Subjectivity and the Political: Contemporary Perspectives 9781138291645, 9781315265162

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Subjectivity and the Political

“This book offers an exciting new take on questions of the political and the subject, and the intersection at which they reciprocally constitute each other. It goes beyond the established post-structuralist and deconstructionist approaches that have dominated past discussions, holding together an array of heterogeneous perspectives and maintaining the contest among them. With contributions ranging across modern and contemporary political theory, political theology, political psychology, and more, this collection will speak to students from across humanities and social science disciplines where the question of the subject-political relation remains central.” —Nathan Widder, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

Despite the structuralist, post-structuralist, and deconstructionist critiques of subjectivity, master signifiers, and political foundations, contemporary philosophy has been marked by a resurgence in interest in questions of subjectivity and the political. Guided by the contention that different conceptions of the political are, at least implicitly, committed to specific conceptions of subjectivity while different conceptions of subjectivity have different political implications, this collection brings together an international selection of scholars to explore these notions and their connection. Rather than privilege one approach or conception of the subjectivitypolitical relationship, this volume emphasizes the nature and status of the and in the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘the political’ schema. By thinking from the place between subjectivity and the political, it is able to explore this relationship from a multitude of perspectives, directions, and thinkers to show the heterogeneity, openness, and contested nature of it. Thinkers addressed include Adorno, Agamben, Arendt, Butler, Derrida, Gramsci, Hegel, Heidegger, Kristeva, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Mill, while the subjectivity-political relation is engaged with through the mediation of the law-political, ethics-politics, theological-political, inside-outside, subject-person, and individual-institution relationships, as well as through concepts such as abjection, genius, redemption, and ugliness. These original essays will be of interest to researchers in Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Psychology, and Sociology. Gavin Rae is Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. He is the author of Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre, and the Alienation of Human Being (Palgrave Macmillan: 2011), Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan: 2014), and The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas (Palgrave Macmillan: 2016). Emma Ingala is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theoretical Philosophy and Vice-Dean of Academic Organization in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. She specializes in post-structuralist thought, political anthropology, and psychoanalysis.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

89 The Social Contexts of Intellectual Virtue Knowledge as a Team Achievement Adam Green 90 Reflective Equilibrium and the Principles of Logical Analysis Understanding the Laws of Logic Jaroslav Peregrin and Vladimír Svoboda 91 Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives on Downward Causation Edited by Michele Paolini Paoletti and Francesco Orilia 92 Using Words and Things Language and Philosophy of Technology Mark Coeckelbergh 93 Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration Edited by Chris W. Surprenant 94 Isn’t That Clever A Philosophical Account of Humor and Comedy Steven Gimbel 95 Trust in the World A Philosophy of Film Josef Früchtl 96 Taking the Measure of Autonomy A Four-Dimensional Theory of Self-Governance Suzy Killmister 97 The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux Analytic and Continental Kantianism Edited by Fabio Gironi 98 Subjectivity and the Political Contemporary Perspectives Edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala

Subjectivity and the Political Contemporary Perspectives Edited by Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-29164-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-26516-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements

Editor’s Introduction: Between Subjectivity and the Political

vii 1

GAVIN RAE AND EMMA INGALA

PART I

Political Subjectivities

11

  1 The Limits of Nomos: Hannah Arendt on Law, Politics, and the Polis13 LIESBETH SCHOONHEIM

  2 From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler: The Conditions of the Political

35

EMMA INGALA

  3 Between Failure and Redemption: Emmanuel Levinas on the Political

55

GAVIN RAE

  4 The Significant Nothing: Agamben, Theology, and Political Subjectivity

75

PIOTR SAWCZYŃSKI

  5 Aporias of Foreignness: Transnational Encounters Through Cinema KATARZYNA MARCINIAK

91

vi Contents PART II

Political Subjectivities111   6 The Abject and the Ugly: Kristeva, Adorno, and the Formation of the Subject

113

SURTI SINGH

  7 Antonio Gramsci: Persons, Subjectivity, and the Political

135

ROBERT P. JACKSON

  8 Embodied Consciousness and Political Subjectivity In the Work of Merleau-Ponty

159

STEPHEN A. NOBLE

  9 John Stuart Mill and the Liberal Genius

175

YOEL MITRANI

10 Hegel’s Ethical Life and Heidegger’s ‘They’: How Political Is the Self?

197

ANTONIO GÓMEZ RAMOS

Notes on the Contributors Bibliography Index

221 225 247

Acknowledgements

The production of an edited volume is the result of extensive collaboration. This obviously involves the authors included, but also extends to others. To this end, the editors would like to thank all those who participated in the international conference ‘Subjectivity and the Political 2016,’ held at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid in March 2016, at which the majority of the papers included here—albeit in earlier, much reduced form—were first presented. At Routledge, we would like to thank our editor, Andrew Weckenmann, and his assistant, Alexandra Simmons, for their support and professionalism throughout the process, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Finally, we acknowledge that this volume forms part of the activities for the following research projects: (1) the Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Project ‘Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics,’ co-funded by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration under Grant Agreement 600371, The Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitivity (COFUND2013–40258), The Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sport (CEI-15–17), and Banco Santander. More information about the research project can be found at: https://sovereigntyandlaw.wordpress. com/; and (2) ‘Pensamiento y representación literaria y artística digital ante la crisis de Europa y el Mediterráneo,’ reference number PR26/16–6B-3, funded by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Banco Santander.

Editor’s Introduction Between Subjectivity and the Political Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala

The twentieth century witnessed a range of intellectual movements that challenged long-held theoretical assumptions, categories, and conclusions. For the purposes of this volume, three trajectories stand out. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, poststructuralists, such as Gilles Deleuze (and Felix Guattari), Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida followed Martin Heidegger’s rejection of the long dominant appeal to a fixed ontological substance or essence as part of their wider refusal of any appeal to a transcendent signifier or fixed foundation to ground thought.1 These were held to be incapable of accounting for the immanent, differential, concrete becomings that truly define things. Subjectivity was not then to be defined by a fixed essence or ahistoric component, but understood as an effect of power relations, norms, discourses, or differential processes. By emptying subjectivity of any substance, these critiques affirmed becoming over being, heterogeneity over homogeneity, and fluid, changing, and contestable identities over fixed, natural, and definitive ones. The second important trajectory refers to the so-called ontological turn in political theory that arose in late 1980s.2 There were, at least, three aspects to this: first, a growing recognition that, prior to talking of actual politics, it was necessary to determine what made something political rather than economic, aesthetic, moral, and so on. Second, in a mirroring of Heidegger’s affirmation of the ontological difference—the difference between the ontic and ontological levels of being—thinkers developed and affirmed the difference between specific (ontic) conceptions of politics and the (ontological) notion of the political subtending them.3 Only by understanding the latter could we understand the former. Importantly, this could not be done by appealing to a fixed, essential substance. Rather, and influenced by poststructuralist thought, proponents tended to affirm the idea that ‘the political’ was defined by fluid, dynamic, non-substantial relations. In so doing, they, third, returned to the thought of Carl Schmitt, who, through his insistence that the political is defined by the friend-enemy distinction,4 was understood to offer a model of the political grounded in relational contestation. One of the critical intents behind this turn to the question of the political was to show that, despite all appearances to the contrary, actual political

2  Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala authority was not absolute, but an inherently contingent and contestable phenomenon. That there was no absolute, fixed ground for politics and, by extension, political authority, did not lead to the affirmation of political nihilism, but to the idea that the political is grounded in contestation and heterogeneity rather than in agreement and homogeneity. Not surprisingly, this stimulated much innovative thought and heated debate on the subject, which generated new avenues for reflection, problems to be engaged with, and concepts to respond with.5 The poststructuralist critique of ontological substance and the return to the question of the political that characterized the final decades of the twentieth century led to the third trajectory informing this volume: the (re)turn to theology that has marked twenty-first century philosophy. While Western philosophical thought since around the eighteenth century witnessed a noticeable turn away from grounding itself in religious premises or foundations, a number of thinkers, located primarily but not exclusively in the French phenomenological tradition, began to rethink that secular heritage to show that theological motifs, ideas, and figures continued to influence, often in subtle and implicit ways, so-called secular philosophical thought.6 Rather than abandoning theology, philosophical thought had simply reconfigured its understanding and use of theology and so was still implicitly inspired by that which it claimed to depart from. This theological (re)turn has been heterogeneous, but the important point for present purposes is the logic underpinning it. Both the poststructuralist critique of ontological substance and the return to the question of the political seemed to be implicitly bolstered by a binary logic affirming fluid, contestable relations over fixed, ahistoric essences. The theological turn called this logical dependence into question. By showing that theological motifs continued to adhere to thinking that often explicitly distanced itself from or even rejected theology, it demonstrated that there was no strict binary opposition between the theological and secular. Terms that were held to be opposed were, in fact, defined by a subtle and implicit entwinement. From this perspective, then, the poststructuralist critique of ontological substance went too far in affirming difference over identity, insofar as it either emptied thought of all identity, replacing it with a constantly changing signifier that was unable to ground political action, or implicitly depended upon a form of the identity it otherwise rejected.7 As a consequence, the ontological turn to the political was derided for producing vapid, empty, conceptual abstractions that, paradoxically, were politically useless.8 The theological turn called out for an alternative understanding of political subjectivity. One way to overcome these problems would be to simply return to a privileging of ontological identity over difference and politics over the political.9 That, however, would be to affirm ontological substantial unity over difference, homogeneity over heterogeneity; a position that, after the poststructuralist challenge, seems naïve at best. An alternative would be to think of the relationship dialectically, whereby ontological identity and difference,

Introduction  3 politics and the political, are in constant entwinement. This would affirm the relationality inherent to the poststructuralist challenge, but would risk reducing that relationship to something akin to a dynamic unity. This volume is guided by a third strategy: returning to Carl Schmitt’s thought, it takes as its ‘starting’ point not his famous friend-enemy distinction, but his often-ignored notion of the complexio oppositorum. Introduced in Roman Catholicism and Political Form in a discussion concerning the relationship between theology and the political, Schmitt claims that the Roman Catholic Church is defined by ‘a complex of opposites, a complexio oppositorum’10 that transcends the oppositions it houses without either collapsing them or subsuming them into itself or each other. The basic point is that Schmitt argues that, in spite of being defined by contradictory relations, the Roman Catholic Church is able to live off of these tensions in a constructive and meaningful way. The purpose of our appeal to this notion is not to endorse Schmitt’s valorization of Roman Catholicism or even his description—one that even the most ardent Roman Catholic would most likely struggle to approve—of it, but to use the logic of the complexio oppositorum to rethink the nature of subjectivity and the political, including the relationship between them. In so doing, the volume does not privilege subjectivity or the political, nor does it collapse one into the other, but thinks both through the tension between them. Similarly, it does not reduce subjectivity or the political to identity or difference to affirm one over the other, but is guided by the contention that both are generated from the tension between identity and difference. This approach affirms the importance of the political and respects the poststructuralist critique of ontological substance, but does not simply affirm difference over identity or heterogeneity over homogeneity (or vice-versa). It suggests that both concepts, including the relationship between them, are generated from and through the tension between them. Starting from this intellectual heritage and guided by the contention that different conceptions of the political are, at least implicitly, committed to specific conceptions of subjectivity while different conceptions of subjectivity have different political implications, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to explore this issue. Rather than privilege one approach or one conception of the subjectivity-political relationship, the essays collected emphasize the nature and status of the and in the ‘subjectivity’ and ‘the political’ schema. By thinking from the place between subjectivity and the political, it is able to explore this relationship from a multitude of perspectives, directions, and thinkers to not only show the heterogeneity, openness, and contested nature of it, but also to feed off it positively. This heterogeneity and contestation is further affirmed through two structural components. While all the thinkers engaged with are part of the European philosophical tradition, the collection is explicitly multi-dimensional in (1) geographical composition, collecting ten essays from scholars, at different stages of their careers, located in nine institutions, eight countries

4  Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala (Belgium, Egypt, England, France, Poland, Spain, and U.S.), and three continents (North America, Europe, and Africa). Based on the notion that thought and being are entwined so that different academic environments lead to different expressions of thought, this multi-dimensionality allows us to bring together different styles of thinking, approaches, and interests to explore the different ways in which the subjectivity-political relationship can be and is being thought; and (2) theoretical composition, with each chapter engaging with a different aspect of the relationship and/or from a different theoretical angle. Furthermore, Marciniak, Rae, Singh, and, to a degree, Sawczyński, discuss postcolonial theory and/or non-European political events, thereby linking the Euro-centric theoretical focus to non-European political discourses and re-affirming the heterogeneity that lies at the ‘heart’ of contemporary approaches to the subjectivity-political relationship. Somewhat paradoxically, the tension, contestation, and difference inherent to the various contributions also provide the volume with coherence because they re-affirm its guiding principle: the subjectivity-political relationship cannot simply be thought from one privileged aspect or perspective, but is better understood as being generated from the tension between aspects.

Structure of the Book The collection is composed of ten original essays, grouped around two parts, each consisting of five chapters. While not suggesting that ‘subjectivity’ and the ‘political’ are absolutely distinct, the chapters collected in each part approach the subjectivity-political relationship through the lens of one side. Whereas it recognizes that the political is implicated in and shaped by a subjectivity-forming process, the first part, called ‘Political Subjectivities,’ is comprised of essays that explore the relationship through the standpoint of the ‘political’ aspect. The second part, called ‘Political Subjectivities,’ gathers chapters that explore the relationship through the question of ‘subjectivity.’ Although this demonstrates the contestation that exists at the ‘macro’ level of the book, that is, the debate taking place regarding the relationship between ‘subjectivity’ and the ‘political,’ it also reveals the significant debate taking place at the ‘micro’ level within each part. In so doing, it demonstrates the contentious nature of the terms ‘subjectivity’ and the ‘political,’ including the relationship between them. Part I, Political Subjectivities, starts with Liesbeth Schoonheim’s (Chapter 1) analysis of Hannah Arendt’s thinking on the role that different conceptions of law play in generating the political and, by extension, politics. Noting that Arendt’s political thought is premised on the idea that the constitution (law) is supposed to originate from participatory democratic practices, as well as to institute and integrate these practices into political decisionmaking, Schoonheim links this to the distinction between power and violence to claim that, for Arendt, law should be based on the former not the latter.

Introduction  5 However, by identifying two conceptions of law—the Greek notion of nomos and the Roman lex—in Arendt’s thinking and developing the political implications of both, Schoonheim demonstrates that Arendt is far more ambivalent about the law-violence relationship than her political thought otherwise reveals. In so doing, Schoonheim brings to the fore the tense relationship that exists in Arendt’s thinking between law, violence, and politics. In Chapter 2, Emma Ingala complements and departs from Schoonheim’s focus by examining the role that Arendt’s thinking played in later thought, specifically that of Judith Butler. To do so, Ingala concentrates on the ways in which Butler employs and elaborates Arendtian terms. Specifically, she argues that Butler takes over Arendt’s notion of the space of appearance to posit the political and subjectivity in relational, rather than substantial, terms. Furthermore, she shows that Butler’s thinking develops through the addition of the body and its precarity to the Arendtian space of appearance, thereby deconstructing the public-private divide that grounds Arendt’s conception of the political. With this, Ingala explores the often overlooked relationship between Arendt’s and Butler’s thinking, clarifies the entwinement between key Butlerian terms—such as precariousness, precarity, vulnerability, and performativity—and presents a relational understanding of the political that sees it taking place in the ‘in-between’ of the space of appearance. With this, she re-affirms its unstable, rather than monolithic or total, character. This is developed further by Gavin Rae (Chapter 3), who explores the instability of ‘the political’ through an analysis of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. While much work has been done on Levinas’s ethical theory, increasing attention is being paid to the political aspect of his thinking. By showing that Levinas’s notion of the political is intimately connected to the theological, Rae charts two conceptions of the political in Levinas’s work based on the theological underpinnings of each: one from Christian premises and one from Judaic principles. Rae suggests that Levinas affirms the later over the former, before explaining what this entails through Levinas’s analysis of the difference between the notion and State of Israel. While the latter is orientated from but always fails to accord with the ethical demand inherent to the former, Levinas claims that the diachronic nature of social relations means that the political can and must continue to affirm the ethical demand. For this reason, Levinas brings to our attention the way in which the political is caught between failure and redemption; it is this place between the two that generates its meaning. Levinas’s work on the theology-Judaism-political relationship exerted a huge influence over subsequent thinking, including that of Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben. In Chapter 4, Piotr Sawczyński turns to Agamben’s thought to argue that it is to a large extent influenced by Gershom Scholem’s conceptual matrix, itself developed from the modern Kabbalistic metaphysics of Isaac Luria and his followers. Agamben’s idea of political subjectivity

6  Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala is then worked out through a conception of messianic action that is dialectically related to the concept of the nothing. The nothing does not, however, simply exist at the ‘center’ of the political, but is that which generates the political. Agamben claims, therefore, that effective gestures of political emancipation ought to repeat the dialectical, cosmological trajectory sketched by Luria, which results in neither reconciliation, nor apocalyptic violence, but cunning messianic tricks that challenge the structure of oppressive immanence. Agamben’s analysis of the nothing is politically significant because it demonstrates that political structures are never total, but, in being linked to the nothing, are always unstable and thus contestable. This conclusion is taken up by Katarzyna Marciniak’s (Chapter 5) examination of the role(s) that aporias play in the political through her engagement with the relationship between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as this is manifested from and through the notion of ‘foreignness.’ Specifically, she uses the Syrian refugee crisis as a platform to address Jacques Derrida’s complex contention that while the aporetic foreign has been philosophically considered a figure of death, there is an obligation to host the foreigner. Marciniak examines this through reference to a number of cinematic examples that discuss the figure of the foreigner and its fraught relation to mobility, agency, and national legitimacy, claiming that these are central to any understanding of current processes of globalization as a contested historical phenomenon. In so doing, she brings to our attention the fundamental role that relations play in generating the political, shows that this concept is structured from and around the host-foreigner, inside-outside dichotomies, and demonstrates that its relational structure means that the political is always aporetic. Part II, Political Subjectivities, turns from analyses of the political-subjectivity relationship that privilege the former to ones that privilege the latter. While approaching the issue in different ways, each contribution is guided by the notion that the category ‘subjectivity’ is not only relational rather than substantial, but is also politically significant. In Chapter 6, Surti Singh compares and contrasts the thought of Julia Kristeva and Theodor Adorno. Claiming that both privilege modern art as an object of mediation between the individual and society (which in its modern form is totalizing), Singh argues that Kristeva and Adorno offer different ways, via their respective concepts of the abject and the ugly, to access the origins of subjectivity repressed by the dominant socio-symbolic system. For both thinkers, this return is a necessary part of the recovery of the subject as a political project. As a consequence, Singh argues that Kristeva and Adorno share the common project of redeeming the Western subject, an endeavor that brings her to question the universality of their conclusions, as a precursor to exploring how contemporary feminist and postcolonial theory might overcome the Western-centrism of their thinking. In so doing, Singh brings to our attention the social and symbolic processes that give rise to the notion of ‘subjectivity,’ before linking it to the way that power relations, manifested

Introduction  7 through the masculine/feminine, Western/non-Western dichotomies, shape and define subjectivity. In Chapter 7, Robert P. Jackson takes this a step further by engaging with the thought of Antonio Gramsci to question whether the category ‘subjectivity’ is an appropriate one. While most famous for his notion of ‘hegemony,’ Jackson argues that, in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci distinguishes between persons and subjects, and models his notion of subjectivity on the former. The reason for this is that the latter is considered to be too indeterminate and abstract to adequately conceptualize the materiality of human being. Arguing that Gramsci develops a theory of persons from his philosophy of praxis and social relations, Jackson maintains that Gramsci’s modern conception of the person neither diminishes the role of consciousness nor affirms the abstract idealism that, according to Gramsci, has been traditionally associated with ‘subjectivity.’ With this, he brings to the fore the question of the relationship between political subjectivity and the ­idealism/ materialism or mind/body problem. The next two chapters extend this questioning, first through Stephen A. Noble’s engagement with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodied consciousness and subsequently with Joel Mitrani’s analysis of John Stuart Mill’s account of genius. In Chapter 8, Noble argues that, while his closest professional collaborators and personal friends noted that Merleau-Ponty’s thinking was shaped, in part, by the political events of his age, commentators have tended to neglect this to focus on his highly original, ontological notion of flesh, with a primary, and often exclusive, emphasis given to the influences of Husserl and Heidegger. As a consequence, Merleau-Ponty’s political thought has tended to be ignored, as has the central role that politics plays in his philosophy, including in its development. To start to rectify this, Noble identifies the various ways in which Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analyses of embodied subjectivity are tied to and informed by a number of the political events that he lived through, such as his experiences of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France, his role in the French resistance, his relationship to the Soviet Union and the French Communist party as well as of Marxism more generally, and the internal politics of Les temps modernes, the journal he co-founded with Jean-Paul Sartre. In so doing, Noble shows, through Merleau-Ponty’s own political experiences and engagements, that subjectivity is always embodied and that embodiment is inherently political. In Chapter 9, Yoel Mitrani takes a different approach by returning to John Stuart Mill’s thinking to argue that he outlines a theory of political subjectivity based on a reconstructed notion of genius. Mitrani affirms that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘genius’ was integral to the subjectivity-political relationship and revolved around, what he calls, a Romantic conception of genius that is best understood through aesthetic analogy, whereby the then dominant mimetic sense of art was gradually replaced by a conception of art based on the notion of individual creativity. According

8  Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala to this notion, an individual-of-genius would create original and expressive art works based in and from his subjective feelings and imagination. Mitrani holds that Mill developed a very different conception of ‘genius,’ termed a Liberal conception of genius, that was not only grounded in an empiricist theory of knowledge, but which was also more ‘democratic’ in nature than the Romantic sense because it held that ‘genius’ was not defined by momentary flashes of inspiration, but concerned with the development of an individual’s ‘thinking faculty.’ With this, Mitrani not only suggests how subjectivity can result from the relationship between two conceptions of genius, but also argues that the supposed imaginary aspects of subjectivity are grounded in materiality, thereby disrupting any straightforward idealism/materialism, mind/body duality and showing how subjectivity is generated from the tension between the two aspects of each relation. In Chapter 10, Antonio Gómez Ramos suggests that the heterogeneous responses to the issue of political subjectivity given in the previous chapters brings forth the questions of what political subjectivity amounts to for an individual and how this affects her or his own sense of selfhood. Starting with Étienne Balibar’s comments on the instability of the equation of ‘man’ and ‘citizen,’ and tracing this back to Rousseau and the French Revolution, Ramos spends the majority of the chapter exploring and comparing two different responses to this problem as these are found in the thought of Hegel and the early Heidegger. In the case of the former, Ramos argues that political subjectivity is intimately linked to an individual’s relationship to standing institutional structures. The dialectical relationship between individual and institution means that, for Hegel, subjectivity is always political: every individual subject can only ever be truly herself if she achieves some integration and recognition within the intersubjective structures that Hegel calls ethical life (Sittlichkeit). In contrast, the pre-Kehre Heidegger tends to consider Dasein as a being-in-the-world, an individual living within the established structures of everyday life; that is, an inauthentic existence, a life in the ‘They’ that ought to be existentially modified through the call from its own conscience and a confrontation with itself, from where a real, authentic self is enacted. Such a call or vocation does not belong to the common ethical life, even if the response by the Dasein happens to be political. Rather than side with either thinker or propose a mediating response to resolve the issue, Ramos leaves it open and asks us to think about the question: how political is the self?

Notes  1 The literature on poststructuralism is enormous, but the classic overview is found in François Dosse, History of Structuralism, volume 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, translated by Deborah Glassman (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997) and History of Structuralism, volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present, translated by Deborah Glassman (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997).

Introduction  9   2 A good overview of the ontological turn is found in Nathan Widder, Political Theory After Deleuze (Continuum: London, 2012), pp. 1–20.   3 For a discussion of the notion of the political difference, see Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2007).   4 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, translated by George Schwab (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1996), p. 26.   5 See, for example, Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (Verso: London, 1993), and the essays collected in Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (Verso: London, 1999).  6 See, for example, Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1999); Dominique Janicaud, JeanFrancois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate (Fordhamn University Press: New York, 2001); Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology (Fordham University Press: New York, 2010); J. Aaron Simmons, God and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn (Indiana University Press: Indiana, 2011).  7 On this point, see Gavin Rae, Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2014), chapter 9.   8 See, for example, Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political (Polity: Cambridge, 2014).   9 For a defense of this position, see James Wiley, Politics and the Concept of the Political: The Political Imagination (Routledge: New York, 2016). 10 Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, translated by G.L. Ulmen (Greenwood Press: Westport, CT, 1996), p. 7.

Part I

Political Subjectivities

1 The Limits of Nomos Hannah Arendt on Law, Politics, and the Polis Liesbeth Schoonheim

This chapter explores the nexus of subjectivity and the political via Hannah Arendt’s work on law and the legal constitution of a political order. For Arendt, the constitution is supposed to originate in participatory democratic practices, as well as to institute and integrate these practices into political decision-making.1 Legal institutions are, furthermore, efficacious insofar as they structure these practices. Arendt writes in her 1970 essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ that ‘all political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.’2 Arendt painstakingly distinguishes between power (the world-changing potential of collective, performative action) and violence (the force yielded in instrumental action that Arendt also calls ‘work’).3 Law, if it is to have any legitimacy, should be based on the former and not on the latter. Yet, as I will argue in this chapter, Arendt is more ambivalent about law and its relation to violence than her quasi-nonchalant reference to ‘materializations’4 seems to suggest. In The Human Condition, she contends that materialization is a transformation of a process into an object, implying a form of violence that involves killing or interrupting a ‘life process.’5 Violence is thus not prohibitive or repressive, but productive.6 If we interpret legislation through the lens of fabrication—that is, as activities that are violent and generative—does this permit us to understand how law establishes a space of equality and freedom alongside one of inequality and subjugation? And is it conceivable that law not only guarantees the continuation of democratic practices (and what Arendt calls its ‘spirit,’ the animating principle of action7), but also solidifies the social inequalities under which these practices first emerged? I will explore these questions through a comparative reading of Arendt’s discussion of nomos, the Greek law demarcating the limits of the city-state, and lex, the Roman pacts with their allies. Nomos and lex are both constructivist concepts of law that highlight the artificiality of political organization.8 The standard reading,9 spurred by Arendt’s own assertions, insists that nomos refers to territory, constructing a ‘space of appearance’10 within which democratic practices take place, while lex is a relational term that

14  Liesbeth Schoonheim constructs ‘roles’ (such as legal personhood) that agents can take up in their public performance.11 Because Arendt considers nomos and lex to be untainted by references to a transcendent, absolute authority, she holds that these concepts provide important resources for thinking through the possibility of secular legal foundations in modernity.12 As such, she turns to nomos and lex as part of her search for a ‘new political principle, . . . a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted in and controlled by newly defined territorial entities.’13 The obvious objection to using nomos and lex to develop a secular conception of law is that the Greek city-state and the Roman republic restricted citizenship to an elite, condemning large parts of society to an inferior legal status, of which the slave is the most extreme example. Various proponents have tried to democratize Arendt’s thought by suggesting, for instance, that nomos, as a demarcation principle, can be maintained insofar as it becomes an object of contestation;14 and that lex (or, more precisely, persona, the concept of legal personhood inscribed in Roman law) can be legitimated when the roles are authored by citizens themselves.15 Rather than try to resolve the tension between power and violence, this chapter investigates how law can be violent and as such impede its own goal of organizing and stabilizing a political space. To do so, I turn to the question regarding the conception of artificiality (and its opposite term, nature) that is operative in Arendt’s discussion of nomos and lex. My comparison does not then start from the observation that nomos is a spatial concept and that lex is a relational one, but from the assumption that nomos and lex transform, in different ways, nature into an object, and humans into legal subjects. More specifically, I will show that nomos (section 1) and lex (section 2) entail distributions of violence that stratify societies into different groups, before suggesting that Arendt’s attempt to identify an ‘origin’ for a political community that consists in pure action ignores the social differentiation under which action takes place (section 3). In conclusion, I show the problems that arise from this for her analysis of the civil rights movement, before alluding to an alternative form of politics.

Nomos The word ‘nomos’ refers, on Arendt’s telling, to the Greek concept of law and to everything that is man-made. As such, nomos is opposed to nature or ‘phusis.’16 ‘The very word [nómos], which . . . receives its full meaning as the opposite of [phusis] or things that are natural, stresses the ‘artificial,’ conventional, man-made nature of the laws.’17 The opposition of nomos and phusis is closely related to the distinction between ‘world’—the collection of artifacts, including our use of them and our speaking about them—and, what Arendt calls, ‘earth,’ nature, or the biological cycle of consumption and production.18 ‘World’ is superimposed on the ‘earth’ because the former

The Limits of Nomos  15 is ‘the man-made home erected on earth and made of the material which earthly nature delivers into human hands.’19 The activity through which humans produce artifacts—which Arendt calls ‘work,’ ‘fabrication’ and ‘poiesis’—requires technical skill, a nondiscursive knowledge of how to transform natural resources into objects.20 Furthermore, insofar as human production entails the use of natural materials, it consists of a violent act of ‘killing’ or ‘interrupting’ the natural cycles producing these materials: ‘This element of violation and violence is present in all fabrication.’21 It is, however, only through this act that nature becomes an object of description, and gains a specific articulateness: ‘Only we who have erected the objectivity of a world of our own from what nature gives us . . . can look upon nature as something “objective.” ’22 Arendt goes so far as to suggest that ‘all subject-object-categories . . . come from the experience of work.’23 The violence of fabrication is thus, first of all, a precondition for objectivity, in the sense of an object standing over against a subject that can be named and discussed, as well as subjectivity in the sense of a subject controlling and mastering material.24 Second, once an artifact has become an object of discourse, it can also retroactively justify the violence committed during its fabrication: ‘The end justifies the violence done to nature to win the material.’25 This justification implies a value judgment insofar as the natural resource is valued for the product into which it is made.26 It is hard to overestimate the formative significance that Arendt ascribes to the experience of fabrication for the Greek imaginary and, through its influence on philosophy, for Western thought. She does not mean that the Greeks were utilitarians27—far from it, as she reminds us that the Greeks asserted the eminence of politics, before, with the Platonic tradition, affirming contemplation as the highest human faculty. Rather, Greek reflections on human activities were heavily influenced by the categories originating in the experience of fabrication.28 Crucially, Arendt is highly critical of this influence because ‘the experience of fabrication (ποιεῖν) displaced all other experiences.’29 The predominance of object-subject and means-end dichotomies was particularly pernicious to the status of labor, the activity through which humans satisfy their corporeal needs and guarantee survival.30 Arendt makes two claims about labor that are relevant to its perversion by ‘the model of fabrication.’31 First, labor signifies biological necessity, in that the satisfaction of our needs is dictated by the necessity of survival.32 Second, although we all experience these corporeal needs, these experiences are so private that they defy communication.33 The instrumental approach to labor tends to depreciate this activity as ‘animal’ and ‘slavish,’34 and claims that it culminates in ‘contempt for life, which only appears as justified, when it serves a “higher end.” ’35 It is in light of Arendt’s critique of instrumentality that we should read her comment that ‘in their opinion [i.e., of the Greek citizens], the lawmaker was like the builder of the city wall, someone who had to do and finish his

16  Liesbeth Schoonheim work before political activity could begin.’36 The foundation of law is, for the Greeks, a singular and violent event that finds its end in the establishment of a political space—‘end’ in its ‘twofold sense that the production process comes to an end in it . . . and that it is only a means to produce this end.’37 The law is, in this view, pre-political in the double sense that it precedes politics and is a condition for politics. The paradigmatic example of legislation is the institution of slavery, which Arendt describes as the ‘prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of life for the freedom of world.’38 To understand this, we have to engage with her understanding of violence. As Peg Birmingham suggests, there is a strong similarity between Arendt’s critique of instrumental violence and Benjamin’s critique of mythical violence in his 1921 essay ‘Critique of Violence,’39 insofar as both question if violence can ever be a justified means.40 Jacques Derrida suggests in his reading of Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence that: A “successful” revolution, the “successful” foundation of a state . . . will produce after the fact [après coup] what it was destined in advance to produce, namely, proper interpretative models to read in return, to give sense, necessity and above all legitimacy to the violence that has produced, among others, the interpretative model in question, that is, the discourse of its self-legitimization.41 Derrida’s point is that an instrumental justification for violence in terms of the means-end dichotomy is established ex post facto; and that the acceptance of this justification depends on the ‘success’ of the foundational violence being repeated and incorporated into a symbolic order. Derrida’s reading of Benjamin helps us to understand Arendt’s discussion of nomos because it redirects our gaze from the singular, pre-political, act of foundation (or, as Benjamin would call it, ‘law-making’ violence42) to the more quotidian practices that reproduce the original act of violence (in Benjaminian terms, ‘lawpreserving’ violence’43) and the speech acts that are corroborated by these minor acts of violence and, in turn, legitimate the original act of violence. Given the central importance of slavery for the legal foundation of the Greek city-state, the nexus of concepts around slavery allows us to explore how violent practices contribute to the retroactive legitimization of the original act of violence. What I propose is that we should read Arendt as suggesting that the enslavement of particular persons is justified in terms that at once depend on and affirm the justification for the institution of slavery. The close relationship between the institution of slavery and individual acts of enslavement is by no means self-evident, as the justification of the former does not necessarily entail the justification of the latter. For instance, Bernard Williams suggests that in the Greek view, slavery was considered necessary for the existence of the polis, while ‘being captured into slavery was a paradigm of disaster.’44 In Arendt’s telling, however, both the justification for the institution of slavery and for acts of enslavement derives their

The Limits of Nomos  17 plausibility from the assumption that life is merely a means towards a higher end—in this case, politics. Arendt claims that, in the Greek view, enslavement is justified by the fact that the slave shows ‘too great a love for life.’45 This love for life manifests itself in the choice made by a free citizen facing slavery: does he choose a life of freedom, thus opting for suicide, or a life of corporeal compulsion, thus reducing himself to a laboring animal? ‘That the slave let himself be coerced is his slavishness—namely, that he does not prefer/bring forward [vorziehen] the death.’46 Hence, the slave ‘served only life’s necessities and submitted to the compulsion of his master because he wanted to stay alive at all costs.’47 Reading Arendt’s texts through a Benjamin-Derridean lens draws attention to the ex-post-facto dimension of justifications of violence. Arendt suggests that the institution of slavery is initially a response to—and attempt at mastery of—natural, corporeal needs: Against the violence, that nature does to humans, who have a body, one responds with compulsion, with the compelling of nature or with the violent rule over humans. In this sense slavery is . . . as the Greeks understood it, the first and most original form of rule and the requirement of all political life.48 The Greeks did not create slavery in order to establish a political space. Rather, the institution of slavery opened up the hitherto unknown possibility of politics. That slavery enables (although, we should hastily add, does not determine) political action, motivates Arendt’s innocuous comment that the law was initially identified with the ‘boundaries between one household and another.’49 Only later did the law transcend this original meaning to include the ring-wall around the town: a ‘wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses . . . but not a city, a political community.’50 These throwaway comments are, in their depersonalization of the development of law, at odds with the emphasis on determination and intention that pervades Arendt’s other comments on Greek legislation. I take Arendt to suggest that the primal law, the wall around the private space, was meant to protect the household or, more precisely, to guarantee that the head of the household had at his disposal the means of subsistence.51 This law demarcates one space—the private space of the oikos—and by doing so creates another space—the space between the various households. To stay with the spatial metaphor, this space outside of the oikos is not yet a public space: it is merely a space where agents do not attend to their bodily needs. For this space to become public, humans have to make it the site of collective action: Greeks formed the polis around the Homeric agora, the place where free men assembled and conversed, and by doing so centered what was

18  Liesbeth Schoonheim truly “political” . . . on this world of coming together, being together, speaking about something with one another.52 Once this has happened—when, in Arendt’s telling, the lords had left the premises of their household and gathered with the heads of other households in the spaces between the houses and started to debate with one other—a wall was erected around this common space. To conclude this section, let me discuss two ways in which, as Arendt would put it, slavery ‘took its revenge’ on the Greeks.53 This revenge mostly consisted in the Greek predilection to articulate political affairs in terms derived from slavery such as the concepts of rule and mastery.54 So, for instance, Arendt traces the classical distinction between monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy to the misconception that the number of rulers (as opposed to the principle of action) is decisive when defining the form of government.55 Indeed, she even mentions that the concept of rule distorted Greek reflection on politics to the extent that ‘in his relationship to the law—that is, to those limits inside of which he was free and that circumscribed the space of his freedom—the citizen of the polis was a “son and slave” his entire life.’56 Second, in a rather odd passage, Arendt suggests that the Greek citizens, relieved from the burden of producing their means of subsistence, paid ‘the price for absolute freedom from necessity [with the experience of] . . . life itself.’57 In an attempt to clarify this, she asserts that the ‘perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor would . . . deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality.’58 One interpretation would be that an important source of joy consists in the experience of feelings one’s needs fulfilled.59 Because Greek citizens never suffered any needs, they did not experience the joy of satisfying those needs, which is the human experience par excellence insofar as humans are living human beings. Another interpretation would relate her comment to her assertion that the slave is confined to the ‘privacy of his [the laboring human’s] own body.’60 Arendt might then mean that the slave, banned from the intersubjective space of public life, is kept from communicating his experiences with others and hence could only experience the mute processes going on in his body. The master on the other hand spends so much time exchanging and validating his experiences with others that he could not take seriously any experience that evades communication (that is, all corporeal and sensual phenomena). To summarize, these two effects of slavery on politics (as well as, of course, the suffering inflicted by enslavement) are for Arendt closely related to the (in her view, spurious) Greek conception of legislation as a pre-political act of guaranteeing the material conditions of existence. The relationship that Arendt suggests between the reproduction of structures of domination on the one hand and the instrumental, pre-political nature of law on the other, raises the question as to whether a performative and political conception of law would avoid the reproduction of structures of domination.

The Limits of Nomos  19

Lex Explicitly contrasting the Greeks to the Romans, Arendt writes that ‘only for the Romans does legislative activity, and with it the laws themselves, belong to the realm of politics.’61 In the Roman view, legislation does not consist in a violent act of demarcating borders, but instead frames a covenant between two parties. Given the discursive and non-violent dimension of these treaties, a number of scholars62 have concluded that Arendt favors Rome over Athens, a conclusion supported by her praise for the ‘political genius of Rome: legislation and foundation.’63 But is this the case? Before answering that question, we need to remind ourselves that Arendt turns to nomos and lex to conceptualize a ‘new law on earth.’64 She has particularly high expectations for the Roman concept of humanity or humanitas, which emerged in the wake of the pax Romana, because, in it, she discerns the possibility for people from different backgrounds to exchange opinions.65 Plurality refers in this context not just to individual uniqueness (as it does in The Human Condition66), but also to the uniqueness of a people who are marked by ‘a common language, religion, a common history, customs, and laws.’67 Against this background, Arendt articulates her thoughts on the covenants—the leges—that the Romans concluded with their vanquished enemies.68 On Arendt’s telling, the foundation of Rome coincided with the conclusion of a covenant: the Roman people ‘derived its own historical existence from a treaty,’69 either from the treaty that Aeneas drew up with the tribes living on the Italian shores70 or from the one between the plebes and the patricians.71 In addition, she considers Roman politics not to be, as in Greek antiquity, motivated by an aspiration for individual fame, but by the conservation and embellishment of the glory of the Roman people: ‘To be engaged in politics meant first and foremost to preserve the foundation of the city of Rome.’72 One of the upshots of the Roman view of legislation and politics is that they (in contradistinction to the Greeks) succeed in preserving and extending their legal constitution in a relentless process of ‘augmentation.’73 This process can be interpreted in various ways, but I will focus here on its meaning as territorial expansion.74 The Romans added territory ‘to the original foundation until the whole of Italy and, eventually, the whole of the Western world were united and administered by Rome, as though the whole world were nothing but Roman hinterland.’75 The extent to which Arendt considers the pax Romana a political, nonviolent form of expansion becomes clear from three points that emerge from her discussion of lex. First, a peace treaty ‘connects two things or two partners whom external circumstances have brought together.’76 I take Arendt to mean that the two peoples who enter into an alliance are ontologically independent, or, as she writes in another context, their ‘common factual present is not based on a common past and does not in the least guarantee

20  Liesbeth Schoonheim a common future.’77 Second, although the unequal force of one party over the other decides the battle, Arendt emphasizes that this inequality is superseded during the peace negotiations by a reciprocal dependence for recognition: an ‘agreement can come about only when the interests of both sides are recognized.’78 Third, as these peace treaties result from a process of discussion, their negotiation belongs to the core of political activities: ‘Formulation of law, of this lasting tie that follows the violence of war, is itself tied to proposals and counterproposals, that is, to speech, which in the view of both the Greeks and the Romans was central to all politics.’79 One of the defining features of the pax Romana was its endurance and stability.80 Arendt relates this not just to the Romans’ military superiority, but also to the fact that the covenants consisted of a promise; that is, a speech act that stabilizes politics.81 This stability pertains, first, to the identity of the agents involved: without promises, ‘we would never be able to keep our identities.’82 More specifically, the stabilizing capacity depends on the ‘presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills.’83 Furthermore, a promise not only stabilizes our identity, but also ‘the world,’ the artificial and objective conditions under which we act: ‘there is an element of the world-building capacity of man in the human faculty of making and keeping promises.’84 Arendt makes this comment in relation to the American Revolution, but it equally applies to the Roman capacity for alliance-formation, which allows the Romans to ‘establish specific public realms between Rome and her neighbors.’85 Arendt explains that these public realms are ‘very specifically a world of its own between both [the Romans and their ally].’86 In Men in Dark Times, she adds that, in these public realms, ‘people of widely different ethnic origins and descent could . . . enter into the discourse among cultivated Romans, could discuss the world and life with them.’87 Thus, the Roman notion of lex as a treaty between warring parties contains, for Arendt, not only the promise of non-violent law, but also the potential of an inclusive and diverse public space. Nevertheless, we need to pause before concluding that Arendt considers pax Romana the ultimate model for a new, secular law. This is not just because of concern over whether a peaceful, voluntary human bond can originate in a violent, military encounter, but also because Arendt would object to the Roman understanding of artificiality that permeates their political and legal activities—or rather, its conspicuous absence. Arendt’s reconstruction of the Roman disposition towards their foundation is interspersed with references to nature and incremental growth. The Romans, Arendt concurs, ‘were really rooted in the soil.’88 These roots were deepest where the city of Rome was founded: ‘the Romans were bound to the specific locality of this one city.’89 Discussing the senators, who derive their authority from their ancestral bond to the founders of the republic, Arendt contends that ‘old age, as distinguished from mere adulthood, was felt by the Romans to contain the very climax of human life . . . because the old man had grown closer to the ancestors and the past.’90 And she continues:

The Limits of Nomos  21 contrary to our concept of growth, where one grows into the future, the Romans felt that growth was directed toward the past . . . it is as though the peak of the pyramid [depicting hierarchy] did not reach into the height of a sky above . . . the earth, but into the depth of an earthly past.91 The political context in which Arendt deploys the terms ‘growth,’ ‘roots,’ ‘soil,’ and ‘earth,’ suggests that, for the Romans, nature was not antithetical to civilization. The primal experience of interacting with nature was situated in agriculture, which they understood as entailing the ‘intercourse of man with nature in the sense of cultivating and tending nature until it becomes fit for human habitation.’92 In farming, the ‘same task, performed year in and year out, eventually transform[s] the wilderness into cultivated land.’93 In this case, a repeated activity gives rise to a relatively stable outcome— ‘relatively stable’ because if it is not tended to, the cultivated land will return to wilderness. Making the earth a place fit for human habituation—for culture and politics—thus requires constant and diligent effort. Arendt clearly appreciates the Roman disposition ‘to cultivate, to dwell, to take care, to tend and preserve [because] it indicates an attitude of loving care and stands in sharp contrast to all efforts to subject nature to the domination of man.’94 In the previous section, we saw how the domineering comportment of the Greeks toward nature manifested itself in, among other things, the institution of slavery. Yet, if we push Arendt beyond what she explicitly says, the absence of this comportment in Roman society does not mean that Roman legislation was free of violence. My concern is not so much that the activities which the Romans described through the non-violent terminology of cultivating were ‘actually’ forms of violent fabrication, but that violence can be exerted through the denial of care and loving attention or, more precisely, through the withholding from individuals of the validation of their history and lineage. Let’s look, for instance, at the slave in the Roman republic. Arendt suggests that the slave is denied artificial personhood—persona—and that he is nothing but natural life—homo, a human being without any legal rights.95 This human without rights and duties is ‘a “natural man”—that is, a human being or homo in the original meaning of the word, indicating someone outside the range of the law and the body politic of the citizens.’96 ‘Nature’ in this quote refers not to corporeal needs but to the natural variation among humans, the individuation of the human species into distinct organisms, what Arendt calls ‘those natural and always present differences and differentiations.’97 The contemporary example of a ‘natural man’ who is denied legal personhood is the stateless person who, like the slave, is ‘different in general, representing nothing but his own absolutely unique individuality.’98 In a little-noticed footnote in The Human Condition, Arendt comments on the Romans’ rejection of a proposition to ‘have slaves dress uniformly in public so that they could immediately be distinguished from free citizens.’99

22  Liesbeth Schoonheim The proposition was turned down out of fear for ‘appearance as such.’100 The Roman senate refused their slave population a uniform dress that would have been the perfect mirror image of their own purple-lined togas. In contrast, the sans-culottes, who were driven by the desire to appear in public, decided to ‘adopt a costume of their own.’101 Despite their continued exclusion from economic and political matters, the sans-culottes made themselves into a conspicuous political force by the mere fact of their increased public presence. Moreover, their political identity had an antagonistic dimension from the very start: not only did they distinguish themselves through their outfit, but the ‘distinction was directed against all others.’102 The Roman senate, by denying the slave population a conspicuous public presence, successfully prevented it from developing from an amalgam of unique, single individuals into a collective agent that could challenge the status quo. Regarding the Roman political agent, Arendt comments that the res publica ‘was always and consciously put above individual glory, with the result that no one could ever fully become himself.’103 The Roman citizen, when appearing in public, did not distinguish himself from his fellowcitizens, but instead only appeared as a representative of his family. She articulates this same thought in terms of persona. Persona originally referred to the theatre masks that hides the face but ‘make[s] it possible for the voice to sound through.’104 Only later, under the Romans, did it start to signify legal personhood. Arendt remarks that ‘in Rome the voice that sounded through the mask was certainly the voice of the ancestors rather than the voice of the individual actor.’105 Since, for Arendt, the voice signifies individuality,106 this quote indicates that individuality is trumped by ancestry—and that authority depends on the latter, and not on the former. Again, we see here the idea that some—the Romans and, given the reference to the ancestors, probably the senators—are politically powerful because they can claim a lineage going back to the inception of the Roman people. But what about Rome’s allies? Does Arendt think that they were allowed to cultivate the ‘historical and political reality housed in [their] world of products’107 after their defeat at Roman hands? Arendt’s answer is ambivalent. On the one hand, she insinuates that the Romans, by incorporating their enemies into the system of alliances, refrained from eliminating their political existence.108 But, on the other hand, she suggests that ‘the idea that there could be some other absolutely different entity equal to Rome in greatness and thus worthy of being remembered in history . . . was utterly alien to the Romans.’109 Again, Arendt presents us with a picture of the Romans in which they are concerned only with their own historical importance to the extent that they purposefully repudiate the historical claims made by non-Roman agents. In relation to the question of whether Arendt affirms a Roman or Greek conception of law, I think Arendt prefers lex to nomos because the former’s consensual basis offers a better model for a modern concept of political and legal organization. Nevertheless, this should be qualified in light of Arendt’s

The Limits of Nomos  23 doubt about the Roman capacity to guarantee cultural diversity. By extending Arendt’s criticism of the incremental and gradual notion of cultivation into a critique of the Roman denial of minority histories, I hope to have emphasized, what Étienne Balibar calls, the ‘equivocality, dissemination, and ambiguousness of the forms of violence.’110 I would propose adding the denial (or, one could argue, outright repression) of minority histories to the list of manifestations of violence that Arendt describes. Just as the concept of violence is a placeholder in Arendt’s thought for a variety of phenomena, so are its complementary notions of nature and action. This is particularly clear when we focus on the similarities that Arendt identifies between nomos and lex, wherein, in both, (1) action emerges from a situation of unequal force, whether that is the institution of slavery enabling heads of households to gather at the market place (as in Greece) or a military victory leading to peace negotiations (as in Rome). Furthermore, both nomos and lex (2) differentiate society into distinct groups, with the subaltern group being designated as ‘natural,’ either in the sense of metabolic process of reproduction (as in Greece) or of natural, innate differences (as in Rome). Finally, in both cases (3) political action takes up a distinctly Greek or Roman shape that is retrospectively articulated in terms of their respective notion of artificiality, either by suggesting (as the Greeks did) that the agonal striving for glory requires the pre-political act of mastering one’s corporeal needs or by arguing (as the Romans did) that the res publica involves caring for its growth.

Origins of Law My reading of nomos and lex shows how law conditions action, insofar as it establishes a social organization that offers the historical conditions of possibility for action. I proceeded by adopting the Benjamin-Derridean idea that law-preserving violence creates the symbolic order that retroactively legitimates the law-making violence. I believe that Arendt would initially agree but, rather than pursuing a critique of law based on its differentiation of society and fragmentation of experience, she ultimately turns to undertake a critique of the city-state and the republic in terms of a Verfallsgeschichte (history of decline). I submit that this historical narrative centers the self-disclosing dimension of action; that is, the constitution of the identity of an agent engaged in an intersubjective, discursive practice. Whether this agent is an individual (such as the Greek citizen) or a collective (such as the Roman people) is less important than the uncertainty involved in this practice,111 as well as its dependence on the presence of others,112 which calls forth an attempt, on behalf of the agent, to control and master his identity. In Arendt’s view, Periclean Athens and the Roman republic tried to emancipate from this uncertainty and dependence, but through this attempt they forfeited the authentic political experience that constituted what Arendt, in Heideggerian fashion, considers their spiritual existence.

24  Liesbeth Schoonheim Surprisingly, for those who assume that the Athenian democracy offers the paradigmatic example of the agonal spirit,113 Arendt situates this authentic experience not in Athens, but in the Trojan War. For Arendt, ‘it is as though the men who returned from the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings.’114 The implication of this and similar passages in The Human Condition115 is that the Trojan War offers a more original instance of political action than the democratic practices of the city-state. This conclusion is corroborated by statements Arendt makes in her Nachlass on the kingship period in general, during which ‘many “kings,” banded together to enlist in a grand enterprise’116; and by her disapproving comments on the Athenian city-state’s ‘highly individualistic’117 concept of action. I fully agree with Margaret Canovan’s contention that Arendt’s appreciative references to the military enterprises (including the Trojan War) and critical comments on the agonal spirit imply that ‘the Athenians lost the authentic understanding of action.’118 The spiritual decline of Greek antiquity is embodied, for Arendt, in the figure of Achilles. Although she follows Homer in praising Achilles as the quintessential ‘doer of great deeds and the speaker of great words,’119 she is also unmistakably critical of the ‘urge toward self-disclosure at the expense of all other factors’120 that was inspired by Achilles. Two points relevant to the interpretation of Arendt’s historical narrative of the decline of the Greek city-state emerge from her depreciative comments on Achilles: first, Achilles ‘remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness, because he withdraws into death from the possible consequences and continuation of what he began.’121 By means of his premature death, Achilles succeeds in being ‘the only “hero.” ’122 I take this to mean that the Athenians had forgotten that action is only possible as action in concert—an insight which had driven the military operations of the kingships, and in the absence of which the agonal spirit exacerbated into ‘an intense and uninterrupted contest of all against all.’123 Second, Achilles’s premature death allows him to ‘[deliver] into the narrator’s hands the full significance of his deed, so that it is as though he had not merely enacted the story of his life but at the same time also “made” it.’124 In other words, Achilles’s death is an attempt to emancipate himself from his dependence on storytellers. Arendt contends that a similar attempt to emancipate from the storyteller inspired the legal constitution of the city-state. Her reading of Pericles’s Funeral Speech in The Human Condition betrays a sense of skepticism that is more explicit in ‘The Crisis in Culture’ when she writes that Pericles boasts that Athens will know how to put “Homer and his ilk” in their place, that the glory of her deeds will be so great that the city will be able to dispense with the professional fabricators of glory, the poets and artists who reify the living word and the living deed.125

The Limits of Nomos  25 This throws a different light on Arendt’s statement that ‘the organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by its laws . . . is a kind of organized remembrance.’126 Rather than condoning this self-understanding of the Athenian political community, her statement highlights that it neglects the importance of storytellers such as Homer. It is in this sense that the Greek instrumentalization of law is an ‘outstanding symptom’127 of the influence that Achilles had on the polis. Note how this reverses the logical order of action and law outlined in section 1, which showed that, for the Greeks, political action was secondary to and conditioned by law. Arendt’s invocation of Achilles serves to explain how action can escalate into a struggle of all against all. Achilles functions here as a mythical figure—myth (borrowing from Lacoue-Labarthe’s critique of Heidegger) being understood as ‘the historical inscription of a people, and the means by which a people is able to identify itself.’128 Crucially, insofar as Arendt blames the downfall of Athens on Achilles’s influence on the spirit of the polis, she disregards the legal and social conditions of political action. This neglect of nomos in general and of slavery in particular is all the more surprising given her observation in the Denktagebuch that ‘slave households [die Sklavenwirtschaften] . . . alone could guarantee these big enterprises,’129 that is, the Homeric military operations. A similar history of decline structures Arendt’s discussion of Rome, whose greatest experience, as we saw, was that of the foundation of the city.130 Nevertheless, Arendt never tires of pointing out that, for the Romans, and ‘strangely enough,’131 ‘even this first act [the foundation of Rome] had been already a re-establishment, as it were, a regeneration and restoration.’132 More specifically (and here Arendt follows Virgil), Rome was presented as the re-establishment of Troy, and Aeneas as a descendent of Hector: Virgil proceeds to invert the Homeric story: this time it is TurnusAchilles who flees before Aeneas-Hector, Lavinia is a bride and not an adulteress, and the end of the war is not victory and departure for one side, extermination and slavery and utter destruction for the others, but ‘both nations, unconquered, join treaty forever under equal laws’ and settle down together, as Aeneas has announced even before the battle begins.133 This and similar passages show that, for Arendt, Roman historiography no longer simply records historical events (as she believes that Homer and Thucydides did) but intentionally restructures the sequence of events in order to embellish Roman history. First, Virgil presents Aeneas’s ordeals as leading to the foundation of the city: ‘all wandering and suffering reach their end and their goal dum conderet urbem (“that he may found the city”).’134 Second, Virgil presents these stories as a justification for warfare: ‘the violence of war between Aeneas and the native Italians. . . [was] in Virgil’s

26  Liesbeth Schoonheim interpretation . . . necessary in order to undo the war against Troy.’135 Third, and more generally, Virgil’s Aeneid foregrounds the Roman attempt to master their collective identity. Presenting Aeneas, rather than Romulus, as Rome’s founder, the Romans ‘deliberately traced their political existence back to a defeat.’136 Unlike Greek historiography, therefore, ‘Roman historiography . . . never was content with the mere narration of great deeds and events. . . [but] always felt bound to the beginning of Roman history’;137 that is, to the foundation of the city, regardless of whether these events happened before or after the foundation. Arendt is unclear on what the motivation behind the Roman manipulation of history is. Could it be that, in her view, the Romans were so proud of the pax Romana that Romulus, who had slain his brother, embarrassed them to such an extent that they decided to trace their ancestry to Aeneas instead, who had fled war and destruction?138 Or was it rather ‘their indefatigable search for tradition and authority’139 that led them to decide who their ancestors were? Either way, Arendt suggests that the successful mastery of their history did not redeem the Romans from the uncertainty and risk of self-disclosure, but instead kindled self-doubt. As Roman historians were solely concerned with passing down ‘the testimony of the ancestors,’140 they excluded the testimonies of the peoples who had been incorporated into the Roman system of alliance. Appropriating the perspective of their former enemies, Roman historians were haunted by the disturbing insight that ‘it might very well appear as if what the Romans called “rule” was synonymous with plunder, murder and theft, and that the pax Romana, that legendary Roman peace, was merely a name for the desert they left behind.’141 Arendt seems to have never made up her mind regarding whether the pax Romana originated in violence and domination, or in collective action and freedom. Her discussion of Roman expansion oscillates between legitimacy (expressed in terms such as action, power, self-disclosure, and ‘for the sake of’), and justification (and its related terms rule, violence, means-end, and ‘in order to’). So, for instance, Arendt suggests that the claim to legitimacy was only valid for the Romans themselves: ‘To the Romans, at least, the conquest of Italy and the building of an empire were legitimate to the extent that the conquered territories enlarged the foundation of the city and remained tied to it.’142 But when Arendt speaks from her own perspective, she slips back into means-end terms: ‘Hence the Roman Republic. . . used [emphasis added] the instrument of leges chiefly for treaties and for ruling [emphasis added] the provinces and communities which belonged to the Roman system of alliances.’143 To summarize this section, I want to suggest that Arendt’s discussion of nomos and lex is not only motivated by her attempt to think through the possibility of secular law, but also to narrate the spiritual decline of Greek and Roman antiquity through the heroic figures of Achilles and Aeneas.

The Limits of Nomos  27 Arguably, the narrative of spiritual decline, which focuses on action as a self-disclosing praxis, forecloses a rigorous analysis of the historical conditions of action, including the legal structures. It also re-centers the experience of the politically dominant—citizens and senators—at the expense of the experiences of marginalized and dominated groups in society. This narrative fuses two closely related conceptions of ‘spirit’: first, spirit in the sense of the historical-political existence of a people—philosophy, poetry (including history) and art—in abstraction from the material conditions under which this spirit emerged or, put differently, under which these cultural artifacts were produced; and, second, spirit in the sense of a principle or rule of action—a ‘fundamental conviction that a group of people share’144—that is irreducible to the legal institutions under which this group lives.145 Arendt’s articulation of the political decline of Athens and Rome—the loss or perversion of the proper principle of action—in terms of their poetic and historiographical decline implies that she disregards the legal and material conditions under which action emerged. Moreover, by asserting the ‘basic experience of men living and acting together’146 she ignores how differences in legal and political status imply a fragmentation of this experience. The concern with spiritual decline (or, put differently, the loss of a collective identity) animates not only Arendt’s discussion of antiquity, but also of contemporary society. It is particularly clear in her attempt to resuscitate the ‘revolutionary spirit’147 of the American Revolution. To show this, I turn to her comments on the civil rights movement, before drawing conclusions regarding the lessons that can be gleaned from her thinking on the nomoslex relationship for contemporary political theory.

Conclusion The nostalgia for origins, already clear in her writings from the 1950s, resurfaces in Arendt’s reflections on the civil rights movement and the student protests in the early seventies. Violence, Arendt writes, always needs justifications but cannot attain legitimacy: ‘Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.’148 Power, on the other hand, ‘needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy.’149 While an act is justified by achieving its end, an act is legitimate by being bound back to a past event: to the ‘initial getting together of people.’150 The advantage of Arendt’s distinction between justifiable violence and legitimate power is that it allows for a non-violent origin of law as well as legitimate civil disobedience. Yet, her attempt to demarcate the legitimacy of power from the justification of violence and to define the former by its relation to the foundational event also reveals that, at the core of her political thought, lies a problematic nostalgia for pure origins. This nostalgia

28  Liesbeth Schoonheim becomes particularly troublesome in her discussion of the civil rights movement and the student protests. All too briefly, the origin of the American republic consists, in Arendt’s telling, in the association of many different people around a shared goal, which found its first expression in the Mayflower Compact,151 and which was subsequently repeated in the townships where it ultimately led to the collective effort of writing the constitution.152 Not only does she praise the American talent for voluntary association, but she also considers these associations to be the guiding example for legitimate political protest. For instance, in her controversial essay on Little Rock, she offers the following advice to parents objecting to school segregation: ‘I would try—perhaps with the help of . . . like-minded citizens—to organize a new school for white and colored children . . . as a means to persuade other white parents to change their attitudes.’153 In her essay on civil disobedience, she similarly appeals to the origin of the republic: ‘civil disobedients are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and . . . they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.’154 Disregarding Arendt’s rich and profound comments on the civil rights movement and on the student protests, her exhortations distinguish between those protests that can claim a traditional precedent and those that cannot. What I believe she overlooks is the insight that I culled from her earlier writings on nomos and lex: law, while enabling an elite to act, simultaneously subjugates a segment of society. This violence can, as we saw, take up a variety of forms, ranging from the denial of citizenship rights and the reduction to mere life (either in the sense of biological reproduction or of natural variation) to the devaluation of minority histories. This violence can also be experienced in a variety of ways, such as the increased intensity of want and satisfaction (in the case of economic deprivation) or affection for those who are in a similar predicament of social and political exclusion (what Arendt calls ‘pariah qualities’155). Arendt famously argues against the politicization of these experiences: she condemns in the strongest terms the lawlessness resulting from ‘the people’s misery and the pity this misery inspired’156 and argues that the warmth and love pervading marginalized communities ‘have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes.’157 Third-wave feminists in particular have used Arendt’s critique of pity and brotherhood to argue against a naïve, essentializing concept of experience that spuriously bases solidarity on experiences of subjugation.158 Yet, as Lois McNay suggests, the risk of such an anti-essentializing approach is that it disregards the ‘social conditions that hinder and facilitate the emergence of effective types of political agency,’159 which includes, I would add, legal and institutional structures. This chapter, which focuses on the production and reproduction of legal subjectivities, has tried to make a minor contribution to this latter attempt to rethink the relation between subjective experiences, agency, and their historical conditions of possibility.

The Limits of Nomos  29

Notes   1 Arendt’s prime example is the American constitution, which originated in a collective effort of self-constituting but floundered in establishing a space for participatory democracy. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Penguin Books: London, 1977), chapter 6.   2 Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics, Civil Disobedience on Violence, Thoughts on Politics, and Revolution (Harcourt: New York, 1972), p. 140.   3 Ibid., pp. 143–145.   4 Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 140.  5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1998), p. 139.   6 Ibid., p. 139.   7 On spirit and law, see Peg Birmingham, ‘On Violence, Politics, and the Law,’ The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 24, n. 1, 2010, pp. 1–20 (p. 10).  8 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 186.   9 Jan Klabbers, ‘Possible Islands of Predictability: The Legal Thought of Hannah Arendt,’ Leiden Journal of International Law, vol. 20, n. 1, 2007, pp. 1–23 (pp. 9–10); Christian Volk, ‘From Nomos to Lex: Hannah Arendt on Law, Politics, and Order,’ Leiden Journal of International Law, vol. 23, n. 4, 2010, pp. 759– 779 (p. 776); Patricia Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007), pp. 76–77; Keith Breen, ‘Law Beyond Command? An Evaluation of Arendt’s Understanding of Law,’ in: Hannah Arendt and the Law, edited by Marco Goldoni and Chris McCorkindale (Hart Publishing: London, 2012), pp. 15–34 (pp. 16, 20–24). 10 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 63. 11 Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 106–107. 12 Ibid., p. 186. 13 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt: New York, 1973), p. IX. 14 Hans Lindahl, ‘Give and Take: Arendt and the Nomos of Political Community,’ Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol. 32, n. 7, 2006, pp. 881–901. 15 Volk, ‘From Nomos to Lex: Hannah Arendt on Law, Politics, and Order,’ pp. 759–779. 16 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman (Schocken Books: New York, 2007), p. 466. 17 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 186. 18 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 2, 9, 52, 134; Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992), pp. 105–111. 19 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 134. 20 Ibid., p. 161. 21 Ibid., p. 139. 22 Ibid., p. 137. 23 Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Piper: München, 2002), pp. 249–250. This and subsequent translations are mine. Emphasis is in the original. 24 Ibid., pp. 249–250. 25 Ibid., p. 153. 26 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 135. 27 Ibid., p. 157.

