept implicit: the fact that the heterogeneity of the singular defines a relation of forces that is conflictual. This also shifts the term from the quantitative sphere to the affective one. Freud used the term “ambivalence” to describe the simultaneity of feelings and attitudes that “logically” would seem to be mutually exclusive: love and hate of the same person or object at the same time; but he was also aware that such a logic—­or antilogic—­could have implications that extend beyond the affective sphere of the individual psyche and indeed apply to the process of identification in the most general sense.5 This simultaneity of incompatibles does not imply that its constituent elements merge or fuse, but rather that they are inseparably in tension with one another. Derrida will call this an “aporetic” notion: the singular, precisely in its distinctive uniqueness, entails plurality. To be unique, one must distinguish oneself from others. The singular is recognizable or identifiable in its singularity only when it is repeated and compared to what it is not. However, in being repeated as what it is not, it changes and is no longer itself. This results in the paradoxical situation that the apprehension or recognition of the singular cannot grasp it in its pure uniqueness. The latter can only be “felt,” as that which resists recognition. The resulting tension between the inaccessible immediacy of the one and the accessible mediacy of the many is what gives rise, in the self-­description of the audiovisual media, of words such as “live,” or in French, en direct. What is “live” is so in being taken as immediately present. But in the media—­and indeed, through the mediacy of the singular (and of identity), what is immediately present is inaccessible as such. The “as such” requires an “apophantic” relationship that estranges that which is being compared from itself. In the Hegelian dialectic, this tension is resolved by being made a function of negativity; the “not-­A” becomes a step toward ever greater determination of the A, but at a conceptual level of generality. This culminates in the identity of identity and nonidentity. What distinguishes the aporia of singularity from dialectical negation is that it does not come full circle, does not produce a synthesis at the level of conceptual thought. Rather, the singular resists such determination and remains accessible only as the affect that exceeds the grasp of the concept. With respect to “news reporting” 80   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

in the televisual media, this disjunction is domesticated as the “break”: “breaking news” complements the commercial “break.” Its interruption is predictable and thereby introduces discontinuity as an element of a continuum. Hence the inexhaustible search and thirst for new “breaks”—­for news breaks. But when everything is introduced as “breaking news,” the break quickly becomes all too familiar. The break breaks nothing, least of all the deadening familiarity of the predictable stories thereby unfolded. The break that really counts—­the “commercial break”—­points to the interest of commercial profit-­making as the very old driving force behind the break that pretends to bring “news.” Traditional televisual media, increasingly under pressure by the new medium of the internet—­mistakenly labeled “social media”—­heighten the frustration produced by this situation: monotonous routines exacerbate the desire for something new, something other than that which is all too familiar; but what is offered merely perpetuates that familiarity. To challenge it is to step outside the “mainstream” and expose oneself to unpredictable and sometimes dangerous consequences. The outbreak of aggression in internet communications—­“flaming” in internet postings, bullying, direct threats of violence, and other expressions of incivility—­are an indication of the power of an ambivalence that the mainstream media, whether private or public, tend to deny by channeling it into hostility toward an external enemy: the foreign terrorist or hacker, certain foreign governments, carefully selected, are today’s preferred enemies; where these are acknowledged as internal rather than external, they are identified with groups considered to be fundamentally alien by religion or by race. The basic formula is to rechannel ambivalence, which might lead to critical introspection, into adversarial opposition, which, by clearly separating “us” from “them,” can be mobilized against the foreign enemy and diverted from the threats to life that are more domestic. However, what I have just described are tendencies that seem particularly characteristic of contemporary media in the United States. They are not necessarily universal or inevitable, but they are also not simply accidental, insofar as they serve powerful interests, which do everything to promote them. The history of psychoanalysis in its relation to the media in America is a complicated one. One aspect of it begins with Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud’s, whose family emigrated from Vienna to the United States a year Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   81

after he was born (1891). In his new home, Edward was to become a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda (the latter being also the title of one of his many books, published in 1928), in which he used the work of his uncle, among others, to develop techniques of manipulating and controlling masses of people.6 When this book was republished in 2004, Noam Chomsky, who introduced the reedition, praised it as an “honest and practical manual [that] provides much insight into some of the most powerful and influential institutions of contemporary industrial state capitalist democracies.”7 Bernays is an example of how psychoanalytically inspired thinking has both served the cause of manipulating public opinion as well as providing tools to analyze critically the conditions that make such manipulation possible. In the American academy, by contrast, psychoanalysis has been largely relegated to the position of a barely tolerated outsider. Despite or because of a continuing interest on the part of students as well as of a certain public—­including the relatively few who can afford the generally expensive cost of an analysis—­one never tires, in the United States but also elsewhere,8 of confirming the irrationality, unscientificity, or quite simply the death of psychoanalysis, placing again and again Freud along with Marx into the dustbin of history—­until, that is, history itself comes to be identified with that same dustbin, as in that uniquely American expression, “That’s history!”(i.e., over and done with). One practical result of this widespread, if not universal, condemnation is that in the United States, outside of training centers psychoanalysis is rarely taught in anything like a coherent manner. It survives in the courses of individuals, often located in departments of literature, and while this can and sometimes does whet students’ appetite for more, that more will not be easy to find in the university due to the hostility of most of the recognized disciplines. The situation in some other countries, like France, is considerably better. But overall, the academic marginalization of psychoanalysis impacts severely on the possibility of psychoanalysis being studied and practiced as anything other than an occasional source of inspiration or a therapeutical technique. And yet, as Freud, Lacan, and many others insisted, the import of psychoanalysis can only be impoverished if it is reduced to such a technique, however important its therapeutic function can be. This situation makes it all the more important that there should be spaces and places where a sustained and comprehensive introduction

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to and reflection upon psychoanalysis can be pursued, and this should include reflection on its implications beyond experience understood as purely individual. But such a desideratum is easier stated than achieved, and the compatibility of psychoanalysis with university instruction should never be considered to be self-­evident. As Derrida once observed, “If one were to take psychoanalysis seriously, [the result] would be a nearly unimaginable earthquake. Indescribable. Even for psychoanalysis.”9 The reason for this “seismic threat” is not just abstract, neither simply individual nor simply social, but rather “passes through ourselves, through the interior of each individual.” The consequence, still according to Derrida, is that “the ‘logic of the unconscious’ remains incompatible with what defines the identity of the ethical, the political and the juridical in its concepts, but also in its institutions, and therefore in its human experiences.”10 This suggests that psychoanalysis, if ever “taken seriously,” could shake the institutions and assumptions that lie at the basis of all identity and identification—­and hence of a certain sense of order: social, political, ethical, and even cognitive. Of course, “taken seriously” here implies an interpretation of psychoanalysis, of the writings of Freud, Lacan, and others, that does not simply remain at the denotative level. And this is even more true if one hopes to interpret the relationship that psychoanalysis might have to media in general, and to the audiovisual media in particular. To illustrate one direction such a reading might take, let me return to the text from which I have been quoting, in which Derrida focuses on the notion of “subject,” a term and concept that significantly plays no real role in Freud’s thought or writing—­no more than does that of the “self.” Derrida insists on the transformation that this notion undergoes in Freud’s writing: In place of a subject conscious of itself, answering for itself in a sovereign manner before the law, one can introduce the idea of a divided, differentiated “subject” that cannot be reduced to a conscious, egological intentionality. And the idea of a “subject” installing, progressively, laboriously, always imperfectly, the stabilized—­that is, non-­ natural, essentially and always unstable—­conditions of his or her autonomy: against the inexhaustible and invincible background of a heteronomy.11

Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   83

The reason why Freud does not use this word, at least not emphatically, becomes clear from Derrida’s intervention: the concept of subject serves generally to stabilize and normalize what cannot be stabilized, namely, the heteronomous conditions of its putative autonomy. This applies not just to individuals, but also to collective, political entities: hence Derrida’s use of the word “sovereign” in describing the manner in which the self-­ conscious subject seeks to answer for itself before the law. When one extends this notion of “subject” from the individual to the collective and to the institutions—­legal, political, economic—­that articulate its life in society, one begins to see just how profound and extensive the “shock” of psychoanalysis taken seriously could be, as well as why it is generally combatted with scorn or dismissed with ridicule by those interested in maintaining existing power relations based on just such a notion of autonomy: individual and collective.12 If, then, the potential consequences of psychoanalysis can undermine the foundations of our legal and conceptual systems, what implications could this have for an understanding of the role of the media today? Again, I want to emphasize that my use of the plural here is not just to emphasize the diversity of the different media, in one country and in different countries, but also to suggest that “the media” themselves do not have an ontologically fixed essence or function. And that, therefore, when one writes of the effect of the media today, one is always referring to—­but often also abstracting from—­very particular uses and situations in which “the media” have developed and operate. Given the powerful socioeconomic interests upon which the televisual media—­and increasingly, the internet—­ depend, it is probably safe to affirm that one of the primary functions of the media today, in the United States but probably also elsewhere, where similar socioeconomic conditions prevail, is precisely to augment and reinforce what Derrida calls the effort to stabilize “the always unstable conditions” in which subjective “autonomy” plays itself out “against the inexhaustible and invincible background of a heteronomy.” What Derrida calls here “heteronomy,” I want to emphasize, is always historically and socially determined, even if it is never entirely reducible to any one particular set of historical conditions. In the United States, I have suggested that the tension between instability and stability is dramatized but also normativized in the already mentioned formula of “breaking news”—­formerly: news break. What appears to be broken in the expectation of a linear continuity 84   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

between past and present. This is already implied in the notion of “news,” quite different from actualités, the corresponding word in French. What is “new” is supposed to break with the old. But when the “break” takes on the incessantly repeated form in which the old and familiar is presented again and again, it loses its power of interrupting expectations and serves instead to confirm them. It tames that heteronomy to which Derrida refers by assimilating it to what is familiar. The result is often what Freud described as a feeling of “the uncanny”—­that is, a feeling that what is familiar is simultaneously profoundly strange and out of our control. I will return to this in the following chapter. It is this tension between the desire for autonomy and the condition of heteronomy to which that desire both responds and seeks to deny that the relation of psychoanalysis to what we call “media” can best be approached. Although in his conversations with Roudinesco Derrida is quite dismissive of the metapsychological theories of Freud, preferring to them what he calls Freud’s “partial, regional and minor analyses”—­of which surely those concerning the uncanny seem to be the most important for him—­I want by contrast to suggest that what is called Freud’s “second typology” of Id, Ego, and Superego (or as it might better be rendered in English, of “It,” “I,” and “Trans-­I”) can indeed be of great use in helping us to articulate more precisely what Derrida himself refers to as the “divided, differentiated subject.” It is precisely with respect to what Derrida refers to as the unsurmountable background of heteronomy that Freud developed his notion of what he called the “dependencies of the I,” which he portrayed as something of a clearinghouse for the conflicting messages arriving from “It” (one should avoid the definite article here) and from “Trans-­I.” Let me take a moment to justify in passing this rather unusual translation of what in English has been translated as “Superego” by “trans-­I.” Of all the many questionable English translations of Freud, and they are legion, one of the most misleading is the use of “Superego” to render the German word Überich. Über-­ in German is not merely a vertical marker but a horizontal one, as, for instance, with the word for “translation”—­ Übersetzung—­or for “transference.” This does not merely change orientation of direction, from vertical to horizontal: it also changes the nature of what it names by introducing movement and time into the process. Über as trans-­suggests a crossing-­over, as with a bridge—­not a stable elevation. To be sure, the “critical” function that Freud attributes to the Überich Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   85

implies something like a vertical elevation over the I that it judges. But Freud also observed that its function depended on the reception of words and notions deriving from acoustic perceptions of words (Herkunft aus gehörten . . . Wortvorstellungen), which it then transmits to consciousness—­in short, the Überich serves as a relay through which transferences take place that transcend the sphere of individual experience, since they entail language. The Überich is not another, superior I, but “a part of the I,” as Freud insists, even if it is one that takes the I as an object. It is both part of and separate from the I: in short, a transitional function.13 For this I submit that the unusual formulation of “trans-­I” would be more appropriate than Superego. In any event, the ambiguity of the “over-­” or worse: “super,” takes us to the heart of the relation of psychoanalysis to media. It tends to suggest that for psychoanalysis, the psyche does not simply relate to media as something external: it functions as a medium. This medial function crystallizes around the word, “transference,” in German, Übertragung, which, as already noted, involves a lateral dislocation rather than a vertical ascent. Significantly, the German word also designates the “transmission” of an event by radio or television as well as a rendition that modifies its “original” more substantially than usually associated with a translation (Übersetzung in German as distinct from Übertragung).14 In other words, Freud’s second topography conceives of the psyche as a complex process of reception, storage (both conscious and unconscious), and transmission. The psyche is thereby defined as a medium that is irremediably separated from itself by virtue of the fact that it consists in the processing of messages and impulses received from elsewhere. That elsewhere is both internal (the so-­called It) and external (the trans-­I). The I, which has the function of mediating between the contradictory messages and impulsions of It and the Trans-­I, forms the privileged addressee of most of the messages emitted by the audiovisual media. To better understand this complicity, it will be helpful to recall the way the I is theorized in the writings of Freud and Lacan. Both emphasize the relation of the I to a certain interpretation of visual experience. This privileging of sight and sound can be seen as continuing a tradition that reaches back to ancient Greece, where a hierarchy of the senses was established in which sight and sound were deemed superior to the “lower” senses of taste, touch, and smell. At the beginning of his Metaphysics, Aristotle de86   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

clares that “we prefer sight, generally speaking, to all other senses. The reason for this is that, of all the senses, sight best helps us to know things and reveals many distinctions.”15 Sight best helps us to know things, according to Aristotle, to the extent that it can be separated from the limitations of individual physical existence. At the same time, it is tied to that existence, and this can also endow it with a certain authenticity. In English there is the expression, “To see with one’s own two eyes,” which illustrates the privileged cognitive function of this sense. The condition of that privilege, however, is that the senses be construed as being one’s property, as “one’s own two eyes.” Media can therefore be distrusted insofar as they substitute other eyes for “one’s own,” replacing or supplementing spectacles, contact lenses, and other prostheses. But the media can also reduce this mistrust in part at least by creating a sense of intimacy and actuality. “Reality shows” are an attempt to bond with their viewers as individuals. TV series do the same, by exceeding the limits of the film and approximating longer-­range experiences of “life.” The audiovisual media, and in a different but related way, the internet and smartphones, seek to respond to the tension between what might be called the sense of physical immediacy qua limitation on the one hand, and the desire to transcend such limitations on the other. This is a major component of the situation in which the audiovisual media have developed. In so doing, they have sought to respond to and exploit the most long-­standing desires and fears provoked by the tension between what I call “life in the singular,” which is necessarily limited, and the notion of a self that is defined by its ability to stay the same over time and through space. This notion of the self, I argue in this book, draws much of its power from the biblical account of the creation of the world by a mono-­theological, universal, and exclusive supreme being, which is construed (projected) as existing before, above, and beyond the restrictions of time and space: which is to say, before, above, and beyond the constitutive limitations of physical “life in the singular.” The biblical origins of this conception of the self are ancient and widespread, but also geopolitically and historically determined—­and therefore not necessarily universal. Other ways of experiencing the relation of self and other are conceivable. Be that as it may, the development of the audiovisual media and its close ties to the development of military technology suggests that conquest and subjugation have often been privileged as means of controlling although not resolving the tension between infinite aspiration and finite reality—­and Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   87

this of course is by no means limited to the societies and cultures informed by the biblical tradition to which I have referred.16 This tension between the experience of physical limitation and the aspiration to what can be called a transcendent, homogeneous self, produces both the prestige and the mistrust associated with the audiovisual media today, but which reflects a more general and long-­standing ambivalence toward the prosthetic dimension of technology. With respect to the latter, this comes to a head in the hopes and fears attached to the development of “artificial intelligence” and robotics. With respect to the media, the “smartphone” has also become a focus of such ambivalence. It marks the greater mobility of human beings and their communications, but also the greater degree to which they can be tracked and controlled. Heidegger’s fears relating to modern technology as Gestell find a remarkable embodiment in the smartphone. Gestell, usually translated as “enframing,”—­I have previously suggested “emplacement” as an alternative—­also is very close to the past participle of the verb stellen, which means “to place,” but also to corner, in the sense of entrap. Heidegger also worries that modern technology furnishes the means of keeping everyone on call—­bestellt—­which has become a reality with the smartphone.17 With the spread of the smartphone, which has a capacity for the recording, storage, and transmission of data that exceeds many larger computers, the media reinforce their intimate and long-­standing claim to supplement and supplant the physical senses. They are as mobile as individual bodies, but they are also capable of recording, storing, and transmitting the localization and movements of those bodies throughout the world. They relate to bodies not merely externally but increasingly as internal prostheses, correcting and directing hearts, minds, and various other inner organs and corporeal functions. What links them to traditional technologies is their dependency on an external source of energy. But this external source may increasingly be naturalized, as solar, wind, and other “renewable” energy sources are made available for supporting their operations. Despite the nonrepresentational nature of the binary codes they translate into electrical impulses, they nevertheless continue to appeal to representational images in order to remain “user-­friendly”—­that is, to be communicable to minds informed by the traditional hierarchies of representational thinking. The selfie only works insofar as it can be recognized as a self by others. Twitter enables the 88   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

verbal equivalent by reducing language to the most easily legible forms of declarative propositions. WhatsApp combines the two. The role of sight in the effort of the I to overcome its own corporeal limitations is reflected upon by both Freud and Lacan. In The I and the It (aka The Ego and the Id), Freud describes the I “as first and foremost a bodily I; . . . not merely a surface entity but itself the projection of a surface.” In a note to the English edition of the essay not reproduced in the German versions he explains how this projection of a body upon a surface is linked to the I: “The I is above all something corporeal; it is not only a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface.”18 Freud thus interprets the I as modeled upon an image of the body, conceived not in the traditional sense originating with Aristotle, as the container of a soul or a psyche, but rather as “the mental projection of ” a surface entity. As Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Jacques Pontalis pointed out many years ago, in the so-­called “autoerotic stage,” the body is organized around oral and anal “erogenous zones” that involve apertures. The passage to narcissism reorganizes this discontinuous surface into a more stable border defining an opposition between I and other, internal and external.19 If we think together these two arguments, the result is that the “projection” simultaneously distances itself from the discontinuous, nonunified bodily surface of erogenous “zones” in order to create a model upon which the I can then construct its sense of self-­identity. The Lacanian “mirror stage” can be understood as a further elaboration of Freud’s insight into the projective character of what he called a Körper-­ Ich, a body-­I.20 According to Lacan, it is the perceived or fantasized image of the other, often the child’s reflection in a mirror, that helps orient the formation of the I, in which the image is apprehended as an integrated “gestalt”—­that is, as self-­contained—­and thereby provides the child between six and eighteen months old with a model for the notion of a unified I; the unity of this I, via the perceived gestalt, nevertheless remains in constant tension with the bodily experience of disunity that the child at that age experiences especially acutely. Thus the I is formed as a reactive–­ defensive identificatory projection—­identification with the mirror image as gestalt—­designed, however, precisely to deny the alterity upon which it depends: it depends on the otherness of an image perceived as a whole as distinct from the experience of one’s body. But it must also deny that otherness if it is to take its place—­that is, if the image can serve as the Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   89

identificatory model for the self-­identity of the I. I note in passing that a similar ambivalence seems to be at work in the story of the Genesis of the world through a supreme being in whose image humans are created but from whom they must remain different—­and inferior. The tension that results focuses in English on the word “image”: man is thus construed as created in the image of God. But precisely in order for God to provide an alternative to the mortality, finitude, and sexual differentiation of singular human beings, He must retain his difference from that being: man must not attempt to take his place—­which is to say, to abolish the distance and difference that separates the limited being of humans from the unlimited one of their creator. And yet man must nevertheless overcome that distance and difference if God is to provide the identificatory model of the human as self-­contained and autonomous. It can be noted that this contradiction is also the model for the Freudian theory of the fetish, connoted by the words und dennoch, “and nevertheless” the phallus is there: there must never be less than the phallus. The narcissistic I of the Lacanian image-­stage has, in a time increasingly dominated by neoconservatism and neoliberalism, drawn support and strength from its exploitation by the audiovisual media, whether radio, television, film, internet, or smartphone. This is of course not all that the media do, nor is it inevitable from their technological infrastructure that they should play this supporting role; but given the socioeconomic conditions and power relations under which media are obliged to function, this is the role most of them are called upon to play here and today. In so doing, they contribute to aggravating the tension between a singular I that can never appropriate and enrich itself enough, and the constitutive biological and existential limits that this same I has to endure. Faced with the increased production of wealth on the one hand, and the increasing disparity between rich and poor on the other, both within countries and between them (disparities that tend to impose ever-­more hazardous conditions of survival upon ever larger population groups)—­anxiety grows and is increasingly channeled into aggressivity by being supplied an object—­ usually external figures that can be imagined, identified, and often named and thereby localized, controlled, and possibly eliminated. At the moment of this writing, the names in favor are “migrants.” Or “terrorists.” Or simply “foreigners.” 90   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

In his early essay on the mirror stage, first written in the mid-­1930s and reworked and modified after World War II, Lacan inscribed the process of imaginary–­projective, idealizing I-­formation as consisting in a tension between the phantasm of the dismembered body (corps morcelé) and a formation of the I that finds its oneiric symbolization in the armed camp, even a stadium—­ distributing from the inner arena to its outer edge, surrounded by rocks and marshes, two fields of struggle, opposed to one another, where the subject bogs down in the quest of the lofty and distant inner castle, whose form . . . symbolizes the it in a striking manner. And on the mental level we find realized those structures of fortification that metaphorically emerge spontaneously, as though issuing out of the symptoms themselves of the subject, in order to designate the mechanisms of undoing, isolating, doubling, displacement—­of obsessional neurosis.21

By locating the terminus a quo, the point of departure of the “struggle” in a phantasy of the dismembered body, le corps morcelé, studied by Melanie Klein, and the other—­the terminus ad quem—­in the “distant inner castle” that is also a fortress, Lacan anticipates one of the major effects of the digitization of media that has occurred in the past decades: the perceived integrity and wholeness of the phenomenal world, upon which the I or ego depends as a model for its own effort to constitute itself as a unity, is revealed as what it always was, namely, as merely “analogical”—­ that is, based on a conception of likeness that seeks to transform similarity into sameness and that necessarily forgets that all likeness is also unlike, all similarity also dissimilar. The dismemberment of the analogical through the digital appears often as a more or less violent process of “pixellation,” in which the image of a coherent object breaks up into its smallest constituent parts, pixels, which in turn are the visible manifestation of binary codes. The effects produced by the abrupt pixellation of images—­above all, of imaged objects and subjects—­can range from exultation to anxiety: anxiety at the loss of a stable, integrated object on which to project and thereby confirm the stability of one’s own self-­identity; and exultation at being liberated from the limiting constraints of a determinate object, especially where the process of liberation is understood as the result of an Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   91

intentional act, and thus as a manifestation of control and of power. Such exultation can therefore be seen as the medial correlative of that “jubilation” that Lacan observed in the young child, recognizing its image in a mirror (or elsewhere). I want to suggest that the fascination with and power of the audiovisual media today has to do with the way it stages this tension between dismemberment and dissolution, on the one hand, and holds out the illusion of its control or disavowal, on the other. The tension, however, is in a certain sense socialized when the gaze of the other is brought into play. Despite the important French series of analyses of this look of the other, ranging from Jean-­Paul Sartre to Lacan, I want to invoke an earlier insight of Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s notion of “aura” is well-­known, but less well-­known is that it went through a series of transformations as he sought to think out its manifold and often contradictory implications. His earliest attempt to define it was to associate it with the étui,—­in German, a Futteral—­the luxurious protective case in which expensive commodities are presented; I note in passing that Apple, followed by many other companies, has put into practice the suggestion of Bernays by appealing to the pre-­and unconscious desire that is less concerned with the use-­value of objects than with their psychic exchange-­ value as a means of strengthening self-­esteem (involving the esteem of others). Marketing products today involves as much their “packaging,” including the étuis in which they are presented to their new “owners,” as the actual price–­performance ratio of the product itself. The carefully cultivated Apple Stores are another manifestation of this desire for a secure home away from home. Benjamin’s second attempt to define the aura is the one that became the best known, where in his essay on the “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” it is described in terms of a process of perception and reception, involving “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. On a summer afternoon, resting, to follow a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the person resting—­that can be called breathing the aura of these mountains, of this branch.”22 Benjamin’s surprising insistence here is that the aura is not simply a property of an object but involves a relationship to that object that is corporeal. The beholder is described first as “resting” or “at repose,” at ease during “a summer afternoon.” But this bodily beholder doesn’t just see; he 92   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

or she breathes. In thus relating the aura not simply to a detached visual perception but to breathing, Benjamin recovers the Greek origins of the word “aura”—­breath, cool breeze, air in motion—­before it was assimilated to a visual phenomenon in Latin. Also significant is that Benjamin does not distinguish here between breathing in and out, between inhaling and exhaling: both coexist in the German verb he uses, atmen, “breathing.” In breathing, the singular living body traverses the inseparable interdependence of inside and outside. But Benjamin’s third and final exposition of aura, this time in relation to its decline, is perhaps the one that is most immediately relevant to the audiovisual media today. It comes in his essay on Charles Baudelaire, where he describes the experience of the decline of aura in a way that is also present in the writings of Franz Kafka, to which Benjamin does not refer here. It involves the experience of the unreciprocated glance: Inherent in the gaze, however, is the expectation of being responded to by the one upon whom it is bestowed. . . . To experience the aura of an appearance means to endow it with the ability of looking up [den Blick aufzuschlagen]. (339)

Aura is thus here equated with a reciprocated glance. Its absence marks its decline. But this decline does not appear to be an entirely negative experience: Glances may be all the more compelling, the more complete the viewer’s absence that is overcome in them. In eyes that look at us with mirror-­like blankness, the remoteness remains complete. It is precisely for this reason that such eyes know nothing of distance. (340)

In short, the lens of a camera, whether of a smartphone in a selfie or a TV or film camera, can—­precisely in the absence of an animating consciousness—have an appeal that Benjamin does not hesitate to designate not as “erotic” but as “sexual”: What happens here is that the expectation aroused by the gaze of the human eye is not fulfilled. Baudelaire describes eyes that could be said to have lost the ability to look. Yet this gives them an appeal that Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   93

to a large, perhaps overwhelming extent, serves as a means of defraying the cost of his libidinal desires. It was under the spell of those eyes that sex in Baudelaire detaches itself from Eros. (339)

And in a short verse of Baudelaire’s that Benjamin then quotes to illustrate this process of detaching sex from Eros, the Freudian and Lacanian accounts of narcissistic projection are both confirmed and delimited: Plunge your eyes in the eyes fixed / of Sirens or of Nixes (339, translation modified)23

What seems to be new here—­and this is why the Baudelaire passage not only confirms the process of narcissistic projection as described by Freud and the Lacan of the mirror stage but also delimits it—­is precisely the fact that the terminus ad quem, the object at which the projection is directed, is no longer that of a well-­defined gestalt, but rather that of a glance that is literally absentminded: a glance from which conscious intention has long since vanished. In previous writings, Benjamin had already suggested that this was one of the main differences between traditional theater and cinema: in the latter, the actor is confronted not by an audience that is attentive, but by something closer to the unconscious or the uncanny—­namely, the “eye” of the camera—­an eye that sees but does not look. This anonymity or inhumanity of the gaze assimilates it to all the mechanisms of recording that render experience “technically reproducible” by detaching it from anything like a constitutive origin—­and that thereby evokes the desire to take the plunge into the abyss. “Plunge your eyes into eyes that are fixed.” Such eyes may be fixed in place, like the lens of the camera, but at the same time they cannot be reduced to any one place, any one identity, any one self-­consciousness. They can be everywhere, as in CCTV—­and nowhere. And it is precisely this mixture of unstable fixity that gives them their libidinal power. In Baudelaire’s poetry, this is attributed primarily to prostitutes, who are literally placed “out in front of themselves,” thus offering an ostensibly irreducible distance in which the spectator or voyeur can project itself and its power without risk. It is also hardly irrelevant today that prostitution together with pornography increasingly figure as models for the ambivalent convergence of total commoditization and media control: through the media, bodies and faces 94   Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media

are put on sale and on show, and a similar process seems to characterize the influence of media on politics, economics, and society in general. The media offer models of projective identification in which the I can figure itself as autonomous by polarizing the other: the “as well as” is thus trumped by an increasingly lethal “either-­or,” “yes-­or-­no.” What should not be forgotten, however, although it often is, is that commoditization always entails a horizon not just of ownership but of dispossession. This double horizon, which once again seeks to domesticate ambivalence by polarizing it, hides—­as I have previously observed—­in and behind words such as “competitivity,” and even “excellence.” Thus the ostensibly unlimited expanse opened by media collapses distance into proximity while revealing the proximate to be infinitely distant—­ and thereby increasingly functions as a means of surveillance, selection, and control. The horizon of ownership that structures the media themselves seems moving toward ever-­greater fusion of production and transmission. But such a tendency must always heed the exigencies of the bottom line, even if that bottom-­line is constantly shifting and displaceable. The bottom line is what serves to subordinate the functioning of the media today to the self-­destructive history of narcissistic projection described by Freud and especially by Lacan, and which seems to have found political and economic expression in today’s finance capitalism and its globalizing tendencies. However, such subordination has been disrupted, to a degree, by the development of the internet and smartphones, which open the possibility that those who were previously only “audience” and “spectators” can actively intervene in the media they use: they can become transmitters instead of being only receivers, producers instead of being only consumers. This was something that Benjamin could only dream about in the 1930s, when he wrote his lecture “The Author as Producer”: “The reader is always prepared to become a writer, a describer and a prescriber [Schreibender, Beschreibender, Vorschreibender].” He saw this as a result of changes not just in technology but in social and political structure, as well as in the intellectual division of labor: As an expert—­not in any particular trade [we could add: discipline], perhaps, but . . . on the subject of the job he happens to be in—­he gains access to authorship. . . . Authority to write is no longer Psychoanalysis and the Mediacy of Media   95

founded in a specialist training but in a polytechnic one, and so becomes common property. In a word, the literarization of living conditions becomes a way of surmounting otherwise insoluble antinomies, and the place where the words are most debased—­that is to say, the newspaper—­becomes the very place where a rescue operation can be mounted.24

Just as Benjamin’s thoughts have to be decoupled from the hopes he placed in the development of the Soviet press in the 1930s, so too must they be very carefully measured against the realities of today, where the totalitarian danger comes not only from a tyrannical state directly but also from the economic powers that stand behind it, and often dictate to it. Nevertheless, there are two points here that can and should be retained. First, the critique of a disciplinary division of intellectual labor that tends to disqualify critiques not grounded in such specialization. Second, the “literarization of living conditions” that today is brought about not by the print media alone, but by the internet, which forces people to write and read—­although often in the most retrograde, simplistic ways. The use of Twitter now favored by politicians and public figures, as well as by ordinary individuals and groups, tends toward the kinds of narcissistic simplifications in language and thought that a critical psychoanalysis is well-­ placed to expose, in its self-­destructive tendencies. To read is first of all to recognize and know conventions of meaning. But if it is not simply to be repetition of the same, it must also expose the dependencies of those conventions on others that are excluded or devalued. It must treat language somewhat the way Freud described the “navel of the dream,” in which all thoughts converge but also expand into obscurity.25 Overdetermination must be understood not just as an excess that undermines clarity but as the result of a transference that is never simply arbitrary, but which, in its constraint, can expose relations of force and open the ways to alternatives. To read and to write means to put the conventions upon which language depends into play, in order to open the way to the alternatives they exclude or marginalize. This is a process that will never be finished, never concluded, except perhaps, as Laurence Sterne wrote in Tristram Shandy, curiously: “The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along” (I.20).

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Reflection on language, on reading and writing, suggests that the bottom line so fervently sought in double-­entry bookkeeping never touches bottom: it is always unfinished. This can lead to an unending search to augment what can be appropriated. But it can also open onto a horizon that exceeds what can be appropriated. The experience of the internet, of “links,” offers both possibilities. Psychoanalysis can serve to underscore that only one of them can avoid implosion.

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5

Protection, Projection, Persecution

THE POLITICS OF PROTECTION Walter Benjamin once wrote that the problem with hypotheses was the temptation “to place them at the beginning” and that it was this temptation that constituted “the abyss of all philosophizing.”1 He formulated this not as a declaration, but as a question, as a kind of suspicion. Hypotheses, and in particular suspicious ones, can and surely are a powerful force producing thought. They can also be fatal to it when they are either ignored or, what often amounts to the same, when they are “placed at the beginning” as a foundation upon which one can construct, or as a cause that simply has to unfold its predetermined consequences. By contrast, they can serve as the beginning of an investigation as long as they are recognized for what they are: preliminary responses to questions that have yet to be asked, and therefore whose validity and relevance have also yet to be demonstrated. From such a demonstration one has the right to expect two things at least: first, a certain coherence of argumentation; and second, the ability to cast light on phenomena that are familiar but as such still far from being understood—­ phenomena that are bekannt but not erkannt, as G. W. F. Hegel put it.2 It is in this spirit that I want to share with you a series of suspicions, concerning the role of something called “protection” in recent and not-­so-­ recent political and intellectual discourse—­and life. In other words, I want to reflect on the role of “protection” in politics, meaning both in its theory and in those practices that may be associated with it. Because I am going to be discussing primarily recent or contemporary authors—­Freud, Benjamin, Derrida—­I want to begin with an extremely brief excursion to one of the founders of modern “Western” political thought, in order then to demonstrate how the problems addressed by the contemporary authors relate to this very long and powerful tradition. 99

1. The year is 1651: England is in the midst of civil war. Cromwell has defeated the Royalists and is preparing to assume the title, “the Great Protector.” Hobbes begins the concluding paragraph of his treatise Leviathan, of The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-­Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill with the following resumé of the work: And thus I have brought to an end my Discourse of Civil and Ecclesiastical Government, occasioned by the disorders of the present time, without partiality, without application, and without other design than to set before men’s eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience; of which the condition of human nature, and the laws divine, (both natural and positive) require an inviolable observation. And though in the revolution of states, there can be no very good constellation for truths of this nature to be born under, (as having angry aspect from the dissolvers of an old government, and seeing but the backs of them that erect a new;) yet I cannot think it will be condemned at this time, either by the public judge of doctrine, or by any that desire the continuance of public peace.3

In thus emphasizing the object of his treatise as being nothing other than setting “before man’s eyes the mutual relation between protection and obedience,” Hobbes closes the circle of the work that began with the following determination of the Leviathan: Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal. . . . Art goes yet further, imitating that rational and most excellent work of nature, man. For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE, (in Latin, CIVITAS) which is but an artificial man; though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body. (7)

The raison d’être of the state qua Leviathan is thus to provide the “protection and defence” of natural man, whose fallen and sinful body is vulner-

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able in a way that the body politic of the Leviathan is not. Which is, of course, not to say that the body politic itself is invulnerable: writing at the time of the English Civil Wars, Hobbes could hardly have thought that. Rather, the principle of “protection” informs both the goal of the body politic as well as that of the state, which must protect itself in order to protect its members. And it must afford protection if it is to expect obedience from its members in exchange. The principle of sovereignty thus depends entirely on the ability of the sovereign to protect: itself no less than its constituents. In what does the protection consist? What is to be protected from what? There are of course multiple answers and aspects to this question. But already from the initial sentences of the Leviathan it is clear that what ultimately has to be protected by the Leviathan is life and livelihoods: above all that of the Leviathan itself, since only as long as it thrives can the lives of its individual members be assured. It is Hobbes’s conception of the Leviathan as an artificial living body, constructed to complement and palliate the vulnerabilities of the bodies of its citizens, that determines its governing principle—­that of sovereignty. The principle of life, as Hobbes describes it, is that of a certain immanence: “Life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principal part within,” he writes. If it is to be like a living body, the body politic must also have its principle of motion “within” itself. Sovereignty is thus determined by Hobbes as “an artificial soul” capable of “giving life and motion to the whole body.” The “whole body” here of course is that of the body politic, which is composed of its various elements, human and nonhuman, including “magistrates, and other officers of judicature and execution” whom Hobbes compares to the “joints” of the artificial body, which allow it to move; wealth and riches, in which he sees its strength, salus populi (the people’s safety), which constitutes “its business”; and finally, “pacts and covenants” said to resemble “that fiat” by which God let there be light—­and created the world (7). But the basic “pact and covenant” is that which proposes to assure the salus populi in exchange for the obedience of that populus to its laws and decrees. It is not insignificant that this covenant is likened to the divine fiat, “by which God let there be light—­and created the world.” For the exchange of obedience for protection is a direct result of the Christian

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interpretation of the fall of man. Hobbes quotes Paul (1 Cor. 15:21, 22): “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive” (298). In the interval between the departure of Christ and the Second Coming, it is the artificial body politic of the Leviathan that must assure the salus populi through “its power of life and death” (297). It is this that justifies and maintains the obligation of subjects to obey the sovereign. If the latter fails in its mission to protect, the contract ceases to exist: The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished. The sovereignty is the soul of the commonwealth; which once departed from the body, the members do no more receive their motions from it. The end of obedience is protection. . . . And though sovereignty, in the intention of them that make it, be immortal; yet is it in its own nature, not only subject to violent death, by foreign war; but also through the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it, from the very institution, many seeds of a natural mortality, by intestine discord. (147)

The many pages devoted by Hobbes to combating the confusion of the Kingdom of God, in which there would be eternal life, “with the present Church or multitude of Christian men now living, or that being dead, are to rise again at the last day” (404), are necessary not simply because of the religious conflicts (the “intestine discord”) being fought out in his time between Catholicism and Protestantism, between church and state, but because the justification of the sovereign state is informed by a notion of “protection” modeled upon Christian redemption and salvation—­even if, and this is the crux, access to that redemption can no longer be obtained directly in a world that has been both visited and forsaken by God in the form of his son. What is left behind is the promise of a Second Coming and of a salvation that in the meanwhile takes the form of public safety, whose protection is the task and mission of the state as Leviathan. Politics in this perspective is thus dependent upon a function of pro-

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tection that is intrinsically paradoxical, if not aporetic. The state that is entrusted with the protection of its subjects must itself be protected—­it must protect itself, qua state, in order to fulfill its function of protecting its subjects. It must safeguard the Christian promise of salvation not directly, through ecclesiastical means, but indirectly, through the assurance of public safety and security, which in turn presupposes its ability to protect itself. Self-­protection thus becomes the first and foremost task of the state, and of the politics that is informed by it. In the political domain at least, and perhaps beyond it, protection means self-­protection. But if the obedience required by the state depends upon its ability to protect those who are to obey, and if the model of such protection is based on the Christian promise of redemption, the question arises of how those who are to obey can decide whether or not the contract is being fulfilled, whether or not they are being afforded the protection they require. Without providing an answer, Hobbes describes the problem as the impossible task of construing infinity: Whatsoever we imagine is finite. Therefore there is no idea, no conception of anything we call infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude; nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, or infinite force, or infinite power. When we say any thing is infinite, we signify only, that we are not able to conceive the ends, and bounds of the things named; having no conception of the thing, but of our own inability. And therefore, the name of God is used, not to make us conceive him; (for he is incomprehensible; and his greatness, and power are unconceivable;) but that we may honour him. . . . No man can conceive anything, but he must conceive it in some place; and endued with some determinate magnitude; and which may be divided in parts; nor that any thing is all in this place, and all in another place at the same time; nor that two, or more things can be in one, and the same place at once. (19)

It should be noted in passing—­we may have occasion to return to it—­ that Hobbes conceives thinking here as the production of images, on the basis of what he calls the “senses,” and in particular, on the basis of what is interpreted as the visual perception of objects as forms or figures, which is

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to say, as located “in some place; and endued with some determinate magnitude,” and consequently, as excluding the possibility of existing in more than “one, and the same place at once.” From this it results that whatever legitimacy is accorded to sovereign states will have to be grounded in an experience or consciousness informed by what I will call unitary localizability: a single body in a single place at one and the same time. This suggests that the “self ” that is to be protected at all costs by the Leviathan must be similarly conceived: as a single body occupying a single place at one and the same time. The singularity of the body thus localized individualizes the self, makes it this self “here” and not another “there.” However, since neither time nor place stand still since the fall of Adam and Eve and their consequent expulsion from the Garden of Eden, the self cannot simply rely on its bodily localization to assure its ability to be a self—­ which is to say, to stay one and the same; rather, it is only as the external but indispensable vessel of the soul that it can exercise this function. The political correlative of this concerns the relation between state and territory: the latter must be contiguous in order for its soul, the Leviathan, to have a self to protect. But the stability of that contiguity is determined by what it excludes as much as by what it includes. What it excludes consists above all of other states ruling over other territories; what it includes is determined by the terms of the pact or covenant by which its subjects exchange obedience for protection. But this structural instability, this permanent state of urgency is in fact a state of emergency in the most literal sense, since it derives from the emergence of the Leviathan itself. The latter is constituted through the decision of a multitude of individuals, living on a common, contiguous territory, to constitute a state in order to better protect themselves. They give up whatever powers they have in isolation or apart from the state and invest them in this new, artificial being, the Leviathan. This creates, however, a fundamental contradiction: the multitude becomes a “people”—­that is, a political body—­only by abandoning its prerogatives qua individuals to the sovereign state. But in thus creating the state that is designed to protect them, in thus ceding (or at least subordinating) their rights to it, they tend to abolish themselves as an independent political entity, as a people. As the French political theorist Gérard Mairet puts it in his introduction to the French translation of the Leviathan: 104   Protection, Projection, Persecution

The unity of a people thus created does not have its center in this same people, like the circle in geometry, because the center of gravity of the unity of a people is exterior to itself: it is the sovereign designated by the people. At the very instant when the individuals speak, they cease to be individuals in a multitude, and form a people; but this people in turn, at the moment when the sovereign is instituted, disappears qua people. The people finds the center of its being outside of itself (in the sovereign). It exists only as a linguistic fiction, without reality since its corporeality is entirely incarnated in the sovereign.4

Although Hobbes does not make explicit the paradox of a people dissolving itself at the moment that it incarnates itself in the Leviathan, the effects of this problematic incarnation emerge in the following passage: This done, the multitude so united in one person, is called a COMMONWEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This is the generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is able to conform the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the commonwealth; which (to define it,) is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defense. (114)

Since all the “power and strength” of the assembled individuals has been transferred to the Leviathan, the result of that transfer is the simultaneous institution and dissolution of the very self—­that of the “people”—­ that the Leviathan is created to protect. As a result, the “terror” through which the state is able to “conform the wills of them all, to peace at home and mutual aid against enemies abroad,” becomes a means not only of defending the body politic but also of constantly reconstituting it, or rather, of repeating its auto-­constitution, which converges with its auto-­ dissolution. It is like a pilot light that in being lit, constantly goes out. It Protection, Projection, Persecution   105

is in the blinking light of terror that the “Mortal God” pursues its ever-­ problematic mission of self-­protection. 2. If one compares the early “deconstructive” texts of Derrida with those written in the last fifteen years of his life, one can discover first, an underlying consistency, and second, a significant shift. The consistency can be described as a focus upon the problem of identity and identification, as epitomized in the concepts of the self, the I, and the subject. The shift takes place in the way the deconstruction of these categories is construed. In one of his earliest and groundbreaking texts, Speech and Phenomena, Derrida demonstrates how the Husserl of the Logical Investigations seeks to map out a sphere in which thinking, equated with self-­consciousness, can constitute itself without getting caught in the “external” and indeterminable relativity of linguistic signification. Husserl’s demonstration reposes on the notion of self-­perception: the speaking subject hears-­and-­understands-­ itself (sich vernimmt) without having to depend essentially upon a system of signification that inevitably introduces distance and indeterminability in its operation. The key term used by Husserl in this context, and which Derrida highlights, is that of Selbstaffizierung, auto-­affection: The operation of “hearing oneself speak” is an auto-­affection of a unique kind. On the one hand, it operates within the medium of universality; what appears as signified therein must be idealities that are idealiter indefinitely repeatable or transmissible as the same. On the other hand, the subject can hear or speak to itself and be affected by the signifier it produces, without passing through an external detour, the world, the sphere of what is not “his own.” Every other form of auto-­affection must either pass through what is outside the sphere of “ownness” or forego any claim to universality. When I see myself, either because I gaze upon a limited region of my body or because it is reflected in a mirror, what is outside the sphere of “my own” has already entered the field of this auto-­affection, with the result that it is no longer pure. In the experience of touching and being touched, the same thing happens. In both cases, the surface of my body, as something external, must begin by being exposed in the world.5

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The concept of auto-­affection is, so Derrida argues in this early text, never “pure” in the way Husserl would have it: as “affection” it always involves an opening, an “exposure in the world” and to the outside, to what is alien and unappropriable. Husserlian phenomenology, as a “metaphysics” of “presence,” is also “a philosophy of life,” which is to say, a philosophy that insists on the immanence and integrity of life, in regard to which “death is recognized as but an empirical and extrinsic signification, a worldly accident” (10). The Husserlian effort to construct a notion of “auto-­affection” that would be “pure”—­that is, purified of all constitutive relation to the external and the alien—­is thus already, implicitly, interpreted by Derrida as a defensive effort to protect the notion of a “self ” that could “express” itself without losing itself in the process, which involves not just a continuum of expression but a discontinuum of signification. Derrida’s argument, which we cannot elaborate on here, consists in demonstrating that the very process of repetition invoked by Husserl to distinguish “ideality”—­that which stays the same over time and space—­from empiricity, harbors within itself an irreducible dimension of difference as well as sameness, and that these two cannot be radically disassociated from one another. This “primordial structure of repetition that . . . govern[s] all acts of signification”—­which will later be designated as “iterability” by Derrida—­is here mobilized to reveal that no representation can be simply expressive, in the sense of establishing an uninterrupted continuum between the consciousness of a speaking subject and his speech. Because of its irreducible iterability, “ideality” can never simply be self-­identical. As Derrida puts it: Auto-­affection is not a modality of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself [autos]. It produces sameness as self-­relation within self-­difference; it produces sameness as the nonidentical. (82)

Derridean deconstruction thus has as its initial object the “self,” the autos of auto-­affection, of Selbstaffizierung, or “self-­presence.” Speech and Phenomenon concludes with the following words: Contrary to what phenomenology—­which is always phenomenology of perception—­has tried to make us believe, contrary to what

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our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the thing itself always escapes. Contrary to the assurance that Husserl gives us . . . “the look” cannot “abide.” (104, my emphasis)

In the following forty years granted him to write and to publish, a primary focus of Derrida’s attention remained the “self,” and above all its inescapable but futile efforts to “assure” itself of its identity in a self-­identical world, a world where “things themselves” could be grasped.6 A necessary correlative of this project was that of exploring the conditions in which “our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing” that such is the case—­that we inhabit a world of “things themselves” in which “the look” might be able to “abide.” And the mechanism that drew his attention again and again, remained the same: the “repetitive structure” of all signification, of all marking and demarcation, of all identification and hence, of all identity—­but which, as irreducibly heterogeneous, inevitably came to mark with a sameness what is never simply identical. The very existence, in English, of the word “selfsame” bears witness to this sameness that is never simply self-­identical. So much, then, for the continuity to which I have referred. The shift with which I am concerned emerges during the last decade of his writing, beginning (to my knowledge at least) in 1993 with Specters of Marx, elaborated and transformed in books such as Politics of Friendship (1994), Faith and Knowledge (1996), and culminating in Rogues (Fr: 2003). It is marked by the introduction of a term that resembles the earlier one I have been discussing sufficiently to make its divergence from it all the more worth reflecting upon: the term autoimmunity. In place of the earlier “affection,” the notion of self is now linked to that of “immunity.” The context of the two terms explains the shift, at least in part. Here, two points can be noted. First, the titles of the books mentioned do not deal exclusively or primarily with philosophy, but rather, either directly or indirectly, with politics (this fact becomes even more evident if we add another text in which Derrida elaborates the notion of autoimmunity, the interview given shortly after September 11, 2001, to the Italian writer Giovanna Boradorri, published some years later in English under the title—­surely not stemming from Derrida—­Philosophy in a Time of Terror). The only partial exception is the book Faith and Knowledge, which, as its subtitle indicates, 108   Protection, Projection, Persecution

is concerned with The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone. But Derrida’s discussion of “religion” clearly places it in a context that is political—­both geopolitical and in its own, quite distinctive way, “biopolitical.” Second, this word, “biopolitical,” which Derrida does not use, brings us to the second aspect of the shift I am describing. The term “autoimmune” comes from the life sciences and, in particular, from medicine, not philosophy. It thus suggests a shift from the discourse of philosophy to that of the life sciences. To determine just what may be new here, in Derrida’s work, is complex, since as we have just seen, deconstruction constituted itself in an encounter with what Derrida, in Speech and Phenomenon describes as a “philosophy of life” (10). In this respect, the question of “life” was already at the heart of Derrida’s earliest writings. The “metaphysics of presence” thereby appears as a defensive effort to offer “assurances” to a desire all too eager to find such no matter what the cost. Life was thus to be considered as the “norm,” and death as the exception. But in his reading of Husserl, Derrida demonstrated that the very arguments that sought to purify “auto-­affection” from all constitutive relation to alterity also irrevocably estranged it from the self-­identity of an “I,” whose ideal “significance” (Bedeutung) had to be universally intelligible—­that is, identically repeatable—­in the absence of the singular entity uttering it and designated by that utterance. Such identity in repetition might thus enable the mark “I” to function in the absence of its original author or referent, but it did not establish the domain of pure interiority, of pure self-­affection that was required to enable a transcendental—­that is, an enduring and unchanging—­process of thought. This suggests one aspect of the shift in question: a shift in perspective from the singularity of the “I” to the generality of a self whose collective identity could now be construed as being species-­specific rather than tied to isolated individuals. With respect to Speech and Phenomena, the problem of the unique and absolutely distinct selfsame (now named “ipseity”) shifts to more collective and institutional entities: the university, Europe, democracy—­autoimmunity. With the emergence of this term, Derrida’s effort to problematize the idea of a self-­ contained and meaningful norm shifts from the effort to describe the auto-­ affection of a consciousness that, despite its individuation, still aspires to a certain transcendence, to a discourse centered on the generality of the living species, also known as the “life sciences.” Protection, Projection, Persecution   109

At the same time, however, Derrida, in adopting the term “auto-­ immunity,” clearly seeks to demarcate it from the biomedical discourse that construes it as an essentially pathological process. For Derrida, autoimmunity does not designate an illness that more or less accidentally befalls an intrinsically healthy organism, no more than “auto-­affection,” in its “impure” and differential dimension, could be construed (I repeat here the passage quoted previously) as “a modality of experience that characterizes a being that would already be itself [autos]. It produces sameness as self-­ relation within self-­difference; it produces sameness as the nonidentical” (82). And yet this passage also suggests the considerable distance that separates the term auto-­affection from its successor in Derrida’s later work. For whereas auto-­affection can be said to “produce sameness as the nonidentical,” auto-­immunity seems much more sinister: in seeking to protect the organism, it attacks and destroys it. Or rather, in the singular interpretation given the term by Derrida, it attacks and destroys itself: namely, the protective defenses of the system. The mechanisms and processes that seek to protect a living system against threats from without, attack its own defenses, thus rendering the organism all the more vulnerable to destruction. However, this debilitating effect of defensive power can also render the system more open to transformation. And it is this that enables Michael Naas, in an extremely helpful and comprehensive discussion of the concept, to suggest that the term functions as “the last iteration of what Derrida called for more than forty years deconstruction.”7 Autoimmunity can thus be both suicidal and self-­transformative. This, at least, is what emerges from several—­although not all—­of its formulations in the writings of Derrida, and perhaps most clearly in one its earliest articulations. In Specters of Marx, Derrida uses the term to describe an attitude shared by both Marx and the object of his scathing critique in the German Ideology, Max Stirner: Both of them love life, which is always the case but never goes without saying for finite beings: they know that life does not go without death, and that death is not beyond, outside of life, unless one inscribes the beyond in the inside, in the essence of the living. They both share, apparently like you and me, an unconditional preference for the living body. But precisely because of that, they wage an end110   Protection, Projection, Persecution

less war against whatever represents it, whatever is not the body but belongs to it, returns to it: prosthesis and delegation, repetition, difference. The living ego is autoimmune, which is what they do not want to know. To protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate, as the same, to itself, it is necessarily led to welcome the other within (so many figures of death: difference of the technical apparatus, iterability, non-­uniqueness, prosthesis, synthetic image, simulacrum, all of which begins with language, before language), it must therefore take the immune defenses apparently meant for the non-­ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary and direct them at once for itself and against itself.8

In order to protect itself, the “living ego” must not just defend against what it considers to be foreign—­it must also “welcome the other within” in the different forms of technical protheses, substitutes, supplements, and simulacra of all sorts, including language. This dependence on what is foreign to the ego complicates the task of the immune system. If it protects by attacking only those elements that it considers alien to its body, it runs the risk of impoverishing, weakening, and ultimately destroying that body. And thus it can come to do what for many years medical science considered exclusively to be an abnormal and pathological process9—­namely, attack itself, which is to say, attack its ability to destroy antigens. To fulfill its mission of protection, it must turn against the system of protection itself, against itself. Autoimmunity thus emerges as the aporetic norm of the singular living being: it can only survive by protecting against its own protection. The passage from Specters of Marx links autoimmunity to life in the singular, which is to say, to the individual body and to the first-­person singular, the ego or I. But it is only in Faith and Knowledge that the political potential of autoimmunity begins to emerge with clarity: Community as com-­mon autoimmunity. No community, which would not cultivate its own autoimmunity, a principle of sacrificial self-­ destruction ruining the principle of self-­protection (the preserving of the integrity of the self), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral survival. This self-­contesting attestation keeps the autoimmune community alive, which is to say, open to something Protection, Projection, Persecution   111

other and more than itself: the other, the future, death, freedom, the coming or the love of the other, the space and time of a spectralizing messianicity beyond all messianism.10

“Community,” political and otherwise, thus is the product not just of “the principle of self-­protection” seeking to preserve “the integrity of the self ”—­the self as integral and integrating—­but of the protection that protects against a mode of protection that would exclude or neutralize what is held to be alien and extraneous. The latter includes the “space and time of a spectralizing messianicity,” as well as “the future, death, freedom” and “the coming or the love of the other.” Note that the survival of the community here depends on its being able to remain open not simply to the future, its indeterminacy and freedom, and not just to the advent or the love of the other, but to death. How is this to be understood? In order for a community to survive—­and a community that does not have a certain duration is not a community—­it must protect not just against its own system of protection, but more precisely against the prevailing actualization of that system as a unified self. In short, it must protect against the principle of sovereignty, which, since Jean Bodin and Hobbes, has served as the defining principle of the state and, in the period of liberal individualism, also increasingly of the ideal and norm of its individual members, qua egos. For Derrida, one of the privileged if infinitely problematic sites from where this link between ego and state can and should be pursued—­ although this interpretive perspective has not yet been developed very far—­is psychoanalysis. That this has not happened, despite an auspicious beginning in the work of Freud, is due not simply to external resistances, but also to internal ones. In a long interview with Derrida, the French historian of psychoanalysis Elisabeth Roudinesco asks him if the resistance of universities to Freud and his followers is not the result of “fear of the unconscious.”11 Derrida’s reply probably surprised her: A “subject,” no matter of what kind (whether individual, citizen, or state) constitutes and institutes itself only out of such “fear,” and therefore it always has the force or the protective form of a dam or a barrier [un barrage]. It interrupts the force that it then stores and channels. For despite their differences, which are never to be forgot112   Protection, Projection, Persecution

ten, our European societies always stand under the aegis of something like an ethical, legal and political “system,” an idea of the Good, of Right and of the Commonwealth. . . . What I in abbreviated form here call a “system” and an “idea,” must be protected against that which might threaten it from psychoanalysis—­which nevertheless arose in Europe and in the person of Freud continued to be thoroughly informed by a European model of culture, of civilization and of progress. This “system” and this “idea” are designed above all to resist whatever is felt to be a threat. For the “logic of the unconscious”12 remains incompatible with that which determines the identity of ethics, of the political and of the juridical not only conceptually, but no less in its institutions and consequently in the experiences of human beings. (290)

Psychoanalysis thus challenges, for Derrida, not simply an established discipline or series of disciplines (psychology, medicine, etc.) but rather an entire “system” of Western culture and civilization, in its “ethical, legal and political” dimensions. But this is a challenge that has not simply been rejected by those institutions, but also—­and this is perhaps more serious—­ been largely ignored in everyday life, and this not just outside of the psychoanalytical institutions: If psychoanalysis were to be taken seriously, really, practically, there would result an earthquake that is difficult to imagine. Something indescribable. Even for psychoanalysts. (290)

This unimaginable “earthquake,” that is scrupulously ignored by both institutions and individuals, is nevertheless in full swing, but so deeply embedded in everyday experience that it is difficult to discern and easy to overlook: In the meanwhile, this seismic threat plays itself out within ourselves, within each single individual. In our lives, as we know only too well . . . we generally act as though psychoanalysis had never existed. Even those who, like ourselves, are convinced of the inescapable necessity of the psychoanalytical revolution, or at least of its questions, Protection, Projection, Persecution   113

still act in their lives, in their ordinary language, in their social experience as though nothing had happened. . . . In an entire realm of our lives we act as though we still believed, at bottom, in the sovereign authority of the I, of consciousness etc., and employ the language of this “autonomy.” We know, to be sure, that we speak several languages at once. But that makes almost no difference, either in our souls or our bodies, whether the body of each individual, the body of society, the body of the nation, or the body of the discursive and juridical-­ political apparatus. (291)

The “questions” of psychoanalysis thus cut across and link the realms of what is usually separated as “individual” and “collective,” “personal” and “institutional” experience, and this cut goes to the root of the modern notions of subjectivity as autonomous. Instead, the subject, “no matter of what kind: individual, collective or institutional . . . constitutes itself only out of fear,” as an instance of protection. Protection therefore, like auto-­ affection and autoimmunity, is not something that befalls a subject already constituted as self-­consciousness. Rather, self-­consciousness constitutes itself as identical in, through, and as that response to danger that we call fear. And this, Derrida asserts, is as true on the institutional and political level, as it is on that of individual experience. This is why the notion of “sovereignty” becomes for Derrida not simply a political notion, but more generally one that sustains—­and is sustained by—­the modern ideal of an autonomous self. In a keynote speech held in the summer of 2000 before an international meeting of psychoanalysts in Paris, Derrida situates the link between individual, collective, and categorical “sovereignty” by relating it to what he designates as a “metaphysics of sovereignty” in an age of “globalization”:13 The world, the world-­w ide process of globalization, with all of its consequences—­political, social, economic, legal, technical-­scientific etc.—­resists without a doubt psychoanalysis. . . . It mobilizes against it not only a model of positive science, which can be positivist, cognitivist, physicalist, psycho-­pharmalogical, genetic, but also at times a hermeneutics that becomes spiritualist, religious or simplistically philosophical; in this mobilization participate institutions, concepts and archaic ethical, legal or political practices that are informed by 114   Protection, Projection, Persecution

a distinct logic, namely by a certain metaphysics of sovereignty (autonomy and omnipotence of the subject—­whether individual or statist—­freedom, egological will, conscious intentionality, or, if you prefer, the ego, ideal-­ego, super-­ego etc.) The first gesture of psychoanalysis will (have to) be to provide an account of the unavoidability [of this mobilization], although at the same time it will have to aim at deconstructing its genealogy—­which also traverses a cruel murder.14

The concluding allusion to the “cruel murder” recalls how, in both Totem and Taboo and in The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion, Freud links the process of civilization to the murder of the founding figure, be it the primal father in the speculative primal horde, or Moses as the Egyptian, that is the foreigner, founder of the Jewish people. However skeptical he remains as to the historical accuracy of such speculations, Derrida insists on their symbolic significance as reminders of the violence required by all institutionalization, whether individual (of the ego) or collective (of the state or nation). The notion of indivisible sovereignty, with its powers over the life and death of its subjects, is here characterized as a power of mobilization, for the purpose of affirming the self, and consequently of resisting that aspect of psychoanalysis that calls into question the self and its autonomy. The “metaphysics of sovereignty” defends its system against the challenges of a psychoanalysis that, however, is also part of it, and that therefore acts in a similar manner. The resistance, once again, comes not just from without but, as always, also from within: “For this resistance is also a resistance against itself. There is something wrong [il y a un mal], at any rate an autoimmunizing function within psychoanalysis as everywhere else, a rejection of itself, a resistance against itself, against its own principle, against its own principle of protection” (244). If such an “autoimmunizing function” is as inevitable as it is ubiquitous, the question then becomes that of distinguishing between its different directions and effects. It can either insist on preserving and protecting what cannot simply be protected: the given, actual self-­identity of the institution or the individual. Or it can offer an opportunity to transform that self-­identity by no longer simply protecting it, as it was, but opening it to a transformation, to the heterogeneity upon which it has always depended, but which it has also sought to ignore or dissimulate.15 Protection, Projection, Persecution   115

This is why Derrida includes the “metapsychological” concepts of psychoanalysis, including, as we have seen, the triad of ego, superego, and id, in the list of concepts belonging to the “metaphysics of sovereignty.” And why his interest in psychoanalysis has always been situated on its margins: either there where Freud disrupts his previous system deliberately, as in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, or where he allows himself to be drawn into areas that are difficult to integrate in the existing psychoanalytic conceptuality, as in his famous essay on The Uncanny. That essay has often been read—­perhaps first by Hélène Cixous16—­as itself being “uncanny.” Freud claims that he has long since ceased to have any direct experience of the “uncanny,” and therefore has to resort to literary examples, whereas, as Ernest Jones, his biographer, long ago noted, he interrupted writing the essay precisely until he had reached the age of sixty-­three, because he was afraid that sixty-two would be the age of his death. In the text, Freud gives as an example of an “uncanny” belief in numbers, the number sixty-­two—­but without of course acknowledging that the significance it had had for himself and the writing of the text. But there is a more systemic explanation for Freud’s uncanny excursion in the uncanny, a realm he seeks to appropriate for his psychoanalytic system. At the time he is writing the essay, he is in the process of rethinking the entire bases of the system, associated with the so-­called pleasure principle. Part of that system was the tenet that anxiety—­the general class to which “the uncanny” in part belongs (but does not exhaust)—­was a result of repression, or rather of its return as unbounded energy. Under the aegis of the “pleasure principle,” anxiety was thereby seamlessly integrated into the Freudian system as the result or effect of repression, itself explained as a result of the pleasure principle. A representation came to be associated with displeasure, and was therefore repressed, banished from consciousness, and replaced by a substitute-­formation, by another “idea.” When the substitute-­idea lost its power to keep the repressed, unpleasant representation from becoming conscious, there occurred a “return of the repressed,” which (so this “first” psychoanalytic theory of anxiety) brought with it the experience of the “uncanny”—­that which had long been familiar but precisely because of its familiarity could not be integrated into the “household” of self-­consciousness. However, already in that essay, Freud had to acknowledge that this

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explanation fell short of being satisfactory, since not every “return of the repressed” produced anxiety, and not every anxiety could be equated with “the uncanny.” A few years later, after discarding the “pleasure principle” due to his discovery of the “repetition compulsion” and the “death drive,” Freud reversed his first theory of anxiety. According to the new theory, most fully elaborated in the 1926 essay, Inhibition, Symptom and Anxiety, anxiety was no longer the effect of repression but its cause. This inversion, however, implied much more than just an exchange of places between anxiety and repression. For in placing anxiety at the origin of repression, Freud acknowledged, at least implicitly, that his psychoanalytic system was incapable of providing an adequate causal explanation of psychic structure. For anxiety, as he emphasized in the 1926 text, presupposes something like an I or a proto-­I, which therefore has to be reckoned with from the beginning, as it were, even before the I can fully constitute itself. The I, for Freud, is on the one hand not given from the start—­it has to be developed, and a certain form of repression is required for its development. But at the same time, if anxiety functions as the cause of repression, then the I has to be somewhere in the wings, inasmuch as anxiety is defined by Freud as the “reaction of the I to danger.” “Danger,” Freud explains, is a relational concept: it is always a danger for or to something else. It is never self-­contained. In this case, the danger involved has to be thought in relation to the disruption that it can bring to the psychic instance or agency—­ the I—­that seeks to establish and maintain a certain degree of unity and coordination among the differing components of the psyche, between id (or “it”) and super-­ego (or “trans-­I”). Now the I, as Freud describes it, is not there from the beginning: it is formed through a gradual process that Freud describes in a late, unfinished essay, his last attempt to provide a synopsis of his entire system, Outline of Psychoanalysis: Under the influence of the surrounding real external world, a part of the I undergoes a particular development. Originally equipped as an exterior surface with organs for the reception of stimuli and with an apparatus for protection against stimuli [mit den Organen zur Reizaufnahme und den Einrichtungen zum Reizschutz], a particular organization emerges that from now on will mediate between It and the external world. This realm of psychic life we assign the name I.17

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This passage, written in 1939, takes up almost literally a description written some twenty years before in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), but with a significant shift. The earlier text, which for the first time places the development of a “protective shield” (Reizschutz) at the core of psychic formation, described not the development of the I but rather that of “consciousness.” At first, however, Freud describes the process as though it concerned the development of an organic system per se, not a psychic one: This little fragment of living substance is suspended in the middle of an external world charged with the most powerful energies, and it would be killed by the stimulation emanating from these if it were not provided with a protective shield against stimuli. It acquires the shield in this way: its outermost surface ceases to have the structure proper to living matter, becomes to some degree inorganic and thenceforward functions as a special envelope or membrane resistant to stimuli. . . . By its death, the outer layer has saved all the deeper ones from a similar fate—­unless, that is to say, stimuli reach it that are so strong that they break through the protective shield. Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli.18

Even before he arrives at the description of the “death drive,” a certain “death” (that of the surface “membrane”) becomes the condition of survival for the organism, and as we shall see, also for the psyche, and ultimately for the ego. Only such a “death”—­the transformation of organic to inorganic matter—­creates the “protective shield” that is necessary if the organism is to survive. In a certain sense, then, “trauma”—­the breaking-­ through of the protective shield—­is the condition against which the organism, consciousness, and the ego will have to defend and protect itself: not just at the origin, but constantly thereafter as well. Everything then depends on just how this process of protection is to be construed. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud throws out a number of suggestive speculations, without being able to develop any of them. The first describes the process of defense and protection as a kind of sampling that implies being able to localize the “direction and nature of the external stimuli”19 and thereby being able to organize it in a way that diminishes its traumatic potential. This involves the development of what might be 118   Protection, Projection, Persecution

called “attention,” although Freud does not. Later, in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, he will, however, call attention to a related defensive process, which he labels “isolation” and which involves separating the potentially dangerous stimulus or representation from its ramifications and connections to other things. Since danger comes not from individual sources but rather from their cumulative and disintegrative connections, such “isolation” is as effective, if not more so, than “repression” in the traditional sense. It is, Freud notes, also very difficult to identify—­one could also say, to “isolate”—­since it overlaps with what is the core of so-­called normal thought processes, namely what is called “concentration.” When, therefore, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud emphasizes both the spatial and temporal aspects of the “sampling” of potentially threatening stimuli—­and he even goes so far as to refer to the “Kantian theorem that time and space are ‘necessary forms of thought’”20—­what he is actually describing is the use of spatiotemporal coordinates to locate and thus partially to neutralize the potential threat to consciousness, the I, and indeed to life itself. To understand wherein this threat consists—­this danger against which the I defends itself both through its “protective shield” and through anxiety, as a “signal” of a potential, impending threat—­requires interpretation. Freud himself tends to formulate the process in terms of an excess of energy, a quantitative amount of energy that cannot be absorbed by the system—­organic or psychic—­that it “threatens.” But given that the two “systems” concerned are, first of all, consciousness, and second of all, the I, we can reformulate the nature of the threat involved: the quantitative excess that threatens the I and consciousness is one that cannot be integrated into the systems concerned. What is at stake is an irreducible multiplicity or differentiality that as such threatens the unity of consciousness and of the I. Indeed, it is not consciousness as such that is threatened—­and indeed, consciousness is, as Freud recognizes again and again, a far more mysterious and enigmatic entity than is commonly realized—­but rather the unity of a consciousness that therefore must be understood as self-­consciousness. It is the unity of a consciousness that seeks to repeat itself as one and the same, despite the irreducible alteration involved in all repetition. Hence, the “demonic” quality of the “repetition compulsion” that Freud acknowledges in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: it is demonic, but also fascinating, precisely insofar as it entails a repetition that does not come full circle, that produces the “same” but without resolving it in the unity of a “self.” It is this Protection, Projection, Persecution   119

that makes it demonic, but also automatic: a repetition that produces the “same” as the “nonidentical,” to recall the formulation of Derrida. It entails sameness without self if by self is understood self-­identity. The protective defense against this “danger” always involves the effort to reduce multiplicity to unity, difference to identity, sameness to self. And because the “danger” comes not simply from “without” but also from “within”—­since the “protective shield” is required in order to establish the very difference between outside and inside, and therefore continues to impinge upon the inside that depends upon it, that is, upon the outside—­ one, if not the preferred mechanism for protecting against internal difference is what Freud calls “projection,” the tendency to treat them [stimuli] as though they were acting, not from the inside, but from the outside, so that it may be possible to bring the shield against stimuli into operation as a means of defense against them. This is the origin of projection, which is destined to play such a large part in the causation of pathological processes.21

Earlier on in Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud introduces a distinction that is by no means specific to the discourse of psychoanalysis, but that can be extremely illuminating in the context of this discussion of protection through projection: that between “fear,” “anxiety,” and “fright” or “terror” [Schreck]: “Anxiety” describes a particular state of expecting the danger, of preparing for it even though it may be an unknown one. “Fear” requires a definite object of which to be afraid. “Fright” [or Terror], however, is the name we give to the state a person gets into when he has run into danger without being prepared for it: it emphasizes the factor of surprise. I do not believe that anxiety can produce a traumatic neurosis. There is something about anxiety that protects its subject against fright and so against fright-­neuroses. (30)

If we take this description together with Freud’s speculation about how a certain “sampling” can function as a protective measure, by determining the “direction” from which the danger comes, we see how time and 120   Protection, Projection, Persecution

space can be mobilized and perhaps even constructed as a framework in which such protection can be construed and the danger contained: time and space are “forms” in which a potential danger can be located as an object of Anschauung, to recall the Kantian term, in which space and time are defined as “forms” of “outer” and “inner” Anschauung, respectively. We see here how misleading the consecrated English translation of Anschauung as “intuition” can be: for what is at stake, in this context at least, is the possibility of literally being “looked at,”—­angeschaut—­and thereby localized, identified, and potentially at least, assimilated and brought under control. This in turn presupposes a certain distance from which one can look “at” something, envisage or imagine it. What ultimately has to be “protected,” then, is the distance that separates the perceiver from the perceived, subject from object—­separates but also joins through the supposed homogeneity of the space “in between.” The three interrelated terms “fear,” “anxiety,” and “terror” (my translation for Schreck) are thus all part of a single process: that of responding to and protecting against an unassimilable alterity or difference, that per se cannot be integrated or reduced to the selfsame. “Anxiety” thus mediates between the relative stability of fear and the relative instability of terror or fright: it involves, as Freud stresses, a certain “preparedness” (Angstbereitschaft), which in turn is directed as much to the future as to the past. To the past, since it cannot imagine or envisage the danger without recurring to memory and reproducing analogous situations; and to the future, since precisely the danger is always yet to come. The child’s game of throwing the spool out of the playpen and then hauling it back, accompanied by the sounds, oooo–­aaa, which Freud translates as fort-­da (gone-­there), indicates how certain repetitive gestures can be used to mimic the “preparedness” that is required to protect the ego from future losses and threats. But qua repetition, what returns as “there” is never simply “here”—­it returns as the “same” perhaps, but never simply as the self-­ same, never a simple unity. What returns can therefore be designated as the aftereffect of the “singular,” which is a differential and relational notion that can be experienced only in its withdrawal, only in its “traces,” as the early Derrida might have said. The “singular” in this sense is very different from the “individual,” especially if we take this term literally. For the “singular” is always divided in and of itself, always separated from the selfsame, and it is this that Protection, Projection, Persecution   121

constitutes both its uniqueness and its inaccessibility. We can never experience the singular directly, in and of itself, but only in what remains, what is “there” but never simply “here”: the resource of the German da, which is not simply dort (the equivalent of “there” as opposed to “here”). What is “da” is both here and there, and thus never simply in one place at a time: a body, perhaps, but not in the sense defined by Hobbes, taking up a definition that goes back to Aristotle, namely as that which can only be in one place at one time and can also never share that place with anything else. It is this definition of bodies and places, based on a certain notion of identity as isolation, that Benjamin, following Freud (but unaware of his thoughts on “isolation”) employs in his study of Baudelaire and relates, as did Freud before him, to memory. Or rather, to different sorts of memory: to that which is presupposed by Erlebnis, by a so-­called “lived experience” that seeks to protect itself by putting experiences temporally in their proper places, by isolating them—­and Erfahrung, which, although Benjamin does not stress this, is constructed on the verb fahren, to travel or traverse, and thus entails movement and alteration. Perhaps the special achievement of shock defense is the way it assigns content an exact place in time [eine exakte Zeitstelle] in consciousness, at the cost of the integrity of the content. That would be the greatest achievement of reflection. It would make the incident into an Erlebnis—­a lived experience. If it is omitted, what would ensue is the joyful [freudige] or (mostly) unpleasant terror [Schreck] that, according to Freud, sanctions the failure to defend against shock.22

It should be noted that Benjamin, via a wordplay on the name of Freud (=freudig: joyful), opens up what Freud himself does not easily acknowledge, although he is later obliged to concede that nonintegrated “tensions” can indeed be a source of pleasure and not merely pain.23 In short, for Benjamin the unitary perspective of self-­consciousness and of the ego does not constitute the court of last resort. It is significant that his notion of an “experience” that cannot simply be reduced to a notion of “life” based on the unity of self-­consciousness—­Erlebnis—­is made in the context of a discussion of poetry, that of Baudelaire, or literature more generally, that of Proust, for instance. The latter provides Benjamin with an instance of “awakening” in which the unity of the body and the unity of consciousness 122   Protection, Projection, Persecution

are dislocated simultaneously: Marcel recalls via the experience of individual bodily members, no longer integrated into the body as an organic whole, container of an equally unified self. Instead of the self-­contained body, it is the nonintegrated relations of individual bodily members to singular contexts that endow “experience” with a sense of irreducible alterity: A man asleep holds in a circle around him the thread of hours, the order of years and of worlds. He consults them instinctively in waking up and reads there in a second the point of the earth that he occupies, the time that has passed before his wakening; but their ranks can become mixed, break apart. If towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep overtakes him as he is reading, in a posture too different from that in which he habitually sleeps, all that is necessary is for him to raise his arm to stop the sun and make it go backwards, and at the first minute of waking, he will no longer know the time, and will think that he has just gone to bed. And if he falls asleep in a position even more displaced and divergent, for example after dinner seated in an arm-­chair, the transformation will be complete in worlds out of orbit, the magic armchair causing him to travel at great speed in time and in space, until at the moment of opening his eyes, he will believe that he fell asleep several months earlier in another country.24

Benjamin, who refers to Proust but does not cite this passage, surely had it and others in mind when he made his distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, between “lived experience” and “experience” that is not simply “lived,” if by lived is meant, as it usually is, that which is reducible to the specious unity of self-­consciousness. Instead, the dislocation of the body into singular members and nonunifiable experiences traversing multiple places at one and the same time, dislocates that one and the same and opens it to an experience of events that are as singular as they are finite. Or rather, indefinite: the never entirely definable singularity of events that are “one” but never simply the “same.” Thus the sovereignty of the subject is dislocated by an experience of the indefinite singularity of events that inevitably entails both pain and pleasure, fright and joy. By a “motion of limbs” that, as we remember, was Hobbes’s definition of life. But it is a life that cannot be assimilated or reduced to the unity of a “whole body,” the correlative of that wholeness Protection, Projection, Persecution   123

of the body politic without which sovereignty, as indivisible, cannot be conceived. Benjamin turns to literature and poetry, that of Baudelaire and Proust, to find instances of that experience of singularity that are neither simply protective nor projective, that do not turn anxiety into a “signal,” as Freud puts it, through which to “prepare” for an assimilation of what is to come. That anxiety, and even terror, can be a source of “pleasure” if not of joy, is an experience that increasingly informs politics today. But whether that pleasure can be acknowledged without being entirely assimilated—­ whether, in short, not just a poetics, but a politics of singularity can come to replace the politics of the sovereign self—­this remains an open question, to which the following chapters try to respond.

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6

The Single Trait

Politics, in its theory and even more in its practice, has always tended to subordinate the singular to the general, usually by equating the singular with the individual and the individual with the particular, which, qua “part,” already implies its dependency upon and subservience to the “whole.” Theorists of “liberal democracy” have sought to legitimate the institution in which the whole materializes itself politically, either juridically, as the nation-­state, or morally, as “the people,” understood as providing the indispensable condition of individual self-­realization. Nothing is more familiar than this claim, going back at least to Hobbes, and yet nothing is more enigmatic. For after all, what is a “self,” and what does its “realization” entail? In the Christian tradition out of whose crisis the political systems and strategies of Western modernity develop, the self is generally understood as that which marks the ability of an individual to stay the same over time. In this sense, the self can be considered as the secular successor of the “soul.” As the quintessence of the “individual,” the self thereby becomes humanized. For we—­“we” here being especially English speakers1—­can all too easily forget or overlook the fact that “an individual” does not have to be human: it can be any entity understood to be in principle in-­divisible and self-­contained. In short: autonomous. U.S. English speakers can all too easily overlook this fact because, in this particular version of English, the word “self ” is almost inevitably associated with a person, and hence with a human being.2 This is not necessarily the case in other languages, in French or German, for instance. The soi in French, like the Selbst in German, need not refer primarily to human individuals. In French, despite the growing influence of Foucault’s publications on the souci de soi3 (the care of the self) the word soi has traditionally had a more linguistic or logical than

125

referential or human significance. Soi designates a reflexive movement, in which something—­not necessarily human—­returns to that which it was, to its essence or its origin. Similarly, Selbst in German is by no means the simple equivalent of “self,” as indicated by its adverbial function, in which the word tends to refer not to the completion of an identity but to its limits: Selbst die Amerikaner translates as “even the Americans,” rather than “the Americans themselves.” But the fact that U.S. English tends to privilege the association of “self ” with the human individual is hardly an accident. For although “self ” as a reflexive marker need not refer only or primarily to human beings, ever since Descartes at least, a certain notion of reflexivity—­of something realizing itself by returning to what it was and is—­has found its exemplary articulation in the human individual, and this by virtue of a long but nevertheless delimitable tradition, which Heidegger has aptly designated as “onto-­theological.”4 If, in this tradition, only the human can be a law unto itself (auto-­nomous), it is only insofar as human beings are construed as created in the image of a being (a divine Creator) held to be fully identical to itself. Human autonomy is thus derived from the notion of man as created in the image of a single and self-­identical Creator. Contrary, therefore, to the opposition often supposed to constitute the relation of secular autonomy and religious heteronomy, the notion of autonomy and its association with man can be seen as an extension of the biblical account of the creation of the world through the divine logos. “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1),5 and then “every living creature after his kind” (1:21). Each living being is thus created as an individual that is exemplary of a “kind,” instantiation of a genus or a genre. The individual is indivisible in its essence because the latter is grounded in the “kind”—­in the genre it exemplifies—­which in turn reflects the self-­identical structure of the Creator: God as the epitome of a being that is one-­of-­a-­kind, and as such serves as the model of the autonomous self. In the monotheistic Creator-­God, individual and genus are absolutely one and the same. In His creation, all creatures are created in the image of such identity, which, however, is no longer immediate and absolute. Only man approaches such immediate self-­identity of individual and genus. But this approach is not unequivocal: man is both singular and plural, splitting the story of creation into two versions, just as he himself is split into man and woman, Adam and Eve. Both are man, which is to say 126   The Single Trait

members of a single genus. But that genus is split generically. The tension between genus and gender thus manifests the incapacity of the human to be simply human, much less divine. It is in this light that the commandment of God to the gendered human should be understood: Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish in the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. (Gen. 1:28)

“Man” will try to forget his/her/its generic disunity by being “fruitful and multiply(ing) and replenish(ing) the earth” but also by “subdue(ing) it” and establishing his/her/its “dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth.” In the beginning, then, there was Life without Death, good without evil, subjection without suffering, dominion without resistance. And time served to measure the space of such limitless life, marked by growth but not by decay, by fulfillment but not by destruction.6 And yet, the very placement of a tree of the knowledge of good and evil points toward what must necessarily come, namely the introduction of evil into a world that ostensibly is devoid of it, where everything is only “good.” Perhaps this explains why Adam is called upon by God not only to reproduce but to “subdue” the result of creation. Perhaps it is because the creation is already virtually at war with itself, and this by virtue of the words of its Creator, who names the tree of the knowledge of good and of evil as that which must remain out of bounds for humans and yet which is placed at the center of the Garden of Eden, where, as we have been told, everything is good. Where everything is Life, without end and without death: And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. (2:9)

Two trees in the Garden, nourished by a river that “went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted, and became into four heads” (2:10). In this place, then, where there seems to be only life and where it is good that there is nothing else, something other casts its shadow on the very tree that is named to identify it. Before the Fall, the knowledge of good and evil has no object in the world; after it, it does. The Single Trait   127

Death will enter this world of pure life only as the result of a deliberate human action—­an act of disobedience. But the condition of the possibility of such disobedience, and hence of the introduction of mortality into the world, is that a certain negativity already be present in the Garden of Eden. And it is precisely this that occurs immediately following the initial description of the Garden, when God addresses man as follows: And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. (2:16)

Freud writes in Totem and Taboo7 that where there are prohibitions, there must first be desires to prohibit. But how could there be a desire of the sort that God thus feels obliged to prohibit? For, as Benjamin observes in his 1916 essay on “On Language as Such and On the Language of Man,”8 in the beginning everything that God had created was per se good: there was no evil. And hence, the tree of knowledge of good and evil could have no purpose, no reason to be. Except perhaps that of casting its shadow over its neighbor, the tree of life. In the Garden of Eden, the tree of knowledge names an opposition, one of which poles does not exist; the tree of life names no alternative: this distinction between the two trees underlines the question of the status of that other of life that would correspond to the other of the good. But it seems as if the other of life, in contrast to the other of good, cannot be named: it can only be signified silently, through the proximity of the two trees, which emphasizes their difference as well as their similarity. In any case, it is this unsaid, unnamed—­“repressed”?—­ other of life that God names in order to reinforce his prohibition: “For in the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die.” This is the first explicit mention of death in Genesis. I have already noted that the word “replenish” suggests implicitly death and decay; but given that the phrase has already been uttered a few lines previously as “be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas,” its status is certainly ambiguous. Read in view of what comes to pass, the fact that God promises instant punishment in case of transgression—­“in the day of ”—­becomes all the more significant, since Adam and Eve will not die immediately following their transgression, proving the serpent to be at least partially correct (“Ye shall 128   The Single Trait

not surely die” [3:4]). Instead, they will receive a suspended sentence. As will another important figure in this context, Cain, who, after killing his brother, Abel, will actually be protected by God from lethal violence by means of a mark inscribed on his body. It is worth noting that Abel is the first person explicitly named as suffering death, which he suffers at the hands of his brother; Cain is therefore marked by God—­not however to be killed in turn, out of vengeance, but rather to become a wanderer—­but also a founder of cities, clans, and technologies. Notwithstanding God’s initial threat, death is not instantaneous—­it takes its time, and in that meanwhile great cultures and civilizations are founded. Instead of its instant appearance, it is as it were replaced and deferred by work, suffering, and enmity. But also, albeit to a lesser extent, by solidarity and by sacrifice. One could conclude that, at least in Genesis, death is put to work while biding its time. Work appears as a way of deferring death, if not of overcoming it. The first chapters of Genesis thus recount the emergence of death as something that was not there from the start but that intervenes as a punishment for a transgression. The question then is, Why should there have been this prohibition—­and this desire—­in the first place? If death is, at the very least, “bracketed” (as the phenomenologists might say) in Eden, why should it be the center of a prohibition that reintroduces it? If one can assume that the “evil” whose knowledge the serpent promises Eve is at least related to death—­since neither exist as such in Eden—­why should its knowledge be so tempting? Could guilt have something to do with this temptation? Whoever eats of the tree of knowledge of good and evil will be guilty. But guilty of what? And again: Why should one want to eat of the forbidden tree, when its “object”—­the difference between good and evil—­has no “purchase” in the Garden of Eden? The words with which the serpent tempts Eve suggest a response. The serpent tells Eve that “in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (3:5). To eat of the tree of knowledge would be “to be as gods.” One of the results of this would be to deprive the mono-­theological Creator of his monopoly—­he would no longer be the one and only God. Indeed, he would have become something like a class, a genus, “gods.” The act of eating from the tree of knowledge promises to bring about this transformation. God responds to this possibility—­which recurs with the project of building a tower at The Single Trait   129

Babel—­both by confirming its reality and by deciding to distance it, by expelling humans from the Garden of Eden: And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us,9 to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. (3:23–­24)

Labor and suffering are thus introduced as a form of punishment, as the divine response to guilt and transgression. Work and suffering are death deferred—­but only deferred. But beyond the content of the punishment, its enunciation is what concerns us here. Whom does God so address, as he judges and condemns Adam and Eve for violating his prohibition and wanting to “become as one of us”? Who is this “us”? A “royal we”? In any case, the use of the first-­person plural here seems to give the word of God the status of an address to an audience. The makeup of that audience is of course not specified and cannot be. But from here on in (i.e., to the end of Genesis 3), God’s words will be addressed to others: mainly to the humans who have controverted his prohibition. The implications of this guilt are multiple. First of all, it has to do with transcending limits: limits assigned to humans, to be sure, but perhaps also to knowledge as such. Can there be a knowledge of the difference between good and evil—­particularly if and when this is related to life. To eat of the tree of life, God suggests, is what might come next, once man has transcended the limits of the human and is on his way to becoming divine, to becoming “like us”: this would mean not only to know the difference between good and evil, but “to live forever” (3:22). In short, although death has up until now nowhere been mentioned except as a punishment, God now acknowledges that man is nevertheless not immortal and that it is the desire to “live forever,” like God, that may be driving his refusal to accept his difference from his Creator. His transgression thus both confirms that aspiration and acknowledges its impossibility in the form of guilt. And of shame. Instead of having their eyes opened to the ultimate—­to knowing the unknowable perhaps—­“the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made

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themselves aprons” (3:7). What the humans “see” is that their bodies are exposed, and this perhaps is what makes them both vulnerable and mortal. But such an awareness is inseparable from being found guilty. To be exposed as a bodily existence is to be guilty, and cause for shame, since it is precisely this bodily existence qua gendered that divides the human—­ Adam—­from itself and thus bars the way to the eternal life of a divinity whose oneness transcends precisely all gender difference. However, the “fall” is always potentially also fortunate: a felix culpa, wherein the Christian tradition, from Augustine to Aquinas and beyond, has located the necessary (if not sufficient) condition of redemption.10 If the desire to know brought about the Fall, another kind of knowledge, called “faith,” can perhaps undo it in the end. If death came about through human action qua disobedience, might it not be overcome equally through human action, as faithful obedience? Precisely this thought is uttered by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians (1:15), which, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Hobbes quotes in his Leviathan: “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” If, as I have tried to show in chapter 5,11 protection is the defining project of the nation-­state in modern Western political theory, and if, as I have emphasized, the force driving this project poses a question that is rarely asked—­namely, protection from what and for what?—­then the beginnings of an answer may be found in the essentially Christian notion of original sin as a fortunate fall. If death came into the world through the actions of man—­actions that are presented as “original” and hence as exempt from any further questioning—­it can be surmounted (so the Christian Good News) through more of the same. It is this promise of salvation and of “resurrection” through action—­modified to include another form of intentional activity, namely, “faith”—­that the modern nation-­state, whether conceived of as a Leviathan or more liberally, as a consensual collective, is expected not to fulfill, but to secure. Homeland Security is thus to be achieved through a protracted and, if necessary, global war against all the forces of evil, death, and destruction—­the true “War against Terror”—­beginning with (sinful) man himself, defined as the “terrorist” and the “enemy.” And if this enemy often takes the form of an internal element, it is in this sense of original

