The politics of community 1888570636, 9781888570632

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Introduction

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THE POLITICS OF COMMUNITY

Michael Strysick, Editor

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The Politics of Community

The Politics of Community ©2002, Michael Strysick All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher. The Davies Group, Publishers PO Box 440140 Aurora, CO 80044-0140 USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The politics of community / Michael Strysick, ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-888570-63-6 (alk. paper) 1. Community. 2. Postmodernism—Social aspects. Michael, 1963- . HM756 .P65 2001 307—dc21 2001047229

Published by The Davies Group, Aurora, Colorado, USA Printed in the United States of America 1234567890

I. Strysick,

Introduction

To Karen and Claire

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Transforming Community Michael Strysick Part I: Bridges to Past and Future More Communal Crisis Verena Andermatt Conley

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Cues, Watchwords, Passwords Alphonso Lingis

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Part II: Community, Politics, and the Political Pleasure and Community in Cultural Criticism Dennis A. Foster

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The End of Community and the Politics of Grammar Michael Strysick Part III: Community and French Theory Against Community: Derrida contra Nancy A. J. P. Thomson Fraternal Anonymity: Blanchot and Nancy on Community and Mitsein Robert Mitchell Part IV: Transnational Communities Re-imagining Community and Cultural Difference: Nancy’s Theory and the Context of Immigration in France 109 Jane Hiddleston Haunted Community Linnell Secomb

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Imagining Communities of the “Yet-to-be-Fully-National”: Hong Kong Action Cinema’s Engagement with a Globalized Transnational Imaginary Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park

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Part V: Community and Identity Reclaiming Radical: Hegemony, Rhetoric, Community Astra Taylor The Politics of Sacrifice Naomi Silver

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New Feminist Communities For The Third Wave Kirsten Campbell Bibliography Index

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Introduction

We are invested with an undeniable responsibility at the moment we begin to signify something (but where does that begin?). — Jacques Derrida, “The Politics of Friendship” Overwhelmingly, current critical discourse on community has preferred to look with indignation on the topic. The reason is clear: our failed attempts at community are abundant in our individual, national, and collectively human endeavors. As Maurice Blanchot has remarked in The Writing of the Disaster, we are merely writing and rewriting our failures, responding not to our triumphs but to our very real helplessness. Not only are we unable to explain why such disasters keep happening but also we are unable to formulate how to prevent their continual occurrence. Indeed, we live under the shadow of these past, present, and future failures. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” managed to anticipate the scale of death, destruction, and violence of the twentieth century, mapping the counterpoint of these failures. In time, one word came to name the scale of our century’s worst failure, and the pejorative imprimatur of Auschwitz looms large over any questions of community, as do the seemingly endless eruptions of comparable holocausts, large and small. In time, Theodor Adorno pronounced that there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, increasing the scale of disaster, and narrative expression fell victim as well. Adorno later reconsidered this apocalyptic pronouncement in the “Meditations on Metaphysics” section at the end of Negative Dialectics, offering a hopeful analysis. “[I]t may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems,” Adorno says, exactly because “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man to scream” (362). Adorno’s original comment is thus reversed: there must be poetry after Auschwitz. In fact, a renewed form of expression is demanded. “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind,” he continues, “to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen” (365).