30  Liesbeth Schoonheim 28 Given Arendt’s emphasis on the conflict between politics and philosophy it might be surprising to find that she considers the predilection to instrumentality characteristic of the Greek mentality in general. Yet, it is exactly on the point of legislation that the opinions of Plato and Aristotle on the one hand, and the Athenian citizenry on the other, converge. Ibid., p. 195. 29 Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 364. 30 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 7. 31 Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 365. 32 The necessity we experience in labor is distinct from the necessity experienced in fabrication, insofar as the former is a general condition of all humans insofar they are living organisms, while the latter is limited to those who have decided to realize a specific goal. 33 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 117. The silence we experience in labor is distinct from that experienced in work, in that the former follows from the subjectivity of the experience that, as such, cannot be communicated (not unlike Wittgenstein’s private language argument), while the latter results from the fact that practical knowhow can never be fully explicated. 34 Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 365. 35 Ibid., p. 365. 36 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 194, emphasis mine. 37 Ibid., p. 143ff. 38 Ibid., p. 31. 39 Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ in: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, edited by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Schocken Books: New York, 1986), pp. 277–300. 40 Peg Birmingham, ‘On Violence, Politics, and the Law,’ p. 5. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Force De Loi: Le “Fondement Mystique De L’Autorité”,’ translated by Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review, vol. 11, n. 5–6, 1990, pp. 920–1046 (p. 993). 42 Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence,’ p. 284. 43 Ibid., p. 284. 44 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1993), pp. 116–117. 45 Arendt, Human Condition, p.  36. Arendt does not naturalize slavery because she understands love, in this context, to be a disposition cultivated over time, and not an innate property. Compare with Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 297. 46 Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 328. 47 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 316. 48 Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 329. 49 Ibid., p. 63. 50 Ibid., pp. 63–64. 51 Ibid., pp. 70–71. 52 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), p. 164. 53 Arendt, Denktagebuch, pp. 329, 368. 54 Ibid., p. 368. 55 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Great Tradition II: Ruling and Being Ruled,’ Social Research, vol. 74, n. 4, 2007, pp. 920–1046 (p. 941). 56 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 182. 57 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 122. 58 Ibid., p. 122. 59 Ibid., p. 108; compare p. 140. 60 Ibid., p. 118.

The Limits of Nomos  31  61 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 179. Compare this to Arendt, Human Condition, p. 195.  62 Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Athens and Rome,’ in: The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, edited by Dana Villa (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000), pp. 165–177; Roy Tsao, ‘Arendt Against Athens: Rereading the Human Condition,’ Political Theory, vol. 30, no. 1, 2002, pp. 97–123; Volk, ‘From Nomos to Lex: Hannah Arendt on Law, Politics, and Order,’ pp. 759–779.  63 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 195.  64 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. IX.   65 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (Harcourt: New York, 1968), p. 25.  66 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 7.   67 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin: New York, 2006), p. 263.  68 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 187; Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 179; Arendt, ‘Great Tradition II,’ p. 953.  69 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 183.   70 Ibid., p. 183.  71 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 188.  72 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eighth Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin: New York, 2006), p. 120.   73 Ibid., p. 166; Arendt, On Revolution, p. 201.  74 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 201.   75 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 120.  76 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 187.  77 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 83.  78 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 180.   79 Ibid., p. 179.  80 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 127.   81 Jacques Taminiaux, ‘Athens and Rome,’ p. 171.  82 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 237.   83 Ibid., p. 237.  84 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 175.   85 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Great Tradition II,’ p. 953.   86 Ibid., p. 953.  87 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 25.  88 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 120.   89 Ibid., p. 120.   90 Ibid., p. 123.   91 Ibid., pp. 123–124.   92 Ibid., p. 208.  93 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 138.  94 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 208.  95 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 107.   96 Ibid., p. 107.  97 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 300.   98 Ibid., p. 302.  99 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 218. 100 Ibid., p. 218. 101 Ibid., p. 218. 102 Ibid., p. 218. 103 Arendt, ‘Great Tradition II,’ p. 951. 104 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 106. 105 Ibid., p. 293. 106 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 179.

32  Liesbeth Schoonheim 107 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 161; Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 197. 108 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 173. 109 Ibid., p. 189. 110 Étienne Balibar, Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy (Columbia University Press: New York, 2015), p. 3. 111 Arendt, Human Condition, pp. 179ff. 112 Ibid., p. 178. 113 Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, ‘Justice: On Relating Private and Public,’ Political Theory vol. 9, n. 3, 1981, pp. 327–352 (p. 338); Dana Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1999), p. 140. 114 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 198. 115 Ibid., pp. 41, 186, 189, 292. 116 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 172. Compare Arendt, ‘Great Tradition II,’ p. 947. 117 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 194. 118 Canovan, Hannah Arendt, pp. 136–138. 119 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 25. 120 Ibid., p. 194. 121 Ibid., pp. 193–194. 122 Ibid., p. 194. 123 Hannah Arendt, ‘Philosophy and Politics,’ Social Research, vol. 57, n. 1, 1990, pp. 73–103 (p. 82). 124 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 194. 125 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 213; compare with Arendt, Human Condition, p. 197. 126 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 198. 127 Ibid., p. 194. 128 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry (University of Illinois Press: Urbana/Chicago, 2007), p. 11. 129 Arendt, Denktagebuch, p. 367. 130 Arendt, Between Past and Future, pp. 138, 166. 131 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 207. 132 Ibid., p. 208. 133 Ibid., p. 209; compare with Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 173. 134 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 121. 135 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 209, emphasis mine; Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 175. 136 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 173, emphasis mine; compare with Arendt, On Revolution, p. 209. 137 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 165. 138 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 209. 139 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 120. 140 Ibid., p. 124. 141 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 189. 142 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 201, emphasis mine. 143 Ibid., p. 188. 144 Arendt, Promise of Politics, p. 195. 145 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Great Tradition: I: Law and Power,’ Social Research, vol. 74, n. 3, 2007, pp. 713–726 (pp. 723–725). 146 Ibid., p. 725. 147 Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 221ff, 232ff. 148 Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 151. 149 Ibid., p. 151.

The Limits of Nomos  33 150 Ibid., p. 151. 151 Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 167ff; Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 85. 152 Arendt, On Revolution, pp. 166, 239, 250. 153 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, edited by Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books: New York, 2003), pp. 194–195. 154 Arendt, Crises of the Republic, p. 96. 155 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Meaning of Love in Politics: A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin,’ HannahArendt.net, vol. 2, n. 1, September, 2006: www. hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/95 156 Arendt, On Revolution, p. 92. 157 Arendt, ‘The Meaning of Love in Politics: A Letter by Hannah Arendt to James Baldwin.’ 158 Bonnie Honig, ‘Toward an Agonistic Feminism,’ in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig (Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania, 1995), pp. 135–166; Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1995); Linda M.G. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2005). 159 Lois McNay, ‘Feminism and Post-Identity Politics: The Problem of Agency,’ Constellations, vol. 17, n. 4, 2010, pp. 512–525 (pp. 514–515).

2 From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler The Conditions of the Political Emma Ingala

Somewhat surprisingly, the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler has been relatively neglected.1 The purpose of this chapter is to start to remedy this by bringing both together through the mediation of the notion of the political. While they do not so much offer a systematized, formal theory about the political as engage in critical interrogations of its conditions of possibility and impossibility, my argument is that Butler’s most recent reflections on the political are shaped by her reading of Arendt, and it is this reading that permits Butler to illustrate how―contrary to those who claim that they are incompatible2―her renowned concepts of performativity and precarity complement one another. In particular, I emphasize two aspects of their relationship: first, both insist that the political should not be thought as a property or substance, but as a relation. Although, in the prologue to The Human Condition, Arendt affirms that ‘speech is what makes man a political being,’3 thereby seeming to imply that humans, thanks to speech, hold the quality of being political in themselves, she quickly clarifies that speech depends on more fundamental conditions: an audience and a public space or, as she calls it, a ‘space of appearance.’4 The space of appearance is for Arendt not an absolute space subsisting independently of things placed in it or people acting in it, but an exclusively relational space; a space that is the effect of a set of relations. Instead of existing in a thing, therefore, the political for Arendt can only be found between things: rather than a being, it is an inter-being, an in-between; ‘something’ that lies between people and that can relate and bind them together.5 Similarly, Butler treats the political in purely relational terms, although she initially draws from alternative sources and premises, including psychoanalysis, Foucault’s power relations, and Althusser’s interpellation, to develop it in a different fashion. Second, this relational political ontology underpins their conceptions of political subjectivity, with the consequence that subjects in the public space (1) have a relational identity and not a fixed essence; (2) cannot be sovereign when engaged in political action, because this action or agency depends on relations to others and other things that escape their control; and (3) are the result of a performative exercise.

36  Emma Ingala These commonalities are, however, accompanied by important differences, the most fundamental of which relates to Arendt’s well-known division between the public and the private and to her critique of the social, which Butler, following an already vast feminist literature, questions and challenges. Given that Butler’s approach to Arendt is tied to feminist appropriations of the latter, it might be helpful to briefly identify some of the major polemics apropos Arendt’s relationship to feminism. This will allow me to situate Butler in relation to this issue, while also highlighting what is unique about her engagement with Arendt. As Bonnie Honig points out, ‘Arendt was impatient with feminism, dismissing it as merely another (mass) movement or ideology. She believed strongly that feminism’s concerns with gender, identity, sexuality, and the body were politically inappropriate.’6 This explicit rejection was grounded in Arendt’s convictions that the private and the public domains of life should be kept apart, and that social affairs and economic necessities should not enter the realm of political freedom. Arendt’s position triggered reactions such as that of Adrienne Rich, who describes The Human Condition as ‘the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideologies.’7 More nuanced feminist critiques stress that the rigid separation between the public and the private veils the system of gender oppression in which current political institutions and codes are grounded, thereby making it impossible for a truly egalitarian space of appearance to exist.8 Somewhat paradoxically, however, the accusation of gender blindness did not prevent readings of Arendt’s work that focused on her notion of natality to revalorize the feminine role of maternal care, reproduction of life, potentiality, cooperation, and responsibility for others.9 While this strand of feminist thinking interprets Arendt through the lens of the problem of ‘femininity,’ the last two decades have also witnessed a reassessment of her work that praises her rejection of any sort of identitarian and essentialist assumptions. According to Honig, the focus on the ‘Woman Question in Arendt’―the question of how Arendt’s theory treats women and the feminine―has given way to the ‘Arendt Question in Feminism’; that is, to the matter of what critical resources and analytic concepts feminism can find for its own use within Arendt’s work, a search that also re-signifies the woman question itself.10 It is within this last trend that Butler’s reading of Arendt should be situated. Butler appropriates various aspects of Arendt’s approach to the space of appearance, but develops and complements it by making visible what remains invisible in it, namely the body and the processes of socialization and subjectivation that manage the conditions that permit appearance in the public space. Before fully developing Butler’s argument then, we first have to turn to Arendt’s.

Arendt’s Space of Appearance Fina Birulés affirms that Arendt’s oeuvre can be understood as an expression of her uninterrupted, albeit differentiated, attempt to respond to the old

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  37 question: ‘what is politics?’11 Rather than portray the diverse ways in which the political is conceptualized in Arendt’s work,12 I will focus on the main theses of The Human Condition regarding the notion ‘space of appearance’ because it will allow me to move to Butler’s conception of the political. Arendt describes the space of appearance as the place where different beings appear to each other, relate to each other, and configure a world in common by gathering to speak and act in concert.13 The realization of the space of appearance is a precondition for any sort of institutional and formal organization of the public realm, since it shapes the domain of inter-est, of worldly or shared interests and concerns.14 This space is illustrated through the famous metaphor of the table: like a table around and between which people are assembled, the space of appearance, ‘like every in-between, relates and separates men [sic] at the same time.’15 Unlike a table, however, the space of appearance is not a substantial location but a pure interspace,16 an ‘intermediary space’17 that ‘can find its proper location almost any time and anywhere.’18 This sphere does not preexist, but is the result of the concerted action and interrelations between subjects, which it continues to depend upon to subsist.19 As a consequence, Arendt claims that there is nothing political in man that belongs to his essence. . .; man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.20 As Margaret Canovan puts it, what unites people in the public domain is not some quality inside each of them―be it a gregarious instinct or a common blood―, but the space between them.21 This ‘in-between’ is, for Arendt, host to three particular phenomena: the expression of plurality and of relationality, the creation of novelty, and the appearing of one to each other. Regarding the first, Arendt holds that politics is not a medium in which human beings are reduced to a homogeneous civil body, but the scenario of an irreducible plurality, of a gathering of men and women in all their variety: ‘the public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other’22; that is, it prevents us from merging into a uniform general will or repetition of the same.23 Politics is what organizes ‘those who are absolutely different with a view to their relative equality and in contradistinction to their relative differences.’24 The emphasis on ‘relative’ stresses the relational status of the individuals that assemble and appear in the public space. This relationality―the fact of being always already entangled in a ‘web of human relationships’25―ensures that each human being holds a singular and unique point of view within that web and, therefore, preserves the plurality.26 Second, the public space is defined by the creation of novelty. A political act calls ‘something into being which did not exist before, which was not given’27; it establishes relations and produces new realities.28 By entering the space of appearance, we undergo a sort of ‘second birth’29 where something

38  Emma Ingala new and unexpected is started, where suddenly there is room for miracles― or at least the infinitely improbable. This is the root of Arendt’s concept of ‘natality,’ which is presented in The Human Condition as ‘the central category of political . . . thought.’30 Third, and as the name itself suggests, the space of appearance is a space where something, or rather someone, appears; it is, in other words, a space of display.31 Insofar as the condition for me to appear is that I appear to other(s), and thus that I relate to others, appearance is a relational term.32 Appearance is also intimately linked to natality, since to bring something new into being is, for Arendt, to make it appear. In this context, the space of appearance is not the weak and delusional counterpart of a privileged space of essence. Appearances are not illusions keeping us apart from the truth; rather, the act of appearing is what constitutes the world itself.33 Against the philosophical long-lasting prejudice of a dualistic world, ‘Being and Appearing coincide’34 for Arendt. In The Human Condition, the space of appearance is the scenario of a particular kind of activity―concerted action and speech of a plurality of human beings―that is neatly differentiated from other activities such as labor and work. Deeds in the public realm stem from freedom as opposed to necessity. Arendt acknowledges that we all are subject to necessity; specifically, the naked necessity of keeping ourselves alive.35 However, she holds that this necessity must be taken care of in the private realm. As such, ‘the distinction between private and public coincides with the opposition of necessity and freedom.’36 Freedom can only exist where the necessities of ‘housekeeping’37 and survival are excluded or, in other words, if they are fulfilled elsewhere. Although human beings can never completely liberate themselves from necessity,38 when they act politically necessities must be put to the side. In a certain sense, then, Arendt recognizes that the space of appearance depends upon a private space dealing with the reproduction of life: the public presupposes the private.39 Only if one has eaten and slept sufficiently is one able to act politically; that is, act freely and in a way that is not dominated by bodily urges. Despite this acknowledgement, however, she insists on the need to maintain a clear distance between the private and public, since their permeation and mutual contamination would entail an immediate annihilation of the public. Additionally, as important as it is for her to preserve the public sphere, it is crucial to safeguard the private space, as it constitutes a ‘place of one’s own,’40 a refuge away from appearances, from being seen and being heard. This division, in its most elementary meaning, establishes what must remain hidden―bodily needs and processes of subsistence―and what must be displayed publicly―political action. Consequently, this separation establishes a very particular regime of visibility; that is, a specific distribution of what is allowed to appear and what must not appear. While the public is bathed in light, the private is its ‘dark and hidden side.’41 Arendt’s rigid distinction between the public and the private is motivated by her negative evaluation of what she calls the ‘rise of the social.’42 This

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  39 describes the invasion of the space of appearance by matters that belong to the private sphere—activities that pertain to the household, the family, and the economy—and that, therefore, should remain hidden. According to Arendt, the disappearance of the gulf between the two realms is an essentially modern phenomenon that, in turning the private into a public concern, conflates the two spaces and makes political action impossible. For this reason, Arendt compares the public sphere with a lost treasure that ‘appears abruptly, unexpectedly, and disappears again, under different mysterious conditions, as though it were a fata morgana.’43 The Human Condition is, in many respects, a continuous effort on Arendt’s part to retrieve the classical distinction between the public and the private and all the divisions associated with it: freedom and necessity; politics and biology; active and passive subject, and so on. Correspondingly, the body is also divided in Arendt’s theory: on the one hand, the private body is the body of material needs, a body that does not have speech but a mere voice to express pleasure and pain, to cry and yell; on the other hand, the public body is a well-fed body that, free from necessities, is able to act and articulate a signifying speech.44 Arendt appeals to this corporeal division to defend, against the modern erosion of the public-private partition, an irreducible distance—a ‘veritable gulf’45—between the two: the matters of the private body are ‘so ‘private’ that they cannot . . . be adequately voiced, much less represented in the outside world.’46 In this respect, the publicprivate divide instantiates not only a regime of visibility, but also a regime of audibility: what can and cannot be pronounced in public. Arendt’s insistence on this distinction has been the most controversial aspect of her theory. Three critiques have dominated: first, it has been argued that it leads to an essentialization and naturalization of the private—often equated to biology—which is opposed to a constructed and historical public realm.47 Second, although Arendt acknowledges that the private is a necessary condition of the public, in designating it as a regime of invisibility and inaudibility, she ends up concealing it.48 Finally, Arendt neglects the political treatment of issues categorized as social, private, and, therefore, according to her logic, pre-political: gender, the body, class, race, sex, material conditions of life, and so on.49 These criticisms have generated a substantial literature constituted by, at least, four positions. Some, especially those coming from the feminist perspective condensed in the famous motto ‘the personal is political,’50 have simply found her position to be untenable.51 Others have claimed that the public and private are not radically distinct or, if they are, that this distinction can be formulated in a non-exclusionary way.52 A third approach has attempted an ‘Arendtian analysis enlightened by gender,’53 while yet another group, composed of thinkers such as Linda Zerilli, Adriana Cavarero, Bonnie Honig, and, importantly for our purposes, Judith Butler, has criticized the category of the private while appraising Arendt’s understanding of the public positively, holding it to be a useful resource for a feminist and radical democratic agenda.54

40  Emma Ingala Without downplaying the mentioned shortcomings in Arendt’s publicprivate distinction, her understanding of the political subject paves the path for Butler’s own position in at least four ways. To begin with, the subject acting in the public sphere is, as we have already mentioned, a relational subject with no nature, essence, or fixed identity.55 In Arendt’s account, who we are is revealed in and shaped by our relationships with others.56 Second, and precisely because of her relational status, the subject can never be sovereign of her own acts, can never be fully in command.57 Arendt is very explicit in distinguishing her notion of freedom from that of sovereignty, stressing that while the former is linked to plurality, the latter is incompatible with it.58 Third, and as a consequence of the previous two points, the relational and non-sovereign subject is free, receives an identity, and creates a space of appearance only by acting in concert with others; that is, through performativity.59 Finally, although there is no explicit treatment of the body in The Human Condition and, indeed, it is presented as a sort of taboo topic beyond speech and symbolization,60 Arendt’s implicit acknowledgement of the embodied subject and her insurmountable necessities, fragility, and pains, opens the door to an understanding of the human condition in terms of vulnerability, dependence, and precariousness.61

Butler from and Beyond Arendt: A Body Politics Butler has described her engagement with Arendt as one of strong ambivalence.62 Despite her reluctance to define herself as Arendtian,63 and, indeed, her delayed engagement with Arendt64―one that was eventually brought about by her teaching on Arendt’s 1951 essay ‘The Decline of the NationState and the End of the Rights of Man’―, Arendt has become one of the pillars of Butler’s reflections on political agency. In particular, she develops her notion of performative politics on the basis of a set of ideas borrowed from Arendt: first, and most fundamentally, the space of appearance and the valorization of the ‘in-between’; second, the notion of a right to have rights as something that is neither granted by nature nor established by any codified law, but enacted in concerted action; third, the conception of a purely relational, non-sovereign, and plural political subject; and, fourth, Arendt’s observations about the unchosen cohabitation with others and its ethicopolitical consequences. Butler’s ambiguous stance toward Arendt results from her rejection of the latter’s public-private divide. As we saw, Arendt holds that politics should be sanitarily separated from the dark domain of the private, which, according to Butler, turns the reproduction of material life into something simultaneously presupposed by and excluded from the public sphere. As such, the logic of Arendt’s position inadvertently condemns those in charge of ‘housekeeping’ to be ‘spectral humans, deprived of ontological weight and failing the tests of social intelligibility.’65 Because being and appearance coincide, their non-appearance corresponds to a non-existence; they are, in Orlando

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  41 Patterson’s66 terms, sentenced to social death. What is most shocking for Butler is that, while Arendt deals with the problem of Statelessness and the unprotected status of the pariah,67 she is blind to the ostracism suffered by those confined to the private, and thus to the fact that their so-called private status is already political.68 Although Arendt admits that the political is essentially dependent on the private, she fails to see that the private is not merely the condition of the political, but part of its very definition.69 For Butler, the provisions for a livable life are not pre-political but fully political.70 In spite of this, Butler finds in Arendt’s thinking resources to read Arendt ‘against herself,’71 a methodology that allows Butler to correct and complement Arendt’s work. Arendt’s conception of the political in terms of a space of appearance aimed to displace a State-centered conception of politics. According to The Origins of Totalitarianism, the State inevitably produces exclusions in the form of Stateless and disenfranchised people. Nevertheless, by limiting her analyses to the inside of the space of appearance, Butler argues that Arendt, in The Human Condition, neglected other forms of exclusion, such as the mechanisms of power that distribute the ‘right to appear’72 and that prevent the private from appearing in public. By incorporating these into her theory, Butler produces a new understanding of the political that renders visible both the modes of regulation of the space of appearance and that which lies outside it. Butler’s description of the space of appearance, which she uses to examine contemporary forms of assembly, alliance, gathering, and acting in concert,73 is formulated in an explicit Arendtian lexicon, insofar as it is defined ‘neither [by] my act nor [by] yours, but [by] something that happens by virtue of the relation between us, arising from that relation.’74 Furthermore, Butler discovers in The Origins of Totalitarianism the germ of a performative politics. Having noted that ‘Arendt is probably one of the first twentieth-century political theorists to make a very strong case for performative speech, speech that founds or “enstates” a new possibility for social and political life,’75 Butler turns to the section ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ to argue that it contains a tension. In the first part of the text, Arendt dismisses the discourse of the rights of man as weak and sterile, while, in the second part, she ‘redeclares the rights of man and tries to animate a discourse that she thinks will be politically efficacious.’76 This new political discourse is materialized in the idea of a ‘right to have rights,’77 which for Butler promotes an understanding of the political in performative terms. The reason for this is that the right to have rights is not a positive or codified right, but is, in its broadest sense, a right to freedom that does not exist unless it is enacted, performed, and declared. Butler stresses that Arendt does not conceive of freedom as independence, sovereignty, a natural capacity, or a legal right, but as a concerted exercise.78 From this perspective, the space of appearance proves to be fundamentally performative.79

42  Emma Ingala In addition to the space of appearance, the critique of Statelessness and disenfranchisement, and the performativity inherent to the right to have rights, Butler finds another useful insight in Arendt’s theory regarding the dynamics of the public realm, one that allows her to defend a normative position. In particular, she turns to Arendt’s claim that Eichmann’s crime was to support a policy that refused to share the earth with certain people or populations, a position that reveals that he and his superiors thought that they had the ‘right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world.’80 From here, Butler infers that one of the conditions of our political life is an ‘unwilled cohabitation.’81 Even if we might choose with whom to share a house, we cannot choose with whom to share the earth without committing genocide.82 That cohabitation is not a choice means that we are bound to one another prior to contract and prior to any volitional act. The liberal framework according to which each of us enters into a contract knowingly and voluntarily does not take into account that we are already living on the earth with those we never chose.83 From this premise, Butler reconsiders Arendt’s plurality. The affirmation of plurality is not a naïve celebration of differences that either live harmoniously together or eventually come to a consensus. It is, rather, the acknowledgement of an alterity that can never be assimilated,84 of differences that will probably never be reconciled but which are nevertheless forced to coexist in ‘a vexed and antagonistic relationality.’85 The diagnosis of an unchosen cohabitation brings Butler to call for an ethico-political obligation to ‘preserve the lives of others whether or not we have contractually agreed to preserve them.’86 However, all these notions are affected by a fundamental omission that Butler sets out to resolve: Arendt’s approach overlooks the fact that the space of appearance, the unchosen cohabitation, and performative politics are all exercises incarnated in a plurality of inevitably precarious bodies. From this perspective, the in-between that constitutes the space of appearance is actually an in-between bodies, ‘a space that constitutes the gap between my own body and another’s.’87 Arendt accepts that the body plays a role in the public realm, but for her the political body, as we have seen, is a speaking and acting body whose requisites have been fulfilled somewhere else. Yet, Arendt’s concerns about statelessness, totalitarianism, and cohabitation seem to acknowledge, albeit implicitly, that the precariousness and vulnerability of life is a political issue.88 If certain populations are in danger of being marginalized or exterminated, it is because life is vulnerable and dependent on others, including the non-human, to survive. Consequently, ‘we cannot understand cohabitation without understanding that a generalized precarity obliges us to oppose genocide and to sustain life on egalitarian terms.’89 While Arendt would never explicitly accept this conclusion, Butler’s charge is that she is implicitly committed to it: if we are bound

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  43 to cohabit and preserve life, then the body’s hunger, need for shelter, and protection from violence—that is, precarity in general—are ‘major issues of politics.’90 Politics is, therefore, always already a bodily politics.91 Having identified the corporeal nature of politics, Butler returns to the notions of performativity and space of appearance to examine how the political is sustained, challenged, and changed. Among her analyses, two examples stand out: Antigone and the singing of the U.S. national anthem in Spanish. Both examples deal with figures that are excluded from the public sphere, but that, nevertheless, succeed in taking political action to defy the prevailing regulation of that sphere. Butler is interested in what happens politically when that which was meant to remain hidden—the unrepresentable, the taboo—occupies the public space. Antigone provides a first answer. Having been condemned to the shadowy realm of the private, she speaks up to claim the right to publicly mourn her brother Polynices, and, in so doing, enacts a ‘performative contradiction’92 in which ‘the unspeakable makes itself heard through borrowing and exploiting the very terms that are meant to enforce its silence.’93 Appearing in public and speaking the public language to name what cannot be named, Antigone challenges the boundaries and norms of the political, thereby forcing their resignification. Butler describes this move as a catachresis, a chiasm within the vocabulary of political norms produced by the action of those who are prohibited from action.94 She claims that the same phenomenon took place when, in 2006, a group of undocumented Mexican workers sang the U.S. national anthem in Spanish to lay claim to their right to be citizens: they were concertedly exercising a claimed freedom and enacting a ‘freedom of assembly precisely when and where it is explicitly prohibited by law.’95 Although they were not legally granted the right to assemble, this action was an efficacious exercise of that right and that condition. Even if officially they were not U.S. citizens, their appropriation of the anthem forces us to reconsider what being a U.S. citizen means. This performative contradiction or catachresis is what happens when the disenfranchised demand and exercise their right to have rights. Indeed, for Butler this performative contradiction is the fundamental basis of democracy. If democracy is committed to equality and combatting exclusion, then the only way to denounce and expose its blind spots and to force it to reconsider its assumptions—for example, what a citizen is and what her rights and obligations are—is precisely by exposing its own contradictions. As a consequence, ‘there can be no radical politics of change without performative contradiction.’96 Throughout these examples, the body is displayed not only as the site of an extreme precarity in the face of the material conditions of existence, but also as the agent of a performative exercise. In this respect, Butler’s body politics seems to combine two apparently incompatible theoretical perspectives. On the one hand, by deconstructing the public-private divide, she transfers the features that characterized the Arendtian public subject—relationality, plurality, performativity, non-natural, and non-sovereign—to the—formerly private—embodied self, which is no longer seen as the bearer of properties

44  Emma Ingala that are an ‘indisputable fact.’97 This was already manifest in Gender Trouble, where sex and gender, far from being given by nature, were presented as the result of a reiterated and socially sustained enactment.98 On the other hand, Butler—especially in her writings from 2000 onwards—develops an understanding of the body as fundamentally precarious and vulnerable, insofar as it experiences undeniable needs that must be fulfilled in order to survive. This purported duplicity of the body—considered as both the result of a performative enactment and as a vulnerable being with necessities beyond any performance—lead Butler to focus on precarity and relegate the concept of precariousness. The reason for this is that, when she first characterized precariousness as a generalized condition of the human,99 she immediately realized that it could be interpreted as a pre-political form. To forestall this issue, she introduced the notion of precarity; that is, the specific differential distribution of precariousness depending on power relations and economic and social regulations, which has the consequence of some being more vulnerable than others—often depending on race, class, sex, population, and so on.100 Based on the contention that precariousness is always already materialized as a particular degree of precarity,101 Butler emphasizes that the body with needs is not a purely existential condition, but a fully political one, since bodily urges are represented and attended in the public space unequally, and, therefore, are always already politically managed.102 In this sense, the vulnerable body is always performed in a specific way.

Public Versus Private, Performative Versus Precarious? Beyond Divisions In spite of Butler’s efforts, the secondary literature has struggled to understand the relationship between performativity and precarity. Bonnie Honnig, for example, asserts that there is a discontinuity in Butler’s thinking, insofar as she abandons, especially in Precarious Life, the element of action constitutive of her earlier work, to focus on the vulnerable and passive body and on an ethics of lamentation.103 With this, Honig concludes that Butler is pulled out of politics,104 a claim that supports the opinion that Butler’s thinking has undergone an ‘ethical turn.’105 In contrast, Moya Lloyd and Fiona Jenkins argue—in-line with Butler’s rejection of the notion of an ethical turn106—that Butler’s ethical considerations, far from leading to a neglect of politics, allow her to show the extent to which vulnerability and performativity, but also ethics and politics, are ‘inter-imbricated,’107 ‘embedded’108 and ‘entwined’109 with one another. Building on this position, my argument is that Butler is able to formulate this bond in all its complexity through her reading of Arendt’s space of appearance.110 The key text for formulating this understanding is Notes toward a Performative Theory of Assembly,111 where Butler assumes the task of giving an account of her movement from performativity to precarity.112 Arguing against Arendt, and Agamben’s notion of bare life,113 Butler maintains that precarity is not the opposite of what happens in the realm of the performative and so is not the outside of

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  45 the political. Precarity is the result of an operation of power and is always politically induced and distributed. Those in a situation of extreme precarity and exposure, those condemned to live an unlivable life, are not beyond power. Even if they are not admitted in the institutionalized forms of politics, their exclusion is a fully political problem.114 Butler aims to show that performativity and precarity do not reinstantiate the public-private divide, nor do they perpetuate a binary opposition between an active subject of performativity and a passive subject of vulnerability, but are two different, yet inseparable, dimensions of the political. Butler’s notion of performativity is reworked to include that of vulnerability, describing ‘both the processes of being acted on and the conditions and possibilities for acting.’115 Conversely, the notion of vulnerability is extended to include that of performativity, and is now understood ‘as a form of activism, or as that which is in some sense mobilized in forms of resistance.’116 This is manifest, according to Butler, in the functioning of the space of appearance. The space of appearance is the result of concerted action, and, at the same time, is regulated by a set of norms of recognizability that, informing every action, distribute appearances, deny or grant the right to appear, and, therefore, allocate different degrees of precarity. This mechanism becomes particularly apparent when the performativity of concerted action takes precarity as its galvanizing condition: ‘those cases when the political struggle is about food, employment, mobility, and access to institutions.’117 Politics is, therefore, not just what happens inside the established space of appearance, but a permanent negotiation between performativity and precarity, between the appearances and the demand of the right to appear. An organized precarity can performatively dispute ‘the very public character of the space’118 and institute a new configuration of the space of appearance. By appearing when it is foreclosed—as we saw with the examples of Antigone and the Mexican workers—precarity not only lays claim to a particular demand, discloses and challenges the actual norms that distribute livability, and reconfigures the public space, but also demonstrates how performativity is inexorably incarnated in a precarious body: we always ‘struggle in, from, and against precarity.’119 Living and acting politically presuppose each other: ‘it is not only that we need to live in order to act, but that we have to act, and act politically, in order to secure the conditions of existence.’120 In this respect, Butler maintains that the problem of the congruency between performativity and precarity is, in the last instance, the following: ‘how does the unspeakable population speak and make its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require in order to persist?’121

Conclusion In contrast to other political theorists and philosophers, Arendt and Butler do not speak openly and profusely about the political.122 Indeed, the word ‘political’ appears in their work mostly as an adjective. When used as a

46  Emma Ingala noun, it refers generally to the sphere, domain, realm, or scene of the political. Butler employs the substantivized form more often than Arendt,123 but when asked about her conception of the political, her response is clear: ‘I am sure I do not have “a conception of the political.” I am not sure one needs to have such a conception in order to think about politics or even to engage politically.’124 This absence corresponds to Arendt’s and Butler’s conception of the space of appearance: it is not a substance or a being, but a pure relation, a purely relational phenomenon. Both agree then that the political cannot be defined once and for all, but must be studied in each particular case as an effect of certain practices and concerted actions. Nevertheless, the impossibility of defining the political does not prevent them from engaging with its conditions. To illuminate such an approach, we should remember what Butler and Joan W. Scott state with reference to poststructuralism in their introduction to Feminists Theorize the Political: If the reader consults this anthology to discover what “poststructuralism” is, she will be frustrated and, perhaps, disconcerted. Poststructuralism is not, strictly speaking, a position, but rather a critical interrogation of the exclusionary operations by which “positions” are established.125 My contention is that we should understand Arendt’s and Butler’s treatment of the political in these terms: we will not find in them a fixed image of the political, but rather a critical interrogation of its conditions of possibility and impossibility. Similarly, what Arendt and Butler contribute to the examination of the problem of subjectivity in the political is the raising of a number of questions, rather than a set of definitive answers: what constitutes a subject in the political? What sort of exclusions are implied in this constitutive operation? Who counts or qualifies as a subject? And what sort of alliances articulate different subjectivities in a concerted action?

Notes   1 There are a number of works that point to this relationship: Birgit Schippers, The Political Philosophy of Judith Butler (Routledge: New York, 2014), pp. 54–56, 61–63, 116–119. Schippers briefly mentions Arendt’s reflections on violence and human rights and their link to Butler’s thinking, but she does not provide a detailed account of how Arendt influences Butler. A more comprehensive book in this respect is Rosine Kelz, The Non-Sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness: Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, and Stanley Cavell on Moral Philosophy and Political Agency (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2016), but it limits its analyses to a very specific angle of approach: that of non-sovereignty. Moya Lloyd stresses the importance of Arendt for Butler’s reflections on politics, but again does not develop this in depth (‘The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies,’ in: Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2015), pp. 167–192).

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  47   2 See, amongst others, Catherine Mills, ‘Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility,’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 18, n. 2, 2007, pp. 133–156; Jodi Dean, ‘Change of Address: Butler’s Ethics at Sovereignty’s Deadlock,’ in: Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, edited by Terrell Carver and Samuel Chambers (Routledge: New York, 2008), pp. 109–126; Drew Walker, ‘Two Regimes of the Human: Butler and the Politics of Mattering,’ in: Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2015), pp. 141–166. On a different note, Adriana Cavarero has praised Butler’s commitment to vulnerability, seeing it as overcoming the limitations of performativity: Adriana Cavarero and Elisabetta Bertolino, ‘Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference: An Interview with the Italian Feminist Philosopher Adriana Cavarero,’ differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 19, n. 1, 2007, pp. 128–167 (p. 142).  3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd edition (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1998), p. 3.   4 Ibid., pp. 198–199. I follow Arendt in using ‘space of appearance’ and ‘public realm’ interchangeably.  5 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 52.   6 Bonnie Honig, ‘Introduction: The Arendt Question in Feminism,’ p. 1, in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig (Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania, 1995), pp. 1–16. See also Elisabeth YoungBruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1982), p. 238; and ‘Hannah Arendt Among Feminists,’ in: Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, edited by Larry May and Jerome Kohn (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 307–324.   7 Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (Norton: New York, 1979), p. 212. Mary O’Brien accused Arendt of being a ‘female male supremacist’ in The Politics of Reproduction (Routledge and Kegan Paul: Boston, 1981), p. 9. For a more penetrating reading, see Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Rowman and Littlefield: New Jersey, 1988), pp. 23–31.   8 For example Carole Pateman, ‘Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,’ in: Public and Private in Social Life, edited by Stanley I. Benn and Gerald F. Gaus (Croom Helm: London, 1983), pp. 281–303.  9 See Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt, translated by Ross Guberman (Columbia University Press: New York, 2001); Nancy C.M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism (Longman: New York, 1983), pp. 210–226. 10 Honig, ‘Introduction: The Arendt Question in Feminism,’ pp. 3–4, in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 1–16. 11 Fina Birulés, ‘Introducción: ¿Por qué debe haber alguien y no nadie?,’ p. 11, in: Hannah Arendt, ¿Qué es la política?, translated by Rosa Sala Carbó (Paidós: Barcelona, 1997), pp. 9–40. 12 See, amongst others, Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt. A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1992); Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997); and Dana Villa, ‘Introduction: The Development of Arendt’s Political Thought,’ in: The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, edited by Dana Villa (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000), pp. 1–22. 13 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 199. 14 Ibid., pp. 182, 50–52. 15 Ibid., p. 52.

48  Emma Ingala 16 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (Harcourt: New York, 1968), p. 31. 17 Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (Schocken Books: New York, 2005), p. 95. 18 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198. 19 Ibid., p. 199. 20 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, p. 95. Also found in Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch I, edited by Ursula Ludz and Ingeborg Nordmann (Piper: Munich, 2002), p. 17. 21 Margaret Canovan, ‘Politics as Culture: Hannah Arendt and the Public Realm,’ p. 195, in: Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, edited by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (State University of New York Press: New York, 1994), pp. 179–205. 22 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 52; see also pp. 7–8 and Arendt, Men in Dark Times, p. 31. 23 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, p. 95. See Margaret Canovan, ‘Arendt, Rousseau, and Human Plurality in Politics,’ The Journal of Politics, vol. 45, n. 2, 1983, pp. 286–302. 24 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, p. 96. 25 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 183–184. 26 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment (Schocken Books: New York, 2003), p. 224. For a reading of Arendt in terms of relationality, see Adriana Cavarero’s work, especially For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, translated by Paul A. Kottman (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2005), p. 189; and Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated by Paul A. Kottman (Routledge: New York, 2000), pp. 28, 61, 71, 86. For a different approach to Arendt and relationality, see Anya Topolski, Arendt, Levinas and a Politics of Relationality (Rowman and Littlefield: London, 2015). 27 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin: New York, 2006), p. 150. 28 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 200. 29 Ibid., p. 176. 30 Ibid., p. 9. 31 Arendt, The Promise of Politics, p. 140. 32 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 198. See also Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking (Harcourt: New York, 1978), p. 19. 33 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 199. 34 Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, p. 19. 35 Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 31, 212. 36 Ibid., p. 73. 37 Ibid., p. 28. 38 Ibid., pp. 71, 121. 39 Ibid., pp. 30–31, 64. 40 Ibid., p. 70. Françoise Collin notes that there are two very different senses of ‘private’ operating in Arendt: one that, in opposition to the public, is linked to nature, biology, repetition, necessity, and the body; and another that, in opposition to the social, is a place for resistance, privacy, love, and difference. Françoise Collin, ‘Du privé et du public,’ Les Cahiers du GRIF, n. 33, 1986, pp. 47–68. 41 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 64. 42 Ibid., pp. 33, 38. The social in itself is neither private nor public, but the conflation of both spheres (p. 28). Arendt’s critique of the rise of the social is also a critique of mass society and the spreading of normalization and homogenization (p. 40). In On Revolution (Penguin: London, 1977), she maintains that the French Revolution failed to open a proper space of appearance and was ultimately doomed because it was conducted by poor people ‘driven by the needs of their bodies’ (p. 59); that is, it contaminated the fragile realm of freedom with ‘the absolute dictate of necessity’ (p. 60).

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  49 43 Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 4. 44 With this, Arendt follows Aristotle’s distinction between logos and phoné, between the signifying speech, exclusive of human beings, and mere voice, common to all animals (Aristotle, Politics, translated by Trevor J. Saunders (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1995), 1253a7–18). Adriana Cavarero reunites this division showing how speech is underpinned by and incarnated in a material and bodily relational ontology. See Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, pp. 34, 181. 45 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 141. 46 Ibid., p. 141. In spite of this, Arendt recognizes that she lives in an age ‘which no longer believes that bodily functions and material concerns should be hidden’ (Ibid., p. 73). Linda Zerilli points out the paradox of this posture: although the body is understood as non-representable, Arendt still forbids its presentation and representation in the public; that is, she forbids something that is already impossible. Linda M. G. Zerilli, ‘The Arendtian Body,’ p. 172, in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig (Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania, 1995), pp. 167–193. 47 Bonnie Hoing, ‘Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,’ in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, edited by Bonnie Honig (Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania, 1995), pp. 135–166. 48 Pateman, ‘Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,’ in: Public and Private in Social Life, pp. 281–303. 49 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2015), p. 78; Richard J. Bernstein, ‘Rethinking the Social and the Political,’ Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, vol. 11, n. 1, 1986, pp. 111–130 (p. 123). 50 Carol Hanisch, ‘The Personal Is Political,’ in: Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation; Major Writings of the Radical Feminism, edited by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt (Radical Feminism: New York, 1970), pp. 76–78. 51 A detailed critique of Arendt can be found in Eli Zaretsky, ‘Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of the Public/Private Distinction,’ in: Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, edited by Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 207–231. 52 Collin, ‘Du privé et du public’; Françoise Collin, ‘Introduction: Actualité de Hannah Arendt,’ Les Cahiers du GRIF, n. 33, 1986, pp. 5–7; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, ‘Justice: On Relating Private and Public,’ Political Theory, vol. 9, n. 3, 1981, pp. 327–352; Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2003). 53 Mary G. Dietz, ‘Hannah Arendt and Feminist Politics,’ p. 241, in: Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays, edited by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (State University of New York Press: New York, 1994), pp. 231–255. 54 This is also the case of Bernstein’s ‘Rethinking the Social and the Political.’ 55 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 10. 56 Ibid., p. 179. 57 Ibid., pp. 32, 184. As Bonnie Honig explains, ‘Arendt’s actors are never selfsovereign. Driven by the despotism of their bodies (and their psychologies) in the private realm, they are never really in control of what they do in the public realm either’ (Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1993), p. 80). See also Kelz, The Non-Sovereign Self, Responsibility, and Otherness. 58 Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 234. See also Arendt, Between Past and Future, p. 163: ‘if men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.’ 59 Arendt’s relationship to performativity has been noted by Bonnie Honig in ‘Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Identity,’ in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 135–166; and Political Theory

50  Emma Ingala and the Displacement of Politics, pp. 76–125. Isabell Lorey also identifies in Arendt a theory of politics as a performative art by appealing to a passage from Between Past and Future, where Arendt compares the virtuosos or leading artists with those who act politically: ‘The performing arts . . . have indeed a strong affinity with politics. Performing artists―dancers, play-actors, musicians, and the like―need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their “work,” and both depend upon others for the performance itself’ (p. 152). Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious, translated by Aileen Derieg (Verso: London, 2015), p. 77. From a different angle, Dana Villa explores Arendt’s performativity in ‘Theatricality and the Public Realm,’ in: Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1999), pp. 128–154; see pp. 116–119 for Villa’s critique of Honig’s approach. 60 Zerilli, ‘The Arendtian Body,’ p. 171, in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 167–193. 61 Zerilli speaks explicitly about vulnerability, noting that ‘although Arendt tries to contain the body, she also seeks to protect it. She worries about the vulnerability of bodies in totalitarian and mass societies.’ Ibid., p. 191. 62 Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State? Language, Politics, Belonging (Seagull Books: New York, 2007), p. 14. 63 Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity Press: Cambridge, 2013), p. 122. 64 Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press: New York, 2012), p. 21. In a different text, Butler acknowledges that she read Arendt much earlier: Judith Butler, ‘Ethical Ambivalence,’ p. 17, in: The Turn to Ethics, edited by Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen and Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Routledge: New York, 2000), pp. 15–28. 65 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, p. 15. 66 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press: New York, 2000), p. 73. 67 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt: New York, 1973), pp. 267–302; Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (East and West Library: London, 1957); Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 114–116. 68 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, pp. 16–17, 23. 69 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 206. 70 Ibid., p. 127. 71 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, p. 27. 72 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 11. 73 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?; Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Bernstein argues that the type of politics theorized by Arendt ‘can only arise out of the womb of the new social movements.’ Bernstein, ‘Rethinking the Social and the Political,’ p. 125. 74 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 9. See also p. 88. 75 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, p. 27. In this reading of Arendt in performative terms, Butler appreciates Bonnie Honig’s precedent (p. 26). 76 Ibid., p. 47. 77 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 296. 78 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, pp. 20–21, 26, 48; Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 52, 88; Judith Butler, ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics,’ AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, vol. 4, n. 3, 2009, pp. I‑XIII (pp. VI‑VII).

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  51   79 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?, p. 25.   80 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Books: London, 2006), p. 279.  81 Butler, Parting Ways, p. 43.   82 Butler and Athanassiou, Dispossession, p. 122.  83 Butler, Parting Ways, p. 23. See also Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 111.  84 Butler, Parting Ways, p. 126.   85 Butler and Athanassiou, Dispossession, p. 123.   86 Ibid., p. 123. Butler recognizes that Arendt would probably dispute this ethical view of cohabitation as the ground for a particular form of politics, since, for Arendt, ethics should remain separated from the realm of the political (see Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 113). ‘Mores and morality . . . are . . . important for the life of society and . . . irrelevant for the body politic’ (Arendt, On Revolution, p. 116).  87 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 77.   88 Zerilli, ‘The Arendtian Body,’ p. 191, in: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, pp. 167–193.  89 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 119.  90 Butler, Parting Ways, p. 174. Vulnerability is ‘an irreducible fact of politics’ (Ibid., p. 174).  91 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 206; Butler and Athanassiou, Dispossession, p. 196.   92 Buter and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, p. 63.  93 Butler, Antigone’s Claim, p. 78.   94 Ibid., p. 82.   95 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, p. 63. See also p. 64: ‘They have no right of free speech under the law although they are speaking freely, precisely in order to demand the right to speak freely. They are exercising these rights, which does not mean that they will “get” them’; and Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 58: ‘sometimes it is not a question of first having power and then being able to act; sometimes it is a question of acting, and in the acting, laying claim to the power one requires.’ See also Butler, ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics,’ pp. IV, X.   96 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation‑State?, p. 66.   97 Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron Feldman (Schocken Books: New York, 2007), p. 466.   98 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 2nd edition (Routledge: New York, 1999), p. 185.   99 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Verso: London, 2004), p. 31; Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Verso: London, 2009), pp. 21–22. 100 Butler, Frames of War, p. 25. 101 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 119. 102 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 103 Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2013), pp. 43–46. Honig also maintains that this abandonment of politics is a consequence of Butler’s mortalist conception of the human—as a grievable life—opposed to Arendt’s notion of natality. This reading forgets that, for Butler, grief and mourning are political affects intimately linked to our relational status, and not solitary, private, and depoliticized emotions. On this point, see Butler, Precarious Life, p. 22. 104 This is also Jodi Dean’s thesis: ‘Butler’s ethical sensitivity is purchased at the cost of politics’ (‘Change of Address: Butler’s Ethics at Sovereignty’s Deadlock,’ p. 109, in: Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics: Critical Encounters, pp. 109–126).

52  Emma Ingala 105 See for example Mills, ‘Normative Violence, Vulnerability, and Responsibility,’ pp. 133–134. Mills goes so far as to affirm that Butler’s ethical turn stands in tension, if not contradiction, with her previous theorization of normativity and subjectivity. For a multifaceted account of this alleged turn, see the essays collected in: Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2015). Drew Walker formulates this idea in terms of ‘a tension between a focus on survival and a desire for subversion’ (‘Two Regimes of the Human: Butler and the Politics of Mattering,’ p. 146, in: Butler and Ethics, pp. 141–166). Adriana Cavarero highlights the conflict between performativity and vulnerability: ‘there is, in fact, very little to say about the performativity of a body that lies crushed and vulnerable in front of you. I see in Judith Butler, especially in her most recent works, an attention to the body that is similar to mine, a real attention to the materiality of corporeal relations’ (Cavarero and Bertolino, ‘Beyond Ontology and Sexual Difference,’ p. 142). 106 See Judith Butler and William Connolly, ‘Politics, Power and Ethics: A Discussion Between Judith Butler and William Connolly,’ Theory & Event, vol. 4, n. 2, 2000: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/32589 (Accessed June 15, 2017); Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press: New York, 2005), p. 3; Butler, ‘Ethical Ambivalence,’ in: The Turn to Ethics, pp. 15–28; and Judith Butler and Emma Ingala, ‘Judith Butler: A Living Engagement with Politics,’ Isegoría, n. 56, 2017, pp. 21–28 (pp. 27–28). 107 Moya Lloyd, ‘The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies,’ p. 167, in: Butler and Ethics, pp. 167–192: ‘Butler is thus fully aware of the “ethical stakes” in “political encounters” and of the “political modalities” shaping “ethical questions” . . . of the ways that politics and ethics are inter-imbricated.’ 108 Fiona Jenkins, ‘Sensate Democracy and Grievable Life,’ p. 121, in: Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh, 2015), pp. 118–140. 109 Ibid., p. 122. 110 Moya Lloyd already suggests this, but the aim of her paper is not to explore the relationship between Butler and Arendt. See Lloyd, ‘The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies,’ pp. 178–180, in: Butler and Ethics, pp. 167–192. 111 It is, however, also present in a number of texts prior to this publication that were later incorporated into it: for example, Butler, ‘Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics,’ pp. I‑XIII; and Judith Butler, ‘Can One Lead a Good Life in a Bad Life? Adorno Prize Lecture,’ Radical Philosophy, n. 176, 2012, pp. 9–18. 112 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 26–65. 113 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1998); Vikki Bell, ‘New Scenes of Vulnerability, Agency and Plurality. An Interview with Judith Butler,’ Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 27, n. 1, 2010, pp. 130–152 (p. 149); see also Butler, Frames of War, p. 29; and Butler, Precarious Life, pp. 67–68. 114 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 78; Lloyd, ‘The Ethics and Politics of Vulnerable Bodies,’ p. 179, in: Butler and Ethics, pp. 167–192. 115 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 63. Almost twenty years earlier, in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1997), Butler paved the way for her later complementary reading of vulnerability and precariousness by studying the subject as both agent and effect of subjection, as a ‘site of . . . ambivalence’ (p. 14) that emerges as the result of a prior power and, simultaneously, as the condition of possibility for a radically conditioned form of agency. 116 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, p. 123. 117 Ibid., p. 73. See also pp. 9, 47, 117.

From Hannah Arendt to Judith Butler  53 118 Ibid., p. 71. 119 Ibid., p. 122. See also pp. 96, 208. 120 Ibid., p. 58. 121 Ibid. 122 For example, Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Routledge: New York, 2005). 123 See for example Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, pp. 9, 18, 48, 78, 127, 151, 181, 205–206. 124 Butler and Ingala, ‘Judith Butler: A Living Engagement with Politics,’ p. 26. 125 Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, ‘Introduction,’ p. XIV, in: Feminists Theorize the Political, edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (Routledge: New York, 1992), pp. XIII‑XVII.

3 Between Failure and Redemption Emmanuel Levinas on the Political Gavin Rae

One of the defining features of contemporary political theory has been its return to the question of the political; that is, the questioning of what makes something political as opposed to economic, aesthetic, moral, and so on.1 The purpose of this chapter2 is to contribute to this re-emergence by examining Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the ethical-political relationship, as a precursor to identifying what it entails for his conception of the political. Levinas’s insistence that the ethical relation resides in the face-to-face relation is justifiably famous and has long over-shadowed his political thought. Indeed, Richard Rorty claims that while Levinas’s ethical notion of responsibility ‘may be useful to some of us in our individual quests for private perfection,’3 when it comes to ‘our public responsibilities . . . the infinite and unrepresentable are merely nuisances.’4 Rorty does not discuss Levinas’s thought in any detail and his conclusion is based on a significant misunderstanding of Levinas’s ethical thought, namely that the ethical notion of responsibility is an individual and private one when it is inherently social and public, but his conclusion does represent a strand of thinking that sees Levinas’s thought as being politically worthless. To combat this reading and to fully understand his thought, recent scholarship has forcibly turned to study Levinas’s conception of the political,5 a turn that has led to wildly different evaluations of it: C. Fred Alford claims, for example, that ‘Levinas’s political theory is the best part of his project’6 while Simon Critchley concludes that it is ‘the Achilles’ heel of his work.’7 While there certainly are problems with his political theory,8 I argue that when understood through reference to his conception of the ethical relation, Levinas offers an original conception of the political grounded in the tension between failure and redemption. This movement results from two claims: (1) there is a structural asymmetry between (political) justice and (ethical) responsibility that means that the former is never able to fully satisfy the latter, and (2) any political decision made about the State’s ethical responsibilities is not a one-off decision, but, given the diachronic nature of social relations, must be continually made. States will always fail to meet their ethical obligations, meaning that failure is inherent to the political. But the possibility of redemption in light of this failure is always possible; the State

56  Gavin Rae can and, on Levinas’s telling, should always attempt to become more just to meet its ethical responsibilities to others. To show this, I briefly outline the trajectory of Levinas’s thinking to show why he affirms the ethical relation and what it entails, before subsequently demonstrating that it leads to a problem—the third (le tiers)—that cannot be resolved within the parameters of that relation, but which requires a political solution. While Levinas initially appears to posit the ethical-political relationship in oppositional terms so that the ethical is privileged over the political,9 the return to the political from this privileging means that the ethical-political relationship must be thought in terms of entwinement, albeit with a privileging of the ethical aspect.10 To develop the implications of this, I turn to Levinas’s comments on the difference and relationship between the notion and State of Israel. While Levinas initially sees the State of Israel as being the first historical opportunity to realize the ethical relation in State-form, he is also aware that, as an actual State, it must necessarily fail to live up to the responsibility inherent to the notion of Israel. Indeed, Levinas became increasingly critical of the State of Israel to the point that, in the 1990 interview ‘In the Name of the Other,’ he named France as his ideal ethical State.11 While some commentators have used his framework and comments to judge the actions of the State of Israel,12 this misses a crucial aspect of his analysis, which is that the diachronic nature of the ethical-political relationship ensures that the State of Israel can always alter its actions towards the other to better realize the notion of Israel on which it is based and, on Levinas’s telling, was created to bring into historical existence. The difference and relationship between the ethical and political, notion and State of Israel point to a conception of the political that is caught between failure and redemption; it is the movement between the two that generates its meaning.

From Ethics to Politics In the early and often ignored 1934 essay ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ Levinas argues that the West’s Christian heritage has led to the privileging of particular form of politics that privileges egoism and results in violence against others.13 For Levinas, the Holocaust death camps were not simply an anomaly of Western reason, but, somewhat controversially, were the most explicit manifestation of the way of thinking that has dominated Western thinking since its Christian origins.14 To support this conclusion, Levinas charts a sweeping history that sees the logic of the West’s Christian foundations being manifested throughout its history, first with liberalism and subsequently with the rise of ontology. For Levinas, the chief principle that defines Western civilization is the notion of freedom, defined in terms of ‘man [being] absolutely free in his relations with the world and the possibilities that solicit action from him.’15 The fundamental historical moment where this took place was not with Judaism and the ancient Greeks, both

Between Failure and Redemption  57 of which, on Levinas’s telling, had a profound understanding of history and its relationship to the present, but with Christianity and, in particular, its rupture of the soul from the body.16 A number of consequences resulted: first, it led to a privileging of ontology, insofar as it perpetuated the idea that to understand the ‘truth’ of something, it was necessary to understand the being of each entity rather than the way it comports itself towards the other. Second, this ontological understanding was based on the notion of a fixed essence, which thought of entities in terms of pure presence. This is problematic for Levinas because it means that everything was thought to be enclosed within a totality, a notion that he will later associate with homogeneity and the annihilation of alterity.17 Third, the focus on a fixed defining essence is based on a primordial understanding that it is possible to determine, once and for all, the truth of that particular entity. Fourth, the focus on a fixed essence leads to the separation of a fixed essence from its outer, inessential appearance. By associating the essential element with the non-physical world, the Christian soul/body division sanctions the notion that the ‘truth’ of the world is based on something other than the physical world. This led to a flight from the concrete to the abstract. The combination of these led, fifth, to a privileging of the ego and an inability to think the other. In ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ Levinas aims to overcome this by replacing its abstract egoism with an embedded, embodied understanding of the ego. Rather than being divorced from its social world, he affirms that we must recognize that ‘the situation to which [the individual] was bound was not added to him but formed the very foundation of his being.’18 We need then a ‘new conception of man’19 wherein the ‘body is not . . . something eternally foreign,’20 but forms the focal point from where analyses must start. After the Second World War, however, he recognized that this approach was not radical enough because, in focusing on the individual’s relationship to the world, it continued to privilege an individual standpoint and so failed to recognize the constitutive role that social relations play in forming the ego. Levinas radicalizes his position substantially in 1961’s Totality and Infinity by outlining the ego’s experiential dependence on social structures and hence the other. To do so, he starts from the position of the self-certain ego which, due to its self-certainty, is, initially, content in and with itself.21 This contentment is, however, won by opposing itself to the non-ego, which is perceived to be ‘foreign and hostile.’22 Importantly, the experience of the ego in this schema is defined not by comprehension or knowledge, but by ‘the element of [sensuous] enjoyment.’23 The ego enjoys itself and does so through its engagement with and use of the other. This leads to a distinction between need and desire. Need entails a void within the ego that can and must be filled by subsuming the other within it. Desire, in contrast, is not based in a void, but in aspiration to ‘possess’ the other.24 Desire does not, however, subsume the other, but leaves it as other. Ethics is based on desire

58  Gavin Rae not need because desire, like ethics, entails a movement to the other that, because it cannot be satiated, is infinite. Through desire’s turn to the other, the ego comes to recognize its proximity to other egos, each of whom also desires the other. The realization that the ego is not alone facing a world it can use for its enjoyment is startling. Through this ‘grand event,’25 the ego loses its self-referentiality: it not only encounters others who it must compete with to obtain the object that will allow it to enjoy itself, but also faces something that it cannot control or determine. The disruption caused is not a pleasant experience, but ‘tears [the ego] from the solid ground on which [the] I, a simple individual, places [it]self,’26 ‘puts into question the sufficiency of [its] identity as an I,’27 and subjects the ego to an infinite responsibility for the other. Levinas writes that ‘the way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face.’28 There are three moments to this: the first obvious thing in the other’s face is the directness of exposure and that defenselessness. The human being in his face is the most naked; nakedness itself. But at the same time, his face faces. It is in his way of being all alone in his facing that the violence of death is to be assessed. A third moment in the epiphany of the face: it requires me. The face looks at me, calls out to me. It claims me. What does it ask for? Not to leave it alone.29 Such is the impact that the experience of the other’s face has on the ego that Levinas maintains that it holds it ‘hostage,’30 which does not entail a physical hostage-taking, but a sense of captivation as the ego becomes beholden to the other. Through this, the ego is brought to a sense of infinite responsibility for the other. This is not because of action on its part, but because its relationship to the other entails ‘a passivity more passive than all passivity, an exposure to an other without this exposure being assumed.’31 The other’s transcendence lies at the ‘foundation’ of the ethical relation and, hence, the ego: ‘transcendence is ethics, and subjectivity, which is not, in the last analysis, the “I think” (which it is at first) or the unity of “transcendental apperception,” is, as a responsibility for the other (Autrui), a subjection to the other (autrui).’32 The ego only is because of the other, a dependence that is not an enslaving, but an election that always returns the ego to the other. While this appears to make the ego an effect of the other, Jacques Derrida33 famously criticized Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, claiming that, by starting from the position of a self-certain ego, Levinas continued to affirm the egoistic standpoint he aimed to overcome. For all its apparent innovation, Levinas’s thinking was not radical enough; it continued to privilege the egoistic perspective that it criticized. Levinas’s response was to radically re-configure his thought from and around the notion of ‘substitution.’ First introduced in a lecture given under the same title in Brussels in 1967, Levinas re-worked it into a longer essay published in 1968,34 before re-writing

Between Failure and Redemption  59 it again and publishing it in 1974 as the ‘centerpiece’35 of Otherwise than Being. The basic point of the notion of substitution is to amend Totality and Infinity’s claim that social relations result from an already formed ego encountering and subsequently subordinating itself to the other. Through the notion of substitution, Levinas offers a conception of onto-genesis from the other: the empirical ego is ontologically not just experientially an effect of the other.36 Substitution offers an important clarification within Levinas’s ethical theory that purges his thinking of the static, egoistic premises that continued to adhere to his earlier formulations. There is, however, another problem that results from the face-to-face that was far more difficult to resolve, namely the problem of the third (le tiers). While Levinas’s ethical theory takes place through a description of the face-to-face relation, he was aware that actual social relations never conform to a simple duality. This complicates the ethical relation substantially and leads to a completely different form of social relation as the question moves from the realm of ethics to the realm of the political. As Levinas puts it, if there were only two people in the world, there would be no need for law courts because I would always be responsible for and before, the other. As soon as there are three, the ethical relationship with the other becomes political and enters into the totalizing discourse of ontology.37 The third disrupts the face-to-face relationship because it brings the two members of that relation to an awareness of others, each of whom also issues a demand that he be cared for. Social relations are not, therefore, zero-sum games played between two actors; they are dynamic and diachronic and, for this reason, ‘[t]he relationship with another is a relationship that is never finished with the other; it is a difference that is nonindifference and that goes beyond all duty, one that is not re[ab]sorbed into a debt that we might discharge.’38 The third does not entail a relationship that culminates, nor does it entail any moment of synthesis or absorption of the other. Throughout the relationship, the alterity of each member is maintained. If it were not, the other would be reduced to the same. The question arises as to how the ego is to adequately respond to the multiple commands it simultaneously receives from the multiple others it encounters. ‘Who, in this plurality, comes first?’39 After all, as Levinas explains, ‘the other for whom I am responsible can be the executioner of a third who is also my third.’40 The ego has an obligation to both, so which one takes precedence? Does the ego attend to the executioner or the one about to the executed?41 Responding to these questions requires judgement and, by extension, a political decision about which other is to take priority. Rather than maintain its initial, immediate pre-reflective relationship with its others, the ego must adopt a reflective stance towards them; a change that gives rise to ‘the birth of thought, of consciousness, of justice, and of philosophy.’42 Levinas uses the term ‘justice’ in Totality

60  Gavin Rae and Infinity to designate the ethical relation, but latterly uses it to mean ‘something which is calculable, which is knowledge, and which supposes politics; it is inseparable from the political.’43 The third is linked to the calculation of justice, which requires judgement, ‘a “weighing,” a comparison, [and] a pondering’44 to determine whether the ego will affirm the other. As Michael Morgan explains, ‘every person is evaluated in terms of a variety of considerations—their needs, the availability of resources, the likelihood of the assistance being effective, any practical or conventional relations between the self and other, and much else.’45 This creates a morality, which is based on ‘a series of rules relating to social behaviour and civic duty.’46 This is ‘necessary [and] justified’47 because it better allows the competing demands placed on the ego by its others to be evaluated to allow the ego to determine how and when to respond to both calls and so meet its ethical responsibilities.