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sin, in which the human “fell” from its initial height, to which it will hopefully be restored in the end. The “internal enemy” may be the most dangerous, and surely is the most insidious, but it is ultimately “external” to what makes the human, human—­before (and following) the Fall. In this light, the nation-­state appears, on the one hand, as heir to a Catholic Church through its ideal of absolute, undivided sovereignty. And on the other, it functions as heir to the Reformation, through its insistence on its territorially limited, distinctive, inborn (“native-­national”) particularity, which in turn regards the individual as the locus of faith and hence of salvation. These two aspects are constantly in tension with one another, resulting in the tendency to expand national sovereignty wherever possible into something like an empire. Since the notion of national sovereignty is informed by the monotheistic claim to universality, it tends to bring states into conflict with other nation-­states, a conflict that in turn produces the justification of single-­state hegemony: the desire of a “super-­ power” or “-­powers” to serve as arbiters of international conflicts. In the wake of immensely destructive wars of religion (intra-­Christian wars for the most part) the modern system of nation-­states sought, through “international law”—­or, as it is called in German: Völkerrecht (a more literal translation of the Roman ius gentium)—­to regulate the inevitable conflicts that emerged between particular political entities whose legitimation involved claims to universal validity that inevitably promoted conflict. The task that the secular nation-­states inherited from the church shifted from that of organizing “salvation” to that of assuring “safety” (these two meanings converge in the French word salut). The raison d’être of the modern state is no longer directly soteriological or redemptive, but rather protective.12 It seeks to secure the lives and livelihoods of its members. In the process it shifts the notion of “guilt” from a religious one, the original sin of Adam and Eve, to a moral and legal one, the “guilt” of those who violate the laws, which are presented as the condition of security and of protection, of public safety. In the judicial system, as in the biblical narrative, the cause of guilt is bound up with intention. Just as original sin was brought into the world by a deliberate act, so juridical guilt is dependent upon intention. And just as criminal guilt can be purged by punishment—­another intentional act—­sin can be purged by penance or repentance. The goal of such penance or repentance, of such punishment, is to “redeem” the “guilt” of the living, qua individuals, by contributing to 132   The Single Trait

the survival of the nation or people. The Christian promise of individual salvation devolves upon the political collective. But that collective is never simply present to itself: it always involves a promise, which is to say, the future. Faith in the future determines the future of faith. Hence also the importance of nouns such as nation and people, which can claim to provide a bridge, a link, from the individual present to the collective future: only through membership in such groups can vulnerable and guilty individuals hope to survive, if not to be “saved.” Hence, the importance of the “nation”: it can claim to secure a “state” by allowing it to transcend the transience of finite living beings. The nation (whether as “state” or as “people”) can claim to provide its citizens—­ and above all its “natives”—­with the time-­transcending space of the same, where birth comes into its own by ostensibly being emancipated from death. The nation fascinates and persists as the virtual fulfillment of the promise of the Nativity, and it is this, perhaps, that ultimately informs and defines its demographic “biopolitics.” But as Agamben and others have argued, what often results from this biopoliticized nation is not so much a culture of life as what could be called a thanaton.13 Birth and contiguous territory, which constitute the temporal and spatial conditions of a providential nation-­state that must also be localized, thus acquire a phantasmatic and thinly veiled theological significance when the primary political task is defined as that of protecting the innocent by punishing the guilty. Borders and walls, fences and enclosures are erected to demarcate this binary opposition, beginning with that of separating the inside from the outside, the “native” from the “foreign,” the innocent from the guilty. Through its interdictory function, law defines guilt and legitimates punishment. The death penalty is the exemplary legal sanction in a political realm that defines its primary task as that of affirming the sanctity of life—­not simply in general but of its citizens. It confirms its sovereignty by demonstrating its power to take life in order to protect life.14 The legal prerogative of taking life provides occasions for the state to demonstrate not just its own power, but through it, the power of life as such over death. The “execution” of the death penalty thus comes to exemplify the very notion of “execution” itself. The legal putting-­to-­death of the guilty is presented as the paradigmatic actus purus. By this act the living seek to assert their power as the power of life over death, revealing the “true” nature of death, from the biblical standpoint just discerned, The Single Trait   133

namely, as the product of an intentional act. Death is thus counter-­acted and the life of the body politic thereby “secured”—­that is, “redeemed.” As Rechtsstaat, or State of Law, the nation-­state seeks to embody this redemptive promise of resurrection—­not of individuals but of a collective that survives and even thrives on the death of the individuals it sacrifices. Execution of the guilty foreshadows redemption to come. Without guilt, no redemption. Without law, no safety. Without punishment, no law. Without incarceration, no freedom. Without death, no life. This interpretation and administration of “guilt,” which is endemic to the political–­legal systems that it in turn informs and sustains, derives its staying power ultimately from an onto-­mono-­theological interpretation of “life” as essentially “birth” and “rebirth,” and thus as a generic process that transcends individual mortality. In this interpretation, which is also at the core of the Christian Gospel, death is defined as that which life must presuppose, but only in order to surpass. In this tradition, sovereignty always entails the power to give and to take life, long before this ability takes on the specifically “biopolitical” forms of population control and management analyzed by Foucault. In the Christian tradition, all politics is biopolitics, which also means thanatopolitics.15 But the rhetorical and political staying power of this tradition depends crucially on a very distinctive determination of guilt, construing it not simply as indebtedness to or dependency on the other but rather as the product of a deliberate, intentional act: in other words, as a product of the self. An act is not just an occurrence or a happening: it is the actualization of an intention. It should be noted that in most jurisprudence the principle of mens rea—­the thing in the mind—­remains an essential condition for the determination of guilt: if acts are committed unconsciously or involuntarily, “guilt” and “punishment” are more difficult to assign.16 It is this act that ultimately defines the subject of history as an individual living being, who, qua living individual, is mortal, but who at the same time is conceived in the image of a unique, universal, and immortal God. Individualism is thus essentially linked to this monotheistic tradition, although clearly not all monotheisms must therefore necessarily lead to individualism. Nor is this link simple or without contradiction. Indeed, the very possibility of law seems to depend upon a maxim that in part appears to contradict mens rea: the maxim that ignorantia legis neminem excusat, ignorance 134   The Single Trait

of the law excuses no one from being subject to it. If not a mystery, at the very least this installs an enigma at the heart of the individual’s relation to the law, and through it, to the state of law, the Rechtsstaat. One is expected to be aware of the consequences of one’s act in order for law to be “applied” to individual acts, and yet one cannot plead lack of knowledge as a reason to be exempted from law, as for example “K.” attempts to do at the beginning of and throughout Kafka’s Trial. As K. quickly discovers, “guilt” does not depend upon knowledge of the law—­although in many cases, it may depend on knowledge or awareness of the consequences of one’s acts.17 Given the massive fact and influence of this tradition, which today is inseparable from what is called globalization—­although it is also not simply identical to it—­any alternative to the dominant monotheistic–­ individualistic interpretation of guilt and its obverse, the good citizen, will have to build on internal contradictions and tensions rather than appealing to an exteriority that, qua exteriority, is already included in the internal logic and program of the mono-­theological political system and its institutions. It is with this in mind that I turn to a short text of Benjamin’s, which does not directly address political questions at all, but only aesthetic ones. If it can be read as having political implications, this reading will therefore have to proceed by readdressing the much-­vexed question of the relation of politics to aesthetics, beginning with the question of how those terms are to be understood. In the process, it may turn out to be advisable to revisit the meaning that Kant sought to reserve for the term “aesthetics,” in a famous note at the beginning of his “Transcendental Aesthetics” of space and time, in his Critique of Pure Reason, in which he argued for a return of the meaning to its Greek origins, associated with the study of sensual appearance rather than with the appreciation of beauty or art.18 As we will see, the implications of Benjamin’s text can be understood better as a continuation of this Kantian critique than as the development of an aesthetical conception of politics articulated in the years following Kant’s Critiques, first by Schiller and then by Hegel and many others.19 The text entitled “Destiny and Character”—­Schicksal und Charakter—­ was written in 1919 but not published until 1921. Although ostensibly not directly concerned with political issues, it was composed at the same time that Benjamin was elaborating what he initially hoped would be a The Single Trait   135

general theory of politics, of which, however, only one text, his Critique of Violence—­Kritik der Gewalt—­has survived, whereas two other major essays, The True Politician (Der wahre Politiker) and True Politics (Die wahre Politik), have been lost (or were never written). Benjamin’s attitude toward “Destiny and Character”20 as documented in his correspondence was somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, in a letter to Gershom Scholem dating from 1919, he counts it among “my best works” and associates it with another lost text: a critique of Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (II. 3, 941).21 On the other hand, in a letter written several years later to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he describes the essay as not entirely successful: A few years ago, I tried to liberate the old words, destiny and character, from their terminological servitude [terminologischen Fron] and to render their original life accessible in the spirit of the German language. But this attempt reveals to me today just how difficult such a project is. Where insight proves to be insufficient . . . forcing [takes place]. (941)

Benjamin still defends such “forcing” as preferable to the false “sovereignty” that marks much writing of the time, but he nevertheless points to his subsequent discussion of “destiny” in the recently completed essay on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities as an improvement over the earlier and much shorter text. It should, however, be noted that this later discussion, like the one that will follow it, in his 1924 study of the Origin of the German Mourning Play, both build on the earlier essay, which they quote at length. It can therefore be argued that the earlier text, notwithstanding its imperfections, still provides the best access to Benjamin’s thinking on the question of “destiny,” and above all on its complex but significant relation to what he will analyze as “character.” It is therefore significant that when Benjamin describes his struggle to “liberate” certain concepts from a terminological tradition that had petrified their internal dynamic, he names only one of the two words that will constitute the title and subject matter of the essay, namely, “destiny” (Schicksal). About the other word, “character,” he says nothing. To be sure, the main focus of the 1919 essay—­and this will also hold for both of the later texts mentioned, the essay on Goethe’s novel and the study of the German baroque mourning play—­remains focused primarily on destiny. 136   The Single Trait

However, as the title suggests and the essay itself makes clear, the two terms, although distinct, are not to be separated. It is in their relationship that they unfold their significance. In his examination of destiny, Benjamin turns for examples to the aesthetic genre that, ever since Aristotle, has been placed at the summit of poetry, namely tragedy; character, on the other hand, he associates with a traditionally less valued literary form, namely comedy, but also with a nonaesthetic domain, if under “aesthetics” we understand strictly “fine arts”: namely, with physiognomy. In his 1924 essay on Elective Affinities, to which Benjamin refers in his letter to Hofmannsthal, he devotes several pages to a discussion of destiny, but very little to the question of character, understandably enough, since its comic dimension is allotted very little space in Goethe’s novel. This comic dimension of “character,” however, will turn out to be of considerable relevance for the particular set of questions we are pursuing here; but to get there, we will first have to examine the way in which Benjamin situates it with respect to tragedy and “destiny.” He begins his essay by attacking the prevailing manner in which destiny and character are generally related to one another, namely causally, character being understood as the cause of destiny. Causality he describes here as a perspective that implies the ability to prognosticate: If the character of a human being, i.e., its manner of reacting, were to be known in all of its detail, and if on the other hand the events of the world were known in all of the regions in which they could meet up with that character, it would then be possible to say both what that character would encounter as well as what acts it would perform. In short, its destiny would be known. (GS 2.1,171/SW 1, 201, translation modified here as elsewhere)

Against this prevailing modern conception, which tends to see in character the “cause” of destiny, thus treating the two as inseparable, Benjamin will go on to distinguish them radically, but also emphasize certain essential attributes that they share. The most significant of these is that both are accessible not directly, but only through signs: character through (mainly) bodily signs, destiny through both bodily and “signs of external life” (172/202). Having thus emphasized the semiotic dimension of both The Single Trait   137

character and destiny, Benjamin asserts that this excludes all causality or determinism: “A signifying connection [Bedeutungszusammhang] can never be grounded causally” (172/202). Just how this connection should be understood, Benjamin is not ready to say: he restricts his discussion to the semantic dimension of the signified or designated—­die Bezeichneten—­ rather than analyzing its specifically semiotic function with respect to character and destiny. The traditional, causal explanation of the relationship of destiny and character presupposes a dichotomy between the external and the internal that for Benjamin is untenable: For it is impossible to form a concept of the outside of an active [wirkenden] human being whose nucleus would consist in character. No concept of an external world can be distinguished from the concept of an active human being. Between both there is rather interaction [Wechselwirkung], their spheres of action intermingle. . . . The outside that an active human being encounters can be derived from his interior and vice-­versa—­indeed each can be considered to be in principle inseparable from the other. From this perspective, character and destiny, far from being theoretically distinct, converge. Thus Nietzsche, when he observes: “When one has character, one also has an experience that returns again and again.” (172–­73/202)

Nietzsche’s observation allows Benjamin to conclude that it is theoretically untenable to determine the relationship of character to destiny in terms of the opposition “inside–­outside,” insofar as this tends to subordinate the external to the internal, with the result that where there is character, there precisely can be “no destiny,” but only a certain recurrence. The implications of this recurrence constitute a problem to which he and we will later return. Having thus challenged the prevailing tendency to associate character with destiny as its internal cause, Benjamin begins to deploy his arguments in favor of their radical separation. Once again, he does so by challenging the dominant view, which associates destiny with religion and character with ethics. He begins by advancing what will be his major argument with respect to destiny, namely, its constitutive relation to “guilt” (Schuld). And it is here that his remarks connect with—­and indeed inspired—­our introductory reading of the first chapters of Genesis. 138   The Single Trait

For in attempting to arrive at a genuine understanding of the relation of “guilt” to “destiny,” Benjamin first of all challenges the prevailing interpretation of guilt as consisting in a transgressive action, and of destiny as consisting in the “response of God or of the Gods to a religious offense [Verschuldung]” (174/203). Destiny, he argues, is indeed linked to guilt, but not to guilt understood in a religious or moral sense. For the latter presupposes—­again the biblical reference is clear—­a state of innocence, a non-­guilt (in German: Unschuld), a paradisiacal situation in which guilt is absent. The model of such innocence and its loss is of course the Garden of Eden, but for Benjamin this is precisely not what marks the notion of guilt with which he is concerned and in which he sees the explanation of destiny. The text that informs his notion of guilt, which is tied not to innocence but to misfortune, is therefore not that of Genesis but that of Greek tragedy, above all the Oresteia of Aeschylus, to which he will explicitly refer in his subsequent discussion of tragedy in the Origin of the German Mourning Play. For it is in Greek tragedy, according to Benjamin, that the essence of destiny and of guilt is both revealed and transcended: In tragedy the pagan senses that he is better than his Gods, but this knowledge strikes him dumb, muting language [verschlägt ihm die Sprache, sie bleibt dumpf]. Without declaring itself [ohne sich zu bekennen], it seeks secretly to gather its forces. It does not place guilt and atonement on a scale to measure them, but rather shakes them up together. (104/203)22

The subject has shifted from the tragic hero as a person to the language in which he is engaged, above all negatively, by refusing to speak. It is not so much “he” that is struck dumb as language itself, which is “muted.” Or rather, not language itself, but the preexisting, predominant language of a certain pagan polytheism. This language is for Benjamin not religious, but rather legal in both origin and structure. Its salient characteristic emerges in an image that Benjamin invokes to describe it: that of the “scale” of legal justice—­which in turn is based on equivalence, on the commensurability of guilt and atonement, of Schuld and Sühne.23 Hence, the figure of the “scale of Justice” (174/203), which in turn presupposes the separability of what it measures, “guilt” and “atonement” (or punishment): The Single Trait   139

The laws of destiny, misfortune, and guilt, are elevated by Law [das Recht] to measures of the person. . . . Law condemns not to punishment but to guilt. Destiny is the guilt nexus [Schuldzusammenhang] of the living. (174–­75/203)

Far from being at home in the realm of religion, then, “destiny” for Benjamin belongs to the juridical realm. But this statement in turn requires further elaboration. For Benjamin’s association of guilt with both “atonement” (Entsühnung) and punishment (Strafe) shows that his notion of the judicial is already informed by certain moral–­religious concepts. And as the last (and often-­cited) sentence of the passage just quoted indicates, this moral–­religious dimension is inseparable from a “biological” one, which in turn is not without its biopolitical implications. What is decisive is that the “person” subjected to fate through guilt and misfortune is treated by the judicial system as a measurable quantity. Law or “right” subordinates the distinctive singularity of human beings to a certain commensurability. And the basis of this commensurability, which provides the “scale” on which the legal subject is judged, is precisely its assimilation to “the living,” which in this case designates a generic category, what Ludwig Feuerbach and Marx call a Gattungswesen, a “species being”—­a term that has recently become frequent in biopolitical discourses. Benjamin elaborates this biogeneric dimension of “guilt” as follows: The Judicial condemns not to punishment but to guilt. Destiny is the guilt-­nexus of the Living. This corresponds to the natural constitution of the Living. . . . At bottom it is not man who has a destiny . . . but rather the bare life in him that partakes of natural guilt and misfortune by virtue of its phenomenality [kraft des Scheines]. (175/204)

For Benjamin, then, all destiny is manifest destiny—­tied to phenomenality, to appearance, and to illusion, since all three of these meanings are wrapped up in the untranslatable German word Schein (literally, “shine” or “semblance”). But the basis of its manifestation is also “natural,” which here suggests that it is linked to an interpretation of human life that can be described (Benjamin does not) as paradoxical. For it is a life that on the one hand is construed as “natural” in the sense of being intrinsically meaningful, self-­contained, but on the other, as guilty and unfortunate, which 140   The Single Trait

implies not so much unhappiness as involvement with and dependence on others. Law thus naturalizes guilt by deriving it from dependence. However, such dependence is also the basis of sociability—­of what can be shared without establishing a substantial identity of a genre in terms of properties. What can be shared in this way, while preserving the irreplaceable singularity of singular living beings, is mortality. This marks the limit of a certain homogenizing generalization, but also the possibility that singular living beings might participate in something other than themselves, and thereby attain a kind of survival. The question then becomes: Survival in what form? In “Destiny and Character” Benjamin’s response is twofold, but also fragmentary. As we have seen, one part of it points to Greek tragedy as the historical moment when “man senses that he is better than his gods,” something he can express only by not expressing it, or rather by refusing to express it in the language available to him. The tragic hero, like Orestes, falls silent, but this fall is fortunate insofar as it disrupts the discourse of (existing) law and order, its grammar and meaning, and with them challenges implicitly the condition of a certain commensurability, subordinating the singular to the generalizable individual. This falling silent is also tantamount to a “secret collecting of forces”—­the forces of a different language to come: in short, of language as other. Other than what? On the one hand, other than the present prevailing language informed by pagan polytheism. Man senses that he is “better” than his gods. The use of the comparative here—­better—­suggests again commensurability, a common bottom line. Pagan polytheism for Benjamin falls under the critique of being merely a homogeneous projection of the human, thus depriving transcendence of its genuine alterity. On the other hand, if man can be said to “come to his senses”—­sich besinnen—­the sich here implies a reflexive movement in which the “hero” discovers an alterity at the basis of his being that defies expression in the language of the time. And perhaps in language more generally. Not by accident it also introduces a radically temporal dimension into the relation of the human to the divine—­which is to say, into the relation of immanence to transcendence—­in which the latter is suggested to inhere in the former, thus undercutting the usual opposition of the two. This also challenges the commensurability or continuity between the two that for Benjamin is at the basis of destiny and The Single Trait   141

guilt. But what is experienced by the tragic hero is the negative dimension, which isolates him from the existing world. The paradoxical implications of this tragic–­heroic refusal to speak are elaborated by Benjamin in his study of the German mourning play, primarily through extended quotation and paraphrase of Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption: By falling silent [indem der Held schweigt], the hero breaks the bridges that bind him to God and the World and elevates himself above the fields of personality [Gefilden der Persönlichkeit], which demarcates and individualizes itself by speaking, into the icy solitude of the Self. The Self knows of nothing outside of itself, it is solitary without limit. (GS 1.1287/Origins, 101–­2)

And Benjamin also quotes Georg Lukács: “The essence of these great moments of life is the pure lived experience [Erlebnis] of selfhood” (Ibid.). What is paradoxical about this lived experience, however—­what makes it not just “lived” by an individual but essentially historical—­is that its significance is not limited to itself, to the Self, but is rather tied to a certain abandonment or sacrifice of the Self, which Benjamin describes as follows: The further the tragic word falls behind the situation—­which could no longer be called tragic where the two coincide—­the more the hero has escaped from the old institutions, to which, when they finally catch up with him, he abandons only the mute shadow of his being, his Self as sacrifice, while the soul is saved in the words of a distant community. . . . The profoundly Aeschylean drive for justice [Zug nach Gerechtigkeit] animates the anti-­Olympian prophesy of all tragic poetry. (287–­88/103)

Much has been written on the difference that Benjamin invokes between Recht (law, right) and justice (Gerechtigkeit). But what is decisive here is that the latter is never simply attained, not in Greek tragedy at least, and that it therefore can only be described as something toward which one moves—­or rather is driven. The phrase that Benjamin uses in German to describe the distinctive dynamics of Greek tragedy, which he identifies with Aeschylus, contains a word that is difficult to translate but that 142   The Single Trait

will recur in a different context in “Destiny and Character”: the word, Zug, which I translate here as “drive,” and which is derived from the verb ziehen, “to pull.” This emphasizes that the origin of the movement is external to what is moved. The latter is pulled or driven toward something unknown or at least unnamed. This dynamic dimension tends to be lost in the usual English translation of Zug as “trait”—­that is, unless one remembers that every trait has to be traced and describes therefore not just a static trajectory but a movement away from something and toward something else.24 In the passage quoted, the movement pulls away from the judicial–­legal—­ for Benjamin ultimately mythical—­order of law and toward the more elusive, more indeterminate area of Gerechtigkeit, a justice or righteousness that is no longer based on commensurability, on guilt as misfortune. Above all, what the passages from Rosenzweig suggest is that this pull or drive involves both a return to and ultimate abandon of selfhood. What is it that characterizes such selfhood? In the way Rosenzweig is using it in the passages Benjamin quotes, the self is marked by a radical opposition to all non-­self, to everything other. But in so doing, a dialectic sets in, at least implicitly, that renders the isolated self alien to itself. As we shall see shortly, this also implies for Benjamin a radical absence of “character,” at least in the sense he will give to the word in the second, shorter part of “Destiny and Character.” But for now, we can already determine what this paradoxical insistence on the self as that which must be abandoned signifies for Benjamin: nothing more or less than the acknowledgment of a genuine temporality, which is to say, of time as a medium of alterity and of alteration, rather than as one of self-­fulfillment in the sense of accomplishing the same. The self-­isolation and abandonment of the tragic—­more precisely Aeschylean—­hero reveals the nature of destiny only by breaking with it and by gesturing toward something else: a temporality informed not by the present but by what is to come. It is this gesture—­consisting in the eloquent refusal to speak—­that opens the “guilt-­nexus of destiny” to an alternative future. For, as Benjamin emphasizes, the guilt-­nexus [of destiny] is only inauthentically temporal, in kind and measure entirely distinct from the time of redemption, of music or of truth. On the fixation of the particular kind of time of destiny depends the completed illumination of these things. The card-­reader and fortune-­teller teach in any case that this time can at all times be The Single Trait   143

rendered contemporaneous with another [time that is not present]. (176/204)

Benjamin does not so much conclude as break off his discussion of destiny here, with the admission that the “fixation of the particular kind of time” involved in destiny remains to be “completed.” Its “inauthenticity” appears to be measured by the criterion of a certain linearity: that of a future toward which the tragic hero can only gesture in silence and in isolation. The future is thus still radically separated from his present. The temporality of destiny, by contrast, seems to be more simultaneous than successive: the unheroic figures of the “card-­reader” or “fortune-­teller” do not simply refuse to speak but rather interpret signs, which suggests a certain “contemporaneity” of the present with the past and the future. Throughout his life Benjamin was fascinated by the interpretive practices of astrologists, physiognomists, graphologists, soothsayers, and mediums of all sorts. By associating their practice with the semiotics of “destiny,” Benjamin had reached a point in his essay where any simple opposition of present and future, or any simple critique of “destiny” as “mythical” (i.e., here as polytheistic and juridical), seems to have become highly problematic. It is precisely at this point that he turns to the second topic of his essay: to the question of “character.” Within the overall structure of this text, this turn appears to be rather ambivalent. On the one hand, it is a turn away from the question of “destiny,” insofar as Benjamin will insist that character, properly understood, has nothing to do with destiny. On the other hand, it is a continuation of his analysis of “interpretive practices” [deutenden Praktiken], although this time shifted to “character.” Despite this shared character trait, Benjamin begins by distinguishing the two: they “belong” he asserts, to two very different “spheres.” Destiny, as we have seen, is associated with the “sphere” of myth, which for Benjamin is the origin also of law (and hence, of a certain politics). It derives from an attitude that construes human beings as essentially “natural”—­that is, self-­contained, in particular with respect to “life.” The result is guilt, or rather, the mythical–­ juridical–­political—­and I would add, although Benjamin would not, theological—­system that confirms guilt by institutionalizing it.25 Comedy, on the other hand, Benjamin assigns to a different “sphere”—­ 144   The Single Trait

which he designates as a Natursphäre, a “natural sphere.” This seems to bring it into proximity with that from which it should be demarcated, Destiny, given that latter’s connection to “bare” (that is, “natural”) life. Benjamin acknowledges that this is a reason why the two, destiny and character, have traditionally been associated with one another. Both have been regarded as providing the basis for a knowledge of the future, that is, for a knowledge that would overcome the uncertainty of temporal existence. The most prominent term that Benjamin employs in this connection, and which he will use precisely to distinguish destiny from character, is that of the “net” (Netz) or “tissue” (Gewebe). But his language makes it clear that what is involved here is not just any tissue or net: indeed, what makes the tissue, or text, into a net is its seeming ability to reduce the spaces between its component stitches: the tissue is “firm” (fest) insofar as the net is drawn tightly closed (verdichtet), and it is this tautness of the netting that transforms it into a solid “cloth” (Tuch). Character is thus understood as the basis and object of what could be called (Benjamin does not) characterology, the organized systematic knowledge that determines character in terms of “properties”—­in German, Eigenschaften. Knowledge of character is possible by virtue of such properties, which, once determined, resist the contingencies of time and space, remaining always the same. Although Benjamin does not pursue this line, today’s notion of “profiling,” and the use of “big data” to predict future behavior, would be one effect of this attitude. But it is based on a conception of character that Benjamin then goes on to reject, for the simple or not so simple reason that character—­ and the moral sphere to which it is assigned26—­can never be determined by “properties but only by actions” (177/205). In this context it should be noted that as soon as Benjamin begins to outline his approach to character he introduces another word that, as already noted, can be seen as providing an alternative to the notion of Eigenschaft (property, feature, characteristic), namely “trait”: On the other hand, the concept of character will also have to divest itself of those traits [Züge] that constitute its erroneous connection to destiny. (176/204, my emphasis)

Already this first, negative use of the word Züge (traits) displays what will turn out to be one of its essential qualities: that of being movable. The Single Trait   145

They can be shed, removed, replaced by other traits. And indeed, this removability is what distinguishes the “trait” from the “property”—­which cannot be removed, legitimately at least, from its “owner” or subject. It should be noted that in German the word has a very different set of connotations than does its English “equivalent.” The word Zug, which, as noted, is the nominalization of the verb ziehen, “to pull” or “to draw,” suggests not just movement but often the discontinuous transition from stasis to movement brought about by a force that is not entirely internal, and hence, not entirely “natural,” in the usual sense of that word. A Zug even today names not only a “train” or a “procession” but also a “draft” and a “stroke.” In conjunction with “character,” a Zug becomes a “trait.” But the associations just mentioned indicate that this “trait” is inseparable from its movement—­both that which removes it from what it traces, and that which can detach it from its current location. Such connotations explain the rather surprising way in which Benjamin goes on to define the “natural sphere” to which character belongs, and which in fact then seems anything but natural: the theatrical stage. If “destiny” is associated with “tragedy,” but in a way that does not emphasize the theatricality but rather its mythical–­legal dimension, “character” for Benjamin is at home in comedy, which in turn is inseparable from the stage. At the “center” of comedy is, Benjamin asserts, “character comedy,” just as comedy itself is the milieu in which “character” must be understood—­or rather experienced. For unlike destiny, character comedy, such as that of Molière, does not pretend or claim to offer knowledge—­neither psychological nor moral: If the object of psychology is the inner life of man considered as an empirical being, Molière’s dramatis personae [Personen] are not even useful as material for demonstrations. Character unfolds itself in them like a sun in the brilliance [Glanz] of its single trait [seines einzigen Zuges], which allows no other to remain visible in the vicinity of its blinding light. (178/205, my emphasis)

It is not just the character “trait” that distinguishes it from destiny and thereby defines its essence for Benjamin: it is the fact that in the “sphere” that is the setting of character—­namely, the theatrical world of comedy, the “trait” must be understood as being radically singular: 146   The Single Trait

The sublimity of character comedy rests on this anonymity of human beings and of their morality in the midst of the highest unfolding of the individual in the singularity of its character trait. (178/205)

For those who would be tempted to reduce Benjamin’s thought to a celebration of naming and of the name, his emphasis here on anonymity can serve as a useful corrective. The “highest unfolding of the individual” in this context at least leads not to anything like a proper, or even improper, name, but to a certain anonymity that marks not only the radical singularity of character but also its comic dimension. If one considers the use of names in comedies explicitly mentioned here by Benjamin—­those of Molière—­the notion of “anonymity” would have to be understood as having a certain “generic” quality about it: The Misanthrope, The Miser, The Imaginary Patient—­all of these would normally be understood as names of general types. At the same time, however, Benjamin insists on the dimension of “individuality” in character comedy, but in a very singular manner. By comparing the comic character to the “sun,” he places it at the center of a solar system, which, however, it also seeks to blot out and render invisible through the power of its manifestation. Benjamin repeats this solar allusion a bit further on in order to illustrate the distance that separates character from destiny, for which he reinvokes the image of the net: The character trait is therefore not the knot in the net. It is the sun of the individual on the colorless (anonymous) sky of human being, which casts the shadow of the comic plot. (178/205)

This is a strange “sun” indeed: instead of creating the conditions of visibility, it blinds—­this itself of course is a long-­standing topos going back at least to Plato. However, Benjamin adds a new twist to his topos: the sun blinds not to itself, but to the others in its vicinity, by making them invisible. Similarly, one can conclude that the “comic plot” emerges not only through the light it emits, but through the shadow it casts. However, something in this likeness is missing: no matter how single and solitary the sun may be, it could never “cast a shadow” all by itself. There must be something else—­another body—­that blocks its rays. The following sentence suggests what that other might be. Benjamin places it within parentheses: The Single Trait   147

(This [i.e., the shadowy comic plot cast by the singular trait] provides the context in which [Hermann] Cohen’s profound dictum may be understood, namely, that each tragic plot, however sublimely it strides on its stilts, casts a comic shadow.) (178/205)

If we are to take the comparison of comedy not just with the sun’s blinding light, but with the shadow it casts, then the allusion to Cohen here suggests that, however distinct they may be, tragedy and comedy are indispensable to one another: each allows the other to cast a shadow: tragedy’s shadow is comic, according to “Cohen’s profound dictum,” and comedy’s tragic, according to Benjamin’s analogy. Benjamin develops one side of this relationship in his book on the mourning play: “The satyr play, which follows or precedes [tragedy], expresses the fact that the non liquet of the staged trial can only be prepared or reacted to by a comic élan” (296/117).27 Orestes’s silence, then, in the Eumenides, invites comedy as its response. But what about the other side of the relationship: how does comedy, through character, invite or presuppose tragedy? If tragedy consists in a recursive–­reflective withdrawal of the self into itself, then this lays the groundwork for that reductive recurrence that defines the medium if not the substance of comedy. Comedy then could be understood as a reflection of the nonidentity of tragic self-­reflexivity. Molière again could be seen as a prime example of this. In any event, the interdependence of the two belies Benjamin’s categorical attempt to separate them radically. If we try to reconstruct what Benjamin calls the eigentlichen Zusammenhang—­the “authentic context” for Cohen’s remark, by juxtaposing it with Benjamin’s analogy and its images, we come upon a curious convergence: the tragic hero is sublimely isolated in his refusal to speak the prevailing language of the gods and the laws; the comic character is also isolated, but this time in a self that takes the place of the world. Whereas the tragic hero singularizes the generic by refusing to speak in the generalities of the prevailing discourse, the comic character, one might say, “idiosyncratizes” the general and thereby both “simplifies” and “singularizes” it. The following passage may shed some light on this process, but not without casting its own shadows: While destiny unrolls the enormous complexity of the guilty and indebted [verschuldeten] person, the complication and bonds of their 148   The Single Trait

guilt, character reacts to the mythical enslavement of the person in the guilt-­nexus by giving the response of genius. Complication becomes simplicity, fate freedom. For the character of the comic person is not the scarecrow [Popanz] of the determinist: it is the beacon [Leuchter: chandelier] in whose rays the freedom of his deeds becomes visible. (178/205–­6)

As so often with Benjamin, images that one otherwise might expect to clarify and render concrete in fact render more obscure and complex—­ not the least irony in a passage that announces the replacement of “complication” by “simplicity.” But this is perhaps also part of its comic character. The “sun” referred to previously to designate the single trait of the comic character here reveals itself to be anything but a lumen naturalis: it is a chandelier, a candelabra, a Leuchter that shows the way, a beacon that beckons. But what it lights up with its chiaroscuro rays—­its light turned to shadow—­is the space of the stage, on which character is stripped of its moral pretensions by a theatricality that is characterized here as the “response of genius” to the “guilt-­nexus” in which destiny enmeshes and thrives. In short, both tragic hero and comic character respond “to the mythical enslavement of the person in the guilt-­nexus,” but in almost opposing ways: the tragic hero by his refusal to speak, the comic character through “deeds” that render a certain “freedom . . . visible.” But since these “deeds” are deliberately theatrical, they take place not under the rays of the sun but under the artificial lighting of the stage. The “single trait” that defines comic character—­that defines character as comic and as theatrical—­is thus described by Benjamin as “the response of genius,” and a few lines later on, as “manifestations of the new global age [Weltalter] of genius.” A new conundrum thus emerges in the constantly evolving Vexierbild (puzzle-­image) that characterizes Benjamin’s writing in general, and “Destiny and Character” in particular. For what, after all, are we to understand by “genius”? The response to this question passes first of all by a consideration of translation. Genius is not simply equivalent to “genius,” and this for reasons that any reader of Saussure—­but how many still read his Course in General Linguistics?—­will well understand. For Saussure insisted that the “value” of a linguistic sign is dependent not on what it appears to refer to—­its referent—­but on its differential relations to other signs belonging to the The Single Trait   149

same system or group. This is why the German Genius cannot simply be translated by the English “genius,” any more than German words such as Repräsentation or da can adequately be translated by “representation” or “there.” For in each case there are other words in German that more closely approximate the apparent English equivalents. In the case of “genius,” that German word is Genie. The word Genius therefore has first of all to be understood as different from Genie, a difference that disappears into the English “genius,” which conflates the two. Agamben begins an essay entitled “Genius” with the following very helpful reminder: The Romans named Genius the god to which each man was entrusted at the moment of his birth. The etymology is transparent and remains visible in the proximity of genius to engender. That Genius should have something to do with engender appears moreover evident if one recalls that for the Romans the “genial” object par excellence was the bed: genialis lectus, because it was there that the act of generation was accomplished.28

What is implied in this link between “genius” and “en-­gendering” is not simply the continuation of the same in the other, in offspring, for instance, but rather a separation of subject from the process of generation: We must therefore consider the subject as a field of tensions in which the antithetical poles are Genius and Ego. The field is traversed by two forces that are both linked and opposed: the one that goes from the individual toward the impersonal, the other from the impersonal toward the individual. The two forces cohabit, overlap, separate, but they can neither isolate themselves entirely from another nor identify with each other fully. . . . Genius is our life insofar as it doesn’t belong to us.29

Although Agamben’s only literary reference in this essay is to Ariel and Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest, his emphasis on the tension between “the individual and the impersonal” and the mention of The Tempest, a play, if not a “character comedy,” can help put us on the track of Benjamin’s cryptic use of the word “genius” in regard to the comic character and its 150   The Single Trait

“singular trait.” For Benjamin too no doubt had a literary text in mind when he invoked this word, although it was not Shakespeare, nor probably not even a comedy, but rather the poetry of Hölderlin. Several years earlier, in 1916, Benjamin had written an essay on “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” in which the word occupies a small but decisive part. One of those two poems, entitled in German Blödigkeit, usually translated as “timidity,” but as Peter Fenves, inspired by Avital Ronell, has recently suggested, could also be rendered as “Stupidity”—­begins thus: Are then many of the Living not known to you? Does your foot not tread on the true as on carpets? Therefore, my Genius, step only Unprotected into life [bar ins Leben], and be not concerned!30

Hölderlin’s Genius, like Agamben’s, is inseparable from the individual and yet irreducible to it—­quite simply because it is defined precisely by its divisibility, its separability, its inability to be contained by and within an integrated ego. Nor can it even remain—thus Benjamin, commenting on Hölderlin’s passage in his essay—­within the sphere of poetry. It must “step unprotected into life,” as a sphere that is not simply reducible to poetry, although not simply isolatable from it. Ironically, in view of his later essay, Benjamin places Hölderlin’s admonition to his Genius under the sign of a profound “destiny linking the Living with the poet” (116/28)—­yet another indication that the “response of Genius to destiny” by no means dissolves the link to it—­even in the comic character with its singular trait. To be sure, Benjamin’s use of “genius” in relation to the comic character seems very distant from Hölderlin’s admonition to the poet—­himself—­to step “bare,” without protection, “into life.” But that very difference is significant, since it suggests that the singularity of the trait cuts in more ways than one. The space of the living is dominated by the guilt nexus of destiny, and at the same time is a scene of singularities. What it “shadows” is precisely that guilt nexus. And it does so not by cutting all ties with it, but by reinscribing it in a space that it can no longer entirely dominate. In Hölderlin’s poem, that space is named as that of the Lage—­the situation that is always more or less “opportune” (gelegen), always more or less temporally relative and relational. One would have to look long and hard to find comic elements in Hölderlin’s poetry. But despite this fact, a sense of the The Single Trait   151

comic is perhaps never very far away, despite and because of the serious shadows that prevail. The single trait is “comic,” it lends itself to laughter and to amusement by presenting itself in isolation, and yet never being absolutely cut off from its surroundings, its past and its future. This is why the singular trait is simultaneously extremely static and yet tendentially always on the move. It seeks to place itself at the center of its world, whether as the sun in a solar system or the chandelier in a theater. But like the chandelier and unlike the sun, it depends upon an external source for its brilliance. In the context of the previous discussion, the single trait involves both the realization and the dismantling of the mono-­theological identity paradigm, since it marks the convergence of extreme individuality with anonymity. But such individuality is precisely not universal, all-­encompassing, since it refers implicitly to that which it renders invisible: other individuals, other traits. In this sense it presents itself as a paragon of simplicity and of simplification. And Benjamin, perhaps recalling the connection Kant makes in The Critique of the Power to Judge between “genius” and “nature,” even goes so far as to assert that it “opposes a vision of the natural innocence of man” to “the dogma of the natural guilt of human life”; the latter, he continues, “constitutes the doctrine . . . of paganism” (206/178)—­which seems here a simple substitution for Christianity. Again, however, following Kant, Benjamin links “genius” to “freedom” but admits this “cannot be shown here.” The paper ends shortly after this acknowledgment. But it leaves us with a notion of “the single trait” that can be called productively ambiguous—­and ambivalent. As part of comic character, it implies an alternative to the monotheistic identity paradigm precisely by developing its dimension of “individuality” to reveal its always incomplete singularity. The singular trait mimes the individual while reducing it to a kind of generic anonymity—­not unrelated to the generalized singular that has previously been discussed. Except that—­and here is where Benjamin’s emphasis on “natural innocence” is at the very least equivocal—­the singular is precisely not natural if this implies having its cause either in itself or in a Creator that is the model of the self. Rather, linking the “genial” dimension of the single trait, of comic character, to freedom, only makes sense if the singular is acknowledged to be precisely what it is—­and is not: primus inter pares, but not the whole. Or perhaps better, first among unequals, because unique. 152   The Single Trait

Comedy has long been understood to have an eminently social and moral significance. Benjamin, however, insists that “character”—­with which modern comedy is profoundly related—­“can be grasped only through a small number of morally indifferent basic concepts, such as those that the doctrine of temperaments tried to identify” (206). He also emphasizes that comedy, epitomized in Molière, “has nothing to do with the concerns of psychology” (205). Instead, he insists on the dimension of signs, and inscribes his notion of a “single trait” in the context of interpretive practices such as physiognomy and fortune-­telling. What then of “the actions of the comic hero,” which, Benjamin insists, can only be interpreted with relation to character and not to psychology or morality? What sort of freedom can emerge from actions that seem so constrained? What about politics, which Benjamin does not mention in this context? Can there be a politics of the singular trait? Would it be a comic politics? Benjamin’s essay “Destiny and Character,” was published in the same year as Sigmund Freud’s paper on “Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis.” A central chapter in that book was devoted to the problem of “identification,” described as an inevitable process in the formation of the I but also one that is highly ambivalent. Focusing as usual on male children, Freud wrote that identification marks the child’s “earliest emotional tie to another person.” It is an ambivalent tie insofar as it involves the desire to be “like” the other person, which ultimately means replacing the other by occupying its place. For a self-­conscious I, it is more or less axiomatic that only one body can occupy one place at one time. From the point of view of this I, therefore, to identify with another—­with the father or mother—­also means to replace that person, often by ingesting it. Cannibalism is thereby cited by Freud as an early tendency and instance of such identification. As Freud went on to describe this process, however, it emerges that identification, which plays such a decisive role in the formation of the identity of the subject, is itself anything but all-­inclusive. It is, as Freud writes, often “partial” insofar as it identifies not with the other as a whole person but only with a part of the other—­with “a single trait” (einzigen Zug) of the other. This form of identification is then interpreted as a powerful force in the formation of groups, of “masses,” and in the organization of such masses through identification of and with a leader, a Führer, as Freud wrote. Naturally in 1921 this word did not have the same connotations it was to acquire in the The Single Trait   153

following years. But even today it is difficult, in English as well as in German (and other languages), to describe organizations, political and other, without having recourse to this word, or at least to the concept it signifies. Of course, the English “leader,” and above all, the quality of “leadership,” retain a positive connotation, as does the impersonal Führung in German. It would be worth reflecting, however, on the way the word relates to another one that appeared in Freud’s 1921 essay, a word that would probably have been forgotten had not Lacan picked it and placed it at the core of his 1962 lectures on the problem of “Identification.” It is the term, einziger Zug, which Lacan rendered in French as trait unaire. What is more, Lacan placed this notion in relation to the philosophical tradition. Hitherto, Lacan told his listeners, philosophy from Plato to Kant had construed the One as the symbol of unity. By contrast, the Freudian experience and experiment emphasized not the unity of the subject but rather on something that only superficially resembled it: as a “singular trait,” an “unsituatable thing, this aporia for thought that consists in the fact that the more it is purified, simplified, reduced to no matter what . . . it can wind up by reducing itself to that: a 1.” And he continues: The paradox of this One is that the more it resembles . . . the more the diversity of all appearances is erased in it, the more it supports, even incarnates . . . difference as such. The reversal of the position around the One results in the fact that we pass from the Unity [Einheit] of Kant to singularity [Einzigkeit], to uniqueness expressed as such. . . . If the function that we assign to the One is no longer that of Unity but rather of Singularity, we have passed—­and it should not be forgotten that this is what is new in psychoanalysis—­from the virtues of the norm to those of the exception.31

It is as a “single trait” that the subject is represented by the signifier to another subject. The subject, symbolic rather than imaginary, to invoke the categories of Lacan at the time, is thus constituted by its place in a network of signification. As distinct from the imaginary “individual” or “I,” the subject qua singular trait emerges here as a fully relational and differential notion, a trait or trace, as Derrida would later call it, stressing its temporal relation to what had gone before and what would be coming after. And most significantly of all, Lacan invokes a term in the passage quoted that will 154   The Single Trait

later recur frequently in the writings of Derrida, “aporia,” to describe the peculiar relation of this notion to thought. For the uniqueness of the singular not only distinguishes it from “others,” it distinguishes it from itself, rendering itself other to itself. But this apparently dialectical movement is articulated through the tension between the One as unity and the One as difference. What can be thought here is not the “result” of the movement, but the movement in its always more or less situated trajectory—­ namely as “trait” (Zug) and trace. “Singular” here means that the trace cannot be grasped as a whole, “entirely different from the circle that collects,” says Lacan in the same lecture, and that he places at the base of “all logical formalization.”32 Singular, in short, connotes here the construction of a pseudo-­whole (model for the imaginary I, according to Lacan), on the basis of only one of its “traits.” The singular trait, however, is singularly significant not by virtue of what it contains, but by its relation to the network of signifiers that invest it with its value, even if the process of investment is excluded in order for the imaginary identification to appear as a whole. Whether Freudian, Lacanian, or read through the perspectives of both, the “singular trait” defines a process by which the subject—­including the political subject—­defines its place in a social and political context that is determined as irreducibly ambivalent. It is ambivalent insofar as it serves to establish a self-­identity that is not self-­enclosed, since it depends upon its relation to other excluded signifiers and “traits.” The demand for self-­ sufficiency, and correlatively for omniscience, derives not just from individuals, but from the mono-­theological identity paradigm and the legal and political system it informs. The tension between imaginary identification as the basis of the notion of an autonomous ego and symbolic signification is reflected in the contrast made by both Benjamin and Derrida (although in different ways) between right and righteousness, law and justice, Recht and Gerechtigkeit. It is this aporia at the heart of all law, insofar as it demands the application of the general to the singular, that led Carl Schmitt to return to the Kierkegaardian notion of the “exception” and interpret it as being constitutive of the rule of law—­or as Lacan put it in the passage quoted, constitutive of “the norm.” Except that Schmitt’s notion of “exception” was not exceptional enough, since it assimilated it to a “state,” a state of exception, an Ausnahmezustand, that could be “decided” by a unitary executive—­ultimately by a subject. It was this unresolved tension that caused Benjamin to assert, in his The Single Trait   155

Critique of Violence, written shortly after “Destiny and Character,” that something is “rotten [Morsches] in the Law” itself (GS2, 188/ SE 242); he emphasizes that the force that was called upon to hold together what tended to fall apart was none other than that of uniformed police, in which the many become one and the single trait almost effaced. In the final section of this chapter, we will take a closer look at the situation of the police, not so much in theory as on the stage, where, we recall, the single trait as a feature of comic character seems to be almost at home. We find this problem staged, if somewhat obliquely, in Jean Genet’s play The Balcony (1956). In it, the anonymity of comic character is reflected in the fact that most of the characters are named by reference to their professions: the Judge, the General, the Bishop, the Chief of Police, the Photographers. The exceptions are mainly women: above all, Madame Irma, who is the patron of the bordello known as “the Balcony.” This title turns out to be a synecdoche, since the building that houses the bordello includes a balcony, on which one of the major scenes takes place. As a place of observation, the balcony recalls the loge in a theater. The bordello itself turns out to be a theater: its individual rooms allow the individual characters to play out their forbidden fantasies, apparently in private but observed by Madame Irma through closed circuit television, and also by the audience. With respect to Moliere’s “character comedy,” there is not just one central character but a host of them. They represent not just “temperaments,” as Benjamin noted of Molière, but social roles implying power relations: military, church, administration; the central couple is Madame Irma and the Chief of Police, but the others are almost as important. In this sense it could almost be classified as a modern, contemporary “character comedy.” “The balcony,” however, names not just a particular part of the edifice of the building where everything is set: it also connotes the balcony of a theater: not just the theater in which the play takes place but the nature of the bordello as a theater. The individual rooms are stages where clients play out their fantasies, ostensibly in private but carefully observed by Madame Irma via tv screens and by the audience on the stage. It turns out to be both the balcony of a bordello and the balcony of a kind of theater. For in this whorehouse, the clients come to play out their fantasies by assuming social roles that are not their own: General, Judge, Priest, Envoy. 156   The Single Trait

The balcony is an island amid a sea of increasing violence, which comes ever nearer before it is finally brought under control by the Chief of Police. If there is something that corresponds to the temperaments, it would be the mixture of desire and anxiety that feeds the fantasies of the visitors to the brothel. On this balcony, but also in their private rooms, these characters exhibit themselves and watch themselves on display. Against a background of political turmoil that at times threatens the balcony, the Police Chief takes on an ever more important role, in all senses of that word. But this Police Chief has a problem. Whereas the other bulwarks of the social and political order—­judge, general, priest, envoy—­are all objects of social esteem and are included in the “pantheon” of iconic figures, the Police Chief, like the police itself, suffers from a lack of recognition. To the police fall the dirty work of applying the laws, enforcing the general upon the singular—­what Benjamin in his Critique of Violence calls their dual function of preserving laws by making new ones. This is simply due to the fact that the police have to mediate between the structural generality of the law and its indispensable application to singular “cases”—­a process that requires both force and intelligence (again, in all sense of that word). Benjamin can hardly find words strong enough to describe and disqualify this hybrid function of the police: “anti-­natural,” “ghostlike,” “disgraceful” (Schmachvolle) (GS2, 189 / SE1, 242), concluding that “its force”—­and it should be noted that the title of Benjamin’s essay is Critique of Force (Gewalt) in the sense of police force, and not more abstractly of “violence”: “Its force,” he writes “is as shapeless [gestaltlos] as its unfathomable, ubiquitously spectral appearance in the life of civilized states” (189/242). Moreover, the police “look everywhere the same” (189/242). Like the regular military, they are uniformed, and the singularity of their members is thus suppressed if not effaced. In Benjamin’s essay on the Critique of Force, however, there is precious little clue of any element of the comic. But there is a description of the police that allows us to make a link to Genet’s play. As already indicated, in The Balcony, the Chief of Police, who remains semi-­anonymous, like all the other characters (some of whom have first names, but never last)—­the Police Chief suffers from the lack of what today would be called “image.” And much of his effort in the play is devoted to trying to find ways of improving his public image, so that he too may one day be granted entrance into the Pantheon of political icons. Such entrance is a means of survival: The Single Trait   157

through it mortal beings are “preserved” in the memory of the nation. “George”—­the Chief of Police—­thus hopes one day to attain the stature that would make him one of the figures with whom the clients of Madame Irma identify in their fantasies. At first, he is stymied about how to overcome the fear and disgust inspired by his office. And then, suddenly, he has an idea: I fear that they’re afraid, jealous of a man, but . . . (he searches) but not of a wrinkle, for example, or a curl of hair . . . or a cigar . . . or a riding whip.33

The Police Chief has stumbled upon the secret of identification, and perhaps of political empowerment, at least in many societies today, where politics is increasingly determined by the audiovisual media and the images they convey. People can be afraid of a “man,” but not of a partial trait: a curl of hair, a cigar, a riding whip. The partiality of identification that Freud observed he interprets as a response, not simply of Genius to destiny, but of anxiety to what it desires but also most fears: the image of an individual who would be truly indivisible and all-­powerful—­that is, the primal father. The super ego that says, “Be like me: be yourself!” To take the place of the other as a whole means doing away with the whole as other—­and therefore also with the minimal distance and difference required in order to construct oneself as a whole through identification with what one is not. To take the place of the idealized other is also tendentially to eliminate the distance that makes that other desirable. And so a compromise is reached, unconsciously, in an identification that could be called “synecdochal”: pars pro toto. The compromise of identifying with “the single trait” as emblem of the whole. And so, at about the same time that Lacan had begun elaborating his theory of the imaginary, the Police Chief comes up with the following project: The Police Chief. The last project of an image that was submitted to me . . . I hardly dare to speak to you of it. The Judge. It was . . . so bold? The Police Chief. Very. Too much. I don’t dare tell you. (Suddenly he seems to decide.) Gentlemen, I have confidence in your judg158   The Single Trait

ment and your dedication. . . . Here it is: I have been advised to appear in the form of a giant phallus! Irma. George, you? (127)

The Police Chief is successful; the defeated revolutionary comes to Irma’s balcony to play the role of the Police Chief, and in so doing, castrates himself. The Police Chief celebrates his victory and his consecration—­political mono-­theology—­by taking leave with the following words, addressed to the audience, both on and off the stage: Police Chief. Did you see? Did you see me? There, just a short while ago, bigger than big, stronger than strong, deader than dead. Well, I have no need to stay with you any longer. . . . I have won the right to take my seat and to wait two thousand years. (To the assembled photographers) You, watch me live and die. For posterity: shoot! (Three magnesium flashes, almost simultaneously). Won! (He enters the tomb backwards . . .) (145)

And his final words echo the cry of Oedipus at Colonos, and the ghost of the King Hamlet: “Think of me!” In this character comedy, the “single trait” that alone secures admission to the political–­theological pantheon is that of the giant phallus, symbol of the whole man, whole before gendered sexuality, whole as representative of the human genre: of “man” as homogeneous. In Lacanian terms, identification is imaginary when it regards the single trait as being an embodiment of the whole. It is, as Benjamin implies at the outset of his essay on “Destiny and Character,” a logic of the signified, not of the signifier. But the notion of the singular trait remains in its singularity partial, and it can never be entirely absorbed into such a totality. Just as the I—­whether as Freudian ego, Jakobsonian shifter, or Hölderlinian poetic voice—­is itself never simply alone. Like it or not, it is, I am, we are networked. And in this fact, there persists the possibility of another kind of politics, for which the singular trait would be something more and other than a moment in the consecration of the indivisible individual.

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7

Money Is Time

Thoughts on Credit and Crisis

Although the precise origin of the saying “Time is money” is difficult to determine, it was Benjamin Franklin who popularized the phrase in his “Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One” (1748).1 What is less well remembered than the adage itself is the manner in which it was introduced: the advice that this “old” tradesman gave to his “young” interlocutor began with an admonition to “remember”—­indeed, with a series of such admonitions. The first was to “Remember that Time is Money.” Both the title of his essay, defining it as “advice” given by an “old” tradesman to a “young” one, and the injunction to remember—­repeated six times at the start of the essay—­suggest that a certain experience of “time” and of aging was already informing Franklin’s letter even before it began with its famous formulation, equating it with money. For time is already at work in Franklin’s title, distinguishing the “young tradesman” from the “old one.” And a certain experience of time already shaped the manner in which Benjamin Franklin introduces each of the bits of advice he gives to the young tradesman. He begins each admonition by urging his reader to “remember” what he is about to say—­a gesture that qualifies his advice as something that was perhaps once known, but that with the passage of time could easily have been forgotten. Even before he begins by identifying time with money, time is, as it were, lurking in the background and calling the shots, both as the condition of the experience that the older man is about to share with the younger one and as that which brings with it the possibility of such experience being forgotten or ignored. Franklin’s manner of giving advice thus suggests that time has a double face and a contradictory function. It can be productive and destructive; it can take away and bring back. It is the dual and indeed contradictory (if not dialectical) potential of time that sets the scene for the advice that 161

Franklin will give to the young tradesman. Its essence or upshot will consist in the admonition, made explicit at the end of the letter, not to allow time to go to “waste.” Time, which in a certain sense itself establishes the possibility of waste, should not itself be wasted. For to waste time is to waste money, and, as Franklin concludes, the Way to Wealth, if you so desire it, is as plain as the Way to Market [ . . . ] waste neither Time nor Money, but make the best Use of both. (Ibid.)

To not waste time, to diminish its destructive character and to augment its productive potential, is here equated with the accumulation of wealth: to be wealthy is thus in a certain sense to overcome the destructiveness of time. But if the “way to wealth . . . is as plain as the way to market,” then the adage for which this essay of Franklin’s will be remembered, “time is money,” tells only half the story. For if wealth is acquired through the market, it is not only time that is money, but money, by paving the way to the market, which is also and necessarily time. More precisely, money, like the market itself, presupposes a temporal process. Money, like buying and selling, takes time. The exchange of goods is never simply instantaneous. Exchange is a process that takes time, even where money is not involved, as with barter. Once money has entered the picture, however, the temporality of the process of exchange grows ever more manifest. Since the exchange of goods for money is part of a process of circulation that at some point entails the reconversion of money into goods, money also takes time, is involved in time, and indeed, can also be converted into time. But it is not just the fact that money takes time, or that it can buy time—­ for instance, time free from work or the time of a longer life span—­that justifies the inversion of Franklin’s adage. Rather, it is the fact that money, which as a medium of circulation is already oriented toward the future, necessarily entails credit, regarding which the temporal dimension is constitutive and irreducible. Money necessarily entails credit because its “value” is never simply inherent in it; its value realizes itself in the future, when it will be put to use as a means or medium of exchange. It is thus no accident that Franklin’s second “reminder” to the young tradesman concerns credit and its relation to money:

162   Money Is Time

Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me the interest, or as much I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum, where a man has good and large credit. (Ibid.)

Time is money not just in the sense of being the medium of circulation and the measure of value, but also because of a very peculiar quality of money, which allows it to mimic a characteristic otherwise associated with living beings: that of self-­production and reproduction. This constitutes Franklin’s third reminder to the young tradesman: Remember, that money is of a prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and three-­pence, and so on till it become a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker . . .

I interrupt Franklin’s portrayal of money in midsentence at a crucial, and indeed, as we shall see, critical, turning point. But before going further, let us just take note of how money here is portrayed as a special kind of living entity: one capable of reproducing and augmenting itself apparently without end or limit: “The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker . . .” Sound familiar? Well, the continuation and completion of the sentence my citation has interrupted sounds not just familiar, but uncannily so. This is how Franklin concludes his encomium to money and thereby completes what grammarians might call a run-­on sentence: . . . so that profits rise quicker and quicker, he that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced.

Money, thus described, appears as an uncanny double not just of living beings but of the deity: with living beings it shares their reproducibility, but with the deity it shares the lack of limit—­that is, a certain immortality.

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However, this is not the way Franklin expresses the idea. Rather, in a single, long, run-­on sentence, he “turns” from the unlimited self-­reproduction as the growth of “profits,” to death as the result of willful killing: “He that kills a breeding sow” robs her forever of the ability to reproduce, and the same with anyone who “murders a crown.” The “crown” in question is, of course, not the monarch but the designation of a currency unit. Nevertheless, the naming of currency units after the symbol of political sovereignty suggests an analogy between the survival of the monarchy and the ability of money to reproduce and multiply. This analogy distinguishes both money and monarchy from the limited life span of individual living beings. Franklin’s identification of time with money, of money with profit, and of profit with wealth, thereby assumes a very particular connotation: the possibility of overcoming the finitude and mortality that otherwise limits the time of living beings qua individuals, through the unlimited reproducibility associated with profit-­producing wealth.2 Reproducibility, as Franklin describes it with respect to money, entails not just reproduction but expanded reproduction. The circulation of money as credit yields interest: it returns not just the same but rather as more of the same, the same as more of itself. When Franklin therefore asserts—­reasserts, since he did not invent the proverb, but merely recalled it3—­that “time is money,” he turns time into a subspecies of the self. He transforms it from a medium of alterability into a medium of self-­fulfillment and self-­aggrandizement, a medium through which the selfsame—­the private individual—­reproduces and expands itself as “profit”: as that which “moves forward”—­a major buzzword today, whether in political, commercial, or ethical discourses—­in the effort to maximize itself. Credit, as the generator of profit, is thus situated squarely within what might be called an “economy of the self ” understood as both private and as individual, which is to say, ultimately in-­divisible and homogeneous. But if time is money, it is only because money in its turn is also time—­ and this poses a problem for interpretations such as that of Franklin. For time is ambiguous. It appears as the condition of an economy of self-­ fulfillment, but it is also the medium that condemns the self to disappear, at least qua private individual. And this perspective of the private individual informs all of Franklin’s discourse. It is a perspective that reflects the heritage of the Reformation in all of its ambivalence. This ambivalence 164   Money Is Time

can be retraced to the convergence and confusion of the categories of the “individual” and the “singular.” The “singular individual” constitutes the distinctively “Protestant” dimension of the Reformation, which transfers the Good News of the Gospels from the rites administered collectively by a universal church to the faith experienced by the private individual. “Faith alone,” and not “good works,” is declared to be the path to grace and salvation. But this “aloneness” of both faith and its bearer or vehicle, the single individual, remains situated within the horizon of sin, guilt, and redemption. And it is this horizon, common both to the Reformation and to the Catholic tradition it seeks to reform, that subordinates the moment of what might be described as differential singularity—­which is radically relational and heterogeneous—­to that of an appropriative individualism that insists on the ultimate homogeneity and indivisibility of “man” qua appropriator.4 As fallen, sinful, and guilty, the individual is mortal and finite; but as redeemable, that same individual can become immortal and participate in the infinitude of the divine. We recall that in his Leviathan, Hobbes quotes St. Paul to this effect (1 Cor. 15:21, 22): “For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.” The resurrection of the dead will not of course take place as such on this earth, to be sure. But something analogous to an earthly resurrection can be imagined, and it is precisely the ostensible production of profit through credit, the production of value through capital, the production of money through the circulation of money. This circulation is not simply the “good works” of man: it involves the “faith” that Luther insisted was the primary path to grace.5 But it is faith in the potential of debt to redeem the mortal consequences of sinful guilt. In this perspective, Calvinism could consider success in business and the accumulation of worldly wealth as a sign of election, whereas Luther could not. Although Calvin thereby rehabilitates a certain kind of “good works” as having redemptive value, the ensuing fascination with credit as producer of profit locates the production of wealth, and hence of grace, in the sphere of “circulation” rather than in that of “production” or of work per se. Thus, the emphasis can easily be shifted from the production of goods (what today is referred to as the “real economy”) to the circulation of financial objects, such as derivatives, credit and interest swaps, and the like, speculating on time and the future (referred to as the “virtual economy”) which tends to become the standard of value in societies dominated by Money Is Time   165

finance capital. But although this tendency is still far from being dominant in the eighteenth century, the contemporary effort to separate the “real” from the “virtual” economies is called into question already by Franklin’s emphasis on the interrelatedness of credit and work—­that is, of circulation and production.6 The religious traditions condemning certain forms of usury are modified by Franklin’s advice to use credit wisely as a path to wealth. And as already mentioned, his description of the ability of money to proliferate and grow tends to invest it with a form of life that allows it to appear as a secular correlative of grace, rather than as the work of the devil. Conversely, Franklin’s surprisingly ungrammatical invocation of “he who kills the breeding Sow” (today more likely to be called the “cash cow”), and who thereby “destroys all her Offspring to the thousandth Generation,” uses the same vitalist analogy to justify the use of credit. In short, for Franklin the refusal to use money to make money through interest on credit and debt is tantamount to a crime against life itself, defined as the ability of individuals to reproduce and regenerate themselves and thereby to overcome their finitude. Conversely, without exploitation of the profit-­producing capacity of money in a capitalist economy, time reverts to its function in a fallen and sinful nature, which it no longer redeems by serving as a medium of accumulation and aggrandizement through exchange. In sum, without the generation of profit, time is seen as the medium not of self-­fulfillment and preservation, but of death and degeneration. That this economical–­theological alternative is seen by Franklin as rife with political implications is underscored by the linking of the murder of the breeding sow to regicide through his allusion to the “Crown.” Just as the monarch through his “two bodies” figures the ability of the nation to survive beyond the life span of its individual members, so the “crown” that produces more of its own figures the capacity of money to transcend the mortality of its human agents.7 The basis of this association, condensed in the “murder of the crown,” is the conviction that the speculative use of money can purge time of its destructive effects on individuals by transforming it into a medium of redemption with profit. Luther’s maxim faith alone has been translated as credit alone. But no matter how close these two words may seem—­faith and credit—­they nevertheless are also significantly different from one another. The shift from faith to credit brings redemption down to earth, and 166   Money Is Time

hence, into time, which is to say, into a time considered as a medium that is homogeneous, and therefore measurable and calculable: chronological time. In his fifth and last call to remember, Franklin emphasizes the link between the calculability of time and its relation to the profitable use of credit: Remember this saying, That the good Paymaster is Lord of another Man’s Purse. He that is known to pay punctually and exactly to the Time he promises, may at any Time, and on any occasion, raise all the Money his Friends can spare. This is sometimes of great Use: Therefore never keep borrow’d Money an Hour beyond the Time you promis’d, lest a Disappointment shut up your Friends Purse forever.

This importance of punctuality in the repayment of debts brings into the open a second shift with respect to the Lutheran sola fides. The debtor (or creditor) may be a private individual, separate from others, but he is not isolated. Money relations, which are also market relations, require the interaction of individuals who are distinct from one another but also interdependent; to be alone with money and credit no longer means to be isolated with God. But neither does it signify equality with the other. In fact, through punctuality—­which entails a certain control over time—­ the debtor appears in the image of his Creator and gains control over his creditor: “The good Paymaster is Lord of another Man’s Purse.” The relation between debtor and creditor is still determined in terms of mastery and lordship, but it is the debtor who is now in the position of mastery, not the creditor.8 And yet it is important to remember that this analogy is possible only because both creditor and debtor have a common purpose: to harness the creative power attributed—­accredited—­to money in order through its use to generate and appropriate more of it, the one by borrowing, the other by lending. The borrower especially has to appear trustworthy, for he is constantly under scrutiny by the lender, and, Franklin emphasizes, “Creditors are a kind of People, that have the sharpest Eyes and Ears, as well as the best Memories in the World.” In response to such scrutiny, it is above all required that the debtor not confuse possession—­his present state—­with ownership, which belongs to the future: Money Is Time   167

Beware of thinking all your own what you possess, and of living accordingly. ’Tis a mistake that many People who have Credit fall into. To prevent this keep an exact Account for some Time of both your Expences and your Incomes. . . . You will discover how wonderfully small trifling Expences mount up to large Sums.

The trap of credit operates through the lure of present possession, and it can be avoided only by the power of calculation to minimize temporal uncertainty. If time is money, and credit also money, then time—­homogeneous, calculable, appropriable—­also is a form of credit, but only where it becomes the medium of calculation and redemption. This redemption entails not just the repayment of principle, but also of interest. It is not yet salvation, but it anticipates it through the surplus it involves, which, as we have seen, for Franklin as for many others, involves a surplus of life over the living—­which is to say, over the mortality of the living being in its singularity. In this perspective it can be seen that the motto that adorns the money of the United States—­In God We Trust—­may be distinctive, but it is by no means entirely idiosyncratic. For if it is the state that serves as primary guarantee of its money, the ability of the state to provide that guarantee presupposes a control over time that ultimately involves the appeal to “faith” or “trust.” In this fiduciary sense, both state and money are secular heirs to the redemptive function formerly attributed to the church, and following the Reformation, reattributed to the faith of the private individual and politically to the sovereign of the localized state. What remains consistent and unchanged in this shift, however, is the promise of redemption—­from sinful guilt through faith, and from deliberate debt through profitable credit. In this respect, credit is not just, as Franklin thought, one particular form of money, but rather its essence. This is because money is intrinsically temporal, and temporality, despite its calculability, remains tied to uncertainty. Money is intrinsically temporal because it must circulate; but what is uncertain is that the circulation will come full circle and provide a “return” on “investment”—­which is to say, that it will serve not just as a means of exchange and of circulation, but also of reproduction and appropriation. In a capitalist system, the goal of private appropriation defines 168   Money Is Time

the horizon of economic activity. And this in turn requires a certain faith or trust in the calculability of the future. Or rather, in the ability of financial circulation to overcome the uncertainty of the future by exploiting its vicissitudes, coming full circle and producing a “return.”9 It is this point of view—­that of private appropriation of profit—­that allows Franklin to define credit as a form of money. But if Franklin takes this point of view for granted, later economists, such as the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding, emphasize the difference between the two. In his 1910 study of Finance Capital, Hilferding distinguishes credit from money. Credit, he argues, involves a merely “private” relationship, a “promise” or “promissory note” to pay at some later date, whereas “money” is guaranteed “publicly,” by society or the state. Although Hilferding’s distinction between publicly backed “money” and privately backed “credit money” underestimates the fact that there can be publicly backed credit as well: government bonds—­U.S. Treasury short-­term bonds, for instance, which as a result of widespread public and private debt have tended in recent years to be in great demand and therefore offer very little interest (German public bonds selling occasionally for negative interest)—­his distinction nevertheless raises two very significant issues. The first concerns the relation of time to the categories of “public” and “private.” Time is more easily taken for granted when processes—­in particular, financial processes—­seem predictable, transparent, and calculable. In the case of money (which is really a form of public credit) this is what creates the appearance of a certain timelessness, as distinct from private credit—­transactions between banks, for instance, and borrowers. That this distinction is not tenable, however, becomes manifest in periods of extreme inflation or deflation, when the nominal value of money may remain the same, but when its real value—­its “buying power”—­can change daily if not hourly. Money can thus be “redeemed” at its nominal worth at any time, and in this sense its value seems impervious to time—­ but its real value may in the meantime have declined or augmented drastically. The fact that the nominal value of money can stay the same, while its real value can change radically, through inflation, indicates that money is not a thing whose properties are fixed independently of time; it serves as a measure of value, but its own value depends on temporal vicissitudes. This is why, when measuring the depreciation of money through inflation, the Money Is Time   169

standard of value must be fixed by equating it with the value of money at a specified time. The ostensible stability of money with respect to “credit money” is the result of its apparent subordination to human volition and control: one can decide when to use money as a means of payment or investment, and so it seems that money allows one a certain control over time considered as the medium of uncertain change and alterability. But although this aleatory dimension of time can be taken for granted more easily with respect to money than with respect to credit, both, money no less than credit—­ and indeed no less than capital itself—­is inscribed in a process of exchange and circulation that renders it intrinsically temporal: its value is never simply self-­contained in the present moment. The apparent difference between money and credit has therefore more to do with the tacit assumption that volition and self-­consciousness can, when identified with the public sphere—­above all, that of the state—­in certain circumstances at least, overcome the uncertainty of time, rather than with the intrinsically aleatory structure of money or credit as such. This is also why there is something shocking in the spectacle of countries like Iceland and then Greece themselves teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. That this reaction is, however, not free of ethnocentrism is demonstrated by the fact that one is far less shocked or reluctant to speak of “failed states” when the states concerned are located in the Southern Hemisphere, rather than in the Northern Hemisphere or in the “East” rather than in the “West.” Although we can conclude from the previous discussion that the difference between “private” and “public” or “social” in financial matters is not absolute, it does not follow that the differences between the two can simply be ignored. Clearly, there is a distinction between buying on credit and paying in full at the time of purchase, just as there is a distinction between public (or “social”) and private credit and debt. When Hilferding emphasizes that credit involves a “private guarantee” as distinguished from the “social guarantee” that underwrites the nominal value of money, he implies at least two things about the exchange process. First, that it is designed to come full circle: it is quite literally “circulation” and not just an arbitrary movement of substitution through exchange. In short, it must not be forgotten that we are dealing with a “limited” economy of appropriation and not a “general” one, to use terms popularized by Georges Bataille.10 And 170   Money Is Time

second, that this circularity depends on the credibility of redemption: the belief or confidence in the “promise” involved in “promissory notes,” the credibility involved in all “letters of credit.” For credit to be creditable, its redeemability must inspire confidence. During the 2008 bank and credit crisis, for instance, “letters of credit” that are used in international transactions were increasingly refused or rejected by prospective creditors or sellers, thus posing a serious threat to international commerce.11 The reason for this, according to Nobel Prize–­winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, was that there was simply no confidence extended any more by private lenders or to private borrowers: “What lies behind the credit squeeze is the combination of reduced trust in and decimated capital at financial institutions” (Ibid.). These “financial institutions” are of course dedicated—­as are all other economic institutions in a capitalist economy—­to the private appropriation of profit and to its “maximization.” The notion of “maximization” can of course be interpreted in different ways. The main distinction organizing those different interpretations is once again related to the interpretation of time: they are either “short term,” “mid term,” or “long term.” A long-­term perspective places the emphasis not just on generating profit for the individual enterprise, but on securing the socioeconomic system of exchange on which all such enterprises depend. A short-­term perspective, by contrast—­and this is what has become dominant in the last decades—­will tend to ignore those systemic conditions of exchange and circulation, and instead focus only on the generation of the greatest amount of profit in the shortest possible time span. Even today this carries over in the behavior of banks and speculators; banks receive subsidies designed to facilitate lending. Companies receive tax breaks designed to encourage investment and employment. But without constraints banks and companies often use these funds either to buy other, weaker banks, and thus strengthen their competitive position, or to buy back shares in order to increase their value. They strive to generate profit through market control, or to gamble on risky speculative ventures since the money they are risking has become readily accessible (a consequence of the “too big to fail” policy, which guarantees private risk-­taking through public funds).12 The question is whether there is not a tendency of the capitalist system, insofar as its finality is the maximization of private profit, to prioritize the short-­term over the longer-­term perspective, especially when the rewards of short-­term gains—­“ bonuses”—­become the Money Is Time   171

primary factor in determining company policies. I will discuss this further in the following chapter. But all of this only emphasizes the legacy of Franklin’s insistence that it is not enough that a debt be repaid, in full and on time. It must be repaid with interest, with “offspring,” so that its value has increased over time. Time, instead of consuming living beings, seems thus to be organized so as to allow them to increase their being, insofar at least as this being is identified with their property, their wealth, their holdings.13 A newly revived saying stemming from J. M. Keynes sums up the attitude that informs this conception of time: “In the long term we are all dead.” With this remark, Keynes sought to parry conservative condemnation of governmental deficit spending as destructive in the long run. But it is a consistent remark from a thinker who sought to solve the problems of capitalist overproduction by stimulating consumption. The state, in the model of Christian redemption, transfers the guilt/debt of society to itself in order to redeem its members from the life-­threatening burden of their guilt/debt. But Keynes’s quip—­acknowledging the finitude of human existence—­can today also serve to reinforce a carpe diem attitude that helps provide a justification for subordinating longer-­term investment to short-­term profit-­taking. Or also for denying the import of ecological changes brought about largely by the efforts of certain industries to maximize their profits. By contrast, long-­term interests and perspectives are embraced today largely by institutions and persons functioning outside or on the fringe of the constraints and compulsions of private-­profit maximization: that is, above all in ecologically motivated discourses. The rise of the words “sustainable” or “renewable” provides an indication of the mindset that informs such discourses and the policies they advocate. They signal a genuine concern and interest in promoting the conditions that allow living species to survive on earth, an instance of where the general need not be opposed to the singular. But given the neoliberal push toward government deregulation of markets, including the labor market, the immediate results of the changes in production and consumption advocated by ecologically aware movements could indeed threaten the livelihood of many of those engaged in the industries that are at the cause of the longer-­ term threat to life on earth. The tension, then, between the long-­term interests of the species-­being and the shorter-­term interests of singular individuals does not permit, 172   Money Is Time

either theoretically or practically, a simple either-­or solution. It must be negotiated and organized so as to produce the least possible short-­term damage and the greatest possible long-­term ameliorations. Against the difficult option of negotiating such tensions, it is far easier to confide in the long-­standing mono-­theological identity paradigm, and to search for its charismatic embodiment in an extraordinary individual. This is precisely what stands behind the credence accorded to a figure such as Donald Trump, or before him, to Bernard Madoff, however different these two undoubtedly are. To limit myself here to Madoff, his success was decisively involved with the introduction of computerized trading, which he was able to exploit early on due mainly to the computational skills of his brother Peter. While Peter stayed largely in the background, Bernie appeared to many as a time-­transcending figure, one whom Elie Wiesel, one of his victims, described as a “god.”14 Given the fact that Madoff was surely intelligent enough to know that it was only a matter of time before he would be caught and punished, and given also that he could have succeeded quite well in his profession without breaking the law, it seems difficult to avoid supposing that his behavior was symptomatic of a strong self-­destructive tendency—­one which, over and above the realm of individual pathology, raises the question of the self-­destructive tendencies of finance capitalism more generally—­or what Derrida tried to think as its autoimmunity. If Madoff, like Lloyd Blankfein, thought of himself as a god, The God That Failed here was not the god of communism denounced by Arthur Koestler in a classic of Cold War literature,15 but that other god that the god that failed struggled against before succumbing, but brought up to date as the pseudo-­divinity of present-­day computerized finance capitalism. In both cases, however, it was still a god that failed. “Only another God can still save us,” was the response of Martin Heidegger, in his posthumously published interview with the German weekly, Der Spiegel.16 Theology continues to inform economics, as it did the revolutionary ideology that sought to destroy and replace it. Precisely because it disembodies material goods by speculating on their future exchange-­value, “investment” can appear to attain a “spiritual” status that seemingly transcends the limitations of mere matter and material bodies. It can appear to be a generator of wealth in a manner that is somewhat reminiscent of the creation of life through the divine logos. But future returns on present investment—­or in the case of credit vehicles, Money Is Time   173

on private promises—­retain a degree of uncertainty. For the promise of “redemption” is never simply immune to temporal changes. It must always reengage, in one form or another, with the temporal process of exchange. Franklin takes stock of this in the “advice” he extends to the “young tradesman.” He does not and cannot promise the young tradesman immortality, nor can he show him the path to grace, but he can point to “the Way to Wealth,” which, as he puts it, is as plain as the Way to Market. It depends chiefly on two Words, INDUSTRY and FRUGALITY; i.e. Waste neither Time nor Money, but make the best use of both.

The two words that Franklin uses suggest how the destructive effects of time are to be mitigated. First through work, and second through the avoidance of “waste” (i.e., “frugality”). Industry and frugality, work and economy, both entail goal-­directed activities, and indeed the two mean almost the same thing. “Waste” is to be avoided through an organization of work by a volition that knows what it wants and how best to attain it. “Industry” entails energy, discipline, and focus. Both “industry” and “frugality” presuppose a notion of work that is thoroughly teleological. For it is this self-­conscious and volitional teleology that, for Marx, as for Aristotle before him, distinguishes human work from the merely goal-­directed behavior of bees, as Marx notes in Capital: A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee would put many a human architect to shame by the construction of its honeycomb cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax.17

The difference between human labor and the no less complex goal-­ directed actions of bees resides in the fact that with humans the purpose of the activity is represented by consciousness prior to the activity itself. The implication of this prior consciousness is that laboring human beings, in contrast to animals or insects, know what they are attempting to accomplish before they begin working. This in turn suggests that consciousness can transcend temporal and spatial separation insofar as it can render 174   Money Is Time

the future representable, and as such also presentable—­that is, realizable through work. Considered in this way, namely as deliberate and volitional, work appears to be an activity that transcends time, at least insofar as the latter is considered to be a medium of separation. For what work in this sense does is not just to modify the materials on which it operates, but to alter them so that they ultimately conform to a preexisting plan, an idea, a representation. In other words, time and space are thereby transformed from a medium of alterability and, for living beings, of decomposition no less than of growth, into a medium of actualization, a medium that allows the “selfsame” to be realized as the product of work. To be sure, in commodity production objects are produced not directly to satisfy the needs of their producers, but rather those of their consumers through a process of exchange. But consumption remains an indispensable goal of commodity production, even if it is mediated by exchange. Consumption may thus be deferred through the separation of producer and consumer and through the introduction of sellers and buyers. But the ultimate horizon of the work process remains that of a volitional and self-­ conscious teleology. It is this volitional and self-­conscious teleology that allows work to retain a certain redemptive value despite the Reformation attack on “good works” as the path to grace. For the “grace” provided by work is that of an end product that fulfills the plan of the producer: a product that remains the same over time and space. A product that in this sense “survives” the ravages of time—­even if it was conceived from the start as a throwaway. Work thus provides a model of the self as a conscious process fulfilling itself in time and space. Productive labor in this sense is the secular heir of divine creativity. Since, however, the producer inhabits a “fallen” world, that analogy must be mediated by the process of the exchange. For it is only the “other” of the producer who can obtain the grace of self-­ fulfillment through consumption—­and through credit (i.e., debt), becomes the economical–­theological heir of sinful guilt. Franklin’s “way to riches” via “the way to the market” ultimately expresses the effort of capitalism to make good on the redemptive promise of Christianity. If Carl Schmitt argued that all the notions of the modern theory of the state are theological in origin—­and by that he meant Catholic—­then the reality of post-­Reformation capitalist modernity is that the economization that Schmitt so feared and fought is ultimately Money Is Time   175

nothing more or less than the attempt of such political theology to bridge the gap that separates the state of the world from the City of God. If the principle of the latter, according to the Schmitt of Roman Catholicism and Political Form, is the principle of “representation,” then the principle of modern capitalism as its heir is that of a certain “speculation” in which what can be described as de-­presentation mirrors and transfigures the (nation-­)state of the fallen world. Walter Benjamin retraced the genealogy of this process in his study of the Origin of the German Mourning Play. His account culminated in his reworking of the category of “allegory.” Allegory is a form of negative representation, signifying the “non-­being of what it represents.” Benjamin was well aware of the relation of allegory and money, even if he alluded to it only briefly in his study: Whatever it [allegory] touched, its Midas-­hand turned into something significant. Transformations of all sorts were its element; and their schematism was allegory. The less this passion is confined to the Baroque period, the more it is able to reveal the Baroque dimension in later phenomena. (GS 1, 403)

It is useful here to recall that the “Origins” of the Baroque mourning play and its use of allegory lay, according to Benjamin, in what he called the Counter-­Reformation, meaning by the term not just Catholicism but all organized religion and indeed, all forms of organization as such. Faced with the radically subversive antinomianism of the Lutheran doctrine of sola fides (which Benjamin, implicitly following Max Weber, clearly distinguishes from its Calvinist version), all organized politics and religion saw itself forced to justify the redemptive significance of those “good works” that Luther had so radically called into question. The thrust of that Lutheran antinomianism—­also origin of the Kantian “antinomies,” of which what Benjamin then called “the antinomies of the allegorical” were perhaps the earliest expression—­was to insist on the irreducibility of the singular confronted by the universalist pretentions of the church and its derived political institutions. It is this insistence on the irreducibility of the singular that challenged all established authority, which justified itself through appeals to a generality whose validity or authority could no longer be taken for granted.

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At the end of his treatise, Benjamin cites an anecdote drawn from the life of Saint Theresa that illustrates the ambiguous situation of the singular mystic, and of the church at the time of the Reformation. Characteristically, Benjamin describes the scene but then leaves its interpretation up to the reader: Saint Theresa has a hallucination in which she sees the Madonna laying roses on her bed; she recounts this to her confessor. “I don’t see any,” he replies. To which she responds: “The Madonna brought them for me.” In this sense, ostentatiously acknowledged subjectivity becomes a formal guarantee [zum förmlichen Garanten] of the miracle, because it announces the divine action itself. (GS 1, 408; Origin, 257; translation modified)

If, for Schmitt, whose shadow haunts this scene, the religious “miracle” is the forerunner of modern political sovereignty, based in his view on the power of the sovereign to make a “decision” that is utterly singular, paradigmatically that of suspending the constitution by declaring the state of exception—­for Benjamin such a decision can hardly decide anything at all, and indeed can never fully take place. For how is the sovereign to save the polity if his situation, as fallen individual, remains delimited by the very creation that, qua singular, demands salvation? For Benjamin, the sovereign is therefore not “saved” by the “principle of representation” but rather undone by it, in the form of allegory.18 What is left is the experience of the mystic, the “hallucination” that she “shares” with her confessor, although only negatively, precisely by confirming that he cannot participate in it: “I don’t see anything,” he replies. Nor can he. For the Good News that for the Christian mystic here takes the form of a hallucination, the image of the roses placed on the bed by the Madonna, is no longer destined for the representative of the universal (Catholic) Church, nor for any representative at all, if it is not for the wholly private and solitary individual, alone with her faith in God, sola fides. The private vision of the mystic thus anticipates the belief in the sanctity of private property that will inform the economic–­theology of capitalism. If the way that leads from the vision of Saint Theresa to the scenes of

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modern consumer and finance capitalism is long, it is also, as Franklin suggests, “plain” for all to see. All that is needed is faith: sola fides. But faith in what? For the United States, at least, the answer is clear enough: The faith required is faith in the promise that to spend is to “save,” and to save is to be saved. Since this may not be entirely clear—­especially to those not familiar with American English—­let me explain it with an anecdote. In 1973, which was the year of the first oil crisis, following the Israeli victory in the Yom Kippur War, the Japanese automobile maker Datsun—­forerunner of today’s Nissan Motors—­started an advertising campaign in the United States using the slogan Datsun Saves! What was meant was that Datsun’s cars required less fuel to run, and hence “saved” money, especially at the then current price of gas. But the slogan hit a raw nerve, and this for several interrelated reasons. Above all, the word “save” was and remains the master word of American advertising discourse. As such, it is the word that dominates the world of consumption in the United States. In order to understand its peculiar significance, it is helpful to recall that of all industrialized countries, the United States is the one whose private citizens actually “save” the least: they have less money deposited in savings accounts with guaranteed, if low, annual interest. Total household debt reached a record high of $13.5 trillion at the end of 2017, marking the “fifth consecutive year of annual household debt growth, with increases in the mortgage, student, auto and credit card categories.”19 So when the word “save” returns, as it were, as the chief “buzzword” of American advertising, it is as the antithesis of what the word means in “official” English (if that exists anywhere). It does not mean putting money aside so as to have a reserve for difficult times. It means rather the contrary: spending money that one does not have, for education, for health, for housing, and other basic necessities. What can be called the American religion of consumption is built therefore on two primary articles of faith, linked to very concrete practices. The first is that the more you spend, the more you save. The second is the more you “save” in this way, the more you are “saved”: that is, lifted out of your ordinary, everyday, vulnerable and ultimately mortal existence and elevated into a sphere of life that for many is the secular equivalent of divine redemption. The more the individual seems to possess—­forgetting Franklin’s warning, that to possess is not necessarily to own—­the more that individual appears to approach the goal of autonomy, through which 178   Money Is Time

the individual seems to acquire something of the omnipotence of the single and exclusive, life-­and world-­creating God.20 It is these two articles of faith that endow the image of credit with an apparent creative power, which promises to raise the indebted to the status of sinners capable of being redeemed. The greater the debt, the greater the promise of redemption. The more you borrow, the more you are “saved.” This religion bears the mark of the Protestant “ethic” that historically and continually informs American capitalism: the original sin of humankind, which condemns it to suffering, work, and ultimately, death, can be redeemed not by “good works” but by “faith alone”; or rather, not quite by faith alone, but by faith in action. The action required, however, is not that of producing good works, but that of consuming them, whereby the process of consuming—­of buying on credit—­becomes the true (practically, often the only available) path to grace and to salvation. As anyone knows who has spent any time at all in the United States, the ubiquitous advertising of most commodities—­and especially of more expensive ones, such as automobiles—­tends to formulate the cost not in terms of actual prices but in terms of monthly credit payments. This did not start with home mortgages—­the “subprime” mortgage crisis marked simply the culmination of a process that had begun long before. Buying on credit was already prevalent in the nineteenth century, but its massive use only began with the spread of credit cards following the Second World War. In 1952 the ratio of private debt to income in the United States was 52 percent. In 2006 it had grown to 126 percent.21 According to a Federal Reserve Report from November 2019, “Aggregate household debt balances . . . have been steadily rising for five years and . . . overall household debt is now 25.1% above the 2013Q2 trough.”22 Up until fairly recently, there was little concern—­either popular or among professional economists—­about growing private and public indebtedness in the United States. There are many reasons for this, of course, but one of them is probably less obvious and hence less discussed. It has to do with what Walter Benjamin describes as the “antinomy” that characterizes Baroque allegory—­which is its response to the radical antinomianism of Luther. Since, from this perspective, the redemption of sinful, fallen, mortal beings can no longer be entrusted to good works (the Catholic Mass, for instance, or confession), the increase in debt (and guilt) paradoxically can serve as the condition of “redemption,” both by confirming Money Is Time   179

the guilty debt of the individual and by promising the redemption of that debt and guilt. Since, however, this redemption can never take place on Earth, but only with the End of Time, the manifestation of the possibility of salvation becomes paradoxically linked not just to the accumulation of wealth (the Calvinist response), but also to the accumulation of debt—­or rather, in a strange synthesis, the accumulation of indebted possession, of expropriable property, of ownership that is not really one’s own. When Donald Trump proudly acknowledged that he regarded himself as “The King of Debt,” he was simply manifesting this long-­standing attitude.23 This is a tendency that Benjamin described in his fragment “Capitalism as Religion”: Capitalism is presumably the first case of a cult that is aimed not at expiation, but at culpabilization [verschuldend]. An enormously guilty conscience [Schuldbewusstsein] that does not know where to find expiation resorts to the cult, not in order through it to expiate its guilt, but to render it universal. (GS 5, 100)

The precise manifestation of this attempt to universalize guilt and debt is a powerful force driving what today is known as “globalization.” What the present crisis reveals, among other things, is how much not just the United States’ but the world’s economies depend on the “cult” of deficit consumption that has increasingly driven the American market since the Second World War. Why save, when credit alone—­sola fides—­is the only clear path to salvation? The American obsession with “saving” the world—­the tradition of so-­called manifest destiny, today reformulated as the mission of American world leadership—­is only one particularly fateful projection of the Puritan sense of profound and pervasive guilt, to which American history, with its genocidal treatment of native Americans and its exploitation of African American slave labor, has so often paid all too real tribute.24 Consumption “saves” and consumption requires credit. This is, to be sure, particularly evident in the United States, and it is no accident that the 2008 economic crisis should have started in the United States. But the fact that this crisis could so quickly engulf the world’s economies, belying the popular thesis of the “decoupling” of those economies from American economic and political hegemony, indicates that, as Horace wrote and Marx, 180   Money Is Time

among many others, echoed, de tua res agitur. Conditions that once were characteristic of and to some extent limited to the American experience are today increasingly imposing themselves worldwide, and it is therefore important to analyze the different local situations and the international relations that have permitted this imposition to take place. This chapter will conclude, then, with some thoughts on the conditions that may have made possible the widespread appeal of the American model of what I have been calling “mono-­theological economy.” If, as Benjamin suggested, capitalism is itself a kind of religion and not just the result of one; if qua religion its strength lies in the fact that it responds to issues and concerns that previously only organized religions tried to address; and if, moreover, the religion that is capitalism follows in the wake of Christianity by developing the sense of universal culpabilization and indebtedness until it includes the deity itself—­an “immature deity” that today conceals itself behind individualist avatars such as the “star” (sports, media, politics) and the dictator—­it may well be because the idea of inexpiable guilt and debt produces a “cult” (an organized, repetitive idealizing practice) of consumption that allows credit and debt to appear as the indispensable constituents of saving grace. In this perspective it is helpful to consider the diverse responses of governments, first to the credit crisis, and then to a stagnation that has overtaken the so-­called “real” economy of many countries. In Europe this has involved primarily “austerity” programs aimed at keeping public debt relatively low, particularly in the northern part of the continent, in accordance with the relatively arbitrary 3 percent of GDP called for by the so-­called Stability and Growth Pact, while by contrast, public debt in the United States continues to rise apparently without limits, but also with minimal reinvestment in infrastructure or in social programs. As King of Debt, President Trump had no problem with this, although some of his own party (and others) were uncomfortable with it. In Europe as well as in the United States, however, public funds are ready to redeem private debt insofar as this concerns banks “too big to fail,” which moreover consider themselves to be doing “God’s work” by making the economy possible. At the same time, the economy thereby made possible tends to increase the gap between rich and poor, both in the United States and in “emerging economies” as well. This question will be explored further in the following chapter. Here it may be sufficient just to recall that, before the 2008 crisis, the upper 1 percent of the population Money Is Time   181

in the United States had gained possession of 28 percent of the country’s wealth—­more than in 1929, at the end of the “roaring twenties.” During the same period, despite the spread of economic “development” to vast regions of the world, the gap between possessors and dispossessed, between rich and poor, increased over the past two decades worldwide, both within countries and between them. The growth in worldwide violence as well as the explosion of the “drug trade”—­which now makes up a substantial portion of the world economy—­seems closely related to such tendencies. Rejection of “Western” and “modern” values by ever larger populations in the world is just one of the more obvious and disturbing results of the same system of “economic theology” that has contributed to the current crisis: the response to a system that claims universal equality while producing ever-­greater inequalities. What ultimately informs this system, driving it and also, I suspect, constituting much of its worldwide appeal,25 is its tendency to valorize reality primarily in terms of the private appropriation of wealth and power. This in turn ultimately presupposes in-­divisible and autonomous in-­dividuals—­ which in the United States now includes corporations—­as its constituent and defining subject. “Freedom,” in the American lexicon at least, is first and foremost, freedom of “individuals” to do as they please, as long as these individuals have the wherewithal to enforce and impose what they do on others.26 Those “others” are thereby construed as other “individuals,” other selves or egos, other potential property owners and proprietors of wealth—­which means, of course, as others construed as just more of the same. Salvation, like damnation, is thereby viewed as essentially the property and destiny of independent individuals, and this means that such individuals are construed as being what they are prior to and independently of their relations to others. An exception might be made for “family.” But even collective categories are generally conceived on the model of the homogeneous individual, and therefore in essence opposed to everything alien and other. Such homogeneity increasingly is considered to be the basis of the “return” on investment that is expected to round off and close the circulation of commodities, the circulation of credit and consumption, in which debt comes full circle in order to produce, magically, a greater, more aggrandized homogeneous self. Deficit spending thus emerges as the not-­so-­secret mechanism of contemporary “self-­fashioning.”

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The notion of the individual, as individual property owner, individual debtor and lender, is as deeply rooted in the Abrahamic tradition as are Adam and Eve, with its constitutive violence becoming first manifest in Cain and Able. However, this heritage is greatly intensified when the Creator God is represented as being able to father a son—­that is, an individual human being—­in order to “save” mankind from itself, which is to say, from its sins, and thereby to bring the promise of eternal life. With the Reformation, the divinization of man in Christ shifts from the external mediation through the church, to the more interior, more enigmatic faith that marks the bond of the singular individual to God. The nature of that relation, as Max Weber emphasized, is interpreted in radically different ways by Luther and by Calvin. For Luther, grace is far less amenable to human activity than for Calvin, who considered commercial worldly success to be a possible indication of election. And as Weber further emphasized, it is therefore the Calvinist strain that has been far more influential in the development of capitalism than has the Lutheran, which retains a sense of the contingency and uncertainty of human existence. At the same time, the latter could produce counterreactions, as it did when the German Lutheran church and culture for the most part lent even more enthusiastic and widespread support to Hitler and National Socialism than did German Catholicism, which saw its nationalism as a potentially dangerous rival—­a rivalry that Hitler was able to control through the Reichskonkordat made with the Vatican in 1933. This followed the Lateran Treaty of 1929 between Rome and Mussolini, which recognized the full sovereignty of the Holy See in the State of Vatican City, which was thereby established as a city-­state. In both cases, these accords invoked a notion of sovereignty that, despite divergences, was acceptable both to the Roman Catholic Church and to the fascist and Nazi State, and both subordinated the ideal of the private autonomous individual to the collective identity of nation and race. However, with the defeat of fascism and Nazism in World War II, one can argue that the notion of sovereignty was progressively reattributed to the private individual, understood by liberalism as the basic building block of political, social, and economic life. Yet through all these changes a constant paradigm of identity tended to remain, one that stressed homogeneity over heterogeneity, and autonomy over heteronomy, private over public interest.