Politics From Ethics While Levinas’s turn to the ethical is guided by a rejection of ontology, totality, and the State, we see that this necessitated a return to the political that brought him to recognize that [t]he State, general laws, are necessary. Institutions are necessary to carry out decisions. Every work of politics and justice is necessary. This order negates mercy, yet is called into being by this very mercy with a concern to recognize all the others who form the human multiplicity.’48 That the political returns from Levinas’s privileging of the ethical brings forth two inter-related questions: (1) when does the Third exist? And (2) how are we to understand the ethical-political relationship? Two options present themselves. Levinas’s statement that ‘first philosophy is an ethics’49 appears to entail a privileging of the immediate face-to-face relation, which first exists before the third is experienced. This is developed in the secondary literature by Amanda Loumansky who claims that ‘the Third’s arrival is not spontaneous with, or contained within, the Self’s face-to-face encounter with the other but is a distinct and separate event that contextualises it.’50 On this understanding, ‘the ethical encounter with the Other must be a solitary affair, absent the Third, because it is as such that it acquires its moral force.’51 The strength of this approach is that it takes seriously Levinas’s insistence that the ethical relation is concrete, emphasizes the radicality of the ethical relation, and, in so doing, distinguishes Levinas’s ethical thinking from politics. However, it drastically downplays the importance of the Third by claiming that, strictly speaking, an individual can only encounter one other at a time. A decision is not then required regarding which other the individual will turn to first because this approach understands that the individual/State can only be responsible for the one it is turned to at that

Between Failure and Redemption  61 particular moment. The political problem is simply removed as Levinas’s thinking is reduced to the ethical face-to-face relation. As noted, however, Levinas makes a number of comments that affirm the importance of the political decision, arguing that it is a natural outgrowth of the ethical relation, and arises because of the existence of the third. Rather than being a secondary phenomenon to the face-to-face duality, Levinas explains that ‘I don’t live in a world in which there is but one single “first comer;” there is always a third party in the world: he or she is also my other, my fellow’52 and my relation with other men is not a relation with a single man. There is always a third, a fourth, because in fact we are in a multiple society where, on the fundamental relation to the other the whole knowing of justice, which is indispensable, is superimposed.53 In the secondary literature, these comments have given rise to an alternative entwined understanding of the ethical-political relationship. Rather than seeing ‘the Third as a secondary element,’54 Madelaine Fagan suggests that ‘an examination of the concept of the face and the face-to-face relationship demonstrates that the Third is present in that face-to-face relationship from the very beginning, in fact as an integral part of the face itself.’55 The Third is not a secondary or unimportant concept coming after the face-to-face relation, the ethical, the face-to-face and the infinite responsibility it heralds are inextricably entwined with the ideas of the Third, justice and politics in Levinas’s work . . . There is not first the Other and then the Third but rather the Other and the face-to-face relationship with them always includes the Third.56 On this understanding, Levinas is not simply proposing that we privilege the ethical over the political, but, with the Third, argues that the ethical and the political are intimately entwined. Fagan supports her position by pointing out that, whereas the oppositional understanding is ‘an approach whereby responsibility is understood in terms of infinite responsibility in the face-to-face and politics as the interruption and corruption of this responsibility with the entry of the Third,’57 the division instantiated between the ethical’s relationship to the other and the political’s relationship to the Third ‘immediately breaks down because the Other is also the Third, and the Third is the Other.’58 As a consequence, ‘the political and the ethical thus become inseparable in Levinas’s work; there is no temporal separation of the Other and the Third and so no possibility of separating justice from charity or politics from ethics.’59 Rather than a ‘pure’ ethical confronting a ‘pure’ political, Fagan suggests that we understand Levinas’s thinking ‘in terms of the ethico-political. Not only does the ethical always permeate the

62  Gavin Rae political . . . but the political is also always within the idea of the ethical or responsible.’60 Diane Perpich draws a similar conclusion to claim that the Third must exist simultaneously with the other because it is through the Third that the movement from ethics to politics takes place. She never discusses it, but Loumansky’s reading would mean that politics is either not required or is optional. For Perpich and Fagan, the Levinasian movement from ethics to politics is not optional, but is a necessity that emanates from the ethical relation itself. ‘This means that ethics, or the ethical relationship, is never present without referring us directly to politics, and politics likewise contains an internal reference to ethical proximity.’61 Politics is not optional for Levinas and so the Third must be related to and implicated ‘in’ the face-to-face relation. It cannot be something tacked onto the face-to-face relation, but always accompanies it. For Levinas, ‘ethics and politics are complementary. We cannot have the one without the other.’62 While it may be tempting to claim that this is one of those moments where we simply have to choose a perspective, Robert Bernasconi claims a way out that reconciles these positions and, in so doing, explains the relationship between the Third and other, ethics and politics, all the while respecting Levinas’s claim that ethics is first philosophy. While Bernasconi favors the entwined conceptions of the ego-other, ethical-political relationships, he accounts for the alternative reading by pointing out that, while there is textual evidence to support it, it is predominantly found in Levinas’s earlier work, especially Totality and Infinity, which tends ‘to present the relation of ethics and politics in terms of a derivation of one from the other.’63 Bernasconi claims that this is subsequently corrected as Levinas recognizes that the ethical and political are ‘conflicting aspects of what he increasingly present[s] as a single structure.’64 The conclusion drawn is not that we need to choose between an ‘early’ and ‘later’ Levinas, but that the two interpretations point to ‘a difference between layers of meaning [whereby] the focus passes from the priority of the ethical over the political to the point of intersection between them.’65 Building on Bernasconi’s insight, my suggestion is that we need to understand that, while the ethical is privileged over the political because it is the source of the meaning of the political, there is no absolute experiential division between the two. There is a distinction between the conceptual level of Levinas’s analysis of the ethical-political relationship that sees the ethical relation grounding the political and so creates a hierarchy between the two, and the experiential level that holds that in the actual, diachronic concrete-ness of the relationship, the ethicalpolitical exist in symbiotic entwinement. The social relation is always an ethical one, while the multiplicity of social relations that each individual always exists within means that ‘the first question of the inter-human is the question of justice.’66 This is not to say that Levinas thinks that every actual politics will affirm justice, only that the foundational role that ethical responsibility has for each form of politics ensures that each actual politics must continuously

Between Failure and Redemption  63 engage with the question of justice, even if that is simply to deny its importance. In In the Time of the Nations, Levinas explains that when politics ignores or rejects its ethical foundations, it is returned to the logic that underpinned Rome; a society ‘with all its strange but indubitable and irresistible greatness of a colossus. Universal legality, though lacking in nuance and cumbersome, unloving, merciless, unpardoning.’67 If, on the contrary, the State decides to affirm the ethical demand, it adopts structures, morality, and ‘political laws which are essentially egalitarian or held to become so’68 where ‘man always cedes his place to the other.’69 When the State affirms its ethical ground, Levinas claims that it has adopted a ‘prophetic’ form of politics. Here, ‘the Other [is] within the Same, [but] the within signifies the waking up of the Same by the Other’70 whereby ‘the Other agitates the Same to the point of the fission of its core.’71 As a form of politics, prophetic politics exists with rules and morality, but its continuous return to the ethical relation prevents these moral rules from reifying into fixed absolutes. Doing so would reduce the alterity of each relationship to the same rule and so perpetuate the ontological form of politics to be overcome. Whether to affirm its prophetic mission is then the first question that a State must decide. However, any justice enacted by prophetic politics must, of necessity, fail for the simple reason that ‘the justice on which the State is founded is . . . an imperfect justice.’72 There are three reasons for this: first, the asymmetry between the infinity of the ethical demand and the finite totality of political structures means that the justice aimed for by the latter can never fully realize the responsibility of the former. Second, the ethical relation is diachronic and so is never finished. Whenever a political arrangement is created to affirm justice, it is always interrupted by the changing dynamics of the ethical relations subtending it. This disrupts the existing political arrangement and calls out for another one to account for these altered social relations. Third, the nature of ‘justice’ itself prevents any finality. Justice is not understood in terms of a binary opposition between a state of perfect justice and its absence. Justice entails a qualitative continuum based on degrees. Each political system is, to a degree, just by virtue of being designed to affirm some at the expense of others. This means that any instantiation of justice always ‘anticipates a justice which is more just.’73 Indeed, ‘justice is always a justice that desires a better justice.’74 It is always, in other words, ‘to come (avenir).’75 Those States that decide not to affirm justice as its guiding norm can always alter that decision to subsequently affirm justice and so, presumably, become more just. Those that do affirm justice can always become more just by altering their structures and culture so that it more properly fulfils all of its ethical responsibilities. Levinas’s conception of the political is then caught between and, indeed, generated from the relationship between its failure to realize a justice that fulfils all its ethical responsibilities and the possibility, one that arises thanks to the diachronic nature of the ethical relations subtending it, of redeeming itself in the future by becoming more just. The political decision is not

64  Gavin Rae a one-off event, but ‘a human order, always to be created anew in order to respond to the extraordinary event of the for-the-other.’76 To explore the tension between the ethical and political, failure and redemption further, I will now show how it plays itself out in the realm of concrete politics by exploring Levinas’s comments on the difference and relationship between the notion and State of Israel.

The Notion and State of Israel Starting in the early 1950s, Levinas continually turned to the notion/State of Israel distinction with the essays found in Difficult Freedom and the last three chapters on Zionism in Beyond the Verse77 being particularly noteworthy. The basic point of the distinction is three-fold: (1) to justify the existence of the State of Israel by locating it within a particular ethical sentiment or notion, (2) to demonstrate the intimate link between Levinas’s ethical thought and actual political States, and (3) to provide a standard from and against which actual States can be judged. This is not to say that the distinction is unproblematic. Recognizing this, Levinas notes that ‘Israel,’ also sometimes called ‘Judaism,’ is a ‘mystery.’78 Nevertheless, if we piece together Levinas’s comments on it, we see that it has a clear meaning. While noting that ‘for many Israelis, their identity card is the full extent of their Jewish identity as it is, perhaps, for all those potential Israelis who are still in the Diaspora,’79 Levinas warns that this ‘runs the risk of [Judaism] becoming confused with nationalism.’80 ‘What brought Judaism into the world is not pride in national excellence (which was the pride of the Greeks setting themselves above barbarians) but the idea of a universality that flows from excellence, a universality of radiance.’81 The notion of ‘Israel’ exceeds any nation or policy and, while it defines a specific religion and culture, it also has a wider, more universal meaning that describes ‘a vague sensibility made up of various ideas, memories, customs and emotions, together with a feeling of solidarity towards those Jews who were persecuted for being Jews.’82 The latter is important because it means that ‘Israel’ can denote non-Jews who affirm the other. It is for this reason that Michael Morgan’s83 claim that ‘Israel’ refers to the Jewish people as a whole is too vague and one-dimensional. A sense of Jewishness is an aspect of ‘Israel,’ but making the two synonymous reduces ‘Israel’ to its religious and cultural senses and forgets that it also entails a sensibility towards others. Those who affirm the other are Jewish, even if they do not identify with that religion or culture. This is the distinguishing feature of Judaism: ‘from the beginning, it bears the weight of all other men’84 with the consequence that ‘the Torah addresses itself not only to Jews but to all men.’85 For this reason, Adriaan T. Peperzak notes that ‘Israel is a particular people with its own language, its books, and its laws, but it is also the spiritual society of all the just.’86 From this, we see that Israel is a particular universalism: it is a particular doctrine that first found expression in a particular moment of history

Between Failure and Redemption  65 through a particular culture, but its doctrine is universal in orientation in that it affirms the other over itself. The particularity of Judaism is, in other words, its focus on universality in the form of alterity. As a consequence, ‘the notion of Israel designates an elite . . . but an open elite and an elite that is defined by certain properties that concretely are attributed to the Jewish people.’87 It is defined by an ethic of responsibility for the other which ensures that it continually reaches out to others as others. Indeed, as the first religion to privilege the ethical demand emanating from the other’s face, Levinas claims that it was ‘for the whole of humanity that Judaism came into the world.’88 This does not mean that Israel is ‘defined by opposition to Christianity, any more than it is defined as anti-Buddhism, anti-Islam, or anti-Brahmanism. Instead, it consists in promoting understanding between all men who are tied to morality.’89 It does not then ‘demand that all men adhere to Judaism. Its mission is not to convert.’90 Rather, it respects the alterity of the other, including, in this case, other religions. This is why the Jewish people are designated as the chosen ones. This does not entail exceptional rights or privileging, but ‘a surplus of obligations for which the “I” of moral consciousness utters.’91 Far from being associated with pride, ‘chosenness’ simply describes the Jews as the ones who were ‘first to hear the call’92 of the other and so ‘expresses the awareness of an indisputable assignation from which an ethics springs and through which the universality of the end being pursued involves the solitude and isolation of the individual responsible.’93 Like the ethical relation, the notion of Israel needs to be actualized in State form. Indeed, ‘a State is the only form in which Israel—the people and culture—can survive.’94 Only this permits it to enter the actual world to enact its social law. The State is important because it creates an environment beyond the immediate face-to-face relation. Because ‘the sovereignty of the State incorporates the universe . . . the citizen may finally exercise a will.’95 Levinas’s point is that, through the State, an individual’s will becomes universal. The decision to affirm the ethical relation contributes to the development of a culture that affirms justice. ‘This is why many recognize his spiritual nature in the dignity he achieves as a citizen or, even more so, when acting in the service of the State. The State represents the highest achievement in the lives of Western people.’96 That Israel had the opportunity to be expressed in State-form is, of course, a relatively new development: For two thousand years, Israel was uninvolved in History. Innocent of all political crime, as pure as the purity of the victim, a purity whose sole merit was perhaps its long patience, Israel had become incapable of thinking a politics which would bring to perfection its monotheistic message. Henceforth, the commitment has been made. Since 1948. But all has just begun . . . [T]his return to the land of our ancestors—beyond solving any specific problem, whether national or domestic—would

66  Gavin Rae thus mark one of the greatest events of internal history and, indeed, of all History.97 The creation of the State of Israel is important, not only for the Jewish people and culture, but for all humanity because ‘it finally offers the opportunity to carry out the social law of Judaism.’98 The State of Israel is not created simply for the sake of it. Nor was it created to fulfil ‘an ancient promise, or [herald] a new age of material security.’99 It was created to finally give expression to the notion of Israel and is, therefore, always subordinate to the social justice inherent to the latter. Indeed, ‘the subordination of the State to its social promises articulates the significance of the resurrection of Israel as, in ancient times, the execution of justice justified one’s presence on land.’100 The newly created (Levinas was writing in 1951) State of Israel entails a return to and re-instantiation of the ancient law of Israel. For this reason, ‘the State of Israel, whatever the ephemeral political philosophy of its greatest workers, is not for us a State like any other. It has a depth and density that greatly surpasses its scope and its political possibilities; it is like a protest against the world.’101 Such were Levinas’s hopes for this new creation that, writing in the earliest years of the new State, he concluded that ‘the masterpiece has now finally come.’102 Through the creation of the State of Israel, a State and society orientated from and around social justice finally entered the world. But Levinas’s privileging of the State of Israel is far more complicated than a straightforward uncritical Zionism. While the State of Israel has a special role and place, Levinas appeals to his notion of ‘chosenness’ to remind us that this entails exceptional duties and responsibilities rather than exceptional rights and entitlements. The State of Israel is caught between two incompatible worlds: the ethical one exemplified by the notion of Israel and the political one in which it must interact with other States. It can always fall foul of realpolitik and seek to maximize its wealth, power, and influence through competition with other States. Howard Caygill explains that ‘under this general scenario, the State of Israel faces the danger of becoming assimilated, betraying its prophetic inspiration and behaving like any other nation-state.’103 This can be a consequence of policy decision regarding the norms of the state. For this reason, Michael L. Morgan explains that ‘Levinas takes the State of Israel as an opportunity and not an end in itself and as an opportunity it can fail.’104 This is true to a point, but it fails to remember that the disjunction between ethical responsibility and political justice, manifested through the notion/State of Israel division, means that even if the State of Israel were to explicitly affirm its ethical mission, it must necessarily fail. All States share this failure by virtue of being structured around the ethical-political relationship. It is, however, far more problematic for the State of Israel given that it was, on Levinas’s telling, specifically created to fulfil that ethical mission. Indeed, no matter how ‘politically difficult it may be for the community of Israel to attain this goal,’105 Amanda Loumansky

Between Failure and Redemption  67 reminds us that it ‘is Israel’s challenge . . . to be more than a political entity, to be a spiritual, and therefore ethical, community.’106 The affirmation of the ethical in spite of its difficult situation and seemingly impossible task is testament to the ‘extreme form of human potential’107 and ‘the chance of a regenerate humanity’108 that Levinas sees in the State of Israel. As he tells it, the State of Israel must continue to affirm its notion or risk falling back into the commonwealth of nations; a movement that would abnegate its right to exist.109 We see then that the notion of Israel not only legitimizes the creation of the State of Israel, but also provides a standard against which to judge its actions and, indeed, the actions of all States. As Michael Flagenblat explains, ‘Levinas’s whole point is that only ethics provides the moral resources for judging the State. Far from being immune to critique from Levinas’s philosophy of Judaism, the State of Israel, like every State, is subject to it.’110 This responds to Simon Critchley’s question regarding what Levinas would have made of Ariel Sharon becoming prime minister of the State of Israel having previously been removed by an Israeli commission from ‘his post as defence minister because of his culpability in a war crime.’111 Critchley implicitly portrays Levinas as straightforward uncritical Zionist who, as a consequence, was unable to critically reflect on the actions of the State of Israel. He points to the 1982 interview ‘Ethics and Politics’ in which Levinas infamously failed to explicitly condemn ‘the murder of Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila’112 as proof that he was unable to criticize the State of Israel. He might also have pointed to Levinas’s claim that ‘I forbid myself to speak about [the State of] Israel, not being in Israel, not living its noble adventure and not running this great daily risk.’113 Caygill explains that, from the perspective of Levinas’s ethical theory, there are three problems with his avowed silence: first, ‘it seems to indicate a scandalous abdication of political and ethical responsibility not to speak about a State and its actions on the grounds that one does not live there.’114 Second, ‘it also seems to renege on Levinas’s own concept of ‘Israel’ that encompasses both the State of Israel and the Diaspora.’115 And third, and perhaps most problematically, it ‘seems to turn back upon the prophetic, universal vocation of human rights central to Levinas’s ethics and politics . . . according to which all rules may be called ethically to account for their actions.’116 There is then a disjunction between his professed silence on the State of Israel and the requirements of his ethical theory, an issue compounded by the fact that Levinas did frequently talk about the State of Israel. Is it then the case that Critchley is correct to claim that Levinas was unable to criticize the State of Israel because he adopted an uncritical stance towards it? One way to engage with the veracity of Critchley’s charge is to distinguish between Levinas’s own comments on the State of Israel and those necessitated by his ethical theory. This leaves three options: (1) Critchley is correct; Levinas does not criticize the State of Israel, and his ethical theory

68  Gavin Rae is unable to do so; (2) Levinas does not criticize the State of Israel but his ethical theory is able to; and (3) Levinas criticizes the State of Israel, and this critique is a possibility supported by his ethical theory. The third option characterizes Levinas’s position: the notion of Israel provides the theoretical tools to judge the actions of the State of Israel. While Levinas insists that the State of Israel is the political complement to the notion of Israel, he is aware that the State must always be defined by the ethical moment to ensure that the alterity of its others are respected. There is then nothing in Levinas’s ethical thinking that prevents a critical analysis of the State of Israel (or any State for that matter). This leaves the possibility that Levinas himself was an unapologetic Zionist and so was unable to criticize the State of Israel. But this critique does not stand either because Levinas did criticize the State of Israel. For example, in the 1971 essay ‘From the Rise of Nihilism to the Carnal Jew,’ he complains that by dint of insisting on its significance as a State, [Israel] has been reduced to political categories. . . . The eschatological dream was substituted by the seduction of tourism, and eighteen years after the creation of the State of Israel, glossy brochures still feed their readers an implausible and invariable visual diet of athletic young girls striding joyfully towards the rising sun.117 Despite his initial optimism, Levinas gradually concluded that the State of Israel was failing to live up to its ethical mission. This reached its apogee in the 1990 interview ‘In the Name of the Other,’ where he explains that it is France, not Israel, that most closely correlates with his concepts of State and democracy.118 This is not to say that he turned his back on the State of Israel; only that it points to the conclusion that Levinas thought that, at that moment, it was France and not Israel that was the most ethical State. It is not the case that Levinas was an uncritical Zionist; his support for Israel masked and depended upon the demand that it live up to its ethical mission. Both his own comments and his ethical theory permit and, in the case of the latter, necessitate this critique.

The Political Between Failure and Redemption This clarifies an important issue in the secondary literature, but we have to remember that Levinas’s notion/State of Israel division was never intended to simply justify or critique the State of Israel. Asking what he would make of certain policies of the State of Israel or of limiting the analysis to his comments on the State of Israel misses the point of his thinking on this topic. The distinction between the notion and State of Israel aims to support and illuminate his philosophical thinking on the ethical-political relationship by showing that (1) the two are entwined, (2) the political is grounded in the ethical which provides the standard to judge the former, (3) no matter how

Between Failure and Redemption  69 the political tries to relate to the ethical, the latter always interrupts and agitates the political, and (4) the disjunction between ethical responsibility and political justice means that, no matter how just it is, the State will always fail to fully realize its ethical responsibilities. The search for justice must always be incomplete and so, in a sense, a failure. Politics is, for Levinas, always so. But the diachronic nature of its underlying social relations in conjunction with the nature of justice itself continues to offer the possibility for redemption through the creation of a more just society. The difference and tension between the ethical and political, notion and State of Israel indicate a conception of the political that is caught between failure and redemption; it is the movement between the two that generates and defines it.

Notes  1 See, for example, Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (Verso: London, 1993); Andreas Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2008); Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political, translated by Rhiannon Noel Welch (Fordham University Press: New York, 2013); Lois McNay, The Misguided Search for the Political (Polity: Cambridge, 2014); James Wiley, Politics and the Concept of the Political: The Political Imagination (Routledge: New York, 2016).  2 This chapter forms part of the activities for the Conex Marie SkłodowskaCurie Research Project ‘Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics’ cofunded by the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (600371), The Spanish Ministry of the Economy and Competitivity (COFUND2013–40258), The Spanish Ministry for Education, Culture, and Sport (CEI-15–17), and Banco Santander. More information can be found at: https://sovereigntyandlaw.wordpress.com/   3 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1998), p. 96.   4 Ibid., pp. 96–97.  5 See, for example, Bettina Bergo, Levinas Between Ethics and Politics: For a Beauty That Adorns the Earth (Duquesne University Press: Pittsburgh, 1999); Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Political (Routledge: New York, 2002); Marinos Diamantides, ed., Levinas, Law, Politics (Routledge: New York, 2007).   6 C. Fred Alford, ‘Levinas and Political Theory,’ Political Theory, vol. 32, n. 2, April, 2004, pp. 146–171 (p. 161).   7 Simon Critchley, ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them,’ Political Theory, vol. 32, n. 2, April, 2004, pp. 172–185 (p. 173).  8 In The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2016), I argue that the fundamental problem with Levinas’s political theory is the lack of justification for the normative aspect of his political thought: the claim that the State must aim at justice.   9 Amanda Loumansky, ‘Reply to Fagan: Hanging God at Auschwitz: The Necessity of a Solitary Encounter with the Other as the Genesis of Levinasian Ethics,’ Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 8, n. 1, 2009, pp. 23–43. 10 Michael L. Morgan, Discovering Levinas (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2007), p. 23; Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2008), pp. 196–197; Madeline Fagan, ‘The

70  Gavin Rae Inseparability of Ethics and Politics: Rethinking the Third in Emmanuel Levinas,’ Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 8, n. 1, 2009, pp. 5–22. 11 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘In the Name of the Other,’ p. 195, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, edited by Jill Robbins (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2001), pp. 188–199. 12 See Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (Columbia University Press: New York, 2012), and Simon Critchley, ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them,’ p. 175. 13 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ translated by Seán Hand, Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, n. 1, Autumn, 1990, pp. 62–67 (preface). 14 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, translated by Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (Columbia University Press: New York, 1998), p. 191. 15 Levinas, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ p. 64. 16 Ibid., p. 65. 17 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press: Pittsburgh, 1969), p. 39. 18 Levinas, ‘Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,’ p. 67. 19 Ibid., p. 69. 20 Ibid., p. 68. 21 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 36. 22 Ibid., p. 37. 23 Ibid., p. 59. 24 Ibid., p. 62. 25 Levinas, ‘On the Usefulness of Insomnia,’ p. 234, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 234–238. 26 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, translated by Michael B. Smith (Columbia University Press: New York, 1999), p. 28. 27 Emmanuel Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, translated by Bettina Bergo (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1998), p. 133. 28 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 50. 29 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 163. 30 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Duquesne University Press: Pittsburgh, 1981), p. 112. 31 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Essence and Disinterestedness,’ p. 121, in: Basic Philosophical Writings, edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernsconi (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1996), pp. 109–128. 32 Levinas, ‘God and Philosophy,’ p. 140, in: Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 129–148. 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,’ p. 132, in: Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass (Routledge: New York, 2002), pp. 97–192. 34 Levinas, ‘Substitution,’ in Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 80–95. 35 Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, p. XLVIII. 36 For a critical engagement with Levinas’s notion of substitution see, Gavin Rae, ‘The Politics of Justice: Levinas, Violence, and the Ethical-Political Relation,’ Contemporary Political Theory, forthcoming. 37 Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,’ p. 21, in: Face to Face with Levinas, edited by Richard A. Cohen (State University of New York Press: Albany, 1986), pp. 13–34. 38 Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death, and Time, translated by Bettina Bergo, edited by Jacques Rolland (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2000), p. 161. 39 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 166. 40 Levinas, ‘Interview with Salomon Malka,’ p. 100, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 93–102. 41 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 103.

Between Failure and Redemption  71 42 Levinas, ‘Substitution,’ p. 95, in: Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 80–95. 43 Emmanuel Levinas, Tamra Wright, Peter Hughes and Alison Ainley, ‘The Paradox of Morality,’ translated by Andrew Benjamin and Tamra Wright, p. 171, in: The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (Routledge: New York, 1998), pp. 168–180. 44 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 104. 45 Michael Morgan, Levinas’s Ethical Politics (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 2016), p. 59. 46 Levinas and Kearney, ‘Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,’ p. 29, in: Face to Face with Levinas, pp. 13–34. 47 Levinas, ‘Interview with Franҫois Poirié,’ p. 51, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 23–83. 48 Levinas, ‘Who Shall Not Prophesy?,’ p. 230, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 219–227. 49 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, translated by Richard A. Cohen (Duquesne University Press: Pittsburgh, 1985), p. 77. 50 Loumansky, ‘Reply to Fagan,’ p. 31. 51 Ibid., p. 41. 52 Levinas, Entre Nous, p. 104. 53 Levinas, ‘Interview with Franҫois Poirié,’ p. 54, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 23–83. 54 Fagan, ‘The Inseparability of Ethics and Politics,’ p. 6. 55 Ibid., p. 7. 56 Ibid., p. 9. 57 Ibid., p. 9. 58 Ibid., p. 9. 59 Ibid., p. 9. 60 Ibid., p. 9. 61 Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, pp. 196–197. 62 Morgan, Discovering Levinas, p. 23. 63 Robert Bernasconi, ‘The Third Party: Levinas on the Intersection of the Ethical and the Political,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 30, n. 1, 1999, pp. 76–87 (p. 83). 64 Ibid., p. 83. 65 Ibid., p. 80. 66 Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, p. 142. 67 Emmanuel Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, translated by Michael B. Smith (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1994), p. 107. 68 Levinas, ‘Peace and Proximity,’ p. 168, in: Basic Philosophical Writings, pp. 162–169. 69 Levinas, ‘The Vocation of the Other,’ p. 112, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 105–113. 70 Levinas, God, Death, and Time, p. 201. 71 Ibid., p. 202. 72 Levinas, ‘Interview with Franҫois Poirié,’ p. 68, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 23–83. 73 Ibid., p. 51. 74 Levinas, Wright, Hughes and Ainley, ‘The Paradox of Morality,’ p. 177, in: The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, pp. 168–180. 75 Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, p. 95. 76 Levinas, ‘On Jewish Philosophy,’ p. 248, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 239–254. 77 Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, translated by Seán Hand (The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1990); Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse, translated by Gary D. Mole (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1994).

72  Gavin Rae   78 Levinas, ‘Judaism,’ p. 24, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 24–26.   79 Levinas, ‘Means of Identification,’ p. 51, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 50–53.   80 Ibid., p. 51.   81 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Secularism and the Thought of Israel,’ p. 117, in: Unforeseen History, translated by Nidra Poller (University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 2004), pp. 113–124.   82 Levinas, ‘Judaism,’ p. 24, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 24–26.  83 Morgan, Levinas’s Ethical Politics, p. 331.   84 Levinas, ‘Religion and Tolerance,’ p. 173, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 172–174.  85 Levinas, ‘In the Name of the Other,’ p. 197, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 188–199.   86 Adriaan T. Peperzak, Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 1997), p. 26.   87 Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Messianic Texts,’ p. 83, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 59–98.   88 Levinas, ‘Israel and Universalism,’ p. 176, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 175–177.   89 It is important to note that while Levinas latterly ties ‘morality’ to the rules of the political, in his earlier texts, including the one under discussion, he uses the terms ‘ethical’ and ‘morality’ interchangeably. Levinas, ‘The Spinoza Case,’ p. 109, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 106–110.   90 Levinas, ‘Secularism and the Thought of Israel,’ p. 118, in: Unforeseen History, pp. 113–124.   91 Levinas, ‘Israel and Universalism,’ p. 177, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 175–177.   92 Levinas, ‘Reality Has Weight,’ p. 163, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 158–164.   93 Levinas, ‘Judaism,’ p. 26, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 24–26.  94 Levinas, ‘Interview with Franҫois Poirié,’ p. 81, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 23–83.   95 Levinas, ‘The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,’ p. 216, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 216–220.   96 Ibid., p. 216.  97 Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 187.   98 Levinas, ‘The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,’ p. 218, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 216–220.   99 Ibid., p. 218. 100 Ibid., p. 218. 101 Levinas, ‘How Is Judaism Possible?,’ p. 250, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 245–254. 102 Levinas, ‘The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,’ p. 218, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 216–220. 103 Caygill, Levinas and the Political, p. 165. 104 Morgan, Discovering Levinas, p. 402. 105 Amanda Loumansky, ‘Levinas, Israel, and the Call of Conscience,’ Law and Critique, vol. 16, n. 2, 2005, pp. 181–200 (p. 192). 106 Ibid., p. 192. 107 Levinas, Beyond the Verse, p. 190. 108 Levinas, In the Time of the Nations, p. 104. 109 ‘The State of Israel will be religious because of the intelligence of its great books which it is not free to forget. It will be religious through the very action that establishes it as a State. It will be religious or it will not be at all.’ (Levinas, ‘The State of Israel and the Religion of Israel,’ p. 219, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 216–220). The religious sentiment it must follow is Judaism which as I previously explained is, for Levinas, synonymous with ethical responsibility and political justice towards the other. 110 Michael Flagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas’s Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2010), p. 186.

Between Failure and Redemption  73 111 Critchley, ‘Five Problems in Levinas’s View of Politics and the Sketch of a Solution to Them,’ p. 175. 112 Ibid., p. 175. For an alternative interpretation of Levinas’s comments on this matter, one that defends Levinas against Critchley’s charge, see Morgan, Levinas’s Ethical Politics, chapter 10. 113 Levinas, ‘Interview with Franҫois Poirié,’ p. 82, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 23–83. 114 Howard Caygill, ‘Levinas’s Silence,’ p. 84, in: Levinas, Law, Politics, edited by Marinos Diamantides (Routledge: New York, 2007), pp. 83–92. 115 Ibid., p. 84. 116 Ibid., p. 84. 117 Levinas, ‘From the Rise of Nihilism to the Carnal Jew,’ p. 222, in: Difficult Freedom, pp. 221–226. 118 Levinas, ‘In the Name of the Other,’ p. 195, in: Is It Righteous to Be?, pp. 188–199.

4 The Significant Nothing Agamben, Theology, and Political Subjectivity Piotr Sawczyński

It has often been noted that contemporary thinking has been marked by an increased interest in the theological. What is usually called the ‘theological turn’ is not, however, just the restitution of traditional thinking of God in a secular world, but the attempt to read theological motives in a highly nontraditional way.1 In these readings, the apparently conservative discourse of theology, frequently used in the past to reinforce fundamental metaphysical concepts, is tested as a way to make ontology ‘weaker’ and thus neutralize the perceived, oppressive potential of metaphysical language.2 Authors, such as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and Gianni Vattimo, have explored the ambiguous nature of theology to stimulate those of its aspects which might be productive for contemporary post-metaphysical thinking.3 Within the theological turn lies another so-called ‘turn,’ referred to in literature as the ‘messianic turn.’4 Messianism, which in religious language designates ‘ideas, concepts, and figures which are related to present or future states of redemption,’5 is explored by those who seek in theology not only ontological inspiration, but also political instruments capable of effecting radical change. Giorgio Agamben has recently offered one of the most promising attempts to introduce a messianic discourse into radical political thinking. He is, however, aware that the very idea of secularizing messianism and, indeed, the attempt to assimilate it within political philosophy has a long and rather inglorious history; communism being the most obvious contemporary example. This is why Agamben, like many other figures of the messianic turn, distances himself from the Hegelian-Marxist legacy and plays with the messianic idiom not to ‘immanentize the eschaton’—to use Eric Voegelin’s famous phrase6—but to deconstruct the very opposition of the secular and the messianic in modern political thought. Agamben argues that without a redemptive horizon, all politics is ‘imprisoned and immobile’7—reduced to a technocratic management of things which offers no ways of transcending what is given. The redemptive moment of his thought is thus supposed to meditate on a new politics, able to challenge the oppressive mechanisms of sovereign power. What is most important for us is that the discourse of redemption is also meant to re-invigorate the problematic category of the subject.

76  Piotr Sawczyński This chapter argues that Agamben’s messianism is primarily aimed at thinking subjectivity beyond power relations to offer a new type of political subject which he calls ‘the remnant.’8 This subject-making project is to a large extent influenced by the messianism of Gershom Scholem, the most prominent twentieth century theorist of Jewish kabbalah, whose name almost always appears when Agamben refers to the Judaic tradition. Since Scholem’s messianic philosophy mostly developed from the sixteenth century kabbalah of Isaac Luria and his disciples, I argue that it is fruitful to read Agamben’s messianic project through the prism of Luria’s core concepts of tsimtsum (contraction), shevira (catastrophe) and tikkun (rectification). These are not explicitly discussed by Agamben, but my guiding contention is that they structure all his conceptions of a coming-politics. What he takes from Luria is the idea that our world is not only catastrophically permeated with negativity (in Agamben ‘catastrophe’ is the name of sovereign power), but also in need of immediate messianic action. Scholem inspires Agamben by also claiming that any redemptive enterprise must entail a substantial portion of negativity, which he describes under the notion of ‘nothing.’ Although risky, the application of nothingness is necessary if the acts of subversion are not to be absorbed and neutralized by the logic of immanence, or politics as it is. I hypothesize that in Agamben’s messianic formula, which draws on both Luria and Scholem, any positive gesture of tikkun must be accompanied by a (seemingly) negative gesture of tsimtsum, which provides the subject-making strategy with a healthy portion of nothingness. The product of this messianic action is the remnant: a political subject which, according to Agamben, is both metaphysically weak—or, shall we say, contracted—and politically effective. The Lurianic background of Agamben’s messianism has been relatively neglected in the literature, even by those authors who accentuate his Judaic inspirations. For example, Jessica Whyte9 uses the kabbalistic matrix of catastrophe and redemption as an interpretive key to Agamben’s political project, but only briefly comments on the theological genealogy of these two concepts. Similarly, David Ferris10 and Jason Thomas McKinney11 extensively discuss Agamben’s ‘contracted messianism,’ but fail to track down the kabbalistic legacy of the idea. This legacy is elaborated throughout the essays contained in the edited collection Benjamin-Agamben: Politics, Messianism, Kabbalah,12 which provide comprehensive insights into the role that Jewish heterodoxy plays in Agamben’s and Walter Benjamin’s writings and, indeed, recognize that Scholem is their primary source of inspiration, but they fail to identify the Lurianic origins of the messianic idea they emphasize. In contrast, I argue that Agamben’s idea of messianic politics cannot be fully grasped without a detailed discussion of its Lurianic and Scholemian backgrounds. To do so, in the first section I outline the metaphysical doctrine of Lurianic kabbalah through the conceptual triad: tsimtsum, shevira, and tikkun. In the second section, I discuss Scholem’s interpretation of Lurianism and

The Significant Nothing  77 comment on his controversial decision to apply the concept of the nothing to his messianic idea. At this point, a reference to the works of Benjamin and Franz Kafka will be needed to introduce Scholem’s redemptive formula of the ‘slight adjustment.’13 Only then do I move on to Agamben to see how he applies kabbalistic notions politically. I focus especially on The Coming Community14 and The Time That Remains, Agamben’s leading messianic texts, where this application is the most elaborate, but occasionally refer to other works if necessary. Specifically, I claim that Agamben’s idea of the messianic time, which is based on Lurianic concept of contraction, influences his conception of the process through which the subject is made. I then concentrate on his primary messianic gesture of the ‘cut of Apelles’15 to argue that it best exemplifies Scholem’s idea of the slight adjustment. Finally, I elaborate on the figure of the remnant, a new political subject which is a product of the messianic action to see if such a subject, which is so tinged with negativity, may really be, as Agamben argues, successful in neutralizing the logic of sovereign power.

Theological Grounding I: Nothingness in Lurianism In his influential essay ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,’ Scholem remarks that ‘Jewish messianism is in its origins and by its nature . . . a theory of catastrophe,’16 thereby suggesting that without a disastrous event there is no force able to activate a messianic impulse. Indeed, medieval kabbalah—the most important Jewish school of spiritual perfection—was long concerned not with collective messianic action but rather with inner mystical contemplation, which was supposed to unite individual human souls with divine substance. It is only with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain towards the end of the fifteenth century that it became impossible for Jews to continue ignoring their political reality, a realization that brought about unprecedented messianic fever. In Scholem’s view, Lurianic doctrine was among the most influential responses to the trauma of expulsion and actually initiated the messianic turn in modern Jewish kabbalah where cosmological processes were often interpreted as a great story of ‘exile and redemption.’17 Lurianic doctrine mirrors the Bible in insisting that, initially, the cosmos was entirely filled with divine presence and, as such, was perfectly undifferentiated. The explanation of the passage from this primordial state to the world of individual beings has always been challenging for Judaism. Medieval kabbalah tended to use the language of emanationism, where at some point things just ‘pour out’ of God; this ensures that they are separate, but also contain an element of divinity. Rabbinic Judaism, on the contrary, has always accentuated the absolute separation of God and the world, and assumed creatio ex nihilo as the only genesis of earthly beings which avoids falling into pantheistic formulations.18 What makes Luria stand out in Jewish kabbalah is that he accepts creatio ex nihilo, but refuses to faithfully

78  Piotr Sawczyński adopt it as a dogma. Instead, he examines the original ambiguity of Judaic creation; namely, how to reconcile the existence of perfect divine substance and something as extremely negative as nothing. This dilemma brings Luria to a paradoxical but highly logical conclusion: creation out of nothing must have been preceded by creation of the nothing itself. From this, Luria explains, through a two-stage process, how God manifests Himself in the world. The key concept here is tsimtsum, the Hebrew word which stands for ‘contraction’ or ‘shrinking.’ Rather than simply manifesting Himself externally in His full glory, God, first, withdraws to just one point of Himself. This radical self-reduction aims to generate a void (tehiru)—a reservoir of nothingness, out of which all beings are going to be created. What is left in tehiru is only the remnant of contracted divine light, which Luria calls reshimu. This receding of God within Himself, described by Scholem as His ‘primordial exile, or self-banishment,’19 is for Luria necessary to make possible the existence of independent non-divine beings. It does, however, mean that tsimtsum also lays the foundation for the exile of the Jewish nation, if not all humanity, from God.20 Only once when God has contracted Himself does He, second, manifest Himself by directing His weakened powers towards tehiru for the sake of creation. However, even this affirmative emanation is intimately related to negativity because the Lurianic idea of creation, unlike other kabbalists’, involves a fundamental moment of rupture. In Luria’s evocative imagery, the contracted God shapes containers which are then supposed to be forms filled with the light of life. Unfortunately, the vessels are made from reshimu, which makes them so tinged with nothingness that, confronted with the divine glare, they break up and start falling into the cosmic abyss together with scattered sparks of divinity. Shevirat ha-kelim, or ‘the breaking of the vessels,’ is a founding catastrophe which results in a general deficiency and displacement of things in this world. In Scholem’s words: ‘Nothing remains in its proper place. Everything is somewhere else, . . . in exile, . . . in need of being redeemed.’21 Therefore, if tsimtsum can be called ‘creation of the nothing,’ shevirah would be ‘nothingness of creation’; an unintentional but disastrous error of a weakened God. In a world so fatally scarred with catastrophe, the final and crucial episode of the cosmological process must be tikkun, which in Hebrew stands for ‘a perfection, a betterment, and a correction’22 of things. This sense of tikkun is not originally Lurianic; it had a different meaning in medieval kabbalah. There, and following Plato, it was generally believed that contemplative devotion was enough to permit every human soul to return to its original state of perfection. In contrast, Luria, building on his insistence of the cosmic rupture, claims that this primordial perfection never existed and so cannot be reconstructed.23 That is why, in Scholem’s view, Lurianic tikkun originates a new type of messianic idea where ‘the renewal of the world is simply more than its restoration.’24 In Luria, this renewal requires the liberation of divine sparks from their entrapment in the material sphere. Only

The Significant Nothing  79 then might God be powerful enough to redeem this world and re-create it in such a way that everything is finally in its right place.

Theological Grounding II: Negativity in Scholem Although central to Lurianic cosmology, tikkun is the most fragmentary and vague element of his kabbalah. It is, therefore, open to multiple interpretations. Luria and most of his disciples believed that the way to repair the cosmic realm was through the pious performance of commandments, in Judaism called mitzvot, and other ritual practices.25 In Scholem, this belief is much weaker. One of his primary theses is that in the nineteenth and twentieth century—due to dramatic historical events and the crisis of faith—the continuity of Judaic tradition was broken, with this greatly affecting the manifestation of tikkun. He claims that contemporarily, ‘the word of God no longer serves as a source for the definition of possible contents of a religious tradition and thus of a possible theology.’26 As a result, the meaning of the rituals prescribed by Luria has been forgotten and almost nothing is left of their redemptive power. However, for Scholem, the experience of this nothingness is not the end of the messianic idea. In one of his most elliptic texts, titled ‘Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,’ he enigmatically remarks that ‘authentic tradition remains hidden; . . . only when it is fallen does its greatness become visible.’27 Not only does he claim that a catastrophic rupture fails to thwart redemptive enterprise; he also implies that without catastrophe the true meaning of redemption may not be fully grasped. To appreciate this peculiar thesis, clearly inspired by Luria’s cosmology, it is necessary to comment on the Scholemian idea of revelation, which complements creation and redemption in the great triad of Judaic concepts. First of all, Scholem accentuates that in Judaism, unlike in Christianity, God has never incarnated and only reveals Himself to His people through the words of the Torah. This hidden nature of the Jewish God is clearly implied in the Book of Exodus when the Lord says to Moses: ‘When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.’28 According to the Torah, any expressive manifestation of divinity is forbidden and revelation may only come in a linguistic form. However, what is crucial for Scholem is that this revelation—despite being linguistic—is not a straightforward message. He follows Benjamin in holding that only human language is based in context. The language of revelation, on the contrary, is ‘the absolute that gives meaning but itself remains meaningless.’29 In other words, it directly communicates nothing and so, from the human perspective, makes no sense. This does not mean that no sense may be understood, only that understanding is dialectical and results when the Scripture is mediated by its multiple interpretations, which endow it with a context.

80  Piotr Sawczyński From this perspective, the Judaic tradition is nothing other than a historical process of commentaries, which, even if fragmentary and never complete, may accumulate in a productive way. This does, however, give rise to the question: what if the flow of the tradition is dramatically interrupted? This was one of the main topics of the correspondence that, in 1934, Scholem undertook with Benjamin à propos Kafka’s literature,30 a topic both were fascinated with. In many of his texts, Scholem argues that the reading of Kafka is necessary to understand the crisis of the Judaic tradition because his writings originally explore ‘the fine line between religion and nihilism.’31 The role that this line plays in Kafka’s oeuvre has been discussed by many interpreters, but Scholem departs from the well-worn paths. He is equally opposed to those, like Max Brod, who place Kafka on the side of religion and try to read his works through positive theological categories,32 and those, like Benjamin, for whom the Kafkaesque world is the world devoid of God, irreversibly fallen into the state of negativity.33 Instead, Scholem links the religious with the negative to examine Kafka’s idiom. This is not to neutralize negativity, but to explore its messianic potential. This exploration is most visible in the letters from July 17 and September 20, 1934, where Scholem refers to the final parts of Benjamin’s essay on Kafka. There, Benjamin comments on the symbolic function of the student—who is a typical character in Kafka’s novels—to conclude that students may symbolize modern Jews who are supposed to study holy texts but have, instead, turned from them and so imprudently squandered the work of revelation.34 Scholem is fiercely opposed to this understanding and tries to convince his friend that things are more complex in Kafka: the texts have not been lost but, for the first time, they are completely unintelligible because an interpretive key is missing. He argues that the world with no link between scattered commentaries is still ‘the world of revelation, but a revelation seen . . . from that perspective in which it is returned to its own nothingness.’35 Confused, Benjamin asks how it is possible to speak of the ‘nothingness of revelation,’36 to which Scholem answers that he means a state in which revelation ‘does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content.’37 Stéphane Moses remarks in his essay ‘Gershom Scholem’s Reading of Kafka’ that the difference between the absence of revelation and its unreadability may seem illusory.38 Indeed, for Benjamin, it is, which leads him to claim that ‘it doesn’t matter whether the disciples have lost the “Scripture” or whether they can’t decipher them.’39 For Scholem, however, the difference is crucial, although I doubt that it is so for the reasons mentioned by Moses, who argues that revelation is incomprehensible to us, but one day might be meaningful again. In other words, that the tradition is ruptured means, for Moses, that it is not dead; there is still the possibility for renewal.40 Although this possibility cannot be excluded, it does not seem to accurately describe Scholem’s notion of the nothingness of revelation, which is a clear reference to Lurianic kabbalah. For Scholem, the world of Kafkaesque revelation is

The Significant Nothing  81 a world from which God has withdrawn, but not one in which He has left His people without a message. On the contrary, it is precisely the lack of any content which seems to be how God’s supreme message is revealed to humans. After all, if the primary function of revelation is to communicate to humans how to redeem themselves, and the revelation comes in the form of nothingness, then we reach a radical, yet highly logical, conclusion: God is telling us that redemption is only possible through nothingness. Scholem emphasizes that the combination of nothingness and redemption should not automatically connote apocalypse. Admittedly, apocalyptic tendencies have always been present in the Judaic tradition, but Scholem, whose messianic idea draws on Lurianic cosmology, rejects this approach. If the nothingness of redemption meant apocalypse—destructio ad nihilum— it would be just a symmetrical reversal of creatio ex nihilo, which for Luria was, as we saw, too problematic. Even though nothingness plays a considerable role in Scholem’s conception of redemption, this conception does not result in nothingness. Speaking in Lurianic terms, it must be another tsimtsum, a radical gesture of self-reduction. This time, however, it is not God, but humans, whose gestures must undergo this process of contraction. What should these redemptive gestures be like? A clue is offered by Ernst Bloch who comments on Scholem’s idea in a fragment titled ‘The Invisible Hand.’41 Bloch tells the story of a rabbi—‘a true Kabbalist’—who teaches others how to perform messianic tricks. Although the story itself is quite comical, the moral extracted from it by the rabbi, who obviously represents Scholem, is very serious: ‘To bring about the kingdom of freedom, it is not necessary that everything is destroyed, and a new world begin; rather . . . all things must only be shifted a little.’42 This conception of little shifts is attributed by Bloch to ‘the practical intuition’43 of the rabbi who is aware that violent gestures only reproduce the logic of earthly powers. If this logic is to be challenged, one should rather search for those fragments of reality, where an inconspicuous, seemingly powerless, shift may be enough to crumble the whole crust of immanence. It is interesting that this messianic formula, which Benjamin aptly calls ‘a slight adjustment,’44 is apparently inspired by the philosophy of Moses Maimonides, perhaps the greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages. Scholem does, however, radically modify it. For Maimonides, whose rationalist teachings were highly conservative, the notion of the slight adjustment means that, while the coming of the Messiah will bring spiritual renewal to the world, the shape of the world will be left intact, with neither earthly beings transformed, nor the natural course of life disturbed.45 For Scholem, however, this minimal shift is anything but conservative. It is rather a clever, subversive trick, equally distant from destructive violence and adaptation; an infinitely small modification, thanks to which the redeemed world will only be ‘slightly’ different, but, in which, this difference is going to change everything. For this reason, Scholem’s messianic notion of the slight adjustment looks like a cunning reversal of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s famous

82  Piotr Sawczyński dictum that sometimes almost nothing needs to change, so that everything may start anew.46

Agamben on Negativity and Nothingness This is precisely the point where Scholem’s thought inspires Agamben, for whom ‘no idea is so central . . . as “the messianic.” ’47 Agamben refers to Scholem’s studies on kabbalah in a number of texts and frequently comments on the complexity of his messianic idea.48 However, a direct reference to the notion of the slight adjustment appears only twice: first, in The Coming Community—a book that attempts to develop a notion of community that is not based on exclusive criteria of belonging—where Agamben not only comments on the ‘well-known parable’49 recounted by Bloch, but also elaborates on Scholem’s messianic formula as this emanated from the mouth of the rabbi. Surprisingly, given that Agamben is the editor of Benjamin’s collected works in Italian, he fails to mention that the parable was actually recounted not only by Bloch, but also by Benjamin. Benjamin’s reading matters because it seems to have influenced Agamben’s conception of the messianic more than Bloch’s. Leland de la Durantaye notes that whereas Bloch concentrates on what needs to be done to bring about the ‘Kingdom of the Messiah,’ and associates the adjustment with qualities of a messianic gesture, Benjamin is rather concerned with what the Kingdom will look like.50 In other words, for Bloch the slight adjustment is a means to redemption, whereas for Benjamin it is more of a property of the redeemed world. This is clearly seen in the short essay ‘In the Sun,’ where Benjamin remarks—in full accordance with the Maimonidesian heritage of the idea—that in the messianic realm ‘everything . . . will be arranged just as it is with us’51; all things will remain in their places, not a single item being shifted. However, while nothing is going to change—says Benjamin—things will be radically different. This paradoxical conclusion makes Agamben note that the adjustment that Scholem and Benjamin have in mind ‘does not refer to the state of things, but to their sense.’52 This remark is crucial: when Agamben speaks of the ‘tiny displacement,’53 as he calls Scholem’s formula, he does not mean any physical passage from the present to the future state of affairs. It is rather the meaning of the things as they are which is going to be displaced. The logic of this messianic trick, as interpreted by Agamben, lies precisely in the use of language. This is elaborated further in The Time That Remains, Agamben’s insightful commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, where, as Catherine Mills points out, ‘his approach to messianism is most explicitly and thoroughly articulated.’54 This erudite work, being an attempt to rethink Pauline doctrine, is also marked by the most extensive application of Luria’s concepts to Agamben’s philosophy. The most ‘Lurianic’ part of The Time That Remains is its crucial chapter ‘Apostolos,’ where Agamben explicates his conception of messianic time. To do so, he distinguishes between the messianic and the

The Significant Nothing  83 eschatological; concepts which, as he argues, have been conflated throughout the history of philosophy.55 Agamben remarks that eschatology, both religious and secular, is always future-oriented and contemplates the end of time when redemption—whether in the form of the Christian Kingdom of Heaven or communist classless society—will finally come to bring about universal happiness.56 Those who foretell this future state of fulfillment, like Jesus Christ or Karl Marx, are prophets. In clear contrast, Paul—for Agamben, the greatest messianist of all time—did not teach of the future coming of the Messiah, but of the Messiah who is already here, although not yet recognized. That is precisely why Paul is traditionally called an apostle, not a prophet. The apostle is the figure of messianic time, which, as Agamben proposes to conceive of it, is always concerned with the present, only slightly different from our chronological understanding of present time.57 The discussion of the ‘meager difference’58 between the chronological and messianic conceptions of time is the place where Scholem’s ‘rabbinic apologue’59 reappears in Agamben’s oeuvre. It is also intimately linked to the Lurianic concepts of tsimtsum, tehiru and reshimu. The interplay of displacement and contraction (tsimtsum) is used by Agamben to explicate Paul’s famous preaching from The First Letter to the Corinthians, where he enigmatically teaches that ‘the time has been shortened.’60 According to Agamben, Paul does not announce the imminent Second Coming—that would be an eschatological mode of thinking—but rather makes a messianic gesture, which results in the shrinking of chronological time. The time ‘that contracts itself’61 produces a sort of tehiru—the Lurianic term for vacuum— where a new quality of time can be constituted. This new quality is precisely the messianic time; in Pauline Greek, it is called ho nyn kairos. Importantly, ho nyn kairos, which escapes linear thinking of history, is not external, but internal to chronological time; it is a displacement in chronological time that is made possible thanks to the gesture of contraction and the production of void. Agamben remarks that this messianic time might also be aptly described as the remnant (Lurianic reshimu), which means ‘the time that remains between [chronological] time and its end.’62 Agamben focuses on the construction of messianic time because he is going to use the relationship between contraction and displacement inherent to it to create a new political subject. Before doing so, however, he needs to face a fundamental problem: in Luria’s myth, whose imagery is widely used in The Time That Remains, the gesture of tsimtsum and the production of reshimu are also supposed to lay the foundations for the act of creation. However, as noted, what actually occurred was the catastrophe of shevira; a faulty creation of the material world caused by too much negativity. Therefore, if Agamben plays with the Lurianic idiom of nothingness to bring about a new subject, he must be careful to avoid this original mistake. This is why he proposes a small but meaningful alteration to Scholem’s reading of Luria. For Scholem, whose mode of thinking was highly dialectical, the slight adjustment should be a product of starkly

84  Piotr Sawczyński contrasted oppositions wherein the moment of negativity (tsimtsum) must first be intensified in order to further complement it with some positive action. Agamben, on the contrary, mistrusts the logic of dialectics, because he thinks that if negativity is reinforced, it might prevent any gesture of positivity from happening. He argues that to avoid a Lurianic breaking of the vessels, the moment of negativity should not precede, but must rather accompany the act of positivity. To develop this, Agamben introduces the intriguing concept of the ‘cut of Apelles,’63 which he takes from Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. There, Benjamin, discussing his conception of the historical fact, speaks of ‘the Apollonian section,’64 which is supposed to represent a rupture within historical time. Agamben suggests that Benjamin’s conclusion is based on a hermeneutical error in that the section he mentions should not be attributed to the mythical god Apollo, but to the Greek painter Apelles. The motif of the cut comes from Pliny’s Natural History which tells the story of two great artists who once strove against each other to determine who could draw a thinner line.65 Protogenes—the first of them—succeeds in drawing ‘such a fine line that it seems not to have been drawn by the paintbrush of any human being.’66 However, when he is almost sure to win, his rival Apelles proves his greatness and divides Protogenes’s line in two ‘with an even finer line, cutting it lengthwise in half.’67 For Agamben, this episode has a distinctive messianic potential. The line drawn by Protogenes, which divides a surface in two halves, represents the logic of sovereign power. The power, claims Agamben, is always concerned with making distinctions, according to the ancient rule of divide et impera. If Apelles strove to draw just another line, external to the first one, he would only reinforce the idea of sovereignty. However, he does something messianically sophisticated: instead of cutting the elements of the division, he cuts the division itself, thus skillfully deactivating it. As such, the positivity of this messianic caesura lies precisely in the act of negation. Even more importantly, this ‘division of division’68 is supposed to be the seed corn of a new conception of subjectivity, which Agamben describes through the notion of the remnant. He argues that this Lurianic term, previously used to explicate the status of messianic time in Paul’s letters, denotes the product of the Apelles cut and is its ‘ultimate meaning.’69 However, the meaning differs from the conventional understanding of the remnant as a numeric portion. According to Agamben, this displacement is clearly visible in Paul’s address to the Romans: when Paul speaks of his Jewish brethren ‘as though they were a whole’70 and announces that ‘only a remnant will be saved’71 of them, he does not mean that only a few have been chosen for salvation. Agamben proposes to read these words through the prism of Benjamin’s ‘In the Sun’ to claim that the remnant—messianically conceived—does not refer to the status of Israel before but after redemption. As such, it does not mean that a remnant of the people will be saved, but that the people will be saved as the remnant.72 In other words, thanks to Apelles’ messianic

The Significant Nothing  85 cut, they will be constituted anew as a being which escapes the sovereign categories of the whole and the part and which will—only in this form— finally be offered redemption. Needless to say, this idea goes far beyond the language in which liberal democracies typically conceive of the political subject. Instead of strict individual and collective identities, it represents ‘the impossibility for the part and the all to coincide with themselves or with each other,’73 thereby initiating a new mode of thinking of parts and wholes, or singularities and communities. That is why, for Agamben, the concept of the remnant lays the foundations for a new political ontology, which is made possible by the messianic deactivation of divisions. For this reason, the remnant might well be the name for his coming community.

Conclusion Having discussed the notions of messianic time, the cut of Apelles, and the remnant, we see that the influence of Luria’s and Scholem’s kabbalistic thinking on Agamben’s conception of the political subject is beyond question. The common denominator for all these notions is the idea of negativity represented by contraction: Lurianic tsimtsum. Importantly, whereas in Luria’s myth tsimtsum only initiates the long process of catastrophe (shevira) and redemption (tikkun), for Agamben—just like for Scholem—it already has redemptive potential. However, let us reiterate that Agamben steps away from Scholem’s conception of contraction to read it non-­dialectically: while in Scholem tsimtsum precedes tikkun, for Agamben it is tikkun. This is best exemplified by the master cut of Apelles, which is a gesture that deactivates the logic of sovereign power by the very fact of self-limitation. Alongside this, it creates nothingness, conceived by Agamben as a linguistic void where words may be endowed with new meanings, escaping conventional language practices. One such word is obviously the remnant, whose designatum is still missing, but will appear once the messianic act has been skillfully completed. But how do we know, one might ask, that all these sophisticated measures prescribed by Agamben really have any subject-making potential? How can we discern the point where they ought to be applied to be productive? And are we sure that they are not self-cancelling? Could it not be that, when they deactivate sovereign divisions, their messianic potential is simultaneously deactivated? As Bloch pessimistically concluded, although ‘all things must only be shifted a little. . ., this “a little” is hard to do, and its measure so hard to find [that] humanity cannot do it in this world.’74 Could this mean that it really is only the Messiah who can save us, so that, if He does not come, we are all doomed to the ‘life lived in deferment,’75 as Scholem once summarized the Jewish condition? While Agamben’s conception of political subjectivity, whose supreme figure of the remnant is grounded on the unsteady foundation of the Judaic tradition, cannot help but provoke such questions, it, unfortunately, does not provide us with clear answers.

86  Piotr Sawczyński What Agamben’s philosophy does provide is an inspiring conception of the subject, whose ontological weakness does not prevent it from being politically effective. While the remnant cannot establish itself as something opposed to the principle of sovereignty, its radical indeterminacy means that it always escapes sovereign power. As such, the very being of Agamben’s subject is already a political act. Indeed, through his original reading of Jewish conceptions of negativity, Agamben puts forward a conception of messianic action that is not violently apocalyptic, utopian, or a passive awaiting of divine intervention. By developing the notion of ‘the time that remains’ and speaking of a redemption which is within our reach, he demonstrates that the Judaic tradition is not only about life lived in deferment, but also about hope for the tiny displacement.

Notes   1 For the discussion of this concept see Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (Fordham University Press: New York, 2000).   2 The most influential critique has probably been Martin Heidegger's discussion of ʻontotheology’ in Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Blackwell: Oxford, 1962), pp. 41–49.   3 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (Routledge: New York, 2001); Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, translated by Luca d'Isanto (Columbia University Press: New York, 2002); Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, translated by Thomas A. Carlson (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2012).   4 The concept is discussed throughout Anna Glazova and Paul North, eds., Messianic Thought Outside Theology (Fordham University Press: New York, 2014); Arthur Bradley and Paul Fletcher, eds., The Messianic Now: Philosophy, Religion, Culture (Routledge: New York, 2014).   5 Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1998), p. 1.   6 Eric Voegelin, New Science of Politics: An Introduction (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1987).   7 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1998), p. 11.  8 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, translated by Patricia Dailey (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2005), pp. 53–55.   9 Jessica Whyte, Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2013). 10 David Ferris, ʻAgamben and the Messianic: The Slightest of Differences,' in: Messianic Thought Outside Theology, pp. 73–92. 11 Jason Thomas McKinney, ʻSecret Agreements and Slight Adjustments: On Giorgio Agamben's Messianic Citations,' The Journal of Religion, vol. 91, n. 1, 2011, pp. 496–518. 12 Vittoria Borsò, Claas Morgenroth, Karl Solibakke and Bernd Witte, eds., Benjamin-Agamben: Politics, Messianism, Kabbalah (Verlag Königshausen and Neumann: Würzburg, 2010). 13 Gershom Scholem, ‘Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, July 9, 1934,’ p. 125, in: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932–1940,

The Significant Nothing  87 edited by Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, translated by Gary Smith and Andre Lefevre (Schocken Books: New York, 1989), pp. 123–125. 14 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, translated by Michael Hardt (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2007). 15 Agamben, The Time that Remains, pp. 49–53. 16 Gershom Scholem, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,’ p. 7, in: The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, translated by Michael A. Meyer and Hillel Halkin (Schocken Books: New York, 1995), pp. 1–36. 17 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, translated by Ralph Manheim (Schocken Books: New York, 1969), p. 117. Unfortunately, space constraints mean that it is not possible to fully discuss the complexity of the Lurianic doctrine. What at least must be said, however, is that Luria did not leave a single written piece and the core of the doctrine was written down by the most prominent of his disciples—Chayyim Vital and Israel Sarug—whose teachings are at times radically different. For further elaboration, see Lawrence Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2003); Shaul Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 2008). 18 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pp. 98–99. 19 Ibid., p. 111. Luria was not the first kabbalist to employ the concept of tsimtsum—important figures including Nahmanides and Moses Cordovero had done so before. He was, however, the first to make it central to his cosmological doctrine. What is important to note is that the word itself is highly ambiguous, denoting both withdrawal and concentration. The consequences of this ambiguity are crucial: ‘concentration’ connotes self-empowerment whereas ‘withdrawal’ is clearly about the renunciation of power. Let us just say that Scholem strongly advocated the latter interpretation and argued that those who followed the former distorted the original meaning of the Lurianic doctrine. See Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books: New York, 1954), p. 260. 20 See Moshe Idel’s interesting analysis of the exilic interpretation of Lurianism by Scholem: Moshe Idel, ‘Scholem’s Exilic Interpretation of the Tsimtsum,’ in: Messianic Mystics, pp. 179–180. 21 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, pp. 112–113. Agata Bielik-Robson interestingly speculates that, while the breaking of the vessels appeared as the error of the weakened God, it may, in fact, have been his clever, far-sighted strategy: if the vessels had not been broken, the divine substance they were filled with could eventually regenerate and squander the work of tsimtsum. Therefore, Bielik-Robson proposes to employ Nietzschean idiom and speak of shevira as ‘creative destruction’ (die schöpferische Zerstörung). See Agata Bielik-Robson, ‘God of Luria, Hegel, Schelling: The Divine Contraction and the Modern Metaphysics of Finitude,’ p. 42, in: Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy: Interchange in the Wake of God, edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore and Duane Williams (Routledge: New York, 2017), pp. 39–58. 22 Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, p. 127. 23 Sanford L. Drob, Symbols of the Kabbalah: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives (Jason Aronson Inc.: Northvale and Jerusalem, 2000), pp. 366–373. 24 Scholem, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,’ p. 14. 25 Fine, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos, p. 144. 26 Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, edited by Werner Dannhauser (Schocken Books: New York, 1976), p. 274.