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This paradigm necessarily brings with it the equation of value with money, since the latter entails not just circulation and exchange of commodities, but their appropriation by private owners (individuals or institutions). But in a capitalist economy, such appropriation, although structurally indispensable, must never be simply arrested in possession: like money itself, it must circulate, and indeed it circulates virtually by virtue of its changing value (in cycles of inflation and deflation). Since the 1980s, when the reconstruction efforts made necessary by the destruction of the previous war essentially came to an end, the economy shifted its emphasis from the production of goods and services to financial speculation, globalized through the introduction of computerized calculation and internet communication. Money developed a power over time that was in direct proportion to its transsubstantialization into computable and communicable electronic data. The emergence of various “bubbles” indicates the kind of de-­substantializing that was now increasingly possible and increasingly exploited: in particular, the housing bubble involving debts that could never be paid back. The crisis of 2008 was the result of one such bubble bursting—­that caused by subprime mortgages, which were then spread around the world in packages that effectively concealed the true risk they involved. Then, in September 2011, a new crisis emerged, that of so-­called “sovereign debt”: the indebtedness of nation-­states. This began in 2008 with the default of the three major Icelandic private banks, which caused the national debt of Iceland to mount from 28.5 percent of GDP in 2007 to 96.4 percent of GDP in 2012, before then gradually dropping to 53 percent in 2016. This was the worst financial crisis of a national government since the Argentine economic chaos of 1999–­2002, which peaked with the freezing of all bank accounts in the country for twelve months, allowing for only minor sums to be withdrawn each week, and at the end of 2001 leading to widespread public protests and confrontations between police and demonstrators. The development of so-­called sovereign debt crises—­in Iceland, Greece, Portugal, Italy, to name just the most conspicuous—­poses the following problem: If money is public debt guaranteed by the state, then what happens when the state itself can no longer guarantee the value of its money? This was the situation in Weimar Germany during the 1920s, and more recently in Venezuela as well. Institutions such as the IMF and the World 184   Money Is Time

Bank are supranational institutions that seek to step in when such situations occur, but the conditions they impose on the state concerned are often tantamount to depriving the latter of its sovereignty, as was patent in Greece in recent years. The problem of sovereign debt demonstrates that the distinction between domestic and foreign, between inside and outside of a given territory, has become increasingly ambiguous as the development of communication technologies radically relativized the distinction of space and time. The “market” of creditors—­those who purchase government bonds and obligations—­functions to a large degree independently of territorial boundaries. What, however, does characterize this market—­and this takes us back to the arguments developed in the previous chapter—­is what I have described as the logic of a profitable “return.” If money is lent, bonds are purchased, and more generally if debt itself has become a privileged object of speculation—­as in credit derivatives, including credit default swaps (CDS), which speculate on the possibility of future defaults—­then what has remained constant is the purpose of such speculation, which remains that of turning a profit, of producing an appropriable return. The return, however, is no longer based on the production and sale of goods, but rather on the possibility of a default—­which is to say, on the possibility of a nonreturn (as in the CDS), where money is to be paid if and when a bond issuer defaults on his obligation and cannot pay back his debts. Potential defaults are thus made into a profitable object of speculation.27 Once again, we see how time is treated as the medium not just of uncertainty, and even less of fulfillment, but of a potential destruction that in turn produces a profit. Time is still treated as money, but in a mediated and indirect sense. Whereas such speculation was previously largely confined to the private sector, what is new with the sovereign debt crises is its extension to the public sphere. The financial markets are now able to speculate on the default not just of banks or of other financial institutions, but of nation-­ states, such as Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and France. This, however, goes to the heart of the very structure that enables market relations to function. What, after all, is a market? Here is a contemporary definition from Wikipedia: Money Is Time   185

A market is one of the many varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services (including labor) in exchange for money from buyers. It can be said that a market is the process in which the prices of goods and services are established.28

However complicated the reality of modern “markets” is compared to this simple and rudimentary description, one thing remains constant: the motivation of the participants in the market in a capitalist society is to get the best possible return on their “investment”: the lowest possible price for the buyer, the most profitable price for the seller. To the extent, however, that the market involves not just the exchange of goods between physical individuals, but the exchange of objects that can be highly abstract between very different types of buyers and sellers—­say a financial investment firm such as Goldman Sachs and an individual, retirement fund, or even nation-­state—­the question of credibility becomes increasingly important and difficult to assure. The subprime mortgage crisis involved the “packaging” of “toxic” mortgages so that their “toxicity” could no longer be easily recognized by the buyer. And since this was often done with the express intention of the seller to enrich himself at the expense of the buyer, but without the latter’s knowledge, the question of credibility became all the more urgent. Already in the 2008 crisis the function of governmental regulators was severely compromised: the SEC and other agencies did not perform effectively; indeed, given that many of their members had been or would be involved in the very institutions they were supposed to regulate, their regulatory power was largely called into question.29 The same could be said, however, of the highest level of government, when finance ministers and advisors all came from the very institutions that again they were supposed to regulate in the public interest. Needless to say, the election of the “successful realtor,” Donald Trump, to the presidency of the United States, has made transparent the dominance of certain sectors of business upon the functions of government. The same could be said of the election of the former banker Emmanuel Macron to the presidence of France in 2017. As

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with Trump, Macron campaigned explicitly as an alternative to established political parties and other establishments. This increasing disproportion of power between private and public sectors, together with a policy of increased “deregulation,” deriving from President Reagan’s credo that “Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem,”30 left little room for any effective advocacy or enforcement of public interests as opposed to private interests. The constant reduction of effective counterpowers, spectacularly demonstrated in the virtual collapse of the “separation of powers” in the United States, has only accelerated this tendency. The very bases of political “sovereignty” have thus been severely undermined not only from without, through mobilization of the “War against Terror,” but also and perhaps above all from within, by the prevalence of the interest in private enrichment over the minimal conditions necessary for social institutions—­including markets—­to cohere and to function. In recent years such policies culminated in the crises of sovereign debt, which made manifest the direct dependency of nation-­state institutions, supposed to assure the minimal degree of social cohesion and order necessary for any sort of interchange—­economic, social, cultural—­to take place, upon “the market” as the embodiment of the private interest requiring a profitable return on investment. Thus, countries such as Greece, whose credit ratings were downgraded by the same privately owned and organized rating agencies that facilitated the subprime mortgage deception, have had to pay exorbitant rates of interest to borrow money, without ever being able to pay back the principal owed, but to the profit of the lenders. It should be added that the rise of nationalist and populist governments all around the world, already mentioned in a note, constitutes a defensive reaction to the neoliberal and globalist glorification of the markets, in which “free trade” and international corporations are made the arbiters of international order. But this reaction does not question the basic paradigm we have been describing: it only resituates its center from globalized international “free trade” to nationally prioritized appropriation. Paradoxically this can demonstrate a “social” element that was already at work in National Socialism and Italian fascism. But such policies are still informed, although in different ways, depending on national traditions

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and cultures, by the logic of private appropriation. In the United States, such appropriation, which links America First to a racially homogeneous white, English-­speaking population, has a long history to look back on—­ just as those who sought to secede from the Union in 1860 could with some justice consider themselves to be true patriots and heirs to a colonial tradition in America, which depended largely on slavery for its profitable operation. In other countries the monotheistic identity-­paradigm can operate somewhat less individualistically, but always stressing the homogeneity of the “people.”31 In either case, whether neoliberal or nationalist-­liberal, we are witnessing today not just the triumph of private over public interest, but also the undermining of the social conditions under which private entities can interact with one another: both within countries and between them. As a result, the tendency—­and danger—­is that the privatization of public policies is encouraging a state of mind that holds not just the “debtor” but the unprofitable debtor to be morally responsible for the coming default: the public interest is redefined as the private interest of the elect, whose debt and guilt have been turned into the machine of a profitable redemption. The others can then with good conscience be relegated to the dustbin of history. In short, the perspective of the autonomous subject can be made to serve as a justification for the destruction or subordination of whole societies, if not of social life itself. And this leaves only force—­police, and ultimately, military force—­as the ultimate arbiter of conflict. The only alternative is one that develops a practice of debt that is not regulated by a notion of “redemption with interest” as salvation of the self, individual or collective. The relation of finite living beings to time and space must be acknowledged as one of a debt that cannot be repaid, but that must be negotiated, not in a perspective of gaining redemption with interest, but in one of collective survival. “Debt forgiveness” must become a term designating something other than the abdication of public interest before private enrichment. The conditions of social interaction must be recognized as transcending the horizon of private, “individual” appropriation. The alternative is a crisis not just of “sovereign debt,” but of the conditions of earthly life as such.

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8

Global Inequality

The Question of Birthright

One of the first things that can strike an observer when confronting the question of global inequality and its dynamics1 is just how complex and contradictory those “dynamics” seem to be. On the one hand, much evidence seems to indicate that the events of past decades have enabled global inequality to diminish, especially when that inequality is measured by comparing the industrialized, developed countries (mainly but not exclusively in the Northern Hemisphere) with those in the process of industrializing; on the other hand, inequality in the distribution of wealth within individual countries, including those that have rapidly industrialized, such as China and India, has grown exponentially.2 A recent report on this topic from researchers at the Massachusetts-­based National Bureau of Economic Research sums up the inequality in these dynamics as follows: Global inequality dynamics involve strong and contradictory forces. We observe rising top income and wealth shares in nearly all countries in recent decades. But the magnitude of rising inequality varies substantially across countries, thereby suggesting that different country-­specific policies and institutions matter considerably. High growth rates in emerging countries reduce between-­country inequality, but this in itself does not guarantee acceptable within-­country inequality levels and ensure the social sustainability of globalization.3

One of the authors of this paper is Thomas Piketty, whose 2013 study of Capital in the Twenty-First Century has provided a much broader historical and statistical basis for the analysis of the dynamics of global inequality than was previously available. The conclusion of his study is that the current evolution of inequalities is not a new phenomenon due to globalization, but rather a long-­term tendency of modern capitalism, going 189

back several centuries at least and rooted in what Piketty describes as a “fundamental contradiction in the relation between economic growth and the profitability of capital.” This contradiction, although the result of structural qualities of capitalist dynamics, is for Piketty not governed by an unalterable determinism, but rather constitutes a deep-­seated trend that can be counteracted by political intervention, especially using taxation as a means of redistributing wealth. A major mechanism in increasing inequality, identified by Piketty, involves the transmission of private wealth through inheritance. Here is how he sums up the tendency: When the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy (as it did through much of history until the nineteenth century and as is likely to be the case again in the twenty-­first century), then it logically follows that inherited wealth (patronyme) grows faster than output and income. People with inherited wealth need save only a portion of their income from capital to see that capital grow more quickly than the economy as a whole. Under such conditions, it is almost inevitable that inherited wealth will dominate wealth amassed from a lifetime’s labor by a wide margin, and the concentration of capital will attain extremely high levels—­levels potentially incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies.4

Piketty’s recipe—­by no means of course uncontested—­involves the use of progressive taxation, and in particular of inheritance taxes, to counteract the factors producing inequalities. Since his book was published some years ago, we have all been privy to the continuing trend in this direction. Here is a recent summary of this tendency: The gap between the rich and poor can be illustrated by the fact that the three wealthiest individuals in the world have assets that exceed those of the poorest 10 percent of the world’s population. The net worth of the world’s billionaires increased from less than $1 trillion in 2000 to over $7 trillion in 2015, so the gap is growing dramatically. Statistics show 28.4 million slaves at the end of 2006 living in the world with zero wealth. . . . Millionaires [accounting for] 1 percent of the world population . . . possess more than half of global wealth.5 190  Global Inequality

Given this extraordinary situation and its progression, it is no less extraordinary that in those countries that have what might be described as formally democratic systems of governance, for instance in Europe and North America but also elsewhere, elections, far from resulting in the support of political parties that promise structural reforms, often tend to favor those that appeal to anxieties in order to redirect them, positively toward charismatic autocrats, and negatively, as resentment or aggression, toward more easily identifiable targets such as foreigners, immigrants, minorities, ethnic and religious groups, or by mobilizing them for a mythic–­religious “war on terror.” The election of Donald Trump in the United States in 2016 demonstrated this nationalist–­xenophobic tendency in the extreme. Trump gained widespread popularity in the United States through his TV reality show, The Apprentice, which has been copied with more or less success in many countries since. In that show, contestants competed with each other for a place in the Trump organization. Of course, only the single “winner” was so rewarded. The many other unsuccessful competitors were thrown out of competition by Trump with the unforgettable words, “you’re fired!”—­a practice that he by no means abandoned after acceding to the presidency. And yet, as a candidate for that office, the speaker of those words was able to present himself successfully as the person who was going to restore jobs to the United States, and thus to “Make America Great Again.” This would be accomplished in part by building a Great Wall to keep out the hordes of impoverished (=criminal) foreigners, this time not from the north, as with the Great Wall of China, but from the south, as well as also by deporting undocumented immigrants, hunting down “Islamic” radicals, instituting protectionist trade policies, and bringing back jobs to American industry, from cars to coal mining. Trump also pledged to reduce taxes radically, on individuals as on corporations, thus increasing buying power of the former and hiring power of the latter—­ while at the same time promising $1 billion that would be dedicated to rebuilding a U.S. infrastructure in shambles. His first major tax-­reduction plan, not surprisingly, favored the rich and very rich, and corporations over the marginalized voters who supported him, and a second tax bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, continued to reduce taxes on the wealthy and corporations while increasing taxes on the so-­called middle class by eliminating personal exemptions and itemized reductions.6 Global Inequality   191

I mention all of this, which is well-­known, to demonstrate how democratic processes, which in Europe have often tended to favor extreme nationalist-­populist parties at the expense of center and left, have responded to the exponential increase in inequality experienced over the past few decades, both in European countries and in the world at large. For this response, there are obviously many reasons. But the one I would like to highlight is the growing influence of the audiovisual media, both the mainstream news channels and the internet, not only in its content but in its manner of representing reality or opinions about reality. Despite the fact that the media are made possible by enormous advances in technology, they can (must not, but can, and this is particularly true in the United States) contribute to naturalizing and simplifying the ways in which complex problems are “viewed”—­a word that significantly has come to be virtually synonymous with “conceived” or “construed”—­by their “viewers,” who also make up a large part of the electorate. For ever-­larger portions of the population, to recognize or to know tends increasingly to be identified with what can be “viewed” or “seen” on the screen—­which in turn generally means “viewed or seen as identifiable objects or subjects.” The function of the voice, and of language in general, is already terminologically and symptomatically ignored. And yet the language and the way it is spoken, as well as the organization of the visual in the media, contribute to this naturalization of reality. Complex concatenations of factors, events, and occurrences tend to be reduced to what is familiar—­and the familiar is often equated with the real. Time is presented in narratives having a clear-­cut beginning, middle, and above all, end, which allows for rapid and seemingly unequivocal conclusions. Anything not corresponding to this matrix is “seen”—­“viewed”—­and condemned as “abstract,” “unreal,” “constructed” if not “contrived.” The manner in which candidate and then president Trump was able to popularize the notion of “fake news” indicates both the desire for simplicity and the suspicion that the forms in which “news” is presented are not as “neutral” as the ideal of American journalism has long advocated (in contrast to the journalism of other countries, France, for instance, where the notion of a particular—­and hence never entirely neutral—­perspective is far more prevalent in newspaper reporting). If there is no simple solution to such a situation, in which large portions of the electorate are encouraged to endorse simple, visualizable 192  Global Inequality

quick fixes to highly complex problems, this makes scapegoating, not to say racism and ethnocentrism, much easier. Structural processes, where causes are never immediately visualizable, are held to be “abstract” in the sense of untrue. And where they are addressed, it is often in the form of negative images: the word “dark” here has emerged as the key signal of this. What is dark is per se bad, concealed, difficult to see, as if seeing were the only way of acceding to reality. Language, by contrast, is not simply visible: it must be read, interpreted, and this involves thinking. Thinking that takes language seriously must be aware that limits must be imposed that are never self-­evident or fully immanent to what they delimit. This means being able to accept a certain uncertainty, as well as a certain partiality and even partisanship in interpreting ensembles, which are never whole in the sense of total or all-­inclusive. This is why important words, which seem to have their meaning intrinsically, quasi-­“naturally,” should not be taken for granted. The process of “granting” is complex and doesn’t depend entirely on the object or the subject it situates. The more familiar words may seem, the more they can hide what is most significant about them. This is particularly true of the word “dynamics,” as in “The Dynamics of Global Inequality.” The following partial definition of the word, taken from an internet dictionary, indicates one aspect of the word’s complexity that may turn out to be relevant for discussing “global inequality”: The branch of mechanics that is concerned with the effects of forces on the motion of a body or system of bodies, especially of forces that do not originate within the system itself.7

Another dictionary definition, this time from Merriam-­Webster, adds that “the effects of forces” stated in the above definition may relate not only to the “motion” thereby imparted, “but sometimes also to the equilibrium” thereby assured. These two mechanistic definitions of “dynamics” are based on two premises. The first is that the forces bringing about the dynamics are located outside of “the system itself.” This is not at all what the Greek origins of the word, namely dunamis, usually translated as “potentiality” or “power,” might lead us to expect. For potentiality or power is generally construed as being “internal” to the system they affect, as its capacity to Global Inequality   193

produce effects or for self-­realization. The “mechanical” definition of “dynamics” shifts this origin and suggests that it is in some way external to what it brings about. The second premise, not unrelated, is indicated by the emendation in the Merriam-­Webster definition, which defines dynamics not just in relation to movement, but also in relation to equilibrium. This seems particularly apt if we consider the dynamics of global inequality with respect to the ways in which the economically more “developed” countries respond to increasing economic (but also social) “inequality”: namely, by turning to nationalist–­populist policies that defend ethnic, and often racial, homogeneity as the solution to social and political problems. Trump’s second most favored slogan, in describing the “vision” that guides his politics—­after that of Making America Great Again, is America First, and indeed, in his inaugural address, Only America First! The slogan has of course a long and ominous history, and it is striking how little commented upon it has been in the U.S. press and media. The New York Times is an exception. Its reporter David Sanger, discussing Trump’s inaugural address, noted that it was “the rallying cry that the famed flier, Charles Lindbergh, championed when in the late 1930s he became one of the most prominent voices to keep the United States out of Europe’s wars.”8 Sanger tactfully omits to mention that proximity of America First to Hitler’s Germany. If one thinks together the implications of Making America Great Again and Only America First! one sees how a dynamic producing inequality can bring about both movement and potential disequilibrium: the disequilibrium of being primus inter impares, first among unequals. In the dynamics of commerce or in military relations, one speaks today increasingly of “asymmetry” to describe this unequal relation of force or power. The notion of a single superpower is thus linked to that of asymmetry. The question that requires discussion here is how such a notion, the figure and policies it entails, could come to exercise such a powerful attraction on large portions of the electorate—­not just in the United States, but in Europe as well. The psychoanalytic notion of “identification with the aggressor” seems appropriate here. It was introduced by Sandor Ferenczi and popularized by Anna Freud as a “defense mechanism,” suggesting an ego that feels threatened, and that seeks to control its fear by turning it into aggression directed against an external object, whose power to threaten is either diminished or exaggerated.9 Transposed from the realm of individual to social psychology, it is important to recall that the psychoana194  Global Inequality

lytic notion originated with Ferenczi as a response to a traumatic experience, and not merely as a general tendency of the ego. To understand its significance in society, it is important to keep both aspects in mind: the real, potentially trauma-­inducing redistribution of wealth underway since the 1980s, and the more recent response both to the fact and to its occultation in the audiovisual media in particular. The official, media-­ propagated discourse(s) tend to minimize the traumatic effects of social inequality in order to propagate a sense of “the normal” that this same inequality is increasingly undermining. Since the media depend financially upon the same groups that are involved in the redistribution of wealth, it is not surprising that they tend to minimize the disruptions it is causing—­ with many exceptions, more in certain print media than in the audiovisual media. With important differences deriving from different cultural and social traditions, a similar tendency is becoming stronger in other parts of the world as well, encouraging as a response the desire for a return to a putatively original but lost purity and glory—­ethnic, religious, national. In short, if “globalization” involves in part an exposure to other cultures and traditions, then the economic inequalities it brings with its form of “development” can easily seem to disqualify such cultural and social diversity, and consequently to provoke as a counterreaction the reaffirmation of homogeneity, in whatever form. In late February 2017, South Africa saw an explosion of popular fury directed against the 4 percent of the population made up of immigrants from other African nations such as Nigeria, Sudan, Zambia, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. In the 2016 French presidential election, Marion Le Pen did very well in the French overseas territories in part because she was able to mobilize fear of immigration there: in La Réunion from the Comoros, for instance. Needless to say, she and her party also did very well in France overall. In the European Union, the Visegrad group of former Soviet satellite countries, composed of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, have been joined recently by Austria and Italy in terms of singling out immigration as a fundamental threat to social cohesion. To this list could be added the 73 million votes received by President Donald J. Trump—­47 percent of the total—­in the 2020 presidential election. There, as elsewhere, foreign immigrants are often regarded above all as economic competitors, lowering salaries and stealing jobs from those who consider themselves “native.” The weakness of the liberal response to this is to deny or ignore the extent to which immigrant labor has in fact Global Inequality   195

often been exploited in order to reduce salaries and degrade working conditions of native laborers. A similar situation exists in the European Union today, where workers from Eastern European countries are imported into France by employers precisely in order to avoid paying the social fees that help finance social protection in France (health insurance, pensions), which is more costly—­but also more extensive—­than that available in Eastern Europe. By ignoring real socioeconomic differences between nations, appeals to a humanistic ethics of hospitality can pave the way for a nationalist–­ populist response that does not entirely ignore real economic disparities, but which also tends to attribute them to ethnic and racial causes rather than to the effects of an unregulated market economy, which works often to strengthen the powerful and to disenfranchise all others. This is particularly true in the case of Africa, which has vast natural resources, but which are exploited by foreign companies in complicity with local elites. This is also why the popular notion of “postcolonial” can obfuscate the fact that the relation of the former colonizers to previously colonized countries often continues their former exploitation through the intermediary of “native” proxies. Neo-­colonial would thus be the more appropriate designation for the current situation of many, if not most, of the countries no longer under direct colonial rule.10 The result is a tendency to glorify force and violence, personified most recently in the person and policies of President Donald Trump. The reciprocal fascination of Trump for autocratic and violent rulers is just one symptom of this situation. The emergence of a ruler such as Duterte in the Philippines, elected on a platform of, among other things, physically eliminating all those involved in the drug trade without bothering about the niceties of juridical “due process,” is indicative of the attraction of what appear to be simple and direct solutions to complex and systemic problems. The general abandonment of the principle of habeas corpus in the “war on terror” is yet another instance. Trump’s commitment to building “a Great and Beautiful Wall” on the U.S.–­Mexican border—­to be paid for by Mexico—­is only a conspicuous recent instance of this mindset. Like all walls, the Great Wall suggests that the danger comes from without, rather than from within, an argument that is also advanced, with some difficulty, by the advocates of Wars on Terror. A brief passage from Kafka’s remark-

196  Global Inequality

able sketch “Building the Wall of China” suggests how counterproductive such measures can be: As is generally known and propagated, the wall was, of course, planned as protection against the Northern peoples. (But) these deserted wall sections can easily be destroyed by the nomads, especially since, frightened by building of the wall, they changed their places of residence with unbelievable rapidity, like grasshoppers, and thus perhaps had a better overview of the construction in progress than even we, the builders, did.11

The attempt to build a protective wall, far from protecting from danger, can easily increase it: a similar argument could be made against the recent installation of the THAAD antimissile system by the United States in South Korea, and more generally against the proliferation of nuclear weapons on a worldwide scale. If up to now in the effort to emphasize the semantic complexity of the dynamics of global inequality I have focused on the word “dynamics,” let me now turn to the last word, “inequality.” In an economic context, it seems to have a straightforward meaning: either referring to inequalities of wealth, salaries, revenues—­or even of opportunities. But the very notion of “inequality” depends on the concept it negates, that of “equality.” Equality may seem to be a fairly simple idea as long as it conceived of primarily numerically. Thus, inequalities of wealth or income can be measured and calculated, more or less. But even here such measures depend in turn not just on the unity of measurement employed but also on the conditions under which such a unity is determined. In his discussion of what he calls the “mathematical sublime” in the Critique of the Power to Judge, Kant insists that there can be no absolute criterion or ultimate unity of measurement, since every such unit of measurement must in turn be measured and thus depend on another measure. For Kant, then, there is no logical or internal limit to this regressus ad infinitum: there is no ultimate criterion, no Grundmass12—­no absolute or definitive unit of measurement. Such measurement thus must ultimately depend on what Kant calls an “aesthetic” perception, in the sense not of an apprehension of the beautiful

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but of a sensory receptivity that will always be relative to its positioning in a particular situation. If one extends this analysis to the notion of “equality,” one concludes that it must inevitably involve not just identity but differences. Equality is therefore never absolute but always relative and partial. Since it entails similarities in certain respects and dissimilarities in others, it is important to keep in mind just which respects are being excluded as well as included in establishing the equation. This means taking into account the spatiotemporal context in which the relation of “equality” is determined. And this in turn suggests that any such contextualization will in turn depend upon changes that can occur through the passage of time and the shifting of place. For instance, wealth cannot be measured purely in monetary terms: a higher average or median salary in one country can be less significant to well-­being than a lower salary in another country—­one which provides greater public services, such as free education and health insurance and low-­cost housing. If, then, spatial and temporal factors are decisive in determining the relation of equality to inequality—­and indeed the very notion of equality itself—­then as Piketty suggests, the transmission of wealth through inheritance may be a major factor tending to augment the relation of revenue to production and thus to increase inequality in a given society. It has long been recognized that such intergenerational transfers of wealth are also responsible for what has reemerged today as one of the primary factors producing disequilibrium, not just economic but social and political as well. In his excellent study of the role of inheritance law in English Renaissance literature,13 Joseph Jenkins draws attention to Machiavelli’s critique of the political effects of inherited power and wealth. In tracing the genealogy of the establishment of “Princes,” in his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli writes: In the beginning . . . when they had to elect a prince, they did not support the boldest but, instead, the man who was most prudent and just. Yet later when they began creating princes through hereditary succession and not through election, the heirs immediately began to degenerate from their ancestors, and abandoning acts of special worth, they thought princes had nothing to do but surpass others in luxury and lasciviousness and all other forms of licentiousness. . . . Subsequently, this gave rise to the beginning of the collapse, and to 198  Global Inequality

conspiracies and plots against princes, executed by those who . . . could not endure the dishonorable life of such a prince. . . . And since these men hated the very idea of a single leader, they constituted a government among themselves, and in the beginning, mindful of past tyranny, they governed themselves according to the laws they had instituted, subordinating their own interests to the common good, and with the greatest care they managed and maintained both their private and public affairs. This administration later passed to their sons, who did not understand the vicissitudes of fortune since they had never experienced evil, and unwilling to remain content with civic equality, they turned to avarice, ambition, and the unlawful seizure of women, causing a government of aristocrats to become a government of the few, without regard for civic bonds of any kind . . . so that in a brief time what happened to the tyrant happened to them . . . and someone soon rose up, who, with the aid of the multitude, destroyed them.14

Although Machiavelli here is concerned with the corruption of the political state, his argument can also illuminate the dynamics of global inequality. For it points out just what the growth of inequality can lead to: the decline of monarchy into tyranny, its replacement by an aristocracy that then becomes an oligarchy, and finally the tendency of the third form of government, democracy, to turn into anarchy—­this is the critical “cycle through which all states that have governed themselves or that now govern themselves pass” (26). But at the core of this disintegration of governance, in which private self-­interest is placed above the common good, lies the transmission of power and wealth (Machiavelli is focusing more on power than on wealth, but both are implied) from fathers to sons, parents to children, through a system of inheritance that produces inequality by allowing individual self-­interest to take precedence over the common good. Machiavelli does not merely describe this process, but—­in a brief but suggestive phrase—­also indicates just what makes it so powerful and all-­pervasive. When wealth and power are passed on from ruling fathers to their filial successors, the latter become powerful without ever having encountered, much less “understood,” what Machiavelli calls “the vicissitudes of fortune” (la variazione della fortuna). This lack of understanding encourages a kind of egotism that places the individual self before Global Inequality   199

all relation to others, above all alterity—­including perhaps first and foremost, that of time itself as the medium and measure of “variation” and change—­of mortality and succession. By contrast, an awareness of the finitude of (what I call) life in the singular can encourage a respect for the heterogeneity of such life—­a heterogeneity that leaves room for respectful acknowledgment of others and thus for a recognition of the priority of the common good over private self-­interest. Returning now to our more immediate concern, it is not hard to see how the dynamics of inequality—­or rather, as I would prefer to call and construe it, a dynamics of disequilibrium—­might be fueled by attitudes, conventions, and traditions that seek to avoid or deny the vicissitudes that singular living beings necessarily experience by virtue of their being physically situated in time and space. Such avoidance or devaluation of bodily experience, insofar as it involves heterogeneity, is informed by a conception of the self that construes it as essentially prior to and independent of all interaction with others, and thus also prior to its relation to the world.15 Inheritance law, by contrast, often stresses the continuity of blood relations and thereby suggests a continuum of life and of property that transcends the limits of singularity: in many European countries, parents are prohibited by law from disinheriting their legal offspring. That the United States is an exception to this tendency testifies to the special status accorded the individual in American culture.16 In either situation, however, what is involved is not just a juridical–­institutional mechanism of inheritance, but the psychological and intellectual effects, the state of mind, and the social position that such transfers of wealth and power both produce and promote. Hegel, in a famous chapter of his Phenomenology of Spirit, describes the emergence of self-­consciousness through a dialectic of what he calls “master” and “servant”: two states of mind that engage in an all-­out struggle, which ends, however, not in death but in the victory of the one as master and the subordination of the other as servant. In a rather idealistic manner, Hegel declares that the master is victorious because he has been willing to risk his life, while the servant submits in order to survive: the first is lord and master, the other does the bidding of the master. The one who has yielded to the other has done so, however, out of fear of death. This condemns him to work for the master, but in so doing, allows him also to experience the limits of his own self and its constitutive dependence on what 200  Global Inequality

it requires to survive—­that is, on what is other. The Lord, paradoxically and dialectically, precisely by being victorious in his struggle, lacks the actual experience of limitation, which in turn entails an acknowledgment of the alterity of life, which for a singular living being is always bounded and informed by finitude. Since the servant is forced to work for the master, he acquires the experience both of his limitations, and of the possibility of interacting with what is not himself and transforming it in purposive ways, even if the purpose does not originate in his own consciousness, but rather in that of the master. This means that, for him, the “purpose” is not his own but imposed on him by another. At the same time, this adds a new dimension to his experience of his dependence on others. Forced to carry out the purposes of the other, he makes the experience of labor as the possibility of transforming what is into something else. His fear of death is thus complemented by his experience of labor and by the recognition of alterity that it involves. The experience of the subjugated servant thus need not be simply passive, or simply reactive; it can also be transformative, and as such involves the acknowledgment of what Machiavelli designated as the “vicissitudes” or “changeability of time.” These “vicissitudes” extend from the fear of alterity as the radical cessation of being—­death—­to the need to transform the alterity of objects through work. The experience of mortality is thus complemented both by that of labor as transformative action on what is other, and that of purpose and intention as something that comes from the other. Conversely, both the desire to acquire unlimited wealth and power, and the intention of passing that wealth and power on to heirs through a “last will and testament,” can be interpreted as an (institutional as well as personal) acting out of the desire to control or limit the inevitable “variability of time” as it affects singular living beings.17 Blood ties provide a physical link between those beings and thus are often valorized in inheritance law. Hence the importance accorded to the biological “family,” “dynasty,” or “clan,” which can be seen as an attempt to invest “life in the singular” with a kind of immortality: the individual perishes, but the clan, family, or dynasty survives. Hence both the attempt to extend the notion of “family” to non–­blood relations, as well as the opposition to this attempt.18 Living singular, corporeal beings can thus appear to transcend finitude insofar as their progeny is understood as an extension of parents through the continuity of blood, genes, and so on. Through the transmission of wealth from Global Inequality   201

parents to children living beings can be considered to rise above the limited lifespan of life in the singular. The social and political significance of this effort to protect the living being of singular individuals from falling victim to the vicissitudes of temporal existence is thus particularly manifest—­and admired—­in those who inherit great wealth and power (two terms that it seems difficult to separate, especially today). Machiavelli implies as much in the short phrase I have highlighted: those who inherit wealth and power at birth can come to regard it as their birthright—­that is, as a right conveyed by a birth seen as the continuation of a previous life. As birthright, the power that comes with inherited wealth can be regarded as a quasi-­natural property of the heir. Since the acquisition of such wealth and power at birth predates activity of the heir as a justification for the acquisition, birthright can be construed as a natural part of the life process itself, which in a certain sense thereby recalls the prelapserian state of life in the Garden of Eden, but even more the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ, whereby inheritance takes the place of the Holy Spirit—­an analogy that the immaterial dimension of money, value, and wealth discussed in the previous chapter helps to support. This theological paradigm can thus persist in modified form in secular culture. The privileged existence of those born to wealth and power acquires a further legitimation from the Calvinist notion that envisages divine election to be manifested in commercial and worldly success—­ something that the Lutheran version of Protestantism, with its dictum of sola fides, initially, at least, tended to deny. In this perspective, the extravagant self-­indulgence described by Machiavelli, to which centuries later Thorstein Veblen will give the name of “conspicuous consumption,” can be considered to constitute a defensively ostentatious effort to conjure away the shadow that haunts living beings who cannot or will not acknowledge the finitude of life in the singular. Just as from the standpoint of capitalism there can be no intrinsic limit to the accumulation of wealth and power, no internal limit to the ongoing search for ever-­greater productivity and competitivity—­no restriction on what today is extolled as “excellence”—­so too there can be no justifiable limit to the production of inequalities from the point of view of those who regard wealth and power as their natural birthright. The Hegelian dialectic 202  Global Inequality

of master and servant is thus reinterpreted and hypostasized into the undialectical polarity of winners and losers. From this perspective, the “general good” is seen to be incarnated in the images of successful individuals who are presented variously as the elect, the meritorious, the most powerful or simply as those who excel—­which is to say, as those who stand out from the mass of others. Outstanding images presuppose a background from which they demarcate themselves as foreground. Hence the preference in the audiovisual media for close-­ups of individuals, emphasizing the independence of foreground from background, the priority of the individual over the context. These images are presented by a largely commercialized audiovisual media today as constituting the highest embodiment of living being. This explains why the two key partner institutions of these media are professional sports and the entertainment industry.19 Here again, Donald Trump, surrounded by his family, can be considered as the most conspicuous recent political image of self-­made success. One of the earliest and most emblematic North American TV series was entitled Dynasty (1981–­89).20 Coming at about the same time that the Thatcherite policies of the Reagan administration began a radical deregulation of finance and commerce, which in turn started what became an exponential increase in inequality, the American Dynasty chronicled the violent adventures of the rich and powerful Carrington family of Denver. The blood relation that marks familial dynasties continues to mark American politics, from the Kennedys to the Bushes, and more recently, to the Trump family. The violence endemic to such families is of course conditioned both by the ambivalent imaginary identification they involve and by the anonymity of money relations that know no familial or other bonds.21 It is this inherent instability that makes the proper name of “Trump” so suggestive: the patriarch must inevitably seek to trump all others, including himself. Thus it can be argued that the transmission of wealth through inheritance—­and in particular, through familial inheritance—­continues to be a powerful force not just in augmenting inequality but in inculcating attitudes that justify such inequalities morally and socially. Inequality thus comes to be considered a necessary and constitutive principle of a society that sees its dynamics as rooted in the priority of private, individual gain over social welfare. This tendency is particularly strong in the Global Inequality   203

United States, but as already noted it is clearly on the rise in Europe and elsewhere, eliciting counterreactions from the Left as well as from the Right. The latter, in the form of cultural and economic nationalism, while claiming to oppose certain aspects of neoliberalism, shares its basic premises, which prioritize a homogeneous self over a heterogeneous other, sameness over difference, the domestic over the foreign. However, in contrast to previous neoliberalism, but also neoconservatism, such nationalism does not see the market as the absolute mechanism in which autonomous selves interact and freedom is expressed: rather the market is subordinated to the nation, understood, however, as an extrapolation of autonomous and homogeneous individuals. The market is seen as an agonistic mechanism where individuals make “deals” and seek to outwit each other. Such an agonistic conception of commercial and human relations seen as a struggle between unequal forces and elements, acknowledges, at least implicitly, the irreducibility of differences and of heterogeneity more generally in the process of identity formation and transformation. A theory of (dis)equilibrium recognizes that qualitative inequalities constitute an irreducible condition of all social interaction. Economic nationalism, by contrast, thinks of such inequalities mainly in terms of a competition producing “winners” and “losers.” Difference is thus seen as quantitatively commensurable because qualitatively similar. Although I will not have the time or the space here to support the following supposition with evidence, much less with extended argumentation, I would like to suggest that one tradition that powerfully informs the notion of inheritance as a means of overcoming temporal disparities and ultimately finitude is associated with Christianity. The notion that a transcendent God can father a son who is charged with redeeming a sinful humanity suggests that procreation is the means by which death is to be overcome. The humanization of the divine promises the divinization of man. God, far from being simply dead, dies only so that man can be reborn. But for earthly mortal beings, this project of deifying the human remains a hope to be fulfilled in a world to come. Moreover, its redemptive effects are, at least for the Western churches, limited to those humans who are saved. By contrast, rejection of the doctrine of apocatastasis, universal salvation, associated with Origen, which was declared a heresy in 553 by the Fifth Council of Constantinople, reinforced the notion of inequality among human beings, an attitude that, as already noted, was probably ex204  Global Inequality

acerbated by the Reformation. Here we see how historically the notion of an “equality”—­underlying the trinitarian identity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and then revered as the defining trait of a humanity created in the image of God—­can become the point of departure for instituting a common standard for a life without limit, which serves in turn as the basis for establishing inequality among the few who are chosen and the others who are not. Such inequality, however, does not entail a respect for differences but rather their ranking according to a hierarchy of value reflecting the capacity of the individual self to survive. Whether or not this hierarchical estimation of inequality is promoted by the idea of a single, universal Creator-­God who, as Jan Assmann has argued, is above all construed as exclusive,22 is a question I cannot go into here. An instructive alternative to such an evaluative hierarchy can, however, be found in the polytheistic world of Greek tragedy, and in particular, in the Theban plays of Sophocles. These take as their point of departure the myth of the curse placed upon King Laios, which dooms him to be killed by his son. Most interpretations of the myth, if not of the tragedies, seek to explain its significance by searching for the cause or origin of this curse, which they equate with its meaning. A few classical scholars, however, very much in the minority, have sought to approach the myth inversely: not by speculating about its possible causes but by reflecting upon its demonstrable effects.23 I have tried elsewhere to develop certain implications of this approach with respect to Sophocles’ tragedies. Here I can only summarize the results: What the curse placed on Laios indubitably, and not speculatively, excludes, is the perpetuation of the royal bloodline of the Labdacides as rulers of Thebes. The curse thereby excludes precisely what Machiavelli will later argue is the bane of all polities: the transmission of power by consanguine inheritance. Laios is the son of Labdacos, who in turn is the grandson of Cadmos, founder of Thebes. The curse placed upon him has a dual effect: first, the Delphic Oracle prophesies that he will be assassinated by his male heir, if he has one; and second, that this patricidal son will marry his own mother, Laios’s wife. The curse thus already contains two elements: that of incest and that of the radical interruption of the perpetuation of political power through male inheritance. In Oedipus tyrannos, Oedipus stages the impossibility of preserving male inheritance as the principle of political longevity. Oedipus becomes king by saving Thebes from death at the hands of the Sphynx. His reign is Global Inequality   205

thus tied from this beginning to questions of life, death, and protecting the polis from danger. Of course, he considers himself a stranger to Thebes, and the Thebans also regard him as a foreigner. But as Sophocles’ audience knew full well, he remains the son of Laios and in this sense the rightful heir to its throne. It is this which brings the city into peril. The plague, with which Oedipus tyrannos begins, is a result not of external causes but of this most internal one. Similarly, his two sons, issued from his incestuous marriage to his mother, Jocasta (whom he has inherited together with the throne), fight over his heritage after his death and destroy each other in the process. The family dynasty thus terminates with the death of Antigone, condemned for seeking to mourn and bury her singularly irreplaceable brother. Only her sister Ismene is left . . . to mourn and mark the demise of her ruling family. However, Sophocles also envisages an alternative to the self-­destructive fate of inherited rule and articulates it in Oedipus at Colonos, written shortly before his death and performed only posthumously. Its conclusion is often read as containing a warning to Athens, then close to defeat in its war with Sparta. The blind Oedipus is given hospitality by Theseus, legendary King of Colonos, which happens to be the birthplace of Sophocles as well as a suburb of Athens, which Theseus will later establish as a city-­ state. Theseus is thus an alternative to Cadmus, who seeks to perpetuate the rule of his family over the city he founds. Theseus, by contrast, protects Oedipus from the schemes of both Creon, who has succeeded Oedipus as ruler of Thebes, and who seeks to kidnap Antigone, and of Polynices, the son of Oedipus, who seeks to kidnap his father as he plots against the city. At the end of the play, Oedipus, recognizing that his time has come, thanks Theseus for his hospitality by making him a strange offer: I will explain, son of Aegeus, what things are laid up for your city, invulnerable to passing time! I myself, with no guide to lay a hand on me, shall now show you the place where I must die. Do not ever reveal to any mortal man where it is hidden, nor in what region it lies: for its perpetual nearness renders to you a protection stronger than many shields or spears brought in from outside! But, for mysteries which speech may not profane, thou shalt mark them for thyself, when thou comest to that place alone: since neither to any of this people can I utter them, nor to mine own children, 206  Global Inequality

dear though they are. No, guard them thou alone; and when thou art coming to the end of life, disclose to him who is foremost alone [tω προφερτατω μονο]; let him teach his successor; and so thenceforth.24

The British classical scholar W. B. Jebb notes that the Greek word chosen by Sophocles to designate the person to whom Theseus should entrust the secret of Oedipus’s burial place—­tω προφερτατω—­is vague enough to encompass both the heir in a hereditary system, as well as the preeminent successor in a nonhereditary transmission of power. But the very ambiguity of the Greek term suggests that consanguinity cannot be considered the only or best way to preserve sovereignty. Oedipus’s own experience with his sons, and the fact that he bars his remaining daughters from ever visiting his grave or even knowing where it is—­all of this indicates that bloodline and birthright cannot be the basis of the survival of the polis. His grave will be on the outskirts of the town, its location unknown to all except its rulers, whose rule will depend on their ability to guard the place secret, while transmitting it from generation to generation. The place of death remains thus out of reach for the family of the departed as for the citizens of the city: as “perpetually near” and yet as far as death is for singular living beings. The political relevance of this secret or mystery seems thus to derive from the acknowledgment of a shared mortality that it both demonstrates and qualifies: for acknowledgment here is not knowledge, any more than proximity means accessibility. Oedipus’s resting place is on the outskirts of Colonus, just as Colonus is on the outskirts of Athens. The futility of seeking to perpetuate the polity through military means—­as in the Peloponnesian Wars—­is here emphasized through Oedipus’s assurance that the cultivation of the place of his death is both near and unattainable: as inevitable and as unappropriable as death itself for mortal living beings. What his gift to Theseus, who has welcomed him precisely as an unknown stranger, and who himself has known exile and hospitality, suggests, is that the polity that acknowledges foreignness as its very condition of existence will survive the test of time better than the one that seeks to subdue aliens through force. Thus, although this may seem to have nothing directly to do with a purely economic inequality, Oedipus’s example indicates that the acknowledgment of incommensurability may be a condition for a polity to Global Inequality   207

survive what Machiavelli called the “vicissitudes of time,” with its unpredictable twists and turns. And that an effective economy of survival will have to involve a transmission of wealth and power that does not privilege the continuity of what has been over the singular possibilities of what has yet to be.

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9

Mind the Cap

A Singular Approach to Europe

CAPPING THE TRADE Jacques Derrida’s major text on Europe—­in English, The Other Heading—­ was written and originally published (in French) in October 1991, which is to say, at a critical juncture in the development both of Europe and of the world. The Berlin Wall had been torn down, and German reunification took place in the same month that the essay appeared. The following year the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. Shortly thereafter the breakup of Yugoslavia began, unleashing a series of bitter interethnic conflicts, first in Croatia and then in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which ultimately resulted in several new countries being added—­or rather, restored—­to Europe, if not (yet?) to the European Union. Thirteen years later, in January 2002, the Euro became the common currency of the European Union. I mention these dates to indicate just how different the situation of Europe was at the time Derrida was writing this text. It would therefore be unrealistic to expect from it anything directly applicable to what can justly be considered to be a Europe whose identity seems even more precarious than it did in 1990. Its postwar political attempt at institutional unification, the European Union, seems today more contested than ever before. In 2020, the European Union, and perhaps Europe generally, is marked by a resurgence of nationalist thinking, often with strong xenophobic tendencies, that is in part a reaction to the years of financial austerity imposed in the name of a united Europe by the dominant forces of the European Union. Its austerity policies, dubbed the “Stability and Growth Pact,” has fostered neither the one nor the other, but rather instability, stagnation, and inequality. Resorting often to undemocratic policies to impose European unity, which ignored popular referenda in France, Denmark (2005), and Ireland (2008)—­a crisis of confidence has resulted that has been largely exploited by right-­wing parties, which are enjoying a resurgence in many 209

countries, most recently in Italy and France. Great Britain voted to leave the European Union. With the collapse of traditional socialist and social-­ democratic parties in France and Italy, and with a media-­inflated spectacle of refugees and migrants from Africa and the Middle East seeking asylum in Europe, the response of the European Union has been either hostile (in the case of the Visegrad group) or largely defensive, again leaving the field open for right-­wing scapegoating and the glorification of national identity in terms of homogeneity. And of course the pandemic of COVID-­19 in 2020 has hardly improved this situation. In this context, it is perhaps even more imperative today than it was in 1990 to ask just where Europe might be heading, or, to refer to the French title of Derrida’s essay, to inquire as to what sort of cap (goal, aim, vision) it might still have available to guide its policies. A timely way to begin, then, is by dwelling for a moment on this strange word cap, and its English translation, “heading.” Beautifully translated by Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas,1 who provide an illuminating introduction as well, the English title allows us to reflect on the linguistic difference between the two languages involved. Translation always involves “tradeoffs.” As l’autre cap moves into English it becomes something other than what it was in French: it acquires a more dynamic, open-­ended quality as the gerund of “to head”—­heading—­while recalling the etymological ties of the French word to the Latin caput, head or leader. On the other hand—­and there are always at least two—­what does not make it into the English translation of the title is precisely its French reference both to “cape,” as a navigational and geographic term, and to “capital,” in its economic and geopolitical senses. It can be argued that the problem of Europe, or at least of the European union, is that it set its “cap”—­its goal—­too short, too closely allied to those of capital as it exists today, with its unconditional advocacy of “free markets” (customs union) and of a “strong” currency, at the cost of sacrificing social welfare and protection. The French word is also suggestive topographically. A cap—­“cape” in English—­stands out from the mainland, but without detaching itself from it. It therefore can serve as a stable orientation point, and in an extended usage, has come in French to signify any goal, purpose, or target. But it can do this only insofar as it both belongs to the mainland and yet begins to take leave of it, marking its outermost limit. Thus in French one can mettre le cap (set sail for, direct oneself toward, a goal) as well as tenir le cap (keep a 210   Mind the Cap

steady keel in the face of storms and obstacles). If, however, the European Union, for instance, can be said to have kept a steady cap, it is precisely this insistence that has produced increasing turmoil and discontent. Derrida, for his part, chooses as his cap—­and as his point of departure—­an essay of Paul Valéry, “The Crisis of the Spirit,” (1919), written just after the end of World War I, which begins by retracing a history of “capitals”—­Athens, Jerusalem, Rome—­in order then to link what he takes to be the distinctively European “spirit” to a certain maximization: not just of “needs, labor capital and production” but also of “ambition and power, ” and culminating in “the maximum transformation of external Nature, the maximum of relations and exchanges.”2 Valéry’s emphasis on the process of “maximization” in the constitution of the European “spirit” places Europe at the summit and also at the forefront of a movement presented as leading the rest of the world. Years later, in a text dating from 1988, this Eurocentric bias will resonate in a text on “European Cultural Construction,” issued by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which defines the role of France in this process as that of an “avant-­garde” (53/53). Derrida argues that Europe has always understood itself as both the forerunner (in science, technology, power) and as the keeper or guardian of a tradition that it takes ultimately to have universal implications. But there remains a tension between these two aspects of Europe as cap. On the one hand, it seeks to conserve and preserve, and on the other, to “advance”—­toward the cap that gives its movement direction and therefore meaning—­at least a certain sort of meaning. Europe is always, Derrida writes, hurrying ahead of itself, albeit often in the hopes of self-­aggrandizement. A decade before the institution of the Euro—­a monetary union undertaken without the political coordination necessary for its success—­this tendency toward a certain precipitation was thus discerned and emphasized by Derrida. The tendency itself has much to do with the question of “debt,” insofar as the latter involves a promise to repay one’s creditors. Europe’s credibility problem may thus reach deeper and further back than its recent crises might suggest. The problem that emerges here has to do with the task of negotiating this tension between conserving the past and navigating the future. The past seems to be relatively determined, even if its significance depends on a future that is far less so. But even this opposition can be misleading, because simplistic. “The past” does not exist “as such” but only as a selection of Mind the Cap   211

innumerable events and processes, which means also to the exclusion of others. The past is never fully present or fully absent. Historical narrative and memories are suggestive, and their limits are never simply “natural” or immanent. By contrast, the indeterminacy of the future is also never absolute, but always related to the never fully determined past. The tension between the two plays itself out where they seem to converge in what Derrida, again following Valéry, thematizes as the problem of “today.” The very word, both in English and in French, indicates that the significance of “today” is far less simple and straightforward than is generally assumed. In Being and Time, for instance, Heidegger precedes his deconstruction of traditional ontology via an analysis of the “everyday”—­in German: Alltäglichkeit (§27). The prefix All-­, in German as in English, imposes a certain homogeneity on the “everyday”: the “every” of “everyday” is thus understood as the instantiation of a generality, an “average” that essentially seeks to stay the same over time. It does not emphasize the heterogeneous, differential singularity of the day as “each and every” day, but rather its commonality, one day being like the next. This is the time of routine, of calculation, of predictability, and, ostensibly, of pure (if “inauthentic”) presence. But the strange composition of the English and French words, “to-­day” and au-­jourd’hui, suggests a less stable temporality. The day is not simply the unit of a continuum, simply present at hand, but rather removed. Only a certain removal, a distance, could explain the necessity of the “to-­,” of the “au-­,” which originally meant “at” or “on this day.” But if the day itself must be named with this qualification, it can only be because the day is not simply present: in its very singularity it eludes our grasp and must be, as it were, stabilized by what otherwise would seem a redundant “on” or “at.” “On” or “at” suggests a time frame that is elusive in its extendedness. The day is not simply one among equals, “all-­days,” to literalize the German Alltag. It is a differential entity that defines itself through its difference as well as its similitude to other days. As a self-­contained period, each day can be interpreted as different from all other days. And perhaps even different from itself. To anticipate a major thrust of Derrida’s argument, “today” is one that can no longer serve simply as a pregiven period or point of orientation. It is not simply “another cap(e)” but something other than a cap(e). Its attachment to a stable “mainland” is uncertain. As in the novel of Pascale Quignard, “All the mornings in the world . . . never return.”3 212   Mind the Cap

And this affects not just the past, or the present, but also the future, which therefore is always in coming, but never fully arrived. We will return to this question of the day and the “to-­day.” As a result, existence in general, and that of “Europe” in particular, involves the need to navigate, the need to identify “cap(e)s” that give direction to its movement, but do not allow an ultimate arrival. Derrida sees this situation as one of “paradox,” or even more, of “aporia”—­of a tension or contradiction or blockage without any simple “way out” or “through.” At the same time, this “blockage” also opens up other ways of moving—­ although not simply “moving forward” (to invoke a current buzzword). His discussion, then, is organized around the different ways in which Europe—­according to a prescient thinker like Valéry—­has sought to negotiate this aporia and its alternative paths. But Valéry’s essay is also informed by the classical attempt that seeks to resolve the aporia: Europe, according to this paradigm, although itself a determinate area, involving a distinctive “spirit,” nevertheless represents the highest form of what is universally human. Its movement seeks to fulfill a potential that was there from the beginning. In a certain sense—­ which is not explicit in Derrida’s essay—­it could therefore be described as the effort to recover and redeem its debt: its debt to humanity and to itself. Continuity between the two is thereby presupposed. In different ways, Derrida also sees this model at work in Husserl and in Heidegger, as well as in Valéry. This circular or spiral movement marks one tendency in European self-­perception to define itself in terms of a forward movement of self-­ development and self-­realization, one that in turn is informed by a notion of self-­identity that sees Europe as the “exemplary” realization of universal mankind, reason, or spirit. European “spirit” would thus be understood as a movement of appropriation of the other by the same. Colonialism and imperialism are just two of the less favorable names given to this movement. It is a movement that thus understands its goal—­its cap—­as an archeo-­teleological projection of the exemplarily human and spiritual self-­identity of Europe. Although necessarily finite in its distinction from other geo­political entities and continents (Africa, Asia) the case of “America,” however, is as we shall see far more complex and complicates this demarcation—­in its spiritual “exemplarity” Europe remains essentially infinite in its trajectory. Mind the Cap   213

It is in this context that the two major lexical connotations of the French word cap are brought into play. To anticipate: they also can provide a bridge—­although not a “key”—­to a productive rethinking of Europe today. For as we shall soon see, the ambiguous and ambivalent temporality of the “today” will prove to be decisive in Derrida’s discussion. But to return first to cap: the two words that Derrida associates with the word—­ and which are also linked to it etymologically—­turn out in English to be condensed in a single word: capital. French, however, distinguishes between la capitale and le capital—­capital in the sense of the city or center of a political entity, and capital in the sense of the profit-­producing circulation of money and commodities. Both of these words, however complex their semantic nuances are, converge in the traditional self-­representation of Europe as the exemplary embodiment of universal humanity and reason—­or, in Valéry’s words, of “spirit.” Walter Benjamin, also an appreciative and close reader of Valéry, was certainly aware of the word’s significant ambiguity when he entitled one of his major later essays and projects “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century.” To be the capital of a century, to be sure, is quite different from being the capital of a state or region, since this geopolitical significance generally is considered to be what it is independent of its temporal situation. The notion of the capital as spatial center and “head” has long been associated with a certain Eurocentrism: Europe as capital of the civilized world. Needless to say, this is an aspect of traditional European self-­ consciousness that Derrida both criticizes and seeks to deconstruct. But he also argues that a “European cultural identity cannot be dispersed . . . into a myriad of provinces” (41/39). In other words, it needs to preserve a certain consistency while avoiding “control and uniformity” imposed by a central authority. Only through sustaining an “experience” that involves the “test of the aporia” between these divergent and equally necessary tendencies can politics in general, and European politics in particular, survive (43/41). The second word (in French: in English they are the “same” word), capital, names the governing principle of the European and now world economy, and through it, of the social and cultural relations that depend on it. (Let me note in passing that the much maligned Marxian notions of economic “base” and political, cultural, and institutional “superstructure,” for all of the determinist dogmatism that they have no doubt fostered, 214   Mind the Cap

nevertheless still point toward a reality that if anything deserves renewed attention today, at a time when the determining influence of economics upon politics in reality is stronger than ever; but precisely as a result of this influence is all the more scrupulously ignored in official discourses and by most of the mainstream media, which themselves are largely controlled by powerful financial interests.) Now it might be protested that merely to play verbal games with words such as cap and capital in their different meanings is hardly sufficient to identify, much less to analyze, the problems facing Europe today. But, one can ask in reply, is it possible to discuss those problems independently of considering critically the categories that inform the identity and values to which the policies practiced—­with respect to immigration, diversity, social justice, republicanism, and so on—­regularly appeal? The word cap in French marks the convergence of the traditional claim to be both at the center and at the forefront—­the avant-­garde—­of historical development. Nothing could be more problematic than such claims, and the word cap, with its links to capital, in both senses, and to “cape” as that which determines one’s course, allows connections to be examined that otherwise would either be ignored or considered in isolation. What distinguishes Derrida’s “approach” to these questions is its openness to the possibility that the “antinomies” of European history and existence must be retraced to their founding values in order to be critically understood and possibly transformed. From the very beginning of his writings, Derrida’s “deconstruction” of the Western (and largely European) “metaphysical” tradition revolved around the unraveling of three interrelated concepts. Those concepts are first, “presence”; second, “self ” (first in the form of the Greek word autos, and then later, perhaps under the influence of Levinas, also associated with the Latin word, ipse); and finally, propre: I give the French word here because again it is difficult to find an adequate English translation that would include the semantic resources that make this word so significant in the writings of Derrida. The French word conjoins what is “proper,” “fitting,” what “belongs” to something intrinsically, to the notion of “property.” The metaphysical, logo-­phono-­centric system of thought that Derrida initially sought to deconstruct was, he argued, informed by a belief in the priority of the self over the other, of the same over the different, of the proper Mind the Cap   215

(propre) over the improper. From the very start, then, Derrida’s thinking involved the effort to deconstruct both the “proper” and “property” as foundational categories of Western thought. In this respect, his thinking aimed at a deconstruction of what, in an early essay on Bataille, he called “the limited (or restricted) economy.” At that time, Derrida defended Bataille’s notion of sovereignty as a “senseless, useless loss,” against the more familiar Hegelian interpretations of the concept in terms of mastery or domination. It would be a great mistake to interpret these propositions as “reactionary.” The consumption of excess energy by a particular class is not the destructive consumption of meaning; it is the significant reappropriation of a surplus value within the space of the limited economy. Sovereignty is from this point of view absolutely revolutionary. But this applies as well to a revolution that would reorganize only the world of work and would redistribute value within the space of meaning. The necessity of this movement . . . is rigorous but is that of a phase in the strategy of the general economy.4 (my emphasis)

In other words, the expropriation of one class by another remains “within the space of meaning,” which is also “the space of the limited economy.” Reappropriation—­the movement of reclaiming a surplus-­value for a property owner (and be it the previously dispossessed class, the proletariat, or its representatives, the party or the state) still is situated “within the space of the limited economy”—­which is to say, within the nomos of a household (oikos) considered as self-­constituted prior to its relation to anything else. And yet what is characteristic of the thinking of Derrida—­political and otherwise—­is its acknowledgment of a certain necessity of that which also has to be transcended or displaced. Here the redistribution of wealth in a more equal fashion, as a process of expropriation that inevitably brings with it reappropriation (by another class), is recognized to be a necessary “phase in the strategy of the General Economy”—­necessary but not sufficient to install that economy he designates as “general.” A similar gesture obtains regarding the cap invoked by Derrida in his discussion of Europe: a cap(e) is necessary, but not sufficient. Thus, what the destiny of Europe calls for is not just the exchanging of one goal for

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another, not “another cap” (l’autre cap), but rather “something other than the cape” (l’autre du cap) (21/15). What that alternative could look like, and how it might bear on the current crisis—­financial and other—­that Europe is traversing, is what I will now try to address. The general formula of Derrida’s alternative is stated straightforwardly, albeit negatively: What is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself. Not to not have an identity, but not to be able to identify itself, to say “me” or “us,” to not be able to take the form of a subject except in the non-­ identity to itself, or if you prefer, in the difference with itself [la difference avec soi]. (16/9)

If any cultural identity—­and this is not specific to Europe—­is constituted not just through its relation to what it is not, to others, but through its inability to identify itself, then the decisive challenge is to determine as precisely as possible, both in general and in the particular case of Europe, what Derrida refers to as “non-­identity to itself or . . . the difference with itself.” This difference both “gathers and divides” the “hearth” or focal point—­le foyer—­of what in French Derrida calls the chez-­soi and what in English we might call “home.” This is the structural inscription of the uncanny, the Unheimliche, in the very constitution of any “home.” It is only constituted by “opening itself ” to a “separation” (un écart)—­to a divergence or distance that is neither simply external to it nor simply internal in the sense of being fully assimilated, and which hence makes the home—­ chez soi—­dependent upon the conjunction “with” (avec soi)—­which joins without merging, retaining a certain separation as the condition of the dis-­juncture. In English there is an expression that designates this movement precisely: “parting with.” To part with generally is understood as simply separating oneself from something or someone. But the use of the conjunction “with” undercuts this ostensible simplicity, since it generally designates a certain relationship, even a certain concomitance. In this sense, to “part with” could mean the establishing of a relationship in and through a certain separation. To be sure, this is not what most users of English would

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think of in employing this expression, but that is also precisely Derrida’s point here: the inability to identify oneself, one’s identity (that is, to know what it is that constitutes “us”) designates a relationship that is all the more significant for eluding any straightforward expression or self-­ consciousness. It is a kind of structural blind spot constitutive of what is called “self-­identity.” Self-­identity thus eludes self-­consciousness: at most it can be acknowledged but never made a transparent object of knowledge. How does one “acknowledge” something that cannot simply be known? Derrida begins his essay by describing this situation, which seemed then—­and still seems—­particularly applicable to what is called “Europe”: Something unique is afoot in Europe, in what is still called Europe even if we no longer know very well what or who goes by this name. . . . What announces itself in this way seems to be without precedent. An anguished experience of imminence, crossed by two contradictory certainties. (12/5)

The “two contradictory certainties” relate first to “the very old subject of cultural identity in general” and that of Europe in particular, which seems “an old exhausted theme.” And second, the suspicion that this tired name might “mask something that does not yet have a face[.]” We see already that the “two contradictory certainties” are hardly symmetrical or even equally “certain.” Relatively “certain” is the sense that the old question of Europe, its “spiritual” or “cultural” identity, is worn out. Less certain, but no less insistent, is the suspicion that this worn-­out name could be the sign of something radically new that is coming. How is this experienced or articulated? Through appeal to something that is relatively rare in the work of Derrida, at least explicitly: through the announcement not of a certitude, much less of a cognition, but of a “feeling”: To begin with, I will confide in you a feeling . . . the somewhat weary feeling of an old European. (13/6)

But in the page immediately preceding this confidence made to his readers (and at the time to his listeners), Derrida has already described

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the way he (and presumably “we”) respond to this facelessness of the future—­in general, and in particular of Europe: We ask ourselves in hope, in fear and trembling, what this face is going to resemble. Will it still resemble? Will it resemble the face of some persona whom we believe we know: Europe? . . . Hope, fear, and trembling are commensurate with the signs that are coming to us from everywhere in Europe, where, precisely in the name of identity, be it cultural or not, the worst violences . . . are being unleashed, mixed up, mixed up with each other, but also, and there is nothing fortuitous in this, mixed in with the breath, with the respiration, with the very “spirit” of the promise. (13/6)

“The worst violence”—­decades after Derrida wrote this, that violence continues and is arguably on the increase. In Greece, a neo-­Nazi party associated with deadly attacks on foreigners and immigrants received 7 percent of the vote and enters parliament before, years later, in October 2020, being declared a “criminal” organization. In the southern part of France, a couple that started shooting at two young Frenchmen of North African origin is condemned to prison but receives widespread support and encouragement via the internet. In Hungary, overtly fascist and anti-­Semitic writers are included in the school curriculum. The list could be extended at will. Anti-­immigrant, xenophobic, and anti-­Semitic activities (this time, however, more directed at Islamic Semites than at Jews, who are nevertheless also included) are clearly on the increase all over what is called “Europe” (and surely not only there). The “experience” of European “aporias” becomes increasingly a “test”— an épreuve—­and the response of Derrida is, I believe, significant: it begins by acknowledging the importance of “feeling.” “Let me begin by confiding in you a feeling,” he writes, after already having described the response to the equivocal, enigmatic signs of change as the response of feelings: “hope, fear, and trembling.” A feeling is one way of taking cognizance of something other that eludes—­perhaps necessarily—­full cognition. Of an aporia, for instance, or a paradox. Something that cannot be simply cognized, although it is by no means simply the other of cognition. Rather it is an excess or deficiency of cognition, but in either case—­and they are ultimately

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the same—­the result of an attempt, necessarily unsuccessful, to recognize and to understand. “Feeling” is not therefore something internal and private, something simply passive or active, but rather something that comes from elsewhere and is on its way somewhere else, something that traverses “us” and at the same time “moves” and “stirs” us, altering us in its passing: trembling with hope and with fear. All of this converges in Derrida’s use of the word cap: as goal, target, point of orientation, and yet as one that is always already taking leave of itself. Already the mark of a certain extremity, both what the word designates as well as what the word itself gestures toward, beyond its immediate situation and location, beyond the mainland and toward somewhere else. One must always, however, attempt to identify the direction of that gesture, even if its distinctive quality turns out to be that it cannot be definitively located, since it is never just “another” cap(e) but something entirely “other” than a cap(e). I have just used the word “one” in the preceding sentence. Derrida suggests that the move from the “I” to the “we”—­or the “one”—­is “another way of moving surreptitiously from feeling [sentiment] to axiom” (14/7). But the very fact that he begins—­and ends—­with declarations of feeling made in the first person suggests that the move to a more objective, collective, “axiomatic” “we” does not simply efface the singular experience of feeling, or the finitude of the I, but rather relocates them. To take seriously feelings associated with life in the singular remains certainly one of the decisive challenges of any politics, and in particular of any European politics. A politics that does not simply manipulate “feelings” to the end of ever greater exploitation but sees in them a necessary and significant response to what cannot be entirely calculated and comprehended seems, then, one of the furthest-­reaching implications of Derrida’s “style” of writing and thinking, one in which what could be called a not-­ entirely-­subjective “I” is never banned from the scene of writing or reading. It is not-­entirely-­subjective insofar as this “I” is no more unified than the “Europe” it is addressing. It confesses to a “somewhat weary feeling of the Old European” on the one hand, but on the other as one who is “not quite European by birth” and who therefore also tries to keep “a little of the indifferent and impassive youth of the other shore.” This experience is then assumed or attributed to a certain kind of European: “We are younger than ever, we Europeans, since a certain Europe does not yet exist. Has it ever?” (14/7). 220   Mind the Cap

The interrogative mode is a necessary form of articulation for an experience based on contradictory feelings that respond to a complex, if not paradoxical, situation. But the “experience” of the “test of the aporia” inscribed in and around the word cap is of a very distinct mode of this question: What if it were just that, Europe: the opening to a history for which the changing of direction, the relation to another goal [cap], or to something other than a goal, is felt [est ressenti] as always possible?” (22/17)

If “all history, the history of a culture doubtless supposes an identifiable goal (cap)” it need not be taken as “given, identifiable in advance and once and for all” (22–­23/17–­18). A culture, a history, can try to hold itself open to what it cannot calculate. To be sure, such a holding-­open can never be construed in terms of a simple alternative, an either–­or. It entails not the elimination of calculation or of intentionality, but a “responsibility” that is responsive—­an English word without French equivalent that nevertheless perhaps captures much of what Derrida means by “responsibility,” while distancing some of the traditional moral connotations of the word.5 Like “feeling,” “responsibility” involves, above all, the capacity to be responsive—­not just to react mechanically, but to “pledge” oneself in return. A response that is truly responsive is, like a promise, always oriented as much to the future as it is to the past. But there is another dimension of “feeling” that should be noted: only a body can feel. This why the feelings described by Derrida contain the Kierkegaardian allusion—­which will be taken up by the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, whose work in relation to the Christian mysterium tremendum Derrida discusses in The Gift of Death.6 Only a body can tremble, although it need not be a human or even a living body: a building can tremble, as can the earth itself, but only insofar as they are bodies. In this sense, trembling becomes exemplary of feeling, which otherwise is all too easy to relegate to “mental,” “spiritual,” or merely subjective experience. This is also part of the fascination and relevance of the “cap(e)”: it too is a body of land, even if it is one that extrudes from the mainland and Mind the Cap   221

therefore can be seen as the result of a division or separation of the body from itself, from terra firma.7 It is only in view of this irreducible “trembling”—­irreducible insofar as it responds to the uncertainty of the future—­that the need of every “culture” for some kind of “cap(e)” becomes intelligible. This also explains why one of the main usages of the word in French cited by Derrida, which he insists cannot and should not be entirely abandoned, signifies the idea of “holding the course” (in French: garder le cap), of keeping a strong sense of tradition, just as a “headland” always implies an indissoluble relation to a mainland. What distinguishes certain figurative uses of the word from its spatial–­geographical meaning, however, is precisely the way time enters the picture here to dislocate its ostensible stability. The “other of the cape” would thus not be just another cape, another promontory, another goal, but something that would open the possibility of a movement that would not be goal-­directed. Here the word “trembling” is significant: it suggests not just a feeling or a motion but a commotion—­one which, however, qua e-­motion, can no longer be simply understood as “loco-­motion,” that is, as a change of (fixed) place, a movement between fixed poles. Trembling can be understood as a response to some overwhelming force, one which results in an irreconcilable tension between “gathering” and “dispersion.” One version of this would be what the German poet Hölderlin, in his theory of tragedy, called a “caesura”: a “counter-­rhythmic interruption.”8 If rhythm can be defined as the recurrence of identifiable patterns, the “counter-­rhythmic” caesura interrupts the regularity of such recurrence without simply abolishing it. As such, it both is part of the rhythm and yet contrary to it—­not just to a particular rhythm, but to the very notion of rhythm qua regularity. A counter-­rhythm therefore cannot simply be heard but must be felt (ressenti). It arrests movement, suspends knowing, and introduces what the filmmaker David Lynch once called feel-­think.9 Strange, perhaps, to bring up such notions in the context of a discussion of Europe. And yet, is not one of the problems of the current crisis (which involves far more than just a crisis of currency, of the Euro) precisely the widespread tendency to ignore, or if not, then to instrumentalize—­but not to analyze and interpret—­the feelings aroused today by what is called “Europe.” Those feelings seem to be increasing in intensity, and this is per-

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haps the present-­day equivalent of that “imminence” that Derrida cited at the very beginning of his essay back in 1991: If this meeting has any chance of escaping repetition, it would only be insofar as some imminence, chance or peril at once, exerted pressure on us. (11/5)

Almost three decades ago, Derrida sensed—­and “sensing” is another English word for a responsive feeling-­thinking—­that this “imminence” could well signal the arrival of something “monstrous,” which is why he spoke and wrote of an “anxious experience of imminence.” The inability to link feelings with thinking in public and political discourse in a serious, responsible, and above all responsive manner, continues to promote the possibility that those feelings will once again, as so often in the past, be channeled into a destructive, enemy-­driven politics of fear that brings short-­term relief by justifying acts of aggression in the name of “homeland security.” Of course, this is a distinctively U.S. version of a pattern that is also at work elsewhere, including Europe, albeit in somewhat different ways. We will return to this question in the context of the relationship of Europe to the United States, an indispensable aspect of any discussion of Europe “today.” This tendency to treat or mistreat “feeling” by isolating it from knowing and thinking is of course deeply rooted in Western philosophy, which has long mistrusted the finite singularity of feeling for being tied to the body, and which therefore sought to subordinate it to the putative universality of reason, spirit, or other systems of knowledge.10 “Feelings” are relegated to the realm of subjective psychology, treated as reactions rather than as responses, as signs rather than as symptoms, as expressions rather than as appeals, and most often today made the object of calculation and manipulation by cognitive science and pharmacology. When they are interpreted, especially in a “political” context, it is almost always in order to confine them to the narrow domain of private, “personal” existence.11 Even Freud, who therefore is increasingly marginalized today by professional psychology and neuroscience, sought to domesticate “feeling”—­“affects”—­by treating them as epiphenomena of the unconscious.12 But what if “feelings,” far from designating something internal and private, were the markers of an

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encounter with the alterity of a world that cannot be reduced to objects of cognition or of calculation? As already indicated, the motif of “feeling” appears in “The Other Heading” in an extremely discreet but suggestive manner. It marks the rhetoric and style in which the text itself is presented—­through “feelings” of a “first-­person singular,” and an “I.” In remarking explicitly the “surreptitious” shift from “feeling to axiom”—­and thereby negating its “surreptitiousness”—­Derrida demonstrates that and how “feeling” cannot simply be absorbed into “axioms,” unless the latter are understood as in some sense the outgrowth of the former. To develop this suggestion, he turns to an essay by Valéry in order to discuss a similar rhetorical move, from the singular to the universal, this time involving not Europe in general, but what Valéry describes as his “personal impression of France”: Our particularity (and indeed sometimes our ridicule, but often our most beautiful pretention) is to believe, to feel ourselves universal—­by that I mean, men of the universe [hommes d’univers] . . . Note the paradox: to have as one’s specialty the sense of the universal. (73/74)

Derrida responds to this “personal impression” of Valéry’s by suggesting that its scope is far more than just personal, and that the “paradox” described is not at all limited to the French, “nor even doubtless to Europeans.” In short, to speak of Europe means to remember not just that it is composed of a plurality of nations, cultures, and languages, but also that the forces acting upon these different components are not simply endogenic and cannot be limited to Europe alone. Methodologically, this gives renewed urgency to the notion of “the other cap(e)” being not just “another cape” but rather entailing “the other of the cap(e)” as such—­that is, not simply consisting of a pluri-­national union but of an interaction that might go beyond the very idea of the nation and of national culture and identity, since these already depend, in their history and their development, on their interaction with “external” forces. This aspect of “Europe” has clearly become unavoidable today, where the “crisis” affecting Europe via its Euro is clearly provoked by reactions to what is euphemistically still called “the market” and which is anything but simply European in origin and structure. But for the moment, let me continue to follow Derrida’s response to 224   Mind the Cap

Valéry’s “personal impression.” Valéry writes that “our particularity . . . is to believe, to feel ourselves [nous sentir] universal,” and Derrida responds by insisting that “the paradox is even more paradoxical than Valéry could or wanted to think” (73/74–­75). For it is not just a question of the paradox of a particular people, here the French, feeling that their particularity consists in somehow being universal, but rather in “believing” or “feeling” themselves to be so. What does it mean to “believe” or to “feel” oneself to be “universal”? Is not “believing” and “feeling” the most subjective and private of experiences? But what if this so-­called subjectivity and privacy—­or perhaps better, the belief or feeling of a certain singularity—­was precisely what is involved in all cultural experience, and hence could be considered to mediate between the particular and the general? What if only certain “feelings” or “impressions” link the self to the other, the singular to the universal, France to Europe and Europe to the World—­without fusing them into a Union or a Unity that would dissolve their differences?13 If Derrida insists on the importance of “the impression” or the “feeling,” it is, therefore, not to reaffirm its purely “subjective” nature but to underscore the necessity of reconsidering the “paradoxical” or even “aporetic” relation between singularity and universality—­a reconsideration that would be at once philosophically and politically informed, and yet not limited to either discourse. Derrida’s essayistic style, combined with the focus upon a limited body of texts by a writer known more as a poet and critic than as a philosopher, indicates one practical consequence: namely that a discourse of epistemic universality cannot be taken for granted or allowed to impose its constraints upon this inquiry. On the other hand, and concomitantly, the sense of self implied by “feeling” and “impression” cannot be understood in terms of a purely individual encounter with a conventionally ordered world. Knowledge is neither dissolved into skepticism nor raised clearly above its critique of objective universality. The experience of impression, feeling, and belief entails a dislocation of knowledge rather than its simple reduction to mere contingency and habit.14 What seems to be at work here is a movement by which knowledge is displaced by acknowledgement: acknowledgement that the goal, object, and target—­the cap—­is in the process of “opening itself without being able any longer to collect itself [se rassembler]” (74/75). This “feeling” or “impression” therefore shifts its focus or view from a pregiven past to a future coming about. But just how this shift takes place may well depend on the Mind the Cap   225

way it responds to the “feelings” that played an important part at the very origin of the postwar European Union. As Michael Loriaux puts it, “The chronic anxieties arising from Greater Rhineland geopolitics” were decisive factors in the founding of the European Union and continue to be so, especially after the reunification of postwar Germany.15 But a union that is based on escaping or attenuating such “chronic anxieties” will not result in the kind of strategies and perspectives that Derrida tries to outline in his essay: it may produce a perpetual “changing of cap(e)” or direction, but not an alternative movement that would be informed by something “other than a cap(e).” Here allow me to briefly reflect upon another question of language—­ since the question of language, translation, and the idiom are at the heart of Derrida’s approach to Europe, as well as those of thinkers who have been inspired by him, such as Marc Crépon16 and Rodolphe Gasché.17 I have chosen to keep the French word cap by using its English cognate, “cap(e),” even if this is not a particularly idiomatic translation. One reason for doing so is to link Derrida’s choice of terms to an idiom used frequently in contemporary English-­language political and economic discourse. I am thinking here of the so-­called cap and trade system. To put a cap or simply cap the amount of gases emitted into the atmosphere is to set a limit. On the other hand, that limit also becomes the basis on which a new commodity is created, namely “allowances” determined by the quantity of harmful emissions inferior to the “cap” assigned to a particular enterprise. This system of capping emissions is thus commoditized, becomes measurable and calculable in terms of price and value, and thereby integrated into the system of capital production. It becomes “another cap(e),” as it were, since it still serves as the basis for the creation of commodity-­value; but it is certainly not “something other than a cap(e).” Europe’s system of “cap and trade” has sought to subordinate “trade” to the goal of reducing harmful emissions.18 But this system has long been criticized for producing huge profits with little environmental benefit.19 Without entering into this debate, it is sufficient here to point out that the “capping” function of the “cap(e)” can thus serve to reinforce the movement of capital, which produces an incessant but ultimately closed circulation oriented toward the goal of achieving a profitable return on “investment.” This “return” tends to define the entire process as self-­ contained, or at least self-­directed. 226   Mind the Cap

EUROPE, SOVEREIGNTY, DEBT Where, however, does such a circular conception of circulation leave the question of “debt” and its significance for Europe? Let me begin by quoting from a recent study of the history and theory of debt that in no way seems influenced by the work of Derrida and yet by no means is entirely incompatible with it: What we are speaking of here is a very particular type of calculating exchange. . . . The difference between owing someone a favor, and owing someone a debt, is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated. Calculation demands equivalence. And such equivalence . . . only seems to occur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else.20

This is taken from a book that became something of a bible for the Occupy Wall Street Movement: Debt, the First 5000 Years, by the cultural anthropologist David Graeber. As its title indicates, it seeks to retrace a monumental, multicultural history of the notion and practice of “debt” but always with an eye toward discerning alternatives to the dominant attitude and practice: that is, to the quasi-­theological conception of debt as an obligation—­moral as well as legal and financial—­that can and must be repaid, no matter what the cost. Coming on the heels of the “subprime mortgage crisis” of 2008, which almost brought the United States’ banking system to its knees, avoided through the “bailout” with public funds—­ and then following the sequel to the sovereign debt crisis, which this time concerned Europe directly, including Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, and Italy, Graeber’s book provides a useful complement to the arguments developed by Derrida regarding the ambivalence of the cap, as capital (city) and as financial capital. Graeber’s thesis, as indicated in the passage quoted above, is that “debt”—­as commonly understood and, above all, as commonly practiced—­is the result of a violent imposition that isolates elements in order to render them commensurable, subordinating them to what Marx (and classical political economy) called a “universal equivalent.” Whereas Graeber argues that “the real origins of money are to be found in crime and recompense, war and slavery, honor, debt and Mind the Cap   227

redemption”21—­that is, in social relations dominated by violence and power struggles—­this history is repressed or obscured in order to institute the self-­identity of a calculable equivalence as the universal and natural measure of human relations. Without being able here to address the suggestive arguments and analyses that Graeber develops in support of his central thesis—­a thesis, by the way, that owes far more to Nietzsche than the few pages Graeber dedicates to him acknowledge22—­and without denying any of the very considerable differences that separate his arguments from those of a deconstructive type (as indicated by the phrase “real origins,”) his main thesis provides a way of making legible the relation of the “debt crisis” to the arguments sketched out by Derrida. The fact that this crisis now appears not merely to concern “private” banks or other “commercial” moneylenders, but rather public institutions, including above all the nation-­state itself, reveals what many have long argued, namely that in the era of advanced financial capitalism political states depend on flows of capital that they do not control; instead they are controlled by financial organizations through processes that transcend geographically limited nation-­states. The crisis of the Euro thus reveals the crisis of national sovereignty with respect to transnational financial markets. Although this crisis began on the “periphery” of the European Union, with Greece, Portugal, and Ireland, it has now spread closer to its center, involving Spain and Italy as well. It has thereby not just revealed the frailty of the outer edge of Europe, but rather revived a historical division at its heart, between the north and the south,23 and to a certain extent between Protestant and Catholic countries. Via its single currency, the European Union—­and with it, a certain idea and practice of contemporary capitalism—­is being attacked by ostensibly anonymous, unlocalizable, unnamable forces, the international “credit markets,” and the nature of that attack is not all that ambiguous. Writing thirty years ago, more about cultural rather than economic changes and vulnerabilities—­but aren’t the two today more inextricable than ever before?—­Derrida pointed in a direction that is no less valid concerning European “sovereign debt”: Through the established and traditionally dominant power of certain idioms, of certain cultural industries, through the extraordinary growth of new media, newspapers, and publishing, through the university, through techno-­scientific powers, through new “capillarities,” 228   Mind the Cap

competitions are already at work. They operate henceforth according to new modes, in a situation that is rapidly changing and in which the centralizing drives do not always work through States (for it can even happen, one can cautiously hope, that in certain cases venerable state structures can help us to struggle against private and transnational empires). (39–­40/37)

It is precisely these “venerable state structures” that in large parts of Europe are under siege, primarily by “private and transnational empires” that constitute the main players in the international “credit markets.” Why? Empirically speaking, the answer seems simple: they are under siege because they cannot pay their debts. Or at least, they are judged to be incapable of doing so. And so, in a self-­fulfilling process, interests rates rise and nations become in fact unable to sustain the burden not so much of the money borrowed, as of the interest they are required to pay on it. Nations, like private companies and individuals, have to borrow against their future, and precisely that future is being held hostage by the “private, transnational empires,” or rather institutions—­for they are not all simply “empires.” In order to assure their creditworthiness, nations are asked to reduce their spending (not just for military items, but for health, education, social services), which in turn lowers consumption and drives their already fragile economies deeper into recession. All of this is already quite familiar from the case of Greece, as well as certain other countries. But the bottom line, if there is one, remains so far relatively simple and straightforward: European governments must continue this downward spiral of so-­called austerity if they and the countries they rule expect to have access to foreign credit markets. In the United States, spending on social services and infrastructure, already much lower than in Europe, is often called “entitlements.” Who is entitled to what? When large banks contract huge debts that they cannot pay off, for instance, through loans that they knew in advance could never be repaid, they are “bailed out” by public spending. They are considered “too big to fail,” something quite different from the fate reserved for those individuals who can no longer meet their mortgage payments because of accumulated debt, a degrading employment situation, and the combination of poor health insurance and skyrocketing health costs. Despite well-­documented breaches of the law by banks in the lending leading up Mind the Cap   229

to the “subprime mortgage crisis,” not a single banker has yet been prosecuted. During the Obama administration, the United States Department of Justice abandoned plans to prosecute Goldman Sachs—­which has provided the government with many of its Secretaries of the Treasury and economic advisors for decades—­despite considerable evidence that the firm had deliberately been deceiving and exploiting its clients and manipulating their investments to the advantage of the firm.24 All of this, to be sure, has an extremely long and complex history, in which the growth of finance capital and the decline of manufacturing capital in both the United States and Europe and the concomitant transfer of wealth to an ever-­smaller speculative class played no doubt a decisive role, one we cannot go into further here.25 In his essay, Derrida goes into very little detail concerning the specifically financial implications and effects of that aspect of the cap that he identifies with capital, a fact no doubt in great part determined by the fact that his essay was originally a contribution to a conference dealing with “European Cultural Identity.” At the time he was writing, as already indicated, the specifically political aspects of the European situation seemed the most urgent: the transformation of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and consequently the approaching end of the Cold War period. In this context, Derrida recalls the experiences that intellectuals of his generation had of a Europe whose borders and culture seemed split and “frozen” (figé) by the Cold War until 1990 (62/62). With the end of the Cold War, those borders suddenly came into—­or back into—­flux, in part peacefully, but often accompanied by wars in the Balkans and a concomitant rise of anti-­Islamic sentiment in Europe. Although at the time he wrote his essay, the sense of imminent change was clear enough, the precise directions that change was going to take could only be surmised. What did resonate, however, was a question posed by Valéry in a series of “Notes on the Grandeur and Decadence of Europe.” In the particular note whose final question fascinated Derrida, Valéry laid out a sort of mind game, which I paraphrase: What if you had all the power without any constraint, thereby being placed in such an elevated position that you found yourself suddenly above all ordinary, egoistic concerns and cares? And Valéry concludes by asking: “Well, what are you going to do? What are you going to do TODAY?” (Que allez-­vous faire AUJOURD’HUI?) (77/11–­12).26 230   Mind the Cap

Ignoring the aspect that possibly fascinated Valéry himself—­the notion of absolute power—­Derrida picks up on the author’s insistence not just on “doing” but on “doing TODAY,” with “today” written in capitals. The response that the current “sovereign debt crisis” seeks to impose on “Europe” today is unmistakably clear: What you are going to do TODAY—­or very soon—­is to repay your debts in full, with interest. But Derrida’s interpretation of “TODAY” written in capital letters complicates the issue. Asking the question, Why should Valéry have bothered to capitalize the word “TODAY,” Derrida responds by calling our attention to the difficulty that results in thinking the “today” of and for a Europe that is trying to wrench itself free of “self-­identification as self-­repetition,” thereby rendering “precisely the unicity”—­not just the unity but also the uniqueness—­of the “today” difficult to think. For this “unicity” has to make room for “a certain event, a singular advent of Europe, here and now.” And he continues: Is there a “today” totally new of Europe, of a novelty that above all would not resemble what has been called, following another familiar and sinister program, a “New Europe”? (18/11–­12)

In short, the challenge is to see TO-­DAY—­each and every day—­as a stage on which the tension between the drive toward union and the need for distinctive uniqueness plays itself out. To leave room, as Derrida puts it, for the unpredictable “event” requires maintaining a certain openness to the future—­here and now—­as something other than what can be programmed and calculated.27 But if we follow Graeber on the moral and legal structure of financial debt, at least as practiced today, it enforces a logic of commensurability that is precisely aimed at eliminating such openness. Financial indebtedness seeks to calculate as precisely as possible a profitable return on investment. All other factors—­and indeed, even those contributing to social cohesion itself—­are subordinated to this economic logic, the logic of the “limited economy” of profit and loss, mastery and servitude. There is a certain paradox in the now familiar term “sovereign debt,” since what is involved in this debt is precisely the undermining of the sovereignty of nation-­states to borrow and thereby plan for their future. The crisis of “sovereign debt” demonstrates, first of all, that Europe is no longer a name for a collection of sovereign nations—­if it ever was. Those nations Mind the Cap   231

are exposed as profoundly, and perhaps structurally, to forces and institutions that no longer have the character simply of nation-­states. And this is true even if nation-­states such as UAE–­Abu Dhabi, Norway, China, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Qatar, and others are major creditors through their nationally owned “sovereign wealth funds.”28 This kind of dependence, qualifying any notion of an autarchic sovereignty, has of course long been true, and has been the cause of military conflicts for centuries. However, today, the introduction of high-­ frequency computerized “trading”—­for instance, Blackrock’s use of the artificial intelligence program “Aladdin” to dominate ETF’s (Exchange Traded Funds)29—­as well as the development of other means of communication and travel have “globalized” such interdependency at the same time as it also dematerialized it. Nation-­states and nation-­based supernational institutions—­such as the European Union—­remain tied to the limits of a Newtonian space as exemplified by the determination of states through contiguous territory. The new technologies of high-­frequency computerized trading permit manipulation of world markets in a way that was not possible before the introduction of such technologies. As a result, “markets” become increasingly an instrument for the manipulation of exchange-­value aimed at enriching individual traders rather than as a regulator of price following (pseudo-­“ laws” of) supply and demand. And through such manipulation, also a means of exercising pressure on political decision-­making. Without being able here to go into further details of what is surely an extremely complex question deserving extended discussion, what seems clear is that the result both of the development of the world economy and of the introduction of the new technologies of calculation, communication, and transport, all have strengthened the “sovereignty” not of nation-­ states but of practices of private appropriation and enrichment, which, however, impose themselves, as always, by presenting themselves as “natural,” “inevitable,” and “objectively” in the interest of the common good.

PARTING WITH DERRIDA: TOWARD NEW RESPONSIBILITIES At the end of his essay, Derrida lists a number of different “duties” or obligations—­devoirs—­that proceed from his discussion. It is a duty “to 232   Mind the Cap

respond to the appeal of European memory, recalling what is promised under the name of Europe, to re-­identify Europe,” which also means “to open it to what it is not and what it has never been and never will be.” Those duties also include that of criticizing a totalitarian dogmatism that would do away with democracy under the pretext of abolishing capital, but also of criticizing a religion of capital that installs its dogmatism under new guises that we have to learn to identify—­and this is the future itself, there will be none otherwise. (75–­76/77)

“Totalitarianism,” a term popularized by Hannah Arendt, focused on the abuse of power by nation-­states, in particular Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Traditional political institutions, even where they have emerged as counterpowers, have almost always tended, or been forced (depending on one’s perspective), to concentrate power and generally abuse it in order to maintain themselves. This challenge remains today and it must be addressed if there is to be a future anything like that suggested by Derrida, and by many others. But if anything has emerged clearly today, through the “current crisis,” it is that the traditional nation-­state institutions draw their power and raison d’être increasingly from the private, profit-­driven economic and financial interests that dominate the institutions of global finance. What seems clear is that the “law” governing the operation of such institutions is not the result of individual persons or even individual companies (as in such slogans as Goldman Sachs Rules the World),30 but rather of a process geared increasingly to the production of a maximum of privately appropriable profit in the shortest possible period. Totalitarianism today has assumed the form of the triumph of the limited over the general economy, and its consequences are a redistribution of wealth that accentuates disparities and destructive dependencies on a national and a global level. Derrida is precise in juxtaposing—­and not opposing—­what he called the “religion of capital” to “totalitarian dogma.” Both have a common source and a common end: the denial of singular finitude in the name of an enduring universal, whether the state, the class, or the (blessed) individual. Derrida insists at the end of his essay on the nonresolvability of the tensions he is describing, both in relation to Europe and more generally: Mind the Cap   233

between singularity and universality, between the preservation of tradition and the openness to the future, between the recurrence of the same and the advent of the other. To this conundrum Derrida refuses to offer a reassuring answer. His response, however, is to suggest that the tensions—­ what he calls, in a Kantian term, the “antinomies”—­had to be “endured,” not simply resolved. He was not an economist, nor am I. But what he proposes as an indispensable element of any effective response to the challenges facing Europe—­and not only it—­remains, I believe, at least as valid today as it was then, some thirty years ago. He offered it as a response to a remark of Valéry’s, once again, his cap. Valéry mourned the loss of a certain “capital,” albeit an “ideal capital”: I have witnessed the progressive disappearance of beings who were extremely precious for the regular formation of our ideal capital.

And Derrida continues: It is the disappearance of people who “knew how to read . . . to understand and even to listen,” who “knew how to see,” “to reread” . . . in a word, people capable of repetition and of memory, prepared to respond, to respond before, to respond for, and to respond to what they had once heard, seen, read, known. (69/70)

To “respond” in this sense is to repeat, but with a difference, and nothing perhaps is more exemplary of such transformative repetition than the ostensibly straightforward process of “reading”—­and writing. Both involve the acknowledgment of a debt that can never be fully redeemed, but that can, should, and will be passed on to others, who can then capitalize on it without necessarily producing a profit or loss.

EUROPE AND THE IRENIC COMPROMISE In conclusion let me offer some thoughts relating to what Derrida called—­ following Walter Benjamin and surely many others—­“the religion of capital.” In an early fragmentary essay, Benjamin argued that capitalism was not simply promoted by the rise of Protestantism, and in particular 234   Mind the Cap

Calvinism, as Max Weber had argued, but was itself the heir and continuation of certain religions, which had previously sought to allay “fears, cares and concerns.” I want to explore a few implications of that statement in order to suggest that the immense staying power of capitalism, its ability to maintain itself even while creating enormous misery and destruction, can best be understood in terms of the ability of religion to allay fears and anxieties that have not been addressed by more “secular” institutions. The convergence of religious with economic language, especially in the notion of “redemption”—­of debt, of sin, and of death—­is especially significant in this respect. The historic role of religion, and especially of Christianity, in sustaining and promoting the rise and survival of capitalism, can be particularly illuminating when investigating the relation of “Europe” to “the United States,” which has become the purveyor of an increasingly extreme form of “neoliberalism”—­one which Europe has until today never entirely accepted. One of the effects of the “sovereign debt crisis” has been to impose this “solution” ever more radically on European nations and on Europe as a whole. An example of this has been the effort of the investment firm Blackrock to bring about the privatization of previously state-­ owned and regulated retirement systems.31 The crisis of “sovereign debt” has thus been made possible both by technological changes in computer trading and communication generally, and by a tradition that is not just economic but also social, cultural, and perhaps most of all, theological. I want to argue that the heritage of self-­ affirmation and aggrandizement that both belongs to the European cap and yet also transcends it draws much of its power and endurance from a theological tradition that goes back at least to the Bible, which portrays the creation of the world as the result of a single and yet universal, exclusive deity, jealously defending its prerogatives (against the polytheism which it sought, successfully, to displace). In his essay on “Capitalism as Religion,” Benjamin argued that modern capitalism was the successor and continuation of Christianity precisely through its universalization—­today we would say “globalization”—­of “debt”: debt as indebtedness that must be redeemed, but that can never be paid back entirely (debt therefore also as “guilt”). Redemption, whether of sin or of debt or of both, thus involves the promise of a return to an original unity and identity as a return of the same. Mind the Cap   235

If the role of what can be called “economic theology” in the development of modern capitalism is far greater than often assumed, this also provides a perspective from which the current European crisis can be interpreted. For despite the fact that this crisis is dependent on the single currency lacking a correspondingly unified political structure governing it, its development cannot be interpreted without taking into consideration its relation to what has long been the motor of the postwar world economy, namely the United States. Since the 1980s, the motor of world capitalism, the United States economy, has been driven by two forces: one by increasing indebtedness of private consumers, the other by increasing militarization. In this latter respect particularly, the United States has increasingly diverged from its European antecedent. The economic role of military and military-­related expenses in the United States has consistently risen since the Second World War, whereas in Europe, especially since the end of the Cold War, it has tended to decline.32 A second significant difference between Europe—­at least insofar as it can be identified with the EU—­and the United States is the role of religion in public as well as private life. Whereas participation in traditional institutionalized religions—­particularly Christian denominations—­has been steadily declining all over the European Union over the past decades, in the United States an opposite tendency seems to prevail. Very few American politicians can afford not to attend church regularly; no American political speech of major significance can conclude without the invocation, “God bless America.” According to a recently updated report of the Pew Foundation, 50 percent of Americans believe that religion is “very important” in their lives, as compared to 13 percent in France and 21 percent in Germany.33 A similar disparity exists concerning the necessity of a belief in God as a condition of morality. Finally, perhaps most significant of all, at least in the context of our discussion, is the disparity between the American belief that individuals can and do control their own destinies (64 percent), and the European belief that individual destiny depends in large measure on external factors and forces (72 percent in Germany, 57 percent in France). In other words, and somewhat paradoxically, the belief in individual autonomy goes together with the belief in a divine creator, who therefore presumably is a necessary ally and support of that autonomy. 236   Mind the Cap

If, as Derrida states—­and this seems difficult to dispute—­the “idea of democracy” constitutes “a uniquely European” heritage (76/78), then from this comparison it emerges that the European idea of democracy involves a greater recognition of the necessary interdependence of individuals upon each other and upon their social, political, and economic institutions than the attitude that prevails in the United States. Protestant, and above all Evangelical, fundamentalism, continuing the American Puritan tradition, holds that “debt”—­and above all, the lack of worldly, financial success—­is above all a problem of the individual, and that unredeemable debt can therefore be regarded as equivalent to unredeemable guilt and sin. Just as the guilty must be punished, if necessary, through the deprivation of their lives, so debts must be repaid. Debt, but even more, the lack of financial success, is thus considered to be the financial correlative and expression of the sinful individual. One can see how this religious tradition could promote the rise and spread of what today is called neoliberalism (and perhaps even more its European version, in which the role of the state is more prominent, known, less widely, as “ordoliberalism”). It is interesting, therefore, to compare this attitude to the dominant attitude in Germany today, which both accepts certain aspects of neoliberalism while rejecting certain others. Germany, as a country that both experienced and emerged out of the wars of religion, therefore constitutes the sole major European country almost equally divided between Protestant and Catholic populations. In postwar Germany the dominant political–­economic ideology was—­ and remains—­informed by the ideal of a “social market economy.” The German notion of a Soziale Marktwirtschaft, first introduced in 1947 by the German economist Alfred Müller-­Armack, was designated by him as an “irenic formula” designed to reconcile the private interests of the “market” with the public interest of society. The word “irenic” seems particularly significant here,34 since it in turn goes back to a text published in 1593 by the Protestant theologian Franz Junius the Elder—­born in 1545 as François du Jon in Bourges—­under the title Eirenicum, and which sought to promote a reconciliation of warring Catholic and Protestant factions after the devastating wars of religion, a devastation that was carried out primarily in German-­speaking areas. The fact that the leitmotif of postwar German socioeconomic ideology presented itself as a compromise between the two major factions of Western Christianity seems particularly Mind the Cap   237

significant given that the idea of a “social market economy” has become not only the shibboleth of a reunified Germany but has also found its way into the Lisbon Treaty, which became effective on December 1, 2009.35 To attain not just a “social market economy” but one that is to be “highly competitive” as the Lisbon Treaty explicitly demands, the member nations must be able to remain creditworthy, which in the given system means capable of repaying their debts with the specified interest in the specified time frame. But given the ability of “the market”—­social or not—­to impose ever-­higher “risk premiums” in the form of unsustainable interest rates, the dependency of most of the European nation-­states upon foreign capital in order to sustain their economies has proved increasingly incompatible with the fundamental “aim” of the Union, which, as stated in the Lisbon Treaty, is “to promote peace, its values and the well-­being of its peoples” (see note 35). And so, the European idea of democracy turns out to be in increasing contradiction with the demand that this idea be implemented through the construction of a “highly competitive social market economy”—­much less one that would seriously respect the need, also stated in the treaty, to achieve “a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment.” What is often considered to be a mainstay of democratic governance—­regular consultation of citizens and residents, not just in elections, but through discussion and even referenda—­has often turned out to reveal an increasing gap between the decisions of European Union institutions and the people they are held to represent. If the “idea of democracy” is one of the distinctive traits marking the history and tradition of what is called “Europe,” then an overriding question posed by the “debt crisis” today is how that idea is to be related to the notion or notions of “economy” that the European Union has always regarded as crucial.36 The Christian heritage that the Lisbon Treaty places at the head—­the cap—­of its text, its preamble, even without naming it as such, reinforces a claim to universality that paradoxically goes together with the most extreme exclusivity: the modern notion of an “elect” who will be “saved” while the others will be condemned. This informs both the notion of “competitiveness”—­“a highly competitive social market economy”—­and the notion of society itself. Hence “democracy” is increasingly understood as a competitive struggle in which there are clearly 238   Mind the Cap

identifiable winners and losers—­and competitive sports becomes the peacetime paradigm of what war imposes directly. This notion of an “elect” is a consequence of universalist monotheism: of the “unicity” of a God who is both one and universal. In the passage from Matthew 2:14 that Matthew Arnold was fond of quoting, “Many are called, but few are chosen.” Translated into the terms of political economy, this could become: “Many are debtors, few are creditors.” Redemption constitutes the path to grace, but it is available only to the select few. Is it an accident that Greece, source of the distinctively European idea of democracy, is condemned by the Christian Democratic–­Christian Socialist Liberal coalition government of Angela Merkel, who here is the leading European advocate of the sacrosanct law of the market, to accept the fate of the unredeemable? But there is a strange reciprocity in market exchange relations that is neither entirely predictable nor quantifiable in terms of indebtedness and credit, and which therefore seems to haunt the isolating logic of debt calculation. For without debtors, there can be no creditors. As capital, money cannot stay put. It must circulate and try to expand its value. This brings out how, even when it is static, it depends upon the changing variables of time and space. This is why it can happen that, at certain moments, short-­ term creditors are willing to pay Germany and France for the “privilege” of lending them money, while at the same time they demand ever higher interest rates from Spain and Italy. This is also why, without the “profligate spending” of countries who today are most exposed to the financial markets, the creditor countries, Germany, and in part, France, themselves risk falling into the spiral of debt and deflation. Of course, since the LIBOR scandal, involving possible falsification of the exchange rates obtaining in interbank transactions by many of the world’s leading banks (including Barclay’s, Citi Group, J.P. Morgan, the Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, and UBS), access to reliable data seems more and more difficult, which in turn makes both analysis and calculation increasingly problematic.37 All of this casts new light on what for many will surely seem one of the more extravagant and least defensible assertions of Derrida in the essay I have been discussing—­indeed one that becomes a leitmotif of his later writing. It is, quite simply—­but nothing is ever so simple—­that the “paradoxes” and “antinomies” of the European situation require one to rethink the possibility, indeed the necessity, of “an experience of the impossible.” Mind the Cap   239

That experience would involve avoiding, on the one hand, a “centralizing hegemony (the capital),” and on the other, “national antagonisms, the chauvinisms of the idiom.” Applied to the “debt crisis,” this could translate as accepting the reality of a debt that cannot and will not be redeemed—­ either in full, or on time. It would mean accepting, in the “economic” realm, the fact that promises cannot be measured strictly on whether they can be “kept.” Until the economy was shaken by the COVID-­19 pandemic, the European Union, under the influence of the German government, had steadily refused to put into question the basic logic of keeping to the cap as it applies to debt, namely that every debt has as its telos and purpose full and punctual redemption—­not just the payback of what was borrowed, but “timely” redemption with interest. There is little evidence that this basic position has been durably abandoned. What the financial system encourages one to overlook is that reimbursement of debt never involves simple equivalence but rather always implies a surplus of repayment. The “debt crisis” is only intelligible in terms of this demanded surplus—­in terms of what is called, euphemistically, “servicing the debt.” But perhaps taking seriously the possibility of an “experience of the impossible” (here, quite concretely, the impossibility of ever fully reimbursing the debt incurred, which “today” includes its accumulated “interests”)also opens onto the more radical possibility of calling the entire logic that dominates the system of credit into question—­that of profitable reimbursement within a predetermined period of time. Economists today increasingly recognize that Greece will never be able to reimburse fully its debt and that the only question is just how that nonreimbursement will be calculated and organized, and how the interest payments will be calculated. David Graeber, for his part, and certain other “radical” economists, have argued for the idea of a “Biblical Jubilee,” in an ironic twist that turns the theological armature of present-­day “redemptive” economics against itself: It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of Biblical-­ style Jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s 240   Mind the Cap

debts is not the essence of morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to agree to arrange things in a different way.38

It is true that in the Bible the Jubilee, which stands as a kind of Sabbath’s Sabbath, “is a time of freedom and of celebration when everyone will receive back their original property and slaves will return home to their families” (Leviticus 25:10). However, the notion of a Jubilee as a celebration of debt forgiveness need not necessarily take the form of restitution or return—­or at least, as the return of what never was originally there. It is therefore not so much a reinstatement of the past as a promise of a future, but of one that affirms its excess over anything calculable or determinable. When Graeber writes, as cited above, that the Jubilee presupposes the notion that “paying one’s debts is not the essence of morality,” I am tempted to add—­“nor of mortality.” For as the convergence of Christian soteriology with the language of economics suggests, the notion of debt as that which is intrinsically redeemable can well draw its power from the implication that human finitude is “redeemable”—­by returning to a state in which man “recovers” that immortality that he originally received from his no-­less-­ immortal Creator. The enormous and often suicidal energies that are emerging today in the pursuit of profit and the manipulation of debt strongly suggest that the forces driving this momentum may well be fueled by a death drive in disguise. The (profitable) redemption of debt would thus be the capitalist successor to the Christian hope for salvation through redemption: a surplus of life over death. Europe today is the name of that part of the “Western” (i.e., above all, Christian) tradition and culture that is both fascinated and repelled by the redemptive economy of its American “offspring.” If the United States is understood to name that system which is seeking to impose this theological economy on a globalized world—­and there are other legitimate uses of the name—­it can be considered to be the “other” of Europe, but not as an alternative to the cap(e) as such. In the words of Valéry, part of Europe still “aspires to be governed by an American Commission.”39 In connection with this continuing aspiration, it may be salutary to remember that the original name given to the most celebrated of all capes—­The Cape of Good Hope—­by its Portuguese discoverer, Bartolomeu Dias, was Cabo Mind the Cap   241

das Tormentas. Whether Europe will remain fixed on hopes that hide and perpetuate torments, whether it will lead beyond torments to new hope, or whether something entirely different from both hope and torments is in the offing—­these are questions that will chart the path of Europe after Derrida.

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10

West of Eden

After the Good Life

If the history of singularity in the West is informed by a religious tradition based on monotheism, this implies that this tradition is not universal, not based in human nature independent of its cultural formation. The “West” then requires a definition that would account for such nonuniversality by indicating its difference from other cultures. In an age of “globalization,” which not only facilitates communication between cultures but also calls into question their diversity, all exchanges—­economic, political, social, including the exchange of commodities, which is the most powerful form of exchange at work today—­tend to establish a common denominator that can be used to facilitate what is generally called “communication.” If this tendency is at work today, perhaps more powerfully than in the past, it is all the more important to define the limits of the culture that informs it and that up to now has been able to impose, not without growing resistance, its “bottom-­line” on the rest of the world. I am of course referring to the culture and history of the “West.” The following chapter, which was originally a talk given in Taipei in 2013 at a meeting of the CLAROC (the Comparative Literature Association of the Republic of China) and which has been revised since then, tries to present some of the forces that inform “the West,” or at least a powerful part of it, in the hopes that this might facilitate discussion of alternatives, informed by other cultural traditions. The title of the conference was After the World: New Possibilities of Comparative Literature. Am I the only one who finds the title around which our conference has been called together both enticing and also somewhat frightening? I don’t mean this in any way as a critique: terror and comedy are both phenomena that we, as comparatists, but also as citizens, should treat with respect. But I could not help but wonder whether “after the world” there would still 243

be time and space for “new possibilities for comparative literature”—­or anything else, for that matter. Although there is little doubt that the “world”—­however one understands this infinitely ambiguous and complex word—­can survive the end of comparative literature, it is not at all self-­evident that comparative literature can or will survive “after the world.” But perhaps the phrase “after the world” is not meant to suggest the end of the world as such, but only, as is stated in the initial call for papers, the end of the “old world,” the old idea of there being only “one world,” and particularly a world whose center is generally presupposed to converge with the position of whomever is uttering the phrase. But of course, the “old world,” like “old Europe” (in the unforgettable phrase of the former U.S. secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld), tends to be identified with that part of the world often called “the West” even though other parts of this world are actually much older in terms of the history of their civilizations. But do we really know where on earth “the West” is to be found? West of what? China is “west” of California, which is “east” of China. How definite is the definite article here, allowing us to ostensibly pin down and capitalize the West, as though it were a fixed and clearly delimited area? Where is “here” anyway? That is, where must one be located in order for such a term to have the power of “orientation,” as one says, precisely in certain languages of “the West”? Where and when does “the West”—­assuming the use of a definite article—­begin and where and when does it end? Can one begin to seriously inquire into what might be the state or options of comparative literature—­or anything else for that matter—­“after the world” without having first carefully considered what has happened “before”? The rise of “world literature” might seem to put an end to such questions: but where in the world is one positioned to be able to speak or write of “world” literature? To begin to respond to such questions—­or is it an admonition dressed up in the guise of questions?—­I want to take a closer look at certain of those limits, which might define that before with respect to an after. I propose to do this first by returning to one of the founding texts of what is generally considered “the West” and which, despite its age and apparent obsolescence, still, I submit, “orients” the traditions, practices, and values associated with that geopolitical entity. It orients the West—­this will be my argument—­insofar as it articulates, in all of its ambivalence, what up 244   West of Eden

until today has functioned as the dominant paradigm of identity for both subject and object, for cognition and truth, for the West and its world (or worlds).1 The text I am speaking of is one that purports to recount the very beginning of things, the absolute origin of the world through the creative act, and word, of a supreme being. I am of course referring to the first chapters of Genesis. This is not the only way to recount the beginning of things. The West is often understood to designate a continuum that begins with ancient Greece. But the ways in which the Greeks recounted the beginning of the world, in Hesiod’s Theogony, is quite different from the text I am about to discuss. Hesiod’s text does not begin with the absolute beginning of the world: it beings with the Muses. From the Muses of Helicon let us begin our singing, that haunt Helicon’s great and holy mountain and dance on their soft feet round the violet-­dark spring and the altar of the mighty son of Kronos.2

And then, after this invocation to the Muses and the Gods, it states: Tell me this from the beginning, Muses who dwell in Olympus, and say what thing among them came first. First came the Chasm, and then broad-­breasted Earth, secure seat for ever of all the immortals who occupy the peak of snowy Olympus; the misty Tartara in a remote recess of the broad-­pathed earth; and Eros, the most handsome among the immortal gods. (6–­7)

In Hesiod’s Theogony, the world just “comes into being,” first as chaos, then as the earth, “secure seat of all the immortals,” the gods being named in the plural. By contrast, Genesis recounts how the world comes into being through the act of a single, universal, Creator-­God: the world is created by a subject through an intentional speech-­act. In this sense, the world “belongs” to its Creator as His creation. Moreover, in contrast with the Greek myth, there is not a plurality of gods, who fight with each other over succession, but rather a single, universal, exclusive God, who is also the Lord—­the ruler—­of creation. In a certain sense, the notion of an “after-­the-­world” is already in evidence almost from the very start of this story. For Genesis recounts not West of Eden   245

merely the creation of the world through a Creator, but also its ensuing near total destruction, shortly after its creation. It is this juxtaposition of creation and destruction that makes the first chapters of Genesis of particular interest: it sets the stage for a certain “after-­world,” following close upon its creation. But this “after” seems to entail the total obliteration of the world “before”: in contrast to the violent struggle for succession that leads from the Titans to the Olympians in Hesiod, the world of the creation is threatened with total destruction. The notion of “weapons of mass destruction” that has become both a reality in recent decades as well as a means of intimidation, can thus be retraced perhaps to an apocalyptic element present from the very first, almost, in the story of the divine creation of the world: if the world was created by a single power, it can also be undone by the same power. The question is why should there be this desire to undo what has been created and what might it signify? The story suggests that it did not take very long for the Creator of the world to get so disgusted with his creation that he decided to do away with it altogether—­or at least, almost: And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. (Gen. 6:7)

Note that the objects of God’s wrath here are all living beings: man, beast, creeping thing, and the fowls of the air. God is dissatisfied not just with the world as a whole, but with the living beings that inhabit it, and in particular with that living being said to have been made “in his image.” God, the source of eternal life, is tempted to do away with “his living image” as well as with the living in general. Freud, surely one of the most profound thinkers to reflect on the traditions I am discussing, writes of a defensive gesture he observes in his patients, which he calls the desire to “undo” what has been done: in German, Ungeschehen machen.3 With this gesture, the I (aka the ego) seeks to demonstrate its mastery over time by rendering it reversible. For Freud, the function of “undoing,” as of defenses in general, involves an attempt to “defend the Ego against instinctual demands.”4 These demands place the

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ego in contradiction to its interests or goals. Could this apply to the situation described in Genesis? The particular reasons for the disgust of the Creator with His creation and His decision to undo it are, as recounted in Genesis, both familiar and strange. Familiar, all too familiar, is the condemnation of man and beast as sensual beings corrupted by the flesh. “Flesh” is here associated with “violence,” with what Freud calls “drives” or “instincts” (Triebe). What singularizes living beings is singled out as the cause of what also “corrupts” them—­which is to say, removes them from their original mission or destiny. All the more significant, then, is the particular way in which this corruption is described in a subsequent passage from the same chapter (6) of Genesis: And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. (Gen. 6:5)

It is not just the “flesh,” then, that is identified as the cause of corruption, but the “imagination” (in the King James version at least, for other translations do not necessarily use the same or approximate words)5 and this might strike the modern reader, at least, as strange: Why talk of “imagination” in connection with corruption of the flesh? And yet, the word recurs when, following the flood, God partially recants and tells Noah, whom he has spared, that he will not pursue his destruction of man and the earth, and why: I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. (Gen. 8:21)

It is once again “the imagination” of man that is the site and cause of his corruption. God will no longer seek to purge the earth of this, since “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Why and how should the “imagination” be the locus of “evil” in man, and why “from his youth”?

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Is this because of the inherited sin of Adam and Eve? On the other hand, it was, after all, God Himself who decided to “make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Playing on the ambiguity of the word “after”—­an ambiguity explored and exploited by Derrida in The Post Card—­one could say that the way man comes after God results in God constantly coming after man, that is, pursuing him, forcing him to keep at a certain distance. For in defining the “image” in terms of “likeness,” God sets the stage for man interpreting this likeness mainly in terms of resemblance, and thus as an invitation to approach ever closer to the divine, indeed to identify with God himself. In temporal terms, one could say that human beings, coming after their divine Creator, seek to assimilate their after to what they take to be its before: for instance, to know the difference between good and evil, even if “evil” cannot be found in the Garden of Eden. Or to become immortal by eating of the adjacent tree of life. The response of God puts this very clearly: Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil, and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever. Therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword that turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life. (Gen. 1:22–­24)

The Cherubim are placed “at the east of the Garden of Eden” to keep man from trying to return to his previous state, to his before. But nothing is said of what might happen west of Eden? Would there be a path leading out of the world of suffering, toil, and mortality and back to the tree of life via the West? Could this be the project determining the afterworld of the “west”? Its desire to go beyond the after-­effects of its expulsion from Eden: by going west, and indeed, by defining itself as “the West”—­that is, as the potentiality of returning to a before that would recover the original imagistic likeness of its Creator? A creator that perhaps continues to inform the conception of being and identity—­of identity as a being that is one and the same and that can stay so beyond all the alterations of spatiotemporal existence? The biblical story of the creation of the world, of life, and of human 248   West of Eden

beings in particular as the creation of a supreme being conceived of as unique, universal, exclusive,6 and purely self-­identical sets the stage for an interpretation of human life that subordinates finitude to infinity, mortality to immortality, alterity to sameness. At the same time, it is precisely this interpretation—­this over-­interpretation of “image” as “likeness,” that in the biblical account is responsible for the emergence of an afterworld and an afterlife that is all the more mortal, painful, and vulnerable. Life qua afterlife is a life that is mortal, unlike the prelapsarian life that preceded it. Man is thus punished for neglecting the ambiguity both of the word “like” and of the word “image”—­the fact that to be “like” is also to be unlike, and to be an image is to be different from what the image images. Ironically, one might say, man is punished in the Bible for overlooking the Platonic critique of the image as mere simulacrum. But what if the story of the creation of the world through a Creator-­God was itself designed in order to dissimulate its own character as a simulacrum? What if the “after” in the narrative sequence, which also establishes a theological and ontological hierarchy, were itself “simultaneous” with its self-­dissimulation? What comes “after” can hardly be disassociated from what comes before. Why begin a talk on “After the World . . .” with a discussion of the biblical account of its creation? Because of the suspicion that for modern-­day cultures, which at least in “the West” tend to consider themselves “secular” and as such free of such theological fables, the biblical creation myth in many respects informs the experience both of “world” and of “time”—­ hence, also the experience of “after,” even today. It does this by conceiving identity, at least in so-­called Western cultures, as informed by an essentially monotheological model: which is to say, as the property of beings considered as primordially selfsame insofar as they stem from a common and homogeneous origin. When asked by Moses for his name—­God responds simply: “I am that—­who—­I am,” or in other translations, “. . . who I will be” (Exod. 3:14). The I that defines the being of the Creator-­God is one that is held to transcend time and space and that is, virtually, already everything that it can become. Above all, such an I must be thought of as being immune to the alterations space and time will bring: these affect only corporeal, “fleshly” human beings in their growth but also in their decline. Put differently, the notion of being that is presupposed and also staged in Genesis is one that is trans-­temporal and non-­ephemeral, free of any West of Eden   249

constitutive relation to alterity or to nonbeing. It is precisely not, to borrow an untranslatable phrase from Derrida, the tout autre is tout autre, but the tout autre as le même, the same. The Creator-­God is thus construed as the original and originating mode of being and of identity, which has always existed, before the creation as well as after it. And insofar as the earth is inhabited not by gods, but only by their imagistic likenesses, human beings, as well as other, less divine-­like beings, this earth is, as it were, doomed from the start. It is the site of finite, mortal life, not of life that would be immortal. No wonder God is quickly disappointed with the state of the earth,7 which he then decides to destroy—­or at least to purge of life—­thus undoing his initial act of creation, which, however, seems in part at least responsible for its corruption. But at the same time, this God decides finally to spare his Creation by purging it from its innate flaws, as it were, by saving the just man, Noah, from whom life in general, and human life in particular, will then be able to regenerate itself. It is the divine ability to distinguish good from evil—­a knowledge he would deny to humans—­that permits God to recognize the corruption but also to relativize it, acknowledging that it is widespread but not universal. One just man suffices to save the world from total annihilation. What is being saved at the same time, however, is the notion that the relation of creation to Creator is viable, despite the tensions that inform it and that crystallize in the similitude–­ dissimilitude of the two poles. In this way, the conception of identity as self-­contained in a universal, immortal, and exclusive Creator-­God is also “saved” from self-­destruction. My contention is that, even today—­and perhaps especially today, in the midst of cultures that deem themselves “secular” and free of most religious residues—­this paradigm of a homogeneous structure of identity, together with its self-­destructive tensions, is still widespread and perhaps growing increasingly powerful in the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions that organize and govern life on earth today. In using the Bible as my reference for this argument, I want to emphasize two points. First, it demonstrates to what extent the tradition on which this sense of homogeneous but self-­contradictory identity builds can be called “religious”—­namely, in the sense suggested by Walter Benjamin

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at the beginning of his unfinished fragment, “Capitalism as Religion.” In that essay, Benjamin describes religion, “so-­called,” as defined by those attitudes and institutions that seek to address and “allay anxieties, torments and troubles” that other institutions are unable or unwilling to address.8 Second, by presenting a reading of one of the foundational myths associated with the “West,” I mean not to reinforce ethnocentrism, but on the contrary, to indicate that the cultures informed by this myth, however large and powerful they may be, are anything but universal. Universality is precisely the claim of this sort of exclusive monotheism. But it is not its reality. There is good reason to see it, following Benjamin but also Freud, as a defensive response to “cares and troubles”—­a response that seeks to relativize finitude and mortality by associating life with a supreme being. In this perspective, the Western concern—­or one could say, obsession—­ with universality is structurally linked to a parallel concern (or obsession) with individuality, since the universality of a Creator-­Lord presupposes His indivisibility, just as political sovereignty, its secular counterpart, is often defined in terms of indivisibility as well.9 It is perhaps the internal instability of this monotheological identity paradigm, in which individuality constantly subordinates singularity to self-­identity, that informs, distinguishes, and drives what has been called the Western tradition. The challenge today, in an age of “globalization,” for literary comparatists, but also for responsible citizens more generally, is to better understand the interaction of this unstable and antagonistic model of identity with other paradigms, coming both from inside and outside the Western tradition. So far, I have spoken mainly of “earth” and of “world” but not of “globe.” But the differences between “world” and “globe” are no less important than those between “earth” and “world.” In French there is a tendency, particularly prevalent among those who criticize the monolithic aspects of globalization, to seek an alternative to the notion of “globe” by using the term mondialisation—­“worlding”—­and also that of altermondialisation, which in English yields the not very felicitous word “other-­worlding.” Not very felicitous insofar as in English the phrase “other world” is generally used to invoke a world beyond that of the living—­the world of the dead, the spectral world, rather than as in French designating a historical, terrestrial alternative to the existing world order: not a “new world order”

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but “another” kind of world order, based not on commercialization and finance-­capital. At first glance the difference between the two words, world and globe, seems clear enough. The latter is both closer to a geometrical figure, the sphere, and to a visual image, whereas “world” is not immediately associated with any particular object or phenomenon.10 This does not hold for the “globe.” As both a figure and an image, the globe is historically associated with a certain “universality”—­despite the fact that it is only part of the universe. Indeed, as a phenomenal part, it presupposes a space that is larger than itself, a space of spectatorship, for instance, or sometimes even of a certain kind of play. Perhaps the most unforgettable scene involving a globe in relatively recent times is from Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator, where the Hitler-­figure throws a globe—­that is, a spherical map of the world—­up into the air like a ball, catching it, throwing it up repeatedly until finally it explodes, like an inflated balloon. The scene depicts what I take to be the driving force behind the fascination with globality, today perhaps more than ever: the Old Testament command to “subdue” all living creatures, as Genesis puts it, and to have “dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Why should such “dominion” be necessary? A possible response: precisely to exclude and subdue the irreducible involvement with and dependence upon others that haunts “every living thing that moveth” insofar as that thing is singular, and not—­as the creation story would have it—­merely the instantiation of its “kind.” As already noted, in the account of the creation, all living beings are “created after their kind.” As members of a genre, of a kind, as “species-­beings,” singular living beings can try to acquire a certain immortality, reflecting that which is attributed to their creator. As Hegel states at the conclusion of his Philosophy of Nature, in nature all singular living beings perish, and only the species survives.11 This may be why the names of the first human beings are generic: Adam, Eve, man, woman, and life. Only through such identification with a metaindividual collective can singular living beings hope somehow to escape the finitude that defines them insofar as they are singular. Only so can they hope to outlive themselves “after the world”—­after their world is gone. But where does this hope, or fear, or both, leave the definite article, the “the” that is generally affixed before the noun “world”? In the previous 252   West of Eden

phrase, I was constrained to shift from the definite “the” to the possessive “their” in speaking of the world that could survive its demise. Such questions or problems tend to disappear when, instead of “world,” we speak of the globe, and of globalization. If the globe is associated with the geometrical figure of the sphere and as such is construed as self-­contained, the same does not hold for “the world.” One need only recall Orson Welles’s famous radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which, when broadcast in 1937, caused a panic among its listeners, many of whom took it for a real and apocalyptic newsbreak. It is as if the plurality of “worlds” is inevitably experienced as an invitation to violence, to war, and thus as a manifestation not of diversity, but of disunity and nonuniversality. The failure of the notion of world to reconcile singularity with universality creates a fertile terrain for anxiety and even panic. For if the word “world” is used frequently in the plural, the word “globe” is almost always used in the singular. It is as if the gap between singular and universal (or general) is given a reassuring form by appearing as the distance between the globe as a corporeal, geometrical object of perception, and the perceiver, separate from it and looking down upon it. Hence the fascination of pictures taken from outer space, whether of the earth, the moon, or other terrestrial spheres, but also the tendency to view such a perspective as implying a vertical hierarchy. However, since the positioning of the observer reintroduces the problem of a differential and relational singularity, it can never entirely suffice to calm anxiety, and in the long run may wind up intensifying it.12 The coupling of the words “war” with “worlds” in H. G. Wells’s title, and indeed in the novel itself, suggests that residual anxiety can be provisionally attenuated if it is provided with a clearly identifiable object of aggression—­an enemy, as Carl Schmitt would call it, that solidifies the polity. Plurality and difference are thus transformed into polar opposition, or more generally, into adversarial “groupings” (to use another term of Schmitt’s).13 For where there is plurality, the question of order, hierarchy, and domination is never far away. A “globalized world” is thus a world that is organized according to a unified and generally hierarchical order, presupposing a head, a leader, a “superpower,” and thus rarely entailing a plurality of nations or peoples or cultures communicating and interacting with one another on the basis of mutual equality and reciprocal respect. This, at least, is the perspective behind United States’ policies from the Monroe Doctrine to “America First.” It is an imperial perspective that is West of Eden   253

theologically informed (“Manifest Destiny”) and that has dominated the foreign policies of not just the United States but most Western nations for centuries. It is far from the only imperial–­universal perspective the world has seen, to be sure, and the Roman Empire is a good counterexample. But it is the one that has been widely adopted by “the West” and that today is testing its limits in a “globalized world.”14 The emphasis I have been placing on the influence of a theological heritage on ostensibly “secular” cultures should not be taken to imply a causal or deterministic process. Such causalist thinking is unproductive and misleading, since it avoids confronting the question of what exactly contributes to the staying power of the ostensible “cause.” Even a cursory examination of certain foundational texts of Western modernity suggests that this power derives from its ability to alleviate anxieties of finitude, especially in the aftermath of the Reformation. And these anxieties are conditioned by an experience that places the individual as an isolated I at its center. An exemplary instance can be found in the Meditations of Descartes, which begin by recounting the discovery of how unreliable established authority seems to have become—­“certain old opinion(s)” such as “that there is a God who can do all things and by whom I, such as I exist, have been created.” Such received ideas fill Descartes with doubt and uncertainty: But how do I know that he has not made it so that there would be no earth at all, no heavens, no extended things, no figure, no magnitude, no place, and yet that all these things would seem to me to exist not otherwise than they seem to now?15

How can one know anything for certain if “image” and “imagination” are essentially and irreducibly “unlike” that which they seem to represent, whether the supreme being itself or those individuals created in its “likeness”? How can one know for certain where similitude ends and dissimilitude starts? Only by forsaking the realm of perception and imagination and retreating to what seems a more immediate and reliable realm of reflective thinking. Descartes’s suspicion of this-­worldly perceptions, representations, and experiences is of course nothing new—­it goes back at least as far as Plato—­but its implications take a particular turn in post-­Reformation 254   West of Eden

European culture, which radicalizes the individualist implications of the Christian Good News. Luther’s notion of sola fides—­faith alone—­as the sole path to redemption, already mentioned, rendered the entire realm of voluntary action problematic, since faith was considered to be more of a gift than the product of a deliberate decision. As is well known, Descartes’s attempt at finding an Archimedean point upon which a sure and certain conception of the world could be founded required him to seek safe haven in the Netherlands, to withdraw from the external world, to question the authority of its institutions and traditions, and to retreat into what he considered the immanence not just of pure thought, but of a thinking, living being considered in the first-­person singular: the “I” of the cogito. It was in this singularity of the first-­person thinking—­note the present participle—­that he hoped to find the last resort of absolute certainty and security, by virtue of its putative immediacy to itself. But in order to sustain the idea of such immediacy, and hence of such certainty, the self of this thinking-­I had to be understood as existing independently of its physical, bodily existence, inasmuch as this existence depends always upon its spatiotemporal situation, which is irreducibly relative and finite. Above all, the world transmitted by perceptions, representations, and traditions has, once again one must add, become dangerously uncertain—­and as such, a threat to the stability of the I, which involves a relation both to an “external” world and to its “own” bodily existence. What a certain empirical tradition usually considers to be the basis of existential certainty—­seeing with one’s own two eyes—­has become totally uncertain for Descartes, a situation that the habitual dimension of language only exacerbates: I still hang on the words themselves and am almost deceived by the use itself of speech. For we see that we see the wax itself if it be there, and not that we judge from the color or the figure that it is there. From whence I would immediately conclude that therefore the wax is cognized by the vision of the eye, not by the inspection of the mind alone—­if perhaps I had not now looked out the window at human beings going by in the street, whom themselves I also say, as a matter of the usage of language, that I see. . . . But what do I see besides hats and clothes under which automata might be concealed? Yet I judge that there are human beings there. (Meditations 2.13) West of Eden   255

Descartes’s solution to this problem, his effort to limit its corrosive effects and to find that Archimedean point upon which a structure might be built that could stand the tests of time and space, hinges on his identifying an indubitably self-­evident instance that is both in the world and yet not entirely of it. This is the famous cogito, the self-­consciousness of an I-­thinking-­itself, and qua thinking, being identical with thinking in the present participle. For only the present participle is open enough, and only thinking oneself is immediate enough to demarcate the borders of a first person who seems (to Descartes at least) indubitably “first,” which is to say, which has to be presupposed by any attempt to reach the ground of being. But because of its very immediacy, the presence of this I to its Self—­ its immediacy—­is also inevitably limited by the temporal duration of its thinking. Therefore, it is not the formula cogito ergo sum that most accurately sums up the result of Descartes’s argument, but rather the formulation cogito me cogitandi. For as Descartes puts it: Cogitation; this alone cannot be rent from me [haec sola a me divelli nequit]. I am, I exist; it is certain. But for how long? So long as I am cogitating, of course. For it could perhaps also happen that if I would cease all cogitation I as a whole would at once cease to be [si cessarem ab omni cogitatione, ut illico totus esse desinerem]. (Meditations 2.6)

All that is certain, then, in this world of doubt, is that the I-­thinking can only be said to exist indubitably as long as it is thinking itself thinking, and no longer. Given the spatiotemporal limits of such a singular finite being, however, what Descartes introduces here as a speculation—­“it could perhaps also happen that if I would cease all cogitation . . .”—­looks increasingly like a certainty: the certainty, namely, of the irreducibility of uncertainty in a finite world struggling to redefine its relation to what might be called the singularity of the living: the fact that the “world” consists—­at least in its “fallen” state—­no longer simply of immortal “kinds,” but of all-­ too-­mortal individuals. The thought that centuries later Paul Celan will render memorable in his verse, to which Derrida returned again and again, namely, “The world is gone; I must carry you” (Die Welt is fort, ich muss dich tragen), already

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haunts the post-­Reformation sensibility, indeed anxiety, which Descartes both stages and seeks to overcome.16 If “world” is to mean anything other than a simple subjective hallucination, fantasy, or dream, then, its uncertain cognitive status will have to be resolved. For is it possible to still speak of a “world,” or of “worlds” in the plural, without having a minimum degree of impersonal or transpersonal certainty that we are speaking of something that actually exists, and not simply of a mere phantasy? It is not just philosophers who have sought to provide an answer to this question, for it also traverses the literature and poetry of the past centuries as well. But whereas philosophers often seek to answer the question, in a way that would resolve it, writers and poets are often more disposed simply to respond to it, without seeking to provide ultimate answers. In English an answer generally seeks to provide a solution to a problem held to motivate a question; a “response” is much less clear; it reacts to a question or problem but does not necessarily seek to eliminate it. When, for instance, one is confronted by the question of what might come “after the world,” one can assume that the responses will be at least as interesting as any attempted answers. After having tried to define certain aspects of the history of the question, I will now try to provide one or two such responses. Forty years before Descartes wrote his Meditations, the ghost of an assassinated king enjoins his son not to forget him and his fate: “Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me,” are the parting words of the ghost of King Hamlet to his traumatized son, who then responds as follows: O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? And shall I couple hell? O fie! Hold, hold, my heart, And you my sinews, grow not instant old, But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live

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Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter. (Hamlet 1.5)

Like Descartes, Hamlet resolves to “wipe away all trivial fond records” and everything else “that youth and observation copied there”—­“there” referring namely to what Hamlet calls “this distracted globe.” Like Descartes, Hamlet seeks to empty his head of all the unreliable thoughts and opinions that he has inherited from tradition or derived from his senses. What remains implicit in Descartes, however—­namely, that such “wiping away” calls into question one’s experience of “the world” if not the world itself—­ becomes explicitly thematic in Shakespeare, albeit not without a certain irony. The “globe” here names both the world—­Hamlet’s “time out of joint”—­and his own head as seat of that “thinking” in which Descartes sought his Archimedean point. And, of course, the “globe” also names the theater in which “Hamlet” the play was first staged, as well as the company that performed it. All of these “globes” are “distracted”—­unable to focus simply or exclusively upon their principal object, out of joint with themselves and their time. Hamlet hopes to overcome that “distraction” and fulfill the command of his father’s ghost by emptying the globe of its inherited contents and thereby making it into a sort of tabula rasa. But the pleonastic emphasis on exclusivity—­“thy commandment all alone”—­will provide a baseline against which the futility of Hamlet’s project of “exclusion” will unfold. For Hamlet cannot judge the authenticity of the ghostly appearance apart from things he has learned and inherited from the past. There is no longer a single tradition informing his world but rather two competing and, in this case, mutually exclusive ones. For Protestants, ghosts are manifestations of the devil; for Catholics, they can be souls on the way to purgatory. Hamlet tends toward the latter interpretation, in order to preserve the sense of legitimacy and continuity of the familial line. But just as the Creator-­God quickly becomes the destroyer-­God when he realizes that his own creatures are seeking to replicate his unique unity—­ for instance, by building the Tower of Babel—­Hamlet’s vow to transform his “distracted globe” into a medium for the attainment of certainty and the enactment of filial obligation only heightens the uncertainty already contained in the ambiguity of that “globe.” For the “distracted globe” be258   West of Eden

comes the scene of the theatrical stratagem designed to demonstrate the guilt of the king by representing its likeness on the stage—­and then registering the effect it produces. What is finally achieved through this strategy is the ambiguous demonstration that familial lineage cannot transcend, much less abolish, the finitude of its members, father and son. Ambiguous, since Hamlet is followed by Fortinbras Jr., son of a father who has been defeated by King Hamlet. The distinctly modern, post-­Reformation sense of history as an irreducible discontinuity, in which singularity and generality resist reconciliation, converges with the emergence of a certain theater as that which comes “after the world.” But it is a theater in crisis, no less threatened than the royal family itself. Hamlet’s remarks addressed to Guildenstern about children employed in theater to parody and devalue adult actors—­and with them the very profession of acting itself—­is a reflective comment on the way in which Hamlet’s own future is called into question by the death (and probable murder) of his father: What? Are they children? Who maintains ’em? How are they escotted? Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players—­as it is most like, if their means are no better—­their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession? (Hamlet 1.2.343–­49)

Just as the child actors are made by “their writers” to “exclaim against their own succession,” succession in general is disrupted by a time “out-­of-­joint,” and which separates rather than unites, dissolves rather than consolidates. What comes “after the world” is not restitution, much less resurrection, but the unsettling prospect of indefinite conflict and decline. Unlike Descartes, then, Hamlet’s “distracted globe” demonstrates through its very ambiguity the impossibility of separating globe and world from the ever-­unfinished singularity of finite, mortal living beings, whose future is no longer assured by the Christian promise of redemption and of grace. Hamlet’s memory will never, therefore, be able to fulfill the command of the ghost. For when he finally does take his revenge, the collateral damage will merely confirm the inability of a dynasty to maintain itself in the face of the finitude of its singular members—­much as was already West of Eden   259

the case, under somewhat different conditions, with the house of Cadmus, which was forcibly separated from the fate of the city it founded, Thebes, and with which it remained identified until Oedipus. A similar experience of the “world,” and yet with drastically different consequences, informs the writings, closer to our own time, of Derrida, who begins with—­and often returns to—­a deconstruction of the project of phenomenology, insofar as Husserl, following Descartes and Kant, seeks to escape and transcend the finitude and contingency of worldly existence by “bracketing” what Husserl calls the “natural perspective.” This is how Derrida, in a later text, describes the Husserlian epoché, the “reduction” or “suspension” of the “world” as it offers itself to the experience of the senses: Isn’t this retreat of the world, this distancing by which the world retreats to the point of the possibility of its annihilation, the most necessary, the most logical, but also the most insane experience of a transcendental phenomenology? In the famous paragraph 49 of Ideas I, doesn’t Husserl explain to us, in the course of the most rigorous demonstration, that access to the absolute egological consciousness, in its purest phenomenological sense, requires that the existence of the transcendent world be suspended in a radical epokhe? The hypothesis of the annihilation of the world does not threaten, by right and in its meaning, the sphere of phenomenological and pure egological experience. On the contrary, it would open access to this sphere: it would make such access thinkable in its phenomenal purity.17

The essay from which this passage is taken was initially given as a lecture in February 2003, a year and a half before Derrida’s death. It was dedicated to the memory of Hans-­Georg Gadamer, who had died a year earlier. The essay is subtitled “The Uninterrupted Dialogue—­Between Two Infinities the Poem,” those two “infinities” being first, and perhaps foremost, the death of the one and the already foreseeable demise of the other. Of course, from his earliest writings on, Derrida sought to reckon with his finitude as the fate of everything living, and yet which distinguishes life-­in-­the-­singular from all generalizations of “Life” (with a capital L). In Speech and Phenomenon, as in his discussion of Husserl’s text on The Origin of Geometry, Derrida pointed to writing as an inexpungible mani260   West of Eden

festation of how absence and separation—­and for living beings, death—­ was at the heart of all attempts to establish self-­presence and meaning. In Speech and Phenomenon, this culminates in Derrida’s insistence that the use of the personal pronoun “I” implies not just the awareness of mortality— “I am” implying “I am mortal”—­since the “I” remains intelligible in the absence of the singular I that utters or inscribes it, but even more, implies the proposition, “I am dead”: Earlier we reached the “I am mortal” from the “I am”: here we understand the “I am” out of the “I am dead.” The anonymity of the written I, the impropriety of the I am writing, is, contrary to what Husserl says, the “normal situation.” The autonomy of meaning [vouloir-­dire] with regard to intuitive cognition . . . has its norm in writing and in the relationship with death.18

The Husserlian, “most logical but also most insane” phenomenological project—­which is that of philosophy going back to Socrates—­is that of annihilating the world of finitude, death, and destruction, the corrupt world that, according to Genesis, God created and then Himself sought to destroy. Only through such annihilation, through the systematic “suspension” or “bracketing” of everything relating to the empirical existence of the world qua “external” could it be hoped to attain a sphere of pure, “egological” meaning—­or, as Derrida translated it, of pure vouloir-­dire, a sphere in which volition (vouloir) and speech (dire) would finally coincide, and in this coincidence attain something like permanence.19 This would truly be a realm “after the world”—­but its “after” would signify its effort to pursue and attain what is irrevocably lost and what only existed as a fata morgana—­the (defensive) fantasy of a world of pure procreation and of a life without death. Thus, only by going after this afterworld of sin and death could one hope to return to the purity of an origin in which life, world, and earth were one and the same, without dependence on anything external. A world in which there is only good with no evil—­but in which there is nevertheless a tree of the knowledge of good and evil that stands next to the tree of life. It is this original world of “the good life” that continually cries “remember me,” and the ghost of King Hamlet only gives voice to this cry. It is a cry to return to the world before the world, whose Eastern gates are barred, West of Eden   261

but whose Western side may perhaps still be open. Or at least this is the hope and fear that has agitated “the West” throughout much of its history. But in Hamlet it is an ambiguous cry, for it is unclear if it designates a path to salvation or to damnation: a Catholic or a Protestant cry. Hamlet, who has studied in Wittenberg, tends to confirm the latter by his own destiny. If Walter Benjamin could assert that “it is only in this prince that melancholy self-­absorption attains to Christianity,” what should be added is that it is a Christianity profoundly divided, and whose salvational power therefore has become radically ambiguous.20 In short, there is perhaps good reason to suspect that the move beyond—­including almost all “post’s”: postmodern, postcolonial, posthuman, posthistorical—­consists in what psychoanalysts have described as a “flight forward”: a move that, like the death-­drive, consists in an effort to repeat the unrepeatable, to render commensurate the incommensurable, to generalize the irreducibly singular. The anxious solitude that caused man to be split and gendered in the biblical account of the genesis of gender returns (but did it ever really leave?) to haunt the fantasies of an autonomous ego turning West in the hopes of finally recovering its self and coming home. But there is another experience of the afterworld that does not confuse it with homecoming. It is one that acknowledges the solitude of the Western, historical, solitary (but not solipsistic) I as a point of departure rather than as a stage to be overcome. The I acknowledges its solitude as the obligation not simply to survive, but to carry on—­not after but on. Indeed, its existence becomes inseparable from this obligation. All of this takes place on the margins of what we still blithely call a “national” or “natural” language: German. German is surely the language in which the Augustinian model of exile and return, sin and salvation, has found a most powerful articulation, in literature as in philosophy. In literature, Schiller’s distinction of “naïve” versus “sentimental” poetry resituated the opposition as one between intuitive immediacy and self-­conscious mediation, something taken up in philosophy then by Hegel’s dialectic of negativity. In criticism, Heinrich von Kleist’s essay on “The Marionette-­Theater” describes the aesthetic implications of this contrast between a state of unconscious immediacy and the weight of self-­consciousness and emphasizes its relation to the Christian salvational narrative. It is also appropriate that the cul262   West of Eden

ture that most powerfully undermined the Christian salvational narrative should supply the language in which that narrative should be most powerfully questioned. And it is also fitting that this undermining should be articulated in French by a writer who, like Celan, writes on the fringes of the language in which he is still fully involved (“I only have one language,” writes Derrida famously, “and it is not mine.”)21 This at least is how Derrida reads—­or reads into—­the verse of Celan already quoted: “The world is gone (fort: away), I must carry you” (Die Welt ist fort, Ich muss dich tragen). After the world has gone away—­we cannot be sure where—­the I, says Derrida, discovers a certain “before”: Before I am, I bear. Before being me, I bear the other. I bear you and must do so, I owe it to you. I remain before [devant; also owing], in debt to you before you. . . . Always singular and irreplaceable, these laws or injunctions remain untranslatable from one to the other, from some to others, from one language to another, but that makes them no less universal. I must translate, transfer, transport [übertragen; also “transmit”] the untranslatable in (another) turn even where, translated, it remains untranslatable. This is the violent sacrifice of the passage beyond—­Übertragen: übersetzen.22

The “before” that the I discovers as the condition of its surviving “after the world” has left, is both “singular and irreplaceable,” and yet also one that precisely by virtue of its unique untranslatability demands to be translated and transmitted. Derrida’s own text here, even more than usually, is in part itself untranslatable. And yet precisely because of that we must translate and transmit it, aware that any such transmission will inevitably also alter it. But as our previous discussion of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams has indicated, the experience of alteration and of alterability is not simply null and void. Rather, it illuminates the irreducible and therefore significant incommensurability of languages, of their enabling limits and those of the cultures they articulate. Here we finally arrive at the question of our conference: What is the situation of something like “comparative literature” “after the world”—­which is to say, after a world that has largely, although not exclusively, been construed in the image of a single and universal creator, of a limited if powerful tradition, as one and the same, and at the same time as universal and all-­inclusive? West of Eden   263

Note that Derrida never abandons the need of thinking singularity in relation to a certain universality: “Always singular and irreplaceable, these laws or injunctions remain untranslatable.  .  .  . but that makes them no less universal.” This relation, however, is not one of continuity or of homogeneous self-­identity; it is not to be confused with what is most removed from it, what Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (Following)—­L’Animal que donc je suis—­calls the “generalized singular.”23 By contrast, the universality of the singular has to do with its irreducibility to a generic genre, to the “kind” as which God is said to have created all living beings—­and be it “humankind.” The singular does not exist “after its kind,” but it does not exist “before” it either. Rather, the singular is precisely that which resists translation but which therefore also demands it. The singular is that which remains “after” the translation has sought to establish a series of correspondences or equivalences; it is that which escapes such equation, but which also cannot be cognized in and of itself, or experienced directly, in an “intuition,” as Husserl might have said. This resistance of singular literary texts—­particularly evident in poetry, but by no means restricted to it—­can perhaps be “felt” as that which comes “after” cognition, but which can never be reduced to it. It can be felt as wonder, surprise, melancholy, anxiety, hope, rage, but such feelings are in turn never sufficient to define and comprehend the singular. Put more positively, such feelings, far from being something internal and psychological, reach out to the singular without ever touching it. As feelings, however, they are touched by it—­by what they cannot themselves reach and grasp. There is no simple reciprocity here. Indeed, in relinquishing the desire of direct contact, they also allow texts to preserve their alterity. More concretely, perhaps, Benjamin, in his essay on “The Task of the Translator,” refers to what can only partially be transmitted in translation, since it is a function of the irreducible difference of languages, as a certain Gefühlston, a certain “affective tone,” “which words bear with themselves” and which is a function of the relation of signified (Gemeinte) to the specific way the word signifies (die Art des Meinens).24 In the passage of Derrida’s just quoted, such an untranslatable Gefühlston hangs on ambiguous words such as devant—­meaning both “before” and “owing”—­or such as the German word in Celan’s poem tragen (Die Welt ist fort, ich muss dich tragen). Rendered in French as porter, it is translated into English, under­

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standably, as “carry.” But there is another possibility that perhaps bears out the complexity of the German word (if not the French), and it is the word “bear.” It is a word that fascinated Derrida, especially in his discussions of the problem of “witnessing,” which in English, but not in French or German, is something “born”: to “bear witness.” Whereas to “carry” suggests a separation of subject from object as well as a linear movement from point to point—­a conception of movement that Heidegger in Being and Time calls “locomotion”—­the word “bear” signifies rather the effort of sustaining, without necessarily going anywhere. One bears a burden, or a child, but one need not for that reason carry it anywhere, exchanging one place for another. Bearing in this sense is carrying on or carrying out, although not necessarily in the sense of staying the same. To be sure, in the Celan verse, tragen suggests that the I must carry someone or something—­“you”—­somewhere. But in a situation where “the world is gone,” what sort of space is thereby traversed? And in the case of a translation that transmits something untranslatable, what is carried, and how? Derrida concludes his essay dedicated to the memory of Gadamer by seeking to continue a dialogue that death is not allowed to simply end—­in part, perhaps, because it may never really have taken place before. He continues his “uninterrupted dialogue—­between two infinities” by concluding with a verse from a very different German poet, namely Hölderlin: Denn keiner trägt das Leben allein (For no one bears life alone). It is interesting that the very attentive and capable English translators make a slight but significant emendation in translating this verse, which they render as, “For no one bears this life alone.” But which life is “this” life? Is it life with the definite article, as in Hölderlin’s German verse? Or is it “this” life, a singular life that cannot simply be reproduced, not identically at least? To be sure, there are numerous ways of reading this demonstrative pronoun. But in the context of our previous discussion, at least, we cannot ignore the suggestion that life in general—­das Leben—­will always and necessarily be translated as “this” life, even if “this” life is always “another” life, of which we may not know anything at all. Perhaps this indicates the decisive challenge to which comparative literature will have to respond, “after the world”—­respond without claiming to give definitive answers. Comparing languages and literatures not simply

West of Eden   265

on the basis of some worldwide common denominator but also and above all so as to allow their incomparable singularity to emerge and withdraw at the same time. Could this be the task—­or at least one task—­of comparative literature “after the world”—­bearing the exciting but often frustrating singularity of texts so that they can be born(e)?

266   West of Eden

11

After Its Kind

The Biblical Origins of Economic Theology

In the following remarks, I present a reading of passages from the first book of Moses, also known as the book of Genesis. I will be relying on the King James translation primarily, because, at least in the English-­speaking world, this has probably been the most influential form in which those books have existed historically. The reading I am going to offer does not claim in any way to be exhaustive, as it could not, since I am not dealing with the original Hebrew. My purpose is rather to explore what I take to be one aspect of this foundational text, an aspect that has had a powerful, continuing, and in many respects, nefarious effect upon the history it overshadows. Not that this “effect” is caused in any way by the texts I will be discussing. Rather, they provide an insight into some of the more self-­destructive tendencies of cultures that in varying ways are informed by them. Let me begin by quoting one of the most famous lines in the first chapter of Genesis, which, as this title indicates, purports to give an account of the creation of the world, and more specifically, that of man: “God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” (1:27). In this version of the creation of man, two points merit special attention. First, the assertion that man is created “in the image” of God. Despite the innumerable ways it has been interpreted, an “image” generally is understood to involve a mixture of resemblance and disparity. Man created in the image of God must therefore be taken to resemble his Creator, but also to be different from him, just as the image resembles its object but is not identical with it. Resemblance includes dissemblance. Perhaps that is also the sense of the repetition, “God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him . . .” For the image, at least as commonly understood, entails a certain repetition, although not every repetition must be an image. 267

Wherein, then, reside the resemblances and differences of man qua the image of God? The resemblances are indicated by the admonition addressed by God to his creaturely image: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish, of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on the earth.” If all creatures are called upon to be fruitful and multiply, man’s role in the creation is distinguished precisely through this injunction not just to reproduce, but to “conquer” the earth and “to master” its other living inhabitants. Why, it must be asked, is this call to conquest and to mastery, which separates man from the other creatures, necessary? And why should it be addressed specifically to man? A possible response: What must be “conquered” and “mastered” is the difference between creaturely life, which is finite, and the life of the Creator, which is supposed to be infinite. And it must be mastered by being interpreted so as to affirm the predominance of the latter over the former. This means that life itself must be construed as intrinsically limitless and self-­sustaining, above and beyond the limits of earthly life. Any limitations placed upon life will thus be portrayed as accidental and secondary, not deriving from the nature of life itself. But since there remains an irreducible difference between earthly and divine life, this difference must not be allowed to threaten the priority of the latter, of divine life over earthly life. The command to “conquer the earth” and “to master” its creatures reflects the awareness of a relation of forces, an irresolvable tension between the two conceptions of life—­a tension that must be controlled and subdued, “mastered,” if never entirely eliminated. It is this task that is assigned man already in Eden and that, I want to suggest, devolves in a secular age upon sovereign states. But these sovereign states, like Adam and Eve, will be revealed to be part of the problem as much as part of its solution. “Sovereign debt” will thus emerge as the contemporary form of the fall of man from a state in which life appears to be infinite and unblemished by death, into a state in which life appears to be little more than the deferral of death. This story serves to explain mortality, suffering, and scarcity as a punishment for a transgression. Which is to say, the punishment for an act that violated the original order of the creation and that could have been avoided. The fact that the fall is thus depicted as the result of an action thus draws attention away from the irresolvable conflict between the two conceptions of life: as divine and as human, as infinite and as finite, while confirming the priority of the former over the latter. But it also suggests 268   After Its Kind

that the action itself may be rooted in the way the relation of man to God is defined, namely in terms of an “image” that suggests both proximity and irreducible separation. It is not sufficiently remarked that God does not simply create individual beings, but “kinds”: “plants bearing seed in their several kinds, and trees bearing fruit with their seed inside in their several kinds.” God creates “every kind of living creature” but always “after their kind,” as the King James version of the Bible puts it. Since there is no death in Eden, no death before the Fall, and since every singular living being has qua singular a limited life span, the only way to overcome such mortal limitation is through the “kind,” not through the singular member of the species. What must be “conquered,” then, in the prelapsarian creation is the mortality of living beings qua singular, and it is conquered and mastered by man, who gives all creatures their name—­a name that is both proper and generic, since it applies not to individuals but to kinds. A species name, if you will. Hegel’s argument in his Philosophy of Nature that in nature the individual perishes but the species—­that is, nature as spirit, as Geist—­alone survives, is already anticipated by the account in Genesis, which has living beings created generically, “after their kind,” and thus potentially immortal. There is, then, a certain tension in the notion of man as image of God, insofar as it requires that the dissimilarities that separate the two be somehow subordinated and absorbed into their resemblance, without the latter becoming pure identity. This process is centered on the determination of life with respect to the living. The living, insofar as this term designates singular beings, are defined and delimited by their mortality. But this cannot hold for man, if he is to be considered as created in the image of God. For to be universal, and indeed metauniversal, since the universe is his creation, God cannot be so delimited. His being must be eternal. And in principle, the life he creates must be no less so, at least in principle. This holds for natural life as species-­beings, but for man the situation is somewhat different. Since he is created in the image of the one, singular, universal God, he cannot simply survive as a “kind”—­as a “genre”—­or even as a dual or split genre, male and female. As an image of God, man must retain a certain singularity, which the other living beings do not. But this singularity must not be delimited by mortality—­not in principle, at least. For the life of the creation must mirror that of the creator: as a direct expression of After Its Kind   269

his Word, it must be no less universal, and no less eternal—­in principle—­ than its source and origin. Thus, the life of the living is construed as initially no less eternal than its divine source. But only initially. The serpent tempts Eve by reassuring her that, even if she eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and contrary to God’s pronouncement, “You will not die!” Indeed, the serpent promises, “You will be like gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 1:3, 4–­6). The knowledge that is promised—­of good and evil—­is desirable, and it is this desire that “opens” the eyes of Adam and Eve to their own nakedness: which is to say, to their own bodily vulnerability and exposure. The knowledge that the Fall brings with it is thus the knowledge of mortality—­a knowledge that was not there before, not explicitly at least. It introduces suffering, labor, and ultimately death as insurmountable facts of life, for humans no less than for other living creatures. But in so introducing death, the story seeks to retain the idea that, in the beginning, and in its essence, life is no less self-­identical, no less eternal, than the being of its Creator. What I want to suggest, in recounting this well-­known story from the first book of Moses, is that the biblical account of creation encourages a conception of life as inherently and intrinsically self-­identical, in the model of its creator, even and especially where the life concerned is that of human beings. For these human beings are created in the image of the Creator, and hence their lives must be considered to be originally and, if no longer actually, virtually no less self-­identical. The self-­identity of the living thus relegates finitude, mortality, death to the status of a secondary attribute: not one that inheres in the very notion of life itself, but one that afflicts the living qua singular beings. What, now, does all this have to do with the question of “debt,” and the crisis many countries and many individuals are going through today?1 My argument is that the biblical tradition articulated in the first chapter of Genesis outlines a perspective upon which contemporary attitudes toward debt and indebtedness are still in large part dependent. This may seem a strange assertion to make during a period that conceives itself as essentially “secular.” But the modern “secular” category of the autonomous subject—­or of autonomy tout court—­is entirely compatible with, and indeed dependent on, what Heidegger has called an “onto-­theological” 270   After Its Kind

tradition, of which we have a founding and enduring articulation in the text I have been quoting and commenting. What is decisive here is the supposition of an original and originating self-­identical being—­God as Creator—­since it provides a paradigm for construing life on earth. Just as the Creator is represented as universal, exclusive, and self-­contained— as a supreme being that, however, supplies the ideal-­type of all being—­so life on earth is expected to conform to the same self-­identical model. This in turn means that the delimitation of life by death, which delimits what I call “life in the singular”—­the life of the living as singular and mortal—­ comes to be regarded as secondary, external, and in some sense, accidental with respect to the essence of life as such, which is to say, life in general. The consequences for this upon the way indebtedness is construed are decisive. All earthly beings, and in particular, human beings, owe their “life” to their Creator insofar as they are not self-­created. On the other hand, since the life they owe to their Creator must, particularly in the case of human life, be an “image” of the life—­or being—­of the Creator, it must in principle be independent of death. Death and suffering are thus not a direct result of the creation, but the result of “sin” and “the Fall”: that is, the result of a transgression of a divine prohibition. Man is thus doubly indebted: first, for life and existence as such; and second, for transgressing the law of the Creator—­the law of creation—­which interestingly enough involves a certain renunciation of knowledge: the knowledge of good and evil. However, the biblical account also makes clear what the attraction is that led to the transgression as well as to its punishment: Then Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, with his knowledge of good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live for ever.” So Lord God expelled him from the Garden of Eden. (Gen. 3:22–­23)2

If man was created in the “image of God,” this meant that he would be required to sustain the tension between similitude and dissimilitude implied in the notion of image, not try to resolve it by becoming in turn a God—­ which here means becoming immortal. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and their consequent condemnation to toil, care, After Its Kind   271

conflict, and mortality thus renders explicit what their fate was to begin with—­which is to say, that of a limited, finite, mortal living being. At the same time, the nonacceptance of this fate is already programmed in the story of the creation as initially the Garden of Eden, in which life regenerates itself from “seeds” that are “internal” to it. This in turn reflects the being of the Creator-­God, who is already singular and individuated—­“I am that I am”: however this is translated, and there are several versions,3 it is the use of the first-­person singular, which does not vary from translation to translation, that is decisive. For it is precisely the status of this first-­person singular with respect to life and to the living that is ambiguous, already at the origins of monotheism. On the one hand, the “I” can only be itself to the extent that its self-­identity transcends temporal change. On the other, such transcendence is the property strictly of the divine Creator, but not of the creatures He creates—­except insofar as they are seen as exemplars or instances of a “kind.” This is why all creatures are created “according to their kind.” Each kind is a mix of homo-­and heterogeneity. The kind is heterogeneous insofar as it is created by an external Creator. But it is homogeneous insofar as its individual instantiations are considered, qua singular, to be mortal and transient, so that only the kind remains the same. This selfsame kind mirrors the self-­identity of the Creator, considered as a universalized singularity. The universal singularity of the Creator-­God is thus reflected in the universal singularity of the different creatures qua “kinds” or species (what Feuerbach, and then Marx, call “species-­being”: Gattungswesen). Man is no exception: “Adam” in Hebrew is a collective noun, meaning “mankind.” Indebtedness—­the situation of being in debt—­is one aspect of heterogeneity. Creatures are indebted to their Creator for their lives. But their indebtedness is implicitly defined with respect to a being that is free of all debt, or alternatively, is indebted only to itself, which is not indebtedness at all. Indebtedness involves both a spatial and a temporal relation. It is always indebtedness to another, understood as existing apart from and outside of—­spatially distinct from—­the indebted. But it is equally temporal: it involves a previous commitment to a certain future: a promise (or when written, a “promissory note”). However, this relation of indebtedness can be experienced in a variety of ways. What I have been describing through recourse to the Bible can be called the “onto-­theological” conception of debt, insofar as it presupposes an original and originating Creditor, source 272   After Its Kind

of all wealth and value, whose being is supreme and “sovereign” insofar as it is held to exist independently of all relation, of all dependence upon any spatiotemporal alterity. This onto-­theological concept of debt (and credit: the two are obviously inseparable) thus considers debt and indebtedness as emanating from an original plenitude and self-­presence. The original creditor is the Creator of the universe and of life itself. He is considered to be both singular and yet also universal, infinite and yet individualized, indeed gendered. And the life he gives is not a gift but rather a loan. For if “The Lord giveth,” he also “taketh away” ( Job 1:21). In short, the Lord as monotheistic Creator of the universe and of life, retains the right of property over what he “gives.” In short, he lends. Life in the singular becomes a loan, eventually to be repaid in full. Time thus changes its significance after the Fall. Before, it was the medium of growth and the proliferation of life. Afterward, however, it emerges as the medium of deferred death—­which also means, of deferred repayment. The Fall transforms time into the measure of the life span of the living, which no longer is characterized as the reproduction and growth of life, but rather as the deferral of death. The means of this deferral is “labor”: “With sweat on your brow / shall you eat your bread, / until you return to the soil, / as you were taken from it.” God had originally promised to kill man if he disobeyed his injunction. The serpent told Eve that God would not carry through on his pledge. Both were right. The death penalty was imposed—­death was imposed as penalty and punishment—­ but as a suspended sentence. Human life became a struggle to ward off death, sickness, and infirmity: a struggle that can succeed only temporarily. For a while. Time becomes the medium in which this “while”—­as “whiling away”—­is measured. The same pattern obtains in God’s response to the fratricide of Cain. Instead of punishing Cain with immediate death, as Cain demands, he defers judgment, allowing Cain in the meanwhile to found a family under the protection of a “mark” that God has placed on him: the first mention of an inscription in the Bible. This “mark” allows Cain to survive for a while, and in that meanwhile to settle “in the land of Nod, east of Eden,” where “he became builder of a town” and father of a great family, from whom all “tent-­dwellers and owners of livestock” descend, as well as “all (those) who play the lyre and the flute,” becoming also “the ancestor of all metalworkers, in bronze or iron” (Gen. 1:4, 15–­22). After Its Kind   273

It is as if the Fall and loss of the Garden of Eden, followed by the murder of Abel, has allowed God’s initial investment in the world to turn into a quite profitable enterprise, founding cities, agriculture, and industries. But what all this “growth”—­the biblical antecedent of the economic ideal of “growth” that has dominated social and political thinking for the past five centuries at least—­reveals, is that it is delimited by a horizon of debt and remains under the shadow of a suspended death-­sentence. Why a death-­sentence? Because if we take the first book of Moses seriously—­and in terms of its consequences, it cannot be taken seriously enough—­it provides the groundwork for understanding human life as a form of laborious repayment of the “gift” of life through labor, suffering, and violence, and ultimately as self-­sacrifice. However, the “self ” that is thus sacrificed as “guilty” and “indebted” is what remains of the divine and creative self-­presence, once mankind has yielded to the desire to become “like” its “Creator”—­through a knowledge that would produce eternal life. For eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is only the first step toward eating of the tree of life, as God makes clear in punishing mankind. In its original Edenic state there was no evil, only good, and therefore the knowledge of their difference can only imply a perspective that transcends that of the Garden—­in short, the perspective of the Creator. To be “like” the creator would be to attain what no singular living being can hope to attain, namely the universal and eternal life of the one and only monotheistic Deity. To want to be “like” the Creator, “in his image,” reflects an anxiety that is ready to “economize” on the gift of life by treating it as a loan that must be paid back, as a debt that must be “redeemed.” “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God” ( Job 19:25–­26). How do the debt crises of recent decades, including both the economic realities of debt and their political exploitation, continue to be informed by this economic–­theological tradition? First and foremost, by construing the relation of debtor to creditor as one dominated by the telos of “redemption”—­a word that, not by accident, applies both to the reimbursement of debt and to the purification of a sinful life. Another word that functions similarly in the lexicon of American consumer capitalism is, as discussed in chapter 8, “save”—­to spend, which means, increasingly, 274   After Its Kind

to indebt oneself, is treated as a process of “saving” (and this permits one to join the community of the “saved.)” Salvation passes by debt, and social standing is determined by “credit ratings.”4 Ever since Luther declared that the royal road to salvation depends on “faith alone”—­sola fides—­and that this faith was not merit-­based but a gift—­credit, and therefore debt, have been the positive and negative signs of salvation, social and otherwise. As Walter Benjamin argued in a fragment written in the early 1920s, capitalism should be seen not just as the outgrowth of Protestantism— in particular, Calvinism—­but as its successor: which is to say, as a cult/ religion which for the first time in history—­asserts Benjamin—­did not seek to exculpate but rather to universalize guilt (which, in German, is almost the same word as debt: in the singular, Schuld, means “guilt,” and in the plural, Schulden, it means “debts.”) This tension between the moral–­religious signification that is associated with the singular, and the economic, associated with the plural, reflects a central tension in modern “Western” history, which is now in the process of globalizing itself, albeit not without strains and potential conflict. This tension derives from the relation of the singular to the plural. Biblically, it is between the one and only God, whose followers proclaim, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord”; and the many that make up the “kinds” of living beings that populate the creation—­and in particular, “mankind.” In the monotheistic perspective, the model of identity is homogeneous: God has no origin beyond Himself. As creature, man is heterogeneous, but since his origin is the self-­identical Creator, that self-­identity is mirrored in the unity of “mankind”—­of “man” as a unified species, above and beyond differences of gender and of plurality. Thus, in the Western European tradition—­which is also the tradition out of which modern capitalism emerges—­this tension between the one and the many is “mediated” by the idea of the generic individual, site of Luther’s appeal to sola fides. The physical individual may be split between body and soul, sin and grace, evil and good, self-­interest and faith, but to the extent that its creaturely being is derived from the divine being of God, all of these splits are at least potentially resolvable in what is taken to be the indivisibility of humanity, of man as kind. Gender, dividing the homogeneity of genre, is relegated to a secondary, accessory position, derived from “man” as Eve is from Adam. What this brief and no doubt simplificatory excursus into biblical After Its Kind   275

exegesis suggests is that the onto-­theological tradition to which much economic and political thinking remains profoundly “indebted” is one that subordinates “debt” to “property,” “credit” to “interest,” “indebtedness” to “appropriation,” and most importantly of all, the singular plurality of the living to the generic indivisibility of life. Living beings are mortal, but they were not so created—­mortality is understood as a punishment—­as a debt that, because of sin, can only be redeemed through death. The book of Genesis encourages and supports this set of economic priorities even though obviously it can and has been read in many other ways. One particularly dangerous result of this reading is that the economy of salvation that informs the prevailing sense of identity, individual and collective, easily accommodates a process in which debt can be redeemed only through further debt: a kind of onto-­theological Ponzi scheme. The pure and perfect growth of the prelapsarian world is replaced by the fallen “bubble” of a debt that produces new wealth—­interest—­until it bursts, revealing the irredeemability of life on earth. A theologically sanctioned and financially implemented death drive. This is not to argue that Ponzi schemes and the speculative ventures of contemporary finance capital are inevitable, but rather that they are supported by a tradition that has long encouraged this sort of circular activity—­with its implosive, self-­destructive consequences. Not for nothing does the redemption of the guilty pass via the apocalyptic destruction of the world of sin and of debt, in which some have glimpsed the final “jubilee”—­the final redemption from debt. Self-­interest can only hope to redeem its indebtedness through (sacrificial) self-­destruction. This is why if it is true that capitalism “is a religion”—­and that it continues the biblical and above all Christian tradition—­it follows that it exacerbates the self-­destructive tendencies of that tradition. Ecologically and militarily, modern nation-­states, driven increasingly by private corporate and financial interests, have developed the power to destroy the conditions of life on earth—­either instantaneously or gradually. All of this is legitimized as necessary for the defense of interests—­private and public. The imperative to growth finds one of its most powerful contemporary expressions in the notion that debts must be repaid with interest; and that if this is not possible, then at least those debts must be cultivated that can produce profits for those who know how to sell them to others while concealing the improbability of repayment.5 276   After Its Kind

The equivocal status of a supreme being defined as the one and only God returns today as a mode for those “bankers” and speculators who, in the unforgettable words of the head of Goldman-­Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, uttered at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, do “God’s work”—­and who expect to be rewarded accordingly. As Genesis tells us, that work can include destroying the world—­but since it is a world created, the Creator has the right and power to “uncreate” it. As with the book of Genesis, what is most revealing is not the paradigm itself but the desires and anxieties to which it responds. “We thought he was God,” was how Elie Wiesel explained his blind faith in Bernie Madoff.6 But what he thereby revealed, without explicitly saying it, was that he—­and many others—­needed such a godlike figure and were ready to pay any price to get it. A decade later, very little seems to have changed in this respect. The weaker and more fearful a people, or class, or group, the more it is ready to seek the solution to its problems in a leader who seems to embody the self-­sufficiency that they want, playing on the ambiguity of this word: lack and desire. The 2016 election in the United States only confirms this trend. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche speculates that the creation of the gods, and indeed of the one and only God, was a result of the fear that primitive societies had of their antecedents. They felt that they “owed” everything to them, and that they had to be “paid back”—­Nietzsche underscores these words—­through sacrifice and performances. The more powerful and rich the living, the greater the debt, which thus disclosed its character as unrequitable. For the living this implies that life in the singular is a gift that could never be paid back. But it does not therefore cease to produce a sense of obligation: obligation to others, to the antecedents, to contemporaries, to descendants yet to come. This does not seem to be the prevailing attitude today, in an age dominated by neoliberalism, by nationalism and by other xeno-­and heterophobic attitudes and policies. The lack of this sense of obligation results when the conceptions of debt and guilt are informed by the mono-­theological economism I have been describing, which in turn draws its strength from the inability to accept a life that is finite, mortal, and heterogeneously singular. The catachresis, “death,” is thus substantivized by being reconceived as a source of profit and surplus. But this does not cause the underlying anxiety to vanish or to diminish, it merely tends to transform some of its energy into aggression: against others to begin with, and then, ultimately, against itself. After Its Kind   277

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12

Like—­Come Again?!

On Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence

AMBUSH: THE “BLOCK” Narratives of historical progress have traditionally drawn much of their support from the biblical and particularly Christian notion of a Heilsgeschichte: a salvational narrative starting with an original innocence (Eden), followed by a transgressive act (“the Fall”), resulting in mortality and suffering as punishment, which in turn opens the way toward an eternal life—­a trajectory prefigured in the sacrificial life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. God becoming man thus presaged man sharing in the fate of God. With the Reformation, however, and in particular its Lutheran form, this narrative was severely undermined. The institutions charged with assuring the earthly relay of this progressive movement, in particular the universal church, and subsequently also its secular political avatars—­nation-­states with imperial ambitions, a notion of sovereignty as indivisible, a conception of reason construed as autonomous and universal, a market reputed to be “free” and self-­regulating, and finally individuals construed as self-­determining—­sought to present themselves as the earthly agents of and actors in an essentially progressive and redemptive teleological movement of “history.” Philosophically, a certain culmination was reached in German Idealism with the Hegelian dialectic, which mobilized negativity as the immanent motor of transcendence, working toward a realization of a whole, understood not simply as individual or collective, moral or political, spiritual or material, but ultimately as the movement of conceptual–­cognitive thinking coming into its own. Such a dialectical movement can also be interpreted as part an ongoing “Counter-­Reformation,” as described by Benjamin in his Origin of the German Mourning Play. One of its consequences was to relegitimize the agents and institutions of universality by taking up the Reformation’s, and in particular Luther’s, insistence that any universal scheme of salvation had 279

to take the singularity of “faith” into account (implicit in the doctrine of sola fides) and by seeking to absorb such “faith,” secularized as loyalty or patriotism into the operation of the structures concerned. One of the key terms in the Hegelian vocabulary that was designed to reveal the negative immanence of the transcendent general in the singular, the whole in the part, was “mediation” (Vermittlung): mediation sought to name the movement of the concept as intrinsic self-­negation, as “determinate negation” (bestimmte Negation), constituting a process that, like Dante’s Divina Commedia, was ultimately to culminate in a certain circularity, one which would encompass, preserve, and situate the individual elements of its progression as stages of the whole on the way toward its self-­realization. It is therefore not simply an accident if one of the most prophetic and powerful challenges to this grand narrative was directed precisely at the term “mediation”; it took the form of affirming the value of a local, nonuniversal language against the putative philosophical privilege of the German language. In 1843, in a book that is neither a philosophical treatise nor a piece of narrative fiction but somewhere between the two, the fictional narrator makes the following, grandiose claim: Repetition is the new category that will be discovered. If one knows anything of modern philosophy . . . one will readily see . . . that repetition proper is what has mistakenly been called mediation. It is incredible how much flurry has been made in Hegelian philosophy over mediation. . . . One should rather seek to think through mediation and then give a little credit to the Greeks. The Greek explanation of the theory of being and nothing, the explanation of “the moment,” “non-­being,” etc., trumps Hegel. “Mediation” is a foreign word, “repetition” is a good Danish word, and I congratulate the Danish language on a philosophical term.1

The “good Danish word” translated into English generally as “repetition” is a bit more complicated than that: Gjentagelse is cognate with the English “again” (gjen) and “take” (tagelse), and as such suggests a process that is far less immanent—­and also, less rewarding—­than the Hegelian notion of Vermittlung would imply. Ver-­mittlung, mediation, claims to be situated 280  Like—­ Come Again?!

“in the middle”—­not as an interval or a between, but in the midst of that which it is dialectically driving forward, thereby determining everything in terms of its negations. “Taking-­again” by contrast suggests an external intervention, something or someone that takes away, and it is upon this aspect of the “good Danish word” that Kierkegaard’s narrator plays, with bitter irony: Indeed, it seemed . . . as if my great talk, which I now would not repeat at any price, were only a dream from which I awoke to have life unremittingly retake everything it had given without giving anything back. (172)

The narrator, named Constantin Constantius, who, as his name suggests, seeks a certain constancy in life, does not find what he was looking for in his experiment and experience of Gjentagelse, which “takes” (tagelse) again (gjen), without giving anything back that might compensate for the corrosive effects of time. Or even help to remove a certain blockage. For this is the “origin” of his concern with repetition, as is made clear in the very first lines, which set the scene for what is to come: When I was occupied for some time, at least on occasion, with the question of repetition . . . I suddenly had the thought: You can, after all, take a trip to Berlin; you have been there once before, and now you can prove to yourself whether a repetition is possible and what importance it has. At home I had been practically immobilized by this question. Say what you will, this question will play a very important role in modern philosophy, for repetition is a crucial expression for what “recollection” was to the Greeks. Just as they taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition. (131)

However “fictional” (or more precisely, “frictional,” which is to say, intratextually overdetermined) all of the narrator’s declarations doubtless are, they do not resist the temptation to converge in a grandiose, sweeping prediction: “Just as (the Greeks) taught that all knowing is a recollecting, modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition” despite the rather Like—­Come Again?!   281

private, not to say idiosyncratic, situation in which they are uttered (“At home I had been practically immobilized by this question”). This convergence of the private–­domestic with the historical reflects the narrator’s conviction that what distinguishes the philosophy of the Greeks from that of his contemporaries is a concern with what he calls “life.” For the Greeks, philosophy was concerned primarily with “knowing” as “recollection.” “Modern philosophy”—­a philosophy largely to come—­“will teach that all life is a repetition.” Modern philosophy is and will be concerned not primarily with knowing, but with life. And not just with life in general, but with living in the singular. Hence the legitimacy of the first-­person discourse with which this treatise begins and which in different forms it maintains throughout. But the first-­person discourse here is more complex than it might seem, since the “first person” is never really “first”: here, he is the eponymous narrator–­author Constantine Constantius, whose name does not so much point to an individual person as to a general attitude. But this general attitude is nevertheless associated with a singular voice or point of view, with a person who engages in relationships, performs actions, makes statements, judges, has desires and fears, and so on. A student not just of Hegel but of Johann Gottlieb Fichte,2 Kierkegaard, even more than here his narrator, was well aware both of the necessity and of the difficulty of bridging the gap between life in general and living in the singular, and this awareness takes the form of developing a highly problematic third-­person narrative in which the two converge, but never merge into one. What results is not the objective third-­person discourse that has previously dominated philosophy as the disinterested love of wisdom or of knowledge.3 A somewhat similar situation repeats itself, in a very different setting, some fifty years later. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche, writing in the first person, looks back upon his life and work; and in the chapter dedicated to Thus Spoke Zarathustra attributes a rather enigmatic origin to the thought that has since become known, in English at least, as that of “the eternal return (or more recently, recurrence).” I will come back to this translation shortly:4 I now recount the history of Zarathustra. The basic conception of the work, the thought of an Eternal Return [Wiederkunft], this highest form of affirmation that can ever be attained—­belongs to August of 282  Like—­ Come Again?!

the year 1881: it was flung onto a sheet (of paper) with the caption, “6,000 feet beyond man and time.” On that day I was walking through the forests along the lake of Silvaplana; at a mighty pyramid-­like towering and piled-­up block not far from Surlei I stopped. Then, there came to me this thought.5

Unlike Kierkegaard’s Constantius, the author of Ecce Homo signs for himself, he is not eponymous. But his title already suggests a certain distance and attitude: Ecce Homo, “Behold the man,” refers—­repeats—­the words of Pontius Pilate as they are recounted in the Gospel of St John, presenting not himself, to be sure, but Jesus, beaten and crowned with thorns, to the crowd. The title of the text is thus both a citation and a demonstration, a gesture, pointing to an image of a man claiming to be the son of God and savior of mankind, on the eve of his death—­or more precisely, of his execution. To use this title to designate an autobiographical text is thus to condense in one gesture the gap that Constantine Constantius was still striving to overcome, between the first-­person singular and the third person as voice of a more general “mankind.” Constantine is still at home, in Denmark, when he introduces the question of repetition. The author of Ecce Homo is no longer at home, even and especially with his repeated, borrowed title. The title combines the gesture of revealing—­“Behold . . .”—­or more literally, the deictic-­indicative-­imperative “There!”—­with that of being revealed “. . . the man.” The real narrator who is posed as the fictional author of the book combines the positions of both: he offers his life and work up to be appreciated, judged, worshipped, or condemned—­or all at once. He is both subject and object; but unlike the claim of the Hegelian dialectic, it is anything but certain that the two are identical. Or ever will be. In the passage that concerns us here, Nietzsche is high up in the Swiss Alps, far from his starting point and yet in a place that has become a second home to him. Like Constantine, Nietzsche describes a specific situation and a surprising experience. While walking along presumably familiar paths, he comes to a stop before “a mighty pyramidal, piled-­up towering block—­bei einem mächtigen pyramidal aufgethürmten Block—­a phrase whose complexity most English translations, for the sake of elegance and idiomaticity, drastically reduce, as does for instance, Walter Kaufman in his translation of this phrase as a “powerful, pyramidal rock.”6 Like—­Come Again?!  

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Unfortunately, what is thereby sacrificed to idiomaticity turns out to be decisive. For what counts is not just that the block is “huge,” or “towering,” but that its pyramidal shape appears to be the result of a gradual process of accumulation and of stratification—­and that it is not just a “rock” but a block that has accumulated petrified energy, “piled” or “heaped up” (aufgethürmt). This sense of being “piled up” makes the “block” both more massive and less stable, as though its layers could decompose or come apart. Time, like Nietzsche’s progression, is brought to a halt not just by an immobile block, but by a process of petrification and sedimentation, in which the base is much larger than the top. It is in the shadow of this very singular “block,” then, that the “thought” in question both came to him and, we might suspect, overcame him, stopping him short in his tracks.7 Whereas Constantine Constantius still thinks he can escape his blockage at home by taking a trip—­back to Berlin, where he had been once before—­Nietzsche no longer seems to have this luxury. But this does not mean that he remains entirely immobile. Far from it. Only that the mobility is no longer a forward progression from one place to another—­ but rather what Heidegger, largely influenced by Nietzsche, will later call Bewegtheit—­being moved (translated generally as “movement”)—­as opposed to “locomotion,” Bewegung (translated generally as “motion”).8 But Nietzsche’s recourse to the vision of a “mighty, pyramidal, heaped­up towering block” echoes images he used fifteen years earlier in his essay On Truth and Lies in an Extra-­moral Sense (1873),9 in which he reflects on the relation of thinking, language, and perception to what is generally considered “truth.” Thinking, perceiving, and speaking, he argues there, are only conventionally related to what they presume to represent or to designate; responding to a desire to identify, which he associates with the common and reassuring notion of “truth,” sensations are transformed into images, which in turn are transformed into concepts, and the only “truth” in this process is the process itself, one of transformation and alteration—­of Übertragung,—­but in the name of identification and of cognition, which proceeds as much by forgetting as by retaining. Impermanent, fleeting sensations and images are rendered ostensibly more permanent and durable as concepts on the basis of a process of selection and exclusion that, although largely unconscious, is by no means entirely arbitrary. This process seeks out similarities and ignores differences. The result,

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Nietzsche observes, is that “truths are illusions which have been forgotten as such” (182). And he continues, [Man] no longer tolerates being carried away by sudden impressions, by visualizations [Anschauungen], he generalizes all of these impressions into colorless, cooler concepts, in order to attach to them the vehicle of his life and of his actions. The only thing that distinguishes man from animal depends on this ability to liquefy graphic metaphors into a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. In the realm of such schemata it becomes possible to do something that would never have succeeded with graphically visual first impressions: to erect a pyramidal order with castes and orders, a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, setting of borders, all of which now opposes that other visualizable world of first impressions as that which is firmer, more universal, more familiar, more human and thus as that which is both regulative and imperative. . . . One can admire man here as a mighty architect, who succeeds in piling up [das Auftürmen] as it were on flowing water an infinitely complex conceptual dome. (182–­84, my emphasis)

The process of replacing fleeting impressions and images with more stable and lasting concepts is here compared to the construction—­again, largely unconscious—­of an order that is compared to a “pyramidal order” with its hierarchy of “castes” and hence its subordination of the singular under what is taken to be general. And this pyramidal order is also described as the result of a progressive process, of an Auftürmen, literally a heaping­up, much like that associated with the “mighty block” not far from Surlei, where Nietzsche will first encounter, and indeed be overwhelmed by, the thought of the eternal return. But it is not enough to be simply subjected to the overwhelming force of this unheard-­of thought. If the “block” is the result of a process that cannot be retraced to a deliberate act or design or intention, the response it evokes, sudden and abrupt, is no different. The thought that so powerfully imposes itself is immediately and unreflectively “flung” onto paper: hingeworfen, literally, “thrown away,” away from the thrower, from the writer.

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Indeed, it seems that it can be recalled only in the form of the perfect participle, hingeworfen, having been cast off or cast away. The thought is a throwaway resulting from the encounter with this static, impervious, but also powerful, towering, pyramidal “block.” As a result, the “block” can be said to leave certain traces. Its power is not simply contained within its heaped-­up form, since it produces an equally powerful response, which will soon become Nietzsche’s major work, Zarathustra. But the aftermath of this encounter does not simply point to Zarathustra. There is another intermediate text that contains the first formal announcement of the greatest and most “abysmal thought.” I will shortly turn to these responses. But before I do, I will follow Nietzsche’s train of thought in the Zarathustra chapter of Ecce Homo one step further—­which also means one step back. Having dated and situated his confrontation with the “block” precisely: August of the year 1881” and “6,000 feet beyond man and time,” Nietzsche goes on to recall that some eighteen months earlier something had taken place that can hardly be called an event, but that nonetheless is described as one of the indispensable “preconditions” of Zarathustra: If I count from this day back a few months, I find, as a foretoken [Vorzeichen], a sudden and profoundly decisive alteration of my taste, above all in music. One can perhaps reckon all of Zarathustra as music—­surely a rebirth in the art of hearing was one of its preconditions. (182–­84)

Without any further explanation, Nietzsche designates a “rebirth in the art of hearing” to have been “one of (the) preconditions” for Zarathustra, and hence presumably for its “basic conception,” the ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen. Zarathustra is thus declared to be “music,” a text that must not just be read but also listened to, with a reborn “art of hearing.” When we arrive at that text, I will show how the acoustic dimension plays an important role in the emergence of the ewige(n) Wiederkunft—­a role that has been largely neglected. But to prepare for the interpretation of such acoustics, it may help to return, briefly, to the notes that Nietzsche wrote shortly after The Birth of Tragedy, in the early 1870s. In these notes, which lead up to the essay quoted—­On Truth and Lies in an Extra-­Moral Sense—­Nietzsche describes the conceptual–­cognitive 286  Like—­ Come Again?!

function of language as a result of a reduction of “tropes” that bear no necessary, internal relationship to what they seem to designate. Nietzsche’s position here could easily be understood as constituting a performative paradox. For on the one hand, he insists that all conceptual and representational use of language is derived from dormant metaphors and figures, from sense impressions that have been translated into images and images that have been codified as concepts—­that is, as more or less stable and univocal words and phrases. But on the other, he seems to be arguing for an elimination of illusion—­of the illusion that language and concepts are anything but illusions. In other words, Nietzsche is arguing for a true recognition of truth as illusion, and of language as its medium. One of the ways he attempts to resolve this paradox is to explore alternative uses of language, habits of perception and modes of representation, alternatives that no longer claim a direct connection to what they seem to designate or postulate. It is this that leads him to describe the function of music as that of “a supplement to language,” capable of rendering “many stimuli and stimuli-­contexts [Reizzustände] that language is incapable of depicting” (111). In other words, music—­and sound more generally—­would, from this perspective, be less reductive of the singular differences that conceptual–­cognitive discourse tends to sacrifice to sameness. This could be one reason why a “rebirth in the art of hearing” could be identified as one of the essential preconditions of Zarathustra, in which the thought of the eternal return is most amply articulated. One particularly memorable occasion is recalled later in the same chapter of Ecce Homo dedicated to Zarathustra. Nietzsche remembers how he was forced to spend a certain time in Rome, which “for the poet of Zarathustra” was “the most disreputable place on earth.” There, where he wrote “that most solitary song that has ever been written, the Night-­song,” he recalls “a melody of unutterable dejection [Schwermuth] going through my head, whose refrain I rediscovered in the words, “dead from immortality” [todt vor Unsterblichkeit]. If we read and listen carefully to this refrain, we might note the singular and yet idiomatic use of the preposition vor, which will recur (although, in chronological terms, it has already occurred) at a decisive point in the articulation of the “thought.” Vor in German—­before—­designates a certain proximity, spatial as well as temporal, but it can also, as here, designate a causal relationship (“from,” which is how the phrase is usually translated). It is precisely this conjuncture of a causality without direct Like—­Come Again?!   287

contact, a causality out of—­from—­proximity, that will return at a decisive moment in the articulation of Nietzsche’s “most affirmative thought” to suggest that, like all “affirmation,” this thought is also and perhaps above all a response. In the passage from Ecce Homo, which remembers and reflects on the initial encounter with the “thought,” Nietzsche is stopped short, near—­before, in front of—­the powerfully towering, heaped-­up pyramidal block. The block, in short, is not just a block, much less a rock. It blocks Nietzsche’s forward motion, his walking, but at the same time overwhelms him with another kind of movement: Da . . . kam mir der Gedanke—­There and then, the thought came to me. Da, as shall see, is itself something like the tip of a powerful pyramidal towering iceberg. It can mean “there” but also “then”—­and even “there and then.”10 It can point to but also interrupt. It repeats itself, but with a difference—­with many differences.11 And the place it defines recalls that of Kierkegaard’s Constantius, since it describes the situation of a solitary if not isolated individual. This sense of solitude, though not necessarily of isolation, is what Nietzsche recalls shortly after remembering the “rebirth of hearing” that impregnated him, as it were, with the offspring he was to produce eighteen months later. Nietzsche recalls “the most solitary song ever written,” and above all its repeated refrain, “dead from (out of) Immortality.” A certain solitude will also set the scene for the three canonical texts in which Nietzsche’s “most affirmative” but also “most abysmal thought” is deployed, and to which I now turn.