88  Piotr Sawczyński 27 David Biale, ‘Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary,’ Modern Judaism, vol. 5, n. 1, 1985, pp. 67–93 (p. 71). 28 Exodus 33: 22–23. 29 Gershom Scholem, ‘Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift “Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit”, von dr. Gerhard Scholem, Universität Jerusalem,’ p. 469, in: Briefe I, 1914–1947, edited by Itta Shedletzky (Verlag C. H. Beck: München, 1994), pp. 466–471. See also Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,’ translated by Edmund Jephcott, in: Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 62–74. 30 Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932–1940, translated by Gary Smith and Andre Lefevre (Schocken Books: New York, 1989). 31 Cited in David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 75. See also Biale, ‘Gershom Scholem’s Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah,’ p. 88. 32 Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, translated by G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard Winston (Schocken Books: New York, 1960). 33 Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,’ in: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn (Schocken Books: New York, 1989), pp. 111–140. 34 Ibid., p. 139. 35 ‘Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, 17 July 1934,’ p. 126, in: The Correspondence of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, pp. 126–127. 36 ‘Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, 20 September 1934,’ p. 142, in: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, pp. 141–143. 37 Ibid., p. 142. 38 Stéphane Moses, ‘Gershom Scholem’s Reading of Kafka: Literary Criticism and Kabbalah,’ translated by Ora Wiskind-Elper, New German Critique, n. 77, Special Issue on German‑Jewish Religious Thought, 1999, pp. 149–167 (pp. 159–160). 39 ‘Gershom Scholem to Walter Benjamin, 20 September 1934,’ p. 142, in: The Correspondence of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, pp. 141–143. 40 Moses, ‘Gershom Scholem’s Reading of Kafka,’ p. 160. 41 Ernst Bloch, ‘The Invisible Hand,’ in: Traces, translated by Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2006), pp. 155–158. 42 Ibid., p. 158. 43 Ibid., p. 158. 44 Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,’ p. 134. 45 Moses Maimonides, Moses Maimonides’ “Epistle to Yemen”: The Arabic Original and the Three Hebrew Versions, edited by Abraham S. Halkin and Boaz Cohen (American Academy for Jewish Research: New York, 1952). See also Scholem, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,’ pp. 28–29. 46 Originally, the phrase goes: ‘Everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same’ (Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, translated by Guido Waldman (Pantheon and Random House: New York, 2007), p. 138). 47 Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2009), p. 366. 48 Agamben discusses Scholem’s influence on Benjamin in Giorgio Agamben, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption,’ in: Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, translated by Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1999), pp. 138–159, and, Giorgio Agamben, ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter

The Significant Nothing  89 Benjamin,’ in: Potentialities, pp.  160–174; Scholem’s conception of language in Giorgio Agamben, ‘Languages and Peoples,’ in: Means Without End: Notes on Politics, translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2000), pp. 62–69; Scholem’s discussion of Kafka’s oeuvre in Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 49–62; and Scholem’s idea of nothingness in Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies, translated by Adam Kotsko (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2015), pp. 162–164. Numerous references to Scholem can also be found in Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2011). 49 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 52. 50 Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, p. 381. 51 Walter Benjamin, ‘In the Sun,’ p. 664, in: Selected Writings: Volume 2, edited and translated by Michael W. Jennings (The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2005), pp. 662–666. 52 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 53. 53 Ibid., p. 53. 54 Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (McGill-Queen’s University Press: Montreal, 2008), p. 120. 55 Agamben attributes this mistake especially to Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg; see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1949) and Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert M. Wallace (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1985). 56 Agamben, The Time That Remains, pp. 62–65. 57 Ibid., p. 62. 58 Ibid., p. 69. 59 Ibid., p. 69. 60 1 Cor. 7:29. 61 Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 62; my emphasis. 62 Ibid., p. 62. The conception of kairos, highly influenced by Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (now-time), was also discussed in Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, translated by Liz Heron (Verso: New York, 1993), pp. 89–105. 63 Agamben, The Coming Community, p. 49. 64 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (The Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 470. 65 Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, translated by John F. Healy (Penguin Books: New York, 1991). 66 Agamben, The Time that Remains, p. 50. 67 Ibid., p. 50. 68 Ibid., p. 53. 69 Ibid., p. 55. The concept of the remnant also plays a crucial role in Agamben’s controversial Remnants of Auschwitz, where he traces the messianic potential hidden in the tragedy of Holocaust; see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Homo Sacer III), translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Zone Books: New York, 1999). 70 Agamben, The Time That Remains, p. 54. 71 Ibid., p. 54. 72 Ibid., pp. 54–55. 73 Ibid., p. 55. 74 Bloch, Traces, p. 158. 75 Scholem, ‘Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism,’ p.  35 (original emphasis).

5 Aporias of Foreignness Transnational Encounters Through Cinema Katarzyna Marciniak

‘Push, push borders away. Push borders, do it today.’ —Pussy Riot, ‘Refugees In.’1 ‘Exploitation is good. The exploiter will keep you alive because exploiter sees value in you.’ —Xiaolu Guo, Late at Night, Voices of Ordinary Madness.2

In August 2015, the Russian feminist band Pussy Riot, known for its political outspokenness and provocative performances, contributed their powerful song, ‘Refugees In,’ to Banksy’s Dismaland. Complementing Banksy’s own efforts to counter xenophobic responses to the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe—most notably his drawing of Steve Jobs as the son of a Syrian migrant on the wall of the Calais refugee camp—Pussy Riot called for open borders. Their lyrics are unapologetic, in-your-face: ‘Refugees in, Nazis out, governments here, should feel the shame, fucking liars, you’re to blame . . . Bombing people out of homes . . . We want peace, not fucking drones.’ In her documentary essay, Late at Night, Voices of Ordinary Madness (2013), Xiaolu Guo—a Chinese-British artist—showcases various individuals encountered in the streets of London, including a black man who offers an almost funny point about exploitation. ‘Exploitation is good,’ he claims in a cheerfully sarcastic voice, because the exploiter will sustain you as long as you are usable. In thinking about philosophical discourses through the medium of art, these two introductory points take me to the conflicting and messy nexus that I will tease out in this chapter: the disposability and usability of foreignness and the relation of these concepts to subjectivity and the political. My central concept is the ‘usability’ of the foreigner as a figure whose physical or emotional labor sustains the citizen, even as the foreigner herself is often considered disposable. She is disposable because she is often easily exchangeable. I want to suggest that the interrelated ‘usability’ and ‘disposability’ of foreignness are symptomatic of the paradox of foreignness itself. After all, both xenophobia and xenophilia are political sentiments,

92  Katarzyna Marciniak often mobilized in the service of a nation. Writing about ‘the United States’ beloved self-image as a xenophilic nation of immigrants,’3 Bonnie Honig, a feminist political scientist, contends that the two impulses xenophobia/ nativism and xenophilia are not necessarily contradictory: ‘American xenophilia and xenophobia both operate in service of American nationalism.’4 Considering the frightening rise of xenophobic and nationalistic movements in various parts of the world at present, I believe her point offers us a critical lens through which to consider political developments in many spaces well beyond the USA. Foreignness as a philosophical concept and as a lived experience has preoccupied me for a long time, along with issues of legality and illegality. One can be a palatable supplemental foreigner (grateful, domesticated, with a ‘cute’ accent, and profiting from xenophilic tendencies), or a dangerous foreigner (a thief of ‘our’ national goods or, worse, a terrorist); foreignness is always overdetermined. This point returns me to the Derridean pharmakon and thus to the way foreignness is simultaneously about being both remedy and poison.5 Derrida plays with the unnerving ambiguity of the pharmakon; it can be a cure or a fatal dose. Like Russian Roulette, it can either save or kill. I think about this paradox—embrace and disavowal, that is, a selective approval of certain foreign bodies and selective dumping of others—through Derrida’s complex contention that while the aporetic foreign has been traditionally considered a figure of death, there is at the same time an obligation to host the foreigner. The contemporary Syrian refugee crisis, presenting an ethical quandary vis-à-vis the relationship between subjectivity and the political on a massive scale, exemplifies this point in all its poignancy. This ‘crisis’ is compounded by the morbid reality of new border regimes and border deaths around Europe, the current hyper-inflammatory rhetoric around the construction of a wall between Mexico and the United States, and the 2016 ‘Brexit’ vote in Britain—largely motivated by anti-immigrant sentiments and a desire to return to the core of white Britishness.6 These occurrences are only some examples that compel a renewed reflection on foreignness as a contentious and challenging idea. The recent proliferation of turbulent and violent images in the media speak to human tragedies on an unprecedented scale, as Syrians hope to be accepted by various European nations and the United States. Simultaneously, the meta-discourse surrounding these experiences in many countries ranges from benevolence to outright rejection of the possibility of housing the refugees. Under the banner of national security, many politicians adopt a vocabulary of ‘foreign infestation’ and ‘Muslim threat’ to deter the acceptance of refugees. Transnational encounters between the citizen and the foreigner are, of course, always political. The claim of ‘rightful’ belonging to the nation often manifests itself in a certain epistemic superiority over those from various elsewheres. These often subtle performances of epistemic dominance are

Aporias of Foreignness  93 acts of privilege, ultimately connected to the way the cultures of xenophobia impress their power on the foreigner’s psyche. What interests me in such encounters is how the subjectivity of both figures—the citizen and the foreigner—is reconfigured, realigned, or reinvested in multiple ways through the interrelated tropes of the ‘usability’ and ‘disposability.’ Approaching foreignness, I remember being philosophically seduced first by Julia Kristeva and later by Sara Ahmed. Kristeva’s provocative formulation points to the need to reimagine the normative idea of the self that compulsively locates foreignness elsewhere, beyond itself, in the body of the other: Foreigner: a choked up rage deep down my throat, a black angel clouding transparency, opaque, unfathomable spur. . . . Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder.7 Kristeva poetically argues here that foreignness is not, in fact, elsewhere, but always already a part of the ‘I.’ She questions the privileged ontological status of the subject that likes to write itself as ‘unitary and glorious,’8 while concealing its own strangenesses and incoherences. In her formulation, the foreigner is ‘the hidden face,’ ‘the space,’ and ‘the time’ and thus not a figure per se but rather a spatial-temporal alterity that troubles the subject. Ahmed, in turn, warns us against ontologizing the stranger and moves against Kristeva’s idea of ‘strangers to ourselves’: While identity itself may operate through the designation of others as strangers, rendering strangers internal rather than external to identity, to conclude simply that we are all strangers to ourselves is to avoid dealing with the political processes whereby some others are designated as stranger than other strangers.9 Mindful of both positions and convinced that Kristeva and Ahmed’s formulations do not need to be seen at odds with each other, I want to suggest that foreignness is critically aporetic—undecidable, impassable, and thus always quivering. In my earlier work I theorized the notion of ‘quivering ontologies’10 as a way of inhabiting the aporia, of conceptualizing the way the figure of the foreigner is always suspended between her place of origin and the host nation. She is negotiating her subjectivity in the interstices of belonging and, as such, is often vulnerable to processes of inclusion and exclusion, appropriation or expulsion. Quivering ontologies is an idea that allows us to explore the intricacy—and the intimacy—of cultural mechanisms that put the foreigner on a precariously wavering border between being and not being a valid, culturally sanctioned subject. Derrida admits his fascination with aporias (he insists on using the plural): ‘the old, worn-out

94  Katarzyna Marciniak Greek term aporia, this tired word of philosophy and of logic, has imposed itself upon me.’11 Aporias express doubt, an impasse; they obscure clarity and certainty. Rather than overcoming or resolving aporias, Derrida posits their critical potential: ‘I was then trying to move not against or out of the impasse but, in another way, according to another thinking of the aporia, one perhaps more enduring. It is the obscure way of this “according to the aporia” that I will try to determine today.’12 Foreignness invites us to think according to this other logic, indeed ‘according to the aporia.’ This is a potentially urgent consideration if we remember Derrida’s claim that ‘ethics and politics . . . start with undecidability.’13 He validates aporetic thinking as a precursor to both the ethical and the political. When considering the ethics of alterity, it is crucial to keep in mind the underpinning sense of ‘ethical undecidability’ in order to forestall a romanticization or sentimentalization of the foreigner. I am convinced that the figure of the foreigner and its fraught relation to mobility, agency, and national legitimacy are central to an understanding of current processes of globalization as a contested historical phenomenon. So, while the notion of ‘ethical undecidability’ should be kept on the horizon, one must also bear in mind that the ‘neurotic citizen’14—as social scientist Engin Isin calls those who give into fear and insecurity stemming from their perpetual worry about the well-being of a nation—can only be sustained through the ongoing, anxious production of foreignness. This is the stereotypical approach to foreignness we know so well already, or what in my earlier work I called ‘alienhood’15: treating the foreign body as ‘poison,’ as a repository for what Isin has called ‘a new type of politics (neuropolitics).’16 In what follows, I consider several contemporary films that reveal figurations of foreignness in the U.S. and Western Europe, two areas that have historically experienced the influx of people arriving from various elsewheres. It would be easy to claim that the host nation and its citizens profit from the foreigner’s usability and disposability in various ways. Yet, as I show, foreigners also profit from the usability of other foreigners, thus complicating the realm of both politics and ethics. Given my interest in immigrant political agency, my ultimate objective in approaching cinema and art more generally is not to compile examples of foreign/immigrant victimhood but rather to foreground modalities of expressing immigrant protest and contestation through audiovisual media.

Cinematic Neuropolitics No art, no narrative can neglect cinema today. Nor can philosophy, moreover. Let’s say that it weighs heavily with the weight of its ghosts. —Jacques Derrida, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts, An Interview with Jacques Derrida’17

In the post-2000 era, transnational cinema concerns about border crossings, (im)migration, and liminality offer a compelling archive of such an aporetic neuropolitics. What lessons can we learn about subjectivity and the

Aporias of Foreignness  95 political vis-à-vis foreignness by surveying this archive? How do contemporary transnational cinematic cultures, especially those preoccupied with foreignness in its myriad representations, respond to various forms of xenophobic or xenophilic tendencies and impulses? What kind of symbolic work does foreignness perform in these narratives? What interests me in the narratives I analyze is the interplay of both usability and disposability of foreignness.18 I start my analysis with usability, and thus the facet of foreignness that highlights specifically the concept of ‘remedy,’ that is, the usefulness of the foreign body in the service of the nation. I refer to this idea as the commodification of foreignness. Chicano performance artist, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, known for his commitment to politicized border art, speaks of this kind of commodification as helpful for the ‘benevolent and apolitical form of multiculturalism,’19 what he terms ‘corporate multiculturalism’20: ‘corporate multiculturalism proved to be both sexy and profitable, for its sponsors, that is.’21 As he claims, under the new corporate logic, ‘this global transculture artificially softened the otherwise sharp edges of cultural difference, fetishizing [various ‘others’] in such a way as to render them desirable.’22 Clearly, thus, ‘usability of foreignness’ is not a new concept. Foreigners have been historically ‘used’ in a variety of ways: as a cheap labor force (for example, the early twentieth-century Bracero Program in the U.S. that sanctioned the use of Mexican farm laborers); as exotic others in the form of mail-order brides, or ‘multicultural’ academics whose very presence allows institutions to claim their investment in ‘diversity;’ as bodies, as bell hooks says, that ‘liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture;’23 or as those who perform, to use Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson’s term, ‘affective and emotional’24 labor, labor that in a variety of forms sustains and nourishes the citizen (for example, Latinas in California, or Eastern European women in various parts of New Europe who work as nannies or care for the elderly). This affective and emotional labor is different, of course, from fruit picking, washing dishes, or from working in sweatshops because it has lingering psychic effects that influence both the subjectivity of the foreign body and the receiving body and, as a form of servitude, it produces multifarious entanglements enmeshed in the lived experiences of gender, nativity, race, class, ethnicity, and economic privilege.

Revival of the Citizen and the Immigrant: Feeding Off the Foreign Body Distraught, worn-out, or physically disabled white bodies that are regenerated though contact with the agency of the foreigner provide an interesting trope of usability—foreigners as healers25—in the corpus of cinema that I am considering in this section. Tom McCarthy’s 2007 U.S. independent production, The Visitor, features Walter Vale, a white, American, financially privileged economics professor whose subjectivity is in a need of ‘repair.’ As

96  Katarzyna Marciniak a widower and an academic who has stopped loving researching and teaching, his professorial life is dull; he is withdrawn and indifferent. The film formally stresses this withdrawal: we often see him standing alone by a window looking outside, motionless, and we follow his monotonous routines. In front of others, he fakes busyness. His chance encounter with Tarek, a vivacious undocumented Syrian drummer, and his Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab, a talented jeweler, is a pivotal moment that leads to Walter’s awakening and rejuvenation. Tarek shows Walter how to play African drums and this music, its different rhythm and style, as well as Tarek’s congeniality— his difference—revive Walter spiritually and, metaphorically speaking, bring him back to life. While the narrative ends on an ironic note—after he exhausted his pedagogical function as a healer, Tarek is deported, removed from the national space—the film stresses the functionality of the foreign body that is instrumental in educating a white male academic who is rescued from a life of ennui and monotony. Furthermore, being an academic, Walter is a rather unusual focal character and, given his presence, the narrative is able to provide a subtle yet poignant critique of academia. Early in the film, Walter, unwillingly, attends a New York University conference, ‘Global Policy and Development.’ In one particular scene, we see Walter with his white male colleague outside the conference building while a group of racially and ethnically diverse drummers perform nearby. In an off-hand comment, his colleague says: ‘Maybe we can invite them to play inside?’ The audience understands that this is an empty proposition as the spirited group of haphazardly gathered musicians has no genuine place in the halls of academia unless as an exotic multicultural entertainment. The film is thus poised to deliver a racial critique vis-á-vis the economies of difference operating in the context of the U.S. immigration politics: these ‘colorful others’—Tarek and the other musicians—are useful when the generosity extended to them is motivated by xenophilic tendencies, when ‘loving’ the foreigner boosts the citizen’s standing. Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s 2011 comedy, a huge box office hit in France, The Intouchables, avoids suggesting that the foreigner be treated punitively; in a more optimistic, if not utopian, way, it presents him as a jubilant healer who is allowed to stay in France. Indeed, one of the critics calls The Intouchables a ‘soothing fantasy.’26 A Senegalese immigrant and an ex-convict, Driss is an unlikely caregiver for Philippe, a wealthy quadriplegic French citizen in need of physical as well as spiritual revitalization. All the other caregivers briefly shown in the narrative are white males who, although capable of lifting, bathing, and feeding Philippe, are unemotive, dull, and even condescending. Unlike Driss, they can service his body but not his soul. Driss, who focalizes the narrative (for the most part, his movements are privileged by the camera, and we often see close-ups of his face and eyes), occupies the position of the ‘magical’ African; he has what all the other white caregivers do not possess: a certain ‘foreign’ jouissance, a certain charismatic flavor. Similarly to Tarek in The Visitor, Driss fulfills the

Aporias of Foreignness  97 function of ‘healing’ the citizen through his unconventional methods and vibrant personality. Driss and Philippe come from opposing worlds; one is a resident of the public housing projects, and the other is an aristocrat living in a mansion, surrounded by opulence and multiple employees. But, as the title suggests, despite these disparities in privilege, social class, and race, they are both ‘untouchables.’ Philippe’s subjectivity is marked by intense vulnerability and fragility. His staff tiptoes around him; many are afraid to touch him. Philippe is in a wheelchair, always stiff; he can express his needs and emotions only through facial expressions and speech; as he says, he is paralyzed from the neck down to his toes. His contact with the world is severely limited: he cannot touch, he cannot feel. Driss, on the other hand, is symbolically untouchable: he comes from social margins and is described by Philippe’s friend, who supposedly has Philippe’s best interests in heart, as ‘unstable’ and ‘brutal’: ‘the guy from the suburbs has no mercy.’ For different reasons and in different ways, Philippe and Driss have experienced incommensurable humiliation and social exclusion. The overcoming of this untouchability, indeed, the economy of touch that the film exposes for the audience to contemplate, reveals that touch is a critical trope for the politics of transnational encounter. Ironically, the economy of intimate touch is mobilized only because the white citizen is paralyzed, in need of revitalization by the black African.27 We can imagine that under no other circumstances, in this configuration, would such intimate proximity of black and white skin occur (and there are several close-ups of black and white skin together). Writing about ‘an ethics of touch,’ Ahmed proposes: ‘I suggested that we need an analysis of the skin, not as the pre-condition of exposure or touchability, but as the locus of social differentiation—the skin is touched differently by different others.’28 The touching we witness in this case is one-directional as Driss is the only one who can touch. To unravel this point we must bear in mind Senegal’s history of colonization by France—involving a different form of transnational encounter and a different form of colonial ‘touching’—which tacitly haunts the relationship of Philippe and Driss. Driss can be thus seen as a symbolic figure, paradoxically hinting at both Derridean concepts—the revenant (‘the spirit [that] comes by coming back’29) and the arrivant (‘that which has not yet arrived’30). This subtle ghosting of the narrative is conveyed through Philippe’s ‘ghost pains’ (he occasionally suffers from phantom pains that plague him and keep him in a convulsive state). Driss embodies the postcolonial revenant in France, which, as many scenes demonstrate, is populated by immigrants of color designated to menial jobs, or doomed to unemployment—indeed, the untouchables. They have ‘arrived,’ but not yet fully. In a curious conceptual flip, we encounter an even more forceful representation of ‘foreigners as healers’ in Jim Sheridan’s 2002 Oscar-nominated production, In America, where the beneficiary of these healing powers is not a citizen of the host country, but rather a white immigrant. The film

98  Katarzyna Marciniak is underpinned by a sentimentalized, ‘weepy’ portrayal of Irish female foreignness inextricably linked to mothering, reproduction, and the realm of the family. It is primarily through this emotional pull—the sight of a struggling Irish immigrant family as an ocular comfort zone—that the film garners spectatorial sympathy, compassion, and acceptance. Wrapped up in the emotive tonality of the fairytale, the narrative depicts an immigrant struggle by reducing the conditions of foreignness to the level of familial traumas revolving around loss, guilt, grief, and experiences of remembering and mourning. The family is introduced as emotionally wounded, haunted by the death of the son, Frankie, whose loss drives the narrative trajectory. Because the narrative foregrounds individual recovery, it strives to offer the comforting, even uplifting image of immigrant survival that occludes experiences of Irish foreignness in the USA. The realm of the maternal is the only prism through which the audience encounters the mother Sarah. After she is introduced as a grieving mother, she is soon pregnant and, as the doctor explains, the pregnancy is complicated, risky: ‘You would have to be a very strong woman to bring this baby to life.’ And, of course, Sarah is just that, risking her own life for the baby, which, the narrative implies, will ‘heal’ the emotionally bruised family after Frankie’s death. Sarah’s eventually successful journey through the life-threatening pregnancy is importantly juxtaposed with the death of their befriended neighbor Mateo, a Nigerian painter. Known in the building as the ‘man who screams,’ Mateo is infected with a fatal disease (though unspoken, the presumption is that he is dying of AIDS). In the film’s climax, the narrative builds an emotional visual parallel between Mateo’s last moments and the prematurely born baby’s starting to move and breathe. Through parallel cutting, the scene moves back and forth between the baby and the dying Mateo, who is chanting in ‘an African language.’ As Mateo dies, the baby’s fingers begin to move, signaling that the crisis is over. The sequence has a ritualistic, almost primal feel: Mateo is coded as a mystical black man, a holy redeemer. The sequence insinuates that through some ineffable miracle, life is transferred from Mateo to the baby, implying that, metaphorically speaking, the reproduction of Irish whiteness is sustained through the annihilation of black African maleness.

Disposability After Usability As The Visitor and In America demonstrate, the trope of usability is inevitably intertwined with the disposability of foreignness. Contemporary transnational cinematic cultures are preoccupied with representing the nexus of usability and disposability in various ways, commenting on the exploitative relations formed between foreigners and the host nation. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Last Resort (2000), for example, privileges the experiences of the Russian Tanya who, stranded at Heathrow airport when her British fiancé fails to appear, decides to apply for political asylum and becomes a ‘bogus

Aporias of Foreignness  99 refugee.’ While waiting for the classification of her status, she ends up in the seaside town of Margate, the location of a refugee center marked by a conflicting mise-en-scène of openness and claustrophobia. Like many others confined in this space, Tanya needs to find employment to survive but, being in a state of ‘suspension’ as a refugee, she is not allowed to work: out of desperation, she tries a local porn establishment where, with much discomfort, she offers cybersex performances in front of a webcam. At another moment, we see her approaching a blood donation center, where she offers her blood for money, an explicit metaphor for the vampiric role of the nation-state that sustains its power by literally draining foreign bodies and diminishing their life energy. Her feminized usability is thus represented via sexualized performances and bloodletting. In Stephen Frears’ 2002 Dirty Pretty Things, one of the first films in Britain to represent the figure of the asylum seeker centrally, such usability is depicted as gruesome and life-threatening. The Baltic Hotel, the main scene for the narrative, is a place where immigrants’ bodies are literally cut up for body parts; their kidneys become precious commodities to be sold and exchanged. The irony of these grisly medical ‘procedures’ is that the immigrants, whom Sarah Gibson calls ‘the ghosts of Britain and its economy,’31 willingly offer their bodies to organ trafficking agencies; they do this in exchange for proper documentation, having already been relegated to the position of what Zygmunt Bauman calls ‘human waste or wasted humans.’32 This point is depicted literally when the protagonist Okwe, the Nigerian undocumented immigrant who works at the Baltic Hotel, finds a human heart in a toilet in one of the guest rooms. The scene produces a visceral response: terrified by what he sees, Okwe pulls the heart out of the toilet amidst blood and dripping fluids. Bauman argues that one of the major characteristics of global capitalism is the manufacture of ever greater numbers of ‘wasted humans’ within and at the borders of sovereign territories. In Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2010 Mexican-Spanish drama Biutiful, there is an eerie scene which exemplifies the idea of ‘human waste’ and the disposability of foreignness in all its traumatic poignancy. We see the bodies of dead Chinese migrant workers washed up on the shore of Barcelona, some lying on the beach, some still floating in water. In an attempt to make them disappear, they were dumped into the sea by their Chinese employer who profited from the migrants’ underground labor and now wants them ‘gone’ so that he can avoid any responsibility. Yet, they return, as if refusing to disappear into nothingness, a forceful testimony to the spectral ethics that The Intouchables alludes to. The Chinese workers had lived in the basement of the sweatshop; in a repetitive gesture, the film shows their morning routine. Men, women, and children sleep on the mattresses placed on the floor in a dismal space of physical and social abjection. They are relegated to the sphere of invisibility, cold, and dirt. One morning when their Chinese employer walks in as usual, nobody moves: we learn that they died in their sleep due to the

100  Katarzyna Marciniak faulty installation of gas heaters set up by the Spanish protagonist Uxbal. The camera stays close to the gassed bodies, revealing the faces of the dead migrants. It is through Uxbal’s subjectivity that the film grounds itself in Derridean hauntology, stressing the ethics of accountability. For Derrida, the discourse on ghosts is about responsibility and justice: ‘If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, not presently living, either to us, in us, or outside of us, it is in the name of justice.’33 The spectrality of the narrative is conveyed already in one of the opening scenes as Uxbal is shown sitting by open coffins containing the corpses of young boys; he is invited there by the boys’ families because of his ‘gift’ of communicating with the dead. As a medium, he is there to help them ‘cross over’ and to find out what the dead want to say to the living. The scene has a ghostly feel as Uxbal sits close to the coffins, chants unintelligible words, and manages to communicate with one of the boys. The eeriness of the scene is conveyed audibly and visually. We hear breathing as the camera moves several times between close-ups of Uxbal’s face and the coffins, highlighting his desire for an exchange. During one such movement, we see the ghostly figure of one of the boys sitting opposite Uxbal, whispering. Uxbal’s proximity to death is also expressed through his own liminal position: having been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, he is told that he has only a few months to live. Thus, he himself hovers between life and death, in the process of ‘crossing over.’ We can consider Uxbal’s subjectivity through the image of the border, the threshold: his calling to speak to the dead places him in a privileged yet precarious position. His epistemologicalontological state—knowing more than the living, being here and there— is both an advantage and a burden. Above all, it is a state of heightened responsibility. It is this state that catalyzes Uxbal’s relationships with the marginalized characters in the narrative. We are shown that his conflicted life is enmeshed with the lives of many Chinese and African immigrants; he helps them and, simultaneously, lives off of them. When asked about profiting from the hard labor of the migrants, Uxbal initially wants to deny his ambivalent situatedness: ‘I don’t exploit them. I help them find work.’ Only after he learns about the gassed bodies of the migrants can he tearfully acknowledge his culpability: ‘I bought the damn heaters because they were the cheapest. Because I needed the fucking money. I knew full well that the heaters were bad.’ He confesses this to Bea, his spiritual guide, who says: ‘Go find them and beg their forgiveness.’ But the narrative never shows us this encounter with the dead, implying perhaps that there is no forgiveness for such gruesome exploitation. Overall, the complex narrative of Biutiful foregrounds its aporetic moral messiness and refuses to designate Uxbal as the only one who is responsible,

Aporias of Foreignness  101 implying that the nation as a whole profits from irregular economies and from exploiting the migrants, as we follow Uxbal’s dealings with the Spanish foreman and a corrupt police officer who willingly takes bribe money from Uxbal. This moral ambivalence suggests collective culpability that, importantly, does not exclude the immigrant community—both Spanish and Chinese employers benefit from the underground labor. This moral messiness is exemplified in the fact that the Chinese employers are implicated in the death of the sweatshop migrants and, by showing this, the narrative avoids a clichéd binary representation that positions citizens as ruthless exploiters and immigrants as victimized others. Similarly to Philippe in The Intouchables, Uxbal is in a vulnerable position: in several scenes, we see him urinating blood; we are shown up close his pants stained with urine; at one point, we see him wearing a diaper. In the end, knowing he is dying, he decides once again to rely on the foreigner’s help: he asks Igé, a Senegalese friend who helps him take care of his two young children, to look after them when he is gone: ‘Take the money. I need your help.’ In one of the final scenes, we witness the touch of white and dark skin when Igé pulls the bandage off Uxbal’s son’s face and, as in The Intouchables, we are prompted to contemplate the intimate encounter between different skins. Even though this fleeting moment might be read as signaling some hope for future multiracial encounters, it is still the foreigner’s ‘duty’ to take care of the vulnerable citizen.

Disappearing/Outsourcing Race Contemporary transnational cinematic cultures invite us to inspect the racial aspect of usability, or to employ Tania Modleski’s phrase, the ‘melancholia of race.’34 Modleski uses this concept in her analysis of Clint Eastwood’s 2008 Gran Torino, in which a bitterly racist, working class war veteran residing in a Detroit neighborhood now populated by Asian immigrants, ultimately sacrifices his body in Christ-like fashion to protect the Hmong community. In Gran Torino we see a curious if not a perverse reversal: it’s not the body of the foreigner that needs to be sacrificed, or treated as disposable. Here it is the racist white male who is diegetically transformed into a protector and savior of an ‘ethnic minority’—a commitment that demands that he melodramatically sacrifice his life. Modleski claims that, on the surface, the film is about ‘white male melancholia,’35 which, in fact, covers up the ‘the melancholia of race.’36 She discusses how the film’s use of the Hmong community is especially troubling: the Hmong people fought on the U.S. side in the Vietnam War but, when the war was over, the United States abandoned them, leaving them to suffer persecution and retaliation by the Laotian government. She concludes: ‘In reality, then, Hmong people gave up their lives trying to save Americans, but in the film the old white man dies to save the Hmong and achieves absolution for the sins of American imperialism.’37

102  Katarzyna Marciniak I see this ‘melancholia of race’ working in many contemporary films. Although articulated in very different tonalities, both Sergio Arau’s 2004 U.S.-Spain-Mexican satirical comedy, A Day Without a Mexican, and Alex Rivera’s 2008 independent U.S. production, Sleep Dealer, are rather unusual films in this respect. A Day Without a Mexican ‘disappears’ race (and with it, crucially, labor) only to ‘reappear’ it, restoring it back to the nation. Sleep Dealer, on the other hand, ‘outsources’ race and ‘outsources’ foreignness, specifically Latino/a bodies, while retaining the ‘usability’ of a foreign laborer. A Day Without a Mexican is an over-the-top satirical comedy with elements of science-fiction, which, in a mockumentary style, narrates a fateful day when all Mexicans inexplicably disappear from California and, in the end, a day when they all come back. Disappearance Day, as it is called, is caused by a mysterious pink fog. The film enacts a political protest against the hypocritical treatment of Mexicans and, in fact, other Latinos in the U.S., by exposing how California depends on their labor while antiimmigrant sentiments continue to proclaim that ‘they steal our way of life,’ as one of the characters puts it. It also pokes fun at the perception that Latinos, regardless of their origin, are often thought of as ‘Mexican.’ Yareli Arizmendi who plays the protagonist, Lila Rodriguez, and who co-wrote the script with Arau, calls the film ‘emergency filmmaking.’38 In a different way than Biutiful, this film too is preoccupied with disappearance and reappearance, but in the end it stresses the return of the indispensable ones that are mistakenly deemed disposable. Indeed, before their disappearance, we see that Mexican laborers are highly useful to the economy: they cut vegetables at restaurants, vacuum white people’s homes, tend to their gardening, and feed their children. Many of them thus perform affective labor. They are plumbers, painters, teachers, farm workers, caretakers, athletes, and entertainers. After they disappear, the mise-en-scène of California reflects desolation and chaos: we see dirty dishes piled up in restaurants, abandoned cars, abandoned leaf blowers; we see dripping faucets that need repairing, and we learn that classes have been cancelled as those who used to teach are now gone. The disappearance of Mexicans is thus represented via an economy of deficit: there are no fresh fruits and vegetables to buy, no waiters to serve at restaurants, no caregivers to attend to children and cook tortillas for the white families who employ them. Border patrolmen have no work and the disappeared ones are referred to as an ‘endangered species.’ The final scene shows the welcoming of a Latino man who has just crossed the border: he is jubilantly greeted by the patrolmen and offered water and a warm blanket—an unimaginable scenario in the current political climate of the U.S.-Mexico border zone. The film also mocks the ‘proper’ usability of foreignness. Lila Rodriguez, the protagonist labeled as the ‘missing link’ and the ‘last remaining Mexican’ (since her Mexican parents have disappeared and she is presumably the only Latina who remains), exemplifies the ethnic body as consumable exotica. Lila is a Latina newscaster and, at one point in the narrative, we

Aporias of Foreignness  103 witness her manager urging her to ‘sound’ Latina. He wants her to be audible as a Latina and to highlight her Latino-ness: he asks her to roll the Rs in her name to enhance her ‘foreign’ appeal. When she performs this feat, he is pleased: she is now a properly ‘accented’ Latina. This presumably innocent coercion shows us a different kind of exploitation: she can be usable and employable only when her foreignness is amplified. Even though Lila is thought to be at the center of the ‘Latino puzzle’ since she has not disappeared, the narrative ultimately reveals that she was, in fact, born in Armenia. After hearing from her aunt that she is in fact an adopted Armenian, Lila still wants to claim her Mexican-ness: ‘I was raised Mexican. You belong to the people who taught you the world. My heart is Mexican. Please don’t take that away from me.’ After her proclamation, she disappears like the rest of the Latinos. Lila’s conflicted positionality and her claim to Mexican identity might be thus read as opposing what Trinh Minh-ha, in a discussion of the modalities of difference, once called ‘the simplicity of essences.’39 Hers is a more cultural, more fluid construction of ethnicity, identity, and belonging. It is also a political act since Lila is claiming an identity that is stereotypically demonized and criminalized in the U.S. Rivera’s Sleep Dealer makes the disappearance of Latinos even more poignant and more forceful politically. Like The Intouchables and Biutiful, it is preoccupied with the economy of touching but, unlike these other films, it withholds touch altogether. In the narrative, the foreigner works in the U.S. while his body physically remains in Tijuana. He is then useful as a laborer who does not even touch the U.S. soil; as the voiceover informs us, he fulfills the ultimately desirable scenario: ‘This is the American Dream. We give the Americans what they have always wanted—all the work and none of the workers.’ Rivera claims that his film is about ‘border disorder,’40 the term he uses to describe the paradoxical and contentious history of the U.S.-Mexico border. Sleep Dealer premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008, at which it won the prestigious Waldo Salt Screenwriting and Alfred P. Sloan Awards. Rivera refers to his film as ‘Third World science-fiction,’41 and ‘cyberpunk of the south.’42 In stylistically innovative ways, the narrative engages the politics of the U.S.-Mexico border, highlighting the intersecting themes of migration, labor, and technology. It offers a dystopic vision of the future where a coyote is transformed into a ‘coyotek,’ and crossing the border on foot is perceived as obsolete: ‘[My uncle] crossed the border in the old days by foot. Before nodes that’s how they used to do it. Unbelievable.’ In Sleep Dealer people from the south connect with the prosperous north via nodes. Instead of ‘Want to cross?’ the question now is ‘Need a connection? Want to connect, baby? Looking for a node job?’ The nodal ‘connection’ is the new ‘crossing;’ Tijuana is branded the city of the future; Tijuana Node Bar is one of those cool sites where one can initiate the desired transaction. The opening shots of Sleep Dealer fragment protagonist Memo Cruz’s body—we see his face, his glazed eyes, his moving hands attached to nodes,

104  Katarzyna Marciniak his mouth covered by futuristic, pilot-like gear. In this opening sequence, the ‘nodal hands’ remain most evocative, recalling a memorable scene from Gregory Nava’s film El Norte (1983), when Arturo Xanax tells his son, Enrique: ‘For the rich all peasants are just a pair of arms to do their work.’ In Sleep Dealer, Memo’s arms perform the work, a hypnotic dance of sorts, which the audience cannot possibly comprehend until Memo reveals that through nodal technology he is actually working in the U.S. while his body physically remains in the factory in Tijuana. His voice-over informs us: ‘We call the factories “sleep dealers” because if you work long enough you collapse.’ Being a node worker one can pick oranges in Florida, work a construction job in New York, or be a nanny in California—all from hyperconnected factories in Mexico, or any of the countless sites around the globe. It is certainly a different kind of labor, a form of disembodied work; as Memo eventually claims, ‘My energy was being drained, sent far away.’ There are several memorable long shots of the factory interior which punctuate the narrative. In a long hallway, connected through endless wires, human bodies perform a robotic, rhythmical movement, recalling similar ‘working’ scenes from the factory in Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis and thus making an intertextual connection with a longer cinematic history of social critique. When Memo gets the desired nodes, his own cybernetic implants, and plugs in for the first time, he reflects: ‘Finally, I could connect my nervous system to the other system—the global economy.’ The moment of connection feels hallucinatory: Memo armors his body and finds himself operating a robot somewhere in California, on a construction site. We hear his heavy breathing; we share the first wobbly moments of Memo trying to steady himself as, uncannily, he finds himself simultaneously in two different spaces. He looks down, while the audience shares his point-of-view, and realizes that, as a robot, he is positioned high up. This initial connection is configured both as a moment of dizziness, an experience of curious emptiness and physical disengagement, while his body performs the work long-distance without actually touching anything on the other side. The fact that ‘real touch’ is not permissible underlines the film’s poignant argument: the futuristic politics of the U.S.-Mexico border is a violent anti-immigrant fantasy—the border is sealed and uncrossable, but the labor from the south can still flow, carefully orchestrated by ‘sleep dealers,’ which of course, reference the contemporary maquiladoras. While at the factory, Memo wears a blue vest stamped with the word ‘cybracero,’ citing Rivera’s own 1997 mockumentary Why Cybraceros?,43 the short film which paved the way for Sleep Dealer. Why Cybraceros? cleverly utilizes and reconfigures an original 1959 promotional film by the California Grower’s Council titled Why Braceros? On the one hand, the viewers hear about the Bracero Program (bracero means ‘a man who works with his arms and hands’), instigated by the U.S. government to bring in skilled Mexican farmers to work in the California fields. On the other

Aporias of Foreignness  105 hand, weaving archival footage, animation, and computer-generated graphics, the original documentary is formally and conceptually reworked into a mocking farce: ‘Under the cybracero program, American farm labor will be accomplished on American soil but no Mexican workers will need to leave Mexico. Only the labor of Mexicans will cross the border; Mexican workers will no longer have to.’ As the cheerful female voice-over delivers this message, we see an animated figure of the Mexican worker jumping across the imaginary border—except that his armless body stays behind and only his arms are permitted on the other side. The innovative idea is ‘cybracero,’ a long-distance farm worker, one that operates a computer with a joystick and uses a high-speed internet connection to act as the telecommuting laborer who, via robots, can work in the orchard and pick the fruit: ‘To the worker it’s a simple as point and click to pick; for the American farmer it’s all the labor without the worker.’

Conclusion: Looking Beyond Borders The right to look. The invention of the other. —Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection44

Drawing on Derrida’s discussion of Marie-Françoise Plissart’s photography, Nicholas Mirzoeff claims that ‘the right to look is not about seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other, or it fails.’45 Several of the films discussed here disclose the economy of touching as impossible and forbidden or permissible, offering critiques of xenophobia while tentatively gesturing at future potentialities. I want to conclude this chapter by considering how touching, as I have argued, is critical for the politics of transnational encounters, and is generally preceded by looking, seeing, and perceiving. I interpret Mirzoeff’s claim that ‘the right to look is not about seeing’46 to mean that looking is, in fact, always implicitly about power relations. It matters who has the right to look and at whom; the performance of looking is always intersectional, and the intimacy of encounters is always about power mediation. A short experimental video, Look Beyond Borders,47 produced by Amnesty International Poland aims at promoting an ethics of recognition of the other by engaging the performance of looking and seeing. In this four-minute web production, filmed in a warehouse in Berlin and released in May 2016, Polish filmmakers, Bartosz Dombrowski and Kuba Kijowski, invited refugees from Syria and Somalia to sit opposite people from various European countries: Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom. There are men, women and children of various ages and races who have never met before. The title of this experiment points to the need to look and see beyond the confines of real and metaphorical borders and

106  Katarzyna Marciniak beyond the ideological constructions created by borders—beyond preconceived fears, xenophobic superstitions, beyond ignorance. ‘Artists are great anarchists—they try to smuggle us across borders,’ writes Magda Betlejewska with regard to Look Beyond Borders.48 Indeed, those invited to this experiment enact transnational encounters, performing dialogic, reciprocal seeing. One of the initial shots shows a citation from a psychologist Arthur Aron: ‘Four minutes of eye contact brings people closer to each other better than everything else.’ The filmmakers applied this theory to the current refugee crisis. The set-up of this experiment seems deceptively simple. Benches are placed in pairs opposite each other in the vast, open space of the warehouse. Here the Syrian and Somalian refugees and Europeans sit facing each other and look at each other in the eye. Initially, there is no speech, no movement, no touching—only looking. They start with eyes closed. When they open their eyes, they begin the act of looking and eventually we hear ‘hello,’ or ‘are you lonely?’ ‘Do you miss your family?’ The looking—here an act of seeing and acknowledging the other—then culminates in bodily contact: we see a white woman extending her hands to a dark-complexioned man, we see a dark-complexioned man extending a handshake to a white man. They touch. Some smile; some laugh; some hug; most are teary-eyed. The two young girls—one Polish, one Syrian—start running and chasing each other; we witness kids’ spontaneous playfulness. The critical reception of Look Beyond Borders has been overwhelmingly positive, even celebratory. The film has been described as ‘moving,’49 ‘beautiful and simple,’50 ‘heartwarming,’51 and a ‘powerful social experiment.’52 Undeniably, the film is a compelling experiment that offers audiovisual resistance to the xenophobic rhetoric permeating contemporary Europe and the U.S. It tries to elicit empathy, feelings of mutuality, trust, and curiosity about the other. It tries to show us how the power of eye contact can indeed transport us across borders. And, yet, it is hard to ignore how the aporetic complexities inherent in such transnational encounters are somehow lost and downplayed. The initial questions are always asked by the Europeans who, perhaps even unconsciously, act as agents and hosts. As such, they emerge as rightful owners of the European space, and foreigners’ bodies become the platform on which to enact European generosity and sentimentality. The overwhelmingly weepy tonality of the experiment suggests that we must cry in sympathy with the often harsh circumstances experienced by these refugees. But it is precisely because they are presented as quiet, docile, vulnerable people that this response can be so readily achieved. The possibility of encountering a defiant migrant has been screened out of this experiment. The films discussed briefly here were all produced in the post 9/11 era, a period that has witnessed the uneven diffusion of globalization, the feminization of migration, the fervor of anti-immigrant politics, the criminalization of racialized foreignness as well as the production of a fetishized

Aporias of Foreignness  107 rhetoric of ‘illegality.’ The transnational encounters they represent invite us to consider our often convoluted ethical and political responsibilities vis-àvis the other. In various ways and with different results, the films wrestle with aporetic potentialities when it comes to representing foreign bodies. But, as Derrida claims, our ethical choices are always aporetic since we can never fulfill the ethical call of the other. As I have shown, the most politically engaging encounters are those that leave us with some uncertainty, validating what Avital Ronell calls an ethics of anxiety. Indeed, for Ronell, ‘anxiety is the mood par excellence of ethicity.’53 And as Derrida reminds us, ‘one must avoid good conscience at all costs.’54

Notes   1 Pussy Riot, ‘Refugees in,’ 2015: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYD3_kDNkWY (Accessed March 26, 2017).   2 Xiaolu Guo, dir., Late at Night, Voices of Ordinary Madness, 2013, produced by Xiaolu Guo and Philippe Ciompi.   3 Bonnie Honig, ‘A Legacy of Xenophobia,’ Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, vol. 27, 2002: http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR27.6/honig.html (Accessed December 10, 2016).  4 Ibid.   5 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, translated by Barbara Johnson (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1981), p. 70.  6 More than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, a majority coming from war-torn Syria, triggering different responses within the European Union (EU) on how best to allocate the unprecedented flow of arrivals. Xenophobic responses to the ensuing humanitarian crisis were quickly manipulated for political ends in various parts of Europe, as various right-wing and populist elements sought to resist EU directives on accommodating the refugees. The term Brexit is applied to the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, which was set in motion by the referendum of June 23, 2016, in which 52% of votes cast were in favor of leaving. Although there is no direct link between the Syrian crisis and the Brexit vote, anti-immigrant rhetoric was a major part of the ‘Leave’ campaign.   7 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press: New York, 1991), p. 1.   8 Ibid., p. 2.   9 Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (Routledge: New York, 2000), p. 6. 10 Katarzyna Marciniak, Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2006), p. 27. 11 Jacques Derrida, Aporias, translated by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1993), pp. 12–13. 12 Ibid., p. 13. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Hospitality, Justice, and Responsibility: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,’ p. 66, in: Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (Routledge: New York, 1999), pp. 65–83. 14 Engin F. Isin, ‘The Neurotic Citizen,’ Citizenship Studies, vol. 8, 2004, pp. 217–235. 15 Marciniak, Alienhood, p. XIII.

108  Katarzyna Marciniak 16 Isin, ‘The Neurotic Citizen,’ p. 231. 17 Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,’ translated by Peggy Kamuf, Discourse, vol. 37, n. 1–2, 2015, pp. 22–39 (p. 28). 18 I began to explore this nexus in Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett, ‘Introduction: Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy,’ in: Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett (Routledge: New York, 2016), pp. 1–35. 19 Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Ethno-Techno: Writings on Performance, Activism, and Pedagogy (Routledge: New York, 2005), p. 49. 20 Ibid., p. 49. 21 Ibid., p. 49. 22 Ibid., p. 49. 23 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press: Boston, 1992), p. 21. 24 Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press: Durham, 2013), p. 104. 25 I theorized this notion in the context of other cinematic texts to stress the proper acceptability of foreignness. Katarzyna Marciniak, ‘Palatable Foreignness,’ p. 194, in: Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak, Anikó Imre and Áine O’Healy (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2007), pp. 187–205. 26 Daphnee Denis, ‘Is the Untouchable Racist?,’ Slate, May 25, 2012: www. slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/05/25/the_intouchables_racist_french_people_ don_t_think_so_and_here_s_why_.html (Accessed January 3, 2017). 27 Ibid. As Denis observes, ‘White France is paralyzed; immigrant France has become its arms and legs.’ 28 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 155. 29 Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Routledge: New York, 1994), p. 10. 30 Ibid., p. 196. 31 Sarah Gibson, ‘ “The Hotel Business Is About Strangers”: Border Politics and Hospitable Spaces in Stephen Frears’s “Dirty Pretty Things,” ’ Third Text, vol. 20, n. 6, November, 2006, pp. 693–701 (p. 700). 32 Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (Blackwell: Cambridge, 2004), p. 5. 33 Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. XIX. 34 Tania Modleski, ‘Clint Eastwood and Male Weepies,’ American Literary History, vol. 22, 2009, pp. 136–158 (p. 152). 35 Ibid., p. 152. 36 Ibid., p. 152. 37 Ibid., p. 152. 38 Ed Gordon, ‘Film Examines “A Day Without a Mexican,” ’ NPR Interviews: Interview with Yareli Arizmendi. May 1, 2006: www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php?storyId=5372878 (Accessed January 15, 2017). 39 Trinh Minh-ha, ‘Not You/Like You: Postcolonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference,’ p. 930, in: The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature, edited by Mary K. DeShazer (Longman: New York, 2001), pp. 928–933. 40 Alex Rivera with Katarzyna Marciniak, ‘Border Disorder,’ in: Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics and Everyday Dissent, edited by Katarzyna Marciniak and Imogen Tyler (State University of New York Press: New York, 2014), pp. 81–95. 41 Ibid., p. 81. 42 Ibid., p. 81.

Aporias of Foreignness  109 43 Alex Rivera, dir., Why Cybraceros?, 1997: http://alexrivera.com/project/whycybraceros/ (Accessed March 26, 2017). 44 Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection, translated by David Wills (Monacelli: New York, 1998), p. XXXVI. The quote comes from Nicholas Mirzoeff’s The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke University Press: Durham, 2011), p. 1. Mirzoeff modifies Wills’ translation of Derrida’s Droit de regards form ‘rights of inspection’ to ‘the right to look.’ 45 Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, p. 1. 46 Ibid., p. 1. 47 Amnesty International, ‘Look Refugees in the Eye: Powerful Video Experiment Breaks Down Barriers,’ 2016: www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/05/lookrefugees-in-the-eye/ (Accessed January 24, 2017). 48 Magda Betlejewska, ‘Two Poles Author Lovely Campaign for Amnesty International,’ Medium#Publiczne, May 19, 2016: http://mediumpubliczne.pl/2016/05/ wystarczy-popatrzec-oczy-minuty-wspaniala-kampania-amnesty-internationalwideo/ (Accessed January 24, 2017). 49 W. P. Wiadomosci, ‘Polacy autorami wzruszajacego filmu o imigrantach z Syrii’ [Poles Author a Poignant Film about Immigrants from Syria], May 21, 2016: http://wiadomosci.wp. pl/kat,1329,title,Polacy-autorami-wzruszajacego-filmuo-imigrantach-z-Syrii,wid,18342468,wiadomosc.html?ticaid=118796 (Accessed January 27, 2017). 50 Betlejewska, ‘Two Poles Author Lovely Campaign for Amnesty International.’ 51 Jesselyn Cook, ‘Refugees and Europeans Lock Eyes in Heartwarming Video to Look Beyond Borders,’ The World Post, May 25, 2016: www.huffingtonpost. com/entry/europeans-and-refugees-hold-eye-contact-in-heartwarming-video_ us_5745afe5e4b055bb1170bedb (Accessed January 27, 2017). 52 Yosola Olorunshola, ‘Look Beyond Borders‑Watch What Happens When Strangers Stare at Each Other for 4 Minutes Straight,’ Global Citizen, May 28, 2016: www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/refugee-crisis-europe-eye-contact-amnesty/ (Accessed January 27, 2017). 53 Astra Taylor, Examined Life: Philosophy is in the Streets, 2008, co-produced by Sphinx Productions and the National Film Board of Canada, in association with the Ontario Media Development Corporation, TVOntario and Knowledge Network. 54 Derrida, Aporias, p. 19.

Part II

Political Subjectivities

6 The Abject and the Ugly Kristeva, Adorno, and the Formation of the Subject Surti Singh

Central to the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Julia Kristeva is a concern with how the subject is transformed, respectively, by twentieth-century late capitalism and the society of the spectacle.1 Both thinkers worry about the subject’s increased passivity when confronted with the cataclysmic shifts of modern society, from the decline of paternal authority and religious values to the loss of meaning after Auschwitz, and an ever-intensifying, mass-mediated, global society that dislocates power from its traditional structures. In a political context, this passivity translates into the subject’s lack of resistance and the loss of the desire to revolt. If in the 1970s Kristeva could write about revolt as a transgression against the law and prohibitive political structures, in her more recent thinking she realizes a marked shift in the very structure of power against which one might revolt. This change leads to a bleak picture of the subject’s political possibilities: Against whom can we revolt if power is vacant and values corrupt? Or, to put it even more gravely, who can revolt if man has become a simple conglomerate of organs, no longer a subject but a patrimonial person, a person belonging to the patrimony, financially, genetically, and physiologically, a person barely free enough to use a remote control to choose his channel.2 Kristeva’s claim, although hyperbolic, has merit. She argues that the subject does not simply recede—pessimistically, nihilistically, or stoically—from the overwhelming nature of society. Instead, subjectivity itself undergoes dramatic changes that become a block to action. Kristeva detailed these changes in the 1980s, in works such as Black Sun,3 Tales of Love,4 and the Powers of Horror,5 which taken together, depicted a subject beset by melancholia and depression, afflicted with an inability to love, and haunted by a deep sense of emptiness. Particularly in Powers of Horror, Kristeva developed her notions of the abject and abjection. She based this work on her clinical encounters with individuals who had unstable boundaries and who lacked a complete or coherent experience of the self, symptoms that

114  Surti Singh appeared more frequently in the twentieth century and that she would later come to term the new maladies of the soul. When Kristeva returned to the question of revolt in the 1990s, it was against the backdrop of this psychoanalytic excursion into the problems of subject formation.6 Given the subject’s psychic inability to revolt in the traditional sense, Kristeva advocated an intimate revolt. She described it ‘as return/turning back/displacement/change . . . that is, the questioning and displacement of the past.’7 In her contemporary work, Kristeva continues to argue for this turn inward as an antidote to the ongoing political problems around the globe.8 Kristeva’s pessimistic pronouncements about the subject’s capacity for revolt dovetail with Adorno’s work. In the 1940s, Adorno’s co-authored work with Max Horkheimer, the Dialectic of Enlightenment, expounded the dangers of a radically darkened modernity and its deleterious effects on the subject. The enlightenment project, as a disenchantment of the world, symbolized the possibility of freedom through a liberation of the human intellect from the fetters of magical, mythical, and metaphysical forms of thinking.9 In contrast with these older forms of knowledge, the clarity and transparency of scientific knowledge ensured mastery of the world by leaving nothing obscure or hidden, no ‘immanent powers or hidden properties.’10 Yet, despite this aim, Adorno and Horkheimer reveal that enlightenment thinking becomes a damaging and destructive form of reason. Failing to deliver on its promised ideals, the subject is dominated by the very instrumental reason that was supposed to lead to its freedom. Nature becomes an object to be controlled, and individuals proceed through life repetitiously, in a world of ever-sameness produced by the commodity economy and saturated with media advertising. The subject turns into a specimen, a mere example of the species. In his later works of the 1960s, Adorno continues this thought in the context of the loss of metaphysical meaning in the twentieth century. After the catastrophe of Auschwitz there are ‘changes in the rock strata of experience.’11 Life is evacuated of meaning and no longer consists in the teleological unfolding of purpose. There is a liquidation of the ego: What meets its end in the camps, therefore, is really no longer the ego or the self, but—as Horkheimer and I called it almost a generation ago in the Dialectic of Enlightenment—only the specimen; it is, almost as in vivisection, only the individual entity reducible to the body.12 In such a world, where individuals are exchangeable and replaceable, life is ruled only by the principle of self-preservation, oriented solely toward maintaining an atomized and alienated existence. Yet, Adorno appeals to the slight metaphysical impulse that lives on, as a form of self-reflection that might re-sensitize the subject, an impulse that arises from the zone of the ‘carcass and the knacker.’13 This is the realm that culture suppresses, the place of ‘carrion, stench, and putrefaction.’14 In Aesthetic Theory, one of the ways in which Adorno thematizes this zone is through the notion of the ugly.15

The Abject and the Ugly  115 Thus, both Adorno and Kristeva are thinkers of negativity—they focus on what is repressed by their contemporary societies and the ramifications of this exclusion for the formation of the subject. In this chapter, I take up Kristeva’s and Adorno’s analyses of the subject through their respective notions of the abject and the ugly. The abject and ugly are borderline concepts, troubling the distinction between subject and object, and revealing the problems with subject formation in contemporary society. My aim is to highlight some of the similarities between the concepts without collapsing the two very different projects from which they arise. Notably, Kristeva focuses on healing the rifts within the subject through an intimate revolt that might one day link up with a new form of politics.16 In contrast, Adorno insists on the individual’s capacity for resistance through a form of self-reflection that would entail a re-sensitization to horror and suffering so that we become the kind of individuals that would not allow catastrophe to repeat itself. Despite their differences, Kristeva and Adorno both belong to the European tradition, sharing similar intellectual predecessors, from Hegel to Freud, and are primarily concerned with the formation of a Western subject. I thus also aim to think beyond their work, and explore the productive potential of the abject and the ugly for postcolonial and decolonial critiques of psychoanalysis and critical theory.

The Abject and Abjection In the 1980s, Kristeva’s work excavated the contours of the subject within the changing conditions of the twentieth century. During this time, Kristeva authored The Powers of Horror, a book that is now a seminal text in her oeuvre. In this work, Kristeva introduced her theory of abjection, which troubled the classic Freudian theory of the subject that presumed a strict division between the conscious and the unconscious. Freud’s theory of the unconscious was based on the idea that repression renders certain affects and presentations inaccessible to the conscious mind.17 Kristeva thinks about this exclusion differently. Her notion of abjection theorizes psychic states in which the unconscious contents that are normally excluded return to trouble the distinction between subject and object. Kristeva later appraised this theory in Intimate Revolt and noted that her early discussion of the abject and abjection pertained to experiences where the separation between subject and object is not yet clear but where these two quasi entities are exhausted in fascination and repulsion. Borderline personalities and certain aspects of depression may be described based on this psychical economy, which also refers to the archaic relationship of nonseparation with the maternal container: the mother being the primary ab-ject.18 The notion of abjection received much attention in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the realm of the arts, inspiring an exhibition at the Whitney

116  Surti Singh Museum of American Art and appearing in various articles, among them by noted art critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster.19 More recently, there has been a return of the concept in both theory and art, as evidenced by Anish Kapoor’s reference to the abject in the discussion of his work and recent volumes exploring the abject in the visual realm.20 The recent English translation and re-issuing of Kristeva’s text for an exhibition that she curated for the Louvre in 1998, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, occasions the opportunity to further revisit abjection in a visual context. In this text, Kristeva takes on the act of beheading in the realm of art and probes the meaning of the severed head through its representations. At the backdrop of her meditation on the severed head is the assertion that art allows for contemplation, which disappears in the media images of such events. It is instructive, then, to turn to Kristeva’s early discussion of abjection in the Powers of Horror, before opening the question about the specificity of the subject from the vantage point of the global spectacle.

Powers of Horror In New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva notes that Freudian psychoanalysis is unable to account for the psychic state of some individuals that begins to appear more frequently in the twentieth century, a historical period marked by the trauma of war and the rise of the spectacle.21 Among these maladies is the borderline patient, an individual uncertain of his or her boundaries and, therefore, lacking a coherent sense of self. Kristeva’s discussion of the borderline patient links to her earlier analysis of abjection in Powers of Horror, which laid the conditions for understanding the emergence of these new patients. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva explains that some lives are not ‘sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion. They are clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic.’22 The neurotic and the psychotic in the traditional Freudian classification presuppose a theory of the unconscious into which certain contents are repressed via the Oedipus complex, a repression that is necessary for subject formation and the contents of which remain inaccessible to our consciousness except through bodily or verbal disturbances— symptoms, hallucinations, etc.23 Neurotics and psychotics are thus the result of maladjustment during the process of subject formation, rooted in the repression of contents into the unconscious, and exhibited in their relationship to language. In contrast, one of the symptoms of the modern borderline subject is that the subject/object relationship itself is unstable, which challenges the rigid separation of the conscious from the unconscious. Kristeva writes that with the case of the borderline patient, ‘the “unconscious” contents remain here excluded but in a strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established.’24 The fundamental opposition then, is not between the unconscious and the conscious,

The Abject and the Ugly  117 but between the I and the Other, or between Inside and Outside. Thus, ‘there are contents, “normally” unconscious in neurotics, that become explicit if not conscious in “borderline” patients’ speeches and behavior.’25 The subject experiences a ‘twisted braid of affects and thoughts,’26 but it does not pertain to any particular object. The abject is neither subject nor object, but something that is opposed to the self, which is felt to be a threat: something that will pull the subject in, overwhelm it, and even destroy it. In this encounter with abjection, the individual experiences a loss of boundaries and confusion about place and space. The subject is at once repulsed and attracted, horrified and fascinated. Kristeva links the constitution of the borderline patient to a process of subject formation that is pre-Oedipal (Freud) and pre-mirror phase (Lacan). She situates it in the primary relationship that a child has with its mother from whom the child must separate. According to Kristeva, the infant must reject the mother in order to form an individuated sense of self. This process occurs at a more primary, fundamental level than the Oedipus complex. ‘It is a violent, clumsy breaking away, with the constant risk of falling back under the sway of a power as securing as it is stifling.’27 Thus the first instance of subject formation is not mimesis or becoming like another, but is that of separation. The process of separation leads to the formation of an emptiness towards which the infant displays ambivalence. The infant wants to retain this emptiness because it is the only way it can establish itself as other, but the infant also seeks to cover it over to protect itself from the suffering that results from this emptiness. For Kristeva, the return of abjection in adult life, then, is an indicator of the phase of subject formation that is pre-Oedipal, pre-sexual difference, and pre-subject/object. As she notes in Intimate Revolt, ‘phobia, on the one hand, and “borderline” disorders, on the other, bear witness to these archaic states of subjectivity where the subject does not yet exist but is separating from the other, from the object, in abjection.’28 The experience of abjection abounds in modern society, as a state that elicits both horror and fascination in the individual. Encountering a corpse, Kristeva says, is as an example intimately connected to the experience of disgust. She describes a visceral, nauseating reaction that disturbs the boundaries comprising an individual’s sense of identity. The revulsion experienced when one faces a corpse is the result of seeing directly what we must ‘permanently thrust aside in order to live.’29 If ridding oneself of waste is how we live, and we identify ourselves as alive over and against this waste, then the corpse is ‘the most sickening of wastes.’30 It is a body that has fallen beyond the limit between life and death and has become waste itself. The encounter with the corpse brings the subject face to face with a state that has encroached upon the boundary necessary for life: ‘It is death infecting life.’31 For Kristeva, this is something different from the signification of death such as a flat encephalograph, in which case there would be the possibility of understanding, reacting, or accepting.32 Instead the corpse invokes

118  Surti Singh an experience of disgust; it is the border between life and death that itself has become an object. For Kristeva, abject art provides a discourse or representation for this experience of the individual, which cannot find any other counterpart in the society of the spectacle. It can, therefore, open up the possibility for self-reflection and transformation in the individual by aesthetically enacting a return to the origin of personality formation—the attachment to and the repulsion of the maternal body through which abjection occurs. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva privileges literature as a realm that can give the reader access to the state of abjection—‘Dostoyevsky, Lautréamont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, and Céline.’33 Indeed, she devotes the concluding chapters, controversially, to the reading of Céline, a fascist and anti-Semitic author. Later, in Hatred and Forgiveness, Kristeva clarifies that she did not undertake this reading to champion his political views, but rather to explore, dangerously, the encounter with the abject in such writing.34 For Kristeva, Céline’s work seizes us in that fragile spot of our subjectivity where our collapsed defenses reveal, beneath the appearances of a fortified castle, a flayed skin; neither inside nor outside . . . at the turning point between social and asocial, familial and delinquent, feminine and masculine, fondness and murder.35 If Kristeva is primarily concerned with literature in Powers of Horror, she further elaborates the abject and abjection in the realm of the visual in her exhibition catalog, The Severed Head: Capital Visions.