THE CONFIRMATION AND THE SEAL: “THE GREATEST HEAVYWEIGHT” (THE GAY SCIENCE) Toward the end of Book 4 of The Gay Science, just before the announcement of Zarathustra (Incipit Tragoedia), in a section entitled “The Greatest Heavyweight,” we find the first appearance of what Nietzsche called his “most abysmal thought.” This appearance takes place in the form of a highly theatrical scene, which is presented to the reader as a thought experiment: What if, one day or night, a demon stole [nachschliche] into your most lonely loneliness and said to you: “This life, as you live it today and have lived it, you will once again and again countless times have to live; and there will be nothing new about it, but each pain and each pleasure and each thought and sigh and everything unutterably small 288  Like—­ Come Again?!

and large in your life must come again to you, and everything in the same series and sequence—­and just so this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and just so this moment [Augenblick] and I myself. The eternal sand clock of existence is turned over again and again—­and you with it, speck of dust!”—­Would you not hurl yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon, who spoke so? Or have you once experienced an extraordinary moment where you would answer him: “You are a God and never did I hear anything more Godlike!” If that thought would gain power over you it would take you, as you are, and change you, and perhaps crush [zermalmen] you; the question with all things and each, “Do you want this once again and again countless times?” would weigh on your actions as the greatest heavyweight! Or how well disposed you would have to become toward yourself and life in order to desire nothing more than this last eternal confirmation and seal?12

If the Nietzsche of Truth and Lies could be accused of indulging in a performative–­cognitive contradiction—­that of using tropes to expose the irreducibly tropical nature of language, thinking, and reality, in which identity is always a product of a process of a transference that is intrinsically unending although extrinsically always “closed” (but in the sense of interrupted)—­then one of the ways to respond to this “contradiction” would be precisely to theatricalize language and thinking, which is to say, to make its representative-­referential function dependent upon what C. S. Peirce called the “interpretant,”13 that is, its signifying and address function. If theatricality can be construed as representation for another,14 then it is not surprising that this appeal to the other—­in the form of the reader—­ should mark all of Nietzsche’s efforts (at least initially)15 to deploy his most “abysmal” and also most “affirmative” thought. Here, it takes the form not just of a thought experiment, but of one that is explicitly addressed to the reader—­as that other implicated in every text qua text while never being absorbed or integrated fully into it. The referential “illusion” of language is thus counterbalanced, but never effaced or simply transcended, by this singular appeal to the reader (and as we shall see, listener), who here is addressed as both spectator and judge. Reading thus is called upon to respond to what I have called “the apparition of language,” which is to say, to its distinctive conjunction of emergence and withdrawal.16 Like—­Come Again?!   289

The passage begins with a question: “What if . . .” that rapidly extends into a kind of scenario: an address, attributed to “a demon” that has “stolen into your loneliest loneliness.” The discourse comes from within, even if it is attributed to a “demon”—­to something or someone that is both part of and alien to one’s self-­consciousness. This demon knows what one doesn’t want to know. The demon recalls the Freudian unconscious, with the important difference that it speaks directly to the self-­consciousness of the reader, as opposed to indirectly, through symptoms. And like the unconscious, its existence hardly diminishes the sense of solitude of the self-­conscious I. Loneliness is still the setting: one is alone with one’s unconscious as with one’s demon. But one is no longer simply “one.” This is why the demon is said to have “stolen” or “slipped” (nachschliche) into the reader’s solitude. The reader, then, is no longer entirely alone—­no longer “all-­one.” And indeed, no reader or listener is ever entirely alone, since he or she is only a reader with respect to that other thing called a “text”—­or in this case, the discourse that is itself just another form of text. A form that seems to speak for itself, in contrast to the block at Surlei, a heaped­up congealed towering accumulation of other experiences, which must be tapped into in order to reveal its contents. Here, however, what is being proposed to the reader/listener goes beyond the silence of the block. What makes the offer both particularly tempting and frightening is its use of time. Time, which otherwise assures the irretrievability of what passes in it—­“All the mornings in the world never return” (Pascal Quignard)—­here is proposed as being precisely retrievable. But only as an idea. For the proposition supposes what would otherwise ruin it as a reality: it proposes that “everything unutterably small and large in your life” would come “again to you, and . . . in the same series and sequence” to you. But this “you” presupposes a consciousness that would already be different from what returns: it would be a consciousness that knows that which returns to be the same as what it experienced. In short, it would be a self-­consciousness that would remember the return as a return, and hence as something different from what it “originally” was. This is the part that tempts. But at the same time, in this bid to transcend time as the medium of finitude, the “thought” is terrifying, for it inserts the “you”—­the I—­in an infinite regress and progress that has the potentiality of “crushing” it. For it must be the same in order to contemplate the return, but were the return to be entirely self-­identical—­“this spider and 290  Like—­ Come Again?!

this moonlight between the trees and . . . this moment [Augenblick] and I myself ”—­it would entail a proliferation of “I’s” and “you’s” and “this’s” (moments) without any possibility of their being recognized as the same. This idea of recurrence thus exposes the aporetic nature of singularity: to become recognizable as unique, it can no longer be unique. This is why the proposal of the demon concerns not a reality, but an idea, which, however can have very real, even material (corporeal) effects. For the idea concerns not primarily cognition, but life. No new knowledge is promised; indeed, nothing new at all is suggested, but “merely” the idea of the recurrence of everything that has been, and which thereby in a certain sense also continues to be: “Everything unutterably small and large in your life,” including “this spider and this moonlight between the trees and . . . this moment [Augenblick] and I myself.” The only thing “new” here is that the affirmation of this paradoxical possibility is what shall distinguish the “transhuman”—­the Übermensch—­from previous forms of humanity. It is this affirmation that will make the difference, precisely by affirming the possibility of a recurrence of the same that will no longer be the same: the same as different. It should not be overlooked here—­and this is what distinguishes Nietzsche’s early notion of the eternal recurrence from his later, cosmological musings—­that the idea has as its frame of reference a singular life and situation. This is why its most powerful articulations will always be expressed not as theses but as scenes and scenarios. For only the latter can claim to contain and reverse temporality as a medium of irretrievable succession. There can be no eternal return or recurrence without there first being something delimited that can recur. The delimiting principle is, first of all, “this life, as you live it today and have lived it.” “Today” delimits the span of life “as you live it . . . and have lived it.” Recurrence presupposes this delimitation: an unlimited flow (of time) cannot recur. Life cannot be relived in general: it must be singularized and determined in order to be able to become the object of the demonstrative pronoun “this.” The thisness of the life in question is then further defined as an object of perception, here still mainly visual. It includes, and indeed is determined by “this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and just so this moment and I myself.” “This” life will consist of a series and sequence of such moments. The life that is to be thought of and affirmed as eternally recurrent is described as a concatenation of such perceptual moments. But such Like—­Come Again?!   291

perception presupposes a perceiver situated at a certain distance from and proximity to what has and is being lived. In short, its delimitation, which is absolutely essential to the possibility of its eternal recurrence, is inseparable from the position of a spectator at a certain remove from what is going on: from the spider and the moonlight between the trees. (Note that moonlight will return in a moment, but in a very different “light”). The spider presumably spins webs, a figure for the textual interconnectedness of disparate places that in themselves are empty but in the net form an ensemble. The moonlight is reflected light that is not itself the source of its illumination, but, like the web, depends on its relation to something exterior in order to be visible. This suggests that the other two elements in the scene, “this moment and I myself,” may be similarly determined by relation to what they are not. This other-­directedness of what looks like a closed temporal sequence is what makes it emphatically a scene. The life that is so delimited is one that has the character of a scene, a spectacle, and a scenario—­all theatrical categories. It is lived as representation for another, who is its enabling and disabling limit. This is why the articulation of the most abysmal thought has to take the form of a staging: the stage extends from a this to a there, and from both to a then. By virtue of this sequence: this-­there-­and-­then, the Augenblick—­whose usual translation as “moment” is, we shall soon see, scarcely adequate—­discloses a triple overdetermination qua repeatable: as a moment in time, as a moment of time, and most importantly, as a momentous overturning of time qua chronologically measurable: “The eternal sand clock of existence is turned over again and again—­and you with it, speck of dust!” The thought of an eternal recurrence of “this life” demands that the reader be situated at a distance, so that the elements of this life can precisely be perceived and situated; and yet at the same time it deprives the reader of the stable position of observer. For the observing reader remains the “subject” and “frame” of the life he or she perceives while being a part of it. This is why the proposition of the demon has to be described as both “godlike” and “crushing” at once. Godlike in its proposition of an unmoved observer whose position gives the measure of the recurrence of the same; and pulverizing, since the position of the observer must also be considered as part of what recurs, thus destroying its unity and dispersing it into countless grains of sand or specks of dust. If bodily existence is what allows the observer to be situated, the proposition of eternal recurrence pulverizes 292  Like—­ Come Again?!

all corporeal (and incorporeal) unity. This is why the word used by the demon, zermalmen, signifies not just “crush.” Rather than just compressing or demolishing identity tied to a bodily position, it explodes and implodes it at once: it pulverizes. Such pulverization is the bodily correlative of what happens to its temporal infrastructure, the “moment.” The proliferation of the moment as indefinitely repetitive makes it indeed “extraordinary.” We will see just how when we arrive at its elaboration in Zarathustra. Here it is still couched in the language of the thought experiment and of “experience.” The articulation of that experience is the response that the demon puts in the mouth of the reader. This reflects the highly ambivalent perspective resulting from the “thought” of an overturning of measurable, linear time. It produces on the one hand the sense of being deprived of one’s distinctive, singular identity. But on the other, it holds open the possibility of recovering a position like that of the God who tells Moses in Exodus (3:14): “I am who I will be.” The question, “Do you want [or do you will: willst du dies] this, once again [noch einmal] and again countless times” must be read as insisting on the subject addressed, the “you.” It is significant that the English translation of willst du is almost always “Do you want . . .” To “want” is not just to “will” but to lack, to be wanting and hence to want to supplant one’s want, to complete one’s lack. This is not as evident in the German “willst du,” where it would seem as if the question is merely one of the will, and not of wanting. But the English here may well bring to light what in the German is more carefully hidden: the rooting of the willst du in a “wanting,” in a lack—­for instance, in that which becomes particularly acute in situations of extreme solitude, which is after all the setting in which the demon’s words become effective. The “will to power” as a response to a “want of power.” Is this the (not so) secret scenario of Nietzsche’s most abysmal thought? The conclusion of the demon’s discourse—­and of this section—­would seem to want to deny this possibility. But as is often the case, when read closely, the statement reveals itself to be more equivocal in its implications. The equivocation is emphasized by the use of the word “or” in framing what is a double question. The first part concludes with an exclamation point, the second with a question mark. The first proposition suggests that if the indefinite recurrence of one’s life could be affirmed, even at the risk of Like—­Come Again?!   293

pulverizing its self-­identity, it “would weigh on your actions as the greatest heavyweight!” This aspect has been taken up avidly by Gilles Deleuze and more circumspectly by Heidegger,17 to suggest that a willing and wanting of eternal recurrence could serve as ballast against reactive nihilism. On the other hand, the constant strictures, especially in Zarathustra, against the “law of gravity” make such an interpretation problematic. And the fact that the second part of the proposition, with which the demon ends his discourse, is introduced by an “or” suggests that the demon concludes by presenting an alternative that leaves it to the reader to decide. What the demon asks—­and he ends as he began, with a question—­is, “How well disposed . . . toward yourself and life you would have to be to yearn for Nothing more than this last eternal confirmation and seal (Bestätigung und Besiegelung)? In the text “Nothing” is capitalized: what the demon is therefore asking about is whether the reader, in affirming the eternal recurrence of his or her life, would be content with affirming “Nothing” more or other than “this last eternal confirmation and seal.” What, however, is this “Nothing” that would be both confirmation and sealing (Besiegelung)? The thought of the eternal repeatability of one’s life, and nothing more, serves as “final eternal confirmation” (Bestätigung) of that life, and in its finality, serves also as that which “seals” it. It is affirmed as that which it was, is, and will be—­and nothing more. Except . . . that a “seal” is also and perhaps above all an impression: something stamped from without on that whose limits it thereby marks, forever. That which is thus sealed is “blocked” from all future change and in this sense is given its final, “eternal” form and meaning.18 And yet, what is being affirmed is not just what was and is, but what will be. The future will be marked by the recurrence of what was and is: the life lived and the living of it. The ambiguous relation between “life” and “living” reflects that between “being” and “becoming.” And even when this is purged of all alteration and change, it nevertheless introduces a moment of instability into the blockage. The seal eternalizes in confirming, but it also marks the encounter of one body with another—­and even while sealing it as forever the same, it leaves open the possibility of change: “it would take you, as you are, and change you” precisely by insisting on the identical repeatability of the living “you.” The idea of the recurrence of the like—­I will discuss this translation shortly—­paradoxically “changes” the one who seeks to think it. 294  Like—­ Come Again?!

What is described here recalls both the towering, heaped-­up pyramidal block—­which seems impervious to change, and yet which changes the one who encounters it, irrevocably—­and less dramatically, the signifiers of a text, which, without changing, by repeating themselves indefinitely in being read, stay the same while signifying something different. This fusion of movement and stasis, immutability and change, is articulated in the German word Bestätigung, translated as “confirmation,” insofar as it designates both what stands and stays (in German, what is stets and stetig), acknowledging and resisting the passage of time. This is the lure that underlies the demon’s final proposition. It is not so far removed from the desire of Constantin Constantius for a certain constancy, for a repetition that would overcome the trial of time and bring back the past without loss. The lure draws its power from the anxiety of impermanence. This is how the option offered by the demon can fascinate the reader. But his discourse says more and other than what may be intended. For the offer of “confirmation” comes at the cost of a Besiegelung, which marks a certain end to what is thereby confirmed. A seal can amount to a confirmation. But in this particular case, the invitation to affirm a life as indefinitely repeatable demands further authentication. It is this that Zarathustra will attempt to provide, and in particular through the various modes of his Untergang. For only in “going under” can Zarathustra approach the “abyss”—­the Ab-­ grund—­that is the site of Nietzsche’s “most abysmal thought.” In what follows, my reading will focus on two chapters of this Untergang, in which the “extraordinary moment” of the demon’s discourse unfolds on a different stage.

PEERING INTO THE ABYSS: “THE VISION AND THE RIDDLE” Sounding Brass In order for something to recur, with or without changes, it must first be delimited. If there is no limit, there can be no recurrence. This in part is a problem for the thought of the eternal recurrence, at least as it is first suggested by the demon in The Gay Science. Only when a series of events, situations, occurrences can be defined and then transformed into an ensemble can their “recurrence” be conceived. This delimitation is first of all associated with “This life, as you live it today and have lived it.” At the end of the Like—­Come Again?!   295

demon’s discourse, “this life” is extended to cover the future, as the idea of an eternal recurrence is said to “weigh” heavily on one’s choice of actions. But the priority, the nucleus of “this life” remains fixated on the present indicative, on the “this”—­and more particularly, on the present moment, the Augenblick. The English translation of this word as “moment” effaces what in German will turn out to be an essential dimension, namely its visibility or visuality. Augenblick is composed of two words, “eyes” (Augen) and “glance” (Blick). It is not therefore quite the same as the French clin d’œil, since Blick designates “look” or “glance” and not the word often associated with it, via its assonance, “blink.” Which is not to say that “blinking” is irrelevant to the Augenblick—­far from it, as we shall see. “In the blink of an eye” an Augenblick can “morph” into an Augenblinzeln—­as we shall discover soon enough. But for the time being, it is important not to confuse the “look” with the “blink.” The look looks for something, whereas the “blink” opens and shuts the eyelids rapidly, marking a visual caesura. Not for nothing is the title of the relevant chapter in Zarathustra “Das Gesicht und das Rätsel,” usually translated as “The Vision and the Riddle.” Gesicht, however, connotes much more than just “sight” or “vision.” If we “unblock” its sedimented denotation, what first emerges is the notion of “face”: Das Gesicht is most commonly used to designate a human face. The face is apparently the “sight” par excellence. It is that which the “look” expects and searches for, first and foremost. But more “literally” and more generally—­if less “idiomatically”—­Gesicht also suggests the past participle of the verb sehen, “to see”: that is, “vision” in the sense of what has been seen: the “sighted.” At the same time, it is also close to the past participle of another verb, sichten, related to the English “sift,” “sieve”—­das Gesichtete is what is filtered out in a process that may be one of purification, or merely one of selection by exclusion. It is only when these two fields of meaning are taken in tandem—­what has been seen and what has been filtered out—­that we are ready to interpret the second part of the chapter’s title, Rätsel, or “riddle.” The riddle will have to do with the principle or process of filtering and selecting in regard to visual experience. The Augen-­blick will emerge as the juncture of seeing and sifting, remembering and forgetting, recalling and foregoing. It will articulate the highly conflictual interdependence at the heart of “this life, as you live it today, and have lived it” and will live it in an uncertain, limited but indefinitely repeatable future.

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And since the future keeps intruding upon Nietzsche’s most abysmal thought, perhaps this is as good a place as any to remark that the specific word he uses to designate this “thought”—­Wiederkunft—­does not quite fit its traditional English renditions, whether as “return” or more recently, and better, as “recurrence.” “Return” would in German be the more common Wiederkehr. The fact that Nietzsche almost always avoids this more common word, preferring to it the more unusual Wieder-­kunft, should encourage us to pay attention to the difference between the two. Whereas a Wiederkehr suggests something relatively stable that re-­turns, comes back, Wieder-­kunft tends to connote an oncoming movement that is arriving but has not yet arrived—­and may never. Most German words formed on the basis of this suffix, -­kunft, such as Ankunft (arrival, on-­coming) Abkunft (provenance), Herkunft (coming-­from), are linked to the future, what they designate is künftig: to come. They suggest a French word that Derrida borrowed from Hélène Cixous and for a while used as a key deconstructive concept, arrivant: arriving or arrival.19 What happens when a “moment”—­condensed in the glance of an eye (an Augenblick)—­is designated as the nuclear experience of “this life—­as you live it today and have lived it,” and also as you may live it? Are we dealing with a succession of “nows” of the sort that Heidegger, in Being and Time, claims to find in Aristotle’s notion of time (an argument that Derrida in turn deconstructs)?20 What is the relation of what is ongoing and oncoming to what has already gone but is always capable of coming back again? This is the Rätsel, the “riddle” that Zarathustra stages in this chapter, and to which it responds in a later chapter, entitled “The Convalescent” (“Der Genesende”). Guided by these questions, let us look at—­and read—­the “Vision and the Riddle”: selectively, to be sure, but as closely as possible. The scene is constituted through a double narrative (which contrasts sharply with the demon’s monologue in “The Greatest Heavyweight”): the narrator of the text tells the reader the story of Zarathustra, who in turn, after a period of silence, tells his own story. This story will make up the substance of the chapter, followed by a number of questions put by the narrator—­which will be taken up in the later chapter, “The Convalescent.”

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Zarathustra, who finds himself on a boat, is at first silent and solitary—­ “cold and deaf from sorrow” (vor Traurigkeit). After two days, he discovers that there is much “strange and dangerous” to be heard on this ship, “which came from far away and which intended to go even farther.”21 Here, as elsewhere in this text, hearing and seeing are carefully distinguished and often at odds with one another. We will discover some of the implications of this shortly. Zarathustra thus begins to recount to his curious and expectant companions an experience he has had, whose setting recalls in different ways the situations described in Ecce Homo and The Gay Science: it involves not a blockage of movement but a difficult, laborious progression up a mountain path, “which crunched under the insolence of my foot” (124). Zarathustra’s climbing recalls the two passages already discussed: “Crushing the rock that caused it to slip, thus my foot forced its way upward.” The warning of the demon, that the thought he announces could “crush” or “pulverize” (zermalmen) the one who seeks to affirm it, and the experience of the powerful “block” in the mountains near Surlei both resonate here in the acoustical experience of the rocks being crushed under foot as Zarathustra winds his way up the mountain path. But although sad and solitary, he is anything but alone, any more than the reader is once the demon has begun to speak (or once he or she has begun to read). He is accompanied by a dwarf perched on his shoulders, adding to the weight he must support as he struggles to climb the mountain. The dwarf, to be sure, is no demon—­there is nothing godlike about his discourse or what it announces. What it shares with the demon, however, is the way it cohabits the body of the one to whom it speaks. The dwarf weighs Zarathustra down: if not as the “greatest heavyweight,” nevertheless as the incarnation of “the spirit of gravity,” which Zarathustra designates here as “my devil and arch-­enemy.” “Half dwarf, half mole, lame, laming; dripping lead through my ear [reminiscence of King Hamlet?], dropping leaden thoughts into my brain” (124). The dwarf mocks Zarathustra’s attempt to climb, to rise, to elevate himself, by warning that the higher he goes, the deeper he will fall: “Each thrown stone—­must fall!” The powerfully heaped-­up pyramidal block at Surlei may be “6,000 feet beyond man and time”—­but Zarathustra still must overcome the dead weight of his body and that of the dwarf perched upon it, or rather, overcome the “spirit of heaviness.”22 At a certain mo298  Like—­ Come Again?!

ment he finally finds the courage to challenge the dwarf by confronting it with what looks like an absolute alternative: “Dwarf! You! Or I!” Zarathustra goes on to congratulate himself on his courage, which, he declares, is “the deadliest weapon” [der beste Todtschläger], capable even of “striking death itself dead.” This phrase echoes—­here on the threshold of the affirmation of an eternal return—­the Pauline promise that, in the end, death itself will be put to death: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26). Except that in Zarathustra it is not love of neighbor nor faith in the Son of God that will accomplish this task. Courage to overcome the spirit of heaviness means, as Zarathustra declares in the chapter of the same name, knowing how “to take a stand”: “Whoever wants to (will) learn how to fly must first learn how to stand, and walk, and run and climb and dance” (240). Here, however, “courage” involves not just learning how to stand, walk, run, climb, and dance—­it is apostrophized as the lethal blow that will strike death dead. But Zarathustra does not kill the dwarf: he merely causes it to jump off his back.23 He has challenged the spirit of heaviness in the dwarf by daring to oppose it to himself—­“Dwarf! You! Or I!” His courage has struck a fatal blow to death by dealing one to “compassion”—­Mitleid. Zarathustra can now stand on his own. Apparently. “Courage strikes compassion dead.” And it does so by affirming the recurrence of the life it has lived: “Was that life? Well good! [Wohlan!] Once again” (125). In short, by letting himself be heard and not just seen. For “is not seeing—­seeing abysses?” And, “Where would man stand that is not close to the abyss?” But just what does this signify? That man is everywhere on the edge of the abyss? That all seeing is a seeing into abysses? That the feeling for others (compassion, sympathy, Mitleid)—­is itself “the deepest abyss”? And that, by implication, it is only by freeing oneself of the need to feel with others, and instead assuming what one has lived oneself, that one can “slay dizziness at the abyss”? “Courage,” then, must be militant, even lethal, aggressive, and offensive. However, the narrator—­presumably not Zarathustra—­concludes this section with the following observation (or is it a caveat?): “In such pronouncements [Spruch], however, there is much sounding brass. Whoever has ears, let him hear.—­” What cannot be heard, however, is the dash that follows this warning. Even if it reinforces graphically the admonition to hear what cannot be read. The dash must be heard. But just what is it that hearing this dash signifies? Like—­Come Again?!   299

The English translation “sounding brass” recalls the biblical and Lutheran overtones that pervade Zarathustra’s discourse—­but it also loses some of the “play”—­the Spiel of sound that resounds in the German phrase. It is occurs twice in short succession here. First, to describe the courage that “attacks”: “For in every attack there is klingendes Spiel.” And second, to suggest a more reactive, even defensive quality of that courageous “attack”: “With klingendem Spiel [courage] overcame even every pain” (125). The militant, military resonances of this sonorous play only “overcome” pain by drowning it out. Zarathustra’s pain, however, has not been “overcome” but only put off and displaced. His effort to distance himself from the dwarf and his spirit of gravity thus concludes this scene on an ambiguous note.

The Gateway Whoever has ears, let him hear: Zarathustra’s klingendes Spiel provides an ironic commentary and update to St. Paul’s reflexive commentary and warning about his own speeches: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Cor. 13:1). In Luther’s version, “charity” (the King James rendering) is replaced by “love” (Liebe). But it is precisely a certain kind of “love”—­love of neighbor, of other, compassionate love—­ that Zarathustra is seeking to escape through his “sounding play” (and not simply “brass”). Zarathustra’s version of the Pauline message replaces “love” with “attack,” charity with militarization. Already in the Notes written in the 1870s, Nietzsche observed that “the normal situation is war; we make peace only for limited times” (56). It is not merely illusion or delusion (sounding brass) but rather the game of war and conflict that resounds in the klingendes Spiel—­for whomever has ears to hear, and to read. But in the section that follows this attack upon the dwarf, the spirit of heaviness and all it represents, above all Mitleid, what Zarathustra will hear and what we will read, with our ears and our eyes, will complicate the simple opposition that informs the military metaphor.24 In the scene that follows, different sounds become audible—­and legible. Zarathustra promises to reveal his “most abysmal secret,” and the dwarf springs from his shoulders in order better to see and hear. Once again, as with the block at Surlei, a forward movement has been brought to a halt just as a strange apparition makes its appearance. This time, how300  Like—­ Come Again?!

ever, it is not a rock but a gateway: “Just there, where we stopped, there stood a gateway [Torweg].” This gateway looms up, all of a sudden: Es war aber gerade da . . . wo wir hielten. The gateway appears just there where Zarathustra and the dwarf have stopped: it appears at the place of a stoppage, if not of a blockage. But it is a peculiar kind of “gateway,” for it does not lead anywhere. Or at least not from one place to another. Rather, it marks something like a crossroads, facing toward both. Zarathustra proceeds: “See this gateway, dwarf!” I continued. “It has two faces [zwei Gesichter]. Two ways come together here: no one has yet reached their end.” (125)

A gateway with a face: this is as unusual in Nietzsche’s German as it would be in English today. Faces usually are attributed to living beings, if not to human beings. Not, however, to inanimate objects. The face of a watch is an exception. Perhaps because it displays the measurement of time. Time is also the dimension in which the ostensibly spatial gateway is situated, at the fold or convergence of past, future, and present: Two ways come together here: no one ever reached their end. This long lane back: it lasts [währt] an eternity. And that long lane outward—­that is another eternity. They contradict each other, these ways. (125)

The “long lane back”—­back into the past, presumably—­“ lasts” forever; it is inexhaustible, at least for a singular living being. The past out-­lasts: This is its “truth,” which in German (Wahrheit) is related to the word for “last” (währt). In English we might be tempted to use the cognate to describe the path: the pathway that is the past wears out those it outlasts. And now comes one of the most puzzling phrases in the whole chapter and also one of the most difficult to render into English. To get a sense of how difficult it is, we need only compare two relatively recent translations. The first from 1961, that of R. J. Hollingdale, renders the phrase: “These paths, they abut on one another”25 The other, more recent, dating from 2006, from Adrien Del Caro and Robert Pippin, is quite different: “These paths, they blatantly offend each other” (125). The difference reflected Like—­Come Again?!   301

in these two very divergent translations depends on whether one reads Nietzsche’s German idiomatically or more “literally”: “Sie stoßen sich gerade vor den Kopf ”; vor den Kopf stoßen, as used today, generally means to insult or offend, to dismissively disqualify, to reject; more literally, however, it suggests a more corporeal conflict and convergence. Nevertheless, Hollingdale’s translation as “abut” is not quite accurate. The German phrase vor den Kopf stoßen excludes direct contact. The vor suggests either “before” or “in front of ” and hence a certain distance. Stossen, it is true, normally denotes such contact: pushing, shoving, repelling. But since the vor precedes the stossen, the reader is left with an impression of a repulsion before actual contact, and certainly without “abutment.” The result is a paradoxical convergence that could be rendered in English perhaps as “they repel each other head-­on.” It is important no doubt to retain the reference to the “head” (vor den Kopf) and to the stoßen as an impulsion—­ but one that operates at an irreducible distance. The two “ways” never touch each other, they do not collide, but repel each other, recoil from each other as they approach contact. This is the sense in which they “contradict” each other: sich widersprechen. Wider, pronounced identically to Wieder, as in Wieder-­kunft—­coming-­back (aka “recurrence”) creates an oppositional force field that excludes direct contact but is no less corporeal and spiritual at the same time, hence the reference to the head. Wieder is wider; in German one could add, es ist sich selbst zuwider: “it is repugnant to itself.” This is perhaps why the conflictual if convergent space can be bridged, named, identified only through a written inscription: They contradict each other, these ways; they repel each other head-­ on—­and here, at this gateway, is where they come together. The name of the gateway stands inscribed above: moment [Augenblick] [literally, “eye-­glance]. (125)

Situated at a place where two roads come together, the gateway marks a limit, and it marks it through writing. Its name is inscribed above that which it names, as a kind of legend, caption, or super-­title. This inscription is all the more necessary since what it names, the gateway, is precisely different from what is usually designated by the word. How are we to imagine a gateway that is called “moment”—­or in German, Augenblick? It is difficult if not impossible to visualize: a word associated with temporality 302  Like—­ Come Again?!

inscribed above a figure that is thought of as spatial. In short, it is not to be “imagined” but to be read and thought. But how are we to read and think it? The elements of visuality are not indifferent, even if they are not transparent. To complicate matters further, the word itself is ambiguous, especially since taken “literally,” in terms of its component words, it refers doubly to the field of vision. An Augenblick is literally an eye-­glance. Taken with its more conventional meaning, this suggests a relationship between the eye that glances or looks and the temporal category called “the moment.” The challenge is to read what cannot simply be seen, namely the relation between the visual–­spatial and the temporal–­acoustic. The significance of the gateway called Augenblick must be acceded to through the eyes, but it does not belong to them exclusively. Like that “moonlight between the trees” that marked the moment in the demon’s discourse, the gateway–­Augenblick must be read relationally, not seen representationally. Reading always entails both the recognition of conventional meaning (the “moment” as the object of an eye-­glance: as a kind of block) and the desedimentation of this momentarily blocked meaning into something that marks a transition and a passage: a gateway. But like time itself, this gateway differs from itself—­is different from what we are used to seeing and reading as a gateway. Like all seeing, and indeed like all words, as we will read explicitly when we arrive at “The Convalescent”—­the gateway Augenblick appears to provide a bridge over the abyss. The abyss, however, is not simply an emptiness or an absence, but rather the focal point of a relation of forces, of a conflict. Placed in quotation marks, this legend already entails repetition and recurrence: it does not change its shape, but it gestures elsewhere. In all of these senses it is a Rätsel (riddle or puzzle).26 Such a riddle is (as Walter Benjamin recognized in his essay on “The Storyteller”) what gives birth to storytelling—­and listening.27 The legend thus refers to a story about to unfold, about to be told. But first the legend must be made legible. And legibility here, as with that of the powerful block near Surlei, requires disassembling blocked-­up meaning. This is what is then deployed in the ensuing conversation with the dwarf, whom Zarathustra has never ceased to address. Zarathustra asks him whether he thinks that these two ways “eternally contradict each other.” And the dwarf, in the spirit of heaviness—­which is above all the spirit of universal (that is, conventional) meanings—­takes the bait: “Everything straight lies . . . all truth is curved, Like—­Come Again?!   303

time itself is a circle.” Everything—­all—­comes back to itself: these are the markers of the spirit of heaviness that Zarathustra seeks to challenge.28 He does this, however, by adapting the universalizing discourse of the dwarf and at the same time singularizing it (which does not appear in the Del Caro–­Pippin translation): namely, by submitting it to the centrifugal force of repetition, in which past and future come together without ever meeting or being joined in a single unity; this is how he reflects upon the gateway as Augenblick: Must not that which can run [Muss nicht, was laufen kann] already have run through this path? Must not that which of all things can happen [Muss nicht was geschehn kann] have already happened, been done and gone past? And if everything has already been there: What do you, dwarf, make of this moment? Must not this gateway as well already—­have been there? And are not similarly all things so firmly entwined that this moment [Augenblick] draws all coming things after itself? Therefore—­ itself as well?29

As Heidegger correctly and insightfully points out, this question is precisely what the dwarf, with his notion of time as circular, cannot answer. For it is posed from the point of view of the moment, the Augenblick, itself.30 This in turn entails an awareness of the temporality of a repetition that involves the future as much as the past. Repetition is no longer opposed to recollection, as Constantin Constantius does at the start of Kierkegaard’s book on repetition, but is seen as deriving from it. This is what so “firmly entwines” all things so that “this moment [Augenblick]” is no longer simply “this” moment here and now, but rather a moment that already has been there and then. And it is this “and then” that “draws all coming things after itself,” including the moment itself. Thus, it is not just the reader’s sense of self-­presence that risks being pulverized, but its temporal condition and correlative, the self-­presence of the here and now singularized in and as the moment. The Augenblick, as always already a recurrence of a previous Augenblick, and as the anticipation of indefinite future recurrences—­all of which would be perfectly identical with it, although occurring differently in time and space—­starts to blink rather than to look. 304  Like—­ Come Again?!

In the blink of an eye, the moment reveals itself to be something like the blinking of an eye. The present participle here should be noted: the moment doesn’t simply blink once and for all, or discretely; it only “is” insofar as it is already blinking qua recurrence. In a curious way, Heidegger’s ontological difference between Sein and Seienden—­which I would be tempted to translate not as “Being” and “beings,” but as to-­be and being—­dissolves into the gerund of being, seiend. The latter can therefore no longer be adequately translated as “entity” but rather as being. To be sure, this translation poses problems, since it congeals the ontological difference between Being and beings into the word “being,” which, as present participle, signifies both. Under the blinking of recurrence, the “to be” (the literal translation of Sein) reveals itself to be inseparable from and determined by the “ing” of the present participle. Even though, as Heidegger would insist, the two, “to be” and “being,” can never entirely merge, nor can one think the one as deriving from the latter. They must be thought in coexistence with one another. It is this coexistence that makes the moment blink. In Zarathustra’s discourse, the Augenblick is suspended, redoubled, duplicated through the adverbs schon (already) and noch (still, again). The examples cited by Zarathustra to instantiate the process repeat in part those previously mentioned by the demon, all constituting the specious “thisness” of the present moment, Nietzsche’s version of the Hegelian dialectical analysis of the “this-­there” (Diesda) qua “here” and “now”:31 And this slow spider, that crawls in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and I and you in the gateway, whispering together, whispering of eternal things—­must we all not already have been there? (126)

From the slow spider, crawling in the moonlight, to the “moonlight itself ”—­the present moment is unpacked in an expansive movement proceeding from the momentary perception of the beings that inhabit it to the conditions of their visibility (for only as visible can they correspond to the Augenblick); that is, from the “moonlight itself ”—­to those who are perceiving it but also “whispering together”: “I and you in the gateway.” Again, note the present participle “whispering,” which nearly deprives speech of its voice, making it an almost inaudible sound, and yet still audible enough to be heard. The voiceless whispering is ongoing, itself Like—­Come Again?!   305

repeating the moment to which it belongs, but also suggesting that that moment does not simply belong to itself, since it, like all of its components, has “already been there” (alle schon dagewesen sein). “There”: But where? Elsewhere than here and now. There and then. And then? Then and here (again)? The whispering articulates not a statement, not a proposition, but this question: Must they all not have already been there? And come again (wiederkommen)? Come again? Such a “coming again” is not simply a returning to the uncertain place where we—­readers and narrators—­are now: it questions (for “come again” is also a question as well as a demand) both the place itself and the way it can be inhabited. This place is on the move—­it is no longer a fixed object, scene, or stage that can be observed at will. On the move, it moves everything, not just “in” it, but with it (those whispering observers) away (hinaus) in a double direction: into the past that returns, and into the future where it all will return again. This movement affects the moment and brings with it a special dada affect—­anxiety: Thus I spoke and ever softer: for I feared for my own thoughts and afterthoughts. Then and there [da] suddenly, I heard a hound close by howling. Had I ever heard a hound howl so? My thought ran back. Yes! When I was a child, in my most distant childhood: —­there [then: da] I heard a hound howl so. And saw it also, hair on end, head raised, trembling, in the stillest midnight, where even hounds believe in ghosts: —­so that it made me feel pity. For the full moon, deathly still, had just risen over the house, was just standing still, a round glow,—­still on the flat roof, like [gleich als: as though] on foreign property: —­thereupon [darob] was the hound so terrified: for hounds believe in thieves and ghosts. And as I heard such howling again, thereupon [da]) I felt pity once again. (126–­27)

I have had to cite this passage at length for several reasons. First, Nietzsche’s punctuation is here, as always, decisive: it breaks apart the different statements into segments of a scene whose coherence is precisely a function of repeated discoveries. The “interior” paragraphs end with colons, and 306  Like—­ Come Again?!

the following ones begin with dashes. The colon announces continuity, the dashes separate and link at the same time. Second, the problematizing of the Augenblick as the spatiotemporal correlative of the eternal return here is associated with the adverb da, which, as emerges clearly in this scene, can mean both “here” and “there,” as well as “there” and “then”: it is a spatiotemporal marker of a limit, and hence of a discontinuous transition. It and its composites are repeated four times: “There, suddenly” (Da, plötzlich), da hörte ich einen Hund, darob entsetze sich damals, da erbarmte es mich. Third, there is an abrupt shift from the visible to the audible, announced already, negatively as it were, by the “whispering” that grows ever softer, almost inaudible. It is as if the closer one approaches the abysmal thought of eternal recurrence, the more the voice becomes inaudible, but only to suddenly make way for other sounds, less articulate but no less significant: for instance, the howling of a dog. This inarticulate but significant sound reinscribes the example given by Hegel in his dialectical deconstruction of sensible certitude, by shifting the “here and now” to the “then and there.” Instead, however, of moving from night to day, as in Hegel’s example—­“Now it is night” to “Now it is midday”)32 and then on to perception, visual perception is exploded by a howling that triggers memory, which splits the present moment and transforms the stage on which it takes place. The scene that is suddenly remembered singularizes the moment of anxiety that had already crept into Zarathustra’s whispering. It is no longer directed at a general fear of an unimaginable indefinite recurrence, but now has a more concrete object: the dispossession of one’s home. The moonlight mentioned by the demon and by Zarathustra now returns, as does the arresting of movement encountered at Surlei and indeed wherever this thought emerges: the full moon had interrupted its course—­“it had just stood still” (eben stand er still) in order to cast a “round glow” upon the roof of the house that the dog presumably is supposed to protect (and vice-­versa). The German word translated as “glow,” Gluth, suggests not just a visible light but a potentially destructive fire—­as with glowing embers that might eventually consume the house. The circularity of the eternal return here—­what Pierre Klossowski, borrowing Nietzsche’s own term, has called “the vicious circle”33—­which is to say, a circle that does not simply come full circle or rather, one that does circle back to itself but in so doing Like—­Come Again?!   307

dispossesses what it encircles. The image of this circle—­the moonlight, itself already a reflection, and hence a repetition, shines on the “flat roof, like unto foreign property.” The question of property—­one’s own and foreign—­forms the crux of this nightmarish recollection. For the vulnerability of private property here converges with that of life itself, “for dogs believe in thieves and ghosts.” The coupling of thieves and ghosts associates the stealing of property (the house) with life that ends but does not stop or disappear. The dog’s howling expresses its terror at the looming dispossession of house and of life, to which Zarathustra reacts with something very close to that “pity” he associates with the spirit of heaviness—­namely, with Erbarmen. Unlike Heidegger, who sees in this Erbarmen a sign of the immaturity of Zarathustra, who, like “children” more generally, “are not mature enough for being [das Seiende]” (394). Despite its Christian associations (misericordia), however, Erbarmen, unlike Mitleid, is not something one “has” or even feels: it is something that overcomes one, like the shock of the thought itself. The German phrase, which Zarathustra repeats in recalling his reaction to the dog’s terrified howling, is es erbarmte mich and da erbarmte es mich abermals. (197). This experience will recur as one of the driving forces in Zarathustra’s response to the discovery he is about to make, once he has returned to his altered present “moment.” But for the time being, Zarathustra, in coming to (himself?), discovers only that everything around him has disappeared: Where was now dwarf? And Gateway? And spider? And all whispering? Was I dreaming? Waking up? Between wild cliffs I stood all at once, alone, desolate, in the most desolate moonlight. (126)34

Only the moonlight bridges the gap between the previous scene and its “desolate” recurrence. For moonlight will be the condition of a discovery that is both visual and audible—­and almost tactile as well. It is the discovery of the present moment, the Augenblick, as a there . . . and then! But there [da!] lay a man! And there [da]. The dog, leaping, bristling, whining—­now it saw me coming—­then [da] it howled again, then [da] it screamed—­had I ever heard a dog so scream for help? (126) 308  Like—­ Come Again?!

Four times the da recurs, but each time with a varying meaning, punctuating the series of events described, and accompanying the howling of the dog.35 The whole character of seeing and hearing has thus been fundamentally altered. What one sees and hears is both more and less than itself: it must be read, heard, deciphered, remembered, anticipated, and above all, related (in both senses of this word). But its relation is never symmetrical, reciprocal, or commensurate. This at least is how Zarathustra announces the apparition that now confronts him: “And truly, what I saw, the likes of which [desgleichen] I never saw” (my emphasis). What does it mean to see something, the likes of which one has never seen? This seeing is without recognition; it is therefore the kind of seeing that causes one to stop short in one’s tracks and try to relate. How can or does one “see” something, if there is no previous experience or image to which one can liken what one sees? And how does such seeing relate to the thought of an eternal recurrence? This will be part of the “riddle” that Zarathustra at the end of his story will pose to his fellow voyagers.36 In his notes from the 1870s already mentioned, Nietzsche had insisted that conceptual identification, above all through causality, was based on first discerning “likeness” and then interpreting it as “causality”: if A is “like” B, A then is conceptualized as the general cause of B.37 Here, in deploying his most abysmal thought, which looks into the abyss, but also through it to a new art of hearing, Zarathustra will react spontaneously to the quandary of the young shepherd, once again by exchanging and repeating a series of da’s: Did I ever see such nausea and pale horror on one visage? He had probably been asleep? There [da] the snake crawled into his gaping throat—­there [da] it bit down firmly. (197)

Zarathustra will first try to pull the snake out of the shepherd’s throat, in vain. Only an involuntary act can help: There [da] it screamed out of me: “Bite it off! Bite it off! (127)

The “there”—­the da—­only can help when it becomes the site of a cry that is unpremeditated, “spontaneous,” giving vent to all “my horror, my hate, Like—­Come Again?!   309

my disgust, my compassion.” Only this cry, which breaks out of him involuntarily, moves the shepherd to free himself by biting the head off the snake. Here two points may be noted. First, the head: it should not be forgotten that the two paths that come together in and as the Augenblick “recoil from each other head on” (sich vor den Kopf stoßen). A collision is headed off, but only just in time. That “just in time” is the Augenblick, which separates from itself through its blinking. Here, the Gesicht—­the face—­becomes the site of a head (Kopf) getting ahead of itself in its response to Zarathustra’s cry, which is also a command. It should not be forgotten that the will to power for Nietzsche will be associated with the power to command.38 Second, the shepherd bites the head off the serpent that has crawled into his gaping throat and is choking him, preventing all intake of air from without; and only the most violent of cuts can open up access again to the outside. It seems as if he has thus rid himself of an external threat, just as it seems as if he is external to Zarathustra himself. But since the latter presumption will quickly be dismissed when the incident returns in “The Convalescent,” we can also suspect that the serpent that is choking him is not entirely external to him or his body. Heidegger will identify it with nihilism, against which both the eternal return and the will to power react and respond. But that nihilism takes a particular form here: a serpent that has crawled into the shepherd’s throat. Biting off its head is not unlike biting one’s tongue—­off or not. In any case, without the serpent in his mouth, the shepherd will never speak again. But what he will do here to conclude the story is to laugh madly, in celebration of his newly found freedom. This mad unheard-­of laughter caps the riddle that Zarathustra will then put to his listeners: “Who is the shepherd, into whose throat the serpent crawled? Who is the man, into whose throat everything heaviest, blackest will crawl?” In lieu of an answer, Zarathustra emphasizes the shepherd’s transformation that culminates in this laughter: No longer shepherd, no longer human—­a transformed, illuminated being, who laughed! (127)

It is this laughter, which replaces and supplants the “tongues” of human (and humanistic) discourse, that foreshadows or announces the third and final chapter in Nietzsche’s deployment of his most abysmal thought. In it, 310  Like—­ Come Again?!

a certain silence will have the first and last word, as it will seem to fill in the blanks. Heidegger will see it as an answer to the riddle.39 By contrast, I will read it not as an answer but as a response, something quite different. It tells the story of Zarathustra as “The Convalescent.”

Come Again? The usual translation of this section of Zarathustra, in which the “riddle” is “explained” and its significance elaborated—­but always with question marks—­misses a nuance of Nietzsche’s German title. “Der Genesende” is a gerund: the one who is convalescing. “The Convalescent”—­standard translation—­although formed from the present participle, places more emphasis on the state than on the process. It accentuates the goal, the “recovery” from an illness or an injury, rather than, as with the German, the process of “recovering.” Does Zarathustra, who is “convalescing,” ever really recover from his experience in “The Vision and the Riddle”? Nothing is less certain, and this bears directly on any interpretation of that most “abysmal thought,” that of eternal recurrence. As we have seen, for Heidegger this section is considered to provide a direct answer to the riddles posed by Zarathustra: “Who is the shepherd into whose throat the snake crawled this way? Who is the human being?” This question of the “who,” however, ignores the true center of the riddle, which concerns not the who, but the what: or at least, which does not separate the one from the other. “Who is the human being into whose throat everything that is heaviest, blackest will crawl?” But what is that “heaviest and blackest” and why should it crawl into the gaping throat? In German, Nietzsche uses a word that is only partially translated as “throat”: namely, Schlund. This word is related to the verb for swallowing. Why should everything “heaviest, blackest” take the form of a snake or serpent, when this animal, together with the eagle, compose “Zarathustra’s animals of honor” (393)?40 Are there good and bad snakes? Why does the shepherd sleep with his mouth open—­an open invitation for things, like serpents, to crawl into it? And why should the “heaviest” here also serve to choke rather than, as in the demon’s discourse, to provide guidance for future action (as “the greatest heavyweight”)? These are questions that Zarathustra does not raise when he first tells the story, but they silently, implicitly, overtake his words, and even more, his silences, when he returns to explain the story in the process of Like—­Come Again?!   311

“convalescing.” Let us try to read and listen carefully, remarking its most salient steps. As with “The Vision and the Riddle,” this chapter begins with Zarathustra separated from his animals and his world. He is no longer on a boat, deciding to speak to his fellow voyagers, but rather in his cave. The section begins with a traumatic awakening: Zarathustra springs up from his bed “like a madman, screaming with fearful voice . . . as though another were sharing the bed with him, who would not stand up.” The other, who shares his bed with him but refuses to stand up with him, seems to be his “abysmal thought,” which he seeks to summon, command, and thereby control through the sound of his voice. He seeks to engage it in dialogue, and thus to gain recognition as the advocate of life, suffering, and the circle. But these efforts are fruitless, and their lack of success plunges him into a deathlike coma.41 Before proceeding, a preliminary remark is required: the English translation of abgründlich—­the adjective that Zarathustra (and Nietzsche) often use to characterize the thought of eternal recurrence—­as “abysmal,” lends itself to misunderstanding, since it tends to suggest a purely negative, mostly moral valorization. In nontechnical English, then, abysmal is generally understood to designate something terribly “bad.” No doubt it also has that connotation in German. However, the moral, condemnatory dimension is by no means as powerful as in English. In German it can be read and heard here as an adjectival derivation of “abyss,” which literally means the lack of a ground or bottom—­the lack of a founding limit, an Ab-­grund. With the thought of eternal recurrence, for reasons that have already begun to emerge, there is no “bottom,” no end in sight. It is related to the kind of “infinite regress” and “progress” (in French, mise-­en-­abîme) of a movement that, through duplication and mirroring, tends to dissolve that which it replicates in an endless proliferation: what Klossowski, following Nietzsche, calls a “vicious circle.” Zarathustra seeks to engage this “abysmal thought” in dialogue, or at least to have it speak to him: “Hail to me, you’re coming—­I hear you! My abyss speaks, my last depth I have turned inside-­out [gestülpt] into the light.” But can an “abyss” be turned inside out, much less illuminated? Does it have an inside? The lack of a positive response causes Zarathustra to collapse “like a dead man and (to) remain for a long time like one.” The abyss first shows itself in the ambiguous “like” of Zarathustra’s comatose 312  Like—­ Come Again?!

collapse: it is like death in rendering Zarathustra immobile and unconscious; but unlike death it is limited in time. Zarathustra awakens, but remains impassive and unresponsive for seven days, the time of the biblical creation. After which, his animals seek to encourage him to return to earthly life—­a kind of resurrection—­by asserting that “All things yearn for you . . . all things want to be your physician!” (175). They appeal to him by placing him in a position that recalls that of the passion of Christ: first dead and then reborn. At the same time they appeal to him for insight and consolation: “Did a new insight [neues Erkenntnis] come to you, which, like leavened dough,” has caused “your soul” to rise and “swell beyond all its borders”? Zarathustra replies by repeating the thoughts on language that Nietzsche had initially penned in his notes of the 1870s and in Truth and Lies, while now acknowledging their therapeutic character: Just keep babbling and let me listen. It livens me so to hear you chatter: wherever there is chatter, there the world lies before me like a garden. (175)

It is difficult not to see in this kindly reproach a certain recognition of the consolatory power of the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. But Zarathustra’s next words indicate the limits of his concessions to the animals’ reassuring chatter: How lovely it is that there are words and sounds; are not words and sounds rainbows and illusionary bridges [Schein-­Brücken] between what is eternally separated [Ewig-­Geschiedenen]? (175)

Words and sounds create the appearance of connections and continuities where in fact there is only eternal separation: Nietzsche’s German phrase Ewig-­Geschiedenen refers not merely to the distance between words and things, but also to mortality.42 Whereas the Christian notion of a resurrection—­the perfected convalescence—­presupposes a universal and exclusive Creator-­God and an equally universal, if inclusive, Son of God, the consequence that Zarathustra draws from what is “eternally separated” is that the unity and universality of the world are complementary illusions: Like—­Come Again?!   313

To each soul belongs another world; for each soul is to each other soul a hinter world.43 Between what is most similar appearances lie most beautifully; for the smallest gap is the most difficult to bridge. For me—­how could there be any outside-­of-­me? There is no Outside! But we forget that with tones. . . . How lovely is all speaking and all lying of tones! With tones our love dances on colorful rainbows. (175)

Zarathustra here insists on the singularity of what is “eternally separate” and separated: this insistence takes two forms that are not identical. On the one hand, when identified with the I or me, it entails the solipsistic refusal of everything “outside”: “There is no Outside!” On the other hand, the I or me can never have the last word. In the section following “On the Hinterworldly,” namely “On the Despisers of the Body,” Zarathustra contrasts the “self ” with the “I”: this self “is the body,” and as such, “a multiplicity with one sense” (23)—­this self “wants to go under”—­to become something other than itself, and in this contrasts with the I. “The self listens and seeks” (23). This listening has something to do with that altered hearing that Nietzsche describes in Ecce Homo as at the origin of the thought of the eternal recurrence. It is a listening that listens to what goes on between sounds and images, neither empty space nor the plenitude of objects. Applying this distinction to Zarathustra, it seems as if he is speaking here both from his I and from his self: the I sees its singularity as exclusive of any relation to the other; the self “laughs at the I,” listens to the presumptions and connotations of the words of the animals, appreciates their rhythms while mocking their content. Their words are “beautiful,” “lovely,” but still “lies” insofar as they seek to dance over the abyss separating singular beings without recognizing the necessity of a certain separation. To this critique, the animals respond with what will be their strongest comeback, precisely by seeking to mobilize the idea of eternal recurrence as a coming back: Oh Zarathustra . . . To those who think as we, all things themselves dance: that comes and reaches each other its hand and laughs and flees—­and comes back. 314  Like—­ Come Again?!

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of Being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, eternally runs the year of Being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally builds itself the same house of being [das gleiche Haus des Seins]. Everything leaves [scheidet], everything greets itself again; eternally true to itself remains the ring of being. (175)

And in case there should be any doubt about the provenance of this happy chatter, which seeks to give the most abysmal thought the semblance of a self-­enclosed, circular ring, “true to itself,” the animals conclude by echoing the words as the dwarf: “Crooked is the path of eternity” (175). Like the dwarf, the animals have adopted the point of view of Life with a capital L: life for them is that which is lived in general; the point of view of a god or of that which is godlike: “Everything dies, everything blossoms again.” Life is an eternal process of death and renewal. Life is thus “true to itself.” The animals thus reflect not singular living beings, but the point of view of the species: the individual living being perishes, but the species remains to return unscathed. The continuity of living being is assured by an attitude and a language that subsumes the singular under the general. This is legible and audible in the very awkwardness of the animals’ language itself: “To those who think as we, all things themselves dance” (175). “To all who think as we,” no doubt. But how do they think? Zarathustra’s animals resort to what Derrida has called the “universalized singular”:44 “that (one) comes and reaches out its hand and flees—­and comes back.”45 Through the use of the definite article as a demonstrative pronoun, the singular is not only neutered but is used to designate a general class—­ here the class of “all things” that “themselves dance.” The animals attribute the “dance” to the “things themselves,” whereas Zarathustra attributes the dance to language (nouns, names) and tones, as the appearance of a false (i.e., nonobjective) continuity.46 The animals move easily from the universal singular das to the universal tout court: all (Alles geht, Alles kommt zurück . . . Alles stirbt, Alles blüht wieder auf). Zarathustra’s response is as ironic as it is telling, for it immediately relates the discourse of the animals to the biblical creation story, where also only species are created: “Adam” (man) and other living beings, “after their kind”: Like—­Come Again?!   315

Oh you foolish rogues and barrel organs . . . how well you know what could be fulfilled in seven days. And how that monster [Untier] crawled into my throat and choked me! But I bit its head off and spat it away from me And you—­you make that already into a hurdy-­gurdy song? While I lie there [da], exhausted . . . And all you do is observe this? Oh my animals, are you also cruel? (175–­76)

Zarathustra suddenly collapses the distance between the figure of the choking “shepherd” in “The Vision and the Riddle” and himself, the storyteller, observer and savior. It is consistent, then, that this attempt at distancing should be criticized in the animals, whose comforting discourse presupposes precisely the same distance that Zarathustra claimed to have from the shepherd. But Zarathustra’s distance was not that of a mere observer or acclaimer, as in the case of the animals—­it was of one who was implicated, intervened, ordered, in spite of himself and involuntarily. Zarathustra however is also not simply identical with the shepherd, since only in being separate from him could he intervene. His command to bite its head off was and remains addressed at a certain use of language. Heidegger is right in associating this with nihilism, but it is the nihilism of constative language that is at issue. The cry of Zarathustra and the laughter of the shepherd have little to do with “the hurdy-­gurdy song” that the animals sing so well, even if their song betrays them. They can only know “how that monster crawled into my throat and choked me” because the monster is of the same world as is their song and dance: the world that tries to choke off the laughter that wracks but also liberates the body of the shepherd from the tyranny of self-­consciousness. The world the animals know and affirm is one in which Alles ist gleich—­the main formula of nihilism—­and in which Gleich (like) means only “the same.” Everything is like, and therefore, for a certain kind of thinking, here exemplified by the animals, everything is gleichgültig, equally valid, and hence indifferent. This is the “knowledge [that] chokes” by choking off any opening to the other that might fructify it and keep it from self-­implosion. Such knowledge “chokes” by neglecting the irreducibly discrete, differential, and plural structure of the singular by seeking to subordinate it to the mono-­theological identity paradigm of a universalized singular, a 316  Like—­ Come Again?!

homogeneous uniqueness. The position of the knowledgeable observer is extremely “cruel” because it is complicit with a violence it denies. It does violence by ignoring or denying its constitutive heterogeneity. But this complicity is not limited to the animals. It is only effective to the point that the snake is desired by the shepherd. His mouth is an open invitation to the snake. It is open, but only to the tongue and discourse that closes it. This is why the violence of the bite must be self-­inflicted and yet must come from without: from the Zarathustra who cries out and commands. It must be done by the self to its body, and yet must be done in response to an appeal of another. Like biting one’s tongue, it is an involuntary affirmation of what it cannot say on its own. This is why, after the shepherd has finally bit the head off the snake and spit it out, he will not speak any more, but only laugh wildly. It marks a triumph of the body over a tongue that speaks only of the same. The self as body and as sense, by contrast, is never simply self-­ contained. Again, quoting from “The Despisers of the Body”: “What the sense feels  .  .  . has never an end in itself.” This self “laughs over the I,” and tells it “here feel pain” and “here feel pleasure.” Tied to the body’s senses, it is both irreducibly singular, referring the I always to its momentary situation, to its “here” and “now”—­and at the same time driven to go beyond itself, driven toward a “there . . . and then?” In this sense, as bodily sense—­and above all, as hearing and listening, as memory and forgetting—­its movement can never be self-­contained. This is why it is connected more to feeling than to knowing, or to perception as traditionally understood. For feeling entails a contact with what cannot be fully known or delimited: “What the sense feels . . . has never an end in itself ” (23). It is connected to feeling as an excess of sense. And this is also why the thought of eternal recurrence is Zarathustra’s—­ and Nietzsche’s—­most abysmal thought. It is abysmal because it on the one hand “confirms,” “seals,” and delimits the life span of a singular living being, as that whose recurrence is to be affirmed. But insofar as such recurrence is to be perfectly identical, it turns on itself. It cannot be identical except in the eyes of another, who must therefore be both the same and different, inside and outside the recurrence. This is why what has been criti­ cized as a mere idea has very real effects: it both seals and unsettles what it affirms, precisely through the idea that it has and that it will come again.47 Zarathustra’s final speech in “The Convalescent” is ultimately reduced Like—­Come Again?!   317

to silence by the painful contradiction of this “thought,” which both confirms and infirms, seals and unseals everything he seeks to leave behind, and which I have labeled, surely too clinically, the mono-­theological identity paradigm. That the ambivalence of this paradigm finds linguistic support in German is supported by the ambiguity of the word Gleich, which can mean both “like,” stressing similarity, and also “equal,” stressing identity. This “same” contradiction blurs the distinction between “pity” (Mitleid) and “commiseration” (Erbarmen). This “paradigm,” which implies the “accusation of life” in the name of a transcendent identity beyond its enabling and disabling limit, “death,” seeks to defuse the sedimented ambiguities that make the Augenblick into a gateway. But the result is that the tensions return as discontinuities and interruptions. “The smallest rift [Kluft] is the hardest to bridge” (175). The “blinking” confirms the disjunctions that remain the irreducible condition of any recurrence, just as the punctuation of Nietzsche’s writing—­its numerous dashes, semicolons, colons—­divides and parses his discourse into discrete segments, which are then capable of recurring elsewhere, in all sorts of places. Nietzsche is a cut-­and-­paste writer long before the arrival of computerized writing, which he surely would have found even more attractive than the typewriter he was quick to adopt. It is thus inevitable that this most “abysmal thought” should “end” in an interjection that performs such separation, both in its vocalic and consonantal composition and in its semantic meaning: Ekel, e-­kel, repeated three times, Zarathustra’s last utterance as a convalescent—­is perhaps the final nonword on the thought of eternal return. “Disgust” is only a weak rendering of this verbal expectorating that repeats the biting off and spitting out of the shepherd’s tongue, and here marks the move from discourse not to laughter but to silence. To a certain silence, that is. This passage leaves the way open for the animals to give a final therapeutic gloss to Zarathustra’s silence, and to attempt to speak in his name, not hesitating to use the first-­person singular, the I, in order to say what they would like him to have said: You would speak and without trembling, rather catching your breath [aufatmend] . . . Now I die and disappear, you would say, and in an instant I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the knots of causes return again [kehrt wieder], in which I am 318  Like—­ Come Again?!

caught up—­they will create me again! I myself belong to the causes of the eternal coming-­again. . . . I come eternally again to this selfsame life, in great and in small, that I may teach again the eternal coming back of all things. I spoke my word, I break apart on my word: so will it my eternal fate [Los]—­as proclaimer I go and perish [gehe zugrunde: literally, go aground]. (178)

But these words that the animals speak for Zarathustra, put in his mouth, as it were, ventriloquize, are words that he himself no longer hears. After speaking, “they waited silently for Zarathustra” to answer. “But Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent. Rather he lay still, like someone sleeping, although he was not asleep. For at that moment he was conversing with his soul” (178). Zarathustra’s response—­which is anything but an answer—­is to eschew discourse and to converse (inaudibly) with his “soul.” He cannot accept an interpretation of eternal return that subordinates the singularity of his life to a generic-­generalizing concept. For the affirmation that this thought calls for is one that respects that singularity, precisely by refusing to detach it from its own iterability. To recur, a life must be singularly determined, limited. But in its recurrence, it can never be entirely the same. It will be as similarly different as the sounds that Zarathustra hears, one the memory from childhood, a howling dog, the other in the present moment, a whining dog. Each resounds in and with the other. Each relates the present moment to another moment, no more and no less present than itself. The same can be said of Zarathustra at the end of “The Convalescent.” Neither simply dead nor simply alive, neither simply alone nor simply together, he is in a state of similarity but with a difference: “similar to one sleeping, and yet not asleep” (einem Schlafenden ähnlich, ob er schon nicht schlief). Through his intermediary state, and without saying a word that could be heard, Zarathustra affirms the singularity of a life that is neither self-­contained nor mediated by what it is not. The word ähnlich is, as has been emphasized, one of the meanings of Gleich (like). In a quasi-­ sleep-­like state, conversing with his “soul,” Zarathustra’s silence at the end of “The Convalescent” invites his animals, and with them the reader, to come again?—­not as the same and not as entirely changed, but with a liking for the “like.” Like—­Come Again?!   319

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13

The Future of Saussure A Signifying Moment

A few years ago, I spent a few months at a research institute in Germany that studies media and cultural theory. As one of the invited researchers, I was asked to give a public talk. In it, I argued for the continued relevance of Ferdinand de Saussure and of the notion he adapted and adopted from medieval scholasticism, that of the “signifier.” When I first mentioned this word, a prominent professor in the audience groaned audibly. Obviously, he was shocked that at such a cutting-­edge research institute anyone could even mention something as obviously dated as the “signifier.” Wasn’t the whole point of contemporary media theory to go beyond the sterile linguistics associated with that word, and to expand into more relevant aspects of social life and its history? Nothing is more characteristic of the temper of the times than a state of mind that seeks to “move forward” in order not to look back. This attitude is the contemporary version of the teleological conception of history as a progression in the process of self-­fulfillment. The emphasis on the short-­term, so widely decried today and so evident in the ravages of finance capitalism, is just one extreme manifestation of this attitude. The attitude toward Saussure—­but not just to him and his work—­is another. Such dismissal of the past as history—­“that’s history!” meaning over and done with—­precludes the possibility of a constructive reflection upon it from which something could be learned. Such a constructive analysis of the past would, to my mind, have to include a serious discussion of “Saussure”—­a proper name I put in quotes not just because we are dealing with a name associated with texts, but because those texts are so divergent that the “name” does not name one thing but at least two. First, there is the “Saussure” of structuralism, and the “Saussure” of poststructuralism, and correspondingly, the “Saussure” of the “Cours” edited by Bally, Séchehaye, and Riedlinger;1 and second, 321

there is the Saussure of Derrida and Lacan, but also the Saussure of the manuscripts published over the past few decades. Both of these Saussures can be regarded as “authentic,” by which I mean corresponding to certain of the author’s intentions. But the fact that those intentions were never fulfilled, never led to a comprehensive theory of language that its author felt could and should be published, is indicative of a split in what this proper name signifies: a split that goes beyond the one proper name insofar as it can be associated with a theory of signification as constitutively split. It is the consequences of this split that I want to discuss here, however briefly. The first, and perhaps most important, of these is the one that splits what might be called “conscious” or “deliberate intentionality,” that direction of consciousness that aims at an object—­a unified, self-­identical object. For Saussure, this object was “language,” but also parole. “Language,” he is published as saying in his Course in General Linguistics, is too “heteroclite” to serve as an identifiable object of knowledge. It is split and dispersed among several fields: physiology, psychology, sociology, and so on. In his search to find what was “properly” linguistic, Saussure, as his manuscripts show more even than his published Course, was increasingly driven to invent terms and to comment on how unreliable and unusable the traditional words were: above all, the word “word,” which suggested a self-­contained unity that precisely language as signifying process was constantly promising but also withdrawing. The example I like to give is that of looking up words in a foreign language. At first, one uses a dictionary that translates back into the “mother tongue,” which is reassuringly familiar but conventionally “known.” After a while, one passes to a dictionary in the language being used, that is, one moves from a French–­English dictionary to a French–­French one. Why does this take time? Because initially when one looks up the meaning of a word in a French–­French dictionary, one is liable to come upon other words that are equally unknown, and thus one is led into a process that can amount to a regressus ad infinitum. But this regressus is going on all the time, even in one’s “own” “mother” tongue—­or if you prefer, one’s “native language.” The only difference is that, in everyday use, conventions that we have “learned” or been taught allow us to ignore it, reining in the potential play of signification and reducing it to what seems most probable or plausible. But as Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Derrida, and many others have pointed out, such reductions—­although inevitable—­reflect 322   The Future of Saussure

not the nature of things but relations of forces: relations that are capable of change. Saussure’s discovery of “signification”—­and even more, of “signifying” as the differential principle of language, as Derrida argued in On Grammatology—­pointed out the internal open-­endedness of this distinctively linguistic process of “signifying.” This also explains why, despite the fact that every signifier must “have” a signified, the “having” here is never fully justifiable in internal terms, precisely because, as a signifying process, there are in language no internally meaningful or functional terms. This is the point of Saussure’s often misunderstood notion about the “arbitrariness” of the sign. A term signifies only insofar as it demarcates itself, distinguishes itself from other terms. But the particular set of terms from which it distinguishes itself is neither fixed nor accidental: it is situational and reflects, as already mentioned, decisions largely imposed by a relation of forces. This is the political and historical dimension at work in the heart of language: the imposition of certain limits and the exclusion of others. And this is what makes its relation to a signifier—­without which language would be incomprehensible and not what we recognize as “language”—­ necessary but always tentative and provisional. As Derrida put it in that same book, every “signified” is delimited and defined only by relation to other signifiers, and this intrinsically open-­ended relationship becomes a vehicle of “meaning” only insofar as its play is interrupted and arrested. Independently, this is also what C. S. Peirce discovered as the “interpretant,” the third term required in a signifying process, in addition to what he called “representamen” and “object.” The dualistic, binary structure of the sign is thus disrupted by Saussure’s insistence that the agens of the sign is the signifier and that this is dependent upon a play of differences, not upon a fixed identity. But difference from what? It is here that the “other” Saussure, the Saussure of structuralism as distinct from poststructuralism, of the “system” rather than the “process,” appears. Referring to the published Course, but fully aware of the fact that the Saussure of the manuscripts could be interpreted differently, Derrida traced a dramatic scenario in which Saussure the investigator, who insists on the irreducibility of difference in the signifying process, was supplanted by Saussure the systematizer, who wanted above all to place the study of linguistics on a stable scientific footing. And this could only be done by reducing the notion of radical difference, The Future of Saussure   323

which was intrinsically open-­ended, to that of opposition, which presupposed the givenness of a closed system—which, in other words, took the delimitation of the “milieu” of signs—­of all that “surrounds” the individual signifier—­for granted. Thus Derrida felt constrained to go beyond Saussure and to look elsewhere in order to develop the more radical dimensions of his notion of language as signifying process, which led him to Louis Hjemslev and his “glossematics.” The latter sought to define the linguistic sign independently of its material embodiments, and thus, potentially at least, demonstrating how the process of signifying was not restricted to language but could be seen at work wherever meaning was constituted through signifying. As it turned out, the Saussure that Derrida felt obliged to deconstruct—­ the Course in General Linguistics—­did not at all give an accurate account of Saussure’s thinking, which was much more extensively, if more fragmentarily, articulated in his notebooks and manuscripts, which have been published since. A footnote in Of Grammatology2 demonstrates that Derrida was aware of the potential difference between the two, even if he had to limit himself to a discussion of the published book, which at the time was the basis of the influence Saussure exercised in particular on French structuralism. But I cannot overemphasize the point that Derrida insisted on in linking Saussure to Hjemslev’s formalizations, namely that the process of signifying could and should not be reduced to what is called “language,” since it is at work wherever articulation and recognition take place—­which is nearly everywhere. In short, the process of signification should not be associated exclusively with discursive language, written or spoken. At roughly the same time, Lacan was elaborating a theory of the triadic structure of “symbolic,” “imaginary,” and “real,” which was based on a similar reading of Saussure, in part at least. Lacan emphasized the asymmetrical interdependence of signifier and signified, and the constitutive/ deconstitutive role of the former in the process of signifying. The inevitable but partial process of closure Lacan compared with the point de capiton, variously rendered in English as “quilting point” and as “anchoring point”; the latter phrase has the advantage of illuminating the function of “anchors” in television news programs, describing it as an “imaginary” process that, when left to its own devices—­above all that of “strengthening” a putatively “autonomous ego”—­could become extremely self-­destructive. 324   The Future of Saussure

Lacan’s “real” as that which resists, could be seen to correspond to Derrida’s “rest” or “remnant,” that which is left over and exceeds the inevitable attempt at meaningful closure. Derrida’s tendency, however, was to emphasize how the “imaginary” could tend not just to strengthen ego identity but to dislocate it through the repetitiveness and doubling that marks the Freudian “uncanny.” This raises the question of whether such a process can be separated from the feeling of anxiety, to which the uncanny is inextricably linked. In the following chapter, I will take a closer look at how Freud, in his essay on the uncanny, tries to integrate anxiety into his psychoanalytic theory, but finally, in the manner of a symptom, has to modify the latter to a degree that calls much of its traditional premises and unity into question. Like anxiety, signifying projects the past toward an uncertain future. This is also the pattern that emerges from a critical reading of Saussure. For once language is construed as signifying, it must be understood and practiced as a dynamic, open-­ended process rather than as a closed system. Its “openness,” however, also affects the very medium in which it tends to be situated: verbal language. If Saussure rejected the “word” as a viable category for understanding language, it is because the dynamics of signifying have no privileged or exclusive relationship to verbal language. Such dynamics can be discerned in all “media”: acoustic, visual, tactile, olfactory. Any “articulation” of signifying elements requires something like the Saussurean distinction or demarcation of one “element” from others and in relation to them, from other elements, in order for it to be recognizable as a signifier. The unresolvable tension arises from the fact that this process of distinguishing and demarcating is always relative to its surroundings, but these surroundings are never in themselves finite: they are virtually unending, interrupted only by convention. What distinguishes the orthodox structuralist from the poststructuralist “moment”—­both of which are at work in the texts attributed to “Saussure”—­is the way the inevitable arresting or closure of this intrinsically unlimited movement is construed. For structuralism the closure of the system tends to be taken for granted and seen as self-­contained. For poststructuralism and its avatars, the closure is inevitable but always exterior to what it encloses: it always remains poised to gesture beyond the borders that define its present, actual signification.3 In short, as signifiers, singular elements always remain pointed toward a future that includes that past but cannot be reduced to it: they are blinking “moments” in the Nietzschean sense.4 The Future of Saussure   325

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14

Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny

The two main perspectives through which Freud construes what he calls the “psyche”—­and it should be noted that he rarely uses either the term “subject” or “self ”—­are that of the topical and the dynamic. The former is a function of the latter, but it also explains how the latter operates. The topical is a function of the dynamic insofar as this latter term—­not entirely appropriate by the way—­designates the conflictual force field that both structures and destructures the psyche. This dual tendency, both to structure and to destructure, requires essentially spatial and topical categories in order to be adequately thought. Space, as Hegel observed, is the domain of externality, of Auseinandersein and of Nebeneinandersein (being-­ outside-­of-­one-­another and being-­next-­to-­one-­another): it is the domain of disunity.1 This essential disunity of the psyche, which requires a topographical approach to be thought, is what results when conflicts define and determine but are not resolved by the effects they bring forth. All of this crystallizes around the theory of the I—­and I note in passing, that I will translate Freud’s second topic as “I,” “it,” and “trans-­I” rather than accepting the traditional terminology of ego, ed, and superego. I do this because I consider it essential that with Freud, as with other thinkers (such as Heidegger and Benjamin), the relation to colloquial, nontechnical language be preserved and not be sacrificed to a technical vocabulary that adds nothing in exactitude while eliminating precisely the experiential associations that the German words tend to preserve. Precisely because Freud thinks in terms of “it” and of “I,” he does not resort to the discourse of the subject, which Lacan sought to reintroduce (in my eyes wrongly) into psychoanalytical discourse. Even less does Freud speak of the “self,” nor does he use the word “personality” as an emphatic category. What takes the place of the “subject” in his second typology, at least, is in large part a so-­called personal pronoun, but one that designates an impersonal 327

gender. This “it” introduces a third dimension that opens up the binary structure of gender to an irreducible alterity and heterogeneity.2 The “it” can be said to take the place of the subject in one respect only: it supplants the originating and constitutive function that a certain modernity—­since Descartes at least—­associates with it, and more precisely with its function as self-­consciousness. But of course, “it” is only one third of the topical “story” Freud has to tell, in which two other figures play decisive roles: an “I” and a “trans-­I.”3 The “I” above all is described as both a “surface” and “body-­I.” It is a surface-­I insofar as it is constituted in the space between “it” and what Freud diversely calls either the “world” or “reality”—­which, however else they may be determined, designate a space that is both “external” and alien to the “I” and to the “it.” Does this mean that Freud himself accepts what I have called one of the major modern paradigms that organizes reality according to the opposition and hierarchy of “inside” and “outside”? To an extent, yes. But at the same time he disrupts the basis on which that paradigm has been constructed and defended ever since Descartes sought absolute certitude in the realm of the mind thinking itself as an I: cogito me cogitans. For it is precisely such certitude, based on the supposed unity of a first-­person thinking itself as self-­consciousness, that Freud’s topical-­dynamic-­conflictual approach to the psyche upsets. Or rather, resituates. Resituates as the essential but impossible effort of the “I” precisely to mediate, not just between inside and outside, between “it” and “world,” but to mediate within, between “it” and “trans-­I.” The I is thus not just the surface through which the psyche confronts the world: it is the surface on which the contradictory messages and impulses of “it” and “over-­I” collide with one another and pull in different directions. It would not therefore be an exaggeration to describe the I as itself essentially and inescapably a “borderline” function: In The I and the It Freud calls it a Grenzwesen, which could be translated as a “borderline being,” seeking to mediate between “world and it.” With characteristic tongue-­in-­cheek—­a tone that all too often is overlooked by many of his readers, Freud goes on to compare the I in this, its impossible borderline situation, with both the psychoanalyst and the politician: [The I] actually behaves like the physician in the analytical therapy, insofar as it proposes itself to the It, with respect to the real world, as a libido-­object and seeks to draw its libido toward itself. It is not 328   Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny

only the helper of the It, but also its submissive servant who courts his master’s love. . . . In this intermediary position between the It and reality [the I] all too often succumbs to the temptation of becoming sycophantic [liebdienerisch], opportunistic, and mendacious, somewhat like a politician who, despite his better insights still, wants to keep favor with public opinion.4

Freud starts by comparing the I to the analyst and winds up with the politician, but both comparisons should be taken seriously. The I provides the model on the one hand for political sovereignty and order, and on the other for its therapeutic reinforcement. But the comparison works to undercut both the sovereignty of the statesman and the efficacy of the analyst. If the I can be compared to the analyst, the analyst can, and perhaps must, be compared to the I, and this aspect of the comparison does not turn out very favorably for the analyst—­unless, that is, the analyst is willing and able to accept the general challenge to subjective sovereignty that Freud implies in his comparison of the I to the politician. For the I winds up not just mediating between but making all sorts of concessions to the It (and, by implication, to the trans-­I) that it seeks to reconcile—­ concessions that involve it in servility, opportunism, and mendacity. And concessions that, above all, by no means achieve the goal of reestablishing or preserving anything like autonomy, sovereignty, or “freedom.” The chapter of the essay in which these observations are inscribed is significantly entitled, “The Dependencies of the I” and indeed it is from the perspective of such “dependencies” that the I ultimately has to be thought. For in the final pages of his essay, what Freud describes as the results of the dependencies of the I gravitate around its relation to anxiety and to death. And here we arrive at what I would call the constitutive “borderline,” the enabling and disabling limit of Freud’s psychoanalytic thinking as such: its relation to anxiety and to death. What is crucial is that Freud insists on linking both of these factors, however different they may be, to the precarious instance or agency that he calls the “I”: The I is in fact the actual seat of anxiety. Threatened by three sorts of dangers [i.e., from external reality, from the It, and from the Trans-­I], the I develops the reflex of fleeing, withdrawing its own engagement [Besetzung] from the threatening perception or from the similarly Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny   329

evaluated process in the It, and releasing it as anxiety. This primitive reaction will later be replaced by the construction of defensive engagements (mechanism of phobias).5

This linkage of anxiety to the I, coming shortly after the association of the I with the analyst and the politician, sets the scene for the emergence of what constitutes the internal and uncanny borderline that separates psychoanalysis from itself, and that concerns precisely what an earlier English translation of Freud’s most significant later essay, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, appropriately called “the problem of anxiety.” For anxiety remains a constant problem for Freud, both before he actually elaborates what will be known as psychoanalysis, as well as throughout that elaboration. It remains a constant problem because it challenges the internal coherence and cohesion of the psychoanalytic discourse he is simultaneously striving to elaborate. It is anxiety, however, that is both before and beyond the pleasure principle, in ways that resist and disrupt all of Freud’s attempts to absorb and integrate it into the system of concepts he is constructing—­but continually also revising. Several of Freud’s earliest publications dealt with the symptomatology, etiology, and general theory of “anxiety neuroses,” and long before he developed his properly psychoanalytic theory of the I, anxiety appeared in those early essays as profoundly related to it, albeit in a negative manner: as that which disrupts the equilibrium of the psyche, and indeed in its most physical dimensions as well (symptoms of light-­headedness, dizziness being associated with anxiety attacks). Anxiety involves, at least in severe episodes, both physically and psychically a certain loss of control. And in the subsequently elaborated psychoanalytic discourse, the part or function of the psyche that sought to establish a certain control over warring factions was of course the I. During the early phases of his writings on psychoanalysis, up until roughly the end of the First World War, Freud sought to integrate the phenomenon of anxiety into psychoanalytic conceptuality by describing it as an aftereffect of repression, which, together with his reformulation of the notion of the “unconscious,” was doubtless the most distinctive term associated with his work. Since repression was always construed as a dynamic process, one that involved not just denying a representation access to consciousness, but replacing it by a “counter-­charge” (Gegenbesetzung). 330   Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny

And since repression is constantly liable to modification through the conflict between what was repressed (but also desired) and what replaced it (for example, a phobia) there is always, Freud insisted, the possibility of the repressed “returning” in one form or another, of its gaining the upper hand—­or threatening to do so—­over that which was repressing it. Anxiety for Freud was to be construed as the response of the psyche, and in particular of the I, to this threat of a return of the repressed, which manifested itself “economically” through the release of energy that could not be bound to representations—­that could not be channeled and objectified, besetzt, as Freud writes, whether through the formation of symptoms, inhibitions, or phobias, or through other means. But as Freud accumulated experience, this rather simple “economic” explanation of anxiety, through which it was ostensibly subordinated directly to the pleasure principle—­in his economic terminology, to the “binding” of energy, preparatory to its pleasurable release or discharge—­ proved to be increasingly untenable. The reason for this was apparent from the start, although Freud had sought to avoid its implications for the sake of his theory. The basic problem of anxiety—­its “question”—­was whether it designated a loss of control (of the I) or a heightening of control. Whether it was a means by which the I defended its integrity or a process by which it risked losing it. In short, whether the essence of anxiety could be seen in trauma and panic, or in the effort to control trauma and panic (questions posed at the outset of Beyond the Pleasure Principle with respect to the repetition of anxiety dreams, for instance). Was anxiety, then, to be considered basically as a salutary defense or as a disruptive threat to the unity of the psyche, and thus first and foremost to that part or aspect of it that sought to establish and preserve such unity, the I? It was the challenge to his theory posed by this question, I submit, that, in part at least, informed one of the most influential and yet also peripheral essays he ever wrote: his 1919 study of “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”). That the uncanny is inseparable from anxiety is evident; what is more difficult is to determine precisely how it relates to it. Everything uncanny involves some sort of anxiety, but not all anxiety is per se uncanny. This is a pattern that Freud repeatedly evokes: B is a characteristic of A, but not all B is A, hence B does not suffice to explain A. Anxiety may involve the return of the repressed, but not every return of the repressed produces Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny   331

anxiety. Anxiety may involve free-­floating energy, but not all free-­floating energy results in anxiety, and so on. This essay of Freud’s is curious for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these is to explain why, and how, he wrote it. Ernest Jones cites as a pragmatic reason the fact that it was written during the war, when it was difficult to get contributions for the journal edited by Freud, Imago, and so Freud was asked to contribute something of his own to make up for the lack of foreign authors. But this hardly explains why he chose the uncanny as his topic. Indeed, he does his best to muddy the traces when he insists that he is writing about something of which he has had very little personal experience. Jones, by contrast, informs us that he had begun writing this essay many years before, but that he had put off finishing it until he had passed the age of sixty-­two, the age at which he feared he would die. In the essay Freud cites the number sixty-­two as an example of an involuntary, and therefore uncanny, recurrence, to which one can even attribute a secret significance, such as an indication of “the particular lifespan that is destined for him.”6 Freud had always been particularly contemptuous of those who would ascribe to the fear of death any sort of fundamental psychological significance. In The Ego and the Id, again in the appendix from which we quoted earlier, on the “Dependencies of the I,” he mocks the “bombastic proposition that all anxiety is at bottom fear of death,” arguing that it is “virtually senseless” and in any case “unjustifiable.” For “death” is “an abstract concept” to which nothing in the unconscious corresponds. That this very fact might be a source of anxiety never seems to occur to him, although he does come up with an interesting explanation for “the mechanism of the fear of death”: “It can only be the fact that the I releases its narcissistic libido-­charge to a large extent, which is to say, gives itself up, just as in other cases of anxiety it gives up another object.” For Freud, then, the “fear of death” is situated “between I and Trans-­I” (288/47–­48). In other words, the fear of death, like anxiety in general—­and in German it is the same word, Angst, that applies to both (which I have had to modify in English)—­once again is situated not with respect to “death” per se, but with respect to the I: the fear of death is fear that the I has of losing itself, abandoning its narcissistic libido and yet having nowhere to “put” it.

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Anxiety, for Freud, is thus related to the experience of loss: loss of object, loss of the access to objects through perception, loss of the self qua I as object. And yet, as the example of the recurring number sixty-­ two indicates—­and this too is a frequent motif in Freud’s discussion of anxiety—­the anxiety that such recurrence evokes is related to something external arriving to provoke a loss that would be irremediable. It is something external—­but external to what? What is uncanny about such repetitions is above all that they occur involuntarily: they take place outside of the control, outside of the conscious volition and intention of the I. It is this that allows them to be subsumed under the category that Freud uses to define anxiety itself. Anxiety, he insists, is the reaction of the I to a “danger.” A “danger” that can be fully external, or internal, coming from “it” or “trans-­I.” Anxiety thus seems on the one hand to occupy a borderline position between internal—­I—­ and external, whether as real or as endopsychic. But if anxiety is a reaction to danger, not every reaction to danger produces anxiety. Anxiety must be further specified. It is a reaction to danger that produces an affect. The word is to be understood as literally as possible: it “af-­fects” the I that it befalls from without. In anxiety the I feels that it is in relation to forces beyond its control. The ultimate fear is that the I will lose control fully, that it will be “overwhelmed” by external or by internal forces. That is, however, but the one side of anxiety. The other side—­its “functional” side—­is that the I does not merely passively succumb to the feeling of anxiety. Its feeling also serves as a “signal,” which is to say, both as a warning and an appeal: a warning of an approaching event, and as an appeal to take action to defend itself against impending danger. Freud has a difficult time deciding which of these two “sides,” which in terms of Austinian speech-­act theory could be called the constative and the performative, is the more important in anxiety, or indeed to what extent they can be separated. And yet they have radically distinct and indeed opposed ends. The performative functions to preserve the I as the agency of control and unification. The constative acknowledges a certain passivity in the face of looming danger. In this recognition, or apprehension, Freud senses a certain complicity, a certain readiness to accept the danger as one’s fate or destiny. This, at least, is how Freud sums up this tendency at the end of The I and the It:

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We know that the fear of death makes its appearance under two conditions (which, moreover, are entirely analogous to situations in which other kinds of anxiety develop), namely, as a reaction to an external danger and as an internal process, as for instance in melancholia. . . . The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: the I gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the trans-­I. . . . When the I finds itself in an excessive real danger which it believes itself unable to overcome by its own strength, it is bound to draw the same conclusion. It sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself die. (Norton, 61)

To be sure, Freud then reaches the same conclusion as in the earlier essay on “The Uncanny”: the fear of death, and anxiety in general, is merely “a development of the fear of castration” in which the I, confronted by the ambivalence of its desire, experiences itself as split. Anxiety would thus ultimately be a function of desire and of libidinal economy, and thus fully explicable in traditional psychoanalytical terms. It is in order to establish conclusively this thesis, and thus integrate once and for all anxiety into the conceptuality of psychoanalysis, that Freud ventures onto the marginal terrain of aesthetics in writing, or rather completing, his essay on “The Uncanny.” It is an essay that begins with a kind of disavowal: The psychoanalyst feels seldom the impulse to undertake aesthetic investigations, not even then, when Aesthetics is not reduced to the theory of the Beautiful but is rather described as the theory of the qualities of our feelings. He [the Analyst] works on other levels of psychic life and has little to do with the goal-­inhibited, muted emotional impulses that depend on so many concomitant constellations, which generally compose the matter of aesthetics. Now and then, however, it comes to pass [trifft es sich doch] that he must interest himself in a particular region of aesthetics, and this is one that is usually both marginal and neglected by aesthetic scholarship. One such is the “Uncanny”7

Just why Freud—­the analyst par excellence and author of these lines—­ has to leave the beaten tracks of psychoanalytic experience to venture out 334   Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny

into the discipline of aesthetics, and not just the aesthetics of the beautiful but of feeling (an area largely neglected by aesthetic scholarship) he never gets around to really explaining. This lends a particular valence, retrospectively, to his formulation that “now and then it comes to pass”—­trifft es sich doch—­a striking formulation, literally: “It meets or strikes itself nevertheless.” What is this “it” that meets itself (trifft sich) or comes upon itself, or strikes itself, and that lures Freud along with it, to that Treffen, a meeting on unfamiliar terrain? In a famous and often-­cited passage, Freud, who insists that he has long had no direct experience that could be called uncanny, and that he is therefore writing about a feeling that is far removed from his own recent experience, describes the kind of meeting that marks the uncanny, and he describes it as an autobiographical experience: As I once, on a hot summer afternoon, wandered through the unfamiliar, empty streets of a small town in Italy, I arrived in an area about whose character I could not long remain in doubt. There were only made-­up women to be seen in the windows of the small houses and I hurried to leave the narrow street through the closest corner. But after I had wandered around for a while, I found myself suddenly back in the same street, in which I now began to arouse some attention and my precipitous exit had only the result that I returned via a different route for the third time. Then, however, I was overcome by a feeling that I can only describe as uncanny. (GW 249, SE 237)

To discover one’s movements driven by a desire that escapes conscious control, which is therefore neither simply foreign nor simply familiar, is to discover the inseparability of desire and anxiety. The entire essay on “The Uncanny” is written in a somewhat similar manner. Its goal is never entirely clear, never entirely explicit, but it seems dedicated to bringing anxiety under the control of psychoanalytic discourse, by defining it as ultimately a “development” of “castration anxiety,” and hence of what Lacan once called the “dialectics of desire.” But at each new turn of the road something appears that prevents that control from stabilizing itself. And the rhythm of that appearance is not indifferent to its content: it is a rhythm of repetition, felt to be “demonic” because out of control. And yet the desire involved remains the desire for such control: what Freud calls Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny   335

the libidinal desire of the I to be an object of love, which is to say, to be an object of unification. It is this desire for unification that is undone at every twist and turn of the Uncanny trajectory, of the trajectory that is itself uncanny. The narcissism of the I, we begin to suspect, may turn out to be an avatar of the death drive. Freud was compelled to write “The Uncanny,” I conclude, as a last-­ ditch effort to defend a theory that would have mapped anxiety onto the scheme proposed by the pleasure principle, via repression. Here is how he himself sums up this intention: Here is now the place for two remarks in which I would like to depose the essential content of this little investigation. First, if psychoanalytical theory is correct in maintaining that every affective impulse, no matter of what kind, is transformed by repression into anxiety, then there must be a group among the cases producing anxiety in which it can be shown that this type of anxiety is something repressed returning. This type of anxiety would be the Uncanny, and therefore it is a matter of indifference whether it was originally anxious or some other affect. Second, if this really is the secret nature of the uncanny, we can understand why linguistic usage has allowed the “canny”—­ literally the “homey”—­to pass into its opposite, the uncanny, the “unhomey.” For this Unhomey-­uncanny is really nothing new or foreign, but rather something that has been familiar to psychic life from time immemorial [vom alters her], that has only been estranged from it through the process of repression. (GW 254/SE 241)

In short, in this account, psychoanalysis still feels itself at home with the uncanny, as it does with anxiety, because both are to be integrated into the psychic household or economy: the uncanny is a form of anxiety, and anxiety in general is still considered by Freud to be essentially a result of repression—­and of its “return.” The uncanny would thus be that form of anxiety in which what appears to be strange reveals itself as familiar, without, however, losing its quality of strangeness—­just as that which was repressed once had to be known, and remains known, albeit not to self-­consciousness. What emerges is a split in the notion of the “familiar” and of the 336   Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny

“known,” which no longer can be understood as opposed to and excluding that which is inaccessible to it. However, at the time Freud is completing his essay on “The Uncanny,” he is on the verge of writing Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and this proximity manifests itself in the importance attached in the earlier essay to phenomena of involuntary repetition or recurrence. The element of the “involuntary” in turn links the uncanny not only to repression as an economic or drive-­dynamic phenomenon, but to the topographical instance of the “I.” For it is the “I” that is the seat not just of anxiety but also of the will—­a phenomenon that Freud constantly collides with, without his ever being able to really theorize it. It plays a decisive role in this essay in the form of its negation, the involuntary. And involuntary repetition in turn anticipates the “repetition compulsion” that shortly thereafter, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, will lead Freud to hypothesize the death drive. In short, Freud’s essay on the uncanny marks the borderline but also the turning-­point between his earlier “economic” theory of anxiety based on repression and his subsequent “second” theory of anxiety now centered on the conceptual couple “I” and “danger.” This is also the strategy employed in “The Uncanny,” where Freud seeks to integrate anxiety not just in terms of drive economy or dynamics but as an offshoot of “castration.” But “castration” in turn has to be interpreted in terms of a shift in the function of the I: by virtue of its anxiety, the I is compelled to restructure itself and to engage with—­if not acknowledge—­its irreducible heterogeneity. In Lacanian terms, what emerges here can be described as a crisis both of the imaginary and of the symbolic: each splitting apart from itself while remaining inextricably interconnected. Castration thus emerges as the model of that “loss,” to which Freud from his earliest writings on had always linked anxiety: the “loss of perception” becomes manifest as the fear of losing one’s eyes in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story of “The Sandman;” and finally, the fear of “castration,” which Freud here links both to a perceptual loss (the negative “perception” of the absence of the phallus) and to an anticipated physical loss. This restructuring of the I through the impact of castration anxiety goes together with a reduction of the priority of visual experience and a consequent revalorization of acoustical, olfactory, and tactile experience—­very much in evidence in Hoffmann’s tale, and in many others as well. The effort to define anxiety as a response of the I to a danger, conceived Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny   337

as the imaginary perception of an impending loss, presupposes an ideal of completeness that in the Freudian topography only the I can aspire to—­but never attain. The consequence of this impossible aspiration is first the crisis of castration, second, the “decline of the Oedipus complex,” and third, the intrapsychic emergence of the trans-­I, which supplants the I’s previous aspiration to completeness, wholeness, and if you will, “sovereignty.” The trans-­I is heir to the desire to be protected by identifying with the fantasized omnipotence of parents and authorities. But it is also that which simultaneously offers and withholds a certain protection and power. By remaining ultimately impervious to the advances of the I, it thereby turns into a measure of its helplessness, its lack of sovereignty. The I can no longer hope to consider itself Herr im Hause, like Kafka’s “House-­Father” in the story that details the latter’s “care” (“Sorge des Hausvaters”: “Cares of a House-­Father”). It is no longer at home, above all with itself, since it is inhabited by something it can neither comprehend nor control. Thus, the home becomes a privileged site of the “unhomey”: the uncanny. The borderline is not that which separates the home from the world outside, the inside from the outside, the familiar from the strange, but rather that which in traversing each renders them inseparable and yet irreconcilable. To this challenging situation at least two responses are conceivable (there are surely more, but I will limit myself here to discussing just two, which are most the most conspicuous in Freud’s writing). The first we have already mentioned: it is the pure and simple self-­abandonment of the I, which “gives itself up” and “lets itself die,” as Freud puts it at the end of The I and the It. But it is not difficult to see that such an abandon is not what it seems. It is not a pure and simple relinquishment: to give up, and to give oneself up is usually to give oneself up to someone or something else. It is a last-­ditch attempt to salvage a notion of the other as alter ego (or, as I almost wrote, altar ego): the imaginary other writ large in Lacanian terms. To such another the I would attribute the properties that it has not been able to find in itself, namely those of a homogeneous, unified, sovereign self, in contrast to the “dependencies of the I.” That is the one solution, a kind of sacrificial sleight of hand through which the I, in giving itself up, seeks to save itself, which is to say, save a certain idealized notion of self (what Lacan calls the “ideal I” [le moi idéal]), which as “imaginary” and which he distinguishes from the “symbolic” “ideal of the I” (idéal du moi). 338   Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny

But there is another solution, one which, however, does not try to overcome the split but rather to alter its significance. For this kind of split need not be primarily the sign of a “loss,” as with the loss of a perception or of an organ, or even of one’s life. Toward the end of his essay, Freud comes upon a version of the uncanny that he calls the uncanny of fiction, which depends entirely on the singular perspective of the reader. The uncanny is textual and theatrical, insofar as it is codetermined by the response it provokes in its audience. That response, although singular, is not arbitrary. It is informed by conventions that are shared, although not by everyone. Conventions clash, and out of this clash emerge consequences that challenge the overriding paradigm that the I seeks to defend, at least in certain cultures. I have tried to summarize this as the mono-­theological identity paradigm. It is not universal, but it is sufficiently widespread and long-­ lasting to appear so. In this it resembles its objective correlative, which may be identified with the expectation of “meaning.” There are certain social activities that both play to this expectation and also undercut it, turning it back on its conditions of possibility in a certain narcissism. This is the solution that Freud retraces in his analyses of “jokes,” in which the ultimate and archetypical joke, as I have tried to argue elsewhere8 is the joke on meaning itself—­or rather, not on meaning itself so much as on the expectation that language and what it represents will turn out to be meaningful. It is the function of this expectation in the joke process as a whole that allows the so-­called shaggy dog story to be considered as paradigmatic for jokes in general. But the shaggy dog story, as its name already implies, is not so much phallic—­and thereby tied to castration—­as it is “thallic,” a word I invoked many years ago to describe the more feminine network or netting that presides over the telling of the joke: These jokes are not entirely untendentious, they are “shaggy-­dog stories” and give the teller a certain pleasure by misleading and annoying the listener. The latter then mutes this annoyance by resolving to become a storyteller himself.9

The passage recalls Benjamin’s insistence, in his essay on the “Storyteller,” that those who tell stories really actually only retell them, and that those who listen in turn do the same, albeit differently. But we are now no longer in the restricted space of the analytical session, but in the more expansive Anxiety, Psychoanalysis, and the Uncanny   339

space of social and historical tradition. The relation of I to trans-­I will not thereby disappear, but it will leave room for others to take its place, however tentatively, just as it itself—­the trans-­I—­is both more and less than a “super” I, being the repository, as Freud insists, of the specific traditions, both familial and cultural, that constitute the world of the I but are never simply reducible to it. Benjamin emphasizes in his essay that the relation of audience to the storyteller is determined by the former’s desire to seek “council” or “advice.” That council or advice will always involve specific objects and problems. But beyond that, it will also inevitably involve, whether the I knows it or not—­indeed whether the unconscious knows it or not—­its relation to that other to which we name catachrestically, “death.” The only answer of the storyteller to that predicament is to tell another story, which, given its function, will always be more or less of a “tall” story—­and then to invite the various I’s gathered around as listeners to abandon themselves sufficiently and become storytellers in their turn. Their stories, like all stories, will end; but not perhaps the hope of discovering yet another one to take its place in the ongoing but finite series of stories to which all tales—­ including this one—­belong. (To be continued . . .)10

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15

The Singularity of Literary Cognition

Looking back over the evolution of literary studies in the United States over the past few decades, two interrelated and in part contradictory tendencies can be distinguished. On the one hand, literary studies have extended their scope both territorially and methodologically: poststructuralism, deconstruction, and New Historicism; postcolonial, gender, queer, ethnic, transnational, and translation studies; and now World Literature, are just some of the approaches that have participated in this development. On the other hand, at the same time that literary studies have extended their scope, there has been a significant shift in the conception of just what constitutes their specifically literary dimension. When I began graduate study, poetry was still widely considered to constitute the core, if not the essence, of what was called “literature.” Much of the most influential criticism of the time dealt with poetical texts. Today, by contrast, when students of literature speak of their subject, they often equate “literature” with “narrative fiction.” The third main “genre” of literature, drama or theater, has also moved ahead of poetry in terms of the interest generated among students, although it remains far behind narrative as the privileged object of study. While this shift in the conception of “literature” from poetry to narrative has facilitated the expansion of literary studies into previously inaccessible areas, it also requires a reconsideration of whatever it is that distinguishes “literature” from other forms of human activity—­what distinguishes literature, say, not from but rather within the larger realms of “culture,” “history,” and “geopolitics” to which it, literature, also no doubt belongs. Without such a reconsideration, the very extension of literary studies, which legitimately seeks to respond to a rapidly changing world, runs the risk of having nothing truly distinctive to offer to society in return for the acceptance it seeks and needs. The social changes to which literary studies have sought to respond are 341

many and complex. The development and spread of computer technology throughout all areas of life, despite the important changes it has wrought, has tended to reinforce the prestige of visual and acoustic experience at the expense of the graphic and linguistic medium that remains decisive for literature. The exponential spread of messaging and social networks over the past few decades seems in general not to have brought with it a new respect for practices of writing or reading, even though it involves both. All of this renders a comprehensive reflection on the distinctive resources and possibilities of literature and literary studies all the more urgent. The remarks that follow seek to provide an initial, tentative, partial—­and no doubt, partisan—­response to this challenge.

THE SINGULAR AS SIGNIFIER One of the things that sets literary studies apart from other disciplines, both in the humanities and in the sciences as well, is the singular nature of the knowledge it produces. Knowledge in literary studies has a different status and function from that in most other academic disciplines. What is distinctive about the study of literature is the way in which the knowledge that it produces results from an encounter with texts that remains both singular and situational, whereas in most other disciplines the value of knowledge tends to be measured by its ability to transcend, through generalization, the limiting quality of the specific situations in which it is produced, transmitted, and received. In other words, and at the risk of overgeneralizing the “singular”—­a paradox of this entire book of which I am well aware—­I want to suggest that in most disciplines texts are seen to be means serving an end that can be clearly separated from them—­ that end consisting in their meaning. In literary studies, by contrast, what counts is not meaning per se, but what Walter Benjamin, in his essay on “The Task of the Translator,” using a term borrowed from scholastic philosophy, called ways of meaning: not just the what of language but above all its how. There is a well-­known line from a poem by the American writer Archibald MacLeish that states that “A poem should not mean. But be.” Like most memorable one-­liners, it is too simple. Too simple because, like all language, meaning always plays a part in poetry, as in all language. The German Romantic poet Novalis articulated a more complex version of MacLeish’s assertion, extending it to works of art in general, and indeed 342   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

emphasizing the relation between “being” and a more general necessity: “Each work of art has an a priori ideal, a necessity of being there.”1 Novalis is no doubt correct in emphasizing the connection between the singularity of the literary work and its “a priori ideal,” which, because it is “a priori,” invokes a generality prior to all differentiation of experience. But the English “has”—­“ has an a priori ideal”—­glosses over the disjunction that characterizes the relation of singular and general in works of art. The work of art may depend on some prior generality, a priori or not, but it is not simply identical with it. This is particularly evident in poetry, inasmuch as it diverges or can diverge widely from the generalized language of everyday communication. But it presumably is at work in “works of art” more generally as well. Poetry and/or art—­and it can be debated whether the two terms are coextensive—­what makes it distinct has to do with the fact that its mode of articulation (its “syntax”) is never simply reducible to its grammatical or semantic contents. There is a memorable formulation of Derrida that rephrases this insight and extends it to thinking in general. It comes at the very end of his reading of Saussure in Of Grammatology. Referring to Saussure’s distinction—­ again borrowed from medieval scholasticism—­of “signifier” and “signified,” Derrida sums up his interpretation of Saussure as follows: That the signified is originarily and essentially . . . trace, that it is always already in the position of signifier, is that apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon writing as its death and its resource.2

Although the terminology in which this proposition is formulated may seem antiquated, I want to suggest that its implications are momentous3 and remain relevant to the pursuit of literary studies today. To begin to understand those implications, however, two assertions must be addressed. First, the assertion that “the signified” can and must be “already in the position of (the) signifier.” And second, that writing can be seen to be both the death of “the metaphysics of presence” and its “resource.” Before responding to these questions, it will be helpful to reflect on a problem of translation. Saussure, like Derrida, wrote in French. This book is written in English and employs English translations of both, although The Singularity of Literary Cognition   343

frequently modified with respect to the published versions. This is not a trivial matter. Translation never is. Indeed, translation, as it turns out, is one way of exemplifying Saussure’s conception of language as a signifying process. Signifiers signify by distinguishing themselves from other signifiers—­they are already a kind of negative or differential translation. Nevertheless, I want to discuss here not translation in general, but a particular translation, one which has become so familiar that most English speakers and readers would be surprised to find it considered problematic. I mean the translation of the French word used by Saussure, signifiant, by the English word, signifier. In French, the word is a gerund, which is the noun formed from the present participle of the verb. “Reading” is the gerund of the verb “to read” when used as a noun, but the present participle when used as a verb. The present participle, however, is a very peculiar—­or as I would prefer to say, very singular—­grammatical form. It articulates a mode of presence radically different from the “metaphysics of presence and of consciousness” to which Derrida refers in the passage quoted—­as different as the present participle is from the present indicative. The present indicative, as its name indicates, designates things that can be pointed to, and that for this very reason are considered to be relatively stable in their localization. The present participle, by contrast, as its name indicates, is partitioned—­constituted by a split between what it signifies and the process of signifying itself. The presence of the present participle, in English at least—­and it is different in different languages—­is often defined by its simultaneity with its enunciation or articulation: I am writing this in English (at a certain time and in a certain place), but I write English in general, independent of spatiotemporal differentiation. However, this simultaneity of utterance and uttering does not result in an undivided unity: rather, it entails a certain separation. One could say that the two coexist, if one thinks of the “co-­” here as a prefix that joins in separating. The presence of the present participle, then, is constituted by a split, and this split reproduces but also anticipates the general relation between signifying and signified. The “signified” is a past participle that is also a past perfect: what it designates is something that has been completed. It belongs to a past that is generally considered to be separate from the present and the future. In this sense it is easy to consider it a kind of a priori or origin of the process of signifying. The signifier, it is generally held, is determined or defined by what it signifies—­by the “signified.” As something complete 344   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

and terminated, it seems appropriate enough to attach the definite article to it. It is relatively easy therefore in English to introduce and use the term, “the signified.” No signified without a signifier and vice versa. But this interdependence can easily obscure the very different nature of the two operations. The difference emerges when we use the gerund in English: in contrast to “signified,” the word “signifying” resists the definite article. It does so because signifying entails an iterative, ongoing, discontinuous series of articulations that moves both away from its immediate appearance or location and toward something or somewhere else. To recall MacLeish’s phrase, it “means” rather than “is.” The very word “meaning” retains this present participle, but for most people this relationship has become insignificant, worn out by the familiarity of routine. It is significant how little attention the present participle and the gerund have attracted. And yet they remain quite distinctive, banned from many “respectable” discourses, precisely because of their unstable temporality. As an ongoing, iterative movement that is situated by reference to its enunciation, the present participle has no internal principle of closure and fulfillment. It therefore requires some sort of intervention from without, some sort of interruption, in order to achieve the status of a relatively stable and static “signified.” The move from signifying to signified is never purely internal. Put differently, what is intrinsic to this movement is that it is never purely intrinsic: it is heterogeneous. This is why individual words can never be exhaustively defined by reference to their “internal” meaning, but only by their “usage,” their “context,” their syntactical position. Such usage can over time be sanctioned by routine and convention and thereby naturalized. It can then appear to be more or less self-­evident, like a common noun. But the fact that this process of naturalization is never entirely satisfactory or stable can, in this particular case, be indicated by the fact that the second English translator of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, Roy Harris, chose to translate signifiant not by “signifier” but by “signal,” and signifié not by “signified” but by “significance.” He thereby distanced both terms—­but particularly signifiant—­from the verb from which they derive (“signifier”).4 To understand how the proximity to the verb might prove shocking and inappropriate, especially in the context of academic discourse, it may suffice to recall that one of the most conspicuous and relatively recent uses of the gerund with the definite article in English was probably made by The Singularity of Literary Cognition   345

Stephen King, whose novel The Shining then became the celebrated film directed by Stanley Kubrick.5 The uncanny dimension of the title reflects the uncanniness of the present participle, and in particular of the one that designates the condition of visibility. For in this film—­as with the present participle generally—­what you see is not at all what you get. And what you get is not always what you see: for instance, you see a writer (played by Jack Nicolson) whose only writing consists in obsessively typing and retyping the well-­worn phrase, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!” In the present participle, there is a bit too much “play” to be comfortable with it. This is perhaps also why the Strachey translation of the jokes retold by Freud in his book on Wit and the Unconscious avoids using the present indicative and the present participle, substituting the imperfect for it, thereby turning jokes into stories and depriving them of the “punch”—­as in “punchline”—­required to produce strong laughter.6 To treat “signifying” as though it were a noun designating a stable, identifiable process raises therefore the question—­ultimately a political question7—­of the ways in which an intrinsically indefinable play of differential signification can be arrested, interrupted, and congealed so that it can assume a relatively stable status and thus bring the movement of “meaning” to a halt in a “meaning-­ful” and identifiable object of cognition. With respect to the present participle, however, the status of such cognition remains as unstable as its object, and this in turn can call into question the identity of the cognitive subject as well. Nicolson’s repeated typing of the same phrase, which designates his character and his own first name, Jack, suggests both the anxiety and the dilemma that can be associated with the present participle: that is, with a “shining” that produces no stable “shine.” External reality and cinematic fiction merge in the name “Jack,” which in turn reflects the merging of outside and inside in the gerund that serves as title: the film in general is a “shining” that shows something different from what we (think we) see. The same holds true for language conceived as a process of signifying. The present participle or gerund, le signifiant—­literally, “the signifying”— is the term that most accurately designates the process of signification that Saussure took to be the constitutive dynamic of language. Language, he insisted, only could name things outside of it by first signifying them. And signifying, he emphasized, was different from representing insofar as it involved a process of demarcation and differentiation that relates not to 346   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

external referents but to other signifiers. Positive meaning he thus considered linguistically to be a result of the differential play of signifiers. Or of “signifying.” This is also why he was so suspicious of traditional attempts to construct a theory of language using the “word” as its basic element. But it also suggests why he was unable to achieve the comprehensive and systematic theory of language that he so desired. For if the nominalization of the present participle as gerund, as in “the signifying” or “the shining,” articulates the essential process of language as signifying, it also endows language with a spectral character, giving it the ghost-­like quality of an apparition.8 In this context it may be recalled that Jack Nicholson’s son in The Shining, played by Danny Lloyd, has the supernatural power of seeing ghosts in the haunted house that Nicolson occupies with his family. As signifying, however, what Heidegger calls the “house of language,” it is no less haunted. The ghost-­like quality of signifying makes language a medium not simply of appearances but of apparitions. It also suggests how and why Derrida describes “writing”—­insofar as it can be considered as the epitome of such signifying—­as both the “death” and the “resource” of a “metaphysics of presence” that precisely strives to separate, as mutually exclusive opposites, life from death, presence from absence. If the presence of language as “signified” consists in its being “always already in the position of signifying,” then life and death can no longer be separated in this way. This gives language an uncanny quality that makes it uncomfortable for many, fascinating for others. If we consider, then, the interplay between present participle and present indicative in Derrida’s assertion—­between “signifying” and “is”—­we can say that language “is” always in advance of itself, but also always trailing behind—­like the threads that trail behind Odradek as it rolls down the stairs in Kafka’s story “Cares of a House-­Father” (“Sorge des Hausvaters”).9 As Saussure puts it, in the more restrained discourse of the linguist: “The content of a word is determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside of it” (Course, 114). But how is this “outside” to be defined, limited, especially if it must be seen not just as spatial but also as temporal? For what “exists outside” of the word is not just the finite number of words included at any one time in what we call a language—­assuming that such a “time” could itself ever be rigorously delimited, concesso non dato—­but also the indefinite number of combinations and decompositions of word and word-­parts to which any one word The Singularity of Literary Cognition   347

can potentially relate. Like the present participle, the “outside” or other of a word has no internal principle of closure. It is virtually unlimited and therefore unpredictable. Perhaps this was behind the famous remark of Karl Kraus, quoted by Benjamin: “The more closely you look at a word, the more remotely it looks back.”10 Readers do not merely read texts as objects; in so doing and even more in writing about them, they are “read” by the texts they read. This constitutive instability of meaning affects the way texts are experienced, which is to say not just read but also transmitted. Transmission—­that is, editing and publishing—­is no less required to interpret the movement of signifying than is reading. I am not able here to dwell on the ways in which the transmissibility of texts and of readings, which is changing before our eyes with the spread of electronic texts, is transforming the relations among reader, writer, and text. But the problems involved are analogous to those already encountered in reading. Reading that responds to the way in which each signified is always already in the position of signifier cannot be described, as Heidegger tries to do, merely as a process of “collection”—­lesen in German, meaning not just reading but also “harvesting.” For reading, like transmission, with which it overlaps, must equally entail separation, dispersion, “dissemination,” as Derrida once called it. It is a response and at the same time an appeal. This is also why there can be no simple “act of reading,” to use a phrase that Wolfgang Iser popularized years ago. But it is also why what he called “the appeal structure” of texts remains a suggestive notion, as long as it is not understood as an essentially negative actualization, as absence or gap.11 Rather, a differential theory of signifying allows notions of act, enactment, and actuality to be understood not as self-­identical or self-­contained but rather as aftereffects of a heterogeneity that can never be fully actualized—­which also means fully cognized, in and of itself. There will always be a remainder, that is, both in excess of and deficient of meaning. What is called into question here is ultimately the status of the “self ”: it can be understood not just as actor or even as agent, but also and perhaps above all as respondent. The notion of an “appeal structure of texts” should therefore be supplemented with that of the text as a response, upon which its appeal depends. To recognize the irreducible aftereffects of signifying in the constitution of all meaning qua signified is to acknowledge the reader as someone who responds rather than simply initiates, much less “creates.” And this 348   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

changes vastly the way the “subject” is construed. A reader is subjected to a text—­to a multifarious network of texts, if you will—­but he or she is not the “subject” of that text, in either the grammatical or philosophical sense of that term. A reader is not the author of a work or the initiator of an action. The reader responds to the text as pent-­up signifying. The reader is a respondent, but so too is the text. The text is pent-­up signifying insofar as it responds to other texts, written and nonwritten, congealed and virtual. It appeals to its readers for further responses. All of this is frozen, congealed under its ghost-­like appearance. Such congealing inevitably entails the selection of certain signifying possibilities to be treated as signifieds, and the consequent rejection of others. This process of inclusion and exclusion in a network of responses is inevitable. But the knowledge it produces remains partial, in the different sense of that word: not total, but also partisan. Literary knowledge is more directly affected by this partiality than is the case in other disciplines, given its constitutive proximity to the process of reading as partial–­partisan response—­and as such, as one that is distinct from observing, measuring, and calculating.12 This, however, creates a problem for literary studies, insofar as they are concerned with texts whose significance depends at least as much on how they are arranged linguistically, graphically—­on their syntactical way of meaning—­as on what they say, declare, or propose (i.e., their propositional, thematic, or representational content). The knowledge that a critical reading of texts engenders cannot claim to have the same permanence or durability—­or even predictive power—­as that claimed by other disciplines. This is why it was fashionable for a while to speak of “strong” and “weak” readings. A paraphrase is a weak reading: it may resume the content of a text, but only by ignoring the signifying process by which that content is articulated—­a process that at the same time relativizes the content, by demonstrating it “always already to have been in the position of signifying.” However, just what that content always already was signifying is not a question that admits of a univocal or definitive answer, even though everyone will agree that some responses are better than others (although not on which are better). But one can perhaps formulate a general principle with which to judge the value of such responses. A better, more productive response will bring out not just the singular directions that have been excluded from previously predominant interpretations, but even more, the forces that have sought to impose such exclusions as ostensibly The Singularity of Literary Cognition   349

self-­evident, natural, “objective.” In so doing such a response unblocks the way to other readings and hence to a future that would be different from the past. This difference from the past has both a positive and a negative side. The positive one is that it opens the way to new experiences. The negative one has been concisely summed up by Derrida (significantly in relation to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism) when he describes “the loss of singularity as the experience of singularity itself.”13 Note that this excerpted phrase does not form a proper sentence or assertion: it describes something, “the loss of singularity” as something else, “the experience of singularity itself.” Singularity is not easily compatible with the copula “is.” For it “is” not—­that is, never directly present as such. This leads me to make one modification to Derrida’s formulation. I would modify the phrase to read: “The loss of the singular is the experience of singularity.” “Singularity” is a general concept and as such should be distinguished from “the singular,” as that which gestures toward a uniqueness that cannot be generalized. But even less can it be perceived or experienced directly as such. “The singular” was never “there” to be had. Nevertheless, its “experience” is inseparable from a sense of loss, not because it was ever possessed in and of itself, but because “the singular” can only be construed in relation to a process of reproduction, repetition, and recognition—­which renders it accessible only by altering it.14 The singular is never accessible as such, directly, because it is never reproducible as such, identically. It therefore eludes our cognitive grasp. But not our feeling. And yet this feeling, like the singular, never simply belongs to us: it is not our property. It overcomes us. There is a tendency to think of feeling as something internal, subjective, private. But the word itself suggests something quite different: it suggests a brush with the outside, in which inside and outside converge but never merge. It entails what I would call, invoking a word that is rarely used in English, a frictional experience. Fiction as friction: not as something that is made, designed, or shaped (meanings of its Latin root, fingere) but rather as a result of the transformational interaction of surfaces. In this sense, the experience of the singularity of signification seems to entail frictional feeling—­not in opposition to but in excess of knowing. This is

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why established knowledge is by no means irrelevant. The singular “manifests” itself always by a certain excess to and resistance to being subsumed under existing concepts. So that the more knowledge we have at our disposal, the less private and more public “the singular” that resists it will be. The fact that we cannot fully “grasp” or “comprehend” the singular, nor even rest in touch with it—­since it has a momentary quality—­adds to the intensity of its effect. In referring to the pleasure produced by the aesthetic idea, Kant (in his Critique of Judgment) repeatedly describes it as a feeling that enlivens the cognitive powers even if it never provides any actual cognition, precisely by means of bringing those powers—­imagination and understanding—­into contact with what he calls “the unnamable,” das Unnennbare. What is unnamable in this sense does not exclude nouns and names, but never names unequivocally or finally. It is precisely this that enlivens the spirit, by spurring it on to further thought, and feeling. Feeling and thinking here are by no means incompatible, but thinking never has the last word, because the “last” word is never the final word, but only the most recent one. Such thinking has a heightened sense of being alive precisely in feeling its own limitations, its own “demise.” In so doing it feels possibilities as possibilities, rather than cognizing them as unfulfilled actualities. Such feeling relates to the singular experiences of the body as the place where internal and external, self and other, brush up against each other without merging. The body is a surface body: both superficial and the place where others interact with the self. The signifier that points to a signified, to a meaning, without being fully absorbed in it, retains therefore a certain material and corporeal quality: its singular makeup is not dissolved into the generalized spirituality of meaning. This resistance to conceptual subsumption gives reading a heightened sense of being alive, of being involved in spatiotemporal movement. Such a feeling of life is also tied to a feeling of separation, of transience. It thereby limits the sense of self—­of self-­identity—­insofar as the self desires to stay the same over time. By contrast, the sense of self in aesthetic pleasure or displeasure—­which for Kant always results from an encounter with a radically singular experience—­feels itself to be most alive only in departing, in taking leave of itself. One can say, therefore, that it appears only in disappearing—­which is to say, as signifying, blinking, “shining.” As an apparition.

The Singularity of Literary Cognition   351

SINGULARITY IN THE SCIENCES As with ghosts, the apparition of such an intense feeling must, however, always be localized. Its locality, however, is unique, which means ultimately inaccessible and impenetrable. It is always context-­dependent, but its context can never exhaust its significance. In this respect, one cannot help but be reminded of the widespread use of the notion of “singularity” today in the sciences: above all, in mathematics, astrophysics, and computational science. In his book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil gives the following account of the development of the term: To put the concept of Singularity into further perspective, let’s explore the history of the word itself. “Singularity” is an English word meaning a unique event with, well, singular implications. The word was adopted by mathematicians to denote a value that transcends any finite limitation, such as the explosion of magnitude that results when dividing a constant by a number that gets closer and closer to zero.15

One of the key words in this description, which traces the migrations of the word from ordinary language to scientific discourse, is the word “transcends,” which also recurs in the subtitle of Kurzweil’s book: When Humans Transcend Biology. Singularity, in his use of the word at least, marks two things: first, the advent of something absolutely new, which of course means something radically different from everything that has occurred previously. This is the sense that governs its initial formulation, which Kurzweil attributes to John von Neumann: The ever-­accelerating progress of technology . . . gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. (10)

As in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Kurzweil describes singularity as the result of an encounter with a radical heterogeneity, mathematically epitomized by the number zero (if that is a number)—­that is, as an encounter with phenomena that are absolutely impossible to assimilate to existing knowledge. And again, somewhat like Kant’s notion of the “mathemati352   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

cal sublime,” which as “the absolutely great” exceeds our capacity to comprehend, the mathematical notion of the singular also seeks to affront the limits of calculability: it is the effort to think what cannot be directly perceived or measured.16 In both mathematical physics and philosophical and literary–­critical discourse the notion of “singularity” can designate a limit of the knowable, which in scientific discourse is often associated with the term “event horizon.” The discovery of “black holes” in astrophysics has become one of the most significant manifestations of the notion of “singularity”: How does our use of “singularity” in human history compare to its use in physics? The word was borrowed from mathematics by physics, which has always shown a penchant for anthropomorphic terms. . . . In physics, “singularity” theoretically refers to a point of zero size with infinite density of mass and therefore infinite gravity. But because of quantum uncertainty there is no actual point of infinite density, and indeed quantum mechanics disallows infinite values. (486)

Kurzweil’s reference here to “quantum uncertainty” alludes to Werner Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle,” which introduced a strong element of situational indeterminacy into experimental knowledge of subatomic particles. Since, as Heisenberg argued in his famous paper of 1927, “the more precisely the position [of a subatomic particle] is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.”17 Such “unsharp” determination of the path of such particles according to Heisenberg should be understood to be the result not of an observational–­ experimental deficiency, but of the nature of the quantum object itself, which can be determined, and predicted, statistically either with respect to its position or with respect to its momentum, but not with respect to both at once. This leads him to yet another quite radical statement: “If the sharp formulation of the law of causality [consists in asserting that] ‘if we know the present exactly, we can calculate the future’—­it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.” In other words, the premise that Heisenberg wound up questioning was one that supposed that “the present” state of the subatomic particle could be known “exactly.” If, however, the present could not be known The Singularity of Literary Cognition   353

exactly, then the same would also apply to the future. The implications of his argument are significant: for the present could not be known exactly because one could not suppose that its spatial and temporal dimensions could be unified in a coherent, continuous way. Rather, as with the present participle, the “present” of the subatomic events splits into temporal and spatial measurements. The noncoincidence of these two measurable “presents” produces the “uncertainty” of the result. It should be noted that Heisenberg’s German word for “uncertainty principle” was far more visually graphic than its English translation: he called it the Unschärferelation (more literally: “relation of unsharpness”), thereby recalling the visual aspect of measurement and situating a certain opacity or ‘fuzziness’ at the core of the knowable. It is also of interest that he wrote of a “relation” rather than of a “principle,” thus cautiously restricting the scope of its validity. To be sure, Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle” does not simply introduce ambiguity into scientific measurement, since its intention is to increase exactitude of measurement: “One should note that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not say ‘everything is uncertain.’ Rather, it tells us very exactly where the limits of uncertainty lie when we make measurements of sub-­atomic events.”18 The scientific significance of Heisenberg’s discovery is that by taking into account the limits of the knowable, the latter can be more precisely measured. Something similar can be argued for critical notions such as ambiguity or undecidability: in not feeling obliged to impose unity of meaning on a text, such concepts can help to more precisely render its fault lines, and conflicts, and also the possibilities it holds open. Terminologically this can be formulated in English as the difference between significance and meaning. Although the two words tend to be used interchangeably, they can be employed to designate an important distinction. If the latter is understood as integral and self-­contained, the former can be taken to involve a disjunction—­the process of signifying—­that can never be fully determined. In both the scientific and literary areas, the “object” of inspection, or of reading, can no longer be conceived as existing independently of the process of inspection, whether as measurement or as reading. To be sure, there remains a decisive difference. Scientific measurement assigns a place to calculability that has no precise correlative in the interpretation of linguistic signifiers, even if that interpretation can also formalize certain patterns. 354   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

And yet precisely because of the importance of such formalization, calculability may not be as alien to language, literature, and even poetry, as one might think. It is significant, however, that in scientific discourse a term seems to have imposed itself as a result of such discussions that might well be appropriate in designating the singular kind of knowledge operative in the critical reading of literary texts. That term is “event,” which, in the passage just quoted, supplants the notion of “particle” as the object of quantum measurement, especially where singularity is concerned. I will have to leave it to others more qualified to discuss whether the interpretation of scientific “events” can be further compared with the reading of a literary text. My suspicion is that the interplay of what Arkady Plotnitsky has called “the knowable and the unknowable”19 in literary studies has to reserve a privileged place for forms of misapprehension that may not hold for sciences, where cognition is increasingly dependent upon processes of measurement and prediction. With respect to literature, however, as in psychoanalysis, miscommunication can be interpreted as a form of communication and transmission, rather than as their mutually exclusive other. In other words, where literature is concerned, missing the target can be as or more significant than hitting it.

TRISTRAM SHANDY: “CURIOUS CONCLUSIONS” Let me in conclusion offer an illustration of how literature and literary criticism can require a rethinking of the relation of the singular to the general, of the individual to the community. My example is taken from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a novel that consists in a profound and prolonged staging of the situation of novel-­writing as a process of calculation, and of reading as a process of misapprehension. Sterne’s narrative, which is constantly “reflecting” on its own nature as narrative (in a way not unlike that suggested by Kant’s notion of “reflective judgment”), is also a study in singularities: that of Walter Shandy, of Uncle Toby, and of all the other cast of characters, including the narrator himself, Tristram. Its beginning—­the circumstances of Tristram’s conception ab ovo—­is no less curious and singular than its end. For the limits of the narrative as well as the characters and events that populate it are never simply what they seem: simple representations of individuals or The Singularity of Literary Cognition   355

occurrences. Rather, they are singularities, in the sense of being structurally divided, not just from others—­as with the Saussurean “signifier”—­ but ultimately also and above all from themselves, which is to say, from self-­consciousness. They are moved not by deliberate motives but rather by their obsessions, which respond to forces and events beyond their control. These responses result in what in the novel are called “hobbyhorses,” compulsive habits of mind and body that subsume singular happenings under a general thesis or disposition, and thus work to preserve a sense of a continuous self, even while leading the characters they drive in directions and along paths over which they have little power. Repetition, instead of establishing control, undermines it. The narrative that deploys and follows the movements of these characters on their hobbyhorses does not simply begin or end—­not at least in the sense of forming a completed whole. Rather, it is constantly interrupted—­ empirically at the end of the novel by the author’s death, but also throughout, by events that demonstrate the defensive nature of the hobbyhorses, responding to conflicts in order to avoid them rather than to resolve them. The novel itself is concluded by the punchline of a joke, which is a joke on the novel, or rather more precisely on the reader’s expectation of what a novel could and should be: a meaningful story of a completed individual life. But already the novel’s title challenges such expectations. Instead of The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy the title reads The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. The times are such that what can be recounted of an individual’s life is not that life itself but rather opinions about that life. The novel’s epigraph states this; attributed to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, it reads: “Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men.” In the medium of language, “things” can be equated with what is “signified,” whereas “opinions” operate in the domain of “the signifier.” In Tristram Shandy, from its title on, the “signified” is already in the position of a signifier, of signifying. And fiction, we shall see, has become frictional as a result. Reading is thus not a process of applying conventional expectations to the text in order to understand what it means: what it means involves precisely the ways in which such expectations mislead—­and encourage thereby reflection on how that misleading might be significant. For readers do not react simply to fictional representations: through habituated, conventional expectations, they both react and help constitute the significance of the 356   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

narrative, which is addressed explicitly to them, as in a conversation. It is a conversation in which misunderstandings are the point of departure for a new and different kind of understanding. This is why the narrative is constantly interrupting what seems to be its progression toward a goal, so as to reveal how expectations of such a goal are in turn significant of something other than the expected goal. The most important of these expectations is doubtless that the novel will move forward to constitute a whole and integrated life story. Yet this never happens. The narrator describes his story as necessarily “progressive and digressive,” in which the digressions constitute the “heart and soul” of reading. The progression of knowledge, he tells his readers, is so great that it may one day obviate writing, reading, and with it, the means of acquiring knowledge: Thus, my fellow-­labourers and associates in this great harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes, thus it is, by slow steps of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical . . . have for these two centuries and more, gradually been creeping upwards towards that acme of their perfections, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the advances of these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off. When that happens, it is to be hoped, it will put an end to all kind of writings whatsoever;—­the want of all kind of writing will put an end to all kind of reading;—­and that in time, As war begets poverty; poverty peace,—­must in course, put an end to all kind of knowledge,—­and then—­we shall . . . be exactly where we started. (I.21)

To disrupt the vicious circle of implosion—­and the narrator’s passing reference to war, poverty, and peace should not be taken lightly—­in which the acquisition of knowledge progressively destroys access to the heterogeneity that makes genuine knowledge possible, Tristram Shandy continually exposes and challenges readers’ habitual expectation that the story will end with a meaningful conclusion, which, like the bottom-­line of commercial bookkeeping, will allow readers to differentiate profit from loss. Instead of this, the novel breaks off with a conclusion that is indeed extremely “curious.” The novel concludes with what is called “a cock and The Singularity of Literary Cognition   357

bull story”—­a story that plays a joke on the expectation of meaning. But it does this in a highly significant way. To understand this, however, we must briefly recapitulate certain aspects of the novel. The novel develops traditionally, which is to say, in the eighteenth century, as the form that seeks to insert the singular life of one or more individuals into a more comprehensive if finite totality. Tristram Shandy, however, demonstrates that the lives of individuals are already divided, irreducibly singular, odd in their obsessive insistence on being consistent, “characters” in the idiomatic–­idiosyncratic sense of that word; and that the family (here, the Shandy family), is no less fractured and disjointed. But as a text to be read against the grain of ingrained expectations, it also demonstrates that this fracturing can give rise to a new kind of significance and afterlife, one that necessarily will include the diverse and varied responses of its readers over the ages. For it is the very diversity of these responses—­ which remain linked to a set of conventional expectations that in many ways have not changed substantially since the novel was first written and published—­that allows the text to speak to a future, which, in order to articulate itself, must wrestle with similar problems, albeit in vastly changed environments. To better understand the significance of this afterlife, it may help to recall some of the ways in which “life” in general is represented in this novel. From the beginning and throughout, there is a constant questioning of paternity, progeny, and fertility, and therefore of the institution of marriage as the contractual basis of the family: in other words, the novel is concerned with the question of how life is produced and reproduced above and beyond the finitude of singular living beings. From the start, it is strongly hinted that Walter Shandy may not have been the father of Tristram (Parson Yorick—­Sterne’s pseudonym—­is a leading contender for that honor), and that illegitimacy runs through the history and even the escutcheon of the Shandy family. Related to such uncertainties, the question of fertility and of impotence is raised with regard to Tristram’s Uncle Toby, who was wounded in the Anglo–­Dutch wars at the battle of Namur in Belgium and who subsequently retired to live with his brother, Walter Shandy. The relation between these two brothers constitutes, of course, one of the main axes of the novel, sharply in contrast to the nonrelation of Tristram with his brother, Bobby, who makes an appearance only in disappearing, dying prematurely and obscurely. It is almost as if 358   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

the paternal, male line of the Shandy Family is incapable of reproducing itself, except for Tristram himself, who we rarely glimpse, and the stories he tells. But these stories often tell of a lack of fertility and of reproductive power as well as of an excess of desire. That very lack and excess, however, will constitute the afterlife of the novel. This plays itself out most clearly in the fate of Tristram’s uncle, Captain Toby Shandy. Toby Shandy, childless and unmarried, shattered in his military career and prematurely retired to his brother’s estate, is constantly retelling the story of his wound, precisely because its consequences—­its effects on his fertility and potency—­remain very much an open question throughout the novel. Toby recounts how he was struck by a fragment of the wall that was supposed to protect his position, after it had been hit by an enemy artillery shell. The result was that Uncle Toby was injured in or near the groin. The exact place, and therefore consequences, of this wound are never made entirely clear, despite the frantic efforts of Toby’s prospective wife, the Widow Wadman. Throughout the novel the question resonates: “Where did Uncle Toby get his wound?” For Uncle Toby this means one thing; for his prospective wife, it means quite another. Uncle Toby interprets it to apply to the situation in Namur and describes in great if ambiguous detail just where he was standing when injured. The Widow Wadman, however, is only interested in the place on his body where the wound occurred, so as to better grasp its effects on Toby’s sexual powers. And so, both in relation to Walter and then to Toby, the reproductive potency of the men of the Shandy family is in question from the start. Not to mention the fidelity of its women. But since in this novel the individual characters also figure types of representation and of language, their predicaments extend to the novel itself: Does it have the power to reproduce itself, to extend its life beyond its immediate conditions of emergence? Negative critics like Dr. Samuel Johnson questioned this from the start: “Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last.” But his judgment has proved premature. Precisely in its “oddity,” which is to say, its singularity, Tristram Shandy has proved an inspiration, although more to writers than to critics. Part of its oddity is of course its ambiguous ending. The novel ends shortly before Sterne’s death, and indeed can be seen as ending with the death of its author. This could be taken to signify that it remained unfinished and a fragment, rather than a completed novel. The Singularity of Literary Cognition   359

To read the end of the novel, however, is to discover that the text already anticipates this question, as it does so many others. It concludes with an anecdote—­that is, with a short segment of a story. It is an appropriate way to conclude, since the entire novel consists of a series of anecdotes, or scenes, more or less loosely strung together. The concluding anecdote concerns an incident in which a bull, who belongs to Tristram’s father, Walter, and who is kept by him for the purpose of breeding, seems to have failed in the task that has been assigned him by the community. Walter’s bull fails in its duty to the community to help reproduce the cattle of the village. A cow of the Parish that was thought to have been impregnated by the bull does not give birth to a “calf.” The cow’s failure to give birth then becomes the subject of a heated argument between the men of Shandy Hall, as to who or what is responsible: Most of the townsmen . . . quoth Obadiah, believe that ’tis all the Bull’s fault—­ —­But may not a cow be barren? Replied my father, turning to Dr. Slop. It never happens: said Dr. Slop,

In the middle of the dispute, Tristram’s mother makes one of her rare appearances: L—­—­d! said my mother, what is all this story about?—­ A COCK and a BULL said Yorick—­And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard. (IX.33)

This question, and Yorick’s answer, could easily apply to the novel as a whole. For it raises the question of what a “whole” can be, especially in relation to life in the singular. Can the singularity of life, animal as well as human (the latter being of course also animal life), be absorbed into the totality of a meaningful individual life story? Or is it the articulation of the singularities separating individual life from itself that make that life significant, precisely in its partialities and its partisanship? Sterne’s narrative, which is constantly “reflecting” on its own nature as narrative (again, in a way not unlike Kant’s notion of “reflective judgment”) is also a study in singularities: that of Walter Shandy, of Uncle Toby, of Yorick, of Aunt Dinah and Mother Shandy, and of Tristram as the heir to all of these singu360   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

lar antecedents: Tristram is split into character and narrator, both bearing the same name, Tristram. The narrative that both follows and stages these “dividuals” in their singularity ends with the punch-­line of a joke, a “cock and bull story.” It is a joke, however, that consists not simply in the denial of meaning but in its transformation into significance. It unmasks the expectation of readers that the novel could and should make a singular life whole and meaningful. Instead we have a story about the inability of a bull and a cow to reproduce life. Immediately there is the search for a cause, for a culprit: who is responsible, the owner of the bull (Walter Shandy) or the owner of the cow? What is the responsibility of the private individual and his family to the public good? Or does the question transcend the opposition of public and private, individual and community? It seems that everything connected with the Shandy Family is incapable of reproducing itself—­its Self as a Life that transcends the limitations of its singular characters. What the cock and bull story suggests, however, is that a different kind of reproduction may escape this limitation. It involves an “afterlife” that is not simply a prolongation of life via the continuation of a self, staying essentially the same over time and space. The afterlife of Tristram Shandy, by contrast, would involve the lives of those who come after it, as readers, but who are not derived from it, as descendants. In such readers the text can “live on,” but not necessarily by staying the same. This, however, presupposes that readers are ready and able to question the expectations that a certain tradition has taught them to have and that they share, mutatis mutandis, with the readers that Sterne’s narrator addresses and teases: readers who insist that an individual life story is meaningful in itself, and that the self is autonomous and self-­sufficient.20 It is the expectation of such a meaningful life of an individualized self that the “characters” of Tristram Shandy, together with its concluding joke, address. The “cock and bull story” is one of the best you could hear, Yorick says, because it allows the expectation of self-­reproduction to be questioned. The “payoff ” of this joke is not that there is no payoff at all—­that everything is absurd—­but rather that a certain “life” is paid off through the alteration of the self rather than through its constancy. Neither individual nor community have the last word. The last word is not a word at all, but laughter. In Tristram Shandy all intentional activity, whether in deeds or in The Singularity of Literary Cognition   361

words, is constantly being interrupted and prevented from reaching its goal, and that this is made possible by ambiguities in language that open alternate possibilities of thought and of action. In this sense, its conclusions are always “curious.” Curious in the sense of being strange, unexpected, and incomplete. Curious conclusions pause, but do not fulfill. They remain singular. But in so doing, they encourage readers to continue thinking and feeling, and to look to the future by asking the question that Benjamin, in his essay on The Storyteller, wrote that every genuine narrative incites its listeners and readers to ask, namely: “What happens next?”21

362   The Singularity of Literary Cognition

16

Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry Hölderlin Asks, Heidegger Answers

Nie treffe ich, wie ich wünsche, / Das Maß (Never do I hit, as I wish, the measure) Hölderlin, Der Einzige (first version)

In the summer semester of 1942, Martin Heidegger held the last of a series of lecture-­courses on Hölderlin’s Hymns that he had begun in the winter of 1934–­35 with interpretations of “Germanien” and the “Rhein,” and then resumed after a long pause in the winter of 1941–­42, with a course dedicated to the poem “Andenken.” The third and final lecture course was dedicated to the poem “The Ister,” a title given the unfinished text by Norbert Hellingrath. In these lectures, Heidegger sought to interpret Hölderlin’s poetry as nothing less than the exemplary poetical articulation of the historical destiny of Germany. And indeed, Heidegger could not have picked a more fateful moment to interrogate this destiny. For in the year 1941, Germany, with its allies, had taken upon itself to decide not only the destiny of Europe, but of the world. However, at the precise moment that Heidegger began his lectures—­ April 1942—­the outcome of the struggle that had begun so auspiciously for Germany, had begun to look more dubious. The United States had entered the war in December 1941, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, thereby giving the conflict a truly global dimension. In Europe itself, the overwhelming victories of the Wehrmacht of 1939 and 1940, and the initially rapid advance of Operation Barbarossa, penetrating deep into the Soviet Union, had ground to a halt before the gates of Moscow in the winter of 1941–­42. That winter saw the first important setbacks of the war for Germany, as the Red Army mounted a series of successful counterattacks that stopped and then drove back the Wehrmacht hundreds of kilometers. 363

For the first time also, the failure of Operation Barbarossa to reach its goal began to bring home to Germany the reality of a prolonged war. In addition, 1942 saw the start of regular and often devastating bombings of German cities by the Royal Air Force, as both sides increasingly targeted civilian populations. Hitler’s dream of a speedy collapse of his adversaries, Britain and the Soviet Union, thus came to an end at about the same time as Heidegger was presumably composing his third and last lecture-­course on Hölderlin. To be sure, the war was far from lost for Germany and the Axis powers in the spring of 1942, but its long-­term prospects had begun to dim. It was therefore a particularly appropriate moment, historically and politically, to raise the question of how human collectives define their destinies, and in particular the role of domestic and foreign relations in that process. To be sure, Heidegger was careful not to formulate this in a manner that would have conflicted directly with the dominant political discourse of the time. But for his listeners, no doubt, the connection was clear if largely implicit. To designate the participants in this relationship, for instance, Heidegger in his lecture-­course scrupulously avoided ideologically charged words such as “nation” and “people,” replacing them with a relatively unusual and apparently noncommittal word, Menschtümer—­ “humandoms.” The word, which although obsolete did exist, in contrast to my literal English rendition of it, and resonated with the more familiar names of religious communities, above all with “Christendom” (Christentum), but also, interestingly enough, with Judentum, as well as, in another vein, with Bürgertum, bourgeoisie, and also with the German word for property, Eigentum.1 Eigen, of course, touches on one of the essential questions that Heidegger will raise in relation to Hölderlin: namely, what exactly constitutes one’s “own” (eigen), how it relates to what is foreign and alien, and finally how it may best be appropriated. On the other hand, the fact that Heidegger uses the word Menschentümer in the plural—­humandoms—­emphasizes the importance of the spatial dimension implicit in the notion of “property” (a connotation that returns often in Heidegger’s use of the German word Anwesen [roughly, “estate”] to designate Being as that which arrives). All of these notions: own, ownership, but also power, dignity, possession, are of course involved in Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s “river poetry,” in which the “river” articulates something very different from a mere “natural” phenomenon—­something Heidegger designates with two 364   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

words implying place and movement, namely Ortschaft and Wanderschaft, literally “place-­ship” and “wander-­ship.” In colloquial German, especially in Heidegger’s native Swabian, Ortschaft was and is commonly used to designate both the local pub and the locality as such. Wanderschaft, by contrast, which is barely employed today, used to designate the status of an apprentice who was in the process of learning a trade or skill—­in other words, a transitional phrase leading to an artisanal mastery, something not irrelevant to the way Heidegger reads Hölderlin’s river-­poems. Hölderlin himself, however, in a passage from a letter to his friend Böhlendorff that Heidegger discusses, related the German emphasis on “skill” (Geschick) to a corresponding lack of “destiny” (Schicksalslosigkeit), which distinguished modern “Germans” from ancient Greeks. The historical task of the Germans, so Hölderlin, was to subordinate their “skill” (Geschick) in “hitting the mark”2 to a certain self-­abandonment that would allow them to develop a sense of other-­directedness, and hence of destiny (Schicksal). More concretely, this in turn implies developing a different attitude toward what is alien and foreign. As Heidegger reformulates this thought during the spring of 1942, what is called for is the ability to experience one’s “unhomeliness” and to “become at home in it”: In Heidegger’s German, the historical task of the Germans is that of Heimischwerden im Unheimlichen.3 Forsaking one’s native “home” thus becomes essential, but remains justified primarily as a means of acquiring what is one’s “own”—­that is, as a step toward coming into one’s own. This meditation on the historical significance of Hölderlin’s poetry thus stands in an extremely complex but undeniable relationship to the historical events that were unfolding at the time. To be sure, in Heidegger’s reading there is no explicit recourse to anything like a biologically and racially grounded notion of Lebensraum—­which provided the ideological basis for the Nazi push eastward. But in a more sublimated, perhaps more symbolic, fashion, a number of strange coincidences emerge that merit further reflection. But first, let me recall the precise political–­military events that accompanied Heidegger’s lecture-­course. In the early spring of 1942, the German High Command (OKH) developed plans for a new offensive, which was intended to complete what Operation Barbarossa in 1941 had failed to accomplish, namely a decisive victory over the Soviet Union. On April 5, Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   365

1942, some two weeks before Heidegger was to begin his lecture-­course, Hitler officially “laid out the key elements of the plan now known as ‘Case Blue’ (Fall Blau) in Führer Directive No. 41.”4 The main objective of the offensive was to occupy the oil fields of the Caucasus (Baku, Maikop, and Grozny). Having access to these resources was of paramount importance to the German war effort, which up to then had relied largely on Romania as its principle source of petroleum. But the Romanian oil fields, which supplied 75 percent of the oil used by Germany at the outset of the war, were running low and were vulnerable to air attacks. It therefore became crucial to wrest control of the Caucasus oil reserves from the Soviet Union, which also depended heavily on them for its military operations.5 Another objective was to take control of the traffic of oil and other items up the Volga and Don rivers toward Moscow and other centers. These rivers came together at Stalingrad, which later caused Hitler to split his southern army group in two, thereby laying the basis for what was ultimately to be the defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943 and the collapse of Case Blue. The Case Blue offensive began on June 28, so that its first very successful weeks coincided with the last weeks of the 1942 summer semester (Heidegger’s course, which began on April 21, concluded on July 14). In the first few weeks of Case Blue, the Wehrmacht again made rapid advances before once again meeting stiff resistance near the city of Voronezh. Nevertheless, the offensive continued and temporarily succeeded in occupying the oil fields of Maikop, which the Red Army had largely destroyed, and in a symbolic gesture, hoisting the Nazi flag on the highest point in the Caucasus, Mount Elbrus. But the Germans were unable to accomplish other crucial objectives, such as taking control of the oil fields of Grozny or Baku. And they also were unable to retain control of Maikop long enough to restore production of the heavily sabotaged oil fields there. At the same time, by splitting his southern army group and deciding to make Stalingrad into a major target, Hitler set the stage for a series of reversals that began in September/October and that culminated in disaster: namely, the surrender of the entire Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943 in what was to be the turning point of the European War. Although this turning point was still some eight months in the future when Heidegger began his lecture-­course in the still-­peaceful university town of Freiburg, the dynamics that would lead to Germany’s defeat had 366   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

already begun. Although his lecture-­course was ostensibly as far removed from military and political issues as any academic philosophical enterprise could be, Heidegger made it very clear that the issues with which he was concerned bore directly on the conflicts then raging. The lectures were composed of three parts. The first developed the significance of the “river poems” of Hölderlin. The second involved a discussion of the second Chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone, a text that Heidegger had already commented on in a lecture-­course given some eight years earlier. Finally, the third section, which Heidegger no longer had the time to actually present, sought to demonstrate how the poetry of Hölderlin, illuminated by his reading of Sophocles, articulated poetically the historical destiny of Germany, and through it the essence of poetry itself. At the center of the lectures, taken as a whole, stood the discussion of the second Chorus of Antigone, which begins—­I translate Heidegger’s rendition—­“Many-­sided is the uncanny, yet nothing / Exceeds Man in Uncanniness” (πολλὰ τα δεινὰ κουδὲν ἀνθρωπου δεινότερον πἐλει᾽). Some years earlier, Heidegger had already interpreted this Chorus at length in lectures initially held during the summer semester of 1935; the reading of Sophocles, however, was published only in 1953, as part of his Introduction into Metaphysics. His students of 1942 therefore would not have been aware of the earlier interpretation, in which Heidegger presents the Sophoclean text as an exemplary articulation of the Greek conception of human being—­namely, as distinctively “uncanny”—­as unheimlich. However, in the 1942 discussion, he modified radically his earlier interpretation of the final words of the Chorus, which after describing how and why man is the uncanniest of beings, abruptly concludes by apparently rejecting this distinctly human uncanniness: Such (a one) shall not be entrusted to my hearth Nor share with me his delusion my knowing, Who put such a thing to work.

In 1935, Heidegger read these words as a defensive confirmation of everything the Chorus had just attributed to human being as such: “In their defensive attitude they are the direct and complete confirmation of the uncanniness of human being.”6 In 1942, however, a revision of his earlier interpretation takes place that Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   367

is in many ways symptomatic both of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin in general and of his understanding of the historical developments on which he was seeking to reflect. In the 1935 version, the final words of the Chorus show it to feel threatened by, and therefore involved in, what it has up to then been merely describing—­the uncanny mortality of man. Put somewhat differently and invoking a notion of Freud’s that Heidegger would certainly have rejected, his 1935 reading portrays the chorus as “acting-­out” its anxieties before the uncanniness it has just articulated by announcing its determination to keep its home free from anyone who has succumbed to this state of being. Interpreting Heidegger’s earlier reading, one can say that the final words of the Chorus show it to be a participant rather than a simple interpreter of the uncanny destiny of man, which in turn is tied to the unimaginable fact of mortality. Throughout the Chorus, the development of man’s mastery of his surroundings is placed in relation to his finitude. Although Heidegger does not comment on it here, this behavior of the Chorus demonstrates the cleavage between a general recognition—­that of human finitude—­and its encounter as a singular truth. The Chorus, which is constituted by the Elders of Thebes, can describe the uncanniness of man in general terms, but when it is a question of confronting directly individual manifestations of that uncanniness, the Chorus refuses and seeks to exclude it. In an expression that has become popular, it is the NIMBY syndrome: uncanny, yes, but “Not in my back yard.” This rejection significantly is couched in epistemic terms: “Nor share with me his delusion my knowledge” (Nicht auch teile mit mir sein Wähnen mein Wissen).7 The Chorus concludes by separating Wähnen from Wissen, “delusion” from “knowledge.” In 1935 Heidegger takes this attempt as itself a defensive expression of its own deludedness. However, in his 1942 rereading, he goes to great pains to argue that these final words reflect an insight into the very nature of human being itself. Attributing to the author, Sophocles, a consistency that he often questions in other poets, Heidegger insists that the playwright would have been incapable of allowing such a “stylistic incoherence” (Stilwidrigkeit)8 into his text.9 The style must not be in contradiction with itself (widrig), which here means that a certain consciousness—­that of the Chorus—­must remain in agreement with itself. Despite his constant protestations, therefore, against the metaphysical 368   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

ideal of a coherent subject of “self-­consciousness,” Heidegger in 1942 now argues that Chorus “knows” essentially what it is talking about when it utters these words, even if he qualifies this by adding that such knowledge is not the result of “calculation” or of “cognition” (Kennen) in the usual sense, but of something more like intuition, presentiment, or intimation (Ahnen). However that may be, the Chorus’s conclusion is no longer qualified as “defensive” but rather as articulating a dual, if implicit (ungesagt), insight: first, that the Uncanny must be distinguished from the familiarity of the domestic (the home); and second, that it is a necessary phase in a process of coming into one’s own. All of this—­and I cannot even begin to retrace the complex and subtle meanders of Heidegger’s argument here—­ culminates in the conclusion that “Antigone is the poem of becoming at home in being-­away from-­home” (Heimischwerden im Unheimischsein).10 It should be remarked that in the process of this shift in interpreting the Chorus, the German word Unheimlich has disappeared altogether and has been replaced by Unheimisch (-­werden or -­sein). This shift has thereby replaced the root “-­heimlich,” which in German denotes “secret,” with -­heimisch, which denotes “familiar, at-­home.” The “detour” of this second section via a rereading of Sophocles’ Antigone, in particular its Second Chorus, thus serves to cement the priority of the domestic and familiar over the foreign, into which one must necessarily venture but ultimately only in order to come into one’s own (I use this phrase to paraphrase, not translate, the German Heimischwerden). Engagement with the other, the alien, is required, but essentially as a transitional phase, subordinated to the priority of the home—­just as the ambiguity of the German root of uncanny, Heimlich, meaning “secret,” is sanitized when supplanted by the word heimisch, suggesting cozily at home. The “knowing” that the Chorus thus seeks to distinguish and protect from the “delusion” of the uncanny other is, Heidegger emphasizes, different from the kind of knowledge that characterizes the metaphysical search for certainty in the modern period. The latter, he argues, is at the origin of the modern conception and practice of “politics,” which, he asserts, is characterized by its assumption of the “unquestionable” as a basis for “action.” Heidegger contrasts this modern understanding and practice of politics with the Greek understanding of the “polis,” a word and concept he associates with the “polar.” The polar, Heidegger explains, is the “site” around which everything turns like a “whirlwind” (Wirbel). Politics Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   369

in this sense could also be described as a “stage” (Heidegger does not use this term), insofar as it is constitutively “open” to receiving its impulses from outside and from elsewhere: such impulses are zugeschickt, sent or destined for it, whereas the modern sense of “politics” seeks to establish a self-­contained “totality” and is therefore inhospitable to questioning.11 The modern, metaphysical search for certainty, epitomized in a practice of politics as the realm of the unquestionable, is according to Heidegger the true source of modern dictatorships: Because the political is based on the technical-­historical certainty of all action, the “political” is distinguished by unconditional unquestionableness [unbedingte Fraglosigkeit]). The unquestionableness of the “political” and its totality belong together. The ground for this connection and its continuance [Bestand] does not depend, as naive minds would have it, upon the contingent willfulness of dictators, but rather is founded in the metaphysical essence of modern reality itself. . . . For the Greeks the πολις is what is eminently questionable. For modern consciousness the “political” is what is necessarily and unconditionally unquestionable. (118)

Yet in view of this definition of modern “politics,” the shift in Heidegger’s reading of the second Chorus of Antigone, and in particular of its concluding words, seems hardly exempt from a modernist “political” tendency. For it seeks to restore to the Chorus an authority that would place its words ultimately beyond question. Their meaning may well be said to be “implicit”—­ungesagt—­but its upshot is to preserve the domestic, das Heimische, as the goal and frame of all human being and practice. The revised interpretation of the Sophocles text in the middle of Heidegger’s lecture-­course thus establishes the priority of the “hearth” and home over the foreign and alien. Indeed, the hearth is designated as nothing less than as the “home-­site”—­the Heimstatt—­of “being” itself (140). Heidegger’s revisionary rereading of the conclusion of the Second Chorus of Antigone is of particular significance in the context of his 1942 lectures, since it frames and introduces the interpretation of Hölderlin’s poetry that he elaborates in the third and final section of his lectures—­the part that was never actually held, spoken, and therefore remained ungesagt. The elaboration of this interpretive frame requires Heidegger to impose a 370   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

certain univocity upon a poetical text that, by its very nature, as he himself acknowledges, is ambiguous (mehrdeutig). Heidegger makes this point in order to develop his interpretation of what he takes to be the key word of the Chorus’s conclusion, namely παρέστιος, based on the root-­word, εστία, “hearth”: The Greek poetry is in itself ambiguous because what is to be poetized is in the truth of its essence ambiguous. For our present understanding [heutiges Fassen] of course we must search for detours and first of all identify a single univocal meaning, in order to use this as a point of departure for a more originary understanding. (130, my emphasis)

Here Heidegger does precisely what Hölderlin has warned the Germans not to do in the passage from the letter to Böhlendorff that Heidegger himself quotes some pages later: he yields to the temptation to grasp and to frame, Fassen and Einfassen, albeit only as a necessary point of departure. In order to “grasp” (fassen) the poetic text, which by its intrinsic ambiguity tends to elude such grasping, Heidegger “identifies a single univocal meaning,” which will allow him to move toward “a more originary understanding.” The imposition of univocity thereby provides the indispensable condition for comprehending the uncanny qua Unheimlich as originally the unhomey, qua Unheimisch, and thereby to install the Heimisch—­the domestic—­as the ultimate origin and end of the entire trajectory. Here a lexical note may be helpful: In German, the word heimlich has, as already mentioned, as its primary denotative meaning that of being kept secret. It inserts the secret at the heart and hearth of the “home” (heim). By subordinating the word heimlich to heimisch, Heidegger makes the “home” the measure of all things, both for Sophocles and for Hölderlin. The foreign, the alien, and the other are “grasped,” comprehended as the space in which the domestic unfolds. It is in this context that Heidegger cites a line from Hölderlin that in 1942 could hardly have sounded as innocent as it might have in 1800: Kolonien liebt, und tapfer Vergessen der Geist (Colonies loves, and brave forgetting the Spirit).12 A page later, in the same context, Heidegger specifies one such colony by quoting a verse from the poem “Wanderung”: Ich aber will dem Kaukasus zu! (“I, however, want to go toward the Caucasus”).13 The fact that there could be no direct relation between Heidegger’s decision to quote these two lines and the military Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   371

operation being pursued by the German armed forces at the same time under the name “Case Blue” only renders the coincidence historically all the more thought provoking. The relationship, if there is any, has to be sought not in empirical facts but in underlying attitudes. Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin here—­and this is the reason I have begun my talk by discussing its historical “context”—­is eminently “political,” albeit in the very way he himself singles out for criticism. It is political not just because it seeks, sometimes in tension with the prevailing politics of the time—­and this should not be overlooked or minimized—­to read Hölderlin as the poet who seeks to articulate the historical “destiny” of “the Germans.” The plural should be noted here: Heidegger seems fully aware that Hölderlin is not writing about a “nation” or even a “people” (not yet, at least). But Heidegger’s decision to “grasp” the poetry of Hölderlin is by his own account “political” insofar as it participates in the metaphysical and modern search for certitude. By imposing the ultimate priority of the domestic over the foreign, which the domestic needs, but only in order to come into its own, Heidegger’s reading constructs an “originary understanding” that in certain important respects—­but not in all—­is informed by the principle he criticizes in modern politics: that of the “unquestionable.” In the metaphysical politics of certitude and security, that principle serves as a basis for “action.” In Heidegger’s “remarks,” it serves as the basis for establishing a recognizable meaning. There are therefore two main reasons why this notion of politics and its relation to poetry is worth discussing today. First, Heidegger’s attempt to define the relation between “artistic composition and the composition of a political community,” as exemplified in the writings of Hölderlin, may have implications for the powerful attraction of “identity politics” today—­an attraction that makes itself felt in literary studies as well as outside the academy. The formula that resumes Heidegger’s reading both of Antigone and of Hölderlin’s “river poetry”—­that of “becoming at home in the uncanny” [Heimischwerden im Unheimlichen]—­indicates how Heidegger in the spring of 1942 sought to define the relation of art, or rather poetry, to community. Despite its historical distance, his reading of Hölderlin and his remarks on the politics of the unquestionable still very much resonate with politics as they are practiced today. At a time when the discourses of universality have lost much of their traditional credibility, a critical reflec372   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

tion on Heidegger’s 1942 lectures, which seek to subordinate uncanniness by absorbing it into domesticity, can provide a perspective for rethinking the relation of the general to the singular in poetry as well as in politics. I will return to this shortly. But before I do, it will be useful to return to a question raised in the previous chapter, relating to the question of “measure”—­in science and in poetry: let me state the second, more specific reason for my returning to this 1942 lecture-­course. Heidegger raises this question toward the end of his lecture-­course, which because of scheduling—­the summer semester teaching period had finished—­he was unable to present publicly. Heidegger quotes from a text that supposedly was written by Hölderlin during the time of his derangement and confinement to the tower in Tübingen. The authenticity of the text, for which no original manuscript exists, has been a subject of debate among philologists. What can be said for certain is only that the text contains lines that are extraordinary, no matter who wrote them.14 This text has been given the title of its opening line: In lieblicher Bläue—­“In Lovely Blueness.” The “blueness” refers to the blue of the sky, presumably, which Hölderlin could see from the tower in which he spent his last thirty-­six years—­that is almost the entire second half of his life. Heidegger calls this text the “latest and most forceful (gewaltigsten) poem (Dichtung), a true δεινότατόν.”15 In this text, a question is posed and then immediately responded to, seemingly without equivocation. The question is, quite simply: Giebt es auf Erden ein Maas?—­ “Is there a Measure on Earth?” And the answer: Es giebt keines—­“There’s none.” Heidegger warns that the answer may not be as simple or straightforward as it sounds. But as is often the case with Heidegger’s readings, he proceeds by extrapolation. He rarely worries about the immediate context of a verse or phrase. Or at least he does not explicitly concern himself with it: that is to say, with what comes before and after the passage he selects to quote and to comment, passages that often, as here, have the form of propositions. Here, of course, the proposition is in answer to a question, and it seems unequivocal: “Is there a measure on earth?” “There is none.” But Heidegger himself does not stop at the seeming unequivocalness of the response: This sounds like a message of hopelessness and despair. And yet it names something else and points toward something else, provided Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   373

that we live poetically on this earth and experience the poetized in its appearing and in its provenance, which in turn means to bear and to endure it rather than to compel and to scrutinize it. If we attempt only to posit and to impose measure forcefully on our own (eigenmächtig), it becomes measureless and disintegrates, is null and void. If we remain merely thoughtless and without the attentiveness of a discerning intimation (Wachheit des prüfenden Ahnens), then once again no measure will show up. If, however, we are strong enough to think, then it can be sufficient for us to think about the truth of poetry and the poeticized, [if] only from a distance—­which is to say barely—­in order to be suddenly struck (betroffen) by it.16

As is so often the case with Heidegger’s “readings,” the immediate context of the particular passage under discussion is entirely ignored. Is this the “distance” to which Heidegger refers, when he argues that it is possible to “think about the truth of poetry and of the poeticized only from a distance”? What sort of “distance” is Heidegger here referring to, and how might it put the thinker of poetic truth in a position to be “suddenly struck by it”? To both elucidate and to conclude this “concluding remark,” Heidegger immediately goes on to cite a passage from another poem by Hölderlin, which he has frequently quoted in these lectures, and whose title indicates its close relation to “The Ister.” This poem is “The Wandering” and here is the passage that now, at the very end of his lecture—­indeed after its actual end, he cites: A dream it becomes to him, if one seeks To sneak up to it and punishes him, who Seeks to equal it by force. Often it surprises him, Who has barely just given it a thought.17

How can one prepare oneself to be “surprised”? How can one prepare oneself to be open to the advent of what in certain circles has come to be known as an “event”? This question becomes all the more difficult, but also all the more urgent, when the “event” is understood to serve as a kind of “measure.” A “measure,” after all, is that which usually serves to homogenize that which it measures. A measure generally provides the basis for 374   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

the commensurable. By contrast, the event that is unheard-­of, unexpected, unpredictable, must also be incommensurable, radically singular. Can the “event” and advent of poetry, which therefore has to retain a certain degree of immeasurability, itself serve as a “measure”? And since the “event” as both Heidegger and Hölderlin describe it in the passages quoted is not just a thing, not at least in the sense of a self-­contained object or entity, what is the relation in and through which it takes place? It is here that the philosophical discourse of Heidegger and the poetical language of Hölderlin diverge. To begin with Heidegger: Heidegger introduces his lecture-­course by defining its project as one of marking. Or rather, as one of remarking. The purpose of his remarks is to render listeners—­and later readers—­attentive, a word that in German is built on the root “mark”: aufmerksam. In English, the word “mark” is now generally understood as a noun, whereas in German the verb form, merken—­as in bemerken, vermerken—­is still predominant. The English “attentive” places the emphasis on the Latin root tenere, that is, to “hold”: to keep, to re-­tain. To be attentive—­to “pay attention”—­has an economical connotation: it suggests grasping in order to hold on to, to take and keep possession. Such retention and possession are also not absent from Heidegger’s explanation of his effort to mark and remark: Such Remarks are always only an adjunct [Beigabe]. It can happen that much of what is remarked is brought from outside and is not “contained in” the poetry. The remarks then are not taken from the poetry [and] by no means achieve the status of . . . an “explication” [Auslegung]. At the risk of missing the truth of Hölderlinian poetry, these remarks give only certain markings [Merkmale], signs to be remarked [Zeichen für das Aufmerken], holding-­points for sensing [Haltepunkte für Besinnung]. Because these remarks are only an adjunct [Beigabe], the poetry itself must above all and constantly be first and present. (2/2)

According to Heidegger, remarks should give the reader something to hold onto—­Haltepunkte—­albeit for a kind of meditative sensing, Besinnung, which in turn should allow “the poetry” to remain “first and present.” But “first and present” in what “sense”? In re-­marking the poetry of Hölderlin, Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   375

what should result is not so much a heightened “attentiveness” but rather a heightened sensitivity, one that responds to the poetry by re-­marking it: that is, by placing a series of “marks” alongside (bei-­) it, as a Beigabe: an “encore.” An “encore” extends the duration of a performance without replacing it. But it at the same time marks its finitude. As encore, Beigabe, marks should neither merge with the poetic text, nor cover it, but be placed alongside it, in the margins, and also after it: both spatially and temporally an adjunct. As Walter Benjamin might have said, thinking of translations, they intervene in the afterlife of the work without directly transforming it or altering it. Heidegger adds: such marks and remarks give rise to heightened sensitivity, heightened responsiveness. Their separation and distance from the work, however, can perhaps best be described as a kind of scansion: they introduce a sequence that both belongs to and is separate from the poetical text. Hölderlin himself seems to have grappled with a similar problem. He articulated it in his own set of “Remarks”: on the plays of Sophocles that he had translated, Oedipus tyrannos and Antigone. The problem he encountered was that of poetical rules, what he called a “lawful calculus” that could be communicated and taught, but which would respect the singularity not just of poetry but of all things: One has, among humans, above all with each thing, to be attentive to the fact that it is something [dass es Etwas ist], i.e., that is recognizable in the means [moyen] of its appearing, that the manner in which it is conditioned, can be defined and taught. For this reason, poetry requires particularly sure and characteristic principles and limits.18

The question that emerges here is how to think the process of “limitation” other than as subsumption of the singular—­“something”—­under the generality of a “lawful calculus.” It is the problem of what Hölderlin calls “the living sense, that cannot be calculated” and yet that nevertheless must “be brought into relation with the calculable law” (ibid). One possible response to this question can be found in the process of writing and reading as such. When one extrapolates a line from a text, as Heidegger does at the end of his lectures, one separates it “from the means” or medium—­“[moyen] of its appearing.” This is inevitable, but it can be done in different ways. I will conclude by looking at one such way, 376   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

which can be found precisely in the text that Heidegger quotes but does not read: “In lieblicher Bläue.” From it, Heidegger extracts the question, “Is there a measure on earth?” and the answer: “There’s none.” But whereas Heidegger quickly jumps to a general conclusion that affirms the value of “living poetically,” Hölderlin’s text goes in a somewhat different direction: Is there a measure on earth? There is none. Namely the thunder is never limited by the worlds of the Creator. Even a flower is beautiful, because it blooms in the sun. The eye often finds beings in life that could be called even more beautiful than flowers. Oh! How well I know that! For to bleed [bluten] on figure and heart and then no longer to be, does that please God?19

Hölderlin’s text dares to do what Heidegger refuses: it speaks in the name of an “I”: “Oh! How well I know that!” But it is not simply or solely the personal I of the poet, the poet as a person. Rather, it is the I that remains the immeasurably singular measure of all things. No longer one and not yet zero. There is no “measure on earth” because there is no single “earth”: there are “worlds of the Creator.” There are many worlds, just as there are many I’s. But this one I remains almost anonymous, almost unnamable—­ like the author of “In lieblicher Bläue.”20 “The eye often finds beings in life that could be called [named] even more beautiful than flowers. Oh! How well I know that!” The singular beings that populate those worlds are unnamable in their uniqueness—­ and in their finitude. This is why, at crucial points in his writing, prose, or poetry, Hölderlin resorts to impersonal designations such as “something” (Etwas) in order to name the unnamable. The unnamable, however, cannot be named precisely because it is radically singular, and as such, radically finite. Overdetermined and yet not entirely indefinite. This is why it can be said to “bloom” and to “bleed”—­blühen and bluten—­in a verbal convergence that is both remarkable and painful. This is also why, in the poem “The Rhine,” Hölderlin can write, in apparent contradiction to “In lieblicher Bläue”: Nur hat ein jeder sein Maß. But the contradiction is not unlimited, for what has “its measure” on earth is ein jeder: each and every one, every singular being has its measure. But that measure is different for each and everyone. And since it is radically singular, it cannot be “grasped” or even touched but only encountered and Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   377

felt in a moment when past and future “recoil headlong.” Nietzsche calls it the Augenblick; Hölderlin, in “In Lieblicher Bläue,” the “Gestalt.” It can be encountered as a shape that disappears in appearing. To try to name it properly, to identify it, would be to try to repeat the singular as the same, to force the like to be equal (ihm gleichen will mit Gewalt) instead of accepting it as merely the “like.” The inevitable generalizations of language—­of words taken in isolation, of sentences taken as meaningful—­can never replace the spectral uniqueness of the one. But they can learn to respect and acknowledge, even to “like” mere “likeness.” This also suggests why the poetry of Hölderlin insists on a use of language that problematizes naming, and that does not hesitate to assume and indeed to radicalize the inescapable linguistic abstraction of—­and from—­the singular, which can be experienced and encountered only in and as the sense of a certain resistance. This is also why, in the poem commented by Benjamin, Blödigkeit—­“Timidity”—­the task of the poet can be described in and through a syntax that struggles with English idiomaticity: “Good also are, and sent skillfully, each to something, we.”21 It is good that both poet and reader of poetry, and countless others as well, have been sent to someone and to something—­and this being sent is the basis of a certain commonality, of a “we” that is not just an I. What is shared is the encounter with the resistance of the singular, whereby the root word of “encounter”—­“counter”—­describes the irreducible distance, the ambivalent movement toward that is at the same time a movement against, since it joins only by separating. This “counter” marks the “distance” through which “we” must read poetry, which means first and foremost, allowing ourselves to be “struck” (betroffen) and “surprised” by it. But unlike Heidegger’s hermeneutic–­ heuristic device, such an encounter cannot simply serve as a “holding point.” Or simply as its negation. To think it beyond the neutrality of the neither–­nor just described, it can help to reread how Hölderlin himself describes his encounter with Sophocles in his own “Remarks” (on Oedipus and Antigone). In these Remarks, Hölderlin develops a theory of tragedy that applies to his poetry as a whole. It is a theory based not on isolated, univocally meaningful words or sentences, but on their spatiotemporal arrangement—­their sequence. It can therefore be called a syntactical theory, or also a rhythmical one. Or more precisely, a counter-­ rhythmical one. Rhythm as a medium of encounter is thus conceptualized 378   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

as counter-­rhythm. At its core is not just the all too frequently quoted word “caesura”—­but rather more precisely the root “counter” (gegen), for this alone endows Hölderlin’s concept of caesura with significance: Tragic transport is namely actually empty, and the most unbound. Therefore, in the rhythmic sequence of representations, wherein the transport exposes itself (sich darstellt), what is necessary is what in prosody is called “caesura” (Cäsur), the pure word, the counter-­ rhythmic interruption, in order to encounter the wrenching change of representations, at its height, so that it is no longer the change of representation that appears but rather the representation itself.22

The “pure word,” the “representation itself,” is constituted by the antinomical movement of the Gegen, first as counter-­rhythmic (gegenrhythmische) movement that interrupts the goal-­directed thrust of the word in a grammatically correct sentence, and thereby allows us “to encounter the wrenching change of representations”—­but in the figure of “the representation itself.” The “self ” is already the product of that counter-­rhythm and is, in the strong sense, a signifier. But it is also a signified. This tension is articulated in the notion of counter-­rhythm. In Oedipus tyrannos, observes Hölderlin, this counter-­thrust interrupts the forward rush of representations, whereas in Antigone it counters the backward pull of the plot. In short, the counter-­rhythm resists: it is a figure of resistance. Such resistance, as counter-­rhythm, impedes the movement of signs toward meaning, of narrative toward its goal. It allows the singular to appear while disappearing: in short, to blink, momentarily (augenblicklich). This contrary movement going nowhere defines the medium of the poet who understands his task as that of not avoiding conflict but articulating it. It also defines the law of Hölderlin’s hymns themselves: they move toward and against. In a scene that recalls that of “In lieblicher Bläue,” but which casts Heidegger’s Heimischsein in a different light, the following passage from “Mnemosyne” suggests how the rhythm of counter-­speaking can intervene to determine poetic language: What about things beloved? Sunshine On the ground we see and dry dust Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   379

And homely the shade of the forests and there blooms On roofs smoke, near the old crown Of the towers, peacefully: Good are namely When counter-­speaking [gegenredend] the soul Has wounded anything heavenly, the signs of the day.23

“Near the old crown” smoke blooms like flowers, but “peacefully.” Poetry, which must not avoid articulating conflict, can also promote a certain “peacefulness”—­not by countermanding the ambient counter-­speaking, but rather by exposing its conditions, both in their power and in their partiality. For this partiality, because it is always interested, is also always finite. And where it denies the very essence of finitude—­the irreplaceable heterogeneity of the singular—­it undermines its conditions of existence. In his Remarks on Sophocles’ Antigone, Hölderlin suggests how such a poetry might be construed today. “Today,” of course, was for him the years immediately following the French Revolution, which in Germany provoked both enthusiasm and ferocious reaction. Hölderlin, therefore, carefully distinguished—­already in his practice of translating Antigone—­ between the age of Sophocles and his own. In reading his Remarks today, it would be good to keep that distinction in mind, also with regard to our present situation. In Antigone, he writes, the overturning of all established conventions takes the form of what he calls a vaterländische Umkehr—­a phrase that has become difficult to translate into English today because of the Umkehr (reversal) that has affected the word Vaterland (Fatherland). At the time Hölderlin wrote, it could be seen as an ideal combining the singularities of local social and political existence with more general aspirations. Today it has become almost disqualified because of the way those aspirations became the slogan of the most brutal colonial, imperial, and nationalist efforts at establishing hegemony. Nevertheless, what Hölderlin is trying to articulate with this notion is almost the opposite of such hegemony, and as such deserves reflection. I have therefore resorted to the neologism “Fatherlandic” to try to render this word into English in a way that would not be entirely devastated by the sinister historical connotations it has acquired since 1800. This is all the more necessary because under different terms the “thing itself ” appears to be returning with a vengeance in the rise of nationalist xenophobia all over the world, in part as a self-­destructive re380   Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry

sponse to the hypocrisies of the various universalisms that have dominated most official discourses and public policies. Here, then, is how Hölderlin summarizes the political dimension of Antigone: The kind of response [Hergangs] in Antigone is that associated with an upheaval [Aufruhr], where what counts, insofar as it is a fatherlandic issue, is that each one, insofar as they are seized by unending overturning [unendlicher Umkehr], and shattered by it, feels itself in unending form. For fatherlandic overturning is the overturning of all modes of representation [Vorstellung: imagining] and forms. A total overturning in such matters, like total overturning in general, without anything to hold on to, is not permitted for a human being, as a cognitive being.24

The overturning of all established “modes of representation and forms” entails not simply a contradiction but something closer to paradox or aporia. A total dismissal of all inherited authority—­“fatherlandic,” in political terms—­is “not permitted” for human beings insofar as they are cognitive, which is to say, insofar as they define themselves through a notion of cognition as conceptual understanding. But human beings are not just cognitive: through the shattering of all cognitive frames of reference they “feel” themselves in the process of being “shattered” (erschüttert). Humans are sentient beings as well as rational beings, and the two are not the same although they are also not independent of one another. In other words, the attempt to overturn all authority, fatherlandic or not, will ultimately only result in the establishment of new authorities, which may turn out to be even more destructive than their predecessors. Hölderlin anticipates here the Freud of Totem and Taboo and The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion—­and surely many others as well. What then is his response, if not solution, to this conundrum? It can perhaps be gleaned from the rather unusual way he concludes his Remarks on Antigone. First, it is significant that he speaks of “groupings of persons” rather than just of persons individually. For he is concerned with emphasizing a certain irreducible plurality and diversity, rather than the polarity of winners and losers, heroes and villains. He uses a striking figure from athletic competition to illustrate this: Mis-­taking the Measure of Poetry   381

The grouping of such persons can, as in Antigone, be compared with a competitive game [Kampfspiel] of runners, where the one who first gasps for breath and jostles [stößt] the opponent [Gegner] has lost. (434)

In other words, the encounter that Hölderlin depicts, negatively, in his comparison of Antigone with a foot race, is one in which the Gegner—­ opponents—­do not touch each other. It is also one in which the one who first gasps for breath (schwer Othem holt) loses. It is, in short, a race in which only the loser can be described, not the winner. Nevertheless, it is a race, a competition, a struggle to prevail temporarily, if not temporally, since it takes place in a time and space that in the end wears out the competitors. The rules of this noncontact sport that Hölderlin sees in Antigone are thus radically different from those that dominate social reality today, where direct and often aggressive ‘contact’ and comparison are major means of “excelling.” In the following paragraph, Hölderlin suggests what he calls a “republican” alternative to such a race, in which there would be neither winners nor losers: The form of reason that here emerges [in Antigone] tragically is political and namely republican, because between Creon and Antigone, formal and counterformal [förmlichem und gegenförmlichem], the equilibrium is at once [zu gleich] maintained. (434)

In short, surprisingly, Hölderlin does not write off Creon and extol Antigone. For the interests of the general (formal) and of the singular (counter-­formal) must be held in a certain equilibrium, a Gleichgewicht, in which the gleich must be read as a relation that maintains the tension between its components rather than resolving them in a unity. “Equal” paradoxically means also unequal, different, “counter-­” in the sense of “against,” which designates both proximity and separation, attraction and repulsion. What then of the poet in this notion of maintaining a Gleichgewicht that would preserve difference as well as interdependence of the singular and the general? The final paragraph of Hölderlin’s Remarks on Antigone allows us to reach another curious conclusion:

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Sophocles is right. This is the destiny of his time and the form of his fatherland. One can to be sure idealize, e.g. choose the best moment, but the fatherlandic modes of imagining [Vorstellungsarten] must not—­at least in their subordination [der Unterordnung nach]—­ be changed by the poet, who presents the world on a reduced scale [Maßstab]. For us this form is usable, because what is unending [das Unendliche], like the spirit of states and of the world, can in any event not be grasped other than through a viewpoint that is gauche [aus linkischem Gesichtspunkt]. (434–­36)

The word linkisch in German is related to the word for “left”—­links—­ but not identical with it. The English word “gauche” keeps both the “left” association while designating the more common sense, which is that of “awkward,”25 “clumsy”—­the very opposite of geschickt, that “skillfulness” that Hölderlin in his Remarks associates in part with the loss of a sense of “destiny” (Geschick or Schicksal), of having to respond to forces that come from elsewhere. To be an outright “republican” in Hölderlin’s time and place would probably have meant spending a good part of one’s life in prison, as did his friend Sinclair, if not worse. But republican is clearly meant in his Remarks as an alternative to a political form based on uniformity: that of a monarch or of a people. It provides an alternative insofar as it can sustain the tension—­the Gleichgewicht—­between the singular and the general, which alone can assure the survival of the common good, the res publica. The poet must learn then from this to acknowledge the “subordination” (Unterordnung) of the “fatherlandic” but not necessarily to accept its hierarchies. The tension between the finite and infinite—­which I have preferred to render in the above passages as the “unending” (German: unendlich)—­is not something that can be simply abolished or transcended by the “overturning” of all established values and hierarchies. Instead, what is necessary is to expose the conditionality of the conventions upon which those hierarchies are based, by revealing them to be responses rather than simply creations ex nihilo: responses to questions, desires, and anxieties, which, if they were made legible, would shake up if not shatter the hierarchies their suppression supports.

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Precisely this defines many of the most powerful texts of a writer who, living a century after Hölderlin, experienced the crisis and collapse of a Vaterland that was not simply his, but from whom he could also not entirely distance himself. His writings draw much of the force from precisely those prosaic everyday details, those Tageszeichen, whose existence belie the normality that relegates them generally to the margins of everyday experience. That writer is of course Franz Kafka. His writings are political and republican, in the sense suggested by Hölderlin—­that is, they demonstrate the fascination and fecundity of a linkischen Gesichtspunkt that even, and especially, today retains all of its feeble force.