Reality, Fantasy, and the Image In The Severed Head: Capital Visions, Kristeva continues with themes of the corpse, the maternal body, and the abject in the context of historical renderings of beheading in art. The representation of decapitation plunges us into the same affects that Kristeva described in Powers of Horror: ‘fascination and abjection, ecstasy and vomit—pain has neither subject nor object: between the two it corrupts and spreads.’36 Kristeva asserts that aesthetic representations of decapitations begin to appear more frequently when there is discord and strife, but she wonders if this is reflective of wider socio-historical fissures, or whether it is reflective of crises within the individual’s psyche, a ‘self-perception of a fundamental imbalance, of that “dark world” that is the speaking being, divided and unreconciled?’37 Kristeva pursues the second possibility, examining in particular the abjection of the female body and the horror of the feminine in art, and thus revealing an aesthetic representation of the originary separation and abjection from the maternal body. By giving expression to this internal psychic process, aesthetic decapitation turns out to have an optimistic bent—it allows for ‘meditation on depression and therefore a rebirth.’38

The Abject and the Ugly  119 Pointing to the macabre Roman sculptures that began to be excavated after World War II, she lyrically explains: Cut from local limestone, varying in weight and hardness, these severed heads assume, to the modern eye, the seriousness and anguish of a melancholy of such implacable elegance perhaps only Nerval’s “black sun” reproduces it. The calm of the hand poised above, like a caress, a possession, or a familiar acknowledgement, retains the cruelty and makes these sliced throats the precursors of a compassion that scrutinizes, with eyes wide open, the harsh fate of men. Silence of the pillar of mute heads engraved into stone. Silence without terror because recaptured in the hands of the sculptor.39 For Kristeva, these sculptures allow for reflection on horror in a way that has disappeared from the images that we encounter in the contemporary media universe. She cites reports of recent civil wars in Biafra, Vietnam, Rwanda, and Algeria, where such practices occur but to which the global community tends to shut its eyes after the initial feeling of horror and shock.40 Kristeva’s analysis has relevance in the contemporary global media landscape that continues to report gruesome beheadings, particularly in connection with ISIS. In contrast with media representations that do little to promote understanding, the sculptures take on a different role. In psychoanalytic terms, aesthetic portrayals of beheading relieve deeper anxieties. While the discussion of decapitation in a purely aesthetic context may seem devoid of political import, it accords with Kristeva’s argument that the society of the spectacle, in its immediacy, does not permit the viewer to make sense. As in the experience of the sublime, the sculpture of the head can allow us to process our feelings of horror from a distance. In contrast, the media images of beheadings promote the opposite, an intensification of horror and the inability to process what has transpired. Controversially, Kristeva asserts that aesthetic representations of beheading have the power to stave off real acts of beheadings. Kelly Oliver probes Kristeva’s assertion in her book Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media: This sentiment could not be more relevant today, as we witness gruesome beheadings in videotaped spectacles that could be diagnosed as a refusal to examine the role of fantasy in constructions of reality, where the inability to represent sacrifice leads to real sacrifice, and where reality itself has become a commodity.41 Oliver writes from the perspective of an American audience that is weaned on a culture of violence and who can no longer tell the difference between the spectacles they view on television and real suffering, a prelude to the

120  Surti Singh violence they are willing to inflict upon themselves and others. Following Kristeva, Oliver asserts that the blurring of fantasy and reality in the spectacle erodes our capacity for imagination, to think otherwise, to critically self-reflect. Thus, rather than creating the room for meaningful signification, the commodified media images ‘encourages spectators to fetishize aggressive, violent, and sexual impulses rather than interpret them.’42 In this context, there is a political dimension to art, insofar as it can generate alternative imagery that encourages reflection rather than passive acceptance of mainstream images and the narratives that accompany them. Oliver’s book examines the American construction of the Middle East, particularly around the issue of war, in order to inquire into the phenomenon of female violence, an inquiry spurred by the release of photographs from Abu Ghraib that depicted female soldiers perpetrating violence upon male prisoners. Although acutely attentive to the necessity of approaching other cultures in a way that does not rely on a model of integration, Oliver’s project is ultimately invested in rehabilitating the Western subject and not in interrogating the assumptions of that subjectivity. It is useful to further pursue the construction of the subject in order to examine some of the assumptions inherent to the liberal project itself. Judith Butler approaches some of these issues in Frames of War, in which she argues that our valuing of some bodies over others is implicitly tied to how some events are framed.43 Butler’s analysis questions the foundations of political subjectivity in the West and diagnoses, following the work of Talal Asad, what could be considered a dissociative disorder at the heart of the liberal conception of the subject. The subject is marked by two conflicting values: the reverence for human life and the legitimate destruction of life.44 Butler notes that the vacillation between these two values with respect to political events, while lending unity to the otherwise bifurcated subject, is not grounded in any kind of justification. In this context, Butler notes Asad’s account of suicide bombing: the Western subject is terrified when such events occur precisely because it strikes at the heart of this unresolved paradox within the liberal subject itself.45 To return to the notion of abjection from within this critique of the liberal subject, we can now inquire into the issue of boundaries in a national context. Sara Ahmed’s reading of abjection points us in this direction.

From the Burqa to Blue Jeans In her essay, ‘The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation,’ Ahmed queries the notion of strangeness that Kristeva develops in Strangers to Ourselves and Nations Without Nationalism. In these texts, she rethinks the idea of the nation from the perspective of the stranger. Kristeva delegitimizes the violence that host nations inflict upon foreigners by demonstrating that strangeness is constitutive of the nation rather than a threat to it. Just as the individual, from the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious, is already a

The Abject and the Ugly  121 stranger to him or herself, so too is the nation. Thus, the violence of nationalism stems from a forgetting of the strangeness that belongs to both host and foreigner. In this context, recognizing strangeness becomes a universal duty, which can allow both host and foreigner to participate and integrate into the nation. Situating Kristeva’s claims within the context of French politics and the crisis of French identity, Ahmed points out that ‘some others are recognized as stranger than others and as already not belonging to the nation in the concreteness of their difference.’46 Ahmed’s example is the Muslim scarf, which challenges the very assumptions of the nation, and thus is perceived as a threat to its ideal of freedom. This imbalance comes to structure how we view bodies in general: there are some bodies towards which we move and with which we identify, and there are other bodies that arouse our disgust and from which we move away. Through her reading of the different valences of strangeness, Ahmed puts into question some of Kristeva’s wider assumptions about the universality of the liberal project and its relationship to the particularity and specificity of certain bodies. The importance of Ahmed’s criticism is poignant in light of Kristeva’s recent remarks about radical evil, in which the universality of the liberal project is presented as the only antidote to the recent political horrors that have seized the global community. In a paper delivered in October 2016 in Stockholm, Kristeva mobilized her notion of abjection to explain why some adolescents might be attracted to terror and violence in the context of radical evil: Besides this evil, there is another, an extreme evil that destroys the meaning of the very distinction between good and evil, and from this fact, destroys the possibility to accede to the meaning of one’s self and to the existence of others. These borderline states are not confined to hospitals nor to the couch, but unfold in sociopolitical catastrophes: such was the abjection of the extermination of the Holocaust, a horror that defies reason. New forms of extreme evil are spreading today in the globalized world, in stride with ideality disorder. Are they “without a why”?47 For Kristeva, psychoanalysis allows us to consider the reason for this radical evil because it can relate its socio-political manifestations to disturbances in the psychic life of the subject. Similar to her view of certain forms of art, psychoanalysis is able to stave off real acts of violence. Kristeva offers her case study of a young girl to whom she gives the name Souad. ‘Souad was hospitalized for serious anorexia: cold mortified passion, fits of bulimia and draining spells of vomiting.’48 But the alarm bells really began to ring when Souad, who was spending more and more time on the internet, donned a burqa and declared her intent to go abroad ‘in order to become the mistress of polygamous combatants, the mother of prolific martyrs or a kamikaze herself.’49 Through a multicultural mode of therapy, consisting of a team of individuals from many backgrounds and with different skills,

122  Surti Singh Souad’s initial resistance to treatment softened and she eventually began to rediscover joy in areas of her life that she had previously disdained. Her lack of success in French and philosophy, for example, was replaced by a rediscovery of the French language that allowed Souad to experience her subjectivity anew. For Kristeva, the success of this therapy, though she admits that there is still work to be done, was signaled when Souad ‘put her jeans back on.’50 The opposition between the burqa and blue jeans in Kristeva’s analysis reflects various conflicts that have played out in the media of late, including bans on headscarves and public outrage at burqinis.51 Against this backdrop, Kristeva’s notion of multicultural therapy is only tolerant of difference if it leads back to ‘ “our” fundamental “values”, our humanistic secularized culture, and our model of civilization where rationality is not without recourse in the face of radical evil under the cover of divine revelation.’52 This analysis of the problem as a conflict between the burqa and blue jeans, religion and secularism, irrationality and rationality, reasserts a dangerous dichotomy that makes openness to the other contingent on the other’s willingness to come over to the ‘right’ side and embrace the values that must be upheld to avoid endorsing the alternative—‘the barbarity of jihadists prey to the malignance of evil.’53 We must ask though, why does Kristeva consider the burqa an unequivocal symbol of oppression? Falguni A. Sheth sheds light on this assumption underpinning Kristeva’s conclusion: The problematic characterization of the veil lies in the assumption that women should not want to veil unless they are being coerced, under false consciousness, or reacting to other oppressive circumstances. Seen from the vantage point of the French state . . . women who veil are preempted from the possibility of realizing their true, authentic, and ideal selves.54 In Kristeva’s case study, electing to wear the burqa is particularly charged since Souad is living in Europe and acculturated to its norms and values. While Kristeva’s main concern is how to curtail Souad’s desire to join nefarious forces abroad, her discussion of the burqa reveals troubling assumptions that remain unquestioned. The burqa, which may indeed in the particular case of Souad have been a symptom of a deeper, more troubling conflict, comes to stand for oppression and coercion in all circumstances. It elides the possibility of alterative socio-historical positions where Islamic dress is not simply a symbol of regression into barbarism. Given her comments, it is not surprising that elsewhere Kristeva has claimed, ‘a ban on wearing the veil might be . . . necessary.’55 Tina Chanter probes Kristeva’s statement that this ban might be necessary: ‘The question becomes: necessary for whom, and for what purpose? Perhaps not so much for the protection of those who would wear it as for the protection for whom the confrontation with it covers over or veils the trauma of colonialism.’56 For Chanter, the desire to remove the veil from women’s bodies conceals a deeper anxiety about a threat to the Western

The Abject and the Ugly  123 liberal subject’s own identity. In this context, the radicality of Kristeva’s notion of abjection is muted when its application is unable to trouble and transcend the liberal assumptions of the framework that gives rise to it. My aim here is not to argue for or against laws that prohibit the veil, or for the morality of wearing the veil as such, but to suggest that Kristeva’s analysis resurrects a dichotomy that obscures the abjected other in the discourse of Western liberal thinking. If it is possible to entertain the uncertainty of one’s boundaries to envision a revolution in subjectivity itself, in the face of wider geopolitical trends, why does only one version of the stable subject emerges? While the discourse of abjection destabilizes the boundary between subject and object, and opens the possibility of rethinking subjectivity, this openness to difference in Kristeva’s account has limitations. Elsewhere, Chanter examines the question of the suppressed other at the heart of psychoanalysis itself, and how we might think about the prehistory that forms the ground of Freudian psychoanalysis so that notions such as abjection can take on a more productive analysis of difference. She draws our attention to a particular passage of Freud’s: Kristeva agrees with Freud’s observation in his essay “The Unconscious,” that fantasies might be compared “with individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their colored descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account are excluded from society and enjoy none of the privileges of white people.”57 Chanter finds it notable that Kristeva does not discuss this metaphor of mixed race individuals that forms the model of how Freud views the unconscious. And yet, it provides one avenue by which we might consider how the assumptions of psychoanalysis are not devoid of socio-historical determinants. John Cassavetes 1959 film Shadows visualizes this Freudian notion of the unconscious. Set in New York, it focuses on a family of black siblings, devoid of parental figures. Of the three siblings, only one brother actually appears to be black, while the other two siblings are lighter skinned. Ironically, it is these two siblings that struggle with their identity, as individuals who ‘resemble white men, but who betray their colored descent by some striking feature or other.’58 For both, this striking feature is their brother, who betrays their identity and often, merely through his presence, reveals that they are black. This has heart-wrenching consequences for the sister, who is pursued by a young white man until he meets her brother. When the realization dawns that his object of affection is black, the young man is visibly revolted, disgusted, and enraged. Suddenly, the object of his desire becomes the object of his disgust, though there has been no visible change in the young woman. This recalls an example cited by Sara Ahmed: Audre Lorde’s autobiographical account of riding the subway train as a young child in New

124  Surti Singh York.59 Lorde sits next to an older white woman in a fur coat, who draws away her garment in disgust, looking down at the seat where the child sits, her nostrils flaring, her eyes wide. Lorde first assumes that there is a cockroach between them, but soon realizes that she herself is the object of disgust. In Shadows, however, the young man is not aware that the body with which he intermingles is an object of disgust. Not until the horror of her secret identity emerges, does his acceptance turn into revulsion. In this sense, the young woman’s blackness is experienced as a betrayal, her willing integration just as loathsome to him as Lorde’s visible difference is to the woman who cringes beside her. In this case, as Ahmed notes, Kristeva’s notion of the reciprocal recognition of strangeness between host and foreigner in the nation does not account for the way in which ‘others have already been recognized as stranger than others, as border objects that have been incorporated and then expelled from the ideal of the community.’60 The inequality of strangeness, which arises from the abjection of the other within the formation of the Western liberal subject itself, challenges the naturalization and universalization of the process of subject formation. In order to inquire further into what is excluded and repressed by subject formation, I turn to Adorno, whose work offers an analysis of the ugly as a counterpart to Kristeva’s notion of the abject.61

Marks of the Frightening In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, modern art is a microcosm for the dialectic of enlightenment. It encapsulates the tension arising from the modern subject’s struggle for autonomy and freedom, and the forces that continually undo this achievement. Adorno’s discussion of modern ugliness sheds light on one dimension of this continually thwarted process—the return of the repressed. Much like Kristeva’s notion of the abject, the ugly signifies an archaic rejection that remains incomplete, and which appears as dissonance or distortion of the artwork’s form: What appears ugly is in the first place what is historically older, what art rejected on its path toward autonomy, and what is therefore mediated in itself. The concept of the ugly may well have originated in the separation of art from its archaic phase: It marks the permanent return of the archaic, intertwined with the dialectic of enlightenment in which art participates.62 The category of the ugly, when defined as the return of what art rejected, complicates the formal understanding of modern ugliness as dissonance. The formal understanding of the ugly vacillates between two positions. On the one hand, the abstract and formal category of the ugly becomes a cover concept for all that is undesirable and condemned by classical notions of

The Abject and the Ugly  125 art such as ‘polymorphous sexuality as well as the violently mutilated and lethal.’63 On the other hand, these prohibitions take on their own canon— the introduction of the ugly into modern art as something shocking, as something that challenged the classical ideal of wholeness, becomes, over time, an accepted convention. The primacy of the particular, which at first challenged the universal rules of the artwork, now itself becomes universal. The ‘canon of prohibitions’64 enforces primacy to the particular as a rigid requirement rather than a vindicating stance toward an empty universalism. Modern artworks become formally dissonant, fragmentary, formless. In this sense, the ugly no longer shocks. Yet, Adorno notes that the ugly cannot be dismissed merely as a ‘canon of prohibitions.’65 In order to reveal another dimension to the ugly, which Adorno ties to the archaic, he presents a genealogy of modern ugliness to show that the formalization of the ugly, at least in some works, maintains a ‘critical material motif.’66 While the ugly is already present in archaic and traditional art, there is something fundamentally different about the ugly in modern art. That is, modern ugliness, like the borderline personality beset by abjection, is specific to its particular era. The primary difference between modern ugliness and what came before is the radical changes to the artwork’s formal qualities. Traditional art, for example, maintained a harmonistic view of the ugly. If the ugly element opposed ‘the work’s ruling law of form,’67 it was at the same time integrated into the artwork. A subject matter considered ugly could still be part of a beautiful artwork in the way that it was pictorially represented. In other words, the ugly could be represented beautifully. In contrast, modern ugliness has a fundamentally different character as compared with traditional art. In the modern artwork, the ugly developed as a formal element that could not be ultimately harmonized within the artwork: ‘The anatomical horror in Rimbaud and Benn, the physically revolting and repellent in Beckett, the scatological traits of many contemporary dramas, have nothing in common with the rustic uncouthness of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings.’68 Rather, the deformation of the artwork, such as in Picasso’s work, produces shock: It carries ‘marks of the frightening.’69 While the ugly may indeed have become the defining feature of modern art, not all modern works contain marks of the frightening. Picasso’s works elicited shock because they arose from the principle of deformation, but many other artworks with similar formal qualities do not. What might lead to this difference? On the one hand, when elements that were previously shunned become modern art’s norm—the particular is universalized. The crude materiality that first disturbed the harmony of the artwork is rendered abstract, and the subjective reason that brought the particular to the artwork becomes its formal principle. Thus, the purely formal appearance of the ugly generates pleasure, akin to mathematical relations. No longer disturbing or difficult, the formalization of the ugly opens the artwork to commodification. Adorno gives the example of kitsch, which he says is ‘the beautiful as

126  Surti Singh the ugly.’70 Ugly artworks, then, become subsumed by the culture industry. On the other hand, the thematic representation of the ugly also retains an affirmative moment that vacates its power to genuinely contest the world. Adorno writes of social realism: The status quo, by contrast, can only deal with this same material by swallowing hard at graphics of starving working-class children and other extreme images as documents of that beneficent heart that beats even in the face of the worst, thereby promising that it is not the worst.71 In this respect, the ugly is tolerable only within the context of a positive message. Thus, Adorno views social realism as recuperating the depiction of violence or what is dissonant into the artwork. To avoid these two scenarios, art has no option but to turn against itself, to become allergic to itself, to negate itself—to exhaust every avenue of affirmation. Adorno suggests that this is a radical formalism, a formalism that is self-critical. The key to art’s critical stance lies in its correspondence with the past.72 We arrive at a fuller picture of how the ugly is connected with art’s separation from the archaic, and the permanent return of the archaic in modern art, by taking up Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the dialectic of enlightenment.

Dialectic of Enlightenment In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer assert a double thesis: ‘myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.’73 The aim of the Enlightenment, which was to liberate humanity from its immaturity, only results in the regression of humanity to the very thing that was shunned. Its failure to overcome myth results in myth’s return. To illustrate, they give their account of the earliest formation of the Enlightenment subject—Homer’s Odyssey, and in particular, Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens. In their retelling of this myth, Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize the fragile construction of the enlightenment subject that fears its dissolution in similar terms to how Kristeva describes the threat posed by abjection. In Homer’s tale, the Sirens have knowledge of the past, of all that has ever transpired on the earth including Odysseus’s past: By directly invoking the recent past, and with the irresistible promise of pleasure which their song contains, the Sirens threaten the patriarchal order, which gives each person back their life only in exchange for their full measure of time. When only unfailing presence of mind wrests survival from nature, anyone who follows the Sirens’ phantasmagoria is lost. If the Sirens know everything that has happened, they demand the future as its price, and their promise of a happy homecoming is the deception by which the past entraps a humanity filled with longing.74

The Abject and the Ugly  127 The Sirens’ song is both alluring for its promise of pleasure in being returned to the past, but yet is also threatening because such a return to the past would require a dissolution of the self. Enlightenment subjectivity is thus marked by a paradoxical desire to hold itself together and to let itself dissolve; that is, the self mediates between self-preservation and self-annihilation: ‘The fear of losing the self, and suspending with it the boundary between oneself and other life, the aversion to death and destruction, is twinned with a promise of joy which has threatened civilization at every moment.’75 In Homer’s epic, no man can resist the Sirens’ song, so Odysseus’s solution is to have his rowers tie him to the mast and to plug their own ears as they paddle by. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this signifies the divergence between art and labor, where art becomes merely contemplative and the subject is tied to the position produced by his relationship to labor. But it also signifies a feature of enlightenment subjectivity, where one is able to win estrangement from nature only by abandoning oneself to it. In order to take up the bourgeois ideal of subjectivity, Western reason sacrifices itself to the thing it wishes to master. For Adorno and Horkheimer, this throwing away of oneself in order to preserve oneself exemplifies cunning. Furthermore, Odysseus’s cunning of reason relies on the mimesis of death, of having himself tied to the mast so that he is inert while he hears the Sirens’ song. Odysseus masters nature through this adaptation or the internalization of sacrifice. The reason that represses mimesis is not merely its opposite. It is itself mimesis: of death. The subjective mind which disintegrates the spiritualization of nature masters spiritless nature only by imitating its rigidity, disintegrating itself as animistic. Imitation enters the service of power when even the human being becomes an anthropomorphism for human beings. The pattern of Odysseus’s guile is mastery of nature by such adaptation.76 In order to maintain the split between art and reason, Odysseus exerts his rationality through an aesthetic, contemplative stance. Sacrifice, as a giving of oneself up to nature, is continued as the internalization of sacrifice, where the self as nature is sacrificed for control over extra-human nature and others. Thus, self-preservation destroys the very thing that was to be preserved—the self.

The Logic of Exclusion In both Kristeva and Adorno, the subject’s formation is riddled with anxiety in the face of a specifically feminine threat, and requires entry into the patriarchal order as a way to subdue the risk of subsumption and the loss of self that both the maternal body and the lure of the sirens signify. In principle, the abject and the ugly in art, with their ties to the origin of subjectivity, allow for an encounter with the prohibitions necessary for subject

128  Surti Singh formation. As was seen in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlightenment subjectivity, anchored in the promise of reason, participates in the domination of nature in order to extirpate the fear associated with it. In contrast, Adorno notes that archaic art imitated fear: ‘Archaic ugliness, the cannibalistically threatening cult masks and grimaces, was the substantive imitation of fear, which it disseminated around itself in expiation.’77 With the emergence of subjectivity and the concurrent diminishment of mythical fear, representation of this fear became taboo. Modern art’s return to the archaic, and specifically to primitivism, raised a number of questions about its function, and specifically about whether this was, as Adorno worried, mere regression. Peter Uwe Hohendahl explores the appearance of the primitive in European art beyond Adorno’s discussion to shed light on what was at stake in modern art.78 Hohendahl analyzes one of Adorno’s cursory references to Carl Einstein’s Negerplastik to further explore the appearance of the primitive in European art. According to Hohendahl, Einstein’s project was driven by the twin poles of better understanding the role of the primitive in the development of the European avant-garde, particularly in artists such as Picasso, and to show that African art itself needed to be evaluated on different terms than the lens of European art history. Einstein aimed to challenge the valuation of African art as deficient based on traditional notions of beauty, and instead, related it to African cult practices. At the same time, he approached African art formally so that it could still be put into conversation with European art. In Einstein’s approach the problem of primitivism disappears, since the designation of African art as “primitive” is based on a European misconception. By introducing a separate logic for African art, Einstein can validate the influence of African art that Adorno acknowledges with suspicion. Yet, we have to note that his African logic remains rather static and, as Einstein concedes, without historical depth. Therefore he contrasts European development with African being—in Negerplastik with a preference for the African side. At the same time he remains attached to the concept of historical development.79 Hohendahl’s analysis points to the divergence between Einstein and Adorno. Whereas the former thought that the appearance of so-called primitivism actually expressed a different logic that could be put into productive conversation with Europe, the latter viewed primitivism in European art as uncritical regression.80 Yet, there is another perspective that emerges from Adorno’s work. Hohendahl, while admonishing Adorno for not taking Einstein’s work more seriously, also acknowledges that this is not Adorno’s project. It is not his aim, as in Einstein’s case, to establish the legitimacy and autonomy of the

The Abject and the Ugly  129 other from a non-European vantage point. Rather, from firmly within a European perspective, Adorno aims to trouble art’s autonomy by showing both its violence toward the other, and also, its inability to deal with the aftermath of this unfinished process of exclusion; that is, it reveals an inherent instability to the European subject that contributes to its on-going crisis. Thus, Adorno is interested in the archaic and the primitive as a return of the repressed, as what haunts and troubles the artwork, and at the same time, as what haunts and troubles the European subject. In relation to Kristeva’s work, Ahmed pointed out the contradiction between the empty universality of liberal norms, and the concrete particularity of experience for which they cannot account. If Kristeva privileges an empty universality, Adorno’s notion of the ugly puts the two perspectives into dialectical relation. Adorno accedes to an empty universalism when he relays the development of the enlightenment subject, but he also shows that it is precisely in this development that the neglect of the body and its sociohistorical suffering occurs. On Kristeva’s account, the phenomenological experience of abjection is attended to according to the universal categories of the modern liberal subject; on Adorno’s account, the ugly troubles these categories. Here, I want to continue to explore the logic of the ugly as one that leads us to what is repressed at the heart of Western subjectivity. I want to consider the logic of exclusion upon which the identity of the Western subject is built, from two vantage points. On the one hand, the refusal to see this exclusion at the heart of the Western subject leads to a blindness to what or who is other in general—a casting away of difference in the desire to maintain one’s own unity. This is the source of the horror that Kristeva feels when confronted with the young woman who others herself by covering her body in traditional Islamic dress; it is the fear of losing one’s own self-preservation in the face of the other, of being subject to the violence of the return of the repressed that allows Kristeva to uncritically validate the norms that produce this exclusion. On the other hand, critical ugliness in modern art embodies the logic of non-identity, which is unable to be absorbed by the beautiful and radically threatens the illusory autonomy of the artwork. Adorno’s concept of the ugly, as the return of the archaic and the primitive, demands a rejection of the conditions of domination upon which Enlightenment ideals rest. In thinking through the resources that Adorno’s work might provide to decolonize critical theory, Amy Allen puts the point this way: The realization of freedom requires the uncovering of the conceptual and normative violence implicit in the norm of freedom itself, such as uncovering how the autonomy of the subject depends on the domination of inner nature or the disciplining of the body or the denial of full subjectivity to those who are deemed wholly Other or abject.81

130  Surti Singh The ugly, while comparable with the abject as a process of subject formation borne from a corporeal violence that the subject undergoes to affirm his or her autonomy, also contains the resources of the critical project to question the ideals by which this transition is measured.

Thinking with Kristeva and Adorno For both Kristeva and Adorno, art brings to light what contemporary reality excludes—the origins of subjectivity, which are the repressed foundations of the totalizing socio-symbolic system. According to Kristeva, abject art can enact the function of psychoanalysis and ‘heal’ the debilitated Western subject by returning to the origins of personality formation, the attachment to and the repulsion of the maternal body through which abjection occurs. It can allow a culture or society that is cut off from its past to repair itself, and to find the capacity to love. In contrast, for Adorno, modern ugliness cannot be an explicit conduit for the betterment of the individual or society. Modern art is troubled by the return of what it must expel in order to constitute itself as art. As a result, art is unable to live up to its concept—the ideal of beauty that has been the thrust of art historically. This failure also carries within it a return of that which has been shunned: the archaic origins necessary for art to exist in the first place. When modern art reveals earlier stages of subject formation that were not fully sublated by the move toward enlightenment, the aim is not to ameliorate or subsume them. For Adorno, the value of the appearance of what is historically older is to disturb the false appearance of identity. The main difference between Kristeva and Adorno, then, can be seen in their respective focus on content: Kristeva is interested in art that portrays the abject, whereas, for Adorno, the appearance of the ugly is symptomatic of a deeper crisis within art itself that brings to light the problem facing all artworks: they can only exist on the initial rejection of the ugly and the archaic. Whereas the representation of the abject brings viewers into touch with their own abjection, in a way analogous to transference in the clinical setting, the ugly offers resistance to meaning, the sheer refusal of the mind’s capacity to understand and harmonize dissonant artworks, which brings us closer to the logic of the non-identical. Within a totalizing society, Kristeva and Adorno agree that modern art is one realm that reveals the illusions of reality and allows for a different reflection and identification of the subject. In this sense, the threats to the sovereignty of the subject posed by the abject and the ugly are not wholly negative, even though they may be experienced as such. Instead, they offer a way to interrogate or reflect on the unfinished process of subject formation in modern society, which can reveal the connection between the damage to the subject and its political consequences: the inability to revolt and resist. In this respect, the abject and the ugly are counter-concepts to the

The Abject and the Ugly  131 totality in which the subject dwells: the numbing society of the spectacle and the context of delusion produced by late capitalism. Thus, rather than assimilating what is abject or ugly, it is more useful to examine how the abject and the ugly put the autonomy of the subject under duress. These concepts offer a bridge between mining the resources of psychoanalysis and critical theory, and decolonizing their methodologies. The abject and the ugly, I have argued, are tied to the racial other at the heart of the identity of the Western, liberal subject. They signify the necessary logic of exclusion that shapes modern subjectivity. By investigating the abject and the ugly, I have ventured to rethink the project of redeeming the Western subject.

Notes   1 Tina Chanter offered invaluable comments and advice on the first draft of this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the first annual Art and Philosophy Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan, New York, March 28–29, 2008.   2 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, Volume 2, translated by Jeanine Herman (Columbia University Press: New York, 2002), p. 4.   3 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press: New York, 1989).   4 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (Columbia University Press: New York, 1987).   5 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon Samuel Roudiez (Columbia University Press: New York, 1982).  6 Sara Beardsworth, ‘From Revolution to Revolt Culture,’ p. 37, in: Revolt, Affect Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Politics, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2005), pp. 37–56.   7 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 5.   8 Julia Kristeva, ‘New Forms of Revolt,’ Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, vol. 21, n. 2, 2014, pp. 1–19.  9 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2002), pp. 3–4. 10 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 3. 11 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 2001), p. 106. 12 Adorno, Metaphysics, p. 108. 13 Ibid., p. 117. 14 Ibid., p. 117. 15 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 45–50. 16 Kristeva, ‘New Forms,’ p. 3. 17 Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, translated by Joan Riviere (W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1960), p. 5. 18 Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 260.

132  Surti Singh 19 Rosalind Krauss, ‘ “Informe” Without Conclusion,’ October, vol. 78, 1996, pp. 89–105; and Hal Foster, ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic,’ October, vol. 78, 1996, pp. 106–124. Winfried Menninghaus has noted that ‘Under the rubric “abject(ion),” the MLA Bibliography lists twenty-eight pages of titles of books and articles for the years 1982–1997, with a sharp increase in titles after 1988’ (Disgust: Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, translated by Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2003), p. 365). 20 Anish Kapoor, ‘Blood and Light: In Conversation with Julia Kristeva,’ 2015: http://anishkapoor.com/4330/blood-and-light-in-conversation-with-julia-kristeva (Accessed March 17, 2017); Tina Chanter, The Picture of Abjection: Film, Fetish, and the Nature of Difference (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 2008); Rina Arya, Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2014). 21 Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul, translated by Ross Guberman (Columbia University Press: New York, 1995), p. 9. 22 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 6. 23 The Oedipus Complex designates a triangular relationship that a child has with his or her mother and father that first appears when the child is between the ages of three and five, and reflects the child’s hostile and loving wishes towards the parents. It can take both a positive and a negative form: ‘In its so-called positive form, the complex appears as in the story of Oedipus Rex: a desire for the death of the rival—the parent of the same sex—and sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. In its negative form, we find the reverse picture: love for the parent of the same sex, and jealous hatred for the parent of the opposite sex.’ J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, translated by Donald NicholsenSmith (W.W. Norton and Company: New York, 1973), pp. 282–283. 24 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 7. 25 Ibid., p. 7. 26 Ibid., p. 1. 27 Ibid., p. 13. 28 Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, p. 157. 29 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 3. 30 Ibid., p. 3. 31 Ibid., p. 4. 32 Ibid., p. 3. 33 Kristeva, p. 18. 34 Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, translated by Jeanine Herman (Columbia University Press: New York, 2010), p. 13. 35 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 135. 36 Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, translated by Jody Gladding (Columbia University Press: New York, 2012), p. 103. 37 Kristeva, The Severed Head, p. 105. 38 Ibid., p. 120. 39 Ibid., p. 26. 40 Ibid., p. 26. 41 Kelly Oliver, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex, and the Media (Columba University Press: New York, 2007), p. 90. 42 Ibid., p. 93. 43 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Verso: New York, 2009), p. 13. 44 Ibid., p. 160. 45 Ibid., pp. 159–160.

The Abject and the Ugly  133 46 Sara Ahmed, ‘The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation,’ p. 99, in: Revolt, Affect, and Collectivity, the Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Politics, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2005), pp. 95–111. 47 Julia Kristeva,‘Interpreting Radical Evil,’ paper presented to The Kristeva Circle, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden, October 13–15, 2016: www.kristeva. fr/interpreting-radical-evil.html (Accessed March 17, 2017). 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Islamic dress has been a point of controversy in France over the past decade. In 2004, France passed a law that banned all religious symbols or clothing in public schools. By 2011, France banned wearing the niqab (full-face veil) in public. In 2016 these issues came to the fore when more than twenty French towns banned wearing the burqini, a modest style of swimsuit that came to symbolize the culture war over Islamic dress in public spaces. 52 Kristeva, ‘Interpreting Radical Evil.’ 53 Ibid. 54 Falguni A. Sheth, ‘Unruly Muslim Women and Threats to Liberal Culture,’ Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, vol. 18, n. 4, 2006, pp. 455–463 (p. 459). 55 Kristeva, Hatred, p. 26. 56 Tina Chanter, ‘The Traumatic Real: Securing the Symbolic Nation Through the Law of the Veil,’ presented at the 4th Annual Kristeva Circle Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, March 28–30, 2014. 57 Tina Chanter, ‘The Exoticization and Universalization of the Fetish,’ p. 159, in: Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Politics, edited by Tina Chanter and Ewa Płonowska Ziarek (State University of New York Press: Albany, 2005), pp. 149–179. 58 Ibid., p. 159. 59 Ahmed, ‘The Skin of the Community,’ p. 104, in: Revolt, Affect, and Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Politics, pp. 95–111. 60 Ibid., p. 109. 61 I have discussed the concept of the ugly in another context in ‘The Aesthetic Experience of Shudder: Adorno and the Kantian Sublime,’ in: The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Adorno and Benjamin, edited by Nathan Ross (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2015), pp. 129–143. 62 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1997), p. 47. 63 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 47. 64 Ibid., p. 45. 65 Ibid., p. 45. 66 Ibid., p. 49. 67 Ibid., p. 46. 68 Ibid., p. 46. 69 Ibid., p. 287. 70 Ibid., p. 47. 71 Ibid., p. 49. 72 Ibid., p. 36. 73 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 3. 74 Ibid., pp. 25–26. 75 Ibid., p. 26. 76 Ibid., pp. 44–45. 77 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 47.

134  Surti Singh 78 Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ‘Aesthetic Violence: The Concept of the Ugly in Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory,” ’ Cultural Critique, vol. 60, 2005, pp. 170–196. 79 Ibid., p. 179. 80 For a recent work that addresses African Art outside of the European framework, see Soulyemane Bashir Diagne’s African Art as Philosophy: Senghor, Bateson and the Idea of Negritude, translated by Chike Jeffers (Seagull Books: London, 2011). Diagne analyzes Lépold Sédar Senghor’s intuition that African Art is an alternative form of thinking. 81 Amy Allen, The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Columbia University Press: New York, 2016), p. 204.

7 Antonio Gramsci Persons, Subjectivity, and the Political Robert P. Jackson

Antonio Gramsci has been widely acknowledged to be one of the most significant political theorists of the twentieth century.1 His concepts influence a wide and growing range of intellectual fields extending from linguistics, geography and anthropology, to cultural theory, subaltern studies, International Relations theory, and beyond. Yet, as Michel Foucault once observed, Gramsci is an author who is ‘more often cited than actually known.’2 This situation, at one time unavoidable, is now contingent thanks to the ongoing publication of various critical editions of his writings and the growing philological work of successive generations of international Gramsci scholars, particularly those in Italy.3 While Gramscian concepts continue to find purchase across this kaleidoscope of intellectual disciplines, the historical-theoretical laboratory of the Sardinian’s Prison Notebooks remains an underexplored resource through which to articulate the complex interrelationship between subjectivity and the political.4 The prevalent image of Gramsci in the Anglophone world as a theorist of hegemony often reduces this term to a rather limited and partial sense.5 These readings frequently note Gramsci’s substantial contribution to our understanding of the macroprocesses of state formation and its apparatuses, but they often overlook his equally insightful framework for analyzing the micro-processes of the transformation of society. I will suggest that a comprehension of these ‘molecular’ micro-processes is vital for a full appreciation of the rich contribution made by Gramsci to our understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and the political. In particular, a central focal point of Gramsci’s Notebooks, the nexus between philosophy and politics, retains a power to provoke stimulating encounters with more contemporary thinkers. This chapter will elaborate the relationship between subjectivity and the political by examining a constellation of concepts (individuality, personality, conformism) deployed by Gramsci to articulate his conception of subjectivity in his prison writings. A major difficulty of realizing Gramsci’s contribution in this regard is that he tends to withdraw from explicitly formulating his theory using the language of ‘subjects’ as such. Thus, Peter Thomas contends that Gramsci’s Notebooks involve ‘a rejection of philosophies of the subject’ in favor of

136  Robert P. Jackson an alternative tradition based on the concept of the ‘person.’6 Beginning with a characterization of his predominantly pre-intentional notion of ‘subjectivity’ and its inseparability from ‘objectivity’ in his thought, I examine Gramsci’s conceptual shift from the language of subjects to that of persons and a theory of personality. Locating the foundation of this move in his ‘politico-gnoseological’ theory of the ‘effective reality of human relations of knowledge,’7 I will then briefly outline the relationship between this theme and his wider conceptual framework (hegemony, ideology, common sense, etc.). On this basis, I will draw on recent scholarship8 to focus in more detail on the relationship between the individual and society in Gramsci’s Notebooks, exploring the distinctive conception of personality that emerges from his theory. This will allow me to study, on the one hand, the category of ‘molecular’ transformations in Gramsci’s writings, and, on the other, the nature of the agency that realizes social change: the formation of collective will. In so doing, I will pay specific attention to Gramsci’s analysis of collective organisms, and of the individual and collective category of ‘person’ to negotiate the ‘strangely composite,’ fractured and fragmentary character of the lived experience of subaltern groups under conditions of modernity.9 Finally, I will argue that Gramsci’s proposal for a ‘new philosophy,’ alongside a new culture that is ‘rooted in the popular consciousness,’10 continues to be relevant as a source for understanding the relationship between subjectivity and the political in our own time.

Gramsci and Subjectivity Given the privileged position of the political in Gramsci’s conception of the will, it is perhaps unsurprising that subjectivity takes on a collective form in the first instance.11 His Prison Notebooks are, among other things, a sustained reflection on the mass popular experiences of his time, whether in the form of the rationalized techniques of Fordism in the United States, the social experiments of the Soviets in Russia, or the rise of Fascism in his native Italy.12 In this context, we can note two distinctive features of his conception of subjectivity: its predominantly ‘pre-intentional’ character, and his extreme reluctance to countenance the speculative separation of ‘subjectivity’ from ‘objectivity.’ In his entry for ‘soggettivo, soggettivismo, soggettività’ [subjective, subjectivism, subjectivity] in the Dizionario gramsciano, Giuseppe Cacciatore examines the variety of fields in which Gramsci deploys the language of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity.’ He identifies a range of philosophical, political, historical, and literary uses of these terms.13 Cacciatore demonstrates that Gramsci articulates the subjective dimension of his thought in different senses in an extremely wide-ranging semantic field.14 However, Gramsci’s primary concern is to avoid succumbing to a speculative conception of subjectivity, rather seeking to realize a ‘more objectified and concretely universalized subjectivity.’15 In the Notebooks, the subjective and the objective are

Antonio Gramsci  137 always already intertwined. One can never disentangle in reality the objective and subjective conditions of history. For Gramsci, this binary distinction is ‘simply one of a didactic character.’16 On the contrary, in the creation of a collective will, the important factor is to analyze the ‘size and concentration of subjective forces,’17 and therefore the ‘dialectical relation between conflicting subjective forces.’18 We find Gramsci’s conception of subjectivity at all times suffused within a wider analysis of the conflict between social forces. In Gramsci’s political thought an account of this struggle is necessary to illuminate the connection between the process of the constitution of individual and collective subjectivities. Guido Liguori suggests that it is the ‘constant cross-referencing of the subjective and objective that makes for a great part of the fascination (and the difficulty) of his work.’19 For Gramsci, subjects (principally class actors) do not emerge in a pure form or ex nihilo, but in a complex and dynamic terrain, a conflicting field of social forces. While Gramsci at times accents different moments of ‘subjects, processes and forms,’20 in order to account for this complex of fields, his reflections are informed consistently by the fundamental configuration of a struggle between dominant and subordinate groups. Liguori also identifies a second aspect of Gramsci’s conception of subjectivity; namely, its predominantly pre-intentional character, ‘where the greater part of subjects are not mobilized, but defined (in their subjectivity, in their individual and collective way of being) by ideology.’21 Gramsci sought to theorize the lack of historical awareness, and thereby lack of autonomy, of the majority of the population. At the same time, his realist treatment of this lack of autonomy does not hypostatize it as an absolute, taking seriously the historical effectivity of ideologies embodied as popular beliefs and their potential for transformation.22 Gramsci’s reading of the Marxian concept of ideology and, more broadly speaking, his innovative interpretation of the doctrine of historical materialism is a terrain for the constitution of these subjectivities, and for the development of an original theory of persons and personality. Gramsci has at times been regarded as a ‘subjectivist’ thinker, whose criticisms of the ‘mechanicism’ and ‘economism’ of the dominant trends of Marxism within the Second International has been associated with its opposite: a valorization of voluntarist agency. Thus, the influential objections to Gramsci’s ‘absolute historicism’ advanced by the French Marxist Louis Althusser assert that, despite its merits, the Sardinian’s thought falls within a trend of ‘theoretical’ or ‘revolutionary humanism’ (shared by thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre) that threatens to undermine the scientific qualities of Marxism.23 Taking this criticism as a starting point, Thomas returns to Gramsci’s texts to argue that Althusser’s claims are misdirected. According to Thomas, Gramsci cuts an unorthodox figure in contemporary discussions regarding subjectivity, since his articulation of the political withdraws from the conventional deployment of the category of the subject. Thus, following Valentino Gerratana,24 Thomas argues that

138  Robert P. Jackson Gramsci’s analyses operate with the much older and more ambivalent category of the “person [la persona],” or more precisely, a particular reformulation of this category that is not easily assimilated to the modern (epistemologically founded) discourses of the knowing subject that have often subsumed the older category.25 Thomas traces the category of ‘person’ back to the Stoic tradition, which transposes the notion of a dramatic mask onto the domain of the ‘ethicopolitical’ as a means of accounting for ‘the various roles “played” by any one individual in the course of social life.’26 He then gives a typology of the bifurcation of this category into polarized currents. An exemplar of the first current is the Kantian conception of ‘the person as an “end” in itself,’27 rooted in ‘an internalization of reason as definitive of the human essence.’28 The second is understood through the Hobbesian distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ persons, where ‘any individual “represents,” in the form of a “person,” numerous social roles.’29 The tension between these traditions is that between a focus on interiority (consciousness) and exteriority (social relations/identity). In what follows, we will trace some of the distinct resonances between the latter tradition of exteriority and the Gramscian conception of the ‘person’ on the terrain of the modern State. However, this is not to suggest that Gramsci is silent on the questions of consciousness and interiority. While Gramsci’s approach to persons rejects the formulation of an original unitary human essence, which he sees as the residue of a ‘theological’ conception,30 this does not logically entail the rejection of all processes of externalization. Nevertheless, Gramsci favors viewing the ‘human’ as a point of arrival rather than as a point of departure.31 He provides, as Thomas notes, ‘an ethico-political explanation of the unity posited by the theologically inflected concept’ of the person.32 For Thomas, this conception provides an ‘anti-subjectivist’ vision of the ‘constitutive social and political over-determination of la persona [the person].’33 Gramsci develops this distinctive approach to the problems of philosophy by engaging in recurring dialogue with key texts by Marx, such as the Theses on Feuerbach,34 and the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.35 Gramsci regards his own positions as an elaboration and unpacking of philosophical insights locked in the Theses on Feuerbach in aphoristic form. In particular, we can examine the foundations of his conception of subjectivity in relation to Marx’s contention that the individual is the ‘ensemble of the social relations.’36 Gramsci takes up this conception, as Thomas explains, exploring the ‘non-identity of the individual’37 as a condensation or synthesis of these relations, ‘as a “composite body” in which the dynamics of the social formation are found to be at work in a “molecular” fashion.’38 We can explain Gramsci’s conception of philosophy more generally in relation to Marx’s eleventh thesis: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’39 As Christine Buci-Glucksmann has argued, this

Antonio Gramsci  139 polemical assertion of the unitary link between theory and practice is both an immediately political statement and the signal for a reconfiguration of our understanding of philosophy.40 It is therefore an important foundation for Gramsci’s conception of subjectivity and his attempt to remove what he sees as the encrustations of both mechanicism and voluntarism from Marxist thought. In this sense, Gramsci follows a path explored initially by the Italian philosopher Antonio Labriola. Drawing on the inspiration of Labriola’s reading of Marxism as a ‘philosophy of praxis,’41 Gramsci attempts to develop a new way of conducting philosophy. This ‘new philosophy’ has significant implications for Gramsci’s theory of knowledge,42 in which the foundations of Gramsci’s move from the subject to the person can be located. In contrast to epistemological theories that are concerned with the problem of the creation of knowledge, Gramsci operates with what has been called a ‘gnoseology of politics,’43 or a ‘politico-gnoseological’44 conception of knowledge.45 On the one hand, this is a conception of human knowledge as a practice, rather than a treatment of knowledge as a type of speculative and passive reflection. On the other hand, Gramsci is outspoken in rejecting the ‘residues of mechanistic thinking’46 that are inherent to conceptions that regard theory ‘as a “complement” of practice, almost as an accessory.’47 He therefore combines an emphasis on practice with the rejection of the reduction of theory to practice. Gramsci addresses this apparently contradictory combination of positions by formulating the problem of the unity of theory and practice as a historical process, ‘as an aspect of the question of the intellectuals.’48 For as long as intellectuals are treated as separate to the great mass of the population, the impression will persist of a separation between theory and practice that is, according to Gramsci, ‘a purely mechanical operation.’49 Thomas argues that this politico-gnoseological conception deals with the ‘effective reality of human relations of knowledge.’50 In an alternative formulation, Christine Buci-Glucksmann explains this conception as a dual process in which ‘philosophical positions have their effects in all practices,’51 and ‘all practices contain knowledge effects.’52 Buci-Glucksmann warns against reducing this conception of gnoseology to politics, or obscuring the connections between philosophy and politics. Rather, she argues that the ‘gnoseology of politics,’53 affirms ‘a new mode of functioning between knowledge, politics, and civiltà [civilization].’54 This conception is new in the sense that it neither privileges philosopher-intellectuals as custodians of knowledge, which they impart to the masses, nor does it reduce knowledge to an epiphenomenon of mechanically-determined economic forces. Rather, Gramsci seeks to reveal that his apparent privileging of practice is an appearance produced only by the mechanical separation of theory and practice. For Gramsci, the novelty of his conception arises from conceiving the unity of these terms as a process of historical becoming, the creation of a ‘philosophical fact’ in the forging of the ‘theoretical-practical principle’ of a new hegemony.55

140  Robert P. Jackson This distinctive conception of knowledge has far-reaching consequences for Gramsci’s theoretical framework. The theory of personality that he develops from the conception of subjectivity associated with this perspective continues to resonate with contemporary thought. Thus, Thomas suggests that Gramsci’s turn to the ‘person’ represents ‘a valuable touchstone for the assessment of “returns of the subject” and discussions of various forms of “individuation” in philosophical debates today.’56 Much of this more recent discussion emerges from the paradigms of structuralism and post-structuralism taking up a perspective that is critical of the type of theoretical humanism identified by Althusser above. While Gramsci advocates an understanding of the ‘philosophy of praxis’ as an ‘absolute humanism of history,’57 he explains this as an ‘absolute secularization and earthliness of thought.’58 In this view, the subject is not reliant on an essentialist framework, rather emerging from a conflicting terrain of competing hegemonies. This conception does not sit easily as an object of ‘anti-essentialist’ criticism, which is the perspective adopted by much of the more recent discussion of the political.59 Indeed, a re-assessment of Gramsci’s conception of the relationship between subjectivity and the political might provide resources to help us to assess critically the formalist ‘discursive’ reading of hegemony at times employed in these debates.60 Before discussing Gramsci’s conception of the relationship between individuality, sociality, and his theory of personality, I will outline briefly the relationship between the theme of subjectivity and his wider conceptual framework. The Gramscian conception of subjectivity is one that formulates the possibilities for action in a historically constituted field of forces. Gramsci analyzes this field of forces as a struggle for hegemony, surveying the competing projects through which classes seek to elaborate various elements of political power, of both leadership and domination. The subject of a hegemonic project is a class, but, as Liguori points out, there is an intimate relationship in Gramsci’s thought between hegemonic power and the State. For Gramsci, a class ‘must “become the State” if it is to be a true hegemon.’61 Here, he understands the ‘State’ to be an expansive ‘integral’ form, incorporating the twin elements of force and consent. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is a thoroughgoing materialist analysis of both ‘narrow’ public state power and the formal institutions of government, which include the police, the army and administrative bureaucracy, and its broader ‘so-called private’ forms in civil society, such as religious institutions, the press, trade unions, and wider civic organizations. Gramsci’s conception of politics and the State rejects a mechanical determination of subjectivity by the economy, understood as the determination of historical evolution by iron laws of necessity.62 Rather, Gramsci proposes a realistic analysis of relations of force that implies an interaction of factors that restricts the possible choices of a subject within a given situation. Gramsci explores different levels in the relation of political forces during the emergence of a hegemonic project, the first of which he refers to as the ‘economic-corporate.’63 This represents

Antonio Gramsci  141 a stage in which the ‘degree of homogeneity, self-awareness and organization’64 of a social group or class is limited to the primitive defense of its economic interests. The elaboration of higher levels of the relation of political forces involves the ability of groups to take ethico-political initiatives on the terrain of the State, meaning the assertion of a socio-political leadership that brings ‘about not only a unison of economic and political aims, but also intellectual and moral unity . . . not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane.’65 For Gramsci, these levels correspond to ‘various moments of collective political consciousness as they have manifested themselves in history up till now.’66 Within this framework, the terrain on which collective subjects develop an awareness of their own projects is that of ideology. However, the constitution of subjectivity is not simply the acquisition of a certain consciousness on a rationalist-Enlightenment model, but rather the elaboration of a ‘conception of the world,’67 understood as a transformation of both ways of thinking and acting, and organized as a material force through its apparatuses. As Liguori explains, the ‘trenches and earthworks’68 of these apparatuses are ‘re-elaborated, adapted and propagated’69 in everyday forms of life, and they relate ‘to the importance of the Notebooks’ extended conception of intellectuals and their social role.’70 Gramsci’s conception of ideology, as a ‘cement’ preserving the unity of a ‘social bloc,’71 runs counter to the dominant understanding of the role of ideology in Marxism as an explanation of distorted and misleading views of the world. The origins of the latter conception of ideology are usually located in Marx and Engels’s German Ideology: ‘If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.’72 Marx and Engels refer here to ideology as the inverted appearance of a historical life-process, in a form analogous to the inversion that takes place in the physical processes of the eye. This approach has provided the basis for a current within Marxism often referred to as a negative-critical approach to ideology. Later thinkers codified this negative theory of ideology with the notion of ‘false consciousness.’73 While Gramsci’s notion of ideology is complex and multivalent in its usage, according to Liguori, it rejects the notion of ‘false consciousness’ and is essentially a ‘positive theory of ideology.’74 Gramsci does occasionally refer to being ‘liberated from the prison of ideologies in the bad sense of the word.’75 In the main however, Gramsci does not regard ideology as something illusory or false. Indeed he notes that the ‘bad sense of the word has become widespread, with the effect that the theoretical analysis of the concept of ideology has been modified and denatured.’76 For Gramsci, ideology is rather the ‘site of constitution of collective subjectivity,’77 the formation of composite social bodies around which ‘revolves the “war of position” and struggle for hegemony with which all society is permeated.’78 This construction neither is the mechanical consequence of environmental factors, nor is it the product of the externalization

142  Robert P. Jackson of an idealistic core of autonomy. Rather, Gramsci seeks to trace the formation of a collective will from a concrete analysis of the historical processes of life, seeking to avoid succumbing to a speculative notion of the economy as a ‘hidden god’—a quasi-Marxist form of metaphysics—but as ‘the ensemble of social relations in which real people move and act.’79 According to Gramsci, this positive construction of a new hegemony, which seeks to develop into an ‘integral State’80 and not simply a ‘government technically understood,’81 must involve the elaboration of a ‘conception of the world.’82 This is, on the one hand, a vision elaborated theoretically by intellectuals on behalf of a social group, but, on the other hand, an expression of the ‘solidity of popular beliefs’83 of the mass of the group itself. Gramsci’s hostility to any form of speculation inclines him to reject any original notion of an essential ‘core’ of human autonomy. He asks us to consider whether the idea of the human being as a starting point is not in fact a ‘theological’ or ‘metaphysical’ residue. At the same time, Gramsci does not conceive of human subjects as being wholly constructed by their environment, since he would point out that these subjects are in fact an active and ongoing part of modifying that environment. Thus, according to Gramsci, ‘each one of us changes himself, modifies himself to the extent that he changes and modifies the complex relations of which he is the hub.’84 Gramsci always already situates these general reflections on humanity within the co-ordinates of a struggle between competing hegemonies, between dominant and subaltern. Gramsci’s writings are marked with a deep concern for the development of elements of autonomy and self-awareness among the subaltern groups. These groups are fundamentally passive, but their passivity is a social relation that is constituted through human activity. Their passivity is a product of the inclusion of subaltern groups as an integral element of capitalist modernity.85 At the same time, this social relation is a fundamental obstacle to their potential emergence from their subaltern condition.86 Gramsci attempts to grapple with this problem by acknowledging what Liguori describes as ‘the largely pre-intentional materials’87 through which he seeks to realize a ‘new subjectivity.’88 Gramsci develops a concept of ‘common sense’ in order to account for a popular form of embodied ‘deep knowledge.’ Contrary to the English meaning of ‘common sense’ as a positive practical attitude, Gramsci’s use of the Italian term senso comune [‘common sense’] has a more neutral meaning.89 As Kate Crehan explains, Gramsci’s ‘common sense’ is the ‘accumulation of taken-for-granted “knowledge” to be found in every human community,’90 which ‘provides a heterogeneous bundle of assumed certainties that structure the basic landscapes within which individuals are socialized and chart their individual life courses.’91 Gramsci uses this concept in order to articulate the complex combination of intellectuals and masses in the process of subject formation. Despite its durability, common sense is something only relatively fixed and demonstrates a level of malleability that is empirically observable. According to Gramsci, in the formation of a collective will, it is both possible and necessary for

Antonio Gramsci  143 intellectuals to guide a modification of ‘common sense’ through a process of ‘intellectual and moral reform.’92 This involves locating the elements of what Gramsci calls ‘good sense’ [buon senso] within ‘common sense’ and rendering these elements more coherent.93 Here, Gramsci employs the concept of ‘coherence’ in an innovative sense, not only to mean an increase of logical consistency, but primarily of historico-political efficacy, the raising of a group’s capacity to act.94 ‘Common sense’ therefore represents, for Gramsci, the point of departure on which any realistic conception of social transformation must be based. Gramsci’s conception of the political maintains a commitment to the active role of subjects and the formation of collective will, while conceiving that the subject is, as Liguori indicates, ‘the outcome of a complex and intangible but nonetheless real combination’95 of the different social elements to which it belongs ‘often in a syncretic manner.’96 Based on this conceptual framework of hegemony, ideology, and common sense, I will now address the relationship between individuals and society in Gramsci’s framework, from which he elaborates his innovative theory of persons and personality.

Politics, the Individual and ‘Molecular’ Transformation Marx’s 1859 Preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy is often treated as the most condensed statement of the theoretical framework of ‘classical’ Marxism.97 In this text Marx employs a metaphor that conceives the relations of social production as an ‘economic basis’ on top of which ‘arises a legal and political superstructure,’98 a superstructure that corresponds with ‘definite forms of social consciousness.’99 This basesuperstructure relationship has often been interpreted as a mechanical and metaphysical determination of ‘social, political and intellectual life’100 (the ideological forms of the superstructure) by the economy.101 While Gramsci’s political thought exhibits a framework with formulations familiar to ‘classical’ Marxism, he articulates these elements in a highly original and sometimes surprising manner. Gramsci’s ‘dilated’102 account of social superstructures (plural) are certainly not epiphenomenal and crudely deterministic products of the economy. As Thomas explains, in Gramsci’s expansive formulation, the superstructures are not only legal and political forms, but are ‘all of the forms in which classes know and comprehend the conditions of their struggle within a determinate social formation.’103 They are the result of all of the relationships between individuals in society that intersect on the terrain of the political struggle for hegemony. Michele Filippini investigates the distinctive conception of individuality that we find in the Notebooks. On his reading, Gramsci treats individuality not as a general abstraction of universal characteristics, but ‘as something concerning the structure of the individual, that is, the individual’s composition from a series of organic, but also conflicting, interconnected parts.’104 The content of these various parts derives from the participation of

144  Robert P. Jackson the individual in various mass experiences, as a member of different social groups stratified from the local to the global level. For Gramsci, the individual is a complex composite of different types of ‘collective man,’105 and therefore a center of interaction or a ‘hub;’106 a site at which these elements form an often contradictory and unstable equilibrium. Gramsci identifies the need to reform the concept of ‘Man in general’107 that derives from the Catholic conception of an individual as ‘well defined and limited.’108 Basing himself on the sixth thesis of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, which states that ‘the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual,’109 Gramsci regards human nature not as a fixed concept, but as ‘the ensemble of social relations.’110 Gramsci expands on Marx’s thesis by using an archaeological metaphor, comparing the individual to a ‘walking anachronism, a fossil,’111 in which the historical process has left ‘stratified deposits.’112 Furthermore, Gramsci notes that it is sometimes social groups ‘that express the most developed modernity,’113 that ‘lag behind in other respects,’114 rendering them ‘incapable of complete historical autonomy.’115 The experience of these groups in particular is one of different competing hegemonies and various elements that are anachronistic to modernity. Thus, for Gramsci, the ‘human’ is not the expression of an original and unitary essence, but a ‘point of arrival,’116 or as Liguori noted above, ‘the subject is the outcome’ of a process.117 As Peter Thomas argues: Only at this point, as a result of a complex series of mediations, can we begin to talk of a “subject” or “human essence,” which nevertheless remains a type of heuristic shorthand for the processes it describes.118 Gramsci’s understanding of the historical forms of ‘individuality,’ first in the struggle of the bourgeoisie with feudal society and later in the developing conflict between different forms of collectivism and individualism (the ‘associational-individual’ and the ‘capitalist-individual’)119 is part of a strategy for negating this notion of ‘Man in general.’ However, it is also a contribution to a process of constructing new forms of individuality. The conception of ‘Man’ envisaged by the philosophy of praxis, according to Gramsci, is a ‘historical bloc of purely individual and subjective elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the individual is in an active relationship.’120 Redolent again of the Theses on Feuerbach, for Gramsci, it is necessary to transform the ‘external world, the general system of relations,’121 in order to ‘develop oneself.’122 Man is therefore ‘a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality, though perhaps the most important, is not, however, the only element to be taken in to account.’123 This leads us to his conception of society, including its relationship to the individual. We can infer Gramsci’s conception of the individual, on the one hand, from his negative criticisms of the monadic conception of ‘Man,’ indifferent to social relations, which he detects in both Catholicism and the philosophy

Antonio Gramsci  145 of Benedetto Croce. On the other hand, Filippini notes that there are two positive aspects to Gramsci’s theory of the individual: first, a ‘historicity (or political quality) defining the contingency of each and every individual formation,’124 and second, ‘the sociality that sees social relations as a constituent element of an individual’s being.’125 According to Filippini, the combination of individuality (‘the specific element of each individual’) with sociality (‘the relations that determine said individual’) effectively constitutes an individual.126 I will explore further below the personality that an individual acquires out of this conflict. In the Notebooks, Gramsci places a great deal of emphasis on the centrality of the French cultural experience, including in its positivistic (Comte) and anti-positivistic (Bergson) forms. In Gramsci’s reflections on the ‘social characteristics of individuality’127 and its ‘social determinants,’128 Filippini argues that the Sardinian both draws on and contributes to a tradition of sociological thought developed by Émile Durkheim.129 Gramsci absorbs elements of this tradition, in a particular form fused with Marxism, through the mediation of the writings of the French syndicalist Georges Sorel. This confluence relates to a shared focus with Durkheim on the individual in ‘modern industrial society.’130 Here, the stability of the social order is dependent both on the ‘dynamic relationship between the individual and social elements of individuality’131 and on the “social production of individuals,” who are differentiated from one another but rendered uniform in the masses.’132 While Durkheim and Gramsci share a number of characteristic features in their processes of argumentation, there are fundamental and illuminating differences. According to Filippini, Durkheim’s categories focus on the preservation of an ordered unity within society, whereas Gramsci emphasizes ‘the political actions of part of society on society itself,’133 which ‘displaces the political within the sphere of partiality rather than that of universality.’134 Filippini argues that Gramsci extends a path pioneered by Sorel before him, namely using the ‘toolbox’ of French sociology while replacing ‘the ‘de-subjectivized’ division of labor’135 of Durkheim with ‘a world view, an ethics and a new society’136 founded on labor.137 Gramsci’s conception of the acquisition of personality develops from a study of conflict and struggle in society, moving beyond the dislocated standpoint of a social scientific observer, whilst remaining cognizant of the challenges formulated by that discipline. The concept of ‘person’ [la persona] is not limited to the individual in Gramsci’s thought, but may refer to either an individual or a collective person.138 While Gramsci discusses individuality in relation to ‘objective’ social relations, his treatment of personality relates to an awareness of these relations, and the development of an historical autonomy through their modification and transformation. Thus, Gramsci states that ‘to create one’s personality means to acquire consciousness of them [the social relations] and to modify one’s own personality means to modify the ensemble of these relations.’139 For Gramsci, consciousness can have a gradation, or ‘degree of

146  Robert P. Jackson profundity,’140 related to the extent to which it knows how to modify these relations, and achieving this consciousness to a certain extent already modifies them.141 Furthermore, it is not enough to know the ensemble of social relations in a synchronic manner; they must also be ‘known genetically, in the movement of their formation.’142 Thus, Gramsci argues that ‘each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but of the history of these relations. He is a précis of the past.’143 Also in his pre-prison writings, Gramsci is deeply concerned with the personification of political leadership as the culmination of a historical process of development of a group, a selection process or a summary. Thus, Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, writing in the ‘Lyon Theses’ in 1926, argue that the political autonomy of a group requires that it achieves ‘a physiognomy, a personality and a precise consciousness.’144 In this tri-partite structure, it would be a mistake to place personality exclusively on the subjective side of this formulation, solely in terms of consciousness. On the contrary, personality appears to play a mediating role between the development of a critical consciousness and the physical embodiment of a collective will in a living organism. This mediating role of personality lies at the intersection of the determining function of social relations and the emergence of an awareness of them. Gramsci’s theory of personality is therefore an element of his wider conception of knowledge, and his attempts to re-formulate its role in both realistic and ‘democratic’ terms. For example, the mediating role of personality seems to correspond to Gramsci’s formulation of a ‘passage from knowing to understanding to feeling’145 in the fusion of individual and mass elements. Thus, Gramsci argues that if the relation of leadership between intellectuals and ‘peoplenation’ is one of ‘organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation.’146 The effective realization of a social force requires a ‘shared life’ in which the popular feelings of the mass and the intellectual element are united without resorting to a mechanical and coercive imposition of their relationship. Gramsci termed this reciprocal interaction between popular initiative and its intellectual organizers a ‘historical bloc,’147 the achievement of a unity between the structure and ensemble of superstructures.148 The emergence of such a ‘historical bloc’ is dependent on the overcoming of a state of ‘incoherence’149 among those groups seeking to engage in a struggle over hegemony.150 For Thomas, Gramsci’s studies of the ‘social and historical determination of the person [la persona]’151 represent a kind of ‘anti-Platonist Platonic allegory’152 in which Gramsci returns to a limited cell-form in order to comprehend a wider perspective, in turn modifying the point of origin.153 His insights into the person ‘are “translated” into the register of the historical efficacy of philosophy—and then in turn “re-translated” back into terms of its instantiation in the individual as the elementary “cell” of hegemonic struggle.’154 We can now discuss the importance of ‘molecular’ transformations for Gramsci’s conception of social transformation and the agency of those

Antonio Gramsci  147 engaged in this process. According to Filippini, in the Prison Notebooks, there is an ‘isomorphism’ between Gramsci’s theory of personality and his theory of society. They are two expressions of a single problem.155 Thus, Gramsci does not counter-pose his account of personality formation and the micro-dynamics of social transformation with the macro-processes of the formation of the State and its apparatuses. Gramsci relates the practical functioning of individuals, who act as individuals despite the incoherence of their individuality, to the particular order that arises in modern industrial society. His reflections on personality both enrich and are enriched by his theory of society. A key element in the emergence of a new personality is Gramsci’s conception of ‘molecular transformations,’156 which are defined by Filippini as ‘the slow, yet inexorable mutation of single elements within an organism (be it individual or collective) that at a certain point metamorphose from quantitative to qualitative, and which redefine the nature and structure of the object in question.’157 Gramsci makes use of the conception of ‘molecular changes’158 to account for different historical phenomena. For example, he examines the political process of ‘transformism’ [trasformismo] during the Italian Risorgimento, in which conservative Moderate forces incorporated individuals from the radical Action party within a new order.159 Gramsci also studies the new production techniques of Fordism, which involved the conscious creation of a new type of worker by industrialists.160 In both of these examples, Gramsci deploys ‘the interpretative criterion of molecular changes’161 which ‘progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes.’162 Gramsci also applies the concept of ‘molecular transformation’ to the process of adaptation and moral crisis, or the ‘catastrophe of character,’163 within an individual. In this form, ‘molecular transformation’ is a dangerous process in which the protagonist experiences a split personality. One part may be aware of the effects, but they serve cumulatively to undermine the entire will to resist this transformation. While Gramsci acknowledges that the phenomenon of ‘molecular transformation’ has existed in the past, he suggests that it is of key importance in modern society.164 In particular, we can distinguish the present form of ‘molecular transformation’ as one that is consciously ‘calculated’165 and ‘prepared systematically.’166 The disaggregating effect of this ‘molecular’ process of transformation on the subaltern groups, Thomas notes, runs counter to Gramsci’s project that seeks to establish a more ‘coherent’ conception of the world.167 In order to address this struggle in more detail, we will explore Gramsci’s analysis of collective organisms.

Collective Subjectivity and Collective Will Gramsci’s reflections on the interaction between individual and collective forms of transformation develop an important line of enquiry into the nature of subjectivity in modern society. These concepts fit within his overall

148  Robert P. Jackson framework of a struggle between hegemonies, which plays out on the terrain of ideology. In Liguori’s formulation, ideology is ‘the site of the constitution of collective subjectivity, but also—in a more contradictory manner—of individual subjectivity, within the ambit of the struggle for hegemony.’168 In Gramscian terms, the nature of the agency that realizes social change is explored through the formation of collective will. Gramsci concentrates not only on the limitations that constrain an individual’s agency in society, but also on the means by which those limitations can be overcome through collective endeavor. Thus, he argues that ‘when the individual can associate himself with all the other individuals who want the same changes, and if the changes wanted are rational, the individual can be multiplied an impressive number of times.’169 This is not to say that Gramsci envisages collective organisms to be absolutely free; rather, they operate within a restricted field of forces. As Liguori states, an organism is capable of making choices according to ‘the (limited) possibility of the real choices in front of it.’170 In this sense, Liguori points out that the inspirations of Gramsci’s youth (Bergson, Gentile) are tempered in his Prison Notebooks by a reflection on the inertia and passivity embodied in the different forms of ‘common sense’ [senso comune] present in society.171 For Gramsci, the importance of ‘supraindividual organisms’ hitherto has been appreciated only in a ‘mechanistic and determinist manner,’172 indicating the legitimate source of some hostile reactions against them. By contrast, Gramsci envisages a conception in which ‘relations are seen as active and in movement’173 between ‘the societas hominum and the societas rerum,’174 or between ‘the society of “men” and the society of things: i.e. the human and natural worlds.’175 Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’ emphasizes the centrality of the ‘collective will,’ characteristic of a life-long rejection of what he described in his early writings as the contamination of Marxism by ‘positivist and naturalist encrustations.’176 Yet, in his later writings, Gramsci’s treatment of the collective will is increasingly concrete in its analysis of collective organisms within a field of forces. In Carlos Nelson Countinho’s estimation, the ‘collective will’ continues to play ‘an important role in the construction of the social order, but no longer as formative of reality, rather as a decisive moment articulated with the determinations that derive from objective reality, in particular the social relations of production.’177 Gramsci criticizes the ‘abstract character’178 of Sorel’s concept of the ‘political myth,’179 identifying not only the negative and destructive aspect of myth, but also its positive constructive potential. Thus, Gramsci demonstrates his appreciation for the historical achievements of the Jacobin forces in the French revolution, which were able to create a ‘national-popular’180 collective will (i.e., a new form of hegemony). This remains a project, albeit in a new post-Jacobin form,181 that Gramsci envisages for a ‘modern Prince,’182 a political party adequate to the tasks organizing an ‘intellectual and moral reform’183 of modern society. Gramsci re-defines the collective will as ‘operative awareness of historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama.’184 On the

Antonio Gramsci  149 one hand, the ‘collective will’ must comprehend the stubborn historical and economic conditions on which arbitrary ventures can founder. The collective will is a ‘rational, not an arbitrary, will, which is realized in so far as it corresponds to objective historical necessities.’185 On the other hand, it must ‘make history’186 by awakening passions that can be only be given coherent expression by organizing a new form of culture. It must become, in Gramsci’s terms, ‘a culture, a form of “good sense,” a conception of the world with an ethic that conforms to its structure.’187 Fabio Frosini points out that for Gramsci there is a tendency in industrial society, born in the material organization of production and education, to render the norms of conduct and forms of life of the masses increasingly homogeneous, and orientated towards the production of standardized individuals.188 Gramsci explains that ‘we are all conformists of some conformism or other, always man-in-the-mass or collective man.’189 The struggle for hegemony is thus a struggle between different types of ‘conformism,’ representing a crisis of civil society. It would be arbitrary and unhistorical to propose a rejection of the process of ‘conformism’ outright, which is, in any case, an impossibility in modern society. Gramsci rather advocates an intervention to organize a new form of ‘conformism’ from below, which would ‘allow new possibilities for self-discipline, in other words for freedom, including that of the individual.’190 A critical yet appreciative attitude towards the notion of ‘conformism’ is therefore central to Gramsci’s conception of ‘intellectual and moral reform.’191 In order to render both the individual and social group more coherent, it is necessary to develop an approach that takes ‘common sense’ as its foundation. Gramsci proposes to raise this disjointed and incoherent form, which arises from the subaltern groups’ experience of a dislocated and non-coherent present, made up of bizarrely composite elements of different conceptions of the world, to a coherent unity. Thomas locates its origins in the modern historical experience, where ‘the present is necessarily non-identical with itself, composed of numerous “times” that do not coincide but encounter each other with mutual incomprehension.’192 For Thomas, Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis gives ‘the practically-focused [‘common sense’] senso comune a level of critical self-awareness regarding its historical determination that allows it to break with the incoherence and passivity imposed upon it by an incoherent present.’193 Gramsci proposes the figure of the ‘democratic philosopher’194 as the embodiment of this concrete new political perspective, a self-critical intellectual for whom an active relationship exists between her and the ‘cultural environment’195 that she is attempting to modify. However, this practical transformation of philosophy, ‘forced to recognize its own foundation,’196 risks what Gramsci describes as the mummification of ‘common sense,’ the transformation of a ‘justified reaction into a permanent attitude.’197 The challenge confronting this project, of re-constructing ‘collective man’ through an approach of ‘conformism from below,’ results from the dual nature of collective organisms found in Gramsci’s Notebooks. They are,

150  Robert P. Jackson as Filippini explains, both ‘organic mechanisms rebalancing the power system,’198 and at the same time ‘an independent expression of subaltern, potentially revolutionary demands.’199 Thomas alerts us to the way in which, for Gramsci, institutionalized practices of philosophy, even in their radical forms, can be integrated into the apparatus of the hegemonic project of the current ruling group as a relation of ‘speculative command.’200 The starting point of Gramsci’s alternative critical project is what he describes as an ‘inventory’201 of the ‘infinity of traces’202 deposited in us by the historical process, and from which a more coherent conception of the world can be consciously formed.203 Gramsci’s discussion of personality emerges at an early stage in the Prison Notebooks through his reflections on Sorel’s concept of the ‘spirit of cleavage,’204 and through his interest in the subaltern groups’ development of an ‘awareness of their own historical personality.’205 The difficulty of comprehending Gramsci’s conception of the subaltern groups is that they are defined by their passivity, and thus in a sense ‘excluded,’ yet are simultaneously actively constituted as passive, and thus included within the dominant hegemonic project. In other words, Thomas argues that the concept of passivity is ‘a social relation we must actively construct, in relation to other equally active social relations.’206 Here, I would argue that Gramsci’s conception of ‘mummification’ mentioned above could play an important role in explaining the passive constitution of the subaltern groups.207 As Thomas noted above, the experience of the subaltern classes, confined to the terrain of a “civil society” subjugated by the existing “political society” of the dominant class, is one of a continual molecular transformation, of disaggregations that decrease the capacity to act of both the individual and the class to which they belong.208 For the subaltern groups to emerge from their condition of passivity requires the rendering coherent of fragmented elements of ‘spontaneous’ leadership that arise and the organization of this into a systematic and ‘conscious leadership.’209 Gramsci argues that the task of the theoretician is to ‘translate’ the healthy elements of historical life into theoretical language, rather than seeking to impose an ‘abstract scheme’ on reality.210 This process, aiming towards a hitherto unrealized unity of theory and practice, is, for Gramsci, a distinctive feature of Marx’s contribution that, by moving into the realm of practice, transforms both the form and content of philosophy itself.

Conclusion Gramsci offers a powerful theoretical toolbox for re-articulating the problem of subjectivity. While Gramsci’s conception of the subject has often, following Althusser, been characterized as a form of ‘theoretical humanism,’ in this chapter, I have argued that Gramsci’s theory of subjectivity is one that

Antonio Gramsci  151 withdraws from the conventional language of ‘subjects,’ to deploy an innovative theory of persons and personality on the terrain of a political struggle between rival hegemonies. The continuing relevance of Gramsci’s thought is demonstrated by his enduring power to provoke stimulating encounters with recent thinkers of the capillary networks of social life, such as with the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. As Kate Crehan has demonstrated,211 Gramsci’s treatment of the problem of ‘deep knowledge’ with his conception of ‘common sense,’ explored above, has productive resonances with the notion of ‘habitus’ developed in Bourdieu’s theory of subjectivity.212 Furthermore, a comparative study of their thought illuminates unexpected aspects of both thinkers’ frameworks.213 Gramsci’s philosophy acknowledges the conflictual basis of social life in realistic terms, acknowledging the ‘pre-intentional’ aspect of the ‘common sense’ of popular social groups. At the same time, it seeks to propose concrete reforms in order to re-shape and elaborate on the intuitions of a ‘future philosophy . . . appropriate for a globally united human species.’214 This involves confronting the passive condition characteristic of the subaltern groups and their experience of a radically incoherent and dislocated present. Yet, Gramsci also outlines the possibility of moving from the time in which the subaltern is considered as a ‘thing’ to that in which it has a feeling of itself as ‘a historical person, a protagonist.’215 While Gramsci does not propose a ready-made blueprint for social transformation, the laboratory of his thought continues to provide a conceptually productive research platform for analyzing the relationship between subjectivity and the political in our current conjuncture.

Notes   1 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer and the editors of this collection for their insightful comments and meticulous editorial work on the present chapter. I would also like to thank Francesca Antonini for her astute commentary on an earlier draft. The text’s remaining defects are, of course, my own.  2 Cited in Joseph Buttigieg, ‘Preface,’ in: Prison Notebooks, Vol. 1, edited by Joseph Buttigieg and Antonio Gramsci (Columbia University Press: New York, 2011), p. XIX.  3 A growing number of these works are now available in translation. See, for example, Giuseppe Cospito, The Rhythm of Thought in Gramsci (Brill: Leiden, 2016), or Guido Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways (Brill: Leiden, 2015).   4 I reference the Italian Gerratana critical edition of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana (Einaudi: Torino, 1975)), followed by the standard reference system giving the notebook number (Q), note number (§), and page number. I also provide a reference to the currently incomplete English critical edition (Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 3 vols., edited and translated by Joseph Buttigieg (Columbia University Press: New York, 2011)), or to a relevant anthology of his writings in English where these translations are available.   5 A survey of some of these ‘images of Gramsci’ is available in: Peter Thomas, ‘Hegemony, Passive Revolution and the Modern Prince,’ Thesis Eleven, vol. 117, n. 1, 2013, pp. 20–39 (p. 24).

152  Robert P. Jackson   6 Peter Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Haymarket: Chicago, 2009), p. XXIV.   7 Ibid., p. 97.   8 See, for example, Michele Filippini, Using Gramsci: A New Approach (Pluto: London, 2017).  9 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §12, p. 1376/Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1971), p. 324. 10 Ibid., Q11, §13, p. 1400/Ibid., p. 424. 11 This is not to overlook Gramsci’s insightful analysis of the transformations of individual subjectivity, e.g. the effect of prison life on the mentality of the prisoner. For example, see Thomas’s discussion of the dislocation of a prisoner’s social identity that generates a tragic ‘non-presence of the present,’ in Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 399. 12 Filippini, Using Gramsci, p. 39. 13 Giuseppe Cacciatore, ‘soggettivo, soggettivismo, soggettività,’ in: Dizionario gramsciano: 1926–37, edited by Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Carocci: Roma, 2009), pp. 778–780. 14 In this chapter, space limitations mean that it is not possible to cover the diverse manifestations in the Prison Notebooks of the question of subjectivity, and by extension of objectivity, e.g., the question of Gramsci’s attitude towards the objectivity of the ‘external world.’ I will draw upon wider issues only to the extent that they illuminate the central focus of the relationship between subjectivity and the political. 15 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q8, §177, p. 1049; my translation. 16 Ibid., Q15, §25, p. 1781/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 113. 17 Ibid., Q15, §25, p. 1781/Ibid., p. 113. 18 Ibid., Q15, §25, p. 1781/Ibid., p. 113. 19 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 24. 20 Ibid., p. 24. 21 Ibid., p. 89. 22 A discussion of Gramsci’s theory of subjectivity must therefore encompass the problem of intellectuals, who help to elaborate and organize the collective historical awareness of particular social groups. The creation of intellectual strata was a key element in the emergence of subjects for Gramsci, playing a vital role in raising the masses from a passive condition and enabling their more or less coherent beliefs to become an effective material force. 23 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading ‘Capital’ (Verso: New York, 2009), pp. 140–153. 24 Valentino Gerratana, Problemi di metodo (Editori Riunti: Roma, 1997), p. 137. 25 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 397. 26 Ibid., p. 397. 27 Ibid., p. 397. 28 Ibid., p. 397. 29 Ibid., pp. 397–398. 30 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q7, §35, p. 884/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 355. 31 Ibid., Q7, §35, p. 884/Ibid., p. 355. 32 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 398. 33 Ibid., p. 450. 34 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 2010), pp. 3–5. 35 Ibid., Vol. 29, pp. 261–265. 36 Ibid., Vol. 5, p. 4.

Antonio Gramsci  153 37 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 398. 38 Ibid., p. 378. 39 Marx and Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 5. 40 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1980), p. 346. 41 Gramsci elaborates on issues raised by Labriola, modifying them in the light of his own experiences. Gramsci articulates his understanding of the unity of theory and practice in more concrete and realist terms by confronting questions of political organization that Labriola had not addressed. (For a wider discussion of their relationship, see Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, pp. 142–155). 42 These complex issues involve the relationship of the philosophy of intellectuals to the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of the mass of the population. Gramsci reconsiders in democratic terms the relationship between knowledge and culture (conceived in a broad sense as a way of life). For a further discussion, see Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11 §12, p. 1375/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 323. 43 Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, p. 346. 44 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 97. 45 Ibid., p. 97. There are dissenting voices to this approach, such as Thomas Nemeth, who reads Gramsci from a phenomenological perspective within the tradition of epistemology. See Thomas Nemeth, Gramsci’s Philosophy: A Critical Study (Harvester: Brighton, 1980). 46 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q8, §169, p. 1042/Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, p. 330. 47 Ibid., Q8, §169, p. 1042/Ibid., p. 330. 48 Ibid., Q8, §169, p. 1042/Ibid., p. 330. 49 Ibid., Q8, §169, p. 1042/Ibid., p. 330. 50 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 97. 51 Buci-Glucksmann, Gramsci and the State, p. 349. 52 Ibid., p. 349. 53 Ibid., p. 349. 54 Ibid., p. 349. 55 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.II, §12, p. 1250/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 365–366. 56 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 450. 57 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §27, p. 1437/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 465. 58 Ibid., Q11, §27, p. 1437/Ibid., p. 465. 59 See, for example, Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (Verso: New York, 1993). 60 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 11. 61 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 9. 62 Gramsci criticized a tendency within the Second International to ascribe to Marx’s Capital a mechanical conception of economic laws that determined the evolution of society in a fatalistic manner. See Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 393. 63 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q13, §17, p. 1583/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 181. 64 Ibid., Q13, §17, p. 158/ Ibid., p. 181. 65 Ibid., Q13, §17, p. 1584/Ibid., pp. 181–182. 66 Ibid., Q13, §17, p. 1583/Ibid., p. 181. 67 Ibid., Q17, §51, p. 1947/Ibid., p. 267. 68 Ibid., Q13, §7, p. 1567/Ibid., p. 243. 69 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 84.

154  Robert P. Jackson   70 Ibid., p. 84.  71 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §12, p. 1380/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 328.   72 Marx and Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 36.  73 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 75.   74 Ibid., p. 75.  75 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.II, §24, p. 1263/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 343–344.   76 Ibid., Q7, §19, p. 868/Ibid., p. 376.  77 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 75.   78 Ibid., p. 75.  79 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.I, §8, p. 1225/Antonio Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Derek Boothman (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1995), p. 347.  80 Ibid., Q17, §51, p. 1947/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 267.   81 Ibid., Q17, §51, p. 1947/Ibid., p. 267.   82 Ibid., Q17, §51, p. 1947/Ibid., p. 267.   83 Ibid., Q7, §21; p. 869/Ibid., p. 377.   84 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1345/Ibid., p. 352.   85 See Thomas, ‘Hegemony, Passive Revolution and the Modern Prince.’   86 In an interesting observation, Jan Rehmann suggests that ‘Gramsci replaced the Marxian language of “alienation” with one of “subalternity.” ’ (Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideology (Brill: Leiden, 2013), p. 145).  87 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 112.   88 Ibid., p. 112.  89 See Thomas for a further discussion of the term senso comune (Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 16 fn61).   90 Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives (Duke University Press: Durham, 2016), p. 43.   91 Ibid., p. 43.  92 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q16, §9, p. 1860/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 395.   93 Ibid., Q11, §59, p. 1486/Ibid., p. 346.   94 See Thomas, Gramscian Moment, pp. 364–366, for an account of the development of this term within the Prison Notebooks and its emergence as an organising thread of Gramsci’s research.  95 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 84.   96 Ibid., p. 84.   97 Marx and Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 29, pp. 261–265.   98 Ibid., p. 263.   99 Ibid., p. 263. 100 Ibid., p. 263. 101 Ibid., p. 263. Space constraints preclude an assessment of the validity of this interpretation, which Gramsci associated with the Marxism of the Second International. See Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §12, p. 1388/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 337. 102 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 67. 103 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 99. 104 Filippini, Using Gramsci, p. 24. 105 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §12, p. 1376/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 324. 106 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1345/Ibid., p. 352.

Antonio Gramsci  155 107 Ibid., Q7, §35, p. 884/Ibid., p. 355. 108 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1345/Ibid., p. 352. 109 Marx and Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 5, p. 4. 110 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q7, §35, p. 885/Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, p. 186. 111 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1377/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 324. 112 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1377/Ibid., p. 324. 113 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1377/Ibid., pp. 324–325. 114 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1377/Ibid., p. 325. 115 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1377/Ibid., p. 325. 116 Ibid., Q7, §35, p. 884/Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, p. 185. 117 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 84. 118 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 395. 119 See Fabio Frosini, ‘individuo,’ in: Dizionario gramsciano: 1926–37, edited by Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Carocci: Roma, 2009), p. 420. 120 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.II, §48, p. 1338/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 360. 121 Ibid., Q10.II, §48, p. 1338/Ibid., p. 360. 122 Ibid., Q10.II, §48, p. 1338/Ibid., p. 360. 123 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1345/Ibid., p. 352. 124 Filippini, Using Gramsci, p. 26. 125 Ibid., p. 26. 126 Ibid., p. 27. 127 Ibid., p. 28. 128 Ibid., p. 28. 129 Ibid., p. 28. 130 Ibid., p. 30. 131 Ibid., p. 30. 132 Ibid., p. 30. 133 Ibid., p. 31. 134 Ibid., p. 31. 135 Ibid., p. 37. 136 Ibid., p. 37. 137 Ibid., p. 37. 138 Rocco Lacorte, ‘persona,’ in: Dizionario gramsciano: 1926–37, edited by Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Carocci: Roma, 2009), p. 634. 139 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.II, §54, p. 1345/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 352. 140 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Ibid., p. 353. 141 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Ibid., p. 353. 142 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Ibid., p. 353. 143 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Ibid., p. 353. 144 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Pre-Prison Writings: 1921–1926, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1978), p. 362. 145 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §67, p. 1505/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 418. 146 Ibid., Q11, §67, p. 1505/Ibid., p. 418. 147 Ibid., Q8, §182, p. 1082/Ibid., p. 366. 148 Ibid., Q8, §182, p. 1082/Ibid., p. 366. 149 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 373. 150 As mentioned above, Gramsci’s use of the term ‘incoherence’ relates to a lack of historical efficacy. 151 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 374.

156  Robert P. Jackson 152 Ibid., p. 374. 153 Ibid., p. 374. 154 Ibid., p. 375. 155 Filippini, Using Gramsci, p. 37. 156 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q17, §51, p. 1947/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 267. 157 Filippini, Using Gramsci, p. 40. 158 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q15, §11, p. 1767/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 109. 159 Ibid., Q15, §11, p. 1767/Ibid., p. 109. 160 Ibid., Q22, §3, p. 2148/Ibid., p. 295. 161 Ibid., Q15, §11, p. 1767/Ibid., p. 109. 162 Ibid., Q15, §11, p. 1767/Ibid., p. 109. 163 Filippini, Using Gramsci, p. 40. 164 Furthermore, this concept has personal significance for Gramsci, as a prisoner resisting a certain individual form of molecular transformation. See Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 399. 165 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q15, §9, p. 1764. 166 Ibid., Q15, §9, p. 1764. 167 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 373. 168 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 84. 169 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 353. Gramsci’s conception of the ‘rational’ is developed with a specific meaning relating to the notion of historical effectivity. 170 Liguori, Gramsci’s Pathways, p. 116. 171 Ibid., p. 116. 172 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 353. 173 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Ibid., p. 353. 174 Ibid., Q10.II, §54, p. 1346/Ibid., p. 353 175 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 353 fn39. 176 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings: 1910–1920 (Lawrence and Wishart: London, 1977), p. 34. 177 Carlos Nelson Coutinho, ‘volontà collettiva,’ in: Dizionario gramsciano: 1926–37, edited by Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Carocci: Roma, 2009), p. 900; my translation. 178 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q13, §1, p. 1559; Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 130. 179 Ibid., Q13, §1, p. 1559/Ibid., p. 130. 180 Ibid., Q13, §1, p. 1559/Ibid., p. 130. 181 See, Fabio Frosini, ‘L’egemonia e i “subalterni”: utopia, religione, democrazia,’ International Gramsci Journal, vol. 2, n. 1, 2016, pp. 126–166 (p. 127), and, Fabio Frosini, La religione dell’uomo moderno: politica e verità nei «Quaderni del carcere» di Antonio Gramsci (Carocci: Roma, 2010). 182 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q13, §1, p. 1559/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 130. 183 Ibid., Q13, §1, p. 1560/Ibid., p. 132. 184 Ibid., Q13, §1, p. 1559/Ibid., p. 130. 185 Ibid., Q11, §59, p. 1485/Ibid., p. 346. 186 Marx and Engels, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 11, p. 103. 187 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §59, p. 1485/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 346. 188 Fabio Frosini, ‘individuo,’ in: Dizionario gramsciano: 1926–37, edited by Guido Liguori and Pasquale Voza (Carocci: Roma, 2009), p. 420.

Antonio Gramsci  157 189 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §12, p. 1376/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 324. 190 Ibid., Q7, §12, p. 862/Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 276. 191 Ibid., Q16, §9, p. 1860/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 395. 192 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 283. 193 Ibid., p. 374. 194 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q10.II, §44, p. 1332/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 350. 195 Ibid., Q10.II, §44, p. 1332/Ibid., p. 350. 196 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 374. 197 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q8, §28, p. 958/Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 3, p. 254. 198 Filippini, Using Gramsci, p. 47. 199 Ibid., p. 47. 200 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 450. 201 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §12, p. 1376/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 324. 202 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1376/Ibid., p. 324. 203 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1376/Ibid., p. 324. 204 The ‘primitive and elementary’ phase of differentiation from the dominant order, taken up and examined by Gramsci as a part of the development of the autonomy of a social group. 205 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q3, §49, p. 333/Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, p. 53. 206 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 305. 207 For Gramsci, the ‘mummification of culture’ helps us to understand the enduring power of certain anachronistic forms, the apparently ‘living’ role played by ‘dead’ traditions. This process can be imposed from above by strategies of dispersion wrought by the dominant groups, but also continues to be reproduced by groups that stand to benefit from the negation of their influence. Gramsci’s concept of mummification helps to explain the obstacles facing the emergence of the subaltern groups from their condition of passivity. For a full examination of the concept of mummification in Gramsci’s Notebooks, see Robert Jackson, ‘Subalternity and the Mummification of Culture in Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks,” ’ International Gramsci Journal, vol. 2, n. 1, 2016, pp. 201–225. 208 Thomas, Gramscian Moment, p. 373. 209 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q3, §48, p. 328/Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, p. 49. 210 Ibid., Q3, §48, p. 332/Ibid., p. 52. 211 Kate Crehan, ‘Gramsci’s Concept of Common Sense: A Useful Concept for Anthropologists?,’ Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 16, n. 2, 2011, pp. 273–287. 212 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1977). 213 For a more sustained analysis, see Robert Jackson, ‘On Bourdieu and Gramsci,’ Gramsciana: Rivista Internazionale di Studi su Antonio Gramsci, vol. 2, 2017, pp. 139–174. 214 Gramsci, Quaderni del carcere, Q11, §12, p. 1376/Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 324. 215 Ibid., Q11, §12, p. 1388/Ibid., p. 337.

8 Embodied Consciousness and Political Subjectivity In the Work of Merleau-Ponty Stephen A. Noble

‘Whatever philosophy one may teach. . ., a society is not the temple of revered values that are inscribed on the pediments of its monuments or in its constitutional texts; its worth is to be found in the worth of its relations between men and between men and mankind. [Quelle que soit la philosophie qu’on professe. . ., une société n’est pas le temple des valeurs-idoles qui figurent au fronton de ses monuments ou dans ses textes constitutionnels, elle vaut ce que valent en elle les relations de l’homme avec l’homme].’1

In the summer of 1953, two of the twentieth-century’s most prominent philosophers—who for many years up until that time had maintained a close friendship as well as a fecund professional relationship, having founded and managed together what became one of the century’s most well-known French-language intellectual, political, and literary reviews, Les temps ­modernes—became entangled in a candid dispute that would quickly lead to an abrupt and definitive parting of ways, with the immediate ceasing of virtually all further personal and professional contact. For the two thinkers concerned, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who shared a common training in philosophy at France’s École normale supérieure as well as a wide range of philosophical interests—from the German phenomenologists to literature and art, to name only a few of the areas—the root of the disagreement was especially about one broad issue: the nature of philosophical activity and its relation to politics. Indeed, dealings between the two philosophers had begun to alter at the beginning of the 1950s, with political issues at the heart of the divergence. On one hand, Soviet involvement in the outbreak of the Korean War, in 1951, prompted Merleau-Ponty to rethink his position towards revolutionary Marxism, while, during the same period, Sartre’s commitment to Marxism’s ideals pushed him closer to France’s Communist Party.2 Sartre expounded his evolving position, and notably his defense of the Communist Party, in a series of articles printed in Les temps modernes, beginning in July 1952.3 In the months that followed, the author of Being and Nothingness became increasingly autocratic about what was published in the review, notably in response to his decision to come to the defense of France’s

160  Stephen A. Noble Communists. In some instances, his actions were public; in others, they were private. On one, public occasion, he printed a particularly acerbic reply to an article published by Merleau-Ponty’s friend and former student, Claude Lefort;4 on another, private occasion, after Merleau-Ponty decided to add a short introductory paragraph to another author’s article that Sartre wanted to print, in order to balance the political points of view the article presented, Sartre took the unprecedented step of censoring Merleau-Ponty’s editorial work and deleting his addition entirely.5 In a selection of personal letters that document the ensuing disagreement between the two philosophers—letters which of course remained private for many years6—a combative and antagonistic Sartre accuses his colleague of adopting an ambiguous philosophical attitude towards the significant events of their age and, more importantly, of distancing himself from political issues. According to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty had come to espouse the belief that ‘the philosopher today cannot adopt a political position’7—an affirmation which is all the more surprising given the defense of Marxism that Merleau-Ponty had developed only a few years earlier, in 1947, in Humanism and Terror. An Essay on the Communist Problem. In his reply, Merleau-Ponty refutes Sartre’s criticisms categorically. What is most significant for the present work is that, in his letter—and more clearly than anywhere else in his writings, whether published or unpublished—the author of the Phenomenology of Perception explains that his overall philosophical interests must not be understood as less political simply because he prefers not to react immediately to each significant political event as it begins to unfold. Rather than ‘hastily taking stands’8—which is, very precisely, the approach he believed Sartre had been following in Les temps modernes— Merleau-Ponty clarifies that, on the contrary, he prefers to write and publish ‘comprehensive studies [des études d’ensemble],’9 which appeal to the reader’s head rather than to his heart. In fact, he goes so far as to state that his own manner of proceeding—which appears more equitable given that it seeks to provide a more complete and balanced understanding of events—is not only no less political than Sartre’s approach, but actually more faithful both to the cause of politics and to the cause of philosophy itself. As he writes: This method is closer to politics than your method of constant commitment [engagement continué]. . . . And, for that very reason, it is more philosophical, because the distance it introduces between the event and the judgment made about it weakens the event’s hold upon us and allows its meaning to be seen clearly. I had thus no need to separate philosophy from the world in order to remain a philosopher—and nor have I ever done so.10

A Tale of Two Philosophies The sharp disagreement had significant consequences, not only in the professional and personal lives of the two philosophers directly concerned, but

Embodied Consciousness  161 also for Les temps modernes, which, due to Merleau-Ponty’s resignation, lost one of its founders and central members.11 For the purposes of the present work, the seriousness of the situation serves to underline the overarching importance that politics had in the lives and work of both of the protagonists. In the case of Sartre, this is unsurprising: the political dimension of his writing is widely recognized and has been extensively examined. However, the same is decidedly not true in the case of Merleau-Ponty. All in all, it must be said that Merleau-Ponty’s political thought—even when considered in general terms, and disregarding any of its specific details—has gained very little scholarly attention indeed, especially in relation to the interest shown for other aspects of his work. Moreover, all too often it is simply ignored entirely, with focus instead placed on the myriads of themes related to, directly or indirectly, his involvement with the phenomenological movement. Of course, the intention here is in no way to suggest that any aspect of the philosopher’s work receives undue attention; the path Merleau-Ponty followed from the development of a phenomenology of embodied perceptual consciousness towards a phenomenological ontology, with all its attendant themes, is an example of highly original philosophical thinking which, quite rightly, has attracted, and continues to attract, a good deal of serious inquiry. Instead, what we seek to make clear is that there is undoubtedly a serious imbalance in the attention given to this philosophy, with many writers, and especially writers coming from predominantly philosophical backgrounds, showing a definite temerity in tackling, or even situating, the political issues in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.12 Before proceeding any further, it must be underlined just to what extent this situation is surprising. And, indeed, there are a number of reasons why it is so striking. First of all, there are the blunt facts of the matter: for example, political philosophy is the exclusive concern of two of the six books (monographs or collections of his own essays) that Merleau-Ponty authored and published during his life-time,13 with political texts also appearing in both of his collections of essays, the second of which was printed just before his death.14 There is also the fact of his significant, and often political, involvement with Les temps modernes, which tends to be overlooked. For example, during a difficult period just after the review was created, which came about in part because of the team’s inexperience, it was Merleau-Ponty who took charge and saved it, after which he went on to serve not only as ‘editorin-chief,’ but also as the ‘director of political affairs.’15 Secondly, there are the substantial claims of his contemporaries. For example, Sartre—who is obviously recognized as a redoubtable and authoritative political thinker— has affirmed that Merleau-Ponty’s first book devoted to political questions, Humanism and Terror, represents not a divergence from his initial phenomenological path, but helps us to grasp the movement of his thinking, and can perhaps even be read as a ‘development [approfondissement]’16 of it. Sartre also states candidly that Merleau-Ponty was much more skillful than he was at navigating the ambiguous world of politics, and, perhaps as a result of this, that his former colleague’s work served as ‘his guide’17 during the

162  Stephen A. Noble period when he himself began to think and write about political matters. Thirdly, writers often overlook the fact that, during the mid-1950s, when he was commissioned by the Alliance française, Merleau-Ponty embarked on an extensive series of journeys that took him throughout much of the African continent, where he presented a large number of lectures. On these occasions, the themes of his talks were not the intricacies and abstractions of phenomenology; rather, they were concrete, progressive, and often political themes pertinent to citizens living in colonial systems. The general topics of the lectures are important to mention in the present context, not only because of their inherently political nature, but also because of how they stand in contrast to the themes that are more commonly presented today as the philosopher’s main concerns. In a series of interviews broadcast on French radio in 1959, Merleau-Ponty’s interlocutor, Georges Charbonnier, clarifies the philosopher’s mission in the following terms: in front of the most diverse of audiences, you spoke about the notion of race, as well as about the psychology and the sociology of colonization and of under-developed countries. In other words, far from addressing your audiences about problems which were unfamiliar to them, and far from diverting them, you spoke to them directly about their problems precisely as the philosopher thinks them through. There was thus a direct confrontation between the ideas of the philosopher and the circumstances of the lives of his audience—circumstances which were at one and the same time concrete, varied, heated, emotional, experienced, and reasoned.18 And yet, despite these most basic facts, the political dimension of this highly original philosophy is, especially today, so often neglected, or simply overlooked. It is, we might say, as if there were actually two distinct philosophies, two separate entities that are tacitly understood to develop in parallel, and that are examined separately, if they are both examined at all. When one considers the circumstances, it might almost be as if there were two writers: on the one hand, the phenomenologist, who has been read and evaluated in relation to his treatment of themes stemming from the work of, for example, Descartes, Husserl, or Heidegger (the cogito, intentional consciousness, the body, language, world, time, art, etc.); and, on the other, the political thinker, who for a time defended a doctrine that has since fallen out of favor in Western democracies—i.e., Marxism—before going on to criticize it and advocate a new form of liberalism,19 all the while remaining staunchly on the left of the political spectrum. There is, so to speak, a rift, or a chasm: between those who deal with phenomenology, or with themes related generally to it, but who rarely, if ever, consider the political side of the phenomenologist; and those who consider the political ideas, but who are, on the whole, less concerned with their relation to Cartesian or phenomenological philosophy.20 Having said this, it is important to underline

Embodied Consciousness  163 that there is of course nothing inherently wrong with specialization, or with focusing on this or that aspect of a philosophy in order to increase our understanding of it. Indeed, such an approach is necessary for advancing knowledge. But in the case of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, the rift today is so definite that one imagines that something of the whole must be escaping us. For, rather than a clear uncoupling of these two different strands of philosophy, surely the separation is not so strict, and a continual intertwining of them must underlie their respective developments.

Subjectivity, Freedom, and Commitment It is generally held that, although it may have been in gestation for many years,21 the first definite manifestation of a political dimension in MerleauPonty’s writing appears after the end of the Second World War, in 1945, with the publication of the article entitled ‘La guerre a eu lieu [The War Has Taken Place].’22 Ostensibly, this judgment is correct: the essay, which appeared in the first installment of Les temps modernes, describes the path that led Merleau-Ponty’s generation abruptly away from a period of ‘peace’23 and ‘freedom,’24 when politics seemed to them ‘unthinkable,’25 and brought them face to face with cruelty, death, and the horrors of war, and then on to the emptiness and uncertainty of its immediate aftermath. The War had been an unspeakable tragedy, as well as a brusque awakening to political realities for those who survived, and it shocked many of MerleauPonty’s generation, including himself, into some form of lasting political commitment or action. Although it is true that this is indeed the place where Merleau-Ponty openly discusses for the first time how the reality of political themes were thrust upon him, the situation is in fact somewhat more complex. For, the first manifestation of a political dimension to Merleau-Ponty’s writings actually comes earlier, although in a different, less direct form, and precisely when the theme of subjectivity is in question. At the end of the Phenomenology of Perception, after more than five hundred pages of dense philosophical argument, which builds as much upon the work of philosophers as it does upon the conclusions of what was at the time the most up-to-date research in experimental psychology, MerleauPonty concludes by introducing and then quoting not, as one might expect, the words of a well-known philosopher, but the words of a popular novelist, Antoine de Saint Exupéry. This sudden, unexpected turn to the work of Saint Exupéry and the placing of his words on the very last lines of the book has, for a long time, been the cause of a certain degree of bewilderment amongst readers and commentators. Most will acknowledge the overall suitability of the passage quoted, while remaining perplexed about the choice of the author. Admittedly, the appearance of Saint Exupéry’s words at such a privileged and forceful position in the book—and the appearance of his name at such an important position on a list that contains the names

164  Stephen A. Noble of so many of those who make up the pantheon of great thinkers in the Western canon—is, to say the least, perhaps surprising. But, in fact, the mention of a work by, very precisely, Antoine de Saint Exupéry at the very end of the Phenomenology, and the decision to conclude the book with his words, has nothing to do with chance and is actually of great significance. And the importance of this decision is directly related to the themes of the present volume: philosophy, politics, and subjectivity. Although the Phenomenology of Perception does contain some allusions to political themes, and although Marx’s name is mentioned on a number of occasions, it is of course not a political work in any way at all.26 Having said this, it is nevertheless quite remarkable that in its final lines, while expressing a fundamental truth about the nature of the human subject—one which will be central to Merleau-Ponty’s political thought in the years to come— the book actually becomes highly political by making a political statement, one which is as bold as it is allusive. The situation was no doubt different at the time of the book’s publication, but, today, it is a significant reference that invariably escapes readers entirely. In order to clarify this point, it is necessary to highlight the context in which the quotation is used, and to recall the precise passage that is quoted. Partly in response to central arguments of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,27 Merleau-Ponty devotes the last chapter of the Phenomenology to developing a nuanced interpretation of a theme that is of course essential to any form of moral or political thought—freedom. The subtleties of his discussions seek to clarify this phenomenon not as an abstract concept, but as one that forms an integral part of embodied human existence. The originality of his thinking here, as in so many cases, comes from his refusal to adopt common categories or common assumptions: in this case, for example, the assumption that freedom must be absolute or else it cannot exist at all. As he states: ‘The rationalist’s two options—either the free act is possible, or it is not; either the event originates with me, or it is imposed on me from the outside—does not apply to our relations with the world and with our past.’28 Instead, Merleau-Ponty construes freedom as a phenomenon that exists within a world where there are nevertheless constraints and impediments, many of which the human subject is born into, such as one’s situation in society, as a member of the working class or the bourgeoisie.29 As he continues in the previously quoted passage: Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but enmeshes itself in it [s’engrène sur elle]: as long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls for privileged modes of resolution, and that it is powerless to bring any at all into being on its own.30 For the author of the Phenomenology, the very meaning of freedom is to be found within our embodied existence where, at one and the same time, we are always both constrained by the existence of the world where we play

Embodied Consciousness  165 out our lives in the midst of other people and capable of overcoming some of these constraints. ‘What then is freedom?’ asks Merleau-Ponty, before answering thus: To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted. In the first instance, we are pressed upon; in the second, we are open to an infinite number of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both ways at the same time.31 At the end of this dense chapter, Merleau-Ponty pursues a discussion in which he explains how philosophy’s role is precisely to help us to see more clearly the world in which we live, by elucidating such concepts as freedom, and by clarifying how freedom, as he has described it, is involved in our choices and our acts, and in the commitments we make in our lives. But only some people, he writes, actually manage to live such commitments— commitments within the world to their fellow men—‘to the limit [jusqu’au bout],’32 and, somewhat abruptly, he calls this type of person a ‘hero’33 and says that he must now fall silent and let one of them speak in his place. And it is here, to conclude the work, that he quotes the following passage from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Pilote de guerre [War Pilot]: And what if your son is caught up in the fire? You will save him! . . . If you encountered an obstacle, you would happily give your left arm if that is what it took to punch it out the way with the other one! You inhabit every act. Your act is you. . . . You give yourself up. . . . The significance of what you are proves to be splendiferous. It represents what you owe allegiance to, what you hate, what you love, what you are faithful to, and what you have created. . . . Man is but an entanglement of relationships. Relationships alone matter to man.34 And so what, precisely, is going on here? First of all, of course, the last two sentences of the passage support and summarize one fundamental aspect of the understanding of subjectivity that Merleau-Ponty has been concerned with developing: namely, its fundamental intersubjectivity, wherein it is understood as a being whose very existence is entwined with the existence of others—or, to follow Saint Exupéry’s construal, as an entanglement of relationships, which are the only thing that matter. Nevertheless, there is a marked contrast between the prose of the passage and the prose of almost every other passage quoted in the book, which, for the most part, are resolutely more sober. And when we underline the fact that these are indeed the words with which the closely argued five-hundred-page tome comes to a close, the contrast appears even more surprising. In order to shed more light on the issue, we must examine the overall circumstances pertaining to the work’s completion. The Phenomenology of

166  Stephen A. Noble Perception was published in April 1945, but it was finished most probably during the previous summer, in 1944. It was Merleau-Ponty’s main doctoral thesis, and his director of research, Émile Bréhier, had read the manuscript by the autumn, with his first evaluation of it dated October 14, 1944.35 The dates are far from being a matter of merely historical importance, for they imply that the completion of the manuscript coincides with the liberation of mainland France, which, as we know, began on June 7, and with the liberation of Paris, on August 24–25. Already one understands a little better the significance of the fact that the work actually ends with a chapter on freedom, which, in all probability, was itself completed as the country and the city were being liberated from Nazi occupation. More importantly, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was a pilot in the armed forces of what was called la France libre, or free France. Gaining this position had not been easy for him, because of his age, but he persevered and was in the end recruited into service. However, during a reconnaissance mission on July 31, 1944, which was planned to take place over the south of France, his plane went missing, and is thought to have been shot down over the Mediterranean. Given the context, it is thus impossible not to understand that the ‘hero’ for whom Merleau-Ponty says he must fall silent at the end of the work, and whom he allows to speak in his place, is none other than Saint-Exupéry himself. The latter is undoubtedly an example of a man of action, a man of commitment, who has lived this commitment ‘to the limit [jusqu’au bout],’36 and, in the words of the Phenomenology that we must imagine are describing him, who has given up his own freedom for the cause of freedom itself.37 And yet the situation is still more complex. For the precise book that Merleau-Ponty quotes by Saint Exupéry—Pilote de guerre [War Pilot]— actually has a turbulent past that is eminently pertinent.38 The novel tells the story of a French war pilot’s heroism in 1940, while fighting the German offensive in the north of France. When it was submitted for publication in 1942, in what had become occupied France, it attracted the attention of the censors of the occupying regime, the Propagandastaffel, who demanded the deletion of a reference to the Führer that was judged unflattering and also a short print-run. Despite these conditions being met, when the book was finally published it provoked an outcry in the collaborationist press. As a result, it came to the attention of the regime in Vichy, and the publisher, Gallimard, was ordered to recall its copies. The novel was subsequently banned, and became rare. However, it soon began to circulate again, this time on the black market, following a number of illicit printings made by typographers in Lyon and Lille who were associated with the Resistance movement. In the present context, it is hard, if not impossible, to overlook these facts, long-forgotten by many. To be sure, the passage quoted from Pilote de guerre [War Pilot], and especially its last lines, is, as we have said, apposite, summarizing effectively an essential point made in the Phenomenology about the embodied subject. But it also must be understood as serving a much deeper function than merely that filled by a supporting quotation.

Embodied Consciousness  167 For, any book that was published in France during the Occupation had to receive a prior authorization from the authorities, and it would have been impossible during this period to print a work legally that ended by irreverently quoting from a publication banned by the regime and by the occupying forces. The submission of a book for publication with this particular author and this particular novel clearly displayed on its concluding lines so close to the end of the Occupation, while fighting continued and large parts of the country were still under the control of enemy forces, must thus be interpreted as a bold statement, a political act of defiance, and, ultimately, a reclaiming of what had been lost—namely, freedom. In other words, while describing and summarizing one of the essential traits of subjectivity, a trait that would become a fundamental feature of his political thought, MerleauPonty the philosopher and author is at the same time affirming himself as a political subjectivity through an act of defiance and commitment. If there is any point where the work of Merleau-Ponty, and the phenomenological subject he describes, becomes political—well before ‘La guerre a eu lieu,’ and well before his involvement with Marxism—it is here, in the last lines of the Phenomenology, where, as a writer, he defies the forces of the Occupation, and reclaims his freedom.

New Perspectives Merleau-Ponty’s description of embodied subjectivity’s essential freedom, and his contention that ‘my freedom and that of the other are established together throughout the world,’39 are central pillars of the humanist political thought that he would go on to develop in the months and years following the completion of the Phenomenology. When coupled with the realization, imposed upon his generation by the War, that ‘[t]here is no actual freedom without some form of power,’40 and that ‘freedom is not outside of the world, but only exists in contact with it,’41 it is not difficult to understand how the concepts of Marxism presented themselves as useful categories for understanding the world that the War had left behind. The force that Marxism had in his thinking, and the appeal of its ideology to him, is perhaps most evident in the fact that he was still willing to come to its defense, in the essays of Humanism and Terror, even when the horrors that had been committed in the name of communism during the Moscow trials had become well-known. To be sure, he grew cautious of his position, later qualifying his attitude as ‘sympathy without adhesion,’42 or as a ‘wait-and-see Marxism,’43 and it was this caution that eventually prevailed. His change in position away from Marxism, which comes with the publication of The Adventures of the Dialectic in 1955 and the call for a new form of liberalism, has befuddled more than one reader,44 and even such an astute reader as Sartre.45 But, as Jean Hyppolite has made it clear, The Adventures of the Dialectic represents ‘a new position with regards to communism and to the historical adventure that we are living’46; it is, in fact, a form of ‘a-communism

168  Stephen A. Noble that is not anti-communism,’47 and, more importantly, one that ‘opens new perspectives, and a new understanding of the world.’48 Some readers underline the fact that Merleau-Ponty’s later work—the work in which he was involved between the second half of the 1950s and the time of his death, in 1961, and notably the work published posthumously as The Visible and the Invisible49—eschews political themes entirely. But this is uncharitable, and it is to overlook the fact that all of the work that was underway at this time— as well as the life itself—was cut brutally short.50 And, in this regard, Hyppolite’s remarks concerning The Adventures of the Dialectic are judicious, and full of significance. If indeed the change in position announced in this book does open a new perspective and a new understanding of the world, we would suggest that this is precisely what Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenological ontology, upon which he was embarking at this very time, was intending to develop as well. As Claude Lefort states: There is some truth to the Marxist critique of science and some truth to the scientific critique of ideology that the philosopher must appropriate. The only certitude is that, in order to express these truths, he would need a new frame of mind, new concepts, a new mental toolbox, a new idea of the dialectic, and a new ontology.51 Perhaps, then, in his later years, the new ontology that Merleau-Ponty sought to develop, with the fundamental revisions it seeks to bring to our understanding of Being, subjectivity, the world, and nature, were, at least in part, also rendered necessary by his own critique of the political philosophy he had espoused in his earlier years. By making such a suggestion, our hope is to bring closer together the two philosophies, and the two subjectivities— phenomenological and political—that, today, are so often examined apart.

Notes   1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur. Essai sur le problème communiste, ‘Les Essais’ series (n. xxvii) (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1947), p. x. English translation: Humanism and Terror. An Essay on the Communist Problem, translated by John O’Neill (Beacon Press: Boston, 1969), p. 5. All translations from the French, without exception, shall be our own. We will provide page numbers for English translations, for reference purposes only, should such translations exist.  2 It is perhaps difficult for many in the West today to grasp the overwhelming importance that Marxism had for those of Merleau-Ponty’s and Sartre’s generation, as well as the constitutive role that the ideology played in people’s lives. Obviously, this subject is vast; but, by way of clarification, we might consider the following brief description by Sartre, which sums up the dominant position occupied by Marxism, not only in the political sphere, but as an overall ideology to be reckoned with: ‘Men of my age know this well: even more than the two world wars, the great concern of their life was a never-ending confrontation with the working class and its ideology, which offered them an unassailable vision

Embodied Consciousness  169 of the world and themselves. For us, Marxism is not only a philosophy: it is the backdrop of our ideas, or the environment that nurtures them; it is the true movement of what Hegel called Objective Spirit’ (Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Le réformisme et les fétiches [‘Reformism and Fetishes’],’ Les temps modernes, n. 122, 1956, pp. 1153–1164 (p. 1158); reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, VII: Problèmes du Marxisme, 2 [Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1980], p. 110. Emphasis added).   3 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Les communistes et la paix’ (I, II, and III), Les temps modernes, respectively, n. 81, July, 1952, pp. 1–50; n. 84–85, October–November, 1952, pp. 695–763; and n. 101, April, 1954, pp. 1731–1819; reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, VI: Problèmes du Marxisme, 1 (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1984), pp. 80–384. English translation: The Communists and Peace, with an Answer to Claude Lefort, translated by Irene Clephane (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1969), pp. 1–206.   4 Both of the articles appeared in the same installment of the review: first, Claude Lefort, ‘Le Marxisme et Sartre,’ Les temps modernes, n. 89, April, 1953, pp. 1541–1570; and, second, Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Réponse à Claude Lefort,’ Les temps modernes, n. 89, April, 1953, pp. 1571–1629; reprinted in Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, VII: Problèmes du Marxisme, 2 (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1980), pp. 7–93. English translation: ‘An Answer to Claude Lefort,’ in: The Communists and Peace, with An Answer to Claude Lefort, translated by Irene Clephane (Hamish Hamilton: London, 1969), pp. 207–264.   5 See Sartre’s account in Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant,’ Les temps modernes, n. 184–185, October, 1961, pp. 304–376 (p. 355); reprinted under the title ‘Merleau-Ponty,’ pp. 259–260, in: Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, IV: portraits (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1964), pp. 189–287. English translation: Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty,’ pp. 260–261, in: Situations, translated by Benita Eisler (George Braziller: New York/ Hamish Hamilton: London, 1965), pp. 255–320. For an analysis of the political context in which these disagreements took place, see, for example, Michel-Antoine Burnier, Les existentialistes et la politique, ‘Idées’ series (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1966), pp. 88–103. English translation: Choice of Action: The French Existentialists on the Political Front Line [sic], translated by Bernard Murchland (Random House: New York, 1968), pp. 75–96.   6 Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Sartre, Merleau-Ponty: les lettres d’une rupture,’ Magazine littéraire, n. 320, April, 1994, pp. 67–86; reprinted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux: 1951–1961, edited by Jacques Prunair (Éditions Verdier: Lagrasse, 2000), pp. 129–169. English translation: ‘Philosophy and Political Engagement: Letters from the Quarrel [sic] Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,’ in: The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, edited and translated by Jon Stewart (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Ill., 1998), pp. 327–354.  7 Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, ‘Sartre, Merleau-Ponty: les lettres d’une rupture,’ Magazine littéraire, p. 70; Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, p. 136. ‘Philosophy and Political Engagement,’ p. 332, in: The Debate Between Sartre and MerleauPonty, pp. 327–354.   8 Ibid., p. 76/p. 148/p. 340. Here, and in the notes that immediately follow, the first reference is to the original publication in the Magazine littéraire; the second, to Parcours deux; and the third, to the English translation.   9 Ibid., p. 76/p. 148/p. 340. 10 Ibid., p. 76/p. 148/p. 340. 11 The significant consequences for Les temps modernes of Sartre’s and MerleauPonty’s parting of ways should not be underestimated. The repercussions that

170  Stephen A. Noble the falling-out had on the review have been described in no uncertain terms by Anna Boschetti: ‘Merleau-Ponty’s departure represented a heavy loss for the review. When he withdrew, it lost a capacity for innovation which is essential for the preservation of pre-eminence . . . When he withdrew, it lost the only editor capable of tempering the effects of Sartre’s monopoly, which tended to crystallize the way of doing things which had already been established. There then began a period dominated simply by imitation; next to Sartre, contributors came to the fore who could not be considered as his peers or rivals, but who were disciples or civil servants—they were, in short, epigones’ (Anna Boschetti, Sartre et « Les Temps Modernes » : Une entreprise intellectuelle, ‘Le sens commun’ series [Les éditions de minuit: Paris, 1985], p. 290. English translation: The [sic] Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, translated by Richard McCleary [Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Ill.: 1988], p. 180). 12 There are of course serious studies of Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. For example, Kerry H. Whiteside’s Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of an Existential Politics (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1988) and Diana Coole’s Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics After Anti‑Humanism (Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, 2007). Invariably, however, these tend to be by writers whose background, and primary interests, are in politics and political theory, and not directly in philosophy. Also, what is rare indeed is any attempt to connect the specifically phenomenological aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s thought to his interest not only in political questions, but in Marxism. 13 Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur. English translation: Humanism and Terror; and Les aventures de la dialectique ‘Folio Essais’ series (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 2000). English translation: Adventures of the Dialectic, translated by Joseph Bien (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Ill., 1973). Although today there are a significant number of books published in Merleau-Ponty’s name, the actual number that he wrote and published during his life–time is significantly less than other authors, a fact that is of course due to his untimely death and the large quantity of manuscripts he left behind. 14 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, ‘Pensées’ series (Éditions Nagel: Paris, 1966). English translation: Sense and Non-Sense, translated by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Ill., 1964); and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1960). English translation: Signs, translated by Richard McCleary (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Ill., 1964). 15 See the account provided in Sartre, ‘Merleau-Ponty vivant,’ p. 319; ‘MerleauPonty,’ Situations, IV, p. 210; English translation: Situations, p. 250. 16 Ibid., pp. 308–309/pp. 195–196/p. 239. 17 Ibid., p. 323/pp. 195–196/p. 239. 18 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Suite des voyages du philosophe,’ Twelfth interview with Georges Charbonnier, broadcast initially on August 7, 1959, 2mins 55secs, in: ‘Entretiens avec Maurice Merleau-Ponty,’ Twelve interviews with Georges Charbonnier, presented by Georges Charbonnier, for the R.T.F. [Radiodiffusion–Télévision française], broadcast initially between May 25 and August 7, 1959. 19 Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, p. 281; Adventures of the Dialectic, p. 195. 20 Perhaps the writer with a background in philosophy who comes closest to broaching this divide is Merleau-Ponty’s friend and former student, Claude Lefort, who of course is a political philosopher in his own right. 21 For an account of this gestation period, see Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundations of an Existential Politics, pp. 13–42.

Embodied Consciousness  171 22 The article is dated ‘June 1945’ by the author and was published in October of that year in the first issue of Les temps modernes (pp. 48–66). Reprinted in Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, pp. 245–269/Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 139–152. 23 Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, p. 246/Sense and Non-Sense, p. 142. 24 Ibid., p. 246/p. 142. 25 Ibid., p. 255/p. 149. 26 See, especially, Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of ‘historical materialism’ at the end of the chapter on ‘The Body as Sexualized Being [Le corps comme être sexué],’ Phénoménologie de la perception, ‘Bibliothèque des Idées’ series (Librairie Gallimard: Paris, 1945), pp. 199–202; English translation: Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, with revisions by Forrest Williams (Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.: London/The Humanities Press: New Jersey, 1962), pp. 171–173. Despite this example, and the mention of political themes elsewhere in the book, which are often related to Marxism, it is important to underline the fact that none of Marx’s works, or any other political works for that matter, are cited in the bibliography. 27 Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant: Essai de phénoménologie ontologique, ‘Tel’ series (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1976), especially Part IV, Chapter I: ‘Être et faire: la liberté [Being and Doing: Freedom],’ pp. 487–615. English translation: Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (Routledge: New York, 1957), pp. 455–577. 28 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 505; Phenomenology of Perception, p. 442. 29 Ibid., p. 505/p. 442. 30 Ibid., p. 505/p. 442. 31 The original reads as follows: ‘Qu’est-ce donc que la liberté ? Naître, c’est à la fois naître du monde et naître au monde. Le monde est déjà constitué, mais aussi jamais complètement constitué. Sous le premier rapport, nous sommes sollicités, sous le second nous sommes ouverts à une infinité de possibles. Mais cette analyse est encore abstraite, car nous existons sous les deux rapports à la fois’ (Ibid., p. 517/p. 453). 32 Ibid., p. 520/p. 456. 33 Ibid., p. 520/p. 456. 34 ‘Ton fils est pris dans l’incendie ? Tu le sauveras ! . . . Tu vendrais, s’il est un obstacle, ton épaule pour le luxe d’un coup d’épaule! Tu loges dans ton acte même. Ton acte, c’est toi . . . Tu t’échanges . . . Ta signification se montre éblouissante. C’est ton devoir, c’est ta haine, c’est ton amour, c’est ta fidélité, c’est ton invention . . . L’homme n’est qu’un nœud de relations. Les relations comptent seules pour l’homme’ (Pilote de guerre [Underground edition printed illegally in Lille, approximately at the beginning of 1944], Chapter XXI, pp. 88–89; pp. 168–171 in the first [legal] edition published in Paris by Gallimard, on November 27, 1942, subsequently censored and taken off the shelves at the beginning of February 1943). First of all, we quote here from an original edition of Pilote de guerre, and not the passage as it is quoted in the Phenomenology. For, in the Phenomenology, although the passage retains its essential meaning, Merleau-Ponty quotes from the book quite freely, modifying a word or the punctuation here and there. The reasons for this should become clear in the course of the following discussion, for, as we shall see, after its publication Pilote de guerre quickly became rare. Secondly, we should like to note that Pilote de guerre was translated into English with the title Flight to Arras (Harcourt: New York, 1969). For obvious reasons, this is inadequate, as we lose not only the essential sense of combat, but also the essential focus on the pilot. For this reason, we will prefer the book’s original title: Pilote de guerre, or War Pilot.

172  Stephen A. Noble 35 To substantiate this claim, we should like to refer to our work entitled La conscience perceptive. La philosophie de Merleau-Ponty au tournant des années 1940. Suivi d’une présentation de textes inédits de et sur Merleau-Ponty [Perceptual Consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy in the Pivotal Years of the 1940s. Followed by a Presentation of Unpublished Texts by and About MerleauPonty] (Zeta Books: Bucharest, 2014), pp. 90–95. 36 Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, p. 520; Phenomenology of Perception, p. 456. 37 ‘Will I give up my freedom in order to save freedom itself?’ This is one of pressing questions that Merleau-Ponty asks on the last page of the book (Ibid., p. 520/p. 456). For a later, brief discussion of Saint Exupéry as ‘hero,’ see MerleauPonty’s essay ‘L’héros, l’homme,’ in Sens et non-sens, pp. 323–331/Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 182–188. And for a discussion of how the notion of the ‘hero’ can be understood in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy after the publication of the Phenomenology, with concern also for his political ideas, see Bryan Smyth, ‘Heroism and History in Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology,’ Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 43, n. 2, 2010, pp. 167–191. 38 For corroboration of the details that follow, see: Paule Bounin, ‘Œuvres littéraires. Pilote de guerre,’ in: Œuvres complètes, Vol. II, edited by Michel Autrand, Antione de Saint Exupéry, et al., ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’ series (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1999), pp. 1300–1341; Gilles Ragache and Jean-Robert Ragache, La vie quotidienne des écrivains et des artistes sous l’Occupation, 1940–1944 (Éditions Hachette: Paris, 1988), pp. 234–243; and Fernand Rude, ‘Éditions clandestines,’ Icare: Revue de l’aviation française: Saint Exupéry, Cinquième époque, 1941–1943, vol. V, n. 84, 1978, pp. 130–139. For what follows, see also Stephen Noble, ‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ou le parcours d’un philosophe: Éléments pour une biographie intellectuelle,’ Chiasmi International, n. 13, 2011/2012, pp. 19–61 (pp. 26–31). English translation: ‘Maurice MerleauPonty, or the Pathway of Philosophy: Desiderata for an Intellectual Biography,’ translated by Stephen A. Noble, Chiasmi International, n. 13, 2011/2012, pp. 63–112 (pp. 72–77). 39 Merleau-Ponty, Sens et non-sens, p. 260/Sense and Non-Sense, p. 156. 40 Ibid., p. 261/p. 157. 41 Ibid., p. 261/p. 157. 42 Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique, p. 318/Adventures of the Dialectic, p. 256. 43 Ibid., pp. 315–316 /pp. 263–266. 44 For example, one of the earlier authors to deal with Merleau-Ponty’s political philosophy in a book–length study actually goes so far as to claim that The Adventures of the Dialectic is weak and incoherent. See Sonia Kruks, The Political Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (Harvester: Brighton, 1981). 45 See Jean Hyppolite, ‘L’évolution de la pensée de Merleau-Ponty,’ p. 720, in: Figures de la pensée philosophique: Écrits de Jean Hyppolite (1931–1968), Vol. II, ‘Épiméthée’ series (Presses universitaires de France: Paris, 1971), pp. 705–730. 46 Ibid., p. 720. 47 Ibid., p. 720. 48 Ibid., p. 720. 49 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le visible et l’invisible, suivi de notes de travail, edited, ‘Foreword,’ and ‘Postface’ by Claude Lefort, ‘Bibliothèque des Idées’ series (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1964). English translation: The Visible and the Invisible, edited by Claude Lefort, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, Ill., 1968). 50 Another point that is also overlooked in this regard is that Merleau-Ponty clearly says, in the letter to Sartre quoted earlier, that he always intended for the The Prose

Embodied Consciousness  173 of the World—the other manuscript he left unfinished when he died—to have a last part that would deal with revolutionary politics (‘Sartre, Merleau-Ponty,’ p. 74; Parcours deux, p. 145; ‘Philosophy and Political Engagement,’ p. 338). 51 Claude Lefort, ‘La politique et la pensée de la politique [Literally: ‘Politics and the Thought of Politics],’ p. 73, in: Sur un colonne absente: Écrits autour de Merleau-Ponty, edited by Claude Lefort, ‘Les Essais’ series (n. cciv) (Éditions Gallimard: Paris, 1978), pp. 45–104. Partial English translation: ‘Thinking Politics,’ trans. —, assisted by Alexander Hickox, pp. 355–356, in: The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, edited by Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005), pp. 352–379.