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17

Towers and Walls

Building the Wall of China

We have no wall. We have no border security. Without a border, you don’t have a country. You don’t have a country. (Applause.) U.S. president Donald J. Trump, June 19, 20181

Franz Kafka described organizational life always from the perspective of the singular individual. But this individual was rarely portrayed as existing independently of the organization. The singular can be distinguished from the (autonomous) individual through the fact that it is eminently dividual, which means that it can never be apprehended—­felt, sensed—­ apart from the tension in which it stands to the other, the nonindividual. This is why it has to be sensed, rather than cognized; it can be read, but never fully interpreted. Schiller once wrote: “If the soul speaks, it is alas no longer the soul speaking.”2 But if the soul, or mind, does not speak when it is speaking, is it still itself? It is not just a question of the individuality of the soul being betrayed by the generality of language—­rather, language as signifying process is what divides the self in itself, as it were, whether as soul or as meaning. Kafka’s writings take this situation into account, and it is why so many of them are profoundly related to jokes—­and perhaps why it is reported that he laughed while reading some of his more gruesome stories. But such laughter and a jocular undertone should not be taken as a sign that those stories and writings are not serious. Rather they are too serious not to be laughed at—­and with. As with certain jokes described by Freud in his book on the subject, Kafka’s wit addresses and dislocates the expectation of meaning that is the basis of most communication, and indeed is a necessary if not sufficient condition of what is called “reading.” The first phase of reading is to recognize the meanings of words and sentences. But that 385

is only the first phase. Were it only that, reading would have a strong tautological moment: it would merely present us with meanings with which we are already familiar. With Kafka that sense of recognition, based on convention and hence relative, is only the point of departure of reading; it is followed by a sense of the uncanny, which recognizes the familiar as being somehow also profoundly strange. Indeed, his texts often reveal this sense of the familiar as being designed to ward off certain anxieties and the uncertainties that produce them. Since familiar meanings depend on shared conventions, revealing them to be not “natural” but rather a defensive response calls into question the authority of the conventions that shape what has been called a “horizon of expectation.”3 In suggesting that this horizon is a defensive barrier rather than simply an epistemic necessity, the “horizon” is thereby displaced, revealing forces and factors that have contributed to the stabilization of convention. Behind such conventions and their apparent stability, then, Kafka’s stories and writings reveal conflicts of forces, and it is these conflicts that constitute the subject of many of Kafka’s texts. This chapter attempts to examine one such text. Kafka wrote the story in 1917, worked on it until his death in 1924, but never finished it, so that it was not published in German until 1930. Three years later the first English translation appeared under the title “The Great Wall of China.” This is how the text is still generally known today. Only in 2005 to my knowledge was a more literal translation and title published in the collection of Kafka texts edited by Stanley Corngold. Corngold restored something that previous English translations had omitted: he translated the title as “Building the Great Wall of China.” It is worth reflecting for a moment on the omission in earlier translations, for it reflects a general tendency in the English-­language reception of Kafka. That consists in focusing primarily on the objects depicted in his stories—­here “the Great Wall of China”—­and ignoring the manner in which they are depicted, usually connected with the narrative discourse. Kafka’s well-­known short text, “Cares of a House-­father,” (in German “Sorge eines Hausvaters,” usually rendered in English as “Cares of a Family Man”) is often referred to by the name of what looks like its principle figure, Odradek: both Benjamin and Adorno, both of whom singled out this text early on as being of particular interest, tend to refer to it this way. Most readers continue to be far more fascinated with Odradek than with the discourse that portrays it—­the discourse of the “house-­father.” And yet Kafka’s title was quite accurate, 386   Towers and Walls

since the focus of interest should be the house-­father, not the thing he is trying to describe. To be sure, the two cannot and should not be separated. But they also should not be identified. The house-­father is worrying about Odradek, not simply describing it. The reasons why he is so worried tell us more about the story than any merely “objective” analysis of Odradek. This should be obvious, but as much of the critical discussion of Kafka’s animals shows, it is hardly the case. When Kafka’s stories describe nonhuman animals or let them speak, this has very little to do with animals as such, but rather with what Derrida has called animots, a French portmanteau word that brings together “animals” with “words.”4 The “words” reflect social and cultural conventions, and through them attitudes toward animals. It is these “attitudes” that are the subjects of Kafka’s animal stories, as I will try to show in the following chapter, with respect to “Josephine, Songstress of the Mouse People.” With this in mind, let us turn to “Building the Chinese Wall.”5 I omit the word “great,” which although idiomatic in English is not so in German. Whether or how the Chinese Wall is “great” could be one of the questions that lead us into the story. It is certainly not, to borrow a term from Kant’s description of the mathematical sublime, “absolutely great.”6 Indeed, it is not even clear in what sense it is a wall at all. It is certainly not a wall in the sense indicated in the epigraph chosen to this essay, one that could guarantee the safety and protection of what it walls in by walling out. This is why the question of “construction” is so important, and also why Kafka gave this text the title “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.” Beim Bau does not merely mean “building”: the addition of the preposition Bei is not insignificant. It relativizes the “building” by relating it to something else, something connected to it but not identical with it. This connection can be temporal, in which case Bei would suggest something like “while”; or it can be spatial, suggesting a form of contiguity or proximity. Given what is described in the story, I would opt for “while.” The reason being that the construction of the Chinese Wall, as the narrator describes it, is destined—­like the story itself—­to remain unfinished. And both the building of the wall, like the building of the narrative, follows a significant diachronic pattern. So let’s begin at the beginning: The Great Wall of China was finished at its northernmost point. The construction was brought forward from the southeast and the Towers and Walls   387

southwest and the sections joined here. This system of partial construction [Teilbau] was also followed on a smaller scale by the two great armies of workers, the eastern and the western. (113/289)

The beginning of this passage accords with what I have described as the horizon of expectation that determines the initial phase of reading: one reads words and sentences to get to a meaning. The meaning unifies and generalizes the significances of the individual words and sentences. In short, one constructs something similar to the way the building of the wall is first described: it is “finished at its northernmost point” and its other elements “join” it from the southwest and southeast. However, immediately after this very satisfying, reassuring start, the general method of construction is described in a way that calls the wall’s completion into question. It is designated in German as a system of Teilbau; today we might call it “modular construction.” The only problem is that the modules don’t come together as nicely as described at the outset. The narrator—­w ho, we will learn shortly, was part of those “two armies” and thus implicated in the construction—­goes on to describe this Teilbau construction in a more problematic manner: But then, after the juncture was accomplished, the construction was not continued at the end . . . as you might expect: instead the groups of workers were sent into quite different regions to continue work on the Wall. In this way, of course, numerous large gaps came about, and these were only gradually and slowly filled in. . . . Indeed, it is said that there are gaps that have not been filled in at all; according to some people these are much larger than the completed sections, although this assertion may be only one of the many legends that have grown up around the Wall and which, given the length of the Wall, is not something one person can verify, at least with his own eyes. (113/289)

“As you might expect . . .” The narrator assumes, not without reason, that most readers will expect a construction to be terminated, whether of a wall or of a sentence. The reason this is not the case, however, is not accidental: it has to do with the fact that construction demands energy, indeed the vital energies of those engaged in it, the “workers.” The workers 388   Towers and Walls

were divided into “groups”—­as isolated individuals they could achieve nothing—­and then the groups were dispersed, “sent into quite different regions to continue work on the Wall.” The result was a wall full of holes, which sometimes might have been larger than the wall itself. “Might have been,” since no “one person” could ever hope to “verify” the state of the entire wall, not “at least with his own eyes.” The individual worker is thus limited, he must work in groups; but those groups turn out to be limited as well. The human collective does not simply overcome the limitations of its singular “individual” members. They have limited energy, limited sense perception and knowledge (which is why they require groups, organizations, and institutions), and a limited life span. Because of these limitations, and because of the desire to know more than they permit the individual, “legends” arise—­which, following the etymological meaning of the word, from the Latin legenda, is something that must not only be heard, but read. But given that it reflects the limited perspective of an individual, the narrator, it must be read not as meaningful (its explicit content), but as significant, whose significance is a function of its relation to other signifiers that are not necessarily explicit. The criteria to be used in discerning which of those possible relationships are relevant cannot simply be taken from the criteria directly called into question, such as the expectation that a construction is destined, teleologically, as it were, to be complete and in this sense literally meaning-­ful. All this adds up to the following: the words of the narrator must be taken seriously, but not necessarily limited to their conventional meanings. They may imply more or other than they say. Here, then, is how the narrator—­who was a part of those involved in building the wall, not as a worker but as a midlevel functionary—­explains the dispersion of workers that in turn made the Teilbau principle of construction necessary: They could not be expected, e.g., to spend months, let alone years, setting one stone next to another, in an uninhabited mountainous region, hundreds of miles from home; the hopelessness of such work, which, however industriously performed, would not achieve its goal even at the end of a long life, would have driven them to despair and, most important, diminished their usefulness to the work. And that is why the system of partial construction was chosen; by that time, of Towers and Walls   389

course, the leaders were generally exhausted and had lost all confidence in themselves, the construction, and the world. (115/292–­92)

The duration of a single human life, even a long one, could never suffice to bring about the completion of the work, and it is this that drives not only the workers but “the leaders” not just to exhaustion but to despair “in themselves, the construction, and the world.” It is probably relevant to recall that Kafka wrote this in all probability in 1917, during the First World War, which, particularly in the preceding year, had devoured the energies and lives of millions of individuals in what may have seemed like endless massacres for no obvious reason. In addition, Kafka’s job with the “Arbeiter-­Unfall-­Versicherungs-­Anstalt” (Workers’ Accident Insurance Company) confronted him daily with the ways in which wage-­labor devoured the vital energies and bodies of individual workers.7 Given this endless and consumptive task, it becomes all the more important to look at the reason the wall was being built in the first place, which was then used to demand and distract the individuals engaged in it from the sacrifices they were being asked to make. “The Wall was conceived of as a defense against the peoples of the north,” the narrator declares early on (113/289). But the manner in which it has to be constructed calls into question its ability to protect, as the narrator himself concedes: “But how can a wall that is not a continuous structure offer protection? Indeed, not only can such a wall not protect, but the construction itself is in perpetual danger” (113/289). In short, the wall is not only ineffective as a means of protection, but it offers a new object that must be defended, namely itself. This is remarkably like what Derrida will later call “autoimmunity,” the way in which a system of protection turns on itself, thus increasing its exposure. The narrator, however, adds an additional moment to the counterproductivity of the wall: not only does it fail to protect; it stimulates those against whom it is directed to be all the more aggressive. And how? By making them more anxious.8 The means of increasing what today is universally called “defensive” capabilities—­for instance, strengthening NATO by placing nuclear missiles on the borders of Russia—­sets a vicious cycle of anxiety and aggression in motion that only increases the danger of mutual destruction: “The nomads . . . made anxious by the construction of the Wall, changed their dwelling places with incomprehensible rapidity, like locusts, and so perhaps had a better overview of the 390   Towers and Walls

progress of the Wall than even we ourselves, its builders” (113/289). One need only think of the mobility of the most recent antimissile systems, such as the Russian S400, now being offered to many of the countries who feel themselves threatened by possible aggression from the United States and its allies, as well as to certain “allies” themselves (Turkey), is a contemporary analogue to this literal “mobilization” of “the nomads.” The reciprocal relation between anxiety and aggression, indicated by the narrator, should also not be overlooked. The wall seems, therefore, to be directed against an external menace, the nomadic “peoples of the north.” But what its construction reveals is that it is also and perhaps above all used to distract the peoples it is supposed to protect from other anxieties, relating not to external threats but to the conditions of their lives as singular beings. The completion of a partial segment of the wall, therefore, is not merely an occasion to fall (back?) into postpartum depression, but also to enjoy, if briefly, its manic counterpart, a certain jubilation: But while they were still ecstatic from the festival when the sections of the thousand-­yard wall were joined, they were sent far, far away. . . . They saw mountains being hammered into stones for the Wall; at sacred sites they heard songs of the pious pilgrims begging for the completion of the Wall. All this soothed their impatience. . . . All these tensed the strings of their souls; like eternally hopeful children . . . they left home sooner than necessary. . . . Every fellow countryman was a brother for whom they were building a protective wall and who was [ . . . ] thankful all his life, thankful with everything that he had and was: unity! Unity! Breast on breast, a round dance of the people, blood no longer confined in the meager circulatory system of the body, but roiling on sweetly and yet returning to its source through the infinity of China. (115/292)

Does the narrator here reflect Kafka’s memories of the enthusiasm that gripped countries as their men marched off to be massacred in the trenches of the First World War: “Half the village accompanied them for long stretches” as they left their homes and discovered “on all the roads, greetings, pennants, and flags: never before had they seen how great and rich and beautiful and lovable their country was” (115/292). Towers and Walls   391

But whether or not this reflects particular experiences associated with the outbreak of World War I, the way in which a collective euphoria could be used to palliate other, politically explosive, anxieties, is striking and instructive today, even if it resonates over centuries. Thucydides chronicles a similar euphoria at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian wars, and it remains sadly true today as then that it is always easier to start such wars than it is to “end” them.9 But in Kafka’s text it is not a question of war, exactly, but of building a wall that would protect a people from its enemies. However, the implications of the process of protection thereby described can and are extended beyond the mere construction of walls. This construction reveals an underlying anxiety that the collective appeal to “unity” can attenuate, if only temporarily, until its destructive consequences become too obvious to ignore. The desire to escape such anxieties can be provisionally relieved through a process that allows an imaginary identification with a collective—­a country, state, ideology—­that is considered to be as “infinite” as the “infinity of China” itself. Bloodletting is already anticipated, but instead of confirming human vulnerability—­“the meager circulatory system of the body” qua individual—­it is imaginatively rechanneled into the inexhaustible body of the collective, “rolling on sweetly and yet returning to its source” in what appears to be an unending cycle of life. But it is life in general, never life in the singular. It is precisely this imaginary vision—­imaginary in the Lacanian sense already discussed—­that turns the body from a mortal into an immortal mode of being, retaining the notion of individuation while ostensibly shedding its temporal and spatial limitations. For this vision there is a powerful “legendary” source that operates for those cultures derived from the Bible, in contrast to those, like the Chinese, that have a different heritage. And it is here that it becomes clear that Kafka’s texts is not “about China,” except in the sense of “about and around”: what it is about is a certain conception of China that is first and foremost not Chinese but Western and European (just as his texts on animals, as already mentioned, are not about animals but about certain specific cultural attitudes toward animals and animality). This breaks into the text, somewhat surprisingly, when the ostensibly Chinese narrator adds, immediately after extolling “the infinity of China,” some “additional reasons,” which in turn lead back to an emphatically non-­Chinese “legend”: 392   Towers and Walls

And in this way the system of partial construction makes sense, but there may well have been additional reasons. . . . If I am to convey and explain the intellectual perspectives and experiences of that time, I cannot dig deeply enough into this question. First of all, you must admit that deeds were accomplished at that time that fall just short of the building of the Tower of Babel, although they were the very opposite when it comes to being pleasing to God—­at least according to human reckoning. (115–­16/293)

“Unity, unity,” this being precisely what the Old Testament God fears when he learns of the project of constructing the Tower of Babel: And the Lord said, Behold the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. . . . Let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. (Gen. 2:6–­8)

The Wall of China is thus intended to protect not just from external danger but to safeguard and strengthen internal unity—­not of all the people on earth, but of a specific, individualized people, different from others. Which is perhaps why the narrator can claim that, in contrast to the Tower of Babel, this wall did not provoke the intervention of a disapproving God. “At least according to human reckoning.” For where such things are concerned—­and it seems that they are concerned everywhere, especially where the unity and totality of the Wall is involved—­one can never be absolutely certain. This, then, is where the work of the unnamed “scholar” comes in. For it advances a remarkable thesis, which takes its point of departure from the fact that the comparison of the Wall of China with the Tower of Babel raises, implicitly, the question of how a tower relates to a wall. They are, after all, quite different, a fact to which the narrator will return after he has recounted the provocative and surprising thesis of the scholar. It consists quite simply in asserting, not speculatively but “based on on-­site investigations”—­in other words, on empirical and scientific evidence—­that if the Tower could not be completed it was not because of Towers and Walls   393

“the generally stated reasons” (i.e., divine intervention) but rather because of “the weakness of [its] foundations”: He maintained that the Wall would create, for the first time in human history, a solid foundation for a new Tower of Babel. Ergo: first the Wall and then the Tower. (116/293)

In short, “for the first time in human history,” the unity of the world’s peoples would be secured not by building a Tower that reaches to the heavens, not by a vertical structure, but by a horizontal one: “First the Wall and then the Tower.” First divide the earth through walls, and then unify it through a tower. The wall would thus provide the only reliable “foundation” for the erection of world unity. Hard not to see in this bold thesis something like a parodistic anticipation of today’s globalization, in which the unity of the one world, regarded as the only one possible, is to be assured by the walls constructed by its dominant powers. “Unity, unity,” thus being the slogan of the New Neoliberal Global Order, an order of hegemony in which vertical subordination is assured by horizontal division and domination: triumph of the self-­identical individual (the superpower) over the differential plurality of singularly distinct nations and peoples. The narrator, however, perhaps because of a certain pragmatic common sense experience, is not entirely convinced, despite the great success that this unnamed scholar’s thesis enjoyed (and perhaps still does): However, I have to admit that even today I do not exactly understand how he [the scholar] construed the construction of the tower. The wall, which does not even form a circle, but only a kind of quarter-­ or semi-­circle, should provide the foundation of a tower? This can only be meant in some sort of intellectual way. But what then was the point of the wall, which was something factual [etwas Tatsächliches], the result of the labor and the lives of hundreds of thousands of workers? (116/293–­94)

To say that the wall was—­or is—­something factual, etwas Tatsächliches— is not to place it outside of the realm of what must be interpreted. Rather, it is to question the manner in which words and facts are interpreted, including the role played by dominant expectations and conventions, as well 394   Towers and Walls

as by ramifications that might change their significance. When language is considered in its aspect of signifying, as here and throughout this book, this does not reduce its singularity but rather allows it to persist, insist, and above all, resist subsumption under the generalities of familiar expectations of meaning. To write, as does the narrator, that the wall was something factual, etwas Tatsächliches, is to point to a signifying potential that cannot be reduced to such conventional expectations. The wall, which is limited and lacunary, reflecting the finitude of the conditions under which it is built, is meant by the dominant social and political powers presiding over its construction to supplement the limitations of the singular living beings laboring on it. But as it inevitably also embodies those limitations, it cannot provide the kind of unity that the biblical Tower of Babel, like the Great Wall of China, was intended to protect: the unity of human life. The Wall reveals that the foundations of that towering aim are unattainable, and also why. In this sense, it demonstrates both why the Tower of Babel could not be completed, and why its more modern equivalent, the Wall of China—­or elsewhere—­will also never attain its ultimate purpose: to keep a people one and pure, homogeneous and free of dependence on others. This tension—­between the desire for a unity that would also imply a certain immortality, and the limitations of singular living beings, whether in the individual or the collective, plays itself out in the story (and outside of it) as the ambiguity of the institutions meant to mediate between the two poles. In the story, these are two: the organization charged with building the Wall, and the Empire, under whose ultimate authority it is to be constructed. The building of the Wall is organized vertically: at the bottom the “day-­ laborers,” who are passive executants; in the middle the engineers and supervisors, to which group the narrator belongs; and at the top, the “leadership” or “directorship,” charged with overseeing the project as a whole. All are consumed by doubts, occasioned by the incompleteness of a construction designed to be continuous and total, in order to fulfill its mission of protection. After much back and forth speculation, the narrator concludes that it is inconceivable—­but by whom?—­that the leaders, if they had seriously wanted to, could not have overcome the difficulties that stood in the way of a continuous Wall construction. And so the only remaining conclusion is that the leaders purposely chose partial construction. (117/294) Towers and Walls   395

Difficult here not to recall Kant’s discussion of how, faced with the infinite singularity of “nature” that escapes all possible conceptual understanding, there is a tendency to presuppose “an understanding like our own,” but infinite, that would have rendered meaningful what for finite intelligences remains obscure and enigmatic. This premise then becomes the basis for what Kant calls “reflecting” judgment, which makes no objective judgment but merely treats things as though they were the product of an intelligence, while recognizing that this is a heuristic and purely subjective rule.10 The ”leaders”—­or rather, the “leadership,” for it is an institution rather than simply an aggregate of individuals in Kafka’s text—­must be regarded as all-­knowing and unified, since it is through idealization of them that the others, including the narrator, confirm their own self-­identity: “We—­here I am very likely speaking on behalf of many—­have really only come to know ourselves as a result of poring over the decrees of the highest leadership” (Ibid.). At the same time, the precondition of such a belief is that the leadership remains inaccessible to ordinary perception and contact: “No one I have ever asked knows or knew” where “the leadership office” was located or “who occupied it.” This is the condition for believing that in this office there surely revolved all human thoughts and desire and, in counter circles, all human goals and fulfillments. But through the window the reflection of the divine worlds fell on the hands of the leaders as they drew their plans. (117/294)

The leadership is absolutely necessary to a humanity, that otherwise—­ according to the narrator, at least—­would be threatened by total dissolution: Human being, giddy at bottom, like a kind of exploding dust, tolerates no chains, and if it chains itself, it soon begins to crazily tear at its chains, rip them up and scatter them and itself in every direction. (116/294)

What the narrator describes here is not “human being” per se, but a particular attitude toward it. It suggests why, given this perspective, leadership is necessary, and necessarily enigmatic. It also explains why the leadership, involved in a particular project, however massive, is not enough. Another

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institution is required to keep humanity from scattering itself to the winds: the emperor. Or rather, the empire. For the empire and the emperor are not the same, even if they cannot be separated. The empire presupposes a unity that only a single emperor can embody. But as a single body, that emperor is inadequate to the task. The famous distinction of The King’s Two Bodies analyzed by Ernst Kantorowicz in his book of that title11 does not suffice to establish the unity and permanence of the empire, at least as the narrator describes it: Among our most obscure institutions is certainly the empire. . . . The emperor as such, to be sure, is for his part great through all the hierarchies of the world. But the living emperor, a man like us, rests as we do on a couch that, while generously proportioned, is still comparatively narrow and short. . . . The empire is immortal, but the single [einzelne] emperor falls and crashes, even entire dynasties finally sink and breathe their last in a single death rattle. (119/297–­98)

The narrator recognizes the difference between the office and the person who holds it, the empire and the emperor. But that does not suffice to establish the sovereign authority of the one or the other. “The Emperor is surrounded by the brilliant and yet shadowy mass of the court, the counter-­weight to imperial power, always ready with poisoned arrows to shoot the emperor and drive him from his authority” (119/297–­98). The office of the emperor is thus marked by conflict and disunity, despite the ostensible (corporeal) unity of the emperor himself. What determines the crisis of imperial authority, however, is the perspective out of which it is judged. The famous parable of the messenger, sent out by the emperor on his deathbed with a message for his people, confirms this. The messenger is unable to get beyond the courtyard; despite his great strength—­he is still mortal and finite. “No one can traverse the distance” that separates the idea of the empire and emperor from the collective but ultimately also singular reality of his subjects; the likeness describes a messenger carrying “the message of a dead man addressed to a nonentity.” But that nonentity is not nothing. It is the passive subject as dreaming spectator, indeed the reader of the legend now addressed in the second person: “But you

Towers and Walls   397

sit at your window and envision it as in a dream when evening comes” (120/300). The “you” here is in the familiar in the German: the narrator addresses himself to the reader as a single and yet anonymous being, Du aber: “You however . . .” This “however”—­aber—­serves to remind the reader that he or she need not respond to the text with the same dreamlike passivity attributed to the emperor’s addressee. Such a reader will never receive the message, precisely because he or she expects it to come from a sovereign subject, from an emperor, who, however, it turns out is “just like us”: corporeal, mortal, singular, male. Us and not us. The legend that is Kafka’s story, however, is more than that: it exposes the limits of such (masculine) corporeality without urging its readers to simply transcend them vertically, by rising (phallically) above them. It is sufficient to take to heart the way the text exposes and solicits certain expectations, which include first and foremost that of a vertical transcendence from signifying to signified, from text to meaning, from singularity to universality. Kafka’s text is unfinished. But certain editions seek, if not to finish it, to extend it toward a greater completeness. This is one case where I find that the earlier versions were more suggestive than Kafka’s subsequent attempts to finish the text. They conclude with a story in which the narrator remembers an event from his childhood involving a conversation with his father. His father is about to explain to him the meaning of a meeting he has just had with a boatman, which is not without recalling the beginning of “The Hunter Gracchus.” The fragment recounts the event as follows: A boat arrives, and the father engages in a heated discussion with the boatman. The son watches from a distance. After a certain time they separate, and the father returns home with his son, who then asks him what he discussed with the boatsman. The father begins to tell him, and although the son—­ the narrator—­cannot recall the details, he asserts that he remembers the gist. This is how the story ends, or rather breaks off: Of course I do not remember the exact words, but because of the extraordinary circumstances, which engrossed me even as a child, the meaning made so deep an impression on me that I trust my memory to give a version of what he said. I am doing so because it was very

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characteristic of the popular attitude. My father then said something like: *** (123; asterisks not in the German12).

Although the three asterisks cannot be found in Kafka’s manuscript, their addition in the English text can be considered fortuitous. For they recall the way Sterne marks ellipses in Tristram Shandy. The story with which the narrator of “Building the Chinese Wall” concludes, in this version of the incomplete text, is full of holes, and yet it is not nothing. Sterne incites his readers to fill in the gaps. Is that what the narrator here calls “characteristic of the popular attitude”? And would, then, the three stars that replace the story his father once told him and that he claims to remember, point to something beyond the dreamlike window through which we wait for the imperial message, “when evening comes”? Evening and morning stars at once?

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18

Kafka’s Josephine, or How a Phrase Can Turn Out

Many years ago, while working on a translation of Theodor Adorno’s essay, “Notes on Kafka,” I stumbled upon—­or rather over—­a remark that has stayed with me ever since: If there is hope in Kafka’s work, it is in those extremes rather than in the milder phases: in the capacity to stand up to the worst by turning it into language. . . . In “The Metamorphosis” the path of the experience can be reconstructed from the literalness as an extension of the lines. “These travelers are like bugs” is the German expression that Kafka must have picked up, speared like an insect. Bugs—­not like bugs. What becomes of a man who is a bug as big as a man?1

There are many reasons why this remark struck me at the time and has remained unforgettable. First and foremost, perhaps, was the reference to a German expression that I have never been able to locate. In German, Diese Reisende sind wie Wanzen. I have combed dictionaries and asked native informants and have never been able to find anyone who has ever heard of this expression.2 Perhaps one day someone will find it for me. But in the meanwhile—­and it’s been quite a while—­I have been haunted by the question: Could it possibly be that Adorno simply made it up for the sake of illustrating an argument: namely, that Kafka’s work consists in taking “the worst” and “turning it into language”? What kind of a “turn” would that be, and what could be its implications? As an epigraph to his essay, Adorno chose the following observation from Proust: Si Dieu le Père a créé les choses en les nommant, c’est en leur ôtant leur nom, ou en leur donnant un autre que l’artiste les recréé. (If God 401

the Father had created things in naming them, it is in depriving them of their name or in giving them another one that the artist recreates them.) (243)

Was Adorno, as reader of Kafka, re-­creating something that had never existed in order to suggest that a story, a narrative, could develop out of an idiomatic expression, especially if the latter were taken at its word: not like bugs but bugs? At the time, I had no answer to this question; but in the meanwhile, I have developed something like a response, if not an answer. The question to which I am responding emerges from Adorno’s assertion itself: What does it mean to “turn” something into language? Is that something outside of language to begin with—­the “worst,” for instance—­and then is transformed or transferred, transposed into words and sentences, into a story? Or, as the quote from Proust suggests, does that turn take place “within” language, or rather within a certain conception of language: a theological one, in which God the Father gives things their names, without mediation and once and for all, in an artistic act of “creation” that consists in the alteration or really effacement of existing, established, indeed consecrated, but still only conventional names? What is a convention? The word suggests a coming together, by which multiple directions, drives, or tendencies converge in a single point—­or in the case of words, in a single meaning. But the singleness of that meaning is as ambiguous as the notion of singularity itself: it appears to be one and the same; but it is the result of a diverse multiplicity of tendencies, which—­as with the Freudian notion of “repression”—­still exert a centrifugal pull away from the “point” in which they have converged. In short, conventional meanings remain overdetermined, and the degree to which they pull away from their established unity depends on the relation of forces that led to the convergence—­the “convention”—­in the first place. Those forces hold it together, but they can also drive it apart, changing it into something else—­usually not unrelated to what they are altering, just as the “return of the repressed” is never unrelated to the symptoms it has both brought forth and is modifying. Although I take full responsibility for this highly speculative reflection, I think it can help explain the train of thought that led Adorno to the remark quoted. In that remark, the turn described is in fact not just a

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move away from but also and perhaps above all a prolongation: “The path of experience can be reconstructed from the literalness as the extension of the lines,” that is, as a continuation of what was in the original expression. This struck me as a curious position for Adorno to take, given his strong dialectical impulses, which should exclude movement being construed in essentially linear terms. But when a linear prolongation reaches a certain point, quantitative change suddenly becomes a qualitative leap. A German word used by Adorno to describe the kind of “literalness” involved here can help us further. It is the word Redensart—­a way of speaking that has become proverbial. Could the elusiveness of the ostensible origin of the Redensart referred to by Adorno have something to do with his critique of a regressive return to origins that he attributed to Heidegger (mistakenly, I believe), and to reactionary thinking in general? In regard to language, the notion of an origin as an absolute beginning is as dubious as it is elsewhere. A Redensart is a way of speaking that has become conventional through repetition. Its significance has to do not with where it ultimately originated but where it is going—­the direction it takes, including the texts in which it is cited and recited. To discover that such repetitions are the medium not simply of identity but of alteration is part of the experience of déjà vu, of uncanny familiarity, which, as Adorno emphasized, marks some of the most bizarre and intense moments in Kafka’s writings: Each sentence . . . compels the reaction, “that’s the way it is,” and with it the question, “Where have I seen that before?”: the déjà vu is declared permanent. (246)

When, however, a déjà vu “is declared permanent” not by a declaration but by a question, it no longer leads back unequivocally to a constitutive origin, but rather points ahead to an uncertain future: Each sentence is literal and each signifies. The two moments are not merged, as the symbol would have it, but gape apart and out of the abyss between them shines the blinding ray of fascination. Here too in its striving not for symbol but for allegory, Kafka’s prose sides with the outcasts. . . . It expresses not though expression but through its repudiation, by breaking off. (246)

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Benjamin emphasized that allegory—­at least baroque allegory—­far from being a manifestation of “conventional expression,” involved the problematic expression of convention itself. In other words, the conventions that ordinarily assure a stable continuity between signifier and signified, were—­at least for the German Baroque—­not confirmed but rather called into question by this kind of allegory.3 Adorno takes his cue here (as so often) from Benjamin, suggesting that the gap between signifier and signified (the so-­called “literalness” of language) is the result of an interruption—­a “breaking off.” What is broken is the conventional expectation that signifiers, letters, words, “naturally”—­which is to say, in and of themselves—­combine to form a unity based on the continuity with what they signify, the “signified.” He describes this as a “repudiation” or “refusal”: a Verweigerung that results in an interruption. He connects this conventional expectation of a continuity between signifier and signified to the position of the conventional interpreter, which Kafka’s texts both address and dislocate: Through the power with which Kafka commands interpretation, he collapses aesthetic distance. He demands a desperate effort of the allegedly “disinterested” observer of an earlier time, overwhelms him, suggesting that far more than his intellectual equilibrium depends on whether he truly understands; life and death are at stake. Among Kafka’s presuppositions, not the least is that the contemplative relation between text and reader is shaken to its very roots. (246)

The reader of Kafka’s texts can only consider himself or herself an “observer”—disinterested or not—­insofar as he or she relies on the conventional assignments of meanings to words. Where those assignments are called into question, so-­called aesthetic distance collapses, drawn into the gap separating signifier and signified. But is this a “presupposition” of a critic seeking to appropriate the texts of a writer? Or is it the experience of reading Kafka’s texts as literally as possible—­whereby “literalness” signifies not an original meaning but rather the resistance of letters to being totally absorbed in and by any one meaning? It is through such resistance that Kafka’s texts acquire what I will call their “singularity”: not by simply rejecting the conventionality of meaning. They do not, as the epigraph from Proust might suggest, simply rename 404  Kafka’s Josephine

conventional names in a creative act that mimics that of the Creator of the universe. Rather, in revealing the conditions in which those conventions have acquired a certain credit, they raise the question of their credibility and even can suggest alternative “ways of speaking.” Thus understood, the repudiation of convention is not just negative, since it opens up possibilities that have hitherto been excluded in order to maintain a certain order. In what follows I will consider one such text, which Adorno does not comment on, but which perhaps illustrates in a strange and different way how the relation to the “ordinary language” he saw at work in “The Metamorphosis” functions in a somewhat different context. That story is “Josephine the Songstress, or the People of Mice.”4 Let us begin then with the title. Not with the clumsy but necessary translation of Sängerin as “Songstress,” which in English resonates with “seamstress” and yet is as different—­or as similar—­as “song” is from “seam.” Josephine, as we will see, is very much of a “seamstress” insofar as she brings and holds together a society that is under constant threat. But this unusual, somewhat archaic translation is necessary given the importance of her gender, which the initial published English translation by the Muirs sacrificed to idiomaticity—­an understandable enough choice but one that in view of the story can hardly be retained. A newer translation by Phillip Lundberg (available on the internet)5 risks the highly unidio­ matic “songstress” and, as we will see shortly, for an American audience at least, compensates for this loss of idiomaticity by translating another decisive German word, used to designate just what Josephine does, not as “piping” (Muirs), but as the far more common “whistling.” For Josephine the great female singer of “the people of mice” does not so much sing as “whistle”—­in German, pfeifen. I will have occasion to return to this question of “whistling.”6 But before I do, I want to highlight the peculiar nature of the title, which recalls a style popular with eighteenth-­century novels: Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism, Fielding’s Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, or in German, Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln (Ardinghello and the Blessed Islands) by Wilhelm Heinse. There is first a proper name—­Josephine, which in Kafka’s work resonates in a feminine vein with Josef K.; but beyond that work, it also recalls the name of the last ruler of the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, Franz-­Josef, and perhaps even that of the spouse of Napoleon. This is followed by an explanatory phrase that completes the title. In Kafka’s text, however, that phrase does not simply Kafka’s Josephine   405

complete or explicate the name it follows: it both includes and excludes it. Josephine or the People of Mice. The conjunction “or” connects by separating; it describes an alternative. Here, however, Josephine is very much a part of that from which she is also distinguished, recalling the way a sovereign is part of the people he or she rules. As elsewhere in Kafka’s writings, however—­and in this reflective of the epoch—­such sovereignty is never unanimously or unambiguously recognized by its “subjects.” This ambiguity, however, complicates Adorno’s assertion that, as we have read, “Kafka’s prose sides with the outcasts.” For Josephine is not simply an outcast, even if her status and standing in the people of mice is anything but clear or stable. The only thing that is unequivocal about her is that she is exceptional, even if the nature of her exceptionality is very much in question. She takes herself, it seems from the narrative—­but can we trust the narrative?—­as a kind of artist, but the narrative makes clear that her art and indeed her exceptionality defines itself only by relation to that from which it is distinguished. This is another reason why it might have been more illuminating if the English translations, including that of Lundberg, had been more “literal” in rendering the title. For in Kafka’s German, in the title one can sense a tension between the “people” to which Josephine relates—­a noun set in the singular, Volk—­and those who compose it, set in the plural, Mäuse. It would have been easy and idiomatic to minimize that tension by using the combined word, Mäusevolk, rather than the somewhat less idiomatic Volk der Mäuse. “People of Mice” separates the notion of “people”—­with its powerfully unitary connotation, especially in German—­from the plurality of those who compose it. Here again, the preposition, “of,” does not merely conjoin but also separates: the plurality of “mice” nibbles away, as it were, at the expected unity of the “people” they are said to compose. This plurality, as we will see, extends not merely to the quantity of individuals involved, but to their internal composition. Adorno’s remark about Kafka’s sentences can be applied here with a slight but significant modification: it is not that literality and meaning simply diverge from one another; everything only becomes “literal” insofar as it signifies. For what it signifies cannot be absorbed into the unified meaning that certain dominant conventions expect and demand. To invoke a scholastic term invoked by Benjamin in his essay on “The Task of the Translator,” “People of Mice” may appear to mean the same thing as

406  Kafka’s Josephine

“Mouse People,” but its way of meaning—­its modus significandi—­is quite different; and this difference deserves our attention. I want to attend to this difference by returning to two expressions in this story that both resonate with Adorno’s attempt to derive “The Metamorphosis” from an idiomatic German expression—­an attempt which, as I have already indicated, raises more questions than it provides answers. It might, however, well turn out that “Josephine” demonstrates more convincingly than “The Metamorphosis” what Adorno had in mind with respect to the literalization of idiomatic expressions through literature. There were two such expressions that can be said to be at the core of the story of “Josephine and the People of Mice.” One is almost impossible to translate into (idiomatic) English, the other not much easier. Both come at key points in the story. Since the second is somewhat simpler to render, let me begin with it. It is the word, or expression, Mäuschenstill, “still as a mouse,” more literally, “mousey-­quiet.” Mäuschen, “mousey,” by the way, is a Kosename, an ostensibly affectionate but diminishing nickname, used almost exclusively by men to designate women, often family members: wives, daughters. Stille—­quiet—­is presumably the behavior generally expected of such little mice. In Kafka’s story, on the contrary, it is used to describe the response of the audience to Josephine’s performance, a performance that belies the characterization of her as a Sängerin, a songstress, since it consists not of singing but of whistling. What complicates the situation even further is that such whistling is by no means peculiar to Josephine: Since whistling belongs amongst our thoughtless habits, one might think that there would also be whistling in Josephine’s audience too; after all we feel at ease with her art and when we feel that way we whistle; but her audience doesn’t whistle, it is still as a mouse, as though we already partook of that yearned-­for peace from which our own whistling at the very least separates us, and so we are silent. (230/259)

“One might think . . .” This phrase reflects a generalized pattern in the narrative: following conventional wisdom and expectations, “one might think that . . . ,” but such thinking turns out to be in error. Repeatedly things

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turn out differently from what one is led to expect. Differently, but by no means entirely unrelated to such expectations. One might think what the title states, namely that Josephine is a songstress, a great female singer; but as it turns out, all she does is to whistle. One might think that her whistling is exceptional, but it turns out that the whole people of mice whistle. One might think, therefore, that her whistling would leave the mice people cold, but it turns out that they are deeply moved by it. One might think that therefore they would accord her a special status, exempting her from the need to do material labor, and indeed Josephine herself expects this: she insistently demands such an exemption, but as it turns out, her demand is respectfully but firmly refused. Hence the fact that her audience is “still as a mouse” acquires a somewhat enigmatic significance, something that affects and afflicts everything in this story. Whatever anything is declared to be, turns out differently. Expectations are thereby not simply dismissed, but on the contrary are highlighted by unexpected turns of events, which, in diverging from what might be expected, throw the expectation into relief. The latter now stands on its own, as it were, qua expectation, set off all the more by the lack of the expected result. What is meant, then, by mäuschenstille (still as a mouse) is anything but passive submissiveness. And yet, something does happen that is related to such silence: the silence of the mice is not the “silence of the lambs,” and there is no Hannibal Lecter to be seen (or read). But danger and death are not therefore any less menacing, and it is this that Josephine’s whistling allows the mice people to forget, albeit only for the time of her performance. Her whistling affords the mice a temporary respite. The experience of the reader is parallel but different: first and foremost, perhaps, because readers cannot hear Josephine but only read about her, and follow the twists and turns of the narrative, and of its way of speaking, its Redensart. Which brings me finally to the second Redensart I want to discuss, and which is the one that most powerfully recalls Adorno’s enigmatic reference to the little or unknown idiom. If I have been holding back mentioning it, it is in part because I despair of finding anything like an idiomatic translation in English that would convey the experiential tenor of the German phrase. The idiom in German is quite simple and immediately understandable: Darauf pfeifen. Literally, “to whistle at it.” But, of course, this word-­for-­word rendering does not convey the most widespread use of 408  Kafka’s Josephine

the German phrase, which is roughly equivalent to “I don’t give a hoot!” The fact that the German is not literally translatable has to do with a cultural difference that is not only linguistic, but which concerns “the thing itself.” In collective contexts—­meetings, sporting events, and so on—­the significance of whistling in North America, where it is generally a sign of approval, is almost diametrically opposed to that in Europe, where it is a sign of disapproval. Now although Josephine is, after all, introduced as the great “singer” or “songstress” of the mice people, and as the epitome “of the power of song,” the narrator rapidly asserts that she does not sing at all, but rather pfeift—­whistles, squeaks, or, as the Muir translation would have it, “pipes.” Although much of the narrative revolves around the ambiguous nature of her pfeifen—­its relation to “art,” to “music,” to culture and society, and specifically to the mice people—­there is only a single time when the expression that drew my attention actually occurs in the text. But this one time, for being singular, is all the more significant. It is also is the sole time when Josephine is directly quoted. But although the phrase is embedded in what looks like a direct quote, it turns out that it was never spoken at all, but only surmised or inferred by the narrator. The context is that of the extremely ambivalent relationship that binds Josephine to the mice people. And this context is all the more difficult to evaluate since it is presented by a narrator who is part of it—­which is to say, who shares the ambivalence of his fellow mice with respect to Josephine. This ambivalence extends to every aspect of their relationship to the whistling “songstress.” Each party is convinced that they protect the other as a parent does a child: the mice people, who have had to forgo their childhood out of external necessity and dangers; and Josephine, who offers them the protection and solace of her “art.” This, then, is how the narrator describes and indeed evaluates their interdependence: No single person is capable of what in this respect the people as a whole can accomplish. To be sure, the difference in strength between the people and the singular individual [dem Einzelnen] is so enormous that it is enough to draw the one exposed into the warmth of its proximity for it to be sufficiently protected. To Josephine, however, one doesn’t dare to speak of such things. “I whistle at your protection,” she says then. “Sure, sure, you whistle,” we think. (99/525) Kafka’s Josephine   409

As usual, the narrator, who like his fellow mice is not without a certain sympathy for, and even awe of, Josephine, ultimately sides with the collective. He thus begins the passage above by stating what he takes to be a general truth about the power of the collective over the singular individual—­ note in passing, although it is hardly trivial, that it is necessary to use this clumsy English locution in order to render the difference in German between Individuum (individual) and Einzelnen (singular). Having thus established the priority of the general over the singular, the narrator goes on to describe what turns out to be an imaginary exchange between Josephine and her audience. “I whistle at your protection” (i.e., I don’t give a hoot for it) are words she does not actually say but would say, if the mice had the courage to challenge her to acknowledge her dependence upon her fellow mice. But precisely because the mice know she would respond in this way, they don’t “dare to speak of such things” with her. And so, the response remains thought but unsaid. It anticipates an “aside” that alerts the audience in Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage, just before the title figure sings a song: “Höre was sie dachte, nicht sagte”: (Listen to what she thought, but did not say).7 Songs express what mere words cannot. And perhaps whistling brings to the fore what mere singing would hide. Thus both the content of the response, in which Josephine challenges the conventional wisdom that renders the collective—­the “people”—­ more powerful and more protective of the singular individuals who compose it, and even more its form, demonstrate the way in which a Reden­ sart (a way of speaking) is turned into a Redewendung (literally, into a turn of speech). Josephine, who, we are told shortly thereafter, “says very little anyway,” nevertheless communicates what she doesn’t say through “flashes from her eyes,” which “you can read . . . off her tightly closed lips” (99/525). Here the Redewendung emerges as in a certain sense the “navel of the story,” in analogy with Freud’s overdetermined “navel of the dream,” which as such can never be exhaustively comprehended but from which all the threads of the dream emanate. But is its legibility all that “plain”? For Freud, the dream-­navel as the nucleus of the dream is only in part interpretable. What about ich pfeife darauf? In terms of what the story recounts, these words are never uttered, only thought. And yet it seems as if the story follows a pattern suggested by this phrase. Josephine might have told the other mice, if the debate had actually taken place, that she didn’t care about their protection, that she 410  Kafka’s Josephine

whistles at it. And her fellow mice would have responded, “Sure, sure, you whistle.” However, none of this is recounted as actually having taken place. No one actually dared to challenge Josephine, and her response therefore remained mute. But this does not mean that nothing happened. On the contrary. Even without being actually said, the imagined exchange reveals something essential about the relation of Josephine to her audience, which is also the “people” of which she is a part, however problematic a part. And this relation, we should never forget, is presented to us through the eyes and ears of a narrator who is anything but neutral. The narrator always gives the last word to the collective; here, it is the ironic affirmation, “Ja, ja, du pfeifst” (verbatim, “Sure, sure, you whistle”). But what does it mean to whistle? Even apart from its negative cultural connotations in Europe, the significance of whistling can remain enigmatic, especially in a collective context. After all, it is not just Josephine who whistles, so the narrator, but the whole people of mice. There is nothing unusual about whistling. And yet he can also advance the following assertions: First, Josephine is our singer, “Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song.” And second, everyone is carried away by her performance, even though the mice are not particularly musical. This apparent contradiction suggests that Josephine’s power to fascinate her audience does not derive from her whistling, but from her performance. “To comprehend her art, it is necessary not only to hear but to see her.” For “when you sit before her you know that her whistling is no ordinary whistling.” In short, Josephine’s performance is what makes her whistling singular. It turns out that she does what all the other mice do, namely whistle, but she does it with a difference. It is this difference that sets the scene. In what does it consist? When Josephine presents herself as a kind of messianic figure, an artistic Joan of Arc or Queen Esther, the mice people remain unaffected by her claims and staunchly reject her demands: She believes that she is the one who protects the people. Out of sinister political and economic situations her song allegedly saves us. . . . To be sure, she does not save us and gives us no strength; it is easy, to stage oneself as Savior of this people, inured as they are to suffering, never sparing itself, prone to rapid decisions, well acquainted with Kafka’s Josephine   411

death . . . it is easy, I say, to stage oneself after the fact as Savior of this people that has always somehow managed to save itself, be it through sacrifices that cause the historian . . . to freeze in horror. (99–­100)

The people of mice, “well acquainted with death,” do not ask for or expect salvation, not from Josephine, not from any artist, nor from any nonartist. But they are drawn to her performance and moved by it, and the way this is described demonstrates a response to adversity that does not insist on confounding consolation with salvation. But this will only be legible to a reader who is sensitive to Adorno’s admonition to seek out what are ostensibly the most insignificant details: The attitude that Kafka assumes toward dreams should be the reader’s toward Kafka. He should dwell on the incommensurable, opaque details, the blind spots. . . . Gestures often serve as counterpoints to words. (248/258)

Those “gestures” to which Adorno alludes are inevitably bodily ones: the fact that they refer here to mice and not to humans only accentuates what living bodies have in common: their discreetness, their situatedness, their capacity for pain and pleasure, their vulnerability and sources of energy. Both Josephine and her audience are bodily, animate beings. But their bodily experiences are as different as they are complementary. They cannot be separated from one another, and yet they commune in their difference: Our life is very uneasy, every day brings surprises, apprehensions, hopes and terrors, so that it would be impossible for a single individual to bear it all did he not always have by day and night the support of his fellows; but even so it often becomes very difficult. Frequently as many as a thousand shoulders are trembling under a burden really meant for only one pair. Then Josephine holds that her time has come. There she stands, the delicate creature, shaken by vibrations especially below the breastbone, so that one feels anxious for her, it is as if she has concentrated all her strength in her song, as if from everything in her that does not directly serve her singing all strength

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has been withdrawn, almost all power of life, as if she were laid bare, abandoned. (97/522)

Living in the shadow of permanent danger, Josephine takes up the trembling vibrations that threaten to overwhelm not just the individual but the collective, and redirects them outward, away from her own body through song—­which will of course only be a squeaky whistle. But it will also be more than just a whistle; for it is “not just a concert but also a spectacle,” as the narrator observes, that brings the mice together, convening them in a certain convention: And to gather around her this mass of our people who are almost always on the run and scurrying hither and thither for reasons that are often not very clear, Josephine mostly needs to do nothing else than to stand there, head thrown back, mouth half open, eyes turned upwards, in the position that indicates her intention to sing. (99/523)

The position assumed by Josephine as she is about to “sing” recalls that of certain ecstatic mystics: “head thrown back, mouth half open, eyes turned upwards.” It is thus not just the acoustics of her song, her whistling, that moves the mice, but the ecstatic position of a body that is abandoning or offering itself to something beyond and above it. The response of her audience is, however, more prosaic, but not less significant: Her art does not go unnoticed. Although we are at bottom preoccupied with quite other things and it is by no means only for the sake of her singing that stillness prevails and many a listener does not even look up but buries his face in his neighbor’s fur . . . something—­that cannot be denied—­irresistibly makes its way to us from Josephine’s whistling. (100/527)

Josephine’s performance brings together the “people of mice” making them into a people, a kind of communion, but one that retains their bodily separateness. “We are happy to come together, happy to press each upon the other. . . . It is not so much a song recital as a people’s assembly” (100/527).

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Of particular interest in this account is precisely the separation of sociability—­of being together, of convening and conventionality—­from every trace of salvation. There is neither a mystical union nor a merging of individuals in a higher, collective individual. The “co-­” or “con-­” denotes proximity but not unification. Rather, there is a pressing of bodies against one another, and a temporary relief from the tensions of the day. But if the bodies remain separated and vulnerable, this is no less true of the medium that describes them. As Adorno put it, proposition (in German, Satz, meaning both “sentence” and “leap”) and significance break apart. Not as objects, however, but as conventions: as a coming-­together (con-­venio) that endures for only a short time before falling apart. This ephemerality reflects the internal heterogeneity that marks the relation of signifier to signified. In language this heterogeneity is often occluded by the relative, conventional stability of meanings. But it is all the more apparent in the expressiveness that human and nonhuman animals share. For instance, in whistling. In contrast to speech—­not to speech as such, which does not exist, but to the conventional experience of speech—­whistling belongs to that group of sounds characterized by friction rather than by the expressive continuum commonly attributed to the voice. Voice is held to express something internal, soul or consciousness, whereas whistling demonstrates that sound of all sorts is produced more by friction than as expression. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive: linguistics speaks of “fricative consonants” in which the passage of air produces sound through contact with inner organs. But whistling takes the process of friction to a new level by detaching it from the voice, whether in language or song. If the voice has been interpreted as the privileged expression of the soul, whistling, by contrast, does not presuppose a preexisting internal source for its sound, but only the passage of air, regardless of where it comes from or where it is going. A kettle whistles no less than does the wind, or a person—­or a mouse. Before the creation through the divine logos, “wind,” it is written (ruach Elohim), was upon the waters. To be sure, there it is attributed to God—­the “spirit of God” in the King James version, or as “breath” in versions more attentive to the original Hebrew. Wind, however, belongs to a world of “darkness and void” (Gen. 1:1). It involves pure relation, before substance and before individuation. But the fact remains that in the sequence of the Biblical narrative, wind is there before the word that gives form and shape to the void, making it a world of objects and things. 414  Kafka’s Josephine

The wind on the water, by contrast, like the wind in the willows—­or in fallen leaves—­produces a very different kind of sound: a frictional sound. Friction is not the same as fiction: it is not something made (fictio), but something transformed, altered. In the case of Josephine, this is perhaps why the narrator can describe her as “this nothing of a voice, this nothing of an achievement” that nevertheless “makes its way to us; we do well to remember this” (100/527). But what is there to remember, in this “nothing of a voice, nothing of an achievement”? Nothing, perhaps, but her name—­which for us is not just a name but a title. “Josephine, Songstress of the People of Mice,” was one of the last texts written by Kafka. His tuberculosis was already far enough advanced so that he could experience the terrifying music of sounds without words, almost without voice, resonating like Odradek, responding to the anxious questions of the house-­father “with a kind of laughter without lungs” that “sounds like rustling in fallen leaves” (73/344).8 Or, like those strange and menacing sounds that penetrate the Burrow in the story of that name: “now hissing, now whistling”(185/501).9 As usual, Kafka’s tales leave us with no easy or comforting answer to the dilemmas they unfold. Unless it be in the unfolding itself, the unfurling of Josephine’s strange song or whistle: “she calls it ‘pearling,’ we call it ‘staccato’ [stoßend]” (102/530). As always in Kafka’s texts, the choice of words and names is not fortuitous. For the audience, her whistling cuts through the cover of conventions, enabling a different, intense if ephemeral, convening to take place. What makes this coming together different is articulated in the word “pearling,” which retains a reference to the discreteness of the singular sounds that compose her song or whistle or squeak: her Pfeifen. These sounds, in short, retain a certain singularity, an indissoluble separateness, and it is this that gives them their force. For they hold out the promise of a communion that would not be a union absorbing singularity but a coexistence respecting it. Its individual manifestations and agents may turn out to be forgotten, but if a community is to subsist, much less a “people,” it will have to retain the memory of a certain “nothing” searching its name. This perhaps is what it might mean to turn something into language: namely, turning language inside out.

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19

Silencing the Sirens

Growing up at a time before television became ubiquitous in American homes, my early experience with radio in certain ways foreshadowed my later encounter with literature. Listening to radio, and in particular, to radio plays—­called “serials” at the time—­I had a strong sense of seeing what I was only hearing. Perhaps this is why my sister and I preferred to listen to those radio plays in the dark, with the glow coming from the wooden radio in the bedroom we shared as the only bit of light in the room. But that glow was like an eye burning brightly in the night, and it brought with it a sense of intense visuality, of seeing while listening in the dark. Remembering and reflecting on this strange and yet self-­evident sensation of a visibility that wasn’t there, what seems to have distinguished it from ordinary sight was a certain emphasis on color at the expense of shapes, bodies, and objects. This tendency of radio images to be deobjectified and disembodied can also to be found in certain literary images. And although this may not hold for all of them, it nevertheless reveals something significant about seeing as well as its acoustic equivalent, hearing, as these function in the process of reading.1 A short text by Kafka relates to this experience but also broadens it, as its acoustically suggestive title already announces: “The Silence of the Sirens.”2 And yet precisely this title, which of course is a translation, requires at the outset a brief commentary. As with almost all translations, it is not exact, and the modification that the German word undergoes is significant. The English word, silence, renders only imperfectly the German word used by Kafka: Schweigen (“Das Schweigen der Sirenen”). Schweigen in German is here used as a noun, but one that is formed from the verbal infinitive schweigen. In English, we would most likely translate this verb as “be silent” or “fall silent.” But this too does not render adequately the significance of the verb, which in German suggests not just the absence of

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sound as a state, but more particularly a refusal to use one’s voice. Since this difference is not at all irrelevant to the text, I have suggested an alternative way of translating Kafka’s title, already anticipated in the title I have given to this chapter: not “The Silence of the Sirens” but “The Silencing of the Sirens.” The Sirens in this text are not just silent, nor are they simply struck dumb: indeed, in the end it is impossible to say for certain whether they are silent at all. What is certain, however, is that they are silenced: not by Ulysses, a figure named in the text, but by the text itself. This reflection may provide a useful entry into this short but enigmatically powerful “story.” I call it here a story, although not much happens in it: it retells in its own distinctive way a more famous episode from The Odyssey. But whether we refer to this as a story, or simply as a text, there is one word that proliferates in Kafka criticism and translations that I prefer to avoid, for to my mind it constitutes a major obstacle in reading Kafka. This word is “parable.” Although the word exists in German, it is significant that Kafka rarely makes use of it—­and for good reason. In English usage—­and in French as well—­parable has been marked by its use in the New Testament. The OED, for instance, defines it as “a simple story used to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, as told by Jesus in the Gospels.” Initially, however, the word meant something quite different, namely a “discourse, allegory” involving a comparison, but not necessarily conveying anything like “a moral or spiritual lesson.” The Greek word from which it is derived, parabolé, designated something “thrown next to something else.” The “next to” is important. In chapter 17, I discussed its significance in relation to another title of a Kafka story, which in English has equally been ignored: “Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer.” This has traditionally been rendered as “The Great Wall of China,” and only recently has the “building” of that wall—­an essential part of the story—­made it into the English title. But the first word of the title, Bei, remains to be noticed. And it too is significant. Just as the “building” of the wall is ongoing, unfinished, and certainly unfinishable, so too the juxtaposition suggested by the etymology of “parable” problematizes any clear-­cut message it is supposed to convey. The German words that Kafka generally employs, which are almost always translated in English (and French) as “parable,” are Gleichnis and Vergleich, which are best rendered as likeness and comparison. To compare, however, is not nec-

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essarily to equate, any more than a likeness is conceivable apart from what in it is unlike. Instead of pointing didactically toward some unifying meaning or moral that would absorb this difference, Kafka’s Gleichnisse accentuate them and in so doing render them significant—­rather than meaningful. This is nowhere more powerfully deployed than in “Das Schweigen der Sirenen.” Nietzsche, in his notes of the 1870s and elsewhere, emphasizes how concepts—­the medium of meaning, truth, and cognition—­arise by forgetting the disjunctive process of metaphorization or transference (Übertragung) that marks the process of comparison. The result is that similes, metaphors, and metonymies are generally treated as the results of equations based on identity, not relations structured by difference. The latter notion is put into practice in Kafka’s Gleichnisse. And as already suggested, this practice begins with the title. Although it refers to the famous episode from book 12 of the Odyssey, the way it refers introduces precisely significant differences with respect to the original. Here is how the text begins, in medias res, as it were: Proof of this, that even inadequate, indeed childish measures can help to save: In order to preserve himself from the Sirens, Ulysses stuffed wax in his ears and had himself chained to the mast. Naturally, something similar could have been done by all travelers from the beginning of time, except for those already tempted from a distance by the Sirens, but it was well known all over the world that this could not possibly help. The song of the Sirens penetrated everything, and the passion of the seduced would have burst more than chains and mast. But about this Ulysses did not think, although he might perhaps have heard about it. He trusted utterly in the handful of wax and the coil of chains and in innocent joy over his little stratagems he sailed toward the Sirens. (127/351)3

Kafka’s text refers, of course, to the Homeric episode; but from the very first sentence it does so in a very “free” manner. For in Homer, Ulysses does not stuff wax into his ears but into those of his crew. Which is why he has himself bound to the mast of the ship, so that once in earshot of the sirens, he will not be able to succumb to their power. This divergence from

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the Homeric text, although never explicitly declared as such, is inscribed in the historical speculation on what “all travelers [could have done] from the beginning of time.” The same distanced perspective allows the narrator to question Ulysses’s behavior and indeed to introduce it as precisely an instance of an “inadequate measure,” which, although “childish . . . can help to save.” Ulysses, for the narrator, behaves in a childish manner, but one that can still be effective. It is childish to have oneself chained to the mast, which Homer’s Ulysses does, and then to have wax put in his ears, which Homer’s Ulysses does not. The text’s narrator, in so doing, ignores what he himself insists “was well known all over the world,” then as well as now—­ namely that such “childish measures . . . could not possibly help.” Ulysses “may have heard about” the power of the sirens’ song to “burst more than chains and mast,” but if so, he chose to ignore it, putting his trust “utterly in the handful of wax and the coil of chains.” Kafka’s Ulysses believes in the power of wax and chains: it is enough not to hear and to be tied up in order to resist the powerful temptation of the sirens. He believes this despite what was well known at the time all over the world. And yet, despite such collective knowledge, or conviction, that would condemn his measures as childishness, Ulysses succeeds. What is “well known all over the world,” and what often is taken to make up the difference between what is “childish” and what is adult, does not have the last word, for it cannot resist “the innocent joy” with which Ulysses “sails toward the Sirens.” Kafka’s Ulysses thus relates to the Homeric figure the way his Abraham relates to that of the Old Testament: “I could conceive of another Abraham for myself,” says the narrator of that other Gleichnis.4 Although it is not possible here to go into the similarities and differences between this other Abraham and this other Ulysses, one point that they have in common is the search for an alternative to the well-­known figures of established legend. This is perhaps prefigured—­or reflected—­in the nonbiblical Abraham’s inability to “stand the uniformity of this world.” But since “the world is known . . . to be uncommonly various . . . this complaint is really a complaint at not having been mixed profoundly enough with the diversity of the world.” Against the impersonality of the phrase about the world just quoted, “the world is known,” it is worth noting the use of the first-­person singular by the narrator at the beginning of the reflection. Such uses of this first person are what lead critics and readers to immediately identify this 420   Silencing the Sirens

voice with that of the author. Yet when the narrator asserts that the biblical Abraham’s complaint about the “uniformity of the world” might be a result of his “not having been mixed profoundly enough with [its] diversity,” this can be taken not only as a critique of the Bible, but also more generally as a warning against too quickly identifying the narrator and the narrative with anything like a proper name, much less that of its author. The narrative voice is “mixed” with the “diversity” of the world it narrates in a way that excludes the distance usually required in order for the authority of the author to go unquestioned. “The Silencing of the Sirens” suggests just how far an experience of that diversity can go in both undoing and redoing the identity of any first person. Any person immersed in such diversity can no longer be simply considered to be “first.” What is first and foremost is the text, which here mixes an experience of the Ungleich with that of its Vergleich, the unlike with its likeness. It is precisely in silencing the sirens that this unlike virtually explodes, namely when we learn that “the Sirens have a weapon that is even more terrible than their Song,” namely their Schweigen: It has certainly never happened, but it is thinkable that someone might be saved from their song, from their Schweigen, however—­certainly not. (128/351)

What is stated here is counterfactual: “It has certainly never happened”—­ but it remains nevertheless “thinkable.” It is thinkable that the Schweigen of the sirens could be more powerful and seductive than their song itself. In other words, not just the absence of their song but their nonsinging as an act might constitute the sirens’ ultimate seductiveness. But this act of silence—­or of silencing—­cuts both ways. For what is involved here is not just the fascination of song, but a relation of forces: The feeling to have conquered them out of one’s own force, and the resulting all-­consuming sense of superiority, nothing earthly can resist. (128/351)

In other words, there is a conflict between two powerful forces. The one related to the refusal of the Sirens to sing, “their silence”; the other, to the imposing of such silence on them by Ulysses. Silencing the Sirens   421

It would seem that the “innocent joy” produced by his “childish stratagems” has in this case been entirely effective. The narrative seems to confirm that this silencing actually took place: “And in fact” (Und tatsächlich), the narrative continues, “the mighty Sirens did not sing as Ulysses came.” So it would seem. But not everything in this narrative discourse is as it seems (except perhaps for the seeming itself, into whose likeness the unlike is ineradicably woven). For having declared this to be “fact,” the narrative immediately introduces a moment of uncertainty. It is possible, as already suggested, that the sirens silenced themselves, believing that this was the only way they could dominate their adversary; but it is equally possible, we read, “that the expression of bliss on the face of Ulysses, who was thinking of nothing but wax and chains, caused them to forget all song.” This latter possibility abruptly reverses the expected relation not just between listener and song, but also between viewer and viewed. Ulysses is so enamored with his work—­his wax and chains—­that he is immune to the wiles of the sirens. Such self-­absorption changes the situation of the sirens radically: their silence now appears to be a possible result not of their free choice but of their captivation by the blissful expression on Ulysses face. Ulysses uses his chains, through the pleasure they afford him, to bind and silence the sirens. But this is only one more in a series of reversals that traverse this text and also many others of Kafka’s shorter writings: an expectation is solicited and then overturned or disrupted, qualified or denied, whereby the expectation is exposed as a largely defensive response whose conventionality and self-­evidence are designed to counter and conceal unacknowledged anxiety. In this particular text, however, the expectations almost all concern the relation of the visible to the invisible, the audible to the inaudible, and above all, their ambiguous interaction, as the passage immediately following the one just quoted makes clear: Ulysses, however, in a manner of speaking [um es so auszudrücken], did not hear their silence, he believed that they were singing and only he was protected from hearing it. Fleetingly he saw first the arcs of their necks, the deep breathing, the tearful eyes, the half-­opened mouth, believed however that these were part of the arias that died away around him unheard. (129/352)

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At this point it may begin to dawn on the reader that he or she is, “in a manner of speaking,” somewhat “like” this other Ulysses, who does “not hear their silence” any more than the reader can hear it, but who therefore believes he can hear their song; at the same time, the reader may also be like Ulysses, who believes he sees, however fleetingly, the sirens moving languorously as they sing. Seeing them move lets him believe that they are singing. Ditto for the reader, who is here more of a spectator if not a voyeur. But there is a difference. Whereas Ulysses ostensibly takes pride in having protected himself from the sirens’ song, the reader has no such protection, and perhaps does not need it. For unlike Ulysses, the reader does not see the sirens at all, not even “fleetingly”: not “the arcs of their necks, the deep breathing, the tearful eyes, the half-­opened mouth.” Readers may feel that they see these things, they may want to see them, but all they actually see are words on a page that they read. To be sure, what they read calls forth the impression of movement and of beings moving. But are these the sirens? As for Ulysses—­the other Ulysses—­does he see anything more substantial? What he sees he construes as the visible “part of the arias that died away around him unheard.” The expression “died away” attempts to render the German verb verklangen—­for which there seems to be no good translation in English, no more than for the title of Kafka’s first novel, Der Verschollener, literally, “the one from whom no sound was heard.” English, so rich in many aspects, seems poor in designating the way sounds not just come but go. This is not true for the correspondent manifestation in the visual domain (“dis-­appeared” is quite close to verschwunden), but no acoustical counterpart seems ready at hand. The German prefix ver-­ here marks the effect of time passing, upon the process of manifestation. A sound, in being heard, also can simultaneously die away. As such it displays an affinity, a likeness, with the finitude of singular living beings. Perhaps this is why time is so important in the missed encounter of the sirens with Ulysses, and what it entails for a certain experience of space. The following lines of the text display this interaction, first with reference to Ulysses, and then, in another surprising turn, with respect to the sirens. First Ulysses: Soon, however, everything slipped away from his glance, directed off in the distance, the Sirens disappeared entirely through his resoluteness,

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and just when he was closest to them, he was no longer aware of them. (129/352)

But the moment that Ulysses, by fixing his glance on a distant horizon, is able to ignore and pass by the sirens without knowing it, they reappear in a “twisted” form, no longer for Ulysses but for the narrator and the reader: They, however—­more beautiful than ever—­stretched and twisted themselves, let their ghastly hair wave freely in the wind and strained their claws freely on the cliffs. They no longer wanted to seduce, only capture the glow of Ulysses’ pair of large eyes for as long as possible. If the Sirens were conscious, at that moment they would have been annihilated. So however, they remained, only Ulysses eluded them. (128/351–­52)

Subject for an instant to the wear and tear of time, the sirens are both “more beautiful than ever” but also more “ghastly,” like nymphs who are already ghosts—­cadaverous and violent, “straining their claws freely on the cliffs.” The tables are turned: it is not Ulysses who is captivated by the song of the sirens, but they who seek to “capture the glow of Ulysses’ . . . eyes for as long as possible.” How long, however, is possible? And in what way can they survive by not being conscious? In some ways, the sirens are like Ulysses. Like him they are made oblivious by the fixity of their glance; he remains focused on the distant goal of his voyage; they on the very eyes that fixedly ignore them. But unlike Ulysses, who ignores their presence, their focus is entirely without consciousness. They neither know nor do not know. And it is this that saves them: “If the Sirens were conscious, at that moment they would have been annihilated. So, however, they remained, only Ulysses eluded them.” The sirens, beautiful and ghastly, with their claws straining against the cliffs, are like the text we are reading—­like it in its impersonal personification. Writing involves incision, inscribing. When it takes the form of telling a story, it promises to hold the attention of the reader, who is eager to find out more and ultimately to possess the whole. But writing remains different from just the telling of a story. If the latter promises a certain continuity, a certain logical causality, writing is riven with cuts and traces. Its traits are never just links in a chain, but disparate in their singularity. They 424   Silencing the Sirens

can thus give rise to a semblance of subjects and objects, which can seem to be alive, self-­conscious, materially existent. And yet, as in its signifying function, writings have neither life nor self-­consciousness. Signifying, which is like intentionality, nevertheless never comes full circle. And this, paradoxically, is what enables it to remain, to avoid annihilation. As signifying that is always in excess of what is signified, writing is what silences and is silenced—­but always only “so to speak,” or as Kafka’s text puts it, um es so auszudrücken: Ulysses, however, so to speak, did not hear their silence, he thought they were singing, and only he was protected from hearing it. (128/ 351–­52)

Ulysses thought he could hear the Sirens not singing, because he could see them moving. He thought that this was because of the precautions he had taken, his wax and his chains. What he could not hear or see, however, was their silence. Readers whose eyes are fixed on a horizon of meaning often cannot distinguish signifying from intending. They also cannot hear a certain resistance of language to what cannot be said in so many words, “so to speak.” But this resistance is never isolated from what is said, from the words that do speak, from what can be seen and heard. It is only in relation to the latter that a certain excess resists and, in so doing, keeps open the possibility of a future—­of something to come that is not yet “known to the whole world.” Unlike Ulysses, the sirens are many. Ulysses is single and singular and in this way both like and unlike a reader. This at least is what might be surmised from the final paragraph of this story—­But is it really a story? Its final paragraph would seem to question that, since it is presented as an appendix, ein Anhang. Do stories have appendices? At any rate, in this appendix or appendage, something like the moral of the story seems to be presented, which would indeed make this story more of a “parable” in the traditional sense. But what comes at this end might also be more like the punch line, the pointe of a joke. And not just any kind of joke, but a shaggy dog story. For where the story seems to conclude, it calls itself once more into question, on the basis of a tradition that has been “handed down”: Silencing the Sirens   425

An appendix to the foregoing has also been handed down. Ulysses, it is said, was so clever, was such a fox, that even the Goddess of destiny could not penetrate his innermost thoughts. Perhaps—­although this can no longer be comprehended with human understanding—­he really noticed that the Sirens were silent, and only held up to them and to the Gods the illusory process described above [den obigen Scheinvorgang], to a certain extent [gewissermaßen] like a protective shield. (128/352)

Suddenly, in this Anhang, the narrative reflects and refers back to itself as a text that is part of a transmission, of a chain of iterations, which opens the possibility that what it recounts might be nothing more than “the illusory process described above,” an obigen Scheinvorgang. In a move strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche, Ulysses is suspected to have an intelligence based precisely on his recognition of illusion, of semblance, which up to now the narrator has presented as a simple reality. Ulysses may have known all along—­so this tradition—­that the sirens were not singing; he only pretended not to know or not to notice, pretended to be confident in his wax and chains, in his protections, in order precisely to use this pretense itself as the ultimate protection—­held up to the gods and goddesses, but also and perhaps ultimately to the readers, who would like to think of themselves as all-­seeing and all-­hearing diviners of the texts they read, working in close collaboration with an “author.” In the end, this appendix, handed down by a powerful tradition, places knowledge and self-­consciousness at the beginning and end of all stories, and all texts—­but only as a protective shield. Protective from what? And how effective a shield? Ulysses is said to have held the story just told “up to the Gods as . . . a protective shield”—­but with an important qualification: “sort of,” gewissermaßen. To a certain extent. The story dissimulates, and in so doing protects—­but only to a certain extent. Which means, however, that this extent remains forever uncertain. For that against which the shield of dissimulation is designed to protect persists in its lyric silence, which is just the manifest face of the signifying of language. And it is this signifying, loquacious and at the same time silent, that makes possible consciousness while also limiting its purview. In order to be readable, a text must present itself to consciousness as meaningful. And yet it can never speak or sing or even whistle for itself. To do all these things, it must be read. Which is 426   Silencing the Sirens

why it must seek to captivate the eyes and ears of the reader, whose eyes and ears remain fixed on the goal, on a certain “cap.” But this cap, which is not just distant but so close that it can only be sensed, places a question mark after the final period of each text. That mark is as silent as a voice in the dark or an image of pure color. It remains a silent appeal to what will be handed down and over, even as the reader vanishes in the distance.

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Notes PREFATORY NOTE 1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57. Interesting to note that the German verb from which the word Verlegenheit is formed, verlegen, can also mean to have mislaid something. The singular would thus be something that has been mislaid with respect to its proper place in existing schemes of knowledge. It has, as it were, gone missing. 2. Jean-­Luc Nancy, Being Singular(ly) Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 3. Peter Fenves, Arresting Language, From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). INTRODUCTION 1. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). 2. The published English translation of both film and novel is All the Mornings of the World, thus sacrificing the colloquial experience of the French title to a literality that lacks the familiarity of the French. I therefore prefer to modify the translation and lose the literalness but regain the experiential content that makes the French so compelling and the English so stilted. 3. It might seem as if Nietzsche is trying to say and think something different, with what is commonly translated in English as “The Eternal Return.” But what is lost in this translation is that in German Nietzsche almost always avoids the word “return”—­Wiederkehr—­and instead writes of an ewige Wiederkunft—­an eternal coming-­back, which, like the word “arrivant” that Jacques Derrida borrows from Hélène Cixous, is always “arriving” but never actually “arrived.” We will come back to this in chapter 14: “Like—­Come Again?! On Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence.” 4. See, for instance, Sophie Nordmann, Du singulier à l’universel: Essais sur la philosophie religieuse de Hermann Cohen (Paris: Vrin, 2007); this title indicates a trajectory that is characteristic for philosophical approaches to the singular. Another recent study whose title avoids the “from-­to” format is G. Jarczyk, Au

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Confluent de la mort: L’universel et le singulier dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: ellipses, 2002). Finally, in a post-­Heideggerian mode: Jean-­François Marquet, Singularité et événement (Paris: Millon, 1995). Partial exceptions would be Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Giorgio Agamben, La communauté qui vient: Théorie de la singularité quelconque (Paris: Seuil, 1990); Jean-­Luc Nancy, Etre singulier pluriel (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1996); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul (Paris: Collège International de Philosophie / PUF, 1997); and of course, Jacques Derrida, passim. The work of Derrida and the essay of Nancy have been of particular importance for this book. 5. The hostility of National Socialism to established religion is probably based on its proximity to it rather than on any fundamental divergence from what I will call the mono-­theological identity principle. This principle is embodied not in isolated, autonomous individuals, as in liberalism, but in a relation between collective—­Volk—­and Führer, who “protects” the people as the shepherd does his flock—­but who also derives his legitimacy from the people he protects. This description suggests a synthesis of Protestant Pastoralism (through the notion of protection and guidance) and Catholic theology: the Führer is to the Volk as the Pope is to the Church. For an excellent study of certain aspects of the relation of National Socialism to Protestant Christianity, see Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010). For the relation of National Socialism to Catholicism, see Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); and Richard Steigmann-­Gall, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–­1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 6. The young Marx took and modified the notion of Gattungswesen (species-­ being) from Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, before rejecting it for a more differentiated conception of social class. See Luca Basso, Marx and Singularity: From the Early Writings to the Grundrisse (London: Haymarket Books, 2013). 7. Herbert Marks, ed., The English Bible, King James Version: The Old Testament (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2012), Kindle location 2928. Biblical citations throughout refer to the King James Version (KJV). 8. Here and throughout, references to the Bible are to the King James Version. 9. The political version of this desire to stand has already been discussed in relation to Schmitt’s determination of political sovereignty as an arresting of movement in a “state of exception,” an Ausnahmezustand. 1 0. One can speculate that the divine preference for blood sacrifice over vegetal offerings could be related to the great degree with which individuation, and hence mortality, is associated with animal life, rather than with vegetable life. Blood thus can be seen as the medium both of singular mortality and its tran-

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scendence through generation—­and hence a more worthy form of life to be offered to the Immortal God. In his remarkable study, Gil Anidjar points to the difference made between the blood of the two brothers, Cain and Abel, but does not discuss the question of blood regarding their different sacrifices. See G. Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity, n. 75 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), Kindle location 7887. 11. The doctrine of sin as felix culpa is first articulated by St. Augustine: “For God judged it better to bring good out of evil than not to permit any evil to exist.” Enchiridion 8, cited in Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_culpa. 1 2. From Luther’s 95 Theses, number 30: “No one is sure of the reality of his own contrition, much less of receiving plenary forgiveness.” From the Theses for Heidelberg Disputation, number 19: “The one who beholds what is invisible of God, through the perception of what is made, is not rightly called a theologian.” Martin Luther, Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1951), 403, 502. 1 3. “The current astonishment that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the 20th Century is not philosophical.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. Needless to say, Benjamin’s remark is turning out to be all the more pertinent to the twenty-­first century. 1 4. In thus stressing the importance of the mono-­theological identity paradigm, I take issue with a perspective that emphasizes the unity of a Western tradition that includes both the biblical tradition, in particular Christianity, and Greece. Greece seems to me in its tragedies at least to depart from the paradigm I have been discussing, understandably given its polytheistic culture. The advent of monotheism is not simply a progress in spiritualization and culture—­a traditional view more recently reinvigorated by philosophies of “alterity” that see the notion of a single God as a radicalization of the other—­rather it also, in a nondeterministic manner, provides the resources for the continued appropriation of the other by the self and the same, which is one of the hypotheses of this study. 1 5. Friedrich Hölderlin, Werke und Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Friedrich Beißner and J. Schmid (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1969), 735–­36. 1 6. Hölderlin, Werke und Briefe, 786. 1 7. Geschick can be translated as “destiny,” while geschickt suggests “skillful.” The challenge here is to think politics from a perspective that brings these two related words together, as in the phrase geschickt linkisch. My friend and colleague Peter Fenves has discerned in Hölderlin’s formulation a possible hint of how “arresting language” can approach an “order” that is “made almost equal—­and altered in turn. Only an ‘awkward perspective’ . . . grants access to this possibility.” Peter Fenves, Arresting Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

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2001), 5, 12. Fenves’s gloss, “Almost equal—­and altered in turn”—­in particular when considered in relation to the German word gleich—­precisely describes the aporetical trajectory of singularity that this book seeks to render legible. 1. SINGULARITY, INDIVIDUALITY 1. Derrida often writes of these three concepts as though they were “absolute”—­ although he generally indicates that this is part of an “aporia” that requires further thought and negotiation. The essays in this volume by contrast do not find the qualification of “absolute” helpful in describing this aporia: rather, I would prefer the notion of “irreducible,” which refers to a limit of consciousness and thought rather than making what looks often like an ontological statement. 2. The distinction is more obvious in Germanic languages such as German or Danish. German distinguishes between Individuum and Einzeln(er), whereby neither has to relate to human beings. Translators of Kierkegaard have found themselves compelled to translate Enkelte as “single individual.” See, for instance, the translators’ introduction to Fear and Trembling & Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), xi–­xii. 3. Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966). 4. One has to add, from other signifiers belonging to the same environment (milieu) or system. But how that environment or system is to be delimited and thus determined as “the same” is the question that haunts (or should haunt) all orthodox “structuralist” interpretations of Saussure. It is doubtless one of the reasons why he never published his lectures on language in book form. It is the merit of certain “poststructuralist” thinkers to have problematized this problem of closure, whether by arguing for the dissymmetry of signifier and signified (Lacan) or by supplementing and supplanting the notion of signifier with that of “trace” and “differing deferral” [différance] (Derrida). 5. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 226; Origin of the German Mourning Play, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). 6. Some newer translations seek to render more precisely the significance of the Danish title, Gjentagelse, literally: to “take-­again” or “take-­back”; thus, a recent French translation is entitled “La reprise” (translated by Nelly Viallaneix, Flammarion: Paris, 1990). I discuss the connotations of the Danish word briefly at the end of a chapter on Kierkegaard in Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 227–­28. 7. Without using the term yet, the notion of a nonunifying repetition that is both a condition of identification and also a condition of its disunity is already at work in Derrida’s earliest publications, such as Speech and Phenomenon, where

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he uses repetition to deconstruct the Husserlian concept of an “ideality” of meaning. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 52–­57 passim. 8. Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Le “concept” du 11 septembre (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 133–­39 passim. 9. My translation of Derrida’s title L’animal que donc je suis. 1 0. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, book 1. 1 1. See chapter 12. 1 2. Since this was initially written, the French have tended to adapt the English designation. 1 3. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). It should be noted that, here as elsewhere, the use of the “same” word changes tonality and significance depending on whether it is used as adjective—­“excellent”—­or as noun, “excellence”—­as above. 1 4. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:226. 1 5. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-­Facement,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 123. 1 6. To be sure, the second part of the phrase, “replenish the earth and subdue it,” suggests that even in Eden, before the Fall, plenitude is not all-­present and resistance not absent. But the emphasis here is on the first two verbs rather than on the last two. The tension however exists, demonstrating the tension internal to every “imaginary” defensive “projection.” 1 7. On the significance of the notion of “like,” see infra, “Like . . . Come Again?!” The problem of “homoiousia” can be traced at least as far back as Plato, but it takes on a new significance during the rise of Christianity, where the relation of the divine to the human is, as it were, in flux. 1 8. From this perspective it is less important what sort of group one identifies with than the way in which that identification takes place: whether it acknowledges the tension between singular and general or whether it seeks to reduce or eliminate it. Today’s “identity politics” are caught in this dilemma, which is perhaps not sufficiently recognized. 1 9. I discuss this at greater length in chapter 7. A very rich and instructive study of the interactions of biotechnology, political economy, and theology can be found in Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). She resumes the neoliberal-­neoevangelical theories of George Gilder as follows: “What Gilder is proposing here is not merely an economic doctrine but a whole philosophy of life and rebirth. What neoliberalism promises, he insists, is not merely the regeneration of capital but the regeneration of the earth itself, out of the promissory futures of U.S. debt imperialism. . . . In a world animated by debt imperialism, there can be no final exhaustion of the earth’s resources, no ecological

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limits to growth that will not at some point, just in time, be renewed and reinvigorated by the perpetual renascence of the debt form itself ” (166). 20. In Leviathan, one of the founding texts of modern political theory, Hobbes insists on the incompatibility of the notions of immortality and of generation, and therefore on a certain incoherence of the Garden of Eden. (“Texts Concerning the Place of Life Eternall For All Beleevers”). Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 2 1. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International, 1970), 195. Cited and briefly discussed in Samuel Weber, Unwrapping Balzac (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 173. 2 2. Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play, 65. 2 3. A recent study retracing this mechanism at work in the United States is by the French historian Sylvie Laurent, in Pauvre petit blanc: Le mythe de la dépossession raciale (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2020). 2 4. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution nowhere accords the right to bear arms to individuals, but only to “a well-­regulated Militia.” Does one need to be a constitutional scholar to see the difference between private individuals and “a well-­regulated militia”? But of course, all words are ambiguous and ultimately open to the most varied interpretations, so that the ones that prevail generally reflect existing relations of force rather than “truth.” The amendment reads: “A well-­regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” 2 5. See “Preface to the Romans,” in Martin Luther, Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962). 2 6. “Preface to the Romans.” 2 7. Novalis, The Encyclopedia, §1363, http://www.kulturtasche.de/modlyr/novpoes1 .htm. See also Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992): 5: “We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals.’” 2 8. Melinda Cooper’s previously cited discussion of the “neoliberal evangelist” George Gilder demonstrates that all it takes for this notion of “the gift” to be appropriated by a capitalist economy is precisely the notion of appropriation and property: “The source of the gifts of capitalism is the supply side of the economy,” she quotes him as writing (Ibid.). In short, as soon as the gift is “economized” and subordinated to the production of appropriable wealth—­as soon as it is determined as “the gifts of capitalism,” the notion of the gift and of debt, even infinitized, especially infinitized—­are subordinated to a logic of identity in the form of the rightful owner of surplus value. This defines exchange in a capitalist economy, no matter of what sort, and it is what distinguishes it from the notion of a “general economy” developed by Georges Bataille and commented on by Derrida in his essay “From Limited to General Economy,” in Writing

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and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251–­77. See Derrida’s effort to extract the gift from every economization in Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 29. The traumatic effect of plagues and pandemics, such as COVID-­19, has to do with the way it reawakens this anxiety on both an individual and collective scale. I hope to discuss this further in a forthcoming book, Recounting the Plague. 2. ON THE MILITARIZATION OF FEELING 1. It should be noted that the word “derive” as used here does not imply anything like an inevitable causal connection, but rather a powerful tendency that persists over long periods of time and in certain cultures. 2. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 3. Of course, the winners and losers can and often do involve “team” effort and as such are a collective undertaking: professionalized sports (which includes university athletics) and the military both insist on teamwork (with the exception of individual sports, like golf or tennis) and business often does as well. But the collective or team tends also to be subordinated to a vertical hierarchy of rank, producing stars and subordinates, receiving vastly different remuneration in business and sports. That it is possible to conceive of a less vertical structure in sports at least—­the military and business organizations are more problematic in this respect—­goes without saying. But this would require a radically different value system from that imposed by contemporary capitalism. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Toward a Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 241 (translation modified). See also Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 186. 5. At the end of his essay on this text, entitled “Force of Law,” Derrida remarks speculatively on the relation between Benjamin’s use of waltende and his own first name, Walter, with which he signed the original manuscript of his essay. Without being able to elaborate on this here, I want to agree with his suggestion that Benjamin’s interpretation of a divine violence that would be waltende rather than schaltende reflects a fundamental tendency of his own writing, which is often not just critical but apodictic, adversarial, and polemical in a way that implies the prevalence of an authority. It would be well worth analyzing how his rhetorical style contributes to the establishing of something akin to the Walten of divine violence, beginning with the essay that Derrida himself refers to, namely his reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. I hope to have the occasion to undertake such an analysis in the near future. In the meanwhile, Werner Hamacher’s insight into the demanding (fordernd) nature of Benjamin’s writings, based on

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his notion of language as demanding, opens up the path such an analysis would have to pursue. See Werner Hamacher, “Intensive Languages,” trans. Ira Allen and Steven Tester, MLN 127, no. 3 (April 2012): 485–­541. 6. In the Harvard edition of Benjamin’s Selected Writings, Zwang is translated as “compulsory,” which transforms it from a noun into an adjective. I prefer to keep its status as a noun, for reasons that will become clear shortly. Selected Writings, 1:241. 7. Jeff Stein, “U.S. Military Budget Inches Closer to $1 Trillion Mark as Concerns over Federal Deficit Grow,” Washington Post, June 19, 2018, https://www .washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/u-s-military-budget-inches -closer-to-1-trillion-mark-as-concerns-over-federal-deficit-grow/?utm_term =.7e340d8c32f1. 8. For an overview of the history of interpretations regarding this amendment, see the article by Nelson Lund and Adam Winkler on “The Second Amendment” at https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/amendments /amendment-ii. 9. For a discussion of this law, see “Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law” at http:// www.husseinandwebber.com/case-work/criminal-defense-articles/floridas -stand-ground-law/. 1 0. A good recent survey of this situation can be found at https://www.vox.com /cards/police-brutality-shootings-us/us-police-shootings-statistics. 1 1. “Playing the games can and does stir hostile urges and mildly aggressive behavior in the short-­term,” a New York Times article noted, but went on to add that “it is not at all clear whether, over longer periods, such a habit increases the likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime.” From this statement the title of the article, “Do Video Games Lead to Mass Shootings? Researchers Say No,” seems to conclude where the article does not: https://www.nytimes .com/2018/02/23/us/politics/trump-video-games-shootings.html. 1 2. One etymological history of the word traces it back to the Second World War, when in 1942 the Bellingham Herald headlined a story, “Those ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bombs Are Called ‘Block Busters’ by Germans.” After the war the phrase came to be used to market films. Today it has been defined as designating films that “gross more than $17.5 million,” thus underscoring how militaristic phrases come to be a measure of power measured in monetary terms. See “Why Is It Called a Blockbuster?” at https://www.dictionary.com/e/blockbuster/. 1 3. To be sure, President Trump was capable of the most total reversals in this respect—­for instance, in his dealings with North Korea. And his insistence on cooperation rather than confrontation with Russia is another such counter­ example. Which goes to show that even simplifiers are themselves exceedingly complex and nonsimple. 1 4. The declaration of the president of the Philippines, citing Hitler’s extermination

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of European Jews as a model for what he hopes to do to the three million drug users in his country, suggests a worldwide shift not just in attitudes toward mass violence, but in the willingness to express such attitudes publicly. The Nazis still felt constrained to keep their mass exterminations as secret as possible. Today the converse seems to be the case: it is often considered politically advantageous to appear as violent as possible and thereby provide deprived populations with a channel for focusing their own discontents. This shift is the result of the failure of policies, mainly neoliberal and neocolonial, which claim to be nonviolent, but which promote economic and social violence. What is happening today is not just the acknowledgment of a long-­standing situation, but the affirmation that only violence can provide a solution to it. Right-­wing populism seeks to mask the power relations that are responsible for such exercise of violence by constructing, with the help of the media, the figure of a charismatic individual, a leader who will claim to speak in the name of other individuals, thus in principle excluding the question of class violence and struggle. It remains to be seen how successful this will be, but at the moment of this writing, such populism, which tends to equate “national” with “social,” seems clearly on the rise: in the United States, in Europe, and elsewhere as well. 15. The political effectiveness of a spoken discourse, conveyed by the media (radio, television, internet) tends to be in inverse relation to the complexity of its content. Other factors turn out to be far more important: intonation (for instance, in spoken discourse, tenor of the voice), visual gestures for television, transcribed oral gestures on Twitter, etc. Part of Ronald Reagan’s political appeal had to do with this modulation of voice, as was demonstrated in his televised debates and speeches in his successful election campaign against Walter Mondale, and it was no less in evidence in Trump’s TV appearances both during the campaign and after it. This is yet another instance of how Hollywood and “the media” directly influence the political process in the United States. The influence of foreign “hackers,” Russian or other, on elections is probably minimal compared to that of the media itself (mainly domestic). It is always easier to blame foreigners than natives. 1 6. “The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in the oppositionality of values. It never occurred to even the most careful among them to begin doubting already here on the threshold, where it was most necessary, even when they had sworn ‘de omnibus dubitandum.’” Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I.2, my translation. 1 7. The German word used by the Nazis to designate their plan for the total extermination of European Jewry, which would once and for all put an end to “the Jewish problem,” at least in Europe. 1 8. See Paul Boyer’s program for the PBS series Frontline entitled “Signs of the

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End Time” at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/apocalypse /explanation/signs.html. 19. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (New York: Norton, 1959), 45–­49. This book, where Freud first makes this connection, was published in 1926; the first concentration camps were established in Germany by the Nazi government in 1933, shortly after it came to power. This will be discussed in the following chapter. 2 0. See, for instance, the otherwise quite extensive article on the “Fuzzy Concept” in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_concept. 2 1. From 1933 to 1945 the German version of this was “Ein Reich, ein Volk, ein Führer”: one Empire, one people, one leader. The leader of course was considered as a kind of demigod, which created certain tensions with established Christian religions—­tensions that did not prevent widespread collaboration between those religions and National Socialist Germany. For the role of Catholicism in the rise of the Nazi movement, see Derek Hastings, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 2 2. See Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 2 3. See my discussion of this film and its concluding question in Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 320–­25. 2 4. The word has also come to designate sexual implements of all kinds (some quite low tech, others more “advanced”). In this respect “toys” and “tools” are both prominent terms in the lexicon of militarism—­and in that of a certain sexuality. 2 5. Popular Science, November 1946; see http://www.etymonline.com/index.php ?term=drone). 2 6. It should also be noted that “drones” are the male bees in a hive, who mate with the queen bee but do not gather nectar or pollen. They are also stingless, as distinct from the females of the species as well as from their technological homonyms. 2 7. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, VIII, 2. The context of this remark deserves elaboration, but this would take us too far afield here. Future references to this text will give only book and chapter, given the diversity of recent editions. 2 8. The question of “darkness” is enjoying a resurgence today—­as a critical theme in critical race theory, as well as in political discourse of the Right and Left, as “dark money” or “the dark state,” and finally (but is it really final?) in the marketing of new technologies in television, where the reproduction of darkness, of shadows and shades, is touted as one of the distinctions of the new technique of organic light emitting diodes—­OLEDs—­not to mention ongoing studies of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from a variety of critical points of view. Darkness as a condition of light, shadow as a condition of brilliance,

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shade as a condition of protection against the sun—­Widow Wadman anticipates all of these in asking Captain Shandy to focus not on the “whites” of her eyes, the traditional military target, but on the “dark.” All of this is a sign that the visible must be rethought as a function of the invisible, or more precisely, that the conditions under which shapes can be delineated are not in themselves entirely discernible. Seeing thus is being “complexified” so as to approximate “reading,” from which it is not as categorically different as has traditionally been supposed. 29. The word “about” wins new dignity in Tristram Shandy, and given its military context, it would be tempting to discuss that here, but again this would exceed the bounds of this chapter. It could, however, be related to the previous discussion of focusing and fuzzy logic, to suggest that the word that seems to assure some sort of direct contact between objects can also be understood as defining an approximate field rather than a point of contact. “About,” then, can be seen as roughly equivalent to “around,” whence perhaps the phrase, “around and about”—­or vice versa. 3 0. To begin to gauge the general historical and social implications of this “game,” it may suffice to recall that the word that in French and German forms the root of the dominant social class of Western modernity—­and sometimes of society itself—­is Burg or bourg, which refers initially to a fortress-­like settlement, as in Luther’s famous hymn: “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (Ein fester Burg ist unser Gott). 3 1. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness [of any thing] that [is] in heaven above, or that [is] in the earth beneath, or that [is] in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth [generation] of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments” (Exod. 20:4–­6). 3. BARE LIFE AND LIFE IN GENERAL 1. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 37–­48. Page numbers henceforth given in parentheses in the text. 2. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Violence, Identity, Self-­determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 106–­18. 3. Agamben’s distinction between bios and zoe in Greek usage seems much less clear-­cut than he would have it. For a critical discussion, see Laurent Dubreuil, “De la vie dans la vie: sur une étrange opposition entre zoe et bios,” available at https://journals.openedition.org/labyrinthe/1033.

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4. Today, one would have to add the camps established for the detention of “migrants” from Africa and Asia seeking to gain entrance to Europe as well as those set up on the American side of the U.S.–­Mexico border to “hold” people seeking to enter the United States. 5. Florida’s “Stand your ground” law discussed below is a case not of the suspension of law but of its modification, which changes established procedures (the so-­called “obligation to retreat” as a response to nonlethal danger). Fleur Johns has interpreted the prison at Guantanamo Bay as “the Annihilation of the Exception.” European Journal of International Law 16, no. 4 (2005), http:// www.ejil.org/pdfs/16/4/311.pdf. Johns argues that “Guantanamo Bay is . . . an instance of the norm struggling to overtake the exception.” 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Future page references to this edition in the text. 7. One of Carl Schmitt’s earliest publications, Gesetz und Urteil (1912), reprinted in 1968 (Munich: C. H. Beck), already laid out this problem of legal practice (Rechtspraxis). The gap between law and verdict or judgment could only be bridged, for Schmitt, by a process of “decision” that, at the time, he related, in a Humean manner, to established tradition—­to precedents. 8. In Il Regno et la gloria (Turin, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri, 2009), Agamben seeks to extend the historical perspective of “biopolitics” beyond the perspective articulated by Foucault by retracing its origins to early Christian theology, demonstrating in particular how the notion of oikonomia was invoked to mediate between theological transcendence and worldly immanence. However, this genealogy underestimates the significance of the Protestant Reformation, which, by calling this mediation into question, thereby sets the stage for the emergence of modern biopolitics. 9. Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 35 (2005): 429, http://ehq.sagepub.com /content/35/3/429. I am indebted to Andrew Hennlich for calling this remarkable article to my attention. More recently, Madley has published a study of another genocide, this time closer to home: An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–­1873 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016). 1 0. Walter Benjamin, “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” in Gesammelte Schriften vol. 2, (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 201–­2 (my translation). 1 1. Gen. 1:9–­24. See infra, chapters 11 and 12 for more extensive discussion of this text. 1 2. 1 Cor. 15:21–­22. Quoted by Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, chapter 38. See chap-

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ter 6 for a more extensive discussion of this text in relation to its political implications in Hobbes and elsewhere. 13. In German the corresponding word, Heil, has been largely discredited by National Socialism, although it continues to play an important role in theological and philosophical discourse, particularly in the form of Heilsgeschichte (salvational history). One of the best-­known studies of this is Karl Löwith’s Weltgeschichte als Heilsgeschehen: Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der Geschichtsphilosophie [World history as the history of salvation: The theological presuppositions of the philosophy of history] (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953). English edition with a very different title: Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). 1 4. I discuss this in chapter 6. See also the discussion of this aspect of Leviathan in Derrida’s lectures on “The Beast and the Sovereign,” La bête et le souverain, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions Galilée, 2008), 73ff; The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, trans. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 68ff. 1 5. With the refinement of algorithmic analyses of “big data” by ever more powerful computers, the idea of predicting the future, also in a legal–­criminal perspective, becomes ever more tempting, as in “profiling” of potential “terrorists.” Minority Report, by Philip K. Dick, filmed by Steven Spielberg with Tom Cruise (2002), stages this process in relation to the question of free will vs. determinism—­an ancient problem facing new challenges in the age of advanced computing. 1 6. This question is discussed more extensively throughout this volume, especially chapter 7, “Money Is Time.” 1 7. Alain Badiou, St. Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme (Paris: PUF, 1997), 75. In this perspective I would take issue with some of the implications of Arendt’s notion of “the banality of evil”: those actively taking part in the Nazi genocide in positions of leadership or executants were not just passively acquiescing but often convinced of the historical importance and value of the task they were undertaking—­something that would enable them to withstand its more unpleasant aspects. This at least is the tenor of the “secret speech” that Heinrich Himmler gave to officers of the SS and other government representatives on the 4th and 6th of October 1943, preparing them to participate in the Final Solution. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posen_speeches. 1 8. For a reading of Oedipus Tyrannos from this perspective, see Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 103–­10. 1 9. Franz Kafka, “The Burrow,” ed. and trans. Stanley Corngold, in Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1998), 506 (translation modified). 2 0. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

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4. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE MEDIACY OF THE MEDIA 1. “Violent video games have become embedded within American culture over the past several decades and especially since 9/11. First-­person shooters, in particular have become increasingly popular. [ . . . ] For the U.S. military, the rise of first-­person shooters has been a welcome development.” “How the US military is using ‘violent, chaotic, beautiful’ video games to trains soldiers,” Conversation, March 7, 2017, http://theconversation.com/how-the-us-military-is-usingviolent-chaotic-beautiful-video-games-to-train-soldiers-73826. 2. The Viennese critic Karl Kraus already documented a similar shift in journalistic reporting in the nineteenth century, by comparing accounts of political events from mid-­century to those in the early twentieth century, concluding: “The Newspaper ruins all power of imagination: directly, since by serving up facts with fantasy it saves recipients the trouble of making their own effort; and indirectly, since it renders them unreceptive to art and deprives it of its charm by taking over the surface values.” Karl Kraus, “Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie”[Downfall of the world through black magic] (Munich: Koselverlag, 1960), 425 (my translation). “The surface values” referred to by Kraus consist precisely in the presentation of an event in lavish visual detail, thus reinforcing the impression of an eye-­witness perspective. 3. A classic critical study of the influence of political and economic forces on the media in the United States remains that of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). The book was revised by the authors in 2002 to take into account changes brought about by the internet. 4. Jean-­Luc Nancy, Being Singular(ly) Plural, trans. Arthur D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). I have modified the title to reflect the ambiguity of the French, where singulier can function also as an adjective, not merely as a noun. 5. Über den Gegensinn der Urwörter [On the antithetical meaning of primal words], (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 155–­61, discusses a book of this name by Karl Abel (1884) to suggest that some of the most fundamental notions, such as the “sacred,” can have contradictory meanings. 6. “It is chiefly the psychologists of the school of Freud who have pointed out that many of man’s thoughts and actions are compensatory substitutes for desires which he has been obliged to suppress. A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in it a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself. A man buying a car may think he wants it for purposes of locomotion, whereas the fact may be that ( . . . ) he may really want it because it is a symbol of social position.” Edward Bernays, Propaganda, Kindle edition, 74. 7. Noam Chomsky, Back cover blurb to Edward Bernays, Propaganda, introduced by Mark Crispin Miller, 2004, http://igpub.com/propaganda/.

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8. In France, where psychoanalysis has played a much more central role, socially and intellectually, there have been similar attempts made by so-­called intellectuals to discredit Freud and psychoanalysis, as exemplified by the pamphlet of Michel Onfray, The Twilight of an Idol (Paris: Grasset, 2010). 9. Jacques Derrida, Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow  .  .  . A Dialogue (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 178. 1 0. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 178. 1 1. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 176. 1 2. In the area of legal relations, responsibility is closely tied precisely to conscious intentionality (mens re), while at the same time insisting on the principle that ignorance of the law is no excuse. Both of these principles, and hence the legal and social system that depends upon them, can be shaken through recognition of the power of the unconscious in thought and action. 1 3. See Freud, The Ego and the Id [better: The I and the It], trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton Library, 1962), 18–­30. 1 4. Literally the two words are distinguished from each other as “setting across” is from “bearing across”: setting implies a more deliberate activity and therefore greater stability than bearing, which in German as in English is associated with child-­bearing, but also with the bearer as vehicle, distinct from its contents. 1 5. Aristotle, Metaphysics A.1.980a25. 1 6. One of the questions this book seeks to raise, but cannot answer, is whether cultural and historical traditions not informed by the mono-­theological identity paradigm might be better able to entertain relations of self and world that would be radically different from the defensive recourse to homogeneity that in its various forms has led to neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and the rise of nationalist, xenophobic, and racist reactions. 1 7. I discuss this aspect of Heidegger’s essay “Questing after Technics” in “Upsetting the Setup,” in Mass Mediauras (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)—­written long before the smartphone made these “abstractions” part of everyday life. 1 8. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 16, n. 1 (translation modified). 1 9. In an essay originally published in 1964, in which they distanced themselves from Lacan, Laplanche and Pontalis observed that the bodily openings that defined the so-­called “erogenous zones” of the body consisted of orifices: oral and anal in particular as well as the vagina. They thereby argued that the use of “auto-­” in “auto-­eroticism” was a misnomer, since there was no basis yet for such a self. See Fantasme originaire, fantasmes des origines, origines du fantasme (Paris: Hachette, 1998; reprint). 2 0. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 255. 2 1. Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir,” in Écrits I (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 94 (my translation).