9 John Stuart Mill and the Liberal Genius Yoel Mitrani

From the mid-eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the concept of genius garnered significant interest in Britain and continental Europe.1 Attempts to account for this rise in interest have often focused on the changing role that the artist was understood to have in relation to the arts and the realm of aesthetics.2 No longer was he understood to be someone who merely aimed to mirror and so reproduce nature; he became a man-of-genius who created original and expressive art from his subjective feelings and imagination. The nineteenth century ‘Romantic Genius’ is often seen as the epitome of this change.3 Due to his unique ability to apprehend truth, some of the British Romantics and their followers gave the man of genius a prominent place in modern societies and political leadership.4 While the notion of ‘Romantic Genius’ is well researched, little has been done on non-Romantic conceptions of genius during this period. To start to remedy this, this chapter5 will focus on the thought of John Stuart Mill. Mill often refers to ‘genius’ in his writings; however, his use and meaning of the term are different from those of the British Romantics. Mill’s references to genius are found throughout his writings from the 1830s until the 1870s,6 where he examines it in relation to different contexts and topics such as the fine arts (mainly poetry), science, ethics, politics, and education. There is, however, no scholarly, systematic study of Mill’s understanding of genius. A few short references to Mill’s use of the term are found in studies that focus on the history of genius in Britain and Europe,7 and several other mentions are included in studies centered on Mill’s thought.8 These have, however, tended to be selective in their choice and interpretation of texts, mostly focusing on Mill’s references to genius in his early writings in the 1830s on poetry and art9 or his political and ethical writings (usually On Liberty).10 Relatively more attention has been given to Mill’s references to ‘artistic genius,’ (rather than to ‘genius’ in general, ‘scientific genius’ or ‘philosophical genius’) which has brought forth an argument in the secondary literature regarding Mill’s relationship to the Romantics: some scholars argue that it demonstrates that he defends a Romantic view of genius, while others claim that it shows that he challenges certain aspects of it.11 All of these, however, explore Mill’s use of the term through the narrow prism of

176  Yoel Mitrani nineteenth-century literary discourse and so present a one-sided interpretation of his understanding of genius that tends to couple it with a Romantic philosophy and view of politics that he largely rejects. On the contrary, I argue that Mill departs from the Romantic conception of genius in three related ways: first, he rejects any ‘mystical’ and supernatural aura surrounding the common conception of Romantic genius. Mill’s conception of genius should be considered in line with his philosophical naturalism: all men, including men of genius, are subject to the same laws of nature. Thus, although men of genius have some exceptional qualities, Mill thinks that they should not be thought of as ‘seers’ or ‘prophets.’ Second, Mill attempts to ground genius in an empiricist theory of knowledge. In his understanding, all knowledge of the world comes through empirical observation, which includes the knowledge gathered by men of genius. Third, Mill understands genius to be more egalitarian in nature than the Romantics do. Genius, for him, is linked to what he calls the ‘faculty of thought itself’12 and therefore might differ in degree, but not in kind, between individuals. With this, Mill outlines a rival definition of human exceptionality, which I will call the ‘Liberal Genius,’ to the one proposed by the Romantics. My interpretation of Mill’s conception of genius aspires to remedy a gap in Mill scholarship and shed new light on the inaccurately popular narrative that regards the Romantic meaning as a representative example of the term for the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, it is my hope that Mill’s egalitarian (and one may even say ‘modest’) understanding of genius might lead to a re-evaluation of supposed larger-than-life figures of genius as they are often perceived in popular culture. After all, his reliance on a naturalist framework and empirical method offers a conception of genius that accords with much contemporary research in psychology, cognitive science, and biology that shows that genius does not entail momentary sparks of exceptional insight, but is a product of personality, environment, and hard work.13 To develop this, I first review the major characteristics of genius found in the writings of the British Romantics, specifically William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Thomas Carlyle, who were closest to Mill and with whom he engaged frequently in his writing. The second part addresses Mill’s early writing on poetry to show how his references to genius aimed to challenge the view of the poet-genius held by his contemporary Romantics. The third part discusses Mill’s essay On Genius, which contains the seed of his conception of artistic and scientific genius, and the fourth part explores how his conception of genius aids our understanding of the role genius plays in his later political theory, especially in On Liberty.

The Romantic Notion of Genius The concept of genius has a long and complicated history prior to the mideighteenth century.14 As previously mentioned, the eighteenth century is

John Stuart Mill  177 the focal point in which a substantial change in the meaning of the concept appeared, first in numerous theoretical writings in Britain before later spreading to those from continental Europe.15 Focusing on the British context, it is possible to identify two distinctive characteristics of genius in the mid-eighteenth century: first, from an earlier meaning of genius (which dates back to antiquity), which signified a tutelary male god or attendant spirit (of individuals, communities, or places), the meaning of ‘genius’ gradually changed in the eighteenth century so that it became associated with human form. From a word denoting a transcendent being, genius was applied to individuals or referred to a certain human capacity (or ‘faculty’). Instead of having a genius, a person was a genius or had genius. The convergence of meanings between genius and Ingenium (natural inclination, aptitude or talent)16 which took force at the time is believed to be responsible for this change.17 Second, genius was understood as a mark of superiority and exceptionality distinguished by ‘invention’ or ‘originality’ (as opposed to ‘imitation’ or ‘copying’ of others). Genius was used in reference to a person who achieved unusual feats or displayed extraordinary capacities, most commonly in what came to be called the ‘fine arts,’ natural philosophy, or politics.18 We find these two characteristics mentioned or implied in the majority of the theoretical writings on genius between the late eighteenth century and (at least) the mid-nineteenth century in Britain. This, however, by no means suggests that only one definition of the term was in use at the time. On the basis of these commonalities grew many disagreements on topics and questions such as: is genius acquired by learning or is it inborn?19 Is genius purely human or does it still hold links to the divine? What is the meaning of originality?20 What are the differences between genius in the fine arts and science?21 Each side in these debates tended to base its arguments on different theological, philosophical, and psychological assumptions. Those who are known as the British Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century took part in those debates.22 For them, genius23 was perceived to be an inborn endowment as opposed to a ‘talent’ acquired by study, often described as an ‘organic’ gift which, rather than being cultivated, grows naturally.24 Unlike the followers of neoclassical laws of art in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, who strongly emphasized the idea of mimesis, the Romantic genius—identified as an artist and most often a poet—was viewed as a ‘legislator’ who intuitively expresses his feelings and unique personality on paper. To use M.H. Abrams’s famous metaphor, rather than a ‘mirror’ revealing nature, the Romantic genius-artist became a ‘lamp’ who reveals his feelings in his poetry.25 Wordsworth famously defined poetry as a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’26 and found ‘the only proof’ of genius in ‘the act of doing well what is worthy to be done, and what was never done before. . . . Genius is the introduction of a new element into the intellectual universe.’27 For Coleridge, to take another example, poetic images ‘become proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion.’28

178  Yoel Mitrani Like many others at the time, the Romantics stressed the importance of originality as a characteristic of genius. Nevertheless, the term had its own distinctive meaning. By originality, the Romantics did not suggest that genius constructed an artistic object completely detached from some idea of ‘truth.’29 They did not regard the man of genius as a creator ex nihilo, as someone who creates ‘something new under the sun.’ In its common Romantic use, ‘originality’ entailed both the act of creating and the act of discovering (in the sense of un-veiling). The Romantic meaning of the genius-poet was rooted in a certain philosophy and metaphysics which often emphasized poetry’s universal and moral value. The poet-genius was an individual who held a unique ability to reach truth which he aimed to express through his art.30 ‘Genius exists in a participation in a common spirit,’ said Coleridge, ‘and to have genius is to live in the universal.’31 ‘Truth’ was believed to be reached through a process which involved not reason and empirical methods but the imagination.32 The imagination, itself a term with a long history,33 was often regarded as having a synthesizing effect, of uniting the particular and the universal, man and nature, individual and society. ‘Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known,’ wrote Shelley, ‘imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things.’34 Contrary to theoreticians of the Enlightenment who labored to eliminate any leftover religious connotations to genius, the Romantics kept alive to some degree the religious aura and mysteriousness—the je ne sais quoi— which followed the term from antiquity. ‘Inspiration’ and ‘enthusiasm’ were terms still to be found in Romantic writings as sources of the poetic impulse, and it was not uncommon for the genius-poet to receive the status of a ‘seer’ or ‘prophet.’ ‘Poets,’ wrote Shelley, ‘were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters.’35 ‘I was a chosen son,’ claimed Wordsworth in his Prelude.36 Since men of genius were regarded as privileged in their ability to apprehend truth, many of the Romantics stressed the social role of poets as moral educators. Some, going even further, advanced the view that men of genius are most fit for political leadership and deserve the worship of less capable individuals. Coleridge, for example, distinguished between two kinds of geniuses: ‘absolute genius’ and ‘commanding genius.’ The ‘absolute genius’ is a poet whose whole concern is writing poetry, one who writes ‘a perfect poem.’37 This type of genius aims to affect and move his audience through his poetry. A ‘commanding genius,’ on the other hand, wishes to take part in political practice, is influenced by the circumstances of public life, and is drawn to ‘politics and war.’38 Carlyle’s praise of the ‘hero’—which in his lectures On Heroes he uses as a synonym for ‘genius’—serves as another example.39 For him, ‘men of genius’ are of ‘wild strong feelings’ who are ‘the most precious gift that Heaven can give to the Earth . . . the Soul of a Man actually sent down from the skies with a God’s-message to us.’40 A hero

John Stuart Mill  179 for Carlyle is responsible for the revelation of ‘divine truth’ that ‘unites a Great Man to other men.’41 He rejected the view which saw the hero merely as a product of his time—créature de l’âge—disregarding his inherent and divine qualities, extraordinariness, and superiority over the common man. The transcendent dimension of his persona and his elevated status among humans meant that he was the one in control of history and not the other way around. ‘The History of the World,’ Carlyle famously claimed, ‘was the Biography of Great Men.’42 In his lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, Carlyle address the political role of the hero. Men of genius are not only figures who seek a moral impact on society through words and beautiful verse, but also men who gain a foothold in public life as leaders who guide society within the political framework. The hierarchy he finds in human abilities and his emphasis on the political role of the hero demonstrate his preference for a socio-political structure which is essentially heroic-hierarchical and non-democratic. ‘Find me the true Konning, King, or Able-man,’ Carlyle passionately said, ‘and he has a divine right over me.’43 The political ideal Carlyle pictured was one united around the transcendent source of authority of the hero-genius, who is reverenced and worshiped by others: And now, sure enough, the cry is everywhere for Liberty and Equality, Independence and so forth; instead of Kings, Ballot-boxes and Electoral suffrages: it seems made out that any Hero-sovereign, or loyal obedience of men to a man, in things temporal or things spiritual, has passed away forever from the world. I should despair of the world altogether, if so. One of my deepest convictions is, that it is not so.44 To sum up, the British Romantics based their conception of genius on certain philosophical, theological, and political assumptions. Men of genius were revered for their unique ability to access truth. They were distinguished by their native gift for harmonizing reason and emotion—for the synthesizing power of their developed imagination—which revealed a mystic union linking subject to object, man to man, and man to nature. Men of genius were poets who were idealized, deified almost. They were ‘prophets’ and ‘heroes’ called to lead society. John Mill was influenced by the writings of the most acclaimed poets of his day, but was not a Romantic, and so to conflate his meaning of genius with the Romantic sense of the term would be a mistake. In what follows, I defend this argument by tracing Mill’s use of the term in his works on poetry and in his political writings.

Mill’s Early Writing on Poetry As mentioned in the introduction, Mill’s conception of genius is commonly associated with his views on poetry and the poet. It is crucial then to examine his understanding of these. An important text for doing so is the 1867

180  Yoel Mitrani essay Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties,45 which was originally published as two separate essays—‘What is poetry?’ and ‘Two Types of Poetry’—in 1833 in the Monthly Repository. Thoughts on Poetry opens with a distinction between science and poetry. While science (or ‘matter of fact’46) addresses reason, poetry relates to feelings and acts by ‘offering interesting objects of contemplation to the sensibilities.’47 While scientific work aims to persuade or convince others through logical argumentation and empirical evidence, poetry ‘moves’48 its audience by appealing to their emotions. Focusing on poetry, Mill then advances to a further distinction between poetry and prose (novel or fiction). Poetry and prose both act upon the emotions of the audience, but the cause for the emotional excitement they arouse is different. While the feelings awoken by reading a novel (prose) derive from the objects in the world the novel depicts, the source of excitement provoked by poetry results from ‘the representation of feeling’49 illustrated in the poem. For Mill, the delight received from poetry is superior to that from novel reading. The enjoyment sensed when reading a novel is common since it depicts external phenomena known to all; poetry, on the other hand, requires the audience to ‘sympathize’50 with the feelings expressed in a poem. Sympathy is possible either by identifying the feelings expressed in a poem with the feelings the audience once felt, or by conceiving what someone could feel by the aid of his ‘imagination.’51 The pleasure brought by poetry requires the ‘vigor of their intellectual powers’52 and ‘depth of sensibilities,’53 which develop through education and life experience. For that reason, Mill thinks that children and nations in their infancy are incapable of appreciating or producing high quality works of poetry, while storytelling is a commonplace artistic genre produced and appreciated by them.54 For Mill, prose and poetry are allied with distinctive meanings of ‘truth.’ The truth in poetry is ‘to paint the human soul truly,’55 while the truth in prose is to give a ‘true picture of life.’56 Mill seems to propose a distinction between what I will call ‘emotional truth’ and ‘rational truth.’ ‘Rational truth’ is a delineation of an external object derived from sensory experience. This is the truth presented in stories of a novelist. ‘Emotional truth,’ on the other hand, is a scrupulous description of the inner-feelings of man when aroused by external stimuli: not of things as they are but the way they appear to someone. This emotional truth is expressed by the poet in his poems. Thus if, for example, a novelist chooses to depict a lion, he might describe the lion’s stride, the different shades of his mane, or the sound of his roar. A poet, on the other hand, will describe the lion ‘by imagery, that is, by suggesting the most striking likenesses and contrasts which might occur to a mind contemplating a lion, in the state of awe, wonder, or terror, which the spectacle naturally excites.’57 Mill also distinguishes between poetry and ‘eloquence’58 (as in a sense of rhetoric). These are both expressions of feelings that describe ‘emotional truths.’ However, while eloquence is written for an end other than the pure

John Stuart Mill  181 expression of emotions and aims to influence the audience, poetry is written in ‘moments of solitude.’59 Poetry is authentic, sincere, and lies in the poet’s ‘utter unconsciousness of a listener.’60 ‘Eloquence is heard,’ says Mill, ‘poetry is overheard.’61 All these distinctions (poetry, prose, truth, and eloquence) permit Mill to define two types of poets: ‘poets of nature,’62 and ‘poets of culture.’63 A ‘poet of nature’ is susceptible for ‘intense feelings’64 from birth. He is a poet who creates through a spontaneous burst of feelings, who is ‘possessed’65 by his emotions and presents ‘emotional truths’ on paper. He is minimally cultivated by society and does not seek to influence his audience.66 Alternatively, a ‘poet of culture’ is ‘cold and spiritless.’67 He uses poetic verse to embellish ‘rational truths’ with the intention of influencing his readers. He is strongly affected by his education and surroundings.68 ‘The poet of culture sees his object in prose, and describes it in poetry: the poet of nature actually sees it in poetry.’69 Mill clearly favors the poetry of the ‘poet of nature,’ which, in conjunction with his claim that this form of poetry is associated with ‘truth’ and the insistence that this type of poet is a ‘genius,’ may lead to the conclusion that Mill advocates a conception of genius similar to the Romantic geniuspoet outlined above. Such a conflation would, however, be misplaced. First, Mill uses the term ‘genius’ to refer to the ‘poet of nature’ and the ‘poet of culture’ interchangeably.70 Second, despite claiming that the ‘poet of nature’ has an innate inclination for emotional susceptibility, Mill asserts that a person’s experiences in the world and upbringing, his formal education and language choice are all external factors which necessarily effect the poet.71 The difference between the natural and cultural poet depends on the degree that these external factors play in the creative process. For a ‘poet of culture,’ external influences have more impact on his writings than for a ‘poet of nature.’ In direct contrast to the Romantics who professed genius as an inborn ability or a divine gift, Mill insists that poeta fit, non nascitur: a poet is made, not born.72 Third, to elaborate on the second point, Mill does not give ‘emotional truth’ a metaphysical meaning. Although the ‘imagination’ plays a role in producing poetic works and in appreciating them, it is not perceived as a gateway to a supernatural existence of some sort. As we saw above, Mill defines two types of poets and allies them with two types of ‘truth.’ Even though he favors the poetry of the poet of nature, he does not suggest that its ‘emotional truth’ is superior to ‘rational truth’ of the poet of culture. As he explains, ‘the poetry of one who is a poet by nature, will be clearly and broadly distinguishable from the poetry of mere culture. It may not be truer; it may not be more useful; but it will be different.’73 Contrary to the common Romantic view, for Mill, a poet (and here it does not matter whether it is one of nature or culture) does not have a direct access to an a priori truth about the external world for the simple reason that, as an empiricist, he thinks that this kind of truth does not exist.74 Truth regarding objects of sense (Mill includes here the objects of both science and ethics) is

182  Yoel Mitrani achieved only through empirical observation and inductive reasoning, not birth, prophecy, or mystic intuition. On this point, Mill expressed reservations about the mysticism of the Romantic poets in a speech he delivered to the London Debating Society in 1829 on the poetry of Wordsworth and Byron. The idea that a poet somehow manages to gain insights about external reality was nonsensical for him. He admits that there are people with innate and greater sensitivity, but claims that it is a mistake to suggest that this tendency indicates a supernatural ability to achieve a priori truths about the world: If people tell me then of his [Wordsworth’s] exaggeration and mystification of this, his talking of holding communion with the great forms of nature, his finding a grandeur in the beatings of the heart and so forth, I allow that this is nonsense but the introduction of this into the present question is charging Wordsworth the poet with the faults of Wordsworth the metaphysician.75 Later, in his 1840 Coleridge, Mill presents similar opposition to the idea of transcendental truth found in Coleridge’s writings: The nature and laws of Things in themselves, or of the hidden causes of the phenomena which are the objects of experience, appear to us radically inaccessible to the human faculties. We see no ground for believing that anything can be the object of our knowledge except our experience, and what can be inferred from our experience by the analogies of experience itself; nor that there is any idea, feeling, or power in the human mind, which, in order to account for it, requires that its origin should be referred to any other source. We are therefore at issue with Coleridge on the central idea of his philosophy.76 In his Thoughts on Poetry, then, Mill separates outward reality and emotional reality, reason and feeling, science and art. Thus, we discover that a poet is not ‘born,’ even the ‘poet of nature’ is (at least in part) ‘made.’ Further, the poet is not linked to the divine—he is not a ‘prophet’—and so does not have a unique ability to access a transcendental realm. For these reasons, Mill’s view of the poet is essentially different from that of the British Romantics. In the next part we will see how, while keeping the basic assumptions of his empiricism, Mill nevertheless affirms a link between reason and emotion. This will be central to his conception of genius.

Genius and the Faculty of Thought Mill, especially after his mental crisis in 1826, aimed to incorporate the ‘cultivation of the feelings’77 into his philosophical and ethical project.78 The strict analytical education devised for him by his father James wore away his

John Stuart Mill  183 feelings79 and left him ‘stranded at the commencement of [his] voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for the ends which [he] had been so carefully fitted out to work for.’80 Indeed, Mill’s goal in Thoughts on Poetry was broader than simply pointing out the differences between science and poetry and reason and emotion. He also wanted to prove that emotion and reason can coexist. Mill argues that a certain combination of reason and emotion, rather than the former alone, has a better chance of discovering, what I called earlier, ‘rational truths.’ Furthermore, he claims that an individual who is emotionally susceptible by nature has a better chance of reaching ‘rational truths’ than someone with a ‘commoner nature’81 who is less temperamental, like a man of science or a philosopher. Feelings are the motivation and impulse behind any form of human endeavor and therefore can serve not only to write poetry and present ‘emotional truths’ but, if cultivated properly under reason, also contribute to the discovery of ‘rational truths.’ Feelings can be transformed into a desire for understanding the world around us. They are the fuel, the ‘energy’82—what we could call ‘curiosity’—that pushes the rational faculties to reach for scientific explanations: that capacity of strong feeling, which is supposed necessarily to disturb the judgment, is also the material out of which all motives are made; the motives, consequently, which lead human beings to the pursuit of truth. The greater the individual’s capability of happiness and of misery, the stronger interest has that individual in arriving at truth; and, when once that interest is felt, an impassioned nature is sure to pursue this, as to pursue any other object, with greater ardor: for energy of character is commonly the offspring of strong feeling.83 The stronger those feelings are, the better the chance of arriving at ‘rational truths.’ Therefore, if a ‘poet of nature’ channels his bursting natural emotions into the pursuit of rational objects, he may grow to become an exceptional individual, to become what Mill calls a ‘philosopher-poet,’84 who will ‘ripen into the most powerful intellect.’85 In fact, in Thoughts on Poetry, Mill presents not one but two examples of human exceptionality, one in the field of art—the ‘poet of nature’—and one in field of science or philosophy—the ‘philosopher-poet.’ Both individuals are characterized by strong emotions, yet these emotions are directed to different ends, to acquiring different kinds of true knowledge.86 The important role that feelings play as a motivating force for acquiring truth is an underlying idea of a text that Mill published in the Monthly Repository in October 1832 under the title On Genius. This text was written in response to an article published anonymously a month earlier under the long title Some Considerations Respecting the Comparative Influence of Ancient and Modern Times on the Development of Genius.87 There, genius was defined as a ‘creative or inventive faculty of mind’88 which produces

184  Yoel Mitrani ‘new combinations of the mind’s existing stock of ideas.’89 According to the author, the development of genius is dependent on two circumstances: (1) the fructifying power of the external materials and ideas available for the mind; and (2) the ‘inherent energies’90 of genius which are associated with a strong religious faith. The main argument proposed is that although modern times are abundant in materials, faith is scarce. This has contributed to the decline in genius found amongst the moderns when compared to the ancients. In On Genius, Mill advances two critical responses: (1) novelty is not the main attribute of genius but only a secondary characteristic of it; and (2) while genius requires ‘vigor,’ we should not gain this through a turn to religious faith. For its development, genius requires an education that encourages the ability to think independently. Indeed, Mill defines genius as ‘the faculty of thought itself.’91 By ‘faculty of thought,’ he does not identify genius with the mind’s rational faculty but as the commonplace capacity of acquiring true knowledge.92 Acquiring true knowledge is the fruit of one’s own labor; it is an intimate and ‘active’93 process; true knowledge cannot be ‘taken upon trust.’94 If someone only ‘parrots’95 ideas dictated by an authority, he does not know it, and if he does not know it, he is no genius. ‘Knowledge,’ says Mill, ‘comes only from within’96 and a man of genius is someone who ‘thinks for oneself.’97 Notice here that, by claiming that the acquisition of knowledge is a personal process, Mill does not mean to say that true knowledge about the world is inborn, nor does he hint to the religious or mystical ideas underlying the Romantic conception of genius. Confirming the approach taken in Thoughts on Poetry, On Genius claims that true knowledge can be achieved in two ways: either by self-observation and the ‘imagination’98 or by ‘analysis and induction.’99 The two forms of acquiring knowledge relate to two types of genius: an artistic genius that ‘creates’100 works of art and a scientific genius that ‘discovers’101 the casual laws of nature. These two types of genius necessitate a desire for knowledge, for thinking for themselves; what Mill also names ‘courage,’102 ‘curiosity’103 or ‘intellectual vigor.’104 This definition of genius leads Mill to question the popular association between genius and ‘originality,’105 understood in the sense of novelty. Originality holds two meanings for Mill: (1) the ability to acquire true knowledge; and (2) being the first to acquire true knowledge. Novelty, he suggests, is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for originality: ‘whoever thinks at all,’ Mill says, ‘thinks to that extent originally.’106 Someone who discovers a truth for himself and who does not relay on authority or tradition is thus both an original and a man of genius: Whosoever, to the extent of his opportunity, gets at his convictions by his own faculties, and not by reliance on any other person whatever—that man, in proportion as his conclusions have truth in them, is an original thinker, and is, as much as anybody ever was, a man of genius.107

John Stuart Mill  185 Mill is obviously pluralizing the notion of genius in a way that distinguishes its meaning from that employed by the Romantics: genius is not a rare gift bestowed on a few. However, despite the claim that genius can be found in whoever ‘thinks for himself,’ Mill does not claim that the same level of genius can be attributed to everyone. Genius is not ‘a peculiar mental power, but it is a mental power that can be possessed in a peculiar degree.’108 For Mill, genius exists in varying levels of intensity: some have (or are) higher geniuses than others. The genius who discovers truth for the first time has (or is) a higher level of genius than the one who re-discovers the same truth afterwards.109 For example, we could say that Homer and Newton were geniuses of a higher degree than someone who properly read and comprehended the verses in the Iliad and the mathematical proofs in the Principia. As such, he asks: Is not the act of knowing anything not directly within the cognizance of our senses (provided we really know it, and do not take it upon trust), as truly an exertion of genius, though of a less degree of genius, as if the thing had never been known by anyone else?110 If genius is the ‘faculty of thought itself’ which is found in everyone, it follows according to Mill, that genius can be developed by proper education. A proper ‘mental training’111 is one that encourages the activeness of the mind to know for itself, to think independently from tradition and authority. Education should not limit the mind by encouraging ‘beliefs’112 as found in Christian ‘dogma.’113 It consists in the inducement of spirit and intellectual vigor, in ‘character’-building114 and spirit-forming rather than mere ‘imitation’115 and the ‘grinding down of other man’s ideas.’116 The role of men of genius is crucial in enabling an education of this sort. Men of genius are not only praised for discovering new truths or acquiring true knowledge but, as educators, are exemplars for the proper cultivation of the ‘faculty of thought’ of others. Gaining knowledge is like climbing a mountain; one cannot reach its peak without extracting the same muscles used by the first man who reached the summit. The role of the first climber of Mont Blanc was to inspire others to follow suit: all that the first climber can do is to encourage the others and lend them a helping hand. What he has partly saved them the necessity of, is courage: it requires less hardihood to attempt to do what somebody has done before. It is an advantage also to have someone to point out the way and stop us when we are going wrong. Though one man cannot teach another, one man may suggest to another.117 For Mill, then, genius is the ‘faculty of thought itself’ and entails a personal and emotional component—it is the ‘motive,’ ‘energy,’ or ‘curiosity’—which is a necessary element in acquiring any kind of true knowledge independent

186  Yoel Mitrani from authority, in art or science. In the next section, I will examine more closely the social role that Mill gives to genius and how it relates to the broader framework of his political theory.

Mill, Genius and Freedom In the third chapter of On Liberty, published in 1859, Mill emphasizes the role of genius when proposing arguments in favor of an individual’s freedom to act in accordance with his opinions.118 As he described two decades earlier in On Genius and Thoughts on Poetry, ‘men of genius’119 are originals120 and strong characters.121 The role of intense emotions is again accentuated and regarded as the source of individual achievements: To say that one person’s desires and feelings are stronger and more various than those of another, is merely to say that he has more of the raw material of human nature, and is therefore capable, perhaps of more evil, but certainly of more good. Strong impulses are but another name for energy. Energy may be turned to bad uses; but more good may always be made of an energetic nature, than of an indolent and impassive one.122 Feelings are the ‘inward force’123—that is, the imperative—that permit the acquisition of true knowledge in art and science. True knowledge is achieved by thinking un-dogmatically, authentically, and originally—by thinking for oneself. It is an ‘active’124 process that requires the courage to stand against the ‘despotism of custom’125 and the negative influence of ‘public opinion.’126 The difference between ‘men of genius’ and other individuals is the degree of intensity of their emotions, of the natural drive they possess for truth: men of genius have stronger ‘energy,’127 ‘impulse,’128 ‘individuality,’129 and ‘spontaneity’130 than others. They are a ‘Niagara river’131 as opposed to a ‘Dutch canal.’132 Less energetic characters find it difficult to think independently and to recognize men of genius when they encounter them.133 In contrast, persons of genius are, ex vi termini, more individual than any other people—less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.134 However, Mill’s aim in On Liberty is also to stress the instrumental value of genius for society. Men of genius protect against ‘mediocrity,’135 stagnation136 and ‘barbarism.’137 They are engines of cultural and scientific advancement, of ‘civilization’138 and ‘progress.’139 The importance of genius is not only in discovering new truths ‘and point[ing] out when what were once truths are true no longer,’140 but also in commencing new practices and

John Stuart Mill  187 setting the example of more ‘enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.’141 Men of genius serve as ‘social reformers,’142 role models, and educators of other individuals in society. Their originality, in science and art, serves as example for others to emulate: Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of. They cannot see what it is to do for them: how should they? If they could see what it would do for them, it would not be originality. The first service which originality has to render them, is that of opening their eyes: which being once fully done, they would have a chance of being themselves original.143 As in On Genius, originality has here a double meaning: the acquisition of true knowledge and the acquisition of true knowledge for the first time. Men of genius are original in the second sense, those who ‘introduce good things which did not before exist.’144 In turn, they encourage originality in its first sense in others. Genius has a role in inspiring others to think and act independently and avoid the ‘ape-like’145 imitation of others. We should be careful not to confuse Mill’s praise for genius and its exemplary role in society with the Romantic conception of genius and the anti-democratic political structure it often advanced. As we saw earlier, the Romantics often regarded a man of genius as a prophet, a mediator between god and man with a super-natural gift which allowed him to reach a divine truth unachievable for the average man. For them, an authoritarian political structure centered around the leadership of men of genius was thus perceived to be vital and their worship indispensable. These views contradict Mill’s understanding of truth, the means for achieving it, the idea of genius, and his exemplary role in society. In a direct reference to Carlyle, Mill writes: I am not countenancing the sort of “hero-worship” which applauds the strong man of genius for forcibly seizing on the government of the world and making it do his bidding in spite of itself. All he can claim is, freedom to point out the way. The power of compelling others into it is not only inconsistent with the freedom and development of all the rest, but corrupting to the strong man himself.146 Since men of genius are, on Mill’s telling, those who think independently and encourage free thinking in others, a social and political environment which enables men of genius to think and act freely is crucial. Men of genius should ‘breathe freely in an atmosphere of freedom’147 since only in a truly liberated society, a democracy which is run by a representative government, will they be able to discover new truths, criticize, and refute existing ideas, and encourage other individuals to follow their example. As he explains in the 1861 essay ‘Considerations on Representative Government,’ genius

188  Yoel Mitrani ‘requires a popular government to enable the conceptions of the man of original genius among them, to prevail over the obstructive spirit of trained mediocrity.’148 For Mill, then, human exceptionality and a liberal society are compatible ideas. In fact, his view of liberalism and genius are interdependent: not only does genius require political freedom, but the freedom of society is dependent on men of genius.

Conclusion Mill’s interest in genius was influenced by Romantic ideas. This is clearly seen from his admiration for poetic genius, claim that a poet-genius expresses ‘truth’ in his poetry, fear of mediocrity, and the important role that he gave to the emotions when searching for the truth. However, as I have shown in this chapter, Mill’s conception of genius differs substantially from that of the Romantics. Mill’s naturalism forced him to reject the metaphysics underpinning the Romantic notion and, by extension, its insistence that the man genius was a supernatural being. He also consistently claims that truth results from empirical observation. Thus, the Romantic reliance on ‘intuition,’ divine inspiration, or religious enthusiasm of some sort that is said to lead to a priori truths about the world were fallacies for him. Men of genius are subject to the same laws of nature as every other man and so their exceptionality must have a rational explanation. A man of genius, for Mill, is not a prophet nor a seer but one with a natural capacity for acquiring true knowledge. Genius is the ‘faculty of thought itself,’ the common ability to hold true knowledge not under the influence of authority or custom. For Mill, this ability always involves a personal element—the emotions—which is regarded as the ‘motive,’ ‘energy,’ and ‘curiosity’ needed for pursuing truth. The difference between a high-level of genius and a ‘common’ genius is the degree of the emotional susceptibility that a man is endowed with. The stronger the feelings the better the chance of creating novel works of art and/or of discovering scientific (‘rational’) truths. Since genius involves heightened mundane aptitudes, Mill suggests that it can be developed by proper training and education. A certain type of education—namely, one that stimulates thought and the emotions—is needed for a poetic genius (‘poet of nature’) to express ‘emotional truths.’ The cultivation of the emotions to pursue ‘rational truths’ will make the ‘poet of nature’ a scientific genius: a ‘philosopher-poet.’ Education is also required to develop the common genius found in the majority of individuals. The role of ‘higher’ geniuses is central for this kind of education: not only does their work present new truths (rational or emotional) and refute old ones, but the way they reach truth and act upon it—the form of their thinking and not merely the content their thoughts—make them exemplars for emulation. As I have suggested, this insight is central to Mill’s liberal political theory. A politically free environment is a crucial factor in enabling genius to flourish as it permits individuals to freely think and seek the truth—to be

John Stuart Mill  189 or become a man of genius. The differences between Mill and the Romantic poets with regards to their epistemological and political premises suggest that we are facing two essentially different conceptions of the term: a Romantic conception—the Romantic Genius—and a liberal conception of genius, which I will call, the Liberal Genius. Crucially, Mill’s liberal conception of genius resonates with much contemporary research on the topic in psychology and cognitive science which suggests that genius is a combination of nature and nurture: certain environmental causes have at least an equal, if not more, weight than genes in the development of genius. A genius might involve an innate talent, but acquired factors such as practice, opportunities, a stimulating educational environment are considered crucial for its development.149 Mill does, however, explicitly link the concept of genius to politics and so engages with a relationship that is often ignored in the contemporary scientific literature. For this reason, while his conception of genius has historical relevance, insofar as it offers a critique of the dominant Romantic conception of genius, and contemporary relevance, in that it accords with much contemporary thinking on the topic, its fundamental contribution—one that remains crucial— is to explicitly tie the notion of genius to the political realm by identifying the form of politics necessary to foster, support, and encourage genius.

Notes   1 See similar claims made, for example, by Darrin McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius (Basic Books: New York, 2013), pp. 70–71; Joyce E. Chaplin and Darrin M. McMahon, ‘Introduction,’ pp. 2–3, in: Genealogies of Genius, edited by Joyce Chaplin and Darrin McMahon (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2016), pp. 1–10; Paul Bruno, Kant’s Concept of Genius: Its Origin and Function in the Third Critique (Continuum: London, 2010), p. 6; David M. Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine: Biography, Celebrity and Politics (Routledge: New York, 2005), pp. 1–2; James Engell, The Creative Imagination (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 79–84. For the rising interest in genius in the British context in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries see, for example: Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press: New York, 1953), pp. 184–225; Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford University Press: New York, 1998), chapter 6; William L. Pressly, The Artist As Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine Frenzy” in Late-Eighteenth-Century British Art (University of Delaware Press: Newark, 2007), pp. 25–36; George J. Buelow, ‘Originality, Genius, Plagiarism in English Criticism of the Eighteenth Century,’ International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol. 21, n. 2, December, 1990, pp. 117–128 (p. 120); Tim Milnes, Knowledge and Indifference in English Romantic Prose (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003), p. 54; Zeynep Tenger and Paul Trolander, ‘Genius Versus Capital: Eighteenth‑Century Theories of Genius and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations,’ Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 55, n. 2, June, 1994, pp. 169–189 (p. 170). On eighteenth and nineteenth centuries uses of genius in the French context see, for example: Ann Jefferson, Genius in France: An Idea and Its Uses (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2014), p. 19; Herbert Dieckmann, ‘Diderot’s Conception of Genius,’ Journal of

190  Yoel Mitrani the History of Ideas, vol. 2, n. 2, April, 1941, pp. 151–182 (p. 151); Kineret S. Jaffe, ‘The Concept of Genius: Its Changing Role in Eighteenth-Century French Aesthetics,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 41, n. 4, October, 1980, pp. 579–599 (p. 579). For the centrality of the genius figure for the Sturm und Drang movement, see: Roy Pascal, The German Sturm und Drang (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 1953), pp. 233–299. For genius in Kant’s writings see: Bruno, Kant’s Concept of Genius, 2010; Orrin Wang, ‘Kant’s Strange Light: Romanticism, Periodicity, and the Catachresis of Genius,’ Diacritics, vol. 30, n. 4, Winter, 2000, pp. 15–37. For a very thorough study of ‘genius’ in the German context from the eighteenth century onwards see: Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie‑Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik, 1750–1945, 2 vols. (Universitätsverlag: Heidelberg, 2004).   2 Apart from McMahon’s Divine Fury and Jefferson’s Genius in France who both suggest broader contexts for the use of genius in the eighteenth century, the rest of the works cited above center on genius in relation to art and aesthetics.  3 The most well-known proponent of this view is M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, chapters 4, 5 and 8. For similar views see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (Columbia University Press New York, 1958), chapter 2; Engell, The Creative Imagination, p. 328; Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine, pp. 2–3; Cecil M. Bowra, The Romantic Imagination (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 5.   4 See, for example: The discussion on Coleridge’s notion of genius in Simon Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1995), pp. 26–27.  5 I would like to thank Gavin Rae and Emma Andrea Ingala Gómez for their patient and careful editing of this chapter. Obviously all errors and incoherencies remain my own.   6 Mill mentioned the term over two hundred times in his writings and also wrote an article specifically on the term. See, for example: John S. Mill, On Genius, pp. 239–240, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, edited by John Robson and John Stillinger (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1981), pp. 327–339; John, S. Mill, Thoughts on Poetry and Its Variants, pp. 354–355, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 341–365; John S. Mill, Writing of Alfred de Vigny, pp. 496–497, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 463–501; John S. Mill, On Liberty, pp. 267–269, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVIII, edited by John Robson (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1977), pp. 213–310. And in numerous places in his autobiography: John S. Mill. Autobiography, pp. 192, 193, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 1–289.  7 McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius, p. 194; Janet Browne, ‘Inspiration to Perspiration: Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius in Victorian Context,’ p. 84, in: Genealogies of Genius, edited by Joyce Chaplin and Darrin McMahon (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2016), pp. 77–95; Paul Guyer, ‘Exemplary Originality,’ p. 133, in: The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Esthetic, edited by Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingstone (Cambridge University Press: New York, 2003), pp. 116–137.   8 See for example: Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books: London, 2007), pp. 184–186, p. 277; Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004), pp. 104–105. See also the recurrent use of the term (without a clear definition) in Geoffrey Scarre, ‘Mill on Induction and Scientific Method,’ pp. 132, 137, in: The Cambridge Companion to Mill, edited by John Skorupski (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1998), pp. 112–138.   9 See for example: Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth‑Century Literature (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007),

John Stuart Mill  191 pp. 38–41; Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, pp. 23–26; Higgins, Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine, pp. 37–40. 10 For the references to genius in On Liberty and Mill’s political writings (that also sometimes include referencing to Mill essay On Genius) see John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1968), pp. 187–192; Robert Haralson, ‘Taking It to Heart: Mill on Appropriation and the Art of Ethics,’ p. 223, in: John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life, edited by Ben Eggleston, Dale Miller and David Weinstein (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011), pp. 215–235; Duncan Kelly, The Propriety of Liberty: Persons, Passions, and Judgement in Modern Political Thought (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2010), p. 212; Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography, pp. 284–285. 11 Abrams famously argued that Mill advocated a notion of the ‘expressive’ poet, which he identified with the Romantics (The Mirror and the Lamp, p. 323). Higgins, on the other hand, claims that for Mill ‘the Romantic conception of genius as a quality belonging to a tiny elite . . . was no longer useful in a modernizing culture.’ (Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine, p. 40). 12 Mill, ‘On Genius,’ p. 330. 13 See for example: Nancy C. Andreasen, The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius (Dana Press: New York, 2005); Hans J. Eysenck, Genius: The Natural History of Creativity (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1995); Michael J. Howe, Genius Explained (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999); Robert Weisberg, ‘The Study of Creativity: From Genius to Cognitive Science,’ International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 16, n. 3, August, 2010, pp. 235–253. 14 For the most elaborate study on genius in antiquity and the Middle Ages see: Jane C. Nitzsche, The Genius Figure in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Columbia University Press: New York, 1975). For the concept of genius in the Renaissance see McMahon, Divine Fury, chapter 2. 15 Among the most well-known of these texts are William Sharp’s Dissertation upon Genius (1755), Eduard Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), William Duff’s An Essay on Original Genius (1767); Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1759) and An Essay on Genius (1774). For studies on these debates see, for example: Ken Frieden, Genius and Monologue (Cornell University Press: Ithaca, 1985), pp. 66–84; McMahon, Divine Fury, chapter 3 and Bernhard Fabian’s very elaborate introduction of Gerard’s An Essay on Genius (Wilhelm Fink Verlag: Munich, 1966). 16 Commonly translated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as wit. 17 Almost every dictionary entry or basic study on the term will tell this much. See, for example, Jefferson, Genius in France, pp. 2–3. 18 Dr. Johnson’s dictionary (1755) agrees with the characteristics of genius mentioned above. Johnson mentions five meaning of the word: (1) The protecting or ruling power of men, places, or things; (2) A man endowed with superior faculties; (3) Mental power or faculties; (4) Disposition of nature by which any one is qualified for some peculiar employment; (5) Nature; disposition (the meaning here is close to the German Geist which can be compared with ‘spirit’ or ‘mind’ in English). See discussion on this in Frieden, Genius and Monologue, p. 73. 19 See, for example, James S. Malek, ‘Isaac D’israeli, William Godwin, and the Eighteenth‑Century Controversy over Innate and Acquired Genius,’ Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, vol. 34, n. 1, Winter, 1980, pp. 47–64. 20 See, for example, Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, chapter 6, and Robert Macfarlane, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth‑Century Literature (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2007), chapter 1. 21 See Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (Columbia University Press: New York, 2002), chapter 6.

192  Yoel Mitrani 22 By Romantic poets, I mean those who are usually considered as part of the ‘Romantic canon’: the lake school poets (among them Coleridge and Wordsworth are the most well-known) and the second generation of Romantic poets (Scott, Byron, Shelley and Keats). 23 The term ‘Romantic genius’, like the concept ‘Romanticism’, cannot be said to have a unified definition. However, despite the differences between Romantic authors, I still believe they share basic common characteristics which I will present here. 24 Coleridge was especially fond of the distinction between ‘genius’ and ‘talent.’ See, for example, his discussion in The Friend where ‘sense’ and ‘cleverness’ are also discussed: Samuel T. Coleridge, The Friend (1818) Volume III, Essay I, pp.  409–423, in: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 4, edited by Barbara E. Rooke (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1969), pp. 5–248. For a more general account on the distinction genius/talent made by the British Romantics see Logan Pearsall Smith, Four Words: Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1924), pp. 108–112. 25 This is the basic thesis of Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp, 1953. 26 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballad, 1800, p. 756, in: The Cornell Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballad and Other Poems 1797–1800, edited by James Butler and Karen Green (Cornell University Press: New York, 1992), pp. 740–760. 27 William Wordsworth, Essay, Supplementary to the Preface, pp. 655–656, in: The Cornell Wordsworth, Shorter Poems 1807–1820, edited by Carl H. Ketchman (Cornell University Press: New York, 1989), pp. 642–657. 28 Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, Volume 2,’ p. 23, in: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 7, edited by Lames Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 1983), pp. 5–248. 29 See Abrams’s discussion on truth among the Romantics in the last two chapters in The Mirror and the Lamp and also his idea of ‘natural supernaturalism’ in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism; Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (Norton: New York, 1971). 30 Christopher Macleod, ‘The Roots of Romantic Cognitivism: (post) Kantian Intellectual Intuition and the Unity of Creation and Discovery,’ European Romantic Review, vol. 25, n. 4, July, 2014, pp. 403–422. 31 Samuel T. Coleridge, ‘Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Lecture 5),’ p. 220, in: The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 8, edited by J. R. de J. Jackson (Routledge and Kegan Paul: London, 2000), pp. 209–252. 32 On the role of the imagination in Wordsworth and Coleridge see Robert Barth, Romanticism and Transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Religious Imagination (University of Missouri Press: Columbia, 2003). 33 For the historical development of the term ‘imagination,’ see, for example, James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Richard Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Routledge: New York, 1998); Mary Warnock, Imagination and Time (Blackwell: Oxford, 1994). 34 Percy B. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (The Bobbs-Merrill Company: New York, 1904), p. 12. 35 Ibid., p. 19. 36 William Wordsworth, ‘Prelude (Vol. 1),’ p. 137, in: The Cornell Wordsworth, Vol. 13, edited by Mark L. Reed (Cornell University Press: New York, 1975), pp. 107–324. 37 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, p. 31. 38 Ibid., p. 32. 39 Whether Carlyle should be considered as a Victorian or a Romantic (or both) is an open question which I chose to leave aside here. See the discussion of this in

John Stuart Mill  193 Margaret Rundle, ‘Poised on the Cusp: Thomas Carlyle-Romantic, Victorian, or Both?,’ in: Victorian Keats and Romantic Carlyle: The Fusions and Confusions of Literary Periods, edited by C. C. Barfoot (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 267–289. It is clear, however, that his use and meaning of ‘genius’ shares many characteristics with the British Romantic poets. 40 Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero‑worship, and the Heroic in History (University of California Press: Berkeley, 1993), p. 38. A similar definition of genius we can also find in his Past and Present: ‘Genius, Poet: do we know what these words mean? An inspired soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature’s own great fire—heart, to see the Truth, and speak it, and do it’ (Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (University of California Press: Berkeley, 2005), p. 89). 41 Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 4. 42 Ibid., p. 26. 43 Ibid., p. 172. 44 Ibid., p. 106. 45 Mill, ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Variants,’ in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 341–365. 46 Ibid., p. 344. 47 Ibid., p. 344. 48 Ibid., p. 349. 49 Ibid., p. 344. 50 Ibid., p. 345. 51 Ibid., p. 345. 52 Ibid., p. 345. 53 Ibid., p. 345. 54 Ibid., p. 345. 55 Ibid., p. 346. 56 Ibid., p. 346. 57 Ibid., p. 347. 58 Ibid., p. 348. 59 Ibid., p. 348. 60 Ibid., p. 348. 61 Ibid., p. 348. 62 Ibid., p. 348. 63 Ibid., p. 348. 64 Ibid., p. 348. 65 Ibid., p. 348. 66 Mill considers the primary example of a ‘poet of nature’ to be Shelley (Ibid., pp. 359–361). 67 Ibid., p. 359. 68 Mill claims that Wordsworth is the primary example of a ‘poet of culture’ (Ibid., pp. 358–359). 69 Ibid., p. 356. 70 ‘the genius of Wordsworth is essentially unlyrical’ (Ibid., p. 359) and ‘how powerfully, in The Cenci, does he [Shelley] coerce and restrain all the characteristic qualities of his genius’ (Ibid., p. 363). 71 Ibid., p. 355. 72 Ibid., p. 354. 73 Ibid., p. 354. 74 This is a common view of Mill’s scholars. See for example: Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 59–60; John Skorupski, John Stuart Mill (Routledge: New York, 1989), pp. 7–9; Parvin Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill (Mouton: The Hague, 1967), pp. 142–149.

194  Yoel Mitrani   75 John S. Mill, ‘Wordsworth and Byron,’ p. 440, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XXVI, edited by John Robson (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1989), pp. 434–443.   76 John S. Mill, ‘Coleridge,’ p. 202, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X, edited by John Robson (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1985), pp. 119–165.  77 Mill, ‘Autobiography,’ pp.  113–114, 147, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 1–289.   78 Mill’s support for ‘many-sided’ education, which deals with the cultivation of rational faculties and the feelings, and ‘aesthetic education’ is a well-researched topic. Mill addressed it in his Bentham, Coleridge and in A System of Logic in the early 1840s, and later in his inaugural address at the University of St Andrews in 1867. For a discussion, see Wendy Donner, ‘Morality, Virtue, and Aesthetics in Mill’s Art of Life,’ in: John Stuart Mill and the Art of Life, edited by Ben Eggleston, Dale Miller and David Weinstein (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2011), pp. 146–165; Andrew Gustafson, ‘Mill’s Poet-Philosopher, and the Instrumental-Social Importance of Poetry for Moral Sentiments,’ British Journal for the History of Philosophy, vol. 17, n. 4, September, 2009, pp. 821–847 (p. 826); Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill, pp. 138–142.   79 Mill. ‘Autobiography,’ p.  141, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 1–289. Mill, ‘Autobiography,’ p. 141.   80 Ibid., p. 143.   81 Mill, ‘Thoughts on Poetry and Its Variants,’ p. 364, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 341–365.   82 Ibid., p. 364.   83 Ibid., pp. 363–364.   84 Ibid., p. 364.   85 Ibid., p. 364.   86 In a later essay, Mill provides Alfred Tennyson as another example of a ‘philosopher-poet.’ Tennyson, Mill writes, ‘possesses, in an eminent degree, the natural endowment of a poet—the poetic temperament . . . and . . . with him, the other element of poetic excellence—intellectual culture.’ See: Mill, ‘Tennyson’s Poems,’ p. 414, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 397–418.  87 Anonymous, ‘Some Considerations Respecting the Comparative Influences of Ancient and Modern Times on the Development of Genius,’ The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, August, 1832, pp. 556–564.   88 Ibid., p. 560.   89 Ibid., p. 560.   90 Ibid., p. 560.   91 Mill, ‘On Genius,’ pp. 239–240, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 327–339.   92 Ibid., p. 332.   93 Ibid., p. 334.   94 Ibid., p. 334.   95 Ibid., p. 336.   96 Ibid., p. 332.   97 Ibid., p. 337.   98 Ibid., p. 332.   99 Ibid., p. 332. 100 Ibid., p. 333. 101 Ibid., p. 332. 102 Ibid., p. 332. 103 Ibid., p. 335.

John Stuart Mill  195 104 Ibid., p. 334. 105 Ibid., p. 332. 106 Ibid., p. 332. 107 Ibid., p. 332. 108 Ibid., p. 331. 109 In Subjection of Women, published in 1869, Mill seems to follow the same line of thought. He claims that women do not hold ‘natural tendencies’ different to that of men. However, the lack of sufficient scientific education and social exclusion prevent women from reaching the highest degree of originality and genius. See John S. Mill, ‘Subjection of Women,’ pp.  316–317, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XXI, edited by John Robson (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1998), pp. 261–340. 110 Ibid., p. 330. 111 Ibid., p. 335. 112 Ibid., p. 337. 113 Ibid., p. 337. 114 Ibid., p. 338. 115 Ibid., p. 331. 116 Ibid., p. 335. 117 Ibid., p. 332 (Italics in the original). 118 Mill, ‘On Liberty,’ p. 260, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVIII, pp. 213–310. 119 Ibid., p. 265. 120 Ibid., p. 267. 121 Ibid., p. 268. 122 Ibid., p. 263. 123 Ibid., p. 263. 124 Ibid., p. 262. 125 Ibid., p. 272. 126 Ibid., p. 271. 127 Ibid., p. 263. 128 Ibid., pp. 263–264. 129 Ibid., p. 267. 130 Ibid., p. 261. 131 Ibid., p. 268. 132 Ibid., p. 268. 133 Mill, like many of his contemporaries, expressed his concerns for the declining value of genius and originality in modern times due to the growing political and cultural influence of the middle class. See, for example, his review of the second volume of Alexis de Tocqueville’s De La Démocratie en Amérique in Mill, ‘De Tocqueville on Democracy in America,’ p. 198, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVIII, pp. 155–204; his review of George Grote’s History of Greece: John S. Mill, ‘Grote’s History of Greece II,’ pp. 320–321, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XI, edited by John Robson (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1978), pp. 307–337; and in his Writings of Alfred de Vigny: Mill, ‘Writing of Alfred de Vigny,’ pp. 496, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, pp. 463–501. 134 Ibid., p. 267 (Italics in the original). 135 Ibid., pp. 268, 269. 136 Ibid., p. 267. 137 Ibid., p. 291. 138 Ibid., pp. 261, 291. 139 Ibid., p. 261. 140 Ibid., p. 268. 141 Ibid., p. 268.

196  Yoel Mitrani 142 Ibid., p. 261. 143 Ibid., p. 268. 144 Ibid., p. 267. 145 Ibid., p. 262. 146 Ibid., p. 269. 147 Ibid., p. 267. 148 John S. Mill, ‘Considerations on Representative Government,’ p. 439, in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XIX, edited by John Robson (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1977), pp. 371–578. 149 See Michael Howe, Genius Explained (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999); Michael Howe, Jane Davidson and John Sloboda, ‘Innate Talents: Reality or Myth?,’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 21, n. 3, 1998, pp. 399–407 (p. 405); Dean K. Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1999), chapter 4.

10 Hegel’s Ethical Life and Heidegger’s ‘They’ How Political Is the Self? Antonio Gómez Ramos

Since Aristotle’s definition of man as zoon politikon,1 it has been commonly admitted that human beings are essentially political beings. But it is far from clear to what extent the political pervades subjectivity. The last decades have witnessed a strong revival in questions relating to subjectivity and selfhood, partly as a reaction to the critique of the subject that was a focal point for many philosophical movements in the second half of the twentieth century, especially structuralism, Marxism, and hermeneutics.2 Whereas many major thinkers of that time, involved as they were in a deconstruction of the Cartesian subject, provided epistemological, ontological, and even political reasons to support their claims about ‘dissolving man’3 and the ‘death of man,’4 the turn of the millennium has brought about a rediscovery of selfhood as an irreducible structure of subjectivity that resists the dissolution of the individual subject into socio-political structures or historical streams. The ‘persistence of subjectivity,’5 the ‘irreducibility of the concept of the self,’6 the ‘inevitability of individuality’7 have been claimed from distinct philosophical standpoints, breaking the path for a new understanding of subjectivity. Dan Zahavi in particular has drawn on the phenomenological tradition to outline a solid conception of a ‘minimal self’ as a pre-reflective, self-referential structure that is the irreducible core of subjectivity.8 However, even when considering the emotional dimension of the self, its sociality, and its relation to the ‘us,’9 these analyses tend to ignore the political dimension, thereby giving rise to the question: how political is the self? This lack of political consideration is all the more surprising given that, within contemporary political theory and activism, subjectivity has become a sort of buzzword as the search goes on for ‘new political subjects’ opposed to the supposedly Cartesian individual of Western Liberalism. These discourses proclaim to find such new subjectivities in subaltern identities and in emergent socio-political agents and look to developments in psychoanalysis, Gender, Racial or Postcolonial Theories, as well as French Post-structuralism.10 They are, however, more concerned with political transformations of present subjectivities than with subjectivity as such. Thus, contemporary thought has struggled to clarify the connection between subjectivity and the political. The purpose of this chapter is to start

198  Antonio Gómez Ramos to rectify this. To do so, I first identify where the political breach within human subjectivity is by examining Étienne Balibar’s11 comments on the instability of the equation of ‘man’ and ‘citizen,’ an instability that can be tracked back to Rousseau and the French Revolution. Rousseau plays a preparatory role in this chapter in that he is the first to note the conflict between man and citizen within modern subject, identify society as the main source of alienation for the self, and expect politics and education to cure that alienation.12 Once the problematic has been formulated with Rousseau, I turn to Hegel’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of the relationship between subjectivity and the political, considering them to be two opposing responses to the question. Rather than provide a complete overview of Hegel’s or Heidegger’s thinking on subjectivity,13 I will selectively focus on aspects of their thinking—in Hegel’s case, aspects of the Philosophy of Right and in Heidegger’s, the sections on das Man in Being and Time—to show that they outline two alternative positions regarding the subjectivitypolitical relationship that can help us to understand the ways in which a free self can flourish in a democratic polity. Specifically, I first focus on the notion of subjectivity as it has been developed in recent Hegelian scholarship to show that, for Hegel, a potentially free, autonomous, reflexive, normative, self-referential individual realizes its freedom through a process of mutual recognition with other potentially free, autonomous, reflexive, and normative individuals. Subjectivity is always then attained within what Hegel calls ethical life (Sittlichkeit), a network of social and political institutions where intersubjective actions and relations take place.14 While this understanding does not equate subjectivity with the political, it still leaves open the question as to whether Hegel reinstates a harmonic equation of man and citizen, as Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Michael Quante, and Dean Moyar have argued,15 or ‘over-institutionalizes’ the whole of ethical life, thereby leaving little room for individual subjectivity in the state, as Michael Theunissen and Axel Honneth often bemoan.16 My contention is that the former interpretation is truthful to the spirit of Hegel and more fruitful for contemporary discussions on political subjectivity. Finally, I turn to Heidegger to consider the social, impersonal, anonymous ‘They’ (das Man) outlined in Being and Time.17 I contend that, in this discussion, Heidegger introduces an alternative conception of the self and its relation to the social and the political to Hegel’s, one that, with regard to the man-citizen relation, favors the former. The conclusion reached is that Hegel’s view is too political, leaving no room for a non-political core of subjectivity, while Heidegger’s is too personal, in that Dasein remains fundamentally individualistic even when it is socially and politically engaged. Rather than offer solutions to resolve this apparent impasse, I leave it open to suggest that it can be used to stimulate thinking on the relationship between subjectivity and the political generally and, in particular, the question: how political is the self?

How Political Is the Self?  199

‘Man’ and ‘Citizen’? The Paradox of Rights When Aristotle defined man as a ‘zoon politikon,’18 it was self-evident to him that the flourishing of the human self required fully-fledged citizenship in a polis, and that, by extension, political subjectivity was intimately and necessarily linked to human subjectivity. Indeed, he valued political life as the highest form of human life.19 Modern scholarship has strongly criticized Aristotle’s linking of human flourishing to membership of a polis because he excluded women and slaves from citizenship. However, when modernity tried to amend this through the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, it not only continued to exclude women,20 but the formulation of the ‘rights of man’ and the ‘rights of the citizen’ implied an identity and difference between ‘man’ (human subjectivity) and ‘citizen’ (political subjectivity). Rather than the unity of ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ as Aristotle affirmed, there was now, as Étienne Balibar explains, a distinction between the ‘rights of man’ (universal, inalienable, subsisting independently of any social institution, thus virtual, etc.), and the ‘rights of the citizen’ (positive, instituted, restrictive but effective), leading in turn to a foundation of the latter upon the former.21 Further, Balibar argues that, since the French Revolution, the definition of what counts as the rights of man has broadened to include ‘freedom of conscience or individual security to the claim for the right to existence or for the self-determination of peoples.’22 A similar broadening has occurred with the rights of the citizen, which itself oscillates between proposals to enlarge the political sphere to new domains (such as ecology) and attempts to revalorate classical politics—synonymous with the collective institution of deliberation and decision—against the invasion of economicism and technocracy.’23 The new ‘rights of the citizen’ (from gender-related rights to ecology and the regulation of technocracy) entail then new dimensions of humanity that the writers of the Universal Declaration could not imagine. As history has shown, the ‘rights of man’ have no reality and no value except as political rights,24 and the first human right is the ‘right to have rights,’25 as Arendt put it, or a ‘universal right to politics,’26 in Balibar’s words. No dimension of humanity can then be effective if it is not in one way or another acknowledged and guaranteed by political legislation. Balibar also notes that the relationship between man and citizen is an unstable one. The realization of human subjectivity can only be achieved within a political structure that is able to guarantee the ‘rights of man.’ But the extension and function of those very political structures oscillates between the radical separation of the categories ‘citizen’ and ‘man’ and

200  Antonio Gómez Ramos their total identification. A dominant tradition in political thinking—one that, for Balibar, prioritizes liberty over equality—reduces the relationship to protecting private life and so separates the private individual from the citizen. This, however, implies a human nature that lies beyond the intersubjective bonds that constitute the political community,27 and so downplays the importance of the political to the realization of human subjectivity. If, however, we accept that political structures shape human subjectivity, it is necessary to explain how the identification of man and citizen—and the subsequent prioritization of equality over liberty—can leave room for the individuality, plurality, and diversity that modernity advocates and that was presupposed by the Universal Declaration. Balibar’s solution is to reject the total identification of ‘man’ and ‘citizen’ by developing the notion of ‘equaliberty,’28 which aims to maintain the identification of man and citizen, while developing the conditions of plurality that are implicit in the Universal Declaration. However, while this movement is essential for developing a politics of rights consistent with the Universal Declaration, it still does not address the question of how a subject constitutes itself by relating to itself and to the political. In order to approach this question, the next section turns to the thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau who, prior to the French Revolution, not only emphasized the role that education plays in constituting subjectivity, but also identified the distinction between the social and the political that was invisible to the ancient Greeks, for whom the zoon politikon signified both the social and the political.

The Individual, the Social, and the Political: A Glimpse at Rousseau According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, it is precisely through the formation of the self that the distinction between the human and the political subject becomes visible. Educating a man and a citizen require two very different tasks. As a consequence, Rousseau urges the educator to choose ‘between making a man or a citizen, for one cannot make both at the same time.’29 The reason being that, in the case of man, he is educated ‘for himself,’ while, as a citizen, he is educated ‘for others’; that is, for the fatherland. This is a radical departure from Aristotle’s thinking on the topic. If, as Aristotle thought, human beings are ‘political animals,’ political subjectivity forms an integral part of human subjectivity, and the education of the citizen is only a further, self-evident step in the education of the individual.30 Rousseau rejects this logic, not to critique Aristotle per se or the role of the individual in the ancient polis,31 but to undermine the notion of the autonomous subject that was dominant in his own society.32 If Emile educates man and not the citizen, it is because in the monarchies of the eighteenth century—when Rousseau was writing—there were, according to him, ‘no public institutions.’33 This led Rousseau to comment that because ‘there is no fatherland . . . there can no longer be citizens.’34

How Political Is the Self?  201 However, Rousseau obviously did not only write Emile. He also wrote the Social Contract. Frederick Neuhouser argues that Emile and the Social Contract offer two different, but complementary, remedies to the evils of humanity whose origin Rousseau had diagnosed in his Discourse on Inequality.35 In the Discourse, Rousseau explains that the rise of society not only produced material inequality, but also a psychic dependence on the recognition of others and the growth of self-love. Alessandro Ferrera argues that, for Rousseau, this dependence and all the social hypocrisy that is associated with self-love (amour propre) are the ultimate causes of the unhappiness and alienation of individuals.36 In the end, society is the origin of evil37 because it is society that tears the individual apart from himself and makes his life insincere, superficial, conceited, and dependent on the judgment of others.38 Rousseau’s project is to heal this evil and its subsequent social pathologies in two complementary ways: first, by educating man so that he attains self-sufficiency in a deceptive society (this is the purpose of Emile). Second, by realizing political freedom and the general will as outlined in the Social Contract, which is the ‘attempt to figure out how the ideal good of all can come to rule the life of a polity’39 and also ‘how the individuals who participate in that life can remain free, or autonomous (governed by their own reason) in their allegiance to such an ideal.’40 Regardless of whether Rousseau’s proscription succeeds, two issues stand out: first, Rousseau shows that the political is a remedy against social pathologies. It is politics, or the civil state, that not only permits the individual to flourish, but that ‘makes him, not a limited and stupid animal, but an ‘intelligent being and a man.’41 Second, and with respect to the question of the relationship between man and citizen, Rousseau introduces a third element—society—that is not only different from the political body, but actually threatens the individual’s autonomy. Social life is understood to be responsible for the individual’s alienation. Overcoming this alienation requires that the individual be educated to attain his inner freedom in opposition to the norms and demands of his society. Thus, the mancitizen, subjectivity-political relationship is understood to be determined by the network of social relations in which individuals encounter one other. This network, full of affective, symbolic, and economical elements is not immediately political. It therefore reveals that any solution to the question of the relationship between subjectivity and the political must take this third sphere—the social—into account. To outline two ways in which this has occurred, I will first turn to Hegel, before subsequently moving to Heidegger.

Freedom in Ethical Life: The Hegelian Solution. In spite of his life-long sympathy for the French Revolution, Hegel remained highly critical of the ‘void of the rights of humanity’42 that he understood it to emphasize. His point was that such rights, as merely rights of man, are abstract rights, which ought to be made concrete for actual individuals.

202  Antonio Gómez Ramos As such, he did not see an antinomy, or even a gap, between ‘man’ and the ‘citizen’—he rather rejected the notion that politics could be founded on an abstract notion of ‘man,’ and contended that the realization and concretization on ‘man’ involves a historical process towards freedom and that citizenship plays an essential role in that process. The issue for him was to account for how modern individuals come to fully realize their free subjectivity, and to do so by providing a rational account of how social political institutions are necessarily involved in the realization of a free subjectivity. It is in the Philosophy of Right where Hegel offers the most complete account of such a realization for modern subjects, describing the relation of individual subjectivity to what he thinks are the decisive modern institutions. In this section, I shall analyze how such relations are defined by Hegel to show that it entails a reciprocal relation between subjectivity and the institutions of ethical life, especially the State. However, I will argue that it remains questionable whether subjectivity can be reduced to its place in this reciprocal relationship. The reason why, for Hegel, discourse about ‘man’—or about ‘human being,’ or ‘persons’—is abstract, is that subjectivity, or being oneself, is not something immediately given, but rather something that must be achieved43 by every individual. Furthermore, freedom does not entail a pure freedom of the will. For Hegel, the most important role of law is to guarantee the absolute rights of persons, since the ‘State is the actuality of concrete freedom.’44 But, in Pippin’s words, freedom is a ‘kind of historical collective achievement [wherein] being an agent [i.e. a practical subject] is not to be analyzed in terms of properties and capacities, but as a kind of collective social construct, an achievement-active state.’45 In other words, the realization of individual freedom is not an individual task. It can only be attained within a collective system of mutual recognitions, so that one is a free individual ‘as an element of a collectively achieved mindedness; or being taken to be one in a certain way.’46 Becoming a free subjectivity requires that the agent be recognized as an autonomous, selfdetermined, normative individual by other subjectivities who, in turn, must also attain the recognition of their own self-determination and normativity. One is free only if all are free, and the freedom of society means the freedom of every individual, which is socially determined through mutual recognition. Already this outline makes clear that, for Hegel, subjectivity is essentially embedded in the political, and that ‘man’ cannot be abstracted from ‘the citizen,’ even if both are not identical. But before we turn to analyze how Hegel conceives of the relation between individual subjectivity and the socio-political institutions that, on his view, define the collective mind and that he calls ‘objective spirit,’ we must comment on the role that ‘achievement’ plays in this relation. By emphasizing that freedom is a collective achievement, Hegel introduces the historical perspective that differentiates the ancient world from the modern one. The Greek polis was already constituted as an ethical life,

How Political Is the Self?  203 with this providing the only possible framework wherein an individual was ‘at home’ ‘with himself’ and, by extension, with the norms and rules of his society. In order to be an accomplished, well-educated man and to flourish in life, one had to be ‘a citizen of a State with good laws.’47 But Hegel thought that Greek ethical life was still unreflective and had not experienced negativity. It was a sort of natural habit, and Greek citizens lacked the reflective subjectivity that would make them really aware of what they had. It was only through the historical process—specifically, the history of Europe, including the Reformation and the French Revolution—that human consciousness could develop the reflectivity and moral subjectivity through which collective and individual freedom could be achieved. This is important because it shows that, for Hegel, the integration of the modern individual within objective spirit implies a high degree of reflective subjectivity, and, indeed, moral subjectivity in the form of conscience.48 As noted, with respect to the formation of subjectivity, Hegel is very explicit that actual freedom is not naturally given to the individual. Rather, the individual must go through a specific process of education in order to achieve his or her free subjectivity. But unlike Rousseau, this does not entail a choice between educating man or the citizen. Education—or Bildung, as he and his German contemporaries called it—should be understood as the process whereby their individuality [i.e. the members of civil society] and naturalness are raised, both by natural necessity and by their arbitrary needs, to formal freedom and formal universality of knowledge and volition, and subjectivity is educated [gebildet] in its particularity.49 Bildung entails a liberation50 from immediacy and the natural, a ‘transition to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life, which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of universality.’51 Hegel insists that education is an essential task of social institutions, specifically family and civil society, in that it helps to realize each individual’s independence and self-determination52 by getting them to acknowledge their universal dimension and ‘make themselves links in the chain of this continuum [Zusammenhang].’53 The outcome of education is the development of the individual’s particularity—that one is uniquely this and not that individual—but this particularity is effected by a dialectic of universality and individuality. In the end, ‘the destiny [Bestimmung] of individuals is to lead a universal life,’54 which must be fulfilled through education and the development of one’s own particularity. We can now turn back to the relationship between individual subjectivity and the socio-political institutions that comprise universality and through which freedom and free subjectivities are shaped and achieved. We are talking here of social freedom, different from ‘personal freedom’ and ‘moral freedom,’ as the source of the normative principles that govern one’s actions.55 It is through this social freedom that a substantially free subjectivity can

204  Antonio Gómez Ramos be achieved; where ‘man’ is a social animal and a ‘citizen.’ In itself, this social freedom is not identical with the realm of the political. Ethical life, the framework where this social freedom is to be realized, is articulated in three spheres: the family, the civil society, and the State. In a sense, all three are political. The State is obviously so, but so is civil society, which includes labor, work, and everything to do with ‘the social’ and ‘the satisfaction of needs.’ To some extent also, the family can be understood to be a political institution, since affectivity, the relation of sexes and the reproduction of life are regulated by laws resulting from political struggles and agreements. But, on the other hand, when an individual makes decisions about his family, or seeks recognition and satisfaction in civil society, or does paperwork in the administration of the State, he is not being political, strictly speaking, although these three kinds of activities are ‘universal.’ The political, for Hegel, refers to the relationship between subjects and the institutions, including their structure, through which they realize their subjectivity. Hegel explains, at the beginning of the section on Ethical Life, that ‘the ethical substance and its laws and powers are on the one hand an object [Gegenstand] inasmuch as they are, in the supreme sense of self-sufficiency.’56 They are ‘an absolute authority and power.’57 This may mean that the State appears to be something fixed and imposing on the individual; an alienating structure opposed to the individual. But Hegel reminds us that law and the State do not necessarily have to be perceived or experienced in this way. After all, if law and powers constitute ethical life, it is because on the other hand, they are not something alien to the subject. On the contrary, the subject bears spiritual witness to them as to its own essence in which it has its sense of self [Selbstgefühl] and lives as in its element which is not distinct from itself—a relationship that at first is more identical than even a [relationship of] faith or trust.58 The identification of an individual with the institutions he lives in goes so far that he finds his own essence in them, and even an immediate perception of his own existence—what Hegel here calls a sense of self. By this, we are to understand that every one of us is self-aware—that is, he senses his own existence as an ‘I’—by belonging to a family, a civil society, and a State. Certainly, it is not the same ‘quality’ of identification in the three spheres. Civil society, as the specifically modern institution between family and State, is a ‘relative totality’59 in which ‘universal and particular wills, although unified (in content), remain external to one another.’60 Even though it produces an ‘interpenetrating unity’61 or particular interests and universal wealth through the market economy, civil society is simply not as close to individuals as family and the State, which are ‘paradigmatic instances of ethical social wholes.’62 Individuals can identify more thoroughly with the universality of the family and of the State, while the identification with civil society is only external.

How Political Is the Self?  205 In a way, Hegel is responding to Rousseau’s distinction between the social and the political, and the alienation Rousseau identifies in socialized man. Hegel inherits the problem from Rousseau,63 knows that ‘the creation of civil society belongs to the modern world,’64 and that ‘it affords a spectacle of extravagance and misery as well of the physical and ethical corruption common to both.’65 But he expects civil society, where every individual seeks to selfishly satisfy his own particular interest, to create welfare for the majority and to work for universality. Rather than alienation, civil society permits the individual to identity with the State and, by definition, the political. If, for Rousseau, socialized man ‘lives outside himself,’66 for Hegel, the purpose of the whole of ethical life is to make the individual ‘being-with-itself-inthe-other.’67 We can leave aside for now whether ethical life succeeds in this purpose.68 Hegel’s civil society is not then the same as Rousseau’s notion of society, nor is it necessarily granted that the identification between the individual and State that Hegel defines would cure the alienation and estrangement of modern life. Michael Theunissen, for example, recognizes that Hegel’s project certainly aims at the free subjectivity of individuals, and his dialectical principle points to a network of intersubjective relations where freedom of all can be achieved, but argues that the Philosophy of Right fails to achieve this.69 No doubt, the central point of the book is freedom, and Hegel, who criticizes the natural rights approach and the idea of society as ‘only an atomistic aggregate of individuals,’70 stresses that freedom of individuals is only realized through their interactions, that is, intersubjectively. But he also defines the ethical sphere as substance, in relation to which individuals are mere accidents,71 and ‘transfers the relation between persons into a relation of a substance to these persons; he then interprets the allegedly primitive relations as a relation of substance to itself.’72 What was supposed to be the most original relation—the one between individuals, through which they interact and encounter one another—is ‘consistently accidentalized, and the independence of persons disappear.’73 On this reading, the intersubjective approach, which was Hegel most valuable contribution to an understanding of modern subjectivity, is destroyed by his theory of the State. In a similar vein, Axel Honneth argues that Hegel makes a decisive contribution to a political understanding of a free subjectivity in terms of recognition, self-realization, and education,74 but this is accompanied by the affirmation of a set of very strong institutions—family, corporations in civil society, the state as divine and absolute—which over-institutionalize the subject. After all, ‘being with one self in another,’ which is the most accomplished realization of freedom and mutual recognition, is dependent on membership of the objective institutions to the extent that Honneth argues that such membership actually threatens to eliminate differences and individuality.75 Despite Hegel’s insistence that ‘the enormous strength and depth of modern state’76 consists in its ability to allow ‘the principle of subjectivity to

206  Antonio Gómez Ramos attain fulfillment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity,’77 and that the ‘essence of modern state is that the universal should be linked with the complete freedom of particularity and the well-being of individuals, and hence the interest of the family and civil society must be focused on the State,’78 Theunissen and Honneth argue that Hegel places the realization of subjectivity under, and so makes it dependent on, a substantialist notion of the political that actually threatens individual expression. This reading has, however, been challenged by an alternative that argues that Hegel does not aim to subsume the individual by the State, but tries to safeguard individuality within the State and hence the political. This alternative reading recognizes that the charges against the Philosophy of Right might be true, but argues that the problem ‘lies in Hegel’s failure to apply his own foundational principles consistently, not in those principles themselves.’79 Following this line of argument, a number of scholars have argued that it is possible to interpret Hegel’s comments on the relationship between the individual and ethical life in such a way that the individual’s freedom is safeguarded and realized in the threefold structure of family, civil society and State. Dean Moyar, for example, argues that Hegel declarations about the State—it’s divinity, absoluteness, authoritativeness and majesty—may certainly appear to be problematic if we identify the State with government, but he reminds us that Hegel never does this. Rather, [Hegel] takes the State to be the totality of institutions of ethical life. The State is constituted by the activity of all individuals within it, not just the activity of the members of the government. The modern state, in Hegel’s idealized picture, is a systematic relationship of individual activity and institutional activity.80 A brief look into what Hegel calls patriotism can illuminate this. Patriotism is the disposition of trust (which may pass over into more or less educated insight) or the consciousness that my substantial and particular interest is preserved and contained in the interest and end of another (in this case, the State) and in the latter’s relation to me as an individual.81 For Hegel, patriotism has nothing to do with the kind of heroic actions that people usually associate with the concept, nor does it have anything to do with a narrow, chauvinistic nationalism. Patriotism is nothing more than the habit of leading one’s normal life doing one’s ethical duty, while taking the State as one’s ‘substantial basis and end.’82 Love of motherland should be directed towards the public institutions that enhance self-determination and make individual and common life possible. A patriot does not, then, love a flag or any abstract symbol; he loves a health and education system, the

How Political Is the Self?  207 structures of the public sphere and the way to participate in it, and even the public transport network. And this affection, out of which he is ready to pay taxes and respect the law, is ‘not based on purely instrumental grounds, but rather on the grounds that through the State the individual’s actions have much greater significance than actions performed without those broader contexts.’83 In other words, the institutions of State and of ethical life in general are ‘the actuality of concrete freedom,’84 the substantial basis and end of the individual because he finds in them a sense of self and a significance for his actions that transcends the private realm. This does not mean that the individual is subsumed by the State, but that he finds himself through the objective spirit of ethical life. This is why, when acting through the State as opposed to merely acting privately or in civil society alone, the individual transcends his purely individual perspective to ‘view [his] actions on specific purposes as expressions of universal purposes.’85 In a similar vein, Frederick Neuhouser suggests that, when describing the relationship between the individual and ethical life, Hegel is not implying an ontological identity that dissolves the individual into the universal. He is proposing a practical identity, so ‘that by participating in institutions of Sitlichkeit [i.e. ethical life], social members arrive at an intuition of themselves; they are able to perceive who they are by looking at their real existence in the world.’86 For Hegel, being is always linked to activity, since subjectivity can only be realized through action. Intersubjectivity means interaction; it is the network of interactions and practices that creates and sustains the structures of ethical life where individuals have, as Hegel puts it, a ‘sense of self’87 and in and through which they realize their concrete freedom. Reciprocally, the institutions of ethical life are not objectivities imposed from above; they live and achieve actuality only in and through the actions and beliefs of the individuals ‘composing’ them, which requires that individuals believe and trust in them—which they do if they are ‘subjectively at home’ in their positions within ethical life.88 The social world is prior to and independent of the will of any of its individual members, but, as Neuhouser clarifies,89 the institutions that compose it cannot be maintained and reproduced without the widespread, voluntary participation of those individuals. A State whose subjects do not believe nor trust in it is a weak State, doomed to dissolution.90 This reciprocity between individuals and the collective mind of the objective spirit, conceived in terms of practical identity, clarifies the relation between modern subjectivity and the political for Hegel. It also explains why the political can be understood to be the highest sense of a communal ethical life: it entails individual subjectivities realizing themselves through the intersubjective relations that simultaneously realize the freedom of all. This should not be understood as an idealization of how relations should be,91 but rather as a description of what grounds the modern project of political freedom. It also explains how modern individuals gain their sense of selfhood from shared values, experiences, and expectations that are

208  Antonio Gómez Ramos embodied in public institutions. It is because of this that, as Charles Taylor put it in a recent interview, when those institutions change, those change reverberate within us: they can seem to endanger the very meanings of our lives. It is partly for this reason that events in the political world can devastate us so intimately, striking us with the force of a breakup or a death.92 This demonstrates the emotional implications that can emanate from and so are intimately tied to Hegel’s conception of the relationship between modern subjectivity and the political. But there still remains the question of whether subjectivity can be reduced to a reciprocal relationship with objective ethical life. Although Hegel argues that the State—as the highest ethical institution—penetrates all spheres of ethical life, there is still the specifically modern question of the social sphere that, as Rousseau saw, is different from the political and ethical and, in its difference, may be alienating. It is also not clear whether subjectivity in the modern world can be reduced without remainder to the social roles that individuals occupy in ethical life and with which they identify. In other words, can there be a real subjectivity distinct from its role in ethical life that cannot be occupied by that role? We now turn to Heidegger to address this question.

Authenticity, Sociality, and the Political: Heidegger If we were to reformulate Aristotle’s ‘zoon politikon’ in a Heideggerian idiom, we could choose, among many others, this expression from Being and Time: ‘Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with,’ or ‘Dasein’s Beingin-the-world is essentially constituted by Being-with.’93 By this, Heidegger means that no individual can be conceived of as existing primarily alone for himself, before happening to encounter other individuals and things in the world. On the contrary, ‘human being is a shared social activity,’94 and individuality is constituted in and through the relation to other individuals and things. Certainly, terms like ‘man’ and ‘individual’ very rarely appear in Being and Time, and Heidegger was very dismissive of the notion of subjectivity, which he associates with Descartes and the old metaphysics that he intends to ‘destroy.’95 But if he avoids using terms like man and citizen, it is not because he is not dealing with what we usually call human being. It is because such terms are categories that are valid on an ontic level, which is secondary to a more primary, ontological one—that level where ‘man,’ ‘woman,’ or ‘person’ are, first of all, Dasein, being-there, that entity whose essence lies in its existence and that ‘is in each case mine.’96 He is looking upon ‘man,’ upon the ‘individual,’ from an existential perspective. If the question for us so far has concerned the subjectivity of man, his parallel question concerns ‘the “Who” of Dasein.’97

How Political Is the Self?  209 Thus, at this ontological level of an existential analysis, when Heidegger shows Dasein to be primarily in relation to others and to things in the world, we find again the tension between being oneself and being in a relation to others in a network of practices and significance. This parallels the tension in Hegel between individual subjectivity and the concrete freedom achieved in ethical life. This casts a new light on the question that resulted from the previous section as to whether subjectivity can be reduced without remainder to its social role in ethical life. In this section, I shall engage with how Heidegger’s existential analysis redefines the sociality of man through the notions of ‘being-with’ (Mitdasein) and the ‘They’ (das Man) in order to discuss how his characterization of the relationship between Dasein and the They affects the question of subjectivity and the political. I first analyze how Heidegger outlines and evaluates the primacy of the social world. Whereas some commentators98 argue that this social world is a network of significance where Dasein is constituted, others99 envisage a space of leveling and anonymity that impedes Dasein from authentically being itself. Since Heidegger offers arguments for both sides, I will analyze what he means by authenticity and how it relates to Dasein’s relation to itself and to others. This will show that Heidegger describes this new relation of authenticity as entailing ‘a modification of the “they.” ’100 Finally, I will discuss what this existential modification means for the practical and theoretical identity of individuals, the political significance it can have, and how far it affects political subjectivity. Adopting an anti-Cartesian vein that seeks to refute the notion of a preexisting isolated consciousness, Heidegger emphasizes the primacy of the public world for the constitution of the self. Dasein is essentially a Being-inthe-world, a Being-with that is constituted by its involvement in practices that presuppose the presence of others. ‘The first thing that is given [to Dasein] is the common world.’101 Not in its ‘inner experiences,’102 but in encountering others environmentally, ‘in what it does, uses, expects, avoids’103 in respect to others. In being with and towards others, there is thus a relationship of being [Seinverhältnis] from Dasein to Dasein. But it might be said that this relationship is already constitutive for one’s own Dasein, which, in its own right, has an understanding of Being and which thus relates itself towards Dasein.104 With this, Heidegger is not far from Hegel in explaining how individuals achieve an accomplished subjectivity in ethical life. Some commentators have gone so far as to state that Heidegger’s being-with ‘can be understood according to the Hegelian model of the synthesis of social substance by mutual recognition.’105 Up to a point, this is certainly so, although Hegel’s ethical life is articulated by an institutional structure that is much more determined than Heidegger’s notions of being-with and being-in-the-world. Nevertheless, the

210  Antonio Gómez Ramos significance of both ethical life and being-in-the-world is similar—both create the space where individuals (or Daseins) dwell106 and where they play social roles that give them a place in the world and an understanding of themselves.107 We saw earlier that the institutions of ethical life could exist and hold only if individuals believed and trusted in them, sustaining them with their actions. Similarly, everyday life and the common world are not a separated substance, but a network of normed practices that rule individuals lives and where, as Heidegger says, ‘lies that “constancy” of Dasein which is closest to us.’108 This is so because we are ‘norm-following creatures.’109 With this, everyday life mirrors language where conformity to rules allows speakers to express themselves and to understand one another, while, conversely, following the rules and norms reinforces the system of language. This appears to affirm Hegel’s claim regarding the positive reciprocity of particular individual and universal substance. But Heidegger also focuses on a negative side of sociality. Heidegger was aware that conformity to rules can ‘degenerate into conformism’110 and, indeed, that this brings out an extremely subtle relationship between the averageness constitutive of intelligibility and the temptation to use norms to cover up the essential unintelligibility of Dasein itself. Averageness hides Dasein’s unsettledness by suppressing all differences of depth or importance.111 It is in the conformism with averageness that the double-sidedness of beingwith shows itself. On the one hand, there is no adherence to social norms without some sort of conformism that allows such norms to rule: that is the common world of being-with. On the other hand, the averageness of conformism produces a leveling effect that conceals Dasein from itself. In §26 of Being and Time, Heidegger links this averageness to a deficient or indifferent mode of relationship between Daseins: ‘Being for, against, or without another, passing one another by, not mattering to one another.’112 He goes on to claim that these modes of being show ‘the characteristic of inconspicuousness and obviousness which belong as much to the everyday Dasein-with of Others within-the-world as to the readiness-to-hand of the equipment with which one is daily concerned.’113 The averageness of social life produces the sort of alienation that so many critics have found in modern social life; an alienation that comes when Dasein as being-with-oneanother is conceived as ‘a summative result of the occurrence of several “subjects,” ’114 and as an ‘ “inconsiderate” being-with “that “reckons” with the Others without seriously “counting on them”, or without wanting to “have anything to do” with them.’115 However, having raised this charge, Heidegger does not proceed to a reconstruction of social life where relations between Daseins could be improved—where they would ‘count on each other,’ instead of ‘reckoning’ with them.116 Rather, he pursues a characterization of everyday common life as the space of ‘the They’ (das Man), where ‘the who of everyday Dasein is not the I myself.’117

How Political Is the Self?  211 In everyday being-oneself Dasein ‘stands in subjection to Others. It itself is not; its Being has been taken away by the Others.’118 Thus, the who of every particular Dasein is replaced by the ‘They.’ This takes various forms, but it comes first as the public environment, where ‘in utilizing the means of transport and making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next.’119 The examples that Heidegger offers are interesting because, from a Hegelian perspective, public means of transport and the media in the public sphere belong materially to those essential structures of the common world to which ‘the subject bears spiritual witness as to its own essence in which it has its sense of self [Selbstgefühl].’120 This reveals a fundamental difference between them: for Hegel, the sociality of ethical life liberates individuals, whereas, for Heidegger, the sociality of the They is a cage, ‘unavoidable but reflectively unredeemable.’121 The They unfolds its dictatorship onto individuals, thereby creating a common bond. As a consequence, Heidegger explains that ‘we take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure, we read as they read, and judge about literature and art as they judge.’122 The They is not a great mass, not even an ‘universal subject which a plurality of subjects have hovering above them’;123 it is rather ‘a free-floating, impersonal construct, a sort of consensual hallucination to which each of us gives up the capacity for genuine self-relation and the leading of an authentically individual life.’124 This has given rise to a debate in the literature between those who see the They as being the source of significance and intelligibility125 and those who claim it entails a dimension of anonymity and depersonalization126 that negates plurality, cancels the pluralistic sharing of deeds and words, and replaces it with unanimity.127 Heidegger provides arguments for both sides. He needs the relationality of beingwith in order to disengage Dasein from an idealistic conception of the subject. This is why being-in-the-world and hence the They are constitutive of Dasein itself: ‘As a primordial phenomenon, it [the They] belongs to Dasein’s positive constitution,’128 and ‘the “They” itself articulates the referential context of significance.’129 But the They is the modern form of the social that Heidegger sees as the space of anonymity, uniformity, and disguise. Dasein is not ‘the “I”, in the sense of my own self, that “am,” but rather the Others, whose way is that of the “they.” ’130 This way of Dasein is not authentic because it entails a mode of being in which Dasein ‘has [not] been taken hold of in its own way.’131 That only happens if Dasein discovers the world in its own way, if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, which is ‘always accomplished as a clearing away of concealment and obscurities, as a breaking up of disguises with which Dasein bars its own way.’132 Rather than following Hegel in outlining the structures that will allow Dasein to be at home-in-the-world, Heidegger affirms authentic Dasein itself by emphasizing what it is for Dasein to exist in distinction from the They despite being part of the They. Like Hegel, Heidegger claims that being authentic is

212  Antonio Gómez Ramos an achievement, but he disagrees that it entails self-realization.133 Rather than affirming oneself through the They, authenticity entails rupture with the overarching norms of the They. This does not, however, mean that Dasein severs all ties with others to try to find itself in isolation.134 One can never give up being a They-self because Dasein is constituted by it through its being a beingwith. Authentic being-one’s-self, concludes Heidegger, ‘does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘They’; it is rather an existentiell modification of the ‘they’—of the they as an essential existentiale.135 Through this modification, Dasein does not necessarily change its practices and its social roles; it does not cease to be a teacher, a spouse, a worker, or a political agent. Such roles, as part of the They, might be defined in purely impersonal terms, but authenticity ‘is a matter of the way in which one relates to one’s roles, not a negation of the roles.’136 Consequently, Dasein relates differently to itself, or, as Heidegger puts it, ‘takes hold of itself in its own way.’137 Dasein moves from ‘the third-person perspective of the They-self to the first person perspective of the authentic self.’138 More could be said on this topic, specifically the way in which the transition to authenticity takes place, but, for the purposes of this chapter, I will focus on clarifying the political implications of this change. When Dasein chooses itself, when it becomes aware of the irreducibility of the first-person perspective that makes it itself, what does it mean for it as a political being and member of a social world that is also a political community? In principle, the ontological analysis of being-in-the-world we have referred to could be followed without regard to the political. Or, rather, the political could be seen as one element among others in the social world of the They that is constitutive of Dasein. Heidegger never refers specifically to the political. However, politics does make an appearance in the late paragraphs of Division II of Being and Time, when Heidegger deals with historicity.139 There, a negative view of the They prevails. Dasein ‘has been submitted to a “world” and exists factically with others. Proximally and for the most part the Self is “lost” in the They.’140 Its possibilities of existence are determined by the They, by its ambiguities and averageness. ‘It understands itself in terms of those possibilities of existence which “circulate” in the average way of interpreting Dasein today.’141 But Dasein, continues Heidegger, comes back to itself in the resolutedness that ‘discloses current factical possibilities of authentic existing, and discloses them in terms of the heritage which that resolutedness . . . takes over.’142 Dasein’s turn to authenticity is then framed within a set of politically loaded terms: fate, history, generation, destiny, heroism: Our fate has been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resolutedness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its ‘generation’ goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein.143

How Political Is the Self?  213 Similarly, we learn that authentic Dasein must, ‘by handing down to itself the possibility it has inherited, take over its own thrownness and be in the moment of vision for its time.’144 Finally ‘the authentic repetition of a possibility of existence that has been—the possibility that Dasein may choose its hero—is grounded in anticipatory resolutedness.’145 Regardless of the expressionist language and his own political decisions,146 two possibilities result from this brief presentation of authentic Dasein. First, Heidegger suggests that a political dimension is inherent to authenticity, since resolutedness, choosing oneself, entails operations such as seeing oneself as being submitted to superior forces of fate, taking over one’s historical heritage, having a vision of one’s own time, and recognizing oneself as a member of a generation which, it is implied, has a crucial mission in history. Authentic Dasein means, therefore, consciously belonging to a political community and consciously being an agent in it. Second, Heidegger seems to relate political authenticity to the individual alone; or, in his words, authenticity is the resolutedness of Dasein confronted with itself—it is not a public issue. At the end of §27, after proposing the existential modification of authenticity, Heidegger speaks of a ‘gap separating the selfsameness of the authentically existing Self from the identity of that I which maintains itself throughout its manifolds experiences.147 This gap is confirmed later, when Heidegger states that ‘Dasein is authentically itself in the primordial individualization of the reticent resolutedness which exacts anxiety of itself. As something that keeps silent, authentic Beingone’s-self is just the sort of thing that does not keep on saying “I.” ’148 On the other hand, ‘in saying “I,” Dasein expresses itself as Being-in-the-world,’149 since ‘when the “I” talks in the natural manner, this is performed by the they-self.’150 The resolution of authenticity remains somehow inwardly to Dasein or, at least, it cannot be publicly expressed—not even when such resolutedness has a political dimension. The authenticity of Dasein does have political significance, but politics remains a personal, private matter of each Dasein. Fascinating as Heidegger’s characterizations of being-in-the world and of authentic Dasein are, his conception of political subjectivity is inconclusive. After all, the best citizen might still be a very anonymous They-self, and it is not decided whether the authentic self ought to be a conscious, responsible citizen rather than a fanatic hero.

Conclusion: How Political is the Self? Both Hegel and Heidegger turn to the political when trying to clarify how the individual subject constitutes itself. In so doing, they offer two different responses to the question of the relationship between subjectivity and the political, man and citizen that was raised by Rousseau and that has since been taken up, more contemporarily, by Balibar. With his notion of ‘ethical life,’ Hegel outlines the structures and institutions needed to allow individuals to fully realize their subjectivity through the intersubjective relations

214  Antonio Gómez Ramos provided by family, civil society, and the State. Crucially, in contrast to Rousseau, Hegel assigns a positive, formative role to social life, but understands that it is the political that is the highest realm in which individuals can realize themselves and recognize one another. As we have seen, however, the reciprocity he insists on between the political universal and individual particularities threatens to identify subjectivity, and hence concrete freedom, with its practical role in ethical life. Heidegger, for his part, sketches a notion of authentic Dasein that not only preserves the self from such identification with its social role, but, through the notion of being-with, also identifies the ambiguity that imbues sociality: it is both constitutive of and alienating for Dasein. Importantly, authenticity—the way Dasein takes hold of itself within the They without ever departing fully from the They—is not inherently political even though it has a political dimension, insofar as its resolutedness implies a decision about one’s historicity and one’s belonging to a generation and a community. Heidegger agrees with Hegel, then, that politics plays a crucial role in the self-achievement of a subject; but, unlike Hegel, he holds that politics is only a particular resolution of each Dasein and so remains private. Their different responses to the question of the relationship between the social and the political are mirrored in their different responses to the question of the relationship between subjectivity and the political. From a Heideggerian perspective, Hegel’s approach to the political subject is too political, leaving no room for a non-political core of subjectivity; whereas, from a Hegelian perspective, Heidegger’s is too personal, in that Dasein remains fundamentally individualistic even when it is socially and politically engaged. While it is tempting to take sides, attempt to mediate their respective positions, and/or offer an alternative that resolves their disagreement, perhaps the best approach—especially if we are to highlight their continuing relevance—is to leave open the impasse between them and to treat it as a stimulus to thinking on the relationship between subjectivity and the political generally and, in particular, the question: how political is the self?

Notes  1 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, translated by Roger Crisp (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000), 1097b.   2 For an overview of the attack on the subject perpetrated by twentieth century (analytical and continental) philosophy, see Franca D’Agostini, Guida alla filosofía degli ultimi trent’anni (Rafaelo Cortina: Milano, 1996).   3 Structuralism played a crucial role in the development of this antisubjective perspective. See, for instance, Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Weidenfeld and Nicholson: London, 1966), p. 247.  4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences (Vintage: London, 1994), p. 386.   5 Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005), pp. 1–27.

How Political Is the Self?  215  6 Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001), pp. 85–92. See also Dieter Freundlieb, Henrich and Contemporary Philosophy: The Return to Subjectivity (Routledge: New York, 2003), pp. 33–69.   7 ‘Inescapability’ translates ‘Unhintergehbarkeit’ in Manfred Frank, Die Unhintergehbarkeit der Individualität (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1991).   8 Dan Zahavi, Subjectitvity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2008).   9 See, for instance, Dan Zahavi, ‘You, Me and We: The Sharing of Emotional Experiences,’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 22, n. 1–3, 2015, pp. 84–101. 10 An overview can be found in Donald E. Hall, Subjectivity (Routledge: New York, 2004). 11 Etienne Balibar, ‘ “Rights of Man” and “Rights of the Citizen’ ”: The Modern Dialectic of Equality and Freedom,’ in: Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx (Routledge: New York, 1993), pp. 44–59. 12 For Rousseau, I will refer to Emile, or On Education, translated by Allan Bloom, (Basic Books: New York, 1979), and The Social Contract, translated by Christopher Betts (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1994). 13 Hegel’s political subjectivity has been discussed by Jean-François Kervegan, ‘Les conditions de la subjectivité politique: Incidences du concept hegelian de “Politische Gesinnung,” ’ Les etudes Philosophiques, vol. 99, 1988, pp. 99–110. As for Heidegger, I am aware that he would reject any talk of ‘subjectivity,’ but my point is that his analysis of Dasein can be read as providing a conception of subjectivity that has a political dimension. 14 Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit) is fully outlined in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, translated by H. B. Nisbet, edited by Allen Wood (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1991). 15 See, Dean Moyar, Hegel’s Conscience (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2014); Robert Pippin, Hegel on Self‑Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2011); and Michael Quante, Hegels Erbe (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 2004). A defence of Hegel against long-standing criticisms can be found in Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2000). 16 See Michael Theunissen, ‘Verdrängte Intersubjektivität in Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts,’ in: Hegels Philosophie des Rechts, edited by Dieter Henrich and Horst Horstmann (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 1982), pp. 317–380; and Axel Honneth, Suffering from Indeterminacy: An Attempt at a Reactualization of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Van Gorcum: Amsterdam, 2000). 17 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Blackwell: Oxford, 1962), pp. 149–168. 18 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1097b. 19 Ibid., 1094b and 1096a. 20 Not only were women excluded, but so were non-white subjectivities. Joan Scott points out that the first historical reaction came from Olympia de Gouges’s Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (‘The Uses of Imagination: Olympia de Gouges in the French Revolution,’ in: Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Harvard University Press: Harvard, 1997), pp. 19–56). Sexual and gender-related issues are, of course, crucial to the question of political subjectivity, but my approach in this chapter will be gender-neutral. There are three reasons for this: first, the authors I deal with—with the exception of Balibar—are male-biased, though not gender-blind. Second, doing full justice to this issue would enormously extend the chapter beyond what is editorially permitted. Finally, I am exploring how the concept

216  Antonio Gómez Ramos of subjectivity relates to the concept of the political. The conclusions drawn are applicable to both genders. 21 Etienne Balibar, ‘ “Rights of Man” and “Rights of the Citizen,” ’ in: Masses, Classes, Ideas, p. 44. 22 Ibid., p. 40. 23 Ibid., p. 40. 24 Hannah Arendt has shown how the Stateless refugees deprived of citizenship in the aftermath of the First World War were reduced to sheer life. In other words, because they were not citizens of any State, they could not claim any human rights at all. See The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest: New York, 1976), pp. 291–299. 25 Ibid., p. 297. 26 Balibar, ‘ “Rights of Man” and “Rights of the Citizen,” ’ p. 44. 27 Ibid., p. 46. For Balibar, this is the erroneous interpretation of the Declaration. 28 Ibid., pp. 50–56. This notion of equaliberty is Balibar’s main contribution in the essay ‘ “Rights of man” and “Rights of the citizen.” ’ A full discussion of it would consider his comments on the ways in which questions of gender and property decisively effect political subjectivity. Interesting as it is, it lies beyond the scope of this chapter. 29 Rousseau, Emile, or On education, p. 39. 30 That is precisely Aristotle’s point at the end of Book X of the Nichomachean Ethics, 1179b‑1181b. 31 It is interesting to note that the examples given by Rousseau in this passage are taken from Sparta, Rome, and Plato’s Republic, that is, Ancient Greece. Frederick Neuhouser argues that this leaves open the possibility that we might find a compatible conception of ‘citizen’ and ‘man’ in a redeemed version of modernity (Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love: Evil, Rationality and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2008), p. 20). 32 Frederick Neuhouser, ‘Jean Jacques Rousseau and the Origins of Autonomy,’ Inquiry, vol. 54, 2011, pp. 478–493 (p. 480). 33 Rousseau, Emile, p. 40. 34 Ibid., p. 40. 35 Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love, p. 19. Neuhouser is aware that most interpretations of Rousseau see his Emile and his political philosophy as being independent and conflicting projects, rather than complementary ones. However, he argues that each implicitly imposes its constrictions on the other (Ibid., p. 23). 36 Alessandro Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity. A Study of the Ethical and Social Thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau (State University of New York Press: New York, 1993), p. 37. 37 This was the main thesis of Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, translated by Peter Gay (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1989). 38 Ferrara, Modernity and Authenticity, p.  137. Ferrara makes clear that Rousseau actually has in mind the Parisian society of the eighteenth century, where he encountered all the evils that afflicted man after he abandoned the state of nature. 39 Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-love, p. 23. 40 Ibid., p. 23. 41 Rousseau, Social Contract, p. 59. 42 Georg W. F. Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy and Its Relation to Positive Sciences of Law, translated by T. M. Knox (University of Pennsylvania Press: Pennsylvania, 1975), p. 134. 43 Robert Pippin has insisted on the importance of the idea of achievement for an understanding of Hegel’s notion of subjectivity (Hegel on Self-consciousness, pp. 15–20, and Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, p. 20).

How Political Is the Self?  217 44 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §260. 45 Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, p. 73. 46 Ibid., p. 73. 47 Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, p. 26; Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §153R. 48 Moyar’s Hegel’s Conscience provides a detailed account of the role that conscience plays in the whole of Philosophy of Right, not only in the section on Morality. 49 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §187. 50 Ibid., §187A. 51 Ibid., §187A. 52 For a discussion of the role of social institutions in education, see Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2000), pp. 148–165. 53 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §187A. 54 Ibid., §258. 55 This distinction is neatly made in Neuhouser, Foundations, pp. 18–27. 56 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §146. 57 Ibid., §146. 58 Ibid., §147. I modify here the English translation by Nisbet, who renders Selbstgefühl as ‘self-awareness’ whereas ‘sense of self’ is more accurate and closer to the German Gefühl. I also follow Neuhouser’s correction of Nisbet’s translation of the last sentence. Nisbet translates ‘A relationship which is immediate and closer than even. . .’, which does not reflect Hegel’s language. See Neuhouser, Foundations, p. 304, n. 21. 59 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §184. 60 Neuhouser, Foundations, p. 88. 61 Ibid., p. 88. 62 Ibid., p. 88. 63 For the centrality of Rousseau in Hegel, see Neuhouser, Foundations, pp. 55–81, and Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1987), pp. 92–108. 64 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §182A. 65 Ibid., §185. 66 Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses (Harper: New York, 1986), p. 199. Quoted by Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, p. 219. 67 This expression, in German ‘im-Anderen-bei-sich-selbst-zu sein’ is frequent in the Philosophy of Right as the expression of concrete freedom. For instance, see Philosophy of Right, §7A. 68 Hegel was very aware that this task was already almost impossible in the modern economy, which produces wealth, but also poverty and a rabble that it is not able to integrate. See Philosophy of Right, §244–245. 69 Michael Theunissen, ‘The Repressed Intersubjectivity in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,’ p. 12, in: Hegel and Legal Theory, edited by Drucilla Cornell and Michael Rosenfeld (Routledge: New York, 1991), pp. 3–64. 70 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §273N. 71 Ibid., §145. 72 Theunisen, ‘The Repressed Intersubjectivity,’ p. 12. 73 Ibid., p. 12. 74 Axel Honneth, Leiden an Unbestimmtheit (Reklam: Frankfurt, 2001), pp. 102–182. 75 Ibid., p. 28. 76 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §260. 77 Ibid., §260. 78 Ibid., §260A. 79 Neuhouser, Foundations, p. 294, n. 48.

218  Antonio Gómez Ramos  80 Moyar, Hegel’s Conscience, p. 191.  81 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §268.   82 Ibid., §268R.  83 Moyar, Hegel’s Conscience, 194.   84 Ibid., p. 191.   85 Ibid., p. 193.  86 Neuhouser, Foundations, p. 107.  87 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §147.   88 On the reciprocity of the individual and the collective, see, Kervegan, ‘Les conditions de la subjectivité politique,’ p. 104.  89 Neuhouser, Foundations, p. 103.   90 Ibid., pp. 211–213.   91 Hegel explicitly rejects any attempt to design a utopia or to outline how the State should be. See the Preface to Philosophy of Right, pp. 20–21.   92 Joshua Rothman, ‘How to Restore Your Faith in Democracy,’ The New Yorker, November 11, 2016: twww.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/howto-restore-your-faith-in-democracy (Accessed January 18, 2017).  93 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 156.   94 Hubert Dreyfus, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (MIT Press: Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 144.  95 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 41–49.   96 Ibid., p. 67.   97 Ibid., p. 114.  98 Hubert Dreyfus, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World, pp.  141–173; Theodore Schatzki, ‘Early Heidegger on Sociality,’ in: A Companion to Heidegger, edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (Blackwell: Oxford, 2007), pp. 233–247.   99 Frederick A. Olafson, Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1994); Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of a Fundamental Ontology (State University of New York Press: Albany, 1991). 100 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 168. 101 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, translated by Theodore Kisiel (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1985), p. 246. 102 Dreyfus, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World, p. 145. 103 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 119. 104 Ibid., p. 162. 105 Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Mass., 2002), p. 310. 106 Robert Wood, ‘Heidegger’s “in-der-Welt-Sein” and Hegel’s “Sittlichkeit,” ’ Existentia, vol. 21, 2011, 255–274 (p. 258). 107 For an interpretation of Heidegger’s Being in the World as role‑playing, see Dreyfus, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World, pp. 158–163. 108 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 166. 109 Dreyfus, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World, p. 153. 110 Ibid., p. 157. 111 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, p. 246. 112 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 158. 113 Ibid., p. 158. 114 Ibid., p. 163. 115 Ibid., p. 163. 116 This may have to do with the absence of the Other in Heidegger’s conception of being-with. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, A Century of Philosophy: Gadamer in Conversation with Ricardo Dottori (Continuum: New York, 2006), p. 23. However, this point, interesting as it is, lies beyond the scope of this chapter. 117 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 156.

How Political Is the Self?  219 118 Ibid., p. 164. 119 Ibid., p. 164. 120 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §147. 121 The comparison is made by Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, p. 217. 122 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 164. 123 Ibid., p. 128. 124 Stephen Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time (Routledge: New York, 1996), p. 68. 125 Theodore Schatzki, ‘Early Heidegger on Sociality,’ pp. 239, 244. 126 Frederick A. Olafson, ‘Heidegger a la Wittgenstein or Coping with Professor Dreyfus,’ Inquiry, vol. 37, n. 1, 1994, pp. 45–64. 127 Jacques Taminiaux, Heidegger and the Project of a Fundamental Ontology (State University of New York Press: Albany, 1991), pp. 129–133. 128 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 167. 129 Ibid., p. 167. 130 Ibid., p. 167. 131 Ibid., p. 167. 132 Ibid., p. 167. 133 Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, p. 73. 134 Schatzki, ‘Early Heidegger on Sociality,’ p. 238. 135 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 168. In the very specific language of Being and Time, ‘existentiell’ refers to an individual’s understanding of his or her own way to be, to his or her role, while ‘existential’ refers to the ontological structures of existence, to what is to be a Dasein. See Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 44, and Dreyfus, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-World, p. 20. 136 Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, p. 73. 137 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 167. 138 Jesús Adrián Escudero, ‘Heidegger on Selfhood,’ American International Journal of Contemporary Research, vol. 4, n. 2, 2014, pp. 6–17 (p. 7). 139 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 434–438. 140 Ibid., p. 435. 141 Ibid., p. 435. 142 Ibid., p. 435. 143 Ibid., p. 436. 144 Ibid., p. 437. 145 Ibid., p. 437. 146 Heidegger’s involvement in National Socialism is a crucial issue, but it is not at stake here. As Dreyfus summarily puts it, ‘if one believed that the issue for Heidegger’s generation was whether or not to support the Nazis, nothing in Being and Time suggests that the situation demanded a positive response. Of course, nothing suggests that it required a negative response either’ (Heidegger’s Beingin-the-World, p. 361n). 147 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 168. 148 Ibid., pp. 369–370. 149 Ibid., p. 368. 150 Ibid., p. 368.

Notes on the Contributors

Antonio Gómez Ramos is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain. He specializes in post-Kantian philosophy, hermeneutics, philosophy of history, and theories of subjectivity. He is the author of three monographs, Between the Lines: Gadamer and the Relevance of Translation (2000), A Plea for the Centaur: Actuality of the Philosophy of History (2001), and Being-one-self like no-one: A Philosophy of Subjectivity (2015), and numerous articles on German idealism, Dilthey, Hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He has translated various works by Gadamer, Dilthey, and Jameson and is the Spanish translator of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. He is currently researching the relationship between subjectivity, emotions, and social structures. Emma Ingala is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theoretical Philosophy and Vice-Dean of Academic Organization in the Faculty of Philosophy at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. She specializes in poststructuralist thought, political anthropology, and psychoanalysis. She has published numerous articles in journals including Isegoria, Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Daimon, and Thémata, and is the Principal Investigator for the international research group ‘Crisis of representation/Representations of Crisis,’ a member of the international research group ‘Metaphysics, Critique, and Politics,’ directed by Professor José Luis Pardo (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain), and the secretary of the journal LOGOS. She has also been an invited Visiting Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London and University of California, Berkeley. Robert P. Jackson is Lecturer in Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University, England, where he teaches political theory and neo-Gramscian approaches to international politics. He previously taught in European Studies at King’s College London, England (2011–12), where he completed a Ph.D. on the problem of subjectivity in Marxism in 2013. He specializes in critical theory with particular emphasis on the thought of Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács. He is co-editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Revisiting Gramsci’s Laboratory: Politics, Philosophy,

222  Notes on the Contributors and History in the Prison Notebooks (Brill publications, Historical Materialism book series) that showcases recent innovative Gramscian scholarship. He has published in Science & Society, the International Gramsci Journal, and Gramsciana: Rivista internazionale di studi su Antonio Gramsci. He also participated in the Ghilarza Summer Schools 2014 and 2016, advanced philological courses with international Gramsci scholars, and co-organized the international Gramsci conference at King’s College London, England in June 2015. Katarzyna Marciniak is Professor of Transnational Studies in the English Department at Ohio University, USA, and specializes in the discourses of immigration and foreignness. As Research Fellow, she is affiliated with the Department of English Studies, University of South Africa. She is the author of Alienhood: Citizenship, Exile, and the Logic of Difference (University of Minnesota Press: 2006) and Streets of Crocodiles: Photography, Media, and Postsocialist Landscapes in Poland (Intellect/University of Chicago Press: 2010), co-editor of Transnational Feminism in Film and Media (Palgrave Macmillan: 2007), Protesting Citizenship: Migrant Activisms (Routledge: 2014), Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent (State University of New York Press: 2014), and Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy (Routledge: 2016). She also co-edited a special issue of Feminist Media Studies on ‘Transcultural Mediations and Transnational Politics of Difference’ (2009), and a special issue on Immigrant Protest’ for Citizenship Studies (2013). She is Series Editor of Global Cinema, a new book series from Palgrave Macmillan. Yoel Mitrani is a doctoral candidate in the Political Theory program at Sciences Po Paris, France, having previously completed his B.A. (magna cum laude) and M.A. (summa cum laude) in philosophy and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He has also held visiting posts at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and at the Modern European History Research Centre at the University of Oxford. His doctoral thesis explores the history of the concept of ‘genius’ in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and focuses on the uses of the concept in debates concerning politics, natural philosophy, and art criticism in Britain and France. Stephen A. Noble lectures at the Université de Paris-Est–Créteil, France, and is an associate member of the Department of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He specializes in twentieth-century European philosophy, especially the phenomenological movement and its development in France. He has published two books: Silence et langage. Genèse de la phénoménologie de Merleau-Ponty au seuil de l’ontologie [Silence and Language: The Development of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology up to the Threshold of Ontology] (Brill, 2014); and La conscience perceptive. La philosophie de Merleau-Ponty au tournant des

Notes on the Contributors  223 années 1940. Suivi d’une présentation de textes inédits de et sur Merleau-Ponty [Perceptual Consciousness: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy in the Pivotal Years of the 1940s, followed by a Presentation of Unpublished Texts by and about Merleau-Ponty] (Zeta Books, 2014). He is also the author of numerous book chapters and scholarly articles that have appeared in international publications including the Revue internationale de philosophie. Gavin Rae is Conex Marie Skłodowska-Curie Experienced Research Fellow at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain where he is the principal investigator for the research project: ‘Sovereignty and Law: Between Ethics and Politics.’ He was previously an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt where he also held an Andrew Mellon Post-doctoral Fellowship. He specializes in post-Kantian philosophy with particular emphasis on ontology, socio-political philosophy, and ethics. He has published three monographs, Realizing Freedom: Hegel, Sartre, and the Alienation of Human Being (Palgrave Macmillan: 2011), Ontology in Heidegger and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan: 2014), and The Problem of Political Foundations in Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas (Palgrave Macmillan: 2016), and numerous articles in international journals including Comparative and Continental Philosophy, Contemporary Political Theory, Critical Horizons, Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy, History of the Human Sciences, Human Studies, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Journal of International Political Theory, Sartre Studies International, and Sophia. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of London (Royal Holloway), England and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Piotr Sawczyński is a doctoral candidate at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and a Tokyo Foundation Junior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, England. He specializes in contemporary critical thought with particular emphasis on the influence of Judaic thought on the problem of political subjectivity. He has published in the international journal Politeja and presented his work at numerous international conferences in Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Liesbeth Schoonheim is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Leuven, writing her Ph.D. dissertation on the relationship between tragedy and politics in the work of Hannah Arendt. Her doctoral research is funded by FWO-Research Flanders. She was a visiting student researcher at the University of California, Berkeley in the Autumn of 2010 with John Searle; at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in the Summer of 2016 with PD Paula Diehl; at Oxford University in the Autumn of 2016 with Lois McNay; and at DePaul University in the Winter of 2017 with Peg Birmingham. Besides numerous book reviews

224  Notes on the Contributors (in, amongst others, Krisis and Tijdschrift voor Filosofie), she has published ‘The Impotence of the New: Political Change in an Age of Invisible Ideology’ in Ethical Perspectives (2015), and (with Marta Resmini) ‘Democracy and its Disfigurements. An Interview with Nadia Urbinati’ in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie (2016). Surti Singh is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt and a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. She specializes in twentieth century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Aesthetics, and Feminism. Her recent work explores issues in aesthetics from the vantage point of early critical theory; theories of the image and the imaginary within the framework of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and social theory; and feminist and postcolonial approaches to subjectivity. Her work has appeared in The Aesthetic Ground of Critical Theory: New Readings of Benjamin and Adorno (Rowman and Littlefield: 2015), and New Forms of Revolt: Essays on Kristeva’s Intimate Politics (State University of New York Press: 2017).

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Index

abjection, 6, 113, 115 – 19, 121, 123 – 27, 129 – 33, 227, 230, 232, 235 Adorno, Theodor, 6, 113 – 15, 124 – 31, 133 – 34, 224 – 25, 234, 243 Agamben, Giorgio, 75 – 77, 82 – 89, 225, 232, 239 alienation, 154, 198, 201, 205, 210, 241 alterity, 42, 57, 59, 63, 65, 68, 70 – 71, 94, 236 aporias, 6, 93 – 94, 107, 109, 231 Arendt, Hannah, 29 – 33, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43, 45 – 51, 53, 216, 223, 226 – 28, 230 – 32, 234 – 35, 240, 243 – 45 art, 7, 91, 94, 115 – 16, 118, 120 – 21, 124 – 27, 130, 159, 162, 175, 177 – 78, 182 – 84, 186 – 88, 190 audience, 35, 50, 96 – 97, 104, 162, 178, 180 – 81 authenticity, 208 – 9, 212 – 14, 216, 232 autonomy, 124, 128 – 31, 137, 142, 157, 216 Balibar, Étienne, 199 – 200, 213, 215 – 16, 227 being-in-the-world, 8, 208 – 13, 218 – 19 Benjamin, Walter, 30, 86 – 89, 225, 227 bodies, 17 – 18, 36, 39 – 40, 42 – 44, 48 – 50, 52, 57, 93, 95 – 96, 99, 101, 103 – 4, 106, 120 – 21, 129 – 30; foreign, 92, 94 – 96, 99, 107; maternal, 118, 127, 130; political, 42, 201 borders, 19, 99 – 100, 102 – 6, 108 – 9, 118, 231, 238 Butler, Judith, 5, 35 – 36, 40 – 47, 50 – 53, 229, 244

catastrophe, 76 – 79, 83, 85 – 86, 114 – 15, 244 Chanter, Tina, 122 – 23, 131 – 33, 226 – 27, 230 citizen, 8, 14, 18, 21, 27, 43, 65, 91 – 93, 95, 97, 162, 198 – 204, 208, 213, 216 city-state, 13, 23 – 24 civil society, 140, 149 – 50, 203 – 7, 214 common sense, 136, 142 – 43, 148 – 49, 151, 157, 231 consciousness, 7, 59, 116, 138, 141, 145 – 46, 206 critical theory, 115, 129, 131, 133 – 34, 221, 224, 226, 243 Dasein, 8, 198, 208 – 15, 219; Authentic, 213 – 14 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 92 – 94, 100, 108 – 9, 231 disgust, 117 – 18, 121, 123 – 24, 132, 238 economy, 39, 69, 89, 97, 99, 102 – 3, 105, 140, 142 – 43, 225 emotions, 64, 97, 179 – 83, 186, 188, 221 essence, 1, 37 – 38, 40, 70, 103, 144, 204, 206, 208, 211, 236 ethical demand, 5, 63, 65 ethical life, 8, 198, 201 – 10, 213 – 15 ethical relation, 55 – 56, 58 – 63, 65 exclusion, 22, 41, 45 – 46, 93, 115 – 16, 129, 131 existence, 16, 18, 43, 45, 61, 64, 78, 121, 129, 164 – 65, 199, 204, 208, 212 – 13, 219 experience, 15, 18, 23, 27 – 28, 30, 57 – 58, 79, 89, 114, 118 – 19, 122, 129, 144, 149 – 51, 182 expression, 4, 36 – 37, 64, 66, 118, 142, 144, 147, 180 – 81, 207 – 8, 217

248 Index fabrication, 13, 15, 30 failure, 55 – 56, 63 – 64, 66, 69, 126, 130 family, 22, 39, 98, 100, 123, 203 – 6, 214 foreigner, 6, 91 – 96, 98, 101, 106, 120 – 21, 124 foreignness, 6, 91 – 95, 97 – 99, 101, 103, 105, 107 – 9, 222 freedom, 16 – 18, 33, 38 – 39, 41, 43, 72 – 73, 114, 129, 163 – 67, 171 – 72, 186 – 87, 198 – 99, 202 – 3, 205, 207; concrete, 202, 207, 209, 214, 217; individual, 202 – 3, 205; political, 36, 188, 201, 207 genius, 7 – 8, 175 – 79, 181 – 93, 195 – 96, 222, 226, 229 – 30, 232, 235, 243 – 44; development of, 183 – 84, 189, 194, 226; history of, 175, 189 – 90, 238; liberal conception of, 8, 189; men of, 178, 186; original, 177, 188 – 89, 191, 241; Romantic, 175 – 77, 189 – 92, 234; scientific, 175 – 76, 184, 188 ghosts, 94, 99 – 100, 108, 227 God, 9, 70 – 71, 75, 77 – 81, 86 – 87, 178, 228, 236 – 37, 243 Gramsci, Antonio, 7, 135, 137, 139, 141, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155 – 57, 221 – 22, 230, 233 – 34 Guido Liguori, 137, 151 – 52, 155 – 56, 230 – 31, 235 Hegel, G. W. F., 8, 87, 115, 169, 198, 201 – 9, 211, 213 – 19, 223, 228, 234, 240, 244 hegemony, 7, 135 – 36, 140 – 41, 143, 146, 148 – 49, 151 – 52, 154, 243 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 9, 25, 32, 162, 197 – 98, 201, 208 – 15, 218 – 19, 223, 232, 234, 236, 239 – 41, 243 – 44 history, 21 – 23, 25 – 27, 56 – 57, 64 – 66, 83, 87, 89, 172, 179, 212 – 13, 218, 222 – 23, 225, 234, 236 – 38; of philosophy, 83, 192, 194, 223, 231, 233 Honig, Bonnie, 33, 36, 39, 47, 49 – 51, 92, 107, 234, 245 horror, 113, 115 – 19, 121, 124, 129, 131 – 32, 163, 167, 235 identity, 2 – 3, 20, 23 – 24, 36, 40, 49, 93, 103, 108, 117 – 18, 123, 129 – 31, 199, 205, 207 ideology, 36, 136 – 37, 141, 143, 148, 154, 167 – 68, 241

imagination, 8, 120, 175, 178 – 81, 184, 192, 215, 235, 243 – 44 individuality, 22, 135, 140, 143 – 45, 147, 186, 200, 203, 205, 208 Infinity, 57 – 58, 60, 62 – 63, 70 – 71, 236 Israel, 5, 56, 64 – 68, 72, 84, 222, 237 Judaism, 56, 64 – 67, 72, 76 – 77, 79 – 81, 85 – 89, 232, 242 justice, 32, 49, 55, 59 – 63, 65 – 66, 69 – 70, 100, 107, 215, 231, 240 – 41 Kabbalah, 76, 79, 82, 86 – 88, 228, 232, 239, 242 knowledge, 57, 60, 114, 126, 139 – 40, 142, 146, 153, 163, 176, 182, 184 – 85, 189, 203, 239 Kristeva, Julia, 93, 113 – 23, 126, 129 – 33, 235 labor, 15, 18, 30, 38, 95, 102 – 5, 108, 127, 145, 184, 204, 238 law, 4 – 5, 13 – 14, 16 – 23, 25, 27 – 32, 69, 72 – 73, 133, 202 – 4, 207, 223, 225 – 26, 228, 230 – 31, 234 Lefort, Claude, 160, 169 – 70, 172 – 73, 236, 238, 241 – 42 legislation, 13, 16, 18 – 19, 30 legitimacy, 13, 16, 26 – 27, 89, 128, 228 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 55, 69 – 72, 223, 231 – 32, 240 liberty, 175 – 76, 179, 186, 190 – 91, 200, 235 life, 15 – 18, 36, 38 – 39, 42 – 43, 48, 50 – 51, 96, 98, 100 – 101, 117 – 18, 168, 201, 203 – 4, 226 – 27, 232 – 33 Luria, Isaac, 6, 76 – 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 228 Marx, Karl, 108, 137 – 39, 141, 143 – 45, 148, 152 – 56, 160, 162, 167 – 71, 215, 221, 227, 231, 237, 243 masses, 36, 136, 139, 142, 144 – 46, 149, 152 – 53, 211, 215 – 16, 227 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 7, 160 – 73, 222 – 23, 234, 236, 238, 240, 242, 244 messianic, 75 – 82, 85 – 86, 89, 228, 232 – 33 Mill, John Stuart, 175, 177, 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 189 – 91, 193 – 96, 230, 232 – 33, 238 – 39, 241, 243 mind, 26, 48, 70 – 71, 82, 94, 168, 180, 183 – 85, 187, 191, 216, 218, 226, 236, 240 mummification, 149 – 50, 157

Index  249 nations, 25, 63 – 64, 67, 71 – 72, 92, 94 – 95, 101 – 2, 120 – 21, 124, 180, 189, 236, 243 nature, 14 – 15, 17, 20 – 21, 23, 40, 44, 48, 113 – 14, 126 – 28, 147 – 48, 175 – 79, 181 – 84, 188 – 89, 191, 193 necessity, 15 – 16, 18, 30, 38 – 39, 44, 48, 62 – 63, 69, 120, 140, 185, 237, 244 negativity, 76 – 80, 82 – 86, 115, 203 nomos, 5, 13 – 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25 – 29, 31, 33, 244 norms, 1, 43, 45, 66, 129, 149, 201, 203, 210 nothing, 6, 19, 21, 28, 37, 68, 76 – 80, 82, 125, 163 – 64, 206, 219 nothingness, 76 – 83, 85, 89, 99, 159, 164, 171, 242 object, 6, 13 – 15, 20, 58, 114 – 18, 123, 140 – 41, 147, 179 – 83, 204 originality, 164, 177 – 78, 184, 187, 189 – 92, 195, 229, 237, 243 pax Romana, 19 – 20, 26 perception, 102, 160, 163, 171 – 72, 178, 204, 238 performativity, 5, 35, 40, 42 – 45, 47, 49 – 52, 229 personality, 135 – 37, 143, 145 – 47, 150 – 51, 176 persons, 7, 60, 105, 113, 126, 135 – 40, 145 – 46, 177, 181, 184, 186, 191, 202, 205, 208 Phenomenology, 9, 71, 86, 161 – 62, 164 – 67, 171 – 72, 223 – 24, 228, 235 poet of culture, 181, 193 poet of nature, 181 – 83, 188, 193 poetry, 27, 32, 175 – 84, 186, 188, 190, 192 – 94, 233, 236, 239, 243 political actions, 2, 17, 23 – 25, 35, 38 – 39, 43, 145 political community, 14, 17, 25, 27, 29, 200, 212 – 13, 237 political decision, 55, 59, 61, 63, 213 political difference, 9, 237 political subject, 40, 76, 85, 200, 214 political theory, 1, 47, 49, 55, 69, 170, 176, 186, 221, 226, 229, 231, 234, 240, 243 – 44 precarity, 5, 43 – 45 prophets, 83, 176, 178 – 79, 182, 187 – 88 psychoanalysis, 35, 115, 121, 123, 130 – 31, 197, 221, 224, 235

redemption, 5, 55 – 57, 59, 61, 63 – 65, 67 – 69, 71, 73, 75 – 76, 79, 81 – 86, 244 relations, 35 – 37, 41, 56, 59 – 62, 138, 140 – 41, 143 – 46, 150, 159, 161 – 62, 175, 197 – 98, 202, 204 – 5, 207 – 10; intersubjective, 205, 207, 213; social, 7, 57, 59, 62, 69, 138, 142, 144 – 46, 148, 150, 201 relationship: ethical-political, 55 – 56, 60 – 62, 66, 68; subjectivity-political, 3 – 4, 7, 198, 201 religion, 9, 19, 64 – 65, 72, 80, 86, 122, 228, 231, 238, 244 remnant, 76 – 78, 83 – 86, 89, 225 resolutedness, 212 – 14 responsibility, 33, 36, 46 – 49, 52, 55 – 56, 58, 61, 63, 65 – 66, 99 – 100, 107, 226, 231, 235, 239; ethical, 55 – 56, 60, 62 – 63, 66 – 67, 69, 72 revelation, 79 – 81, 179 revolt, 113 – 14, 131, 133, 224, 226 – 27, 230, 235 Revolution, 29, 31 – 33, 48, 51, 123, 131, 192, 225 – 27 rights of the citizen, 199, 215 – 16, 227; of man, 199, 216, 227 Romans, 19 – 23, 25 – 26, 82, 84, 86, 225 Romantics, 175 – 76, 178 – 79, 181, 185, 187 – 88, 191 – 92, 243; British, 175 – 77, 179, 182, 192 – 93 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 8, 48, 198, 200 – 201, 203, 205, 208, 213 – 17, 230, 241 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7, 137, 159, 169, 171, 241 – 42 Scholem, Gershom, 76 – 83, 85, 87 – 89, 242 science, 168, 175, 177, 180 – 83, 186 – 87, 217 self, 8, 58, 60, 93, 113 – 14, 116 – 17, 121, 127, 197 – 201, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211 – 17, 219 slavery, 16 – 18, 21, 23, 25 sociality, 140, 145, 197, 208 – 11, 218 – 19 society, 23, 27 – 28, 113, 118 – 19, 130, 135 – 36, 141, 143 – 45, 148, 178 – 79, 181, 186 – 88, 190, 200 – 203, 205 sovereign power, 52, 75 – 77, 84 – 86, 225 space, 5, 13, 17 – 18, 24, 29, 35 – 42, 45 – 46, 92 – 93, 99, 104, 117,

250 Index 209 – 11; of appearance, 5, 13, 35 – 43, 45 – 48; political, 14, 16 – 17; private, 17, 38 speech, 20, 35, 38 – 41, 49, 97, 106, 117, 182 State, 55 – 56, 60, 63 – 69, 72, 80, 82 – 83, 99 – 100, 140 – 41, 146 – 47, 153, 202 – 8, 214, 216, 218, 229; modern, 138, 205 – 6 strangers, 93, 107 – 8, 120 – 21, 124, 233, 235 subaltern groups, 23, 136, 142, 147, 149 – 51, 157 subject, 6 – 7, 37 – 38, 40, 77, 113 – 18, 120 – 21, 127, 129 – 31, 135 – 37, 139 – 40, 142 – 44, 150 – 52, 204 – 5, 210 – 12, 214; new political, 77, 83, 197 subjectivity, 1, 3 – 8, 46, 91 – 95, 117 – 18, 122 – 23, 127 – 28, 135 – 41, 150 – 52, 163 – 65, 167 – 68, 197 – 98, 200 – 209, 213 – 16, 221; free, 202 – 3, 205; individual, 148, 152, 198, 202 – 3, 207, 209 substitution, 58 – 59, 70 – 71 theology, 2 – 3, 75, 86, 194, 226, 232 – 33 the Third, 26, 38, 40, 57, 60 – 63, 70, 176, 232

tikkun, 76, 78 – 79, 85 time, 70 – 72, 81 – 83, 86 – 87, 89, 125 – 26, 128 – 29, 135 – 37, 149 – 51, 162 – 68, 177 – 79, 197 – 98, 208, 212 – 13, 218 – 19, 234; messianic, 77, 82 – 85 totality, 57, 59 – 60, 62, 70, 131, 206, 236 transformation, 13, 118, 135, 137, 141, 145, 147, 149, 152 truth, 38, 57, 168, 178 – 81, 183 – 88, 192 – 93 tsimtsum, 76, 78, 81, 83 – 84, 87 violence, 4 – 5, 13 – 17, 21, 23, 26 – 30, 32, 43, 46, 56, 58, 70, 119 – 21, 129, 226 – 29, 231 vulnerability, 5, 40, 42, 44 – 45, 47, 50 – 52, 227, 239 women, 36 – 37, 99, 105, 122, 132, 195, 199, 215 world, 14 – 16, 18 – 20, 37 – 39, 56 – 59, 61, 64 – 66, 76 – 81, 97, 114, 149 – 50, 164 – 65, 167 – 69, 178 – 84, 187 – 88, 207 – 12 xenophobia, 91 – 93, 105, 107, 234 zoon politikon, 197, 199 – 200, 208