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22. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 255 (translation modified). 2 3. “Plonge tes yeux dans les yeux fixes / Des Satyresses ou des Nixes.” 2 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Polity Press, 2003), 90. 2 5. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, standard edition, vol. 5 (New York: Vintage, 1999), 530. 5. PROTECTION, PROJECTION, PERSECUTION 1. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 141. 2. “Das Bekannte überhaupt ist darum, weil es bekannt ist, nicht erkannt” (The familiar in general is, precisely because it is familiar, not understood). Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1952), 28. 3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 475 (my emphasis). Henceforth, page numbers are given in the text. 4. Gérard Mairet, introduction to Thomas Hobbes, Léviathan (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 42 (my translation). 5. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 78–­79. (Henceforth, page numbers are given in the text.) Since Derrida made this observation over fifty years ago (the book was published in French in 1966) the advent of the “selfie” adds a new twist to the process of self-­seeing: the selfie is generally practiced not just as a representation of self, but as a representation of self for others; hence its theatrical dimension. The other is thus present in a way that Husserl, according to Derrida, was seeking to exclude it. This change surely has to do with the spread of the audiovisual media, first television, and now above all the internet, which involves transmission as much as self-­presentation. 6. One of the major aims of Husserlian phenomenology was to develop a method of “getting back to the things themselves” (die Sachen selbst). Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 24. 7. Michael Naas, “‘One Nation . . . Indivisible’: Jacques Derrida on the Autoimmunity of Democracy and the Sovereignty of God,” Research in Phenomenology 36, no. 1 (2006): 15. 8. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 141. 9. In the past few decades this attitude has changed radically in the life-­sciences, which has recognized the usefulness and necessity of attenuating immunologi-

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cal reactions in order to “protect” the system—­as in the case of organ transplants, the most obvious example of the dependency of the “self ” upon “others” in order to survive. 10. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Jacques Derrida: Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 87. 1 1. Jacques Derrida, Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow? Page numbers in the text refer to the French edition, De quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Flammarion, 2003). 1 2. Derrida puts this (Lacanian) phrase in quotes to signal that it is not one that he endorses, but rather questions throughout this interview and elsewhere, since in his eyes, psychoanalysis does not merely establish another form of “logic,” even one of the unconscious. 1 3. In an early essay on Georges Bataille, Derrida sought to portray the latter’s notion of “sovereignty” as an alternative to the Hegelian notion of “mastery” (Herrschaft). But he seems to have abandoned this attempt subsequently, considering sovereignty itself to be inextricable from the “metaphysical” tradition culminating in Hegel. 1 4. Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 243–­44 (translation modified here as elsewhere). 1 5. Freud’s 1926 essay, “On the Question of Lay Analysis,” with its critique of the medicalization of the U.S. Psychoanalytical Association, could be seen as an attempt to allay certain institutional effects of autoimmunization on psychoanalysis itself. 1 6. Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s ‘Das Unheimliche’ (‘The Uncanny’),” New Literary History 7 (1976): 525–­48. 1 7. Sigmund Freud, Abriss der Psychoanalyse, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 17 (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1966), 79. Further references to this work given in text as GW with volume number (my translation and emphasis). 1 8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), 52–­53. 1 9. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 53. 2 0. Kant, of course, writes of Anschauung, intuition, literally in German, “looking­at,” rather than of “thought” in general. 2 1. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 56. 2 2. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 1:615; Selected Writings, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 319 (translated modified). 2 3. In “The Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud comes to the belated realization that there are certain “tensions” that can be pleasurable, and certain

Notes to Chapter 5   445

relaxations that can be painful, of which sexual experience is the most obvious instance. From this he concludes that the equation of tension with displeasure, at the basis of the “pleasure principle,” cannot be sustained, and that instead of an absolute increase or decrease in tension, it may be questions of “rhythm” that are more relevant to the discrimination of pleasure and displeasure. 24. “Un homme qui dort tient en cercle autour de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes. Il les consulte d’instinct en s’éveillant et y lit en une seconde le point de la terre qu’il occupe, le temps qui s’est écoulé jusqu’à son réveil ; mais leurs rangs peuvent se mêler, se rompre. Que vers le matin, après quelque insomnie, le sommeil le prenne en train de lire, dans une posture trop différente de celle où il dort habituellement, il suffit de son bras soulevé pour arrêter et faire reculer le soleil, et à la première mi­nute de son réveil, il ne saura plus l’heure, il estimera qu’il vient à peine de se coucher. Que s’il s’assoupît dans une position encore plus déplacée et divergente, par exemple après dîner assis dans un fauteuil, alors le boule­versement sera complet dans les mondes désorbités, le fauteuil magique le fera voyager à toute vitesse dans le temps et dans l’espace, et au moment d’ouvrir les paupières, il se croira couché quelques mois plus tôt dans une autre contrée.” (5) 6. THE SINGLE TRAIT 1. In view of the multiform dimensions of the English language in its very different global manifestations, I should add that this usage applies particularly to that English spoken and written in the United States. 2. It being generally forgotten that the word “person” originally meant “mask”—­ that “through which (per-­) sound (sona)” passes. 3. Michel Foucault, Le souci de soi: Histoire de la sexualité 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1984). 4. I have found it useful to add the prefix “mono-­“ to this designation: “onto-­ mono-­theological.” But this term should not obscure the constitutive ambiguity of the “one” as a mark of singularity. Singularity can signify not just uniqueness in the sense of self-­identity or indivisibility, but uniqueness in the sense of that which resists such self-­identification, since any such identification would necessarily redouble and adulterate its unicity. Singularity, therefore, both initiates and perturbs the economy and the purity of the self. A similar ambiguity holds also for the related words “same,” “I,” and “self.” This ambiguity concerns not just the conceptual meaning of these words but the words “themselves.” Their significance depends not on a putative semantic essence of words taken individually, or as “names,” but rather on the varied configuration in which the words have been and may be used. Since such possibilities can never be strictly limited, words can never have an entirely univocal or predictable mean-

446   Notes to Chapter 5

ing. Hence the paradox of naming a monotheistic God: the name as generally understood is essential to the oneness of the named, but as a signifying element of language it also precludes such oneness. I thank Zakir Paul for informing me “that according to tradition, there are ninety-­nine attributes/names of God in Islam.” See https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Islam. 5. Translation throughout is the King James Version, references given in text. 6. It is true that the word “replenish” in the passage just quoted suggests an alternation of growth and decay: one can only “refill” what previously has been emptied. But the dominant emphasis is on fructification, not decay. 7. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (New York: Norton, 1950), 87. 8. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 71. 9. But what of this “us” to and of whom “God” speaks? In what sense can the monotheistic Lord of the Creation entail a plurality? Is this a “royal we”? At the very moment that the divinity defends his prerogatives against encroachment by his creation, the unity of those prerogatives is put into question, implicitly at least, by his mode of address. See also Gen. 1:26, where God declares to have made “man in our image.” 1 0. The phrase is sung annually in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil: “O felix culpa quae talem et tantum meruit habere redemptorem, ‘O happy fault that merited such and so great a Redeemer.’ . . . The medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas cited this line when he explained how the principle that ‘God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom’ underlies the causal relationship between original sin and the Divine Redeemer’s Incarnation.” Other goods that followed from this fortunate Fall were Jesus Christ’s Second Coming and Last Judgment, and man’s eventual hope of Heaven. See http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Felix_culpa. 1 1. See chapter 5 in this volume. 1 2. A former French minister of justice, Rachida Dati, once defended a proposition to mandate lifetime incarceration for criminals considered incorrigible—­ emulating the (in)famous “3 Strikes” law—­by asserting, in an interview with Le Monde (February 27, 2008), that “it is not playing with emotions to protect the French” (Ce n’est pas de jouer avec l’émotion que de protéger les français). She thereby echoed the French president of the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, who campaigned under the slogan of “protecting the French.” 1 3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 2002).  1 4. In democratic states, it is this demonstration that is decisive, even where the perpetrator(s) were not direct representatives of the state. This is perhaps one

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of the reasons why most of the major assassinations of the 1960s in the United States were carried out in public or before TV cameras: those of President John F. Kennedy, his brother, Robert, and Malcolm X, but also of Lee Harvey Oswald. Martin Luther King, executed on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, is an exception. 15. Foucault’s fascination with the medieval Christian “techniques of self ” is perhaps indicative of this continuity; see Les Aveux de la chair (Paris: Gallimard, 2018). 1 6. “According to the traditional principle, actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea, which states that ‘an act does not make a man guilty unless the mind is guilty.’ In other words, without the existence of a guilty intention, a person should not be found guilty of committing some crime—­accidental acts are not to be regarded as criminal.” http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/political /bldef_mensrea.htm?rd=1. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea. Although the term is Latin, originating in Roman Law, the concept itself was “resurrected” in juridical practice by the Church: “Mens Rea began to be used after the 4th Lateran Council in 1215 during the Gregorian Reform. In the 1230’s, Bracton (law clerk for Judge Raleigh) reached back to Augustine and wrote material that was influential for the next 550 years of jurisprudence. Bracton was influenced by the Roman notion of culpa (fault) and the Catholic Church’s emphasis on moral guilt. These legal principles were not new ideas but were resurrected as a result of theological reforms within the Catholic church.” Miguel Vatter, Creating God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 355. Once again, I thank Zakir Paul for the reminder that the Fourth Lateran Council also canonized the practice of obligatory confession (Canon 21), making it a yearly obligation. The practice of confessing one’s sins is the obverse of the acknowledgment of conscious intent in determining the legal status of guilt. See https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Fourth_Council_of_the_Lateran. 1 7. “‘Our authorities, as far as I know, and I only know the lowest grades, don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draws them out, as it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That’s the law. Where d’you think there’d be any mistake there?’ ‘I don’t know this law,’ said K. ‘So much the worse for you, then,’ said the policeman.” Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. David Wyllie, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7849 (translation modified). 1 8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Müller (New York: Doubleday/Anchor 1966), B35–­36, n. 22. 1 9. See Joseph Chytry, The Aesthetic State: A Question in Modern German Thought (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

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20. Usually rendered in English as Fate and Character, but I prefer “destiny” to “fate” in order to retain something of the German verb, schicken—­to send—­ out of which Schicksal is formed. 2 1. Benjamin references are to W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, in text as GS, followed by the Harvard University Press edition of Walter Benjamin’s Selected Writings, 4 vols., in text as SW. Page references in text refer first to the German, then to the English editions. 2 2. English: Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 104. 2 3. This is also the German title of the novel by Dostoyevsky translated into En­ glish as Crime and Punishment. 2 4. The word “trait” is derived from the Latin tractus, which means “drawing” but also “stroke,” as in the stroke of a pen. In his “Epistemo-­critical Preface to the Origins of the German Mourning Play,” Benjamin designates his work as a Traktat, which he distinguishes from Lehre, “doctrine” (or “teaching”), since it lacks the “authority” of the latter while still referring, “albeit implicitly, to those objects of theology without which truth is inconceivable.” Benjamin, Origin of the German Mourning Play, 3. 2 5. Although Benjamin explicitly asserts that “destiny,” in being mythical, is not truly “religious,” that does not necessarily contradict or exclude my reading of it as nevertheless theological, insofar as the world of myth is a world that seeks to provide a logos of the gods—­in the plural, to be sure. What is more difficult is the relation of Greek polytheism to Christian “monotheism,” since from this text as from others it is clear that Benjamin construes the latter as a continuation of the former: Greek guilt, which tragedy refuses, becomes Christian “original sin.” The clear implication is that for Benjamin, Christianity is not authentically monotheistic. I will return to this difficult question briefly toward the end of this essay. 2 6. It should be noted that this conception of “morality” is resolutely pre-­Kantian, insofar as it equates morality with nature. 2 7. This connection is grounded in the imperfect “solution” and “redemption” brought about by tragedy. Tragedy ends with a “non liquet,” suspending judgment, legal and otherwise (296/117). It is decisive here that Benjamin associates the “comic” response or preparation of tragedy with an “élan”—­which is to say, with a movement that pulls / draws away from its immediate manifestation. In short, with a Zug. Comedy zieht, and as we will argue, in a most singular manner. 2 8. Giorgio Agamben, Profanations (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2005), 7. 2 9. Agamben, Profanations, 16. 3 0. Cf. Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (Penguin: London, 1998), 101. See also SW1, 22. My translation and emphasis.

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Sind denn dir nicht bekannt viele Lebendigen? Geht auf Wahrem dein Fuß nicht, wie auf Teppichen? Drum, mein Genius! Tritt nur Bar ins Leben, und sorge nicht! 31. Jacques Lacan, Seminar (unpublished) on “L’identification,” session of February 21, 1962. The seminar can be consulted, in draft form and in French, at http:// staferla.free.fr/S9/S9%20L%27IDENTIFICATION.pdf. 3 2. Lacan, Seminar. 3 3. Jean Genet, Le Balcon (Paris, 1956), 127 (my translation here as throughout). Henceforth, page numbers given in text. 7. MONEY IS TIME 1. Benjamin Franklin, Selections (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 30. Future page references in text. Franklin’s letter was the object of a detailed commentary in Max Weber’s study of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The following essay can be considered as a supplementary consideration of Franklin’s text, following the suggestive fragment of Walter Benjamin on “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 288–­91, in which Benjamin argued that through its internal structure capitalism was not merely promoted by Protestantism but is the heir to Christianity as such. 2. Marx is well aware of this connection, as the following passage from the Grundrisse makes explicit: “The immortality which money strove to achieve by setting itself negatively against circulation, by withdrawing from it, is achieved by capital, which preserves itself precisely by abandoning itself to circulation.” Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 190. 3. The first instance of the phrase is usually attributed to the magazine the Free-­ Thinker, which published it in 1719. The notion that time has value has been traced back to the Greek orator, Antiphon, who is quoted as saying, “The most costly outlay is time.” The phrase “Time is precious” is found in Sir Thomas Wilson’s A Discourse Upon Usurye (1572) and John Fletcher’s comedy The Chances (1617). 4. I use the phrase “appropriative individualism” rather than the more familiar “possessive individualism” popularized by C. B. MacPherson in his 1962 study, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), since it seems to me to more precisely render the process of appropriation rather than simply the state of possession. 5. Luther was well aware that the notion of sola fides was not necessarily a literal

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rendering of Scripture, but he justifies his introduction of the word “alone” as requisite to making the sense of the Bible intelligible to his German readers: “I knew very well that the word solum [“alone” in Latin] is not in the Greek or Latin text. . . . It is a fact that these four letters S O L A are not there. . . . At the same time . . . it belongs there if the translation is to be clear and vigorous. I wanted to speak German, not Latin or Greek, since it was German I had undertaken to speak in the translation. But it is the nature of our German language that in speaking of two things, one of which is affirmed and the other denied, we use the word solum (allein) along with the word nicht [not] or kein [no]. For example, we say, ‘The farmer brings allein [only] grain and kein [no] money.” Cited in Wikipedia, Sola fide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Sola_fide#Origin_of_the_term. 6. Among right-­wing circles in Weimar Germany, a somewhat similar distinction was that between productive and parasitic capital—­schaffendes and raffendes Kapital—­a notion introduced by Gottfried Feder in 1919 and popular among the anti-­capitalist wing of the National Socialist Party, which demanded the abolition of interest and the nationalization of banks and even parts of industry. This political line was eliminated with the massacre of the Röhm leadership of the SA by Himmler’s SS in 1934—­curiously to this day known as the Röhm putsch. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapitalismuskritik. 7. This relation is reinforced by the Ricardian–­Marxian theory of labor-­time as the source of value: the quantity of the latter is in direct proportion to the expense of vital energies—­for Marx, “socially necessary labor”—­required for its production. Value is thus the materialization of vital energies of its producers, which, however, for singular beings are only “renewable” to a limited degree, whereas the accumulation of value is intrinsically without limit. 8. In contemporary discussions of U.S.–­Chinese economic relations, there seems little consensus about which of the two nations—­the creditor nation (China) or the debtor (United States)—­is more dependent on the other. The recent prospect of a commercial “war” between the two countries threatens to put this theory to a practical test. 9. “Insider trading” is a current, illegal, and yet widely practiced technique for accomplishing such overcoming—­or manipulation—­of uncertainty in a profitable manner (selling while high, buying when low). It is a striking if less glorious example of the widely touted “value” that “knowledge is power.” 1 0. See Derrida’s dis-­seminal essay on this subject: “De l’économie restreinte à l’économie Générale,” in L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil 1967), 369–­407; English translation: “From Restricted to General Economy,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 251–­77. In this early essay, Derrida sought to elaborate a notion of “sovereignty” and of “general economy” that would exceed the metaphysics of

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presence as resumed in the Hegelian dialectic. Later, with the emergence of the notion of singularity, he becomes more critical of the notion of sovereignty in general and will abandon this attempt. 11. “Hardly a day goes by without news of some further disaster wreaked by the freezing up of credit. As I was writing this, for example, reports were coming in of the collapse of letters of credit, the key financing method for world trade. Suddenly, buyers of imports, especially in developing countries, can’t carry through on their deals, and ships are standing idle: the Baltic Dry Index, a widely used measure of shipping costs, has fallen 89 percent this year.” Paul Krugman, “What to Do,” New York Review of Books, December 18, 2008, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22151. 1 2. In Capital, Marx remarks on the significance of the fact that in Great Britain one speaks of the Royal Exchequer where it is a question of the wealth of the country, but where money is owed, of the National Debt. Debt is “public” and nationalized, whereas wealth is private, quasi by definition. “The only part of the so-­called national wealth that actually enters into the collective possessions of modern peoples is their national debt. Hence, as a necessary consequence, the modern doctrine that a nation becomes the richer the more deeply it is in debt. Public credit becomes the credo of capital. And with the rise of national debt-­making, want of faith in the national debt takes the place of the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which may not be forgiven.” Capital, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (Moscow: Progress, 1996), 535. 1 3. Once the process is considered from the point of view of the producer, the laborer, it looks quite different: Marx frequently writes of the laborer being devoured, even vampirized, by capital, which extracts surplus-­value by purchasing the labor-­power of the laborer at the lowest possible cost. “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-­like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Capital, 163. Inequality is thus built into the mechanism of capitalist production, a fact that has only recently been confirmed empirically by Thomas Pickety and others, as I discuss in the following chapter. See his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020). 1 4. https://www.cnbc.com/id/29428542. 1 5. Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, and André Gide, The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949). 1 6. I discuss Heidegger’s dictum and this translation of noch—­still—­in “The Indefinite Article of the Love of a Phrase,” in Diane Davis, ed., Reading Ronell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 131–­42. 1 7. Marx, Capital, 127. 1 8. In Benjamin’s “political anthropology,” the sovereign therefore necessarily be-

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comes a tyrant, the tyrant a martyr, and out of the martyrdom of sovereignty emerges the new and decisive political figure, the plotter. But the plotter no longer saves: he consummates the fall of a world without grace. Examples—­ not cited by Benjamin—­are Iago and Loge. Other more recent examples, this time drawn from “real” politics and not literature, can be left to the reader’s imagination. I have discussed the varying views of the “exception” in Schmitt and Benjamin in “Taking Exception to Decision: Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt,” in Benjamin’s -­abilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 19. CNBC article by Tae Kim, February 13, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02 /13/total-us-household-debt-soars-to-record-above-13-trillion.html. This tendency continues: prior to the COVID-­19 pandemic, private household debt climbed to $14.30 trillion: https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-10-20/a-debt -reckoning-is-unavoidable-will-activists-seize-the-moment/. 2 0. Paying with credit for health, education, or child care does not involve the acquisition of material goods, it should be stressed, but rather of the conditions of a life worth living. It is clear, however, that the aim here is far from the omnipotence emphasized by the advertising slogans and has to do rather with assuring minimal conditions of survival. 2 1. http://www.rapidtrends.com/blog/private-debt-is-much-higher-now-than -during-the-great-depression/. 2 2. https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data /pdf/HHDC_2019Q3.pdf. 2 3. See Thomas Pentzek, King of Debt: Businessman Donald J. Trump, trans. Nicole Y. Adams, (N.p.: Babelcube Books, 2018), Kindle edition. 2 4. With the rise of economic nationalism in the United States (“America First”) and elsewhere, the redemptive ambitions of economic liberalism (including neo-­conservatism) are challenged—­but by one of the most profound tendencies of liberalism itself, namely “competitivity,” which tends to divide the world into winners and losers—­hence the popularity of competitive sports as a paradigm for competition more generally. The winners are the saved and elect, the losers condemned and forgotten. Each is held responsible for its own fate, which therefore it merits. That this can lead to a collapse of social cohesion goes without saying, and the search for “external” and “foreign” scapegoats is palpable in many parts of the word—­although fortunately not unchallenged. 2 5. This “appeal” may increase with the distance from its actual realization, as the growth of (mainly right-­wing) populist and nationalist movements in recent years attests. 2 6. This admittedly tendentious definition of “freedom” would not openly be endorsed—­here, John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” would still be acknowledged—but it seems to conform increasingly to economic, political, and social

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practice. Which is why the word “trump” today names not just a person but also a principle. 27. For a detailed discussion, see the recent book by Michel Feher, Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age (New York: Zone Books, 2018). 28. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_(economics). 2 9. A similar situation seems to exist in other regulatory agencies as well, as the recent problems surrounding Boeing’s ill-­fated 737-­Max 10 once again thrust into prominence. See Kathryn A. Wolfe and Brianna Gurciullo, “How the FAA Delegated Oversight to Boeing,” Politico, March 22, 2019, https://www.politico .com/story/2019/03/21/congress-faa-boeing-oversight-1287902. 3 0. Inaugural Address, January 20, 1981: https://www.reaganfoundation.org/ronald -reagan/reagan-quotes-speeches/inaugural-address-2/. 3 1. See, for instance, W. Barksdale Maynard, “How the Founders Sowed the Seeds of the Civil War,” Colonial Williamsburg, https://www.history.org/Foundation /journal/Winter11/war.cfm. 8. GLOBAL INEQUALITY 1. This chapter was originally presented at a conference on The Dynamics of Global Inequality, held at the Center of Advanced Studies of the University of Munich in July 2017. Insofar as these “dynamics” are inseparable from the more general problems discussed in this book, I have retained the references to this singular occasion to emphasize the relation between such ostensibly specific topics and the issues addressed here. Additions made since the text was originally written and presented are placed in parentheses. 2. Indeed, each day brings new and more terrible evidence of the effects of such inequalities: most recently, as I write this (March 2017), “UN humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien” is quoted as asserting that “more than 20 million people face the threat of starvation and famine in Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria,” calling this “the worst humanitarian crisis the world has faced since 1945. And UNICEF has already warned 1.4m children could starve to death this year.” BBC, March 11, 2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-39238808. Of course, the situation in Yemen, at least, is in great part attributable to the U.S.-­backed war against Yemen waged by Saudi Arabia, its Gulf allies, and its client country, Egypt. 3. Facundo Alvaredo et al., “Global Inequality Dynamics: New Findings from WID. World,” Working Paper 23119, National Bureau of Economic Research, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings 2017, 107 (5), 404–­9, https://eml .berkeley.edu/~saez/ACPSZ2017AEAPP.pdf. 4. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-­First Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017), Kindle location 556.

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5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth. 6. See “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017,” in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017. 7. https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=dynamics&submit.x=29 &submit.y=16. 8. David Sanger, “With Echoes of the ’30s, Trump Resurrects a Hard-­Line Vision of ‘America First,’” New York Times, January 20, 2017. 9. For Ferenczi, who coined the term, this identification was the response to a specific traumatic aggression, whereas for Anna Freud, it was a more general defense mechanism of the ego. See Sandor Ferenczi, “The Confusion of Tongues between Adults and Children,” trans. Michael Balint, International Journal of Psycho-­analysis 30, no. 4 (1949), https://web.archive.org/web/20140328012000 /http://kevinsartain.com/aps/confusion-of-the-tongues-between-the-adults -and-the-childe28094the-language-of-tenderness-and-of-passion.pdf; Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1966) (originally published in German in 1936). For Trump, see Joseph Nowinski, “Donald Trump and ‘Identification with the Aggressor,’” October 20, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-almost-effect /201510/donald-trump-and-identification-the-aggressor. 1 0. See for instance, Celeste Michelle Condit, ed., “Postcolonial or Neocolonial? Defining the Grounds of Research in Global Communication Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15, no. 2 (1958), https://www.tandfonline.com /doi/abs/10.1080/15295039809367042?journalCode=rcsm19. 1 1. Franz Kafka, Die Erzählungen, Original Version (Frankurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1998), 290 (my translation). I discuss this text in chapter 19. 1 2. Kant, Critique of Judgment, §26. 1 3. Joseph S. Jenkins, Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton: Election and Grace as Constitutional in Early Modern Literature and Beyond (London: Routledge/Ashgate, 2013). 1 4. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I.2, trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 24–­25 (my emphasis, translation modified). 1 5. Practices that treat the body as material that can be trained, controlled, and thus subjected to the will of an ego—­whether in sports, asceticism, or other activities—­are often exempted from such debasement. 1 6. In the jurisprudence of most American states, parents can disinherit their children and are free to dispose of their possessions and property as they wish. This privileges not the singular, which entails a recognition of relationality as constitutive, but the individual. This reflects the power of a Puritan–­Calvinist tradition that invests the individual with a power that retains, symbolically, the

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coherence and continuity of the living over time and finitude. The political consequences of this have been pointed out by Louis Hartz in his book, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955). I have discussed his reading of American history in Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, expanded edition (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2002). 17. See Jenkins, Inheritance Law. 18. Hence the significant differences between inheritance laws in the United States and Europe previously referred to, regarding the possibility of disinheriting blood relatives. 1 9. This holds as well for team sports, in which the notion of individual excellence is transferred to the “team”—­which then becomes a model for all such individualized, privatized collectivities, whether commercial, political, academic, or other. The “team,” like the “family,” is designed to provide the link that enables the singular to ostensibly and ostentatiously transcend its limitations by being extended to a private collective. 2 0. Ten years earlier a television series called Dynasty aired on Australian (public) television: significantly, it related the question of “dynasty” to the media, in what appears to have been a barely veiled reference to Rudolph Murdoch, arguably the most powerful political figure in the rise of neoliberalism. His “News Corporation” is the second-­most powerful media organization globally, and he is still acting CEO of Fox News, in which his sons now also play leading roles in the recent developments at Fox Television. 2 1. A significant example of the familial-­destroying effect of money—­one worth a season of Dynasty—­can be found in the personal history of the Kushner family, one of whose offspring, Jared, is the son-­in-­law and senior advisor of President Trump. Kushner’s father, Charles, like Trump’s, was a successful New York city real-­estate entrepreneur. In 2005 he was charged with tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering, convicted on all counts, and sentenced to two years in prison. “The witness-­tampering charge arose from Kushner’s act of retaliation against William Schulder, husband of his sister Esther, who was cooperating with federal investigators; Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-­in-­law, arranged for an encounter between the two to be secretly recorded, and had the tape sent to his sister,” https://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/Charles_Kushner. 2 2. Jan Assmann, The Mosaic Distinction, or The Price of Monotheism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 2 3. I refer here to the works of Jean Bollack and Piero Pucci. See my discussion in Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 141–­59. 2 4. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonos, trans. R. C. Jebb (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2004), 235 (lines 1518–­30) (translation modified).

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9. MIND THE CAP 1. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. Pascale-­ Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); L’autre cap (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1991). References to these books will be given in the body of the text, with the English pagination first and the French second. On occasion I have modified the existing translation. 2. Paul Valéry, La crise de l’esprit, Œuvres, t. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, la Pléiade, 1957), 1004; The Crisis of the Spirit, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews, “The European,” in History and Politics (New York: Bollingen, 1962), 323. 3. Quignard plays on this expectation in giving his novella the title Tous les matins du monde—­All the Mornings in the World—­which, however, turn out to be precisely not the subsumptive “all,” since in both his text and the film drawn from it, the utterance, which comes right after the suicide of one of the characters, is immediately “completed” by the phrase sont sans retour—­“never return.” Pascal Quignard, Tous les matins du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 107. The “all” of mornings that “never return” is no longer one of subsumptive generality, but of a singularity that can never be reproduced or “returned” as such, but only through a memory that acknowledges its departure. If my memory is correct, Derrida referred to the text and film in one of his lectures. 4. Jacques Derrida, De l’économie restreinte à l’économie générale [From the limited to the general economy], L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 397. 5. I maintain this conjecture despite the fact that in another text, “Passions,” Derrida explicitly seems to reject the English word “responsiveness” with respect to “the secret,” which, “even if it makes [the relation to the other] possible . . . does not answer to them, it is what does not answer. No responsiveness.” But “responsiveness” is radically different from “answering”—­to the other or to anything else. It is what preserves “the secret,” precisely in responding, however negatively. The fact that French combines “answering” with “responding” in the one word répondre is what leads to the confusion here, which assimilates “responding” to “answering.” Jacques Derrida, “Passions,” trans. David Wood, in On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 30–­31. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). 7. I should add that in both French and English, the “cap(e)” (le cap) signifies two kinds of garment: one worn on the head, usually with a visor, as though to protect and guide the view in a certain direction; and a cloak, surrounding the body but attached to it only at the top and hence ready to billow out behind the body when it moves rapidly or when there is a strong wind. 8. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Notes on Oedipus,” in David Constantine, Hölderlin’s Sophocles: Oedipus & Antigone (Northumberland, U.K.: Bloodaxe Books, 2001), 63.

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9. In the context of explaining why he refuses to provide any simple resolution or key to his films, Lynch argues that telling the audience “robs them of the joy of thinking it through and feeling it through . . . because even if you get the whole thing, there would still be some abstract elements in it that you’d have to kind of feel-­think.” Chris Rodley, Lynch on Lynch, rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), 288. 1 0. Although this tendency is more complex in Aristotle than in Plato, “feelings” are still treated by Aristotle as subjective factors altering the ways things appear and therefore changing one’s ability to judge them objectively. See, for instance, Rhetoric 1378a20–­23. 1 1. Even collective “enemies,” who are invoked to fulfill the Schmittian “concept of the political,” and to perform the function of causing the polity to refocus its anxieties on an “external” cause, are still portrayed in terms of individual pathology rather than related to their social and political histories and backgrounds. 1 2. Chapter 16 argues that Freud’s theory of “The Uncanny” is indeed written as a last-­ditch attempt to bring “anxiety” under the control of psychoanalytic concepts, before Freud saw himself obliged to acknowledge, at least implicitly, that those concepts—­above all “repression”—­themselves had to be seen as a result of and response to anxiety. 1 3. There is no place here to go into the extremely interesting but complex question of the relation between “impression,” “belief,” and “feeling”; we can, however, recall the philosophy of David Hume, for whom “belief ” derived from “feelings,” which in turn derived from “impressions.” For Hume, the stabilization of singular “impressions” via feelings into more stable systems of “belief ” was accomplished via “habit” and convention. But the status of such habitual and conventional “beliefs” remained therefore entirely open to question, and to “skepticism.” At the political, social, and economic levels, the epistemological problem remains unresolved and an ongoing source of conflict. 1 4. The relation between Derrida and Hume has been discussed by Fred Wilson in “Hume and Derrida on Language and Meaning,” Hume Studies 12, no. 2 (November 1986): 99–­121. 1 5. See Michael Loriaux, European Union and the Deconstruction of the Rhineland Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 298. In his immensely usable and readable book, which reinterprets the European idea and its history, and which, as its title indicates, is informed by his reading of Derrida, among other thinkers, Loriaux criticizes Andrew Moravcsik’s influential study, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), for totally ignoring “geopolitical anxieties” in order to emphasize the decisive role of economic interests. Loriaux makes the important point that “economic concerns” take priority for Moravcsik in describing the EU primarily because they “surface frequently in

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the documentary record, while geopolitical anxieties do not.” This “assumes that important factors, whatever their nature and origin, will always figure in the record of negotiations.” Loriaux’s response is telling: “Why this is so is unclear. . . . Indeed, one can imagine that negotiators would not feel compelled to refer to geopolitical urgency in negotiations that seek to dispel that urgency.” And he concludes: “Archives are not foundational. The hermeneutic circle is inescapable” (298). 16. See especially Aimer sa langue autrement, in Marc Crépon, Altérités de l’Europe (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 29–­52. 17. Rodolphe Gasché, Europe, or The Infinite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). I have discussed Gasché’s book in “Europe and Its Others: Some Preliminary Reflections on the Relation of Reflexivity and Violence in Rodolphe Gasché’s Europe, or the Infinite Task,” New Centennial Review 8, no. 3 (Winter 2008), 71–­83. 1 8. See the European Commission’s description of its Emissions Trading System (ETS): https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en. 1 9. For a journalistic critique of “cap and trade,” see Keith Bradsher, “Outsize Profits and Questions in Effort to Cut Warming Gases,” New York Times, December 21, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/business/21pollute.html ?_r=1/. 2 0. David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), 386. 2 1. Graeber, Debt, 19. 2 2. See, for instance, the discussion of Nietzsche’s remarks in Toward A Genealogy of Morals (Debt, 76–­68) on how the moral sense of “guilt” and “sin” developed out of the commercial relation of buyer and seller, as the quintessence of calculation. This by the way is still very prevalent today: in the academic world, and not only there, the use of the word “excellence” as the supreme criterion in assigning value, both symbolic and financial, presents what is relative as an absolute. Relative here signifies the difference of self and other; absolute, the rendition of that difference as hierarchical. In the West, hierarchy is generally associated with the vertical axis. Thus, to ex-­cel is not just to “stand-­out” from—­as with a “cap” qua promontory—­but “above all” to sur-­pass, to rise above and out of the ordinary: in short, to be “cap” in the sense of capital, which must always “surpass” itself by ostensibly realizing a surplus, a pro-­fit. 2 3. A geopolitical division that Giorgio Agamben invokes in his article, “The Latin Empire Should Strike Back,” Libération, March 26, 2013, and to which the French politician Jean-­Luc Mélenchon often refers in his polemical critique of the “ordoliberal” dominance of Germany in shaping the economic policies of the European Union. 2 4. Nomi Prins, a former director of Goldman Sachs and analyst at Bear Stearns, has documented some of these practices in her book, It Takes a Pillage: Behind

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the Bonuses, Bailouts and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street (New York: John Wiley, 2009). 25. For neo-­Marxist attempts to describe the roots of this crisis, see Robert Brenner, “What Is Good for Goldman Sachs Is Good for America: The Origins of the Current Crisis,” eScholarship, April 18, 2009, http://escholarship.org /uc/item/0sg0782h; David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For two recent studies of the development of speculative finance capital since 2008, focusing on the investment firm Blackrock, see Heike Buchter, Blackrock: Eine heimliche Weltmacht greift nach unserem Geld [Blackrock: A secret world power is after our money] (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2020); and Denis Robert, Larry et moi (N.p.: Massot Editions, 2020). Neither of these two books is available in English, despite or because the object of both is an American-­based multinational concern. 2 6. Paul Valéry, Œuvres, vol. 2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 931. Quoted in AC 17–­18/ OH 11–­12. It would be interesting to reflect on the relation of Valéry’s question, and Derrida’s reading of it, to a similar question that only four years after the publication of L’autre cap was used by Microsoft to launch its first global advertising campaign for its new version of Windows: “Where do you want to go today?” Between “what do you want to do” and “where do you want to go” there lies a world of difference but also an underlying continuity, as indicated by the barrage of one-­word responses Microsoft received to its question, which one year later it finally dropped. Microsoft, to be sure, did not capitalize “today.” Microsoft’s question seemed eminently answerable. Valéry’s question, at least as interpreted by Derrida, becomes unanswerable—­and the lack of a simple answer is the beginning of what Derrida would call a response. 2 7. In an early essay on “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin,” Walter Benjamin emphasizes the significance of the phrase “the thinking day” (der denkende Tag) as a striking figure of the internal plasticity of being-­there (Dasein) in a way that could, in part at least, be related to Derrida’s reading of Valéry’s capitalized “TODAY”: the day is never simply given, never simply present, it must be “thought” (and I would add, felt) in its differential singularity, which always points us toward other days, past and to come. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980), 119ff. 2 8. For a recent ranking of such sovereign wealth funds, see http://www.swfinstitute .org/fund-rankings/. 2 9. See Buchter, Blackrock; Robert, Larry et moi. 3 0. For one analysis of the formula launched on his BBC interview by the trader Alessio Rastani, see Ayke Suthoff, “How Goldman Sachs Rules the World,” Indybay, February 23, 2012, http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/02/23 /18707991.php/. 3 1. See Buchter, Blackrock; Robert, Larry et moi.

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32. “America spent $711 billion (€548bn) at current prices on its armed forces last year (2011), according to figures published on Tuesday (17 April) by Swedish NGO the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri). The fast-­ growing US number compares to $496 billion spent by the EU ($281bn), China ($143bn) and Russia ($72bn) combined.” Andrew Breitman, “Military Spending: EU Dwarf Shrinks as US Gets Bigger,” euobserver, April 17, 2012, http:// euobserver.com/defence/115906. This is the equivalent of almost 5 percent of the GDP and 20 percent of the overall federal budget. For the European Union as a whole, military spending is slightly above 1.5 percent of the GDP. An exception to the tendency toward demilitarization in Europe is France, which continues to use its military forces to defend its economic interests in its former African colonies, under the justification of the “war against terror.” Of all Western European countries, France has also probably gone furthest in militarizing its police force. 3 3. http://www.pewglobal.org/2011/11/17/the-american-western-european -values-gap/. 3 4. From the Greek, εἰρήνη, eirene, “peace.” 3 5. “(1) The Union’s aim is to promote peace, its values and the well-­being of its peoples. (2) The Union shall offer its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers, in which the free movement of persons is ensured in conjunction with appropriate measures with respect to external border controls, asylum, immigration and the prevention and combating of crime. (3) The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress . . .” Treaty of Lisbon, Article 2, https://eur-lex.europa.eu /LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2007:306:FULL:EN:PDF. 3 6. The preamble to the Lisbon Treaty asserts that the EU draws its “inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person” (Article 1a). The formulation of this “inheritance” in the singular, and the claim that it forms the basis of “universal values,” continues the pretention of monotheistic religions, and in particular Christianity, to be the sole basis of “universal values”: a tendency that Derrida has identified as rooted in the tendency of all “national affirmation” to assume the form of a “philosopheme”: “National hegemony . . . claims to justify itself in the name of a privileged responsibility and memory of the universal, hence of the transnational, even of the trans-­European—­and finally transcendental and ontological. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism have always gone well together, as paradoxical as that may appear” (49/47–­48). 3 7. For example, see Georges Ugeux, “La manipulation du Libor pose de sérieux

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problèmes structurels” [The manipulation of LIBOR poses serious structural problems], Le Monde, August 16, 2012, http://finance.blog.lemonde.fr/2012 /08/16/la-fraude-du-libor-pose-de-serieux-problemes-structurels/; Antonia Oprita, “Worried about Fake China GDP? Watch Other Data,” Emerging Markets, July 23, 2012, http://www.emergingmarkets.org/Article/3064880/Worried -about-fake-China-GDP-Watch-other-data.html/. 38. Graeber, Debt, 390. 39. Valéry, Œuvres, 2:930. 10. WEST OF EDEN 1. The biblical account also plays a role in the Qur’an and thereby also has a certain influence in the non-­Western Islamic world. But those aspects I will be highlighting do not seem as present in the Islamic account of the origin of the world as well as of the introduction of mortality into it. See “Biblical and Quranic Narratives,” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_and _Quranic_narratives. 2. Hesiod, Theogony, in Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. Future references to this work will be given as page numbers in the body of the main text. 3. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety, trans. Alix Strachey (New York: Norton Library, 1989), 90. The current (2020) behavior of President Trump demonstrates that flamboyant self-­contradiction can increase the adulation of a leader (ego) who thereby demonstrates his ability to ignore and transcend such obstacles: the word of the leader thus asserts its power over the limitations that define its content semantically. This, too, can be seen as a behavior that mimics that of a supreme being, whose supremacy was once defined precisely in its ability to embody the contradiction of opposites, that coincidentia oppositorum whose theory was formulated by Nicholas of Cusa. 4. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxiety, 90. 5. Luther, for instance, translates the passage as follows: “Da aber der Herr sah, daß der Menschen Bosheit groß war auf Erden und alles Dichten und Trachten ihres Herzens nur böse war immerdar.” 6. The Egyptologist Jan Assmann has in various studies insisted on the negative effects of the biblical notion of a God that is not just universal but exclusive. Jan Assmann, Die mosaische Unterscheidung: Oder der Preis des Monotheismus [The mosaic distinction, or the price of monotheism] (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003). English as The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). 7. Although I have used the words “earth” and “world” almost interchangeably, it

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would be more correct to reserve “earth” for the Old Testament and “world” for the New. Jesus declares: “I have overcome the world” ( John 16:33). 8. Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 288. 9. To be sure, since the Treaty of Westphalia established the bases of the nation-­ state, this “indivisibility” is restricted spatially, if not temporally. But what the notion of political sovereignty inherits, however problematically, from the mono-­theological tradition, is the notion of absolute supremacy: “supreme authority within a territory,” as a recent definition puts it. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sovereignty/. This is why there is always a tension if not conflict between sovereign states (about their defining limits) and also between sovereignty and democracy, understood as alternation, separation of powers, and futurity, as in Derrida’s democracy-­to-­ come; Jacques Derrida, Rogues, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 1 0. There are many indications in the New Testament that “the world” is the heir of the sins of “the earth” in the Old Testament: “For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith” (1 John 5:4; see also 1 John 2:15–­16 and 1 John 5:19). 1 1. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), §375. 1 2. I would suspect that this applies even to the kind of remote warfare now being waged via drones: the isolation or distance of the observer-­warrior does not eliminate participation in what is being viewed and manipulated, often destroyed. The 2014 film Good Kill suggests the problematic of this participation, which continues and radicalizes that of airplane crews in military combat; the main character of the film is a former fighter pilot. See chapter 3 for a brief discussion of the implications of this change in military technology. 1 3. It is not sufficiently considered that Schmitt’s Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) bases the latter concept not simply on “the enemy,” but on the “friend-­enemy grouping.” See especially pp. 35–­36. 1 4. Mary Beard begins her study of ancient Rome by observing that “Rome still helps to define the way we understand our world and think about ourselves, from high theory to low comedy. After 2,000 years it continues to underpin Western culture and politics, what we write and how we see the world, and our place in it.” SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York: Liveright, 2015), 15. 1 5. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. George Hefferman (Notre Dame, Ind.: Notre Dame Press, 1990), 93. 1 6. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Throughout his work, Derrida sees the philosophical gesture of “bracketing” the

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world—­the Kantian and phenomenological “reduction” (epoché) as instances of this effort to come to terms with the departure of “the world.” 17. Derrida, “Rams,” in Sovereignties in Question, 74–­75. 18. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomenon, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 97. 1 9. In French the verb vouloir, like the German wollen, does not simply mean “wishing,” much less “willing,” but to want—­which, by a strange irony of language, also and above all in ordinary speech means “to lack.” This suggests that the will—­for instance, in Nietzsche’s Will to Power—­is not merely the manifestation of a movement toward a goal, but also, as Nietzsche well understood, of a movement away from: an effort to combler un vide, responding to a lack rather than to a goal to be obtained. This also fits very well with Derrida’s deconstruction of the vouloir-­dire in general (meaning to say as wanting to assert) and that of Husserl (Bedeutung) in particular. 2 0. Walter Benjamin, Origins of the German Mourning Play, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). That Christianity should produce “sparks” in Hamlet derives for Benjamin from its form as mourning play, no matter how exceptional. The “charge” (Klage) of the creature against its Creator does not result in a decision or verdict, as in Greek tragedy, but in a suspended sentence (137). 2 1. Jacques Derrida, The Monolingualism of the Other, or The Prosthesis of the Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 2 2. Derrida, “Rams,” 162 (translation modified). 2 3. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 45. 2 4. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Selected Writings, 1:17. 11. AFTER ITS KIND 1. Since this was written, the COVID-­19 pandemic has only increased the burden of debt, both public and private, for the vast majority of populations, and thus heightened the “crisis.” 2. What is thus mentioned only indirectly in Genesis is explicit in the Qur’an: “Despite the Biblical account, the Quran mentions only one tree in Eden, the tree of immortality, which God specifically claimed it was forbidden to Adam and Eve.” Wikipedia, “Garden of Eden,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden _of_Eden#Islamic_view. 3. Ehyeh—­the first person singular, is also in the imperfect form: its “perfection” consists in resisting temporal change and repeating itself identically, Ehyeh asher ehyeh, which might therefore also be rendered as “I was that I shall be.” Or, to vary a phrase of Freud’s: “Where I was, I shall come to be.”

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4. When asked by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about his position on the question of debt while he was still a candidate for President, Donald Trump declared that “I am the king of debt. I love debt.” True to his words, once president, the King of Debt has worked to raise the U.S. fiscal debt to previously unseen levels, at least in what might be considered peacetime. It wasn’t debt that he disliked: it was just interest: “If interest rates go up one percent, that’s devastating.” See https://money.cnn.com/2016/05/05/investing/trump-king-of-debt-fire-janet -yellen/index.html. 5. It is significant that Islam forbids lending with interest and that Christianity at various times has also imposed such a prohibition. This suggests that the process by which money is lent in order to reproduce and augment itself is felt to be too close to the divine prerogative. The “Surah Baqarah” declares that if “God blots out usury . . . freewill offerings He augments with interest.” Wikipedia, “Riba,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riba#Quran_and_prohibition. 6. “Elie Wiesel Says He Can’t Forgive Bernie Madoff,” CNN, n.d., https://www .cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/27/wiesel.madoff/index.html. 12. LIKE—­COME AGAIN?! 1. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 148–­49. Here as elsewhere published translations are often modified. 2. Considerable recent research has been dedicated to revising the traditional notion of Kierkegaard as primarily influenced, positively and negatively, by Hegel, and instead to foregrounding the importance of Fichte’s theory of self-­consciousness and the I for the Danish writer. See, among many others, J. Stolzenberg and S. Rapic, eds., Kierkegaard und Fichte: Praktische und religiöse Subjektivität (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010); David Kangas, “J. G. Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to Existence,” in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, ed. Jon Stewart (Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate, 2009). 3. I have discussed the specifically theatrical dimension of Kierkegaard’s study in my book Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 200–­228. 4. As we will see, time is always struggling to recover its “due” from the thought of the Eternal Return—­with the partial result being that this phrase may have to undergo a drastic modification to be rendered intelligible in English (assuming this is possible). Changing “Return” to “recurrence” is surely an improvement but still hardly adequate, for reasons that will hopefully become clearer in the course of this chapter. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, VI. 3 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969), 333.

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6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1969). 7. Er überfiel mich is how Nietzsche describes the advent of Zarathustra, “as type”; literally, he ambushed me: the colloquial sense is of a surprise attack. 8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, § 38. See also Rainer Ansen, “Bewegtheit”: Zur Genesis einer kinetischen Ontologie bei Heidegger (Berlin: Junghans Verlag, 1990). 9. Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth, ed. D. Breazeale (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1979), 79–­100. Page numbers refer to this edition and will be given in the body of the text. 1 0. “There—­and then?” is one of my proposals to render in English Heidegger’s Dasein. 1 1. For a preliminary analysis of Nietzsche’s use of da, in texts that I will continue to explore in this essay, see my article “Einmal ist Keinmal: Das Wiederholbare und das Singulare,” in Gerhard Neumann, ed., Post-­Strukturalismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 434–­48. 1 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 194–­95. 1 3. C. S. Peirce, “On a New List of Categories,” 1868: see http://www.peirce.org /writings/p32.html. 1 4. A position I have sought to develop in Theatricality as Medium. 1 5. Nietzsche’s writing on the eternal return can be divided into two periods and types: the first recounts the initial encounter with this “thought” and is, without exception, staged in a highly theatrical manner; the second, later, reflects upon the thought as something finished and seeks to insert it into a cosmological context. In this essay we will be concerned above all with the former phase of “discovery,” since it is only here that the “recurrence” engages the problem of singularity—­and the Augenblick (moment)—­as its determining factor. 1 6. This will be discussed further in the following chapter. 1 7. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1962), 77–­80; Martin Heidegger, “Die Wiederkunftslehre als Überwindung des Nihilismus” [The teaching of the recurrence as overcoming of nihilism], in Nietzsche, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: Klett-­Cotta, 1961), 387–­91. 1 8. Heidegger defines the link between the doctrine of the Eternal Return and the Will to Power precisely by relation to this notion of impression, Aufprägung, with reference to the assertion of Nietzsche that defines the Will to Power as “the impression (Aufprägung) of being upon becoming.” Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:418. 1 9. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions de Galilée, 1993), 266ff. The advantage of this word, as I understand it—­as distinct from the formula “mes-

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sianicity without messianism,” which in Derrida’s writing tended to supplant it, is that arrivant does not have the same associations of persons and of salvation as does “messianic.” An arrivant need not designate a person but can designate “things” or processes as well. 20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1972), §81. Jacques Derrida, “Ousia et grammè,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972), 31–­78. 2 1. All quotations are from Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. and trans. Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 123–­24. Page references in text. Translations generally modified. 2 2. In “The Spirit of Gravity”—­more precisely, “Spirit of Heaviness” (Geist der Schwere)—­“gravity” in German would be the more abstract Schwerkraft. In the same book 3, Zarathustra declares himself “the enemy of the spirit of gravity . . . deadly enemy, arch-­enemy, ancient enemy!” Although this “enemy” is at first determined as something alien, external, it is then recognized to also inhabit one’s “own”: “And truly! Much of one’s own is also heavy to bear! And much that is inward [viel Inwendiges].” The separation between self and other, inside and outside, own and alien is never absolute in Nietzsche’s work. 2 3. How not to think here of the conclusion of Benjamin’s essay on Kafka: “Whether man or horse is not so important any longer, if only the burden is taken off one’s back.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 226; Selected Writings, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 816. Except that with Nietzsche, the weight is not simply “taken” but thrown off Zarathustra’s back, when he decides to stand on his own. Of course, when one’s own is already invested by the other—­ “spirit”—­the distinction between activity and passivity becomes far more problematic. This is also—­and perhaps above all—­the problem of “eternal recurrence.” 2 4. One should recall here that it is Nietzsche above all who warned against hypostasizing the category of opposition as the scheme of reality—­for him the truly “metaphysical” move that deserved the most critical deconstruction. Cf. Beyond Good and Evil, §2. (KG VI.2, 10): “The fundamental belief of Metaphysicians is the belief in the oppositionality of values. It never occurred to even the most prudent that it is here on the threshold, where it was most necessary, that doubt should set in” (my translation). 2 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1961), 178. 2 6. Hard here not to be reminded of the often-­quoted verse of Hölderlin from his poem “The Rhine”: Ein Rätsel ist reinentsprungenes (A riddle is pure emergence). 2 7. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” Selected Writings, 3:143–­66. According to

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Benjamin, the storyteller provides Rat to the Ratlos—­i.e., “council” to the disconsolate, not in the form of a theory or a concept but in that of a story that repeats and modifies earlier tales and at the end always encourages the question, “What happened next?” This may explain the resurgent interest in “series” today. The modern novel itself develops out of such serial storytelling as an escape from dangers, as with The Decameron or Scheherazade. Narrative continuity as a replacement for an authoritative Heilsgeschichte (salvational narrative). 28. The heaviness of the dwarf ’s circular notion of time also marks Heidegger’s reading of this unfolding scene, which can only be qualified as heavy-­handed. In it he sees a thinly veiled representation of Nietzsche’s biographical desolation during the 1870s—­a stage for him in the process of Nietzsche finding his way to himself. Thus, the sleep of the shepherd and the oneiric quality of the scene is, for Heidegger, related to the fact that “Nietzsche had not yet come into his own” [Nietzsche war noch nicht bei sich selbst]. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:395. 2 9. Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 125 (translation modified). 3 0. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:263, 393. 3 1. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes [Phenomenology of Spirit] (Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1952), I; Die sinnliche Gewissheit [Sensible certitude], 79–­89. 3 2. Hegel, Phänomenologie, 81. 3 3. Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1978); English: Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Klossowski is one of the first, if not the first, reader of Nietzsche to have emphasized the seminal importance of the Sils-­ Maria experience. 3 4. Klossowski discusses at length the paradox involved in an eternal recurrence that is supposed to repeat identically what has already taken place, and the fact that to the extent that what is repeated involves consciousness, memory of the previous occurrence has to be replaced by forgetting: there can be no continuity of consciousness between the various occurrences. Klossowski, Nietzsche, 59ff et passim. 3 5. I have discussed Nietzsche’s use of the da in this passage at somewhat greater length in “Einmal ist Keinmal: Das Wiederholbareund das Singuläre,” in Gerhard Neumann, ed., Poststrukuralismus. DFG-­Symposion 1995 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 434–­48. 3 6. This is also the “predicament” or embarrassment (Verlegenheit) that Kant tries to resolve by his theory of aesthetic judgment of taste, in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57. 3 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy and Truth (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1993), §131, §152 et passim.

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38. “It is part of willing that something is commanded.” Nietzsche, Will to Power, § 668. 3 9. “‘Who is the shepherd, in whose throat the serpent crawled?’ We can now answer: He is Zarathustra as thinker of the thought of eternal recurrence.” Heidegger, Nietzsche, 1:398. We will discover a similar propensity to confound responses with answers, and thereby to minimize open questions—­surprising perhaps for a thinker for whom “questioning is the piety of thought”—­in Heidegger’s discussion of Hölderlin. See infra, 375ff. On Heidegger’s complex and ambivalent attitude toward questioning, see Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 4 0. See Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). 4 1. One is reminded of Kafka’s “house father,” who seeks to engage Odradek in dialogue in order to gain some control over it, but ultimately without success. In Kafka’s story, as in Nietzsche’s, a certain nonhuman laughter, suggesting a body without organs, is the only response. 4 2. In German, the word abgeschieden means “departed,” “deceased.” 4 3. This reference to a Hinterwelt seems quite different although not unrelated to the condemnation of the “hinterworldly” in the chapter of that name in the first book of Zarathustra. There the hinterwelt is associated with a metaphysical–­ religious renunciation of the body and the earth; here it is associated with the singularity of “each soul” and of the I. Interesting is that the “convalescent” is mentioned in this earlier section and warned away from the false consolation of the hinterworld. The “other world” of other “souls” of course can also be a “hinterworld” in the sense criticized by Nietzsche, although this does not seem to be the main thrust of the term here. 4 4. Derrida, L’animal que donc je suis (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 56 et passim. The same generalization of the singular governs the discourse of racism: “The Jew,” “The Arab,” “The Black,” “The Terrorist,” etc. This is not to accuse the animals of being protoracist, but only to show how something like racism can be nourished by discourses that themselves seem entirely nonaggressive and conciliatory. 4 5. In German this universal singular, designated by the anonymous “that” (“das kommt und reicht sich die Hand und lacht und flieht—­und kommt zurück”), gives itself the hand: reicht sich die Hand. 4 6. It is interesting to note that the otherwise careful and elegant recent translation of Zarathustra by Adrian de Caro and Robert Pippin is so captivated by the consoling chatter of the animals that it renders the singular das by the more reassuring plural “they”: “They come and reach out their hand and retreat.”

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“Retreat” may also go better with the idea of a dance step, but the German text reads flieht, which is “flees,” which underscores the tension between a passing that is a “flight”—­from what?—­and the happy dancing “return.” What has really “retreated” from legibility in this translation is the animals’ subsumption of the differential, discreet—­eternally separate—­singular under the happy uniformity of the generalized singular “they.” 47. The British philosopher Bernard Williams makes this critique: “The affirmation is supposed to be immensely costly, an achievement commensurable with the dreadfulness of what it wills. Yet its content, and so inescapably, the affirmation itself, occurs in the gravity-­free space of the imagination. Can the ‘greatest weight’ . . . really weigh anything, when it consists in willing an entirely contrary-­to-­fact recurrence? Can it be more than a Styrofoam rock on a film set of cosmic heroism?” The Sense of the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) 53. But the “idea” of an “entirely contrary-­to-­fact recurrence” can have more powerful effects that Williams seems able to imagine; the space of the imagination is anything but “gravity-­free.” (I am indebted to Zakir Paul for bringing this passage to my attention.) 13. THE FUTURE OF SAUSSURE 1. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, re­ edited by Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). This edition and translation is to be preferred to the later one by Roy Harris, who chooses to translate signifiant—­literally, “signifying”—­as “signal,” thereby effectively obscuring the lexical link of Saussure’s choice of terms to the process of differential signifying. 2. “It is not impossible that the literality of the Course, to which we have indeed had to refer, should one day appear very suspect in the light of unpublished material now being prepared for publication. . . . Caring very little about Ferdinand de Saussure’s thought itself, we have interested ourselves in a text whose literality has played a well-­known role since 1915.” Of Grammatology, revised translation by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 387–­88. 3. Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between “totality” and “infinity” can be seen as an anticipation of this poststructuralist tendency. Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Linguis, 3rd ed. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 4. I have discussed Saussure in more detail in an older and newer text: Samuel Weber, “Saussure and the Apparition of Language,” MLN 91, no. 5 (1976): 913–­38; and, in French, “Saussure et l’avenir,” in Ferdinand de Saussure et l’epistème structuraliste, ed. Ludwig Jäger (Berlin: De Gruyter, forthcoming).

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14. ANXIETY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, AND THE UNCANNY 1. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 28–­43. 2. In an older essay, but not unrelated to this one, I explore the relation of this pronoun to Derrida’s aporetic concept of “iterability”: Samuel Weber, “It,” Glyph 4 (1978), 1–­31. 3. My use of “trans-­I,” instead of the more usual “super-­ego,” is based on the fact that Freud’s Überich does not merely stand above the I as a higher I, but has an entirely different structure. It transcends the I by both drawing it toward an ideal and at the same time prohibiting it from attaining it: “Be like me, be yourself,” as the famous author Vereker tells his aspiring young acolyte in Henry James’s “Figure in the Carpet”—­not word for word but in so many (other) words. I discuss this impossible injunction in Institution and Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 180–­206. 4. Sigmund Freud, Das Ich und das Es, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13, 286; The Ego and the Id (New York: Norton, 1960), 58–­59. 5. GW 10:287/Norton, 60. 6. Freud, Das Unheimliche, GW 12:250; Freud, “The Uncanny,” standard edition, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–­74), 238. 7. Freud, Das Unheimliche, GW 229/SE 219 (future references to this work in body of text). 8. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 101–­56. 9. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, SE 8:139, quoted in The Legend of Freud, 153. 1 0. One particularly marked instance of this ongoing dimension of storytelling, in a written text, is to be found in a tale of E. T. A. Hoffmann, author of “The Sandman,” but also of The Stories of Kater Murr: stories told not by a human, but by a cat named “Murr” (which in German suggests “mumbling” but also “complaining”—­as in “demur”). Each story ends with a phrase that links it to the next: Murr fährt fort, which is only weakly translated as “Murr continues.” Why weakly? Because fort in German means not only “continues” but also “gone”—­as in the famous fort/da game discussed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As Derrida writes in his essay “Spéculer sur Freud,” in La Carte postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 381 et passim, the da is also the fort (which I have tried to transpose in the formula “there—­and then?” as a translation of Heidegger’s Dasein. 15. THE SINGULARITY OF LITERARY COGNITION 1. Since I have not been able to render Novalis’s German with the desirable accuracy, here it is in German: “Jedes Kunstwerk hat ein Ideal a priori, eine

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Notwendigkeit bei sich, da zu sein.” Fragmente I, at http://gutenberg.spiegel .de/buch/fragmente-i-6618/23. The major difficulty in translating is to render adequately the phrase bei sich, da zu sein: the a priori necessity is associated but not identical with the work of art, “with” it perhaps but not “of it.” The tension between generality and singularity is thus at work in this difficulty of translation. 2. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 79. 3. In the Nietzschean sense of “moment”—­as Augenblick—­discussed in chapter 12. 4. While Harris’s translation brings out the dissymmetry between the two terms—­ “signification” designating a process, signal an entity—­it also obscures lexically the complex interdependence of the two terms, which in French remain forms of a single verb: signifier, to signify. To “signal” is also something quite different from to “signify.” See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (Chicago: Open Court, 1983), xi. What Lacan observed about the sign also applies to the signal but not to the signifier: “The whole ambiguity of the sign derives from the fact that it represents something for someone. This someone may be many things [ . . . ] A signifier is that which represents a subject for another signifier.” Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-­A . Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 207. 5. The title of Kubrick’s first full-­length feature film was also a gerund: The Killing, adapted by Kubrick and Jim Thompson from a novel originally called Clean Break. With the gerund, however, the break is never ‘clean’ but always more or less violent, because imposed, which is why “The Killing” is a much more powerful, because more immediate, title than Clean Break. In 2018 an early unfinished scenario of Kubrick was discovered with the title “Burning Secret.” Kubrick, it seems, was highly sensitized to the fascination of the present participle. 6. See, for instance, the joke about a man who enters a coffee shop; in Freud’s German, “Ein Herr kommt in eine Konditorei and lässt sich eine Torte bringen . . .” In Strachey’s translation: “A gentleman entered a pastry-­cook’s shop and ordered a cake . . .” GW VI, p. 65; Jokes and the Unconscious (New York: Penguin, 1986), 98. 7. Political, since what is involved here is the process by which boundaries are set and maintained—­which is often and to my mind rightly regarded as one of the defining functions of the political. But if it is political, it is also heterogeneous, since its impulsion necessarily comes from outside that which is then bounded. 8. Samuel Weber, “Saussure and the Apparition of Language,” Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 913–­38. See also Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

472   Notes to Chapter 15

9. “Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be clattering [kollern] down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children?” Kafka’s Selected Stories, trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton, 2006), 73 (translation modified). 1 0. Karl Kraus, Pro domo et mundo (Munich, 1912), 164, cited in Walter Benjamin, Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire, GS 1, 647; SW 4, 354. 1 1. Wolfgang Iser, Die Appelstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung literarischer Prosa, Konstanzer Universitätsreden, vol. 28 (Constance, Germany: Verlag der Druckerei und Verlagsanstalt Konstanz Universitätsverlag GmbH, 1970), 1974. I have discussed some of Iser’s theories in Samuel Weber, “Caught in the Act of Reading,” in Institution and Interpretation, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 1 2. Literary history can only avoid such partisanship by presupposing that its objects are given qua “literary,” without however being able to interpret or evaluate the pertinence of such “givenness.” 1 3. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 161. 1 4. This is the more general form of Freud’s argument, which claims that the “distortion” of the dream in being retold and interpreted is part of the dream process itself, which is already one of distortion. Dreams for Freud are radically singular events, which is why he rejected any sort of general code, such as that proposed by Carl Jung, which presupposes the fixity of symbols as a way of interpreting dreams. The latter are rigorously idiomatic and singular, to the point of being inaccessible directly. Hence also the affinity between dreams and specters, which is what Derrida focuses on in his discussion of singularity in relation to Marx. 1 5. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin, 2006), 22. Future page references are given in the body of the text. 1 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, §25. 1 7. Werner Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930). 1 8. http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p08c.htm. 1 9. Arkady Plotnitsky, The Knowable and the Unknowable (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002). 2 0. “I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all,—­who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of everything that concerns you.” Tristram Shandy I.4. 2 1. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 155 (translation modified).

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16. MIS-­TAKING THE MEASURE OF POETRY 1. The German Duden dictionary describes the suffix -­tum as a “petrified” (erstarrt) version of the old-­high and middle-­high German noun tuom, meaning “power, dignity, possession, judgment.” Duden Das große Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 4th ed. (Mannheim, Germany: Bibliographisches Institut, 2012), digital version. 2. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe 53, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993), 169. English: Hölderlin’s Hymn, “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 49. Future references to the German and English editions as “GA 53” and “Eng.” Although Heidegger warns here against the German penchant for “Fassenkönnen und Einfassen um seiner selbst willen,” he himself treats Hölderlin’s poetry in a somewhat similar manner, as we will see. Hölderlin’s critique that a certain Schicklichkeit that is attained at the cost of Schicksalslosigkeit can, mutatis mutandis, be seen as anticipating Heidegger’s own critique of technology in his “Questing after Technics,” in which Hölderlin’s poetry, and in particular his notion of Geschick, plays a central role. I have discussed Heidegger’s text, although not in relation to Hölderlin, in Mass Mediauras (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 76–­107. 3. GA 53, §20, 143ff et passim. Eng 115ff. 4. David M. Glantz, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 108–­10. Cited in Wikipedia, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Blue#cite_note-8. 5. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Blue#cite_note-8. 6. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 176 (translation modified); German: Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer Verlag, 1953), 126. 7. GA 53, 114. 8. GA 51, 121; Eng 97 (§16). 9. This, interestingly enough, is the same argument used to discredit as a foreign interpolation the argument brought forward by Antigone when she justifies her behavior by emphasizing the irreplaceability of her brother by contrast to the replaceability of children (which she will never have). I have discussed this in Theatricality as Medium (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 137. 1 0. GA 151; Eng 115. 1 1. It should be noted that in the Germany of 1942, to criticize the notion of a “total politics” by accusing it of Fraglosigkeit would hardly have been welcomed by the ruling power structure.

474   Notes to Chapter 16

1 2. The verse is from revisions to the poem “Bread and Wine.” 1 3. GA 53, 166; Eng 133. 1 4. For a relatively recent discussion in English, see Silke-­Maria Weineck, The Abyss above Philosophy and Poetic Madness in Plato, Hölderlin und Nietzsche (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), 54–­55. 1 5. GA 205; Eng 167. 1 6. GA 205; Eng 167. 1 7. “Zum Traume wirds ihm, will es Einer / Beschleichen und straft den, der / Ihm gleichen will mit Gewalt. / Oft überrascht es den, / Der eben kaum es gedacht hat.” GA 205; Eng 167. 1 8. Friedrich Hölderlin, Anmerkungen zu Sophokles’ Ödipus, in Friedrich Hölderlin, Fragments de poétique, bilingual edition edited by Jean-­François Courtine (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale Editions, 2006), 394 (my translation). 1 9. “Giebt es auf Erden ein Maaβ? Es giebt keines. Nemlich es hemmen den Donnergang nie die Welten des Schöpfers. Auch eine Blume ist schön, weil sie blühet unter der Sonne. Es findet das Aug’ oft im Leben Wesen, die viel schöner noch zu nennen wären als die Blumen. O! ich weiss das wohl! Denn zu bluten an Gestalt und Herz, und ganz nicht mehr zu seyn, gefällt das Gott?” 2 0. The much-­discussed question of the authenticity of this poem has to be bracketed here: whether or not it stems entirely from Hölderlin or is a compilation, it certainly merits the attention Heidegger and others have devoted to it. Precisely the uncertainty of authorship throws into relief the question of the poem as the enunciation of an “I.” 2 1. “Gut auch sind und geschickt einem zu etwas wir.” 2 2. Hölderlin, Anmerkungen zu Sophokles’ Ödipus, 396. 2 3. “Wie aber liebes? Sonnenschein / Am Boden sehen wir und trockenen Staub / Und heimatlich die Schatten der Wälder und es blühet / An Dächern der Rauch, bei alter Krone / Der Türme, friedsam: gut sind nämlich / Hat gegenredend die Seele / Ein Himmlisches verwundet, die Tageszeichen.” 2 4. Hölderlin, Remarks on Antigone, in David Constantine, Hölderlin’s Sophocles (High Green, U.K.: Bloodaxe Books, 2001), 117–­18. 2 5. This is how Peter Fenves translates Hölderlin’s term, in what to my knowledge is the first discussion of the importance of the word, both for Hölderlin and for Fenves’s own approach to “arresting language.” Peter Fenves, Arresting Language, From Leibniz to Benjamin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 4ff. The title of this chapter is intended as an indication of my indebtedness to Fenves’s work, and in particular to his reading of Hölderlin in “Measure for Measure, Hölderlin and the Place of Philosophy,” in Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: New Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 25–­43.

Notes to Chapter 16   475

17. TOWERS AND WALLS 1. Remarks by the president. Trump at the National Federation of Independent Businesses 75th Anniversary Celebration, June 19, 2018, https://www.whitehouse .gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-national-federation -independent-businesses-75th-anniversary-celebration/. 2. Friedrich Schiller: Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1 (Munich: Hanser Verlag), 313. 3. The notion is generally associated with the “reception-­aesthetic” school of literary criticism, identified with Hans-­Peter Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. It can, however, be traced back to the phenomenology of Husserl: “Every subjective process has a process ‘horizon’ that changes with the process and with the alteration of the process itself from phase to phase of its flow—­an intentional horizon of reference to potentialities of consciousness that belong to the process itself.” Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations / Paris lectures (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1967), 44. 4. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 47ff. 5. For references to the English text, I will be using the aforementioned edition of Stanley Corngold, Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York: Norton, 2007); for the German the edition of Roger Hermes, based on the critical edition of Kafka’s texts edited by Jürgen Born, Gerhard Neumann, Malcolm Pasley, and Jost Schillemeit: Kafka, Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1996). Page numbers will be given in the body of the text, first English, then German. 6. “Great” is one of the words that President Trump has helped to popularize: Make America Great Again was then echoed, if critically, by the French president Emmanuel Macron, who, in defending the Paris Agreement on climate change, called on President Trump to help Make the Planet Great Again. Needless to say, this flattery by imitation had no effect. But at this point it does seem that the two words that Trump catapulted to lexical fame are “great” and “fake”: their connection is perhaps not entirely fortuitous. 7. Kafka’s writings in connection with his position in this post have been collected and edited by Stanley Corngold et al., Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 8. A possible antecedent can be found in Thucydides’ account of how the project of the Athenians to construct a wall around their city contributed to the decision of Sparta to go to war. See Robert B. Strassler, ed., The Landmark Thucydides (New York: Free Press, 1996), 49ff (I.90.1–­2). 9. I have discussed this passage from Thucydides in the introduction to Targets of Opportunity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 18–­21. 1 0. I discuss this aspect of Kant’s Third Critique in relation to Kafka in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 15–­35.

476   Notes to Chapter 17

11. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; rev. ed. 2016). 1 2. Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente, vol. 1, ed. Malcolm Pasley (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2002), 357. 18. KAFKA’S JOSEPHINE 1. Theodor Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 254–­55 (translation modified). 2. To be sure, the association of bugs—­Wanzen—­with travels and travelers is fairly commonplace. But the expression cited by Adorno has proved impossible to find—­for me at least. 3. Walter Benjamin, Origins of the German Mourning Play (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019). 4. As in previous chapters, references to the English text will use the edition of Stanley Corngold, and the German the edition edited by Roger Hermes. Page numbers will be given in the body of the text, first the English, then the German. Throughout I have modified the translation wherever necessary—­starting here with the title. 5. Phillip Lundberg, Essential Kafka, Rendezvous with Otherness, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, Ind.: AuthorHouse, 2009), http://www.kafka-online.info/josephine -the-songstress-or-the-mouse-folk.html. 6. Corngold opts for “squeaking,” which to American ears is certainly more idio­ matic than “piping.” But “squeaking” strikes me as too negative and involuntary to do justice to the demonstrative nature the story ascribed to Josephine. Given the human–­animal divide that is important for all of Kafka’s animal stories, it is helpful if the word is something that could be common to both: this is more the case with “whistling” than with “squeaking.” 7. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001). This “aside” is not in the published text—­I remember hearing it at a performance of the play at the Berliner Ensemble around 1961, and it has remained with me ever since. 8. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1988), 161 (translation modified). 9. Franz Kafka, Sämtliche Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1981). 19. SILENCING THE SIRENS 1. I have discussed this at greater length in “What Is a Literary Image?” Paragraph 43, no. 2 ( July 2020): 125–­39.

Notes to Chapter 19   477

2. Kafka’s Selected Stories, trans. and ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2007), 127–­28; Roger Hermes, Franz Kafka: Die Erzählungen (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag, 2011), 351–­52. 3. Although I have gratefully used the published translation by Corngold, I also depart from it frequently. Page numbers are given in the text, first the English, then the previously cited German edition of Kafka Die Erzählungen, op. cit. 4. Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, trans. Heinz Politzer, http://zork.net/~patty /pattyland/kafka/parables/abraham.htm.

478   Notes to Chapter 19

Index Abyss (Abgrund), 312 Adorno, Theodor: the non-identical, vii, ix, 18; “Notes on Kafka,” 401–4, 412 “Advice to a Young Tradesman . . .” (Benjamin Franklin), 161–62, 165–67, 174 Agamben, Giorgio, 57–68; genius, 150–51; Homo Sacer, 59, 61–64, 66–67; Profanations, 150; protective custody (Schutzhaft), 71–72; Roman law, 64, 66–67, 448n16; suspension of law, 60–61; “What Is a Camp?,” 57–61, 71 All the Mornings of the World (Corneau), 3–4, 212, 290, 429n2, 457n3 anthropocene, 35 anxiety, 21–23, 30–31, 116–21, 124, 253, 306–7, 329–40; constitutive trauma, 118; as preparedness, 121 Arendt, Hannah: banality of evil, 441n17; death camps, 60–61; totalitarianism, 233 Aristotle: Metaphysics, 86–89 autonomy as heteronomy, 28 Babel: tower of, 8, 24, 129–30, 393–95 Badiou, Alain, 73 Balcony, The (Genet), 156–59 Bataille, Georges: limited vs. general economy, 170–71, 434n28; sovereignty, 216, 445n13 Baudelaire, Charles, 93–94, 122

Benjamin, Walter: affective tone (Gefühlston), 264; allegory, 176–79, 404; aura as gaze, 92–94; “The Author as Producer,” 95–96; awakening as dislocation, 122–23; “Capitalism as Religion,” 180, 234–35, 251, 275; character and genius, 144–52; compulsion (Zwang), 38, 40, 43–44, 436n6, 449n6; “Critique of Violence,” 38–40, 67–69, 156–57; “Destiny and Character,” 135–56, 159, 449n25, 449n27; force (Gewalt), 38–40, 68–69, 435n5; Greek tragedy, 68–69; “literarization” of living conditions, 96; on militarism, 38, 44; naturalization of guilt, 139–41; “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 69–70, 128; origin, 2, 4, 11, 16, 20, 26–27; The Origin of the German Mourning Play, 2, 4, 16, 26–27, 139–40, 142, 176–77, 429n1, 432n5, 434n22, 449n24, 452n18, 464n20; the police, 156–57; Schuld (guilt/debt), 275; signifying as misfortune, 137–38; “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 93–94, 122; “The Storyteller,” 339–40, 467n27, 471n10; “Task of the Translator,” 264, 342, 406; temporality of the future, 143; tragic silence, 141–42; “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin,” 151, 460n27; way of meaning (Art des Meinens), 342; “The Work of Art in the Age

479

of Technological Reproducibility,” 92–93 Bernays, Edward, 81–82 Bible: Corinthians, 22, 102, 165, 299–300; Deuteronomy, 20–21; Exodus, 7–8, 10, 439n31; Genesis, 6–10, 18, 24, 70–72, 90, 126–31, 138–39, 245–49, 252, 257–77, 393, 414, 430n10, 433n16, 447n6, 447n9, 464n2; John, 22–23; Matthew, 20 biopolitics, 57–76, 109, 133–34, 140, 440n8 blockage, as meaning and sedimentation, 281, 283–88 body. See corporeality breaking news, 81, 84–85 Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty), 189–90, 198 capitalism, 26, 165–83, 189–90, 202, 210, 214–15, 228, 234–36, 251, 274–76, 321, 433n19, 435n3, 451n6; neoliberalism, 36, 90, 172, 187–88, 204, 235–37, 277, 433n19, 434n28, 443n16, 456n20 causality: of character, 137–38; without contact, 287–88; likeness as cause, 309; in quantum mechanics, 353 Celan, Paul, 256, 263–65 colonialism, 64–67, 436n14; neo, 196; and self-identity, 213 comparative literary studies, 263–65, 341–42, 349; singular knowledge of, 341, 349 compulsion: “hobbyhorses,” 52, 356; repetition compulsion, 119, 337; use of force, 38–41, 44 concentration, 44–45, 119; camps (reconcentrados), 64–66 consumption, American religion of, 178–79 convention (Redensart): as conver-

480  Index

gence, 402–3, 414; expression of, 404; vs. Redewendung, 410; as sociability, 414–15 corporeality, 17, 21, 45–46, 56, 88–92, 292–93, 397–98; bodily existence, 14, 131, 255, 292; flesh, 247 credit, as money, 162–63, 453n20; public vs. private, 169–88 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 68 danger: imagining the unimaginable, 22, 329–30, 333–37; as a relational concept, 117; response to, 114, 117, 119–21 death: administration of, 73–76; of death, 299; and debt, 270–73; drive, 117–18; nation as thanaton, 133–34; penalty, 133–34; and psychoanalysis, 329, 332, 334; as result of human action, 70–71, 128–31; and writing, 261, 347 debt: forgiveness, 188; indebtedness, 272–77; sovereign debt crisis, 184–87, 227–32, 235 Debt, the First 5000 Years (Graeber), 227–28, 231, 240–41 democracy, 237–41, 463n9 Derrida, Jacques: The Animal That Therefore I Am (Following), 18, 264, 315, 387; aporia, 80; apparitions, 347; auto-affection and auto-immunity, 106–11, 390; community as common autoimmunity, 112; deconstruction of presence, self, and property (the proper), 215–16; divided and differentiated subject, 84–85; Faith and Knowledge, 108–9, 111–12; “Force of Law,” 435n5; For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, 83, 112–14, 445n12; generalized singular, 18, 20, 152, 264;

The Gift of Death, 221–22; iterability, 16–17, 107, 319; metaphysics of sovereignty, 114–15, 445n13, 451n10; mortality, 260–61; Of Grammatology, 323–25, 343; The Other Heading, 209–34, 237, 239–40; “Psychoanalysis Searches the States of Its Soul,” 114–15; question of life and life sciences, 109; Rams, 260, 263; responsibility, 221, 457n5; Self, 108–9; signified as signifier, 343; Specters of Marx, 108, 110–11, 350, 466n19; Speech and Phenomena, 106–10, 260–61, 432n7, 444n5; “Uninterrupted Dialogue— Between Two Infinities the Poem,” 260, 263; universalized singular, 315 Descartes, René: cogito as certainty, 254–60, 328 distraction, 258 drone warfare, 46, 48–49, 55–56, 438n26, 463n12 economic inequality, 189–208; dynamics of, 193–97; inheritance, 190, 198–205, 455n16; Western democratic response to, 191–92 Europe, 209–42, 463n9; economic austerity, 181, 209, 229; European Union, 195–96, 209–11, 226–28, 232, 236, 238, 240, 458n15, 461nn35–36; self-identity of, 213, 217–18, 231 event, 2, 13, 18, 231; as measure, 373–75; media “events,” 37; sub-atomic events, 354–55 Ex-istenz (Cronenberg), 47 experience: as aporia, 214, 219–21; Erlebnis and Erfahrung, 1–2, 122–24; of the impossible, 239–40; as loss, 333 extermination camps, 64–65, 71; Nazi camps, 58, 63–67, 72–75

Fall, the, 9–10, 69–70, 102, 104, 127–31, 268–76, 433n16 feeling, viii, 17, 31, 80, 218–26, 317, 350–51, 458n13; of body, 221; after cognition, 264; “feel think,” 222–23, 458n9; response vs. reaction, 221–23, 457n5; of shattering, 381; singularity of, 224–26; of the uncanny, 333–34 Fenves, Peter, viii, 151, 431n17, 475n25 Finance Capital (Hilferding), 169–71 financial crisis 2008, 171, 180–86, 277, 452n11 Freud, Sigmund: ambivalence, 44, 80; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 116, 118–20, 331, 337, 471n10; castration, 337; consciousness as protective shield, 118–20; disunity of the psyche, 327, 471n10; drives (Triebe), 247; The Ego and the Id, 83, 89, 327–30, 332–34, 338–39, 471n3; flight forward, 262; fort-da, 121; history of psychoanalysis in North America, 81–84; “I” as mental projection, 89; identification, 153–54, 158; Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety, 44–45, 117, 119, 246–47, 330; on jokes, 339–40, 472n6; The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion, 115, 381; “Mass Psychology and Ego Analysis,” 153–54; Outline of Psychoanalysis, 117–18; problem of anxiety, 329–40; psyche, 116–19; repetition-compulsion, 119, 337; repression, as counter-charge (Gegenbesetzung), 330–31, 336; return of the repressed, 116–17; Totem and Taboo, 115, 128, 381; trait unaire, 154–55; the uncanny, 85, 116, 325, 332–39, 458n12; undoing (Ungeschehen machen), 246–47 friction vs. fiction, 338, 350, 414–15

Index  481

gaze as glance, 94 generality, 24–25, 38, 45, 51, 61, 70; of the enemy, 62; life in general, 56, 69, 71, 72–75 gift, 29, 225, 274–77; capitalism, 434n28 globalization, 37, 180, 195, 251–53 goal (cap), 210–21, 224 Grand Inquisitor (Dostoyevsky), 60 Greek tragedy, 11–12, 137–39, 141–42, 148, 449n27; Oedipus at Colonos, 206–7 guilt, 10, 22–23, 129–35, 139–41, 448n16, 449n25, 459n22; and absolution, 68–69; as debt, 172, 175, 179–81, 188, 235, 237, 275–77; guilt-nexus, 144, 149, 151 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 55, 257–58, 261–62, 464n20 Hegel, G. W. F.: dialectics, 80, 279–81; master-servant, 200–203; Phenomenology of Spirit, 99, 200–201, 305, 307, 444n2 Heidegger, Martin: the everyday (Alltäglichkeit), 212; “Humandoms” (Menschentümer), 364; “Lectures on Hölderlin’s Hymns,” 363–75; “Lectures on Sophocles’ Antigone,” 367–72; modern politics of certitude and polis, 369–72; onto-theology, 126, 270; property (Eigentum), 364–65; Sein and Seinenden as to-be and being, 305; technology as Gestell, 88, 474n2; the uncanny (unheimlichkeit) and un-homely (Unheimisch), 365, 367–72 Heilsgeschichte, 262, 279–80 Heisenberg, Werner: Uncertainty Principle (Unschärferelation), 45, 353–54 Hjemselv, Louis: glossematics, 324 Hobbes, Thomas, 71; Leviathan, 71, 100–106, 131, 165, 434n20; life, as

482  Index

motion, 101, 123; obedience, 100; sovereignty, 101; thinking, as perceiving, 103–4 Hölderlin, Friedrich: caesura, 222, 379; event, 374–75; genius, 151; “I” the unnamable, 377–78; “In Lovely Blueness,” 373, 377, 475n20; “The Ister,” 363, 374; lawful calculus, 375; measure of the earth, 373–74; “Mnemosyne,” 379–80; Remarks on Sophocles’ Antigone, 11–12, 375–83; republican equilibrium (Gleichgewicht), 382–83; “The Rhine,” 377; skill (Geschick), 12, 365, 431n17, 474n2; striving, 11–12; “Timidity,” 151, 378; Vaterländische Umkehr, 379–82 horizon of expectation, 385–86, 388, 398–99, 476n3 Husserl, Edmund: auto-affection, 106–7; egological meaning, 261; epoché, 260 hypotheses as premise of investigation, 99 identification, 8–9, 153–54, 392, 433n18; audiovisual models of projective, 95; “synecdochal,” 158; with aggressor, 194 identity: politics, 372; Principle of, 79; Principle of Noncontradiction, 37 image: of God, 7–8, 70, 89–90, 126, 167, 246–49, 268–71, 274; imagination, as corruption, 247; literary, 417, 423; prohibition of, 56; as “truth,” 284–87 individuality, 1–2, 5–6, 13, 22; collective groupings and, 33; “dividual,” 361, 385; “individual,” 19, 33, 36; individualism, 10, 165, 450n4; indivisibility of, 33, 125, 134; as self, 125–26; as universal, 251

intuition (Anschauung), 121; “visualizations,” 285 Jebb, W. B., 207 Jenkins, Joseph, 198 Kafka, Franz: “The Burrow,” 75–76, 415; “Cares of a House-Father,” 338, 386–87; “The Great Wall of China,” 196–97, 386–99, 418; “Josephine the Songstress, or the People of Mice,” 405–14, 477n6; “A Message from the Emperor,” 397–98; “Silence of the Sirens,” 417–26 Kant, Immanuel: beauty, 17; Critique of Judgment, vii, 1, 197, 351–53; distinction between theoretical and practical philosophy, 14; mathematical sublime, 25, 197, 352–53; “reflective judgment,” 1, 396; relation of politics and aesthetics, 135; Unity, 154; the “unnamable” (das Unnennbare), 351 Keynes, John Maynard, 172 Kierkegaard, Søren: Repetition, 16, 280–83, 288, 304, 432n6, 465nn2–3 King’s Two Bodies, The (Kantorowicz), 397 Knowable and the Unknowable, The (Arkady), 355 knowledge: displaced by acknowledgment, 225; of good and evil, 24, 69–70, 127–31, 248, 270–71, 274; literary knowledge, 342, 349, 355, 357, 473n12; as recollection, 281–82; universality of, 14 Kraus, Karl, 442n2 labor, volitional teleology of, 174–75 Lacan, Jacques: “altar” ego, 338; identification, 154–59; mirror-stage, 8,

89–95; real, 324–25; symbolic operation of the signifier, 14–17 language(s): incommensurability of, 263; as signifying, 395; the “turn” of, 401–2, 415; virtuality of signification, 325 Laplanche, Jean, 89, 443n19 life: as after-life, 249; bare (zoē), 60; in general, 282; generic indivisibility of, 276; Life, 4, 6–7, 21, 30, 260, 315; the “living,” 67; living space (Lebensraum), 65–66; qualified (bios), 60, 64, 67–68; in the singular, 22, 87, 111; singular delimitation of, 291 likeness, 91; like (Gleich), 316, 319, 378; parable, as “Gleichnis,” 418–19 Luther, Martin, 26, 29, 165–67, 176, 183, 275, 450n5 Machiavelli: vicissitudes of fortune, 198–99, 201–2, 205, 208 Madoff, Bernard, 173, 277 “Manifest Destiny,” 254 market, definition of, 185–86 Marx, Karl: Capital, 25–26, 174, 451n7, 452nn12–13; Grundrisse, 450n2 media, 77; analogical dismemberment of, 91–92; audiovisual media, 35, 42–43, 47, 55–56, 78–80, 192–93, 203, 437n15, 442n2; ontologizing, 79, 84; tele-technologies, 46; visuality, 78 Meditations (Descartes), 254–56 memory, 4, 121–22, 457n3, 468n34; recollection, 4, 281–82, 304 militarization, 33–38, 44–45, 50, 461n32; drone warfare, 49; of feeling, 38, 43; of thinking, 38, 43; three institutional complexes of, 36–38, 435n3; violence and, 33–36 money: reproducibility and, 163–64; as time, 161–88, 450n3

Index  483

mono-theological identity paradigm, 6, 33, 56, 70–73, 87, 152, 163–64, 173, 183, 202, 204–5, 249–51, 316–18, 339, 431n14, 446n4; Creator-God, 6–8, 10, 14, 18–22, 27–30, 33, 126, 205, 245, 249–50, 258, 272, 313, 464n3; monotheological economy, 181 mortality. See death Nancy, Jean-Luc, viii, 429n4; Being Singular(ly) Plural, 79 nationalism, 187–88; economic, 204, 453n24 Nazis, 430n5, 436n14; 438n21; Case Blue, 366, 372; death camps, 64, 72; “final solution” (Endlösung), 44; Operation Barbarossa, 363–66 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on concept formation, 419; and debt, 277; Ecce Homo, 282–88; eternal recurrence, 279–319, 429n3, 465n4, 466n15, 467n23, 470n47; The Gay Science, 288–93, 295–96; laughter, 310; moment (Augenblick), 296, 302; music and the art of hearing, 286–87; nothing as confirmation (Bestätigung), 294; On the Genealogy of Morals, 277, 459n22; “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 284–86, 289, 313; pity (Mitleid) and commiseration (Erbarmen), 299, 318; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 297–319, 467n22, 468n28, 469n43, 469n46; transhuman (Übermensch), 2–3, 291; truth as transformation (Übertragung), 284–85; use of punctuation, 306–7, 318; will to power, 293, 310 9/11, 18, 47 nonidentical reproducibility, 4 Novalis, 29, 342–43, 434n27, 471n1

484  Index

“On the Marionette-Theater” (Kleist), 262 overdetermination, 96, 402; of time, 292 Passion of the Christ, The (Gibson), 73 Pontalis, Jean-Jacques, 89 poststructuralism vs. structuralism, 325 present participle, 39, 255–56, 305, 344–48; gerund, 210, 305, 311, 344 protection, 99, 390; as pretense, 426; through projection, 120 Protestant Reformation, 4, 26–27, 75, 164–65, 175–78, 183; Calvinism, 26, 202; redemption, 165–66, 168, 171–74, 178–80, 188, 235; sola fides, 11, 26, 165–69, 177–80, 202, 255, 275, 450n5 Proust, Marcel, 122–24, 401–4 psyche, 116–19; disunity of, 327; Ego, 328–37; Id, 328; Superego as trans-I, 85, 86, 471n3 psychoanalysis: in academia, 82–83; danger of, 83, 112 Quignard, Pascal. See All the Mornings of the World Ratzel, Friedrich, 65 reading, 96–97, 234, 397–98, 425; afterlife of readers, 358, 361; as encounter and counter, 378–79; relationally not representationally, 303–4, 309; as re-marking, 375–76; as response, 289–90, 348–50; significance vs. meaning, 389 Readings, Bill: “excellence,” 19–20, 36, 433n13 Saint Paul, 102; charity and love, 300 salvation, 131; economy of, 276; by nation-state, 132–33

Saussure, Ferdinand de: Course in General Linguistics, 321–24, 345–47, 472n4; language as signifying process, 322–23, 325; language as system, 323–24, 432n4; order of the signifier, 54–55; le significant, 344, 346, 347, 470n1 Schmitt, Carl, 175–77; The Concept of the Political, 62, 458n11, 463n13; friend-enemy grouping, 62–63, 253, 458n11; “The Führer Protects the Law,” 5; Political Theology, 5–6, 61–62; sovereign as decision maker, 5–6, 60–65, 71, 75, 155, 440n7 secular as a theological category, 102, 249–50 Second Amendment, 28, 41, 434n24, 436n8 self. See mono-theological identity paradigm Shining, The (Kubrick), 346–47, 472n5 shock, 3; defense from, 122; and fright, 120; of poetry, 378; of thought, 308 signifying, 322–25, 344–49, 354, 356, 395; and address function, 189; connection, 138; as distinguished from intending, 425–26 silence: in disgust, 318–19; silencing (schweigen), 417–18, 421–23, 425–26; tragic, 141–42, 144 simultaneity of incompatibles, 80 singularity, vii–ix, 1–12, 429n4; “appearance” of, 379; of the body, 45, 51; of the camp, 58–59; as corruption, 247; experience of, 123; of feeling, 223–26; as frictional, 350–51, 356; irreducibility of, 176, 432n1; and law, 62; life in the singular, 56, 74, 200–201, 282; of literary knowledge, 341, 349; of the living being, 168, 256; in mathematical physics,

352–53; as odd (impair), 13, 15, 359; and plurality, 79–80; plurality of the living, 270–71, 276; politics of, 124–25; as relational, 13–16, 165; as resistance, 17, 80, 264, 351, 378–79, 404; singular delimitation of life, 291 Singularity Is Near, The (Kurzweil), 352–53 species-beings, 6, 125–26, 172, 252, 269, 272, 315, 430n6 sovereignty, 61–64, 163–64, 177, 183–87; decision, 5, 177; legal-putting-todeath, 133; as mobility, 115; state of emergency, 104, 430n9 Star of Redemption (Rosenzweig), 142 subject: as resistance, 379; as sovereign self, 83–84 surprise. See shock surveillance, 49, 95 technology: as prostheses, 87–89, 111 temporality: Augenblick, 292–93; contradiction of past and future, 301–2; as exposure to aporetic nature of singularity, 290–91; of today, 211–14, 230–31, 240 terror, 105–6; feeling of, 31, 47; war on, 42–43, 47, 196 theatricality: after the world, 259; and comedy, 146; as delimitation, 289, 291–92 Theogony (Hesiod), 245–46 transference, 85–86; and identity, 289, 419; and overdetermination, 96; and transmission, 443n14 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 49–56, 96, 355–62, 438n28, 439nn29–30, 473n20 Trump, Donald J., 20, 40–42, 78, 180–81, 186–87, 191, 194–96, 203, 385, 436n13, 456n21, 462n3, 465n4, 476n6

Index  485

unitary localizability, 104 unity, desire for, 393–97 universality vs. generality, 13–14; and auto-affection, 106; Western obsession with, 251–53 Valery, Paul: “The Crisis of the Spirit,” 211–14, 224–25; “Notes on the Grandeur and Decadence of Europe,” 230, 234, 460n26 violence, 33–36; counter, 43; discourse and, 42–43; experience of, 35; liberal– democratic societies and, 36

486  Index

War of the Worlds (Wells), 253 Weber, Max, 26, 176, 183, 235 world: as after-world, 246, 462n7; uniformity of, 421 writing: as “cutting up,” 54; as ghostly, 346–48; and progression of knowledge, 357; as response, 234; and selfpresence, 261, 343; silence, 424–25; temporality of, 302

Samuel Weber is Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and director of the Paris Program in Critical Theory at Northwestern University. He is author of twelve books, ­most recently Benjamin’s -­abilities and, in French, Inquiétantes singularités, and an editor of the Electronic Mediations series of the University of Minnesota Press.