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After all, what language can remain untouched, Adorno asks, by “what the sadists in the camps foretold their victims, ‘Tomorrow you’ll be wiggling skyward as smoke from the chimney’” (362). The so-called postmodern condition, defined by Jean-François Lyotard as incredulity to metanarratives, is the speculative warning of how not to undertake this transformation. In short, no single solution, no single poem, poet, word, or question, can solve our predicament. So, how do we, as Eliot’s poem intones, grow “Lilacs out of the dead land”? (29). Still bound by language, by grammar, by the need to express, Adorno suggests that “After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation” (367, emphasis added). Throughout Negative Dialectics, Adorno opts for what he calls “micrologies,” small-scale logics that do not pretend to find singular solutions. After all, when Eliot claims “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (46), he implies that the only success of our poetic, literary, and critical expression can come through the piecing together of whatever fragments can be found. A programmatic definition would defeat the point, however, for we must speak in the absence of any easy prescription, any definable definitions. This undeniable responsibility requires being aware that the voice of the Other is always already inscribed at the very moment, as Derrida suggests, that “we begin to signify something.” Having had enough of complex forms, of logics, and of metanarratives, we are left with the daunting responsibility of saying something nonetheless. The essays contained in this collection work toward this end, offering a complementary web of “micrologies” on a topic that gained prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the height of poststructural theory in the American academy. Geopolitical and technological changes were challenging existing forms of community, and the time was ripe to consider what role the dismantled Berlin Wall and the nascent presence of computers would have. The publication of Community at Loose Ends (1991), the product of a colloquium on community held at the University of Miami (Ohio) in 1988, was the work of American and French critics engaged in discussing this pressing topic. As the contributors made clear in the pages of this collection, we could expect the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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Around the same time, related titles appeared in translation, including work by those participating in the Miami colloquium and whose work helped initiate the discussions. Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1984), and its critique of metanarratives, and The Differend (1988) suggested that notions of inclusion/exclusion must give way to notions of linking when thinking of community. The Inoperative Community (1991) by Jean-Luc Nancy illuminated points in Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (1988), both demonstrating the presence of an earlier French writer, Georges Bataille, on the topic of community. With the discourse on community now opened up, Benedict Anderson’s important Imagined Communities (1983) was revised for publication in 1991, and issues of nationalism and nation-building entered the picture. Giorgio Agamben’s The Coming Community (1993) pondered the role of identity and ethics in community, and Alphonso Lingis, in The Community of Those Who Have No Community (1994), considered mortality as structuring our relations. Ten years after the publication of Community at Loose Ends, with interest in the topic perhaps even greater, it seemed appropriate to gather together another community of writers on the topic. Despite the best and worst of times we now enjoy, with the proliferating influence of computers in our everyday lives, I should note that were it not for the important Call for Papers (CFP) based at the University of Pennsylvania, the geographic and critical breadth of this book may not have been possible, drawing as it does on scholars from around the world. My intent in organizing this collection was to include new essays by writers originally engaged in the discussion, to reprint several essays that provide context for the debate, and to focus on how critics engage the issues here and now. Part I, titled “Bridges to Past and Future,” contains essays by two critics whose voices were especially prominent on the topic a decade ago and remain so today still. Verena Andermatt Conley’s “More Communal Crisis” is the anchor of this collection, linking directly this book with the work of those critics meeting over a decade ago in Miami, Ohio. Her new essay admonishes that the communal crisis she outlined in her eponymous essay for the Community at Loose Ends collection has not dissipated but merely intensified in new and challenging ways. Alphonso Lingis’ “Cues, Watchwords, Passwords” looks back to his earlier book, to Rousseau, and to the

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sixties as it considers the defining role of communication and language in issues of community today. Part II, “Community, Politics, and the Political,” offers reprints of three essays to help set the context and history of the issues involved in the debate. Dennis A. Foster’s “Pleasure and Community in Cultural Criticism” wonderfully balances theory and practice, considering as it does the ways in which serious concern for social change is helped or hindered by contemporary critical theory. “The End of Community and the Politics of Grammar” attempts to trace the genealogy of the topic of community from Georges Bataille to the present. Ernesto Laclau’s “Power and Representation” demonstrates the argument for praxis in the light of omnipresent political exigencies. Part III, “Community and French Theory,” reinvestigates the contributions of French critical theory to discussions of community. A. J. P. Thomson’s “Against Community: Derrida contra Nancy” analyzes the startling proposition offered by Jacques Derrida in Politics of Friendship; namely, that we should avoid a politics of community and politics per se. Thomson considers the consequences of such a statement. Robert Mitchell’s “Fraternal Anonymity: Blanchot and Nancy on Community” rethinks the Heideggerian philosophy of community. Mitchell’s goal is to distinguish Blanchot and Nancy from one another, a task more difficult than it might seem, for the two authors appear to be in almost complete agreement with one another. Their apparent consensus in fact hides a fundamental disagreement, Mitchell argues, and understanding their divergence from one another helps to clarify what is at stake in a Heideggerian philosophy of community. Part IV, “Transnational Communities,” investigates issues of migration, nationalism, and postcolonialism. Jane Hiddleston’s “Reimagining Community and Cultural Difference: Nancy’s Philosophy and the Context of Immigration in France” assesses the socio-political weight of French theories of community and explores new models capable of mapping cultural differences in multicultural France. Linnell Secomb’s “Haunted Community” considers the possibility of creating community within a nation haunted by colonial wars and racial enmity. The creation of a community that fully recognizes difference, Secomb suggests, requires an acknowledgment of murderous deaths and a consideration of the functioning of grief, the

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role of the spectre, and the modes of friendship possible in a postcolonial context. Secomb explores the possibility of refiguring community through a rethinking of friendship and mourning. Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park’s “Imagining Communities of the ‘Yet-to-be-Fully-National’: Honk Kong Action Cinema’s Engagement with a Globalized Transnational Imaginary” addresses the continuing rise in global visibility, dissemination, consumption, and incorporation of the Hong Kong action cinema as an active part of world cinema, bringing into question the dominance of the national paradigm as the preferred trope in addressing imagined communities and cinematic culture. Given its non-national status, addressing Hong Kong and its culture requires, he suggests, an approach that is not dependent on the national paradigm. Based on this scenario, he frames Hong Kong as a community of the “yet-to-be-fully-national.” Part V, “Community and Identity,” offers three interrelated essays on politics and the politics of identity. Astra Taylor’s “Reclaiming Radical: Hegemony, Rhetoric, Community” explores the ambiguous space community occupies now that it is no longer conceived of as a closed structure with solid foundations. She asks what possibilities exist for discourse now that an absolute and insular community is no longer the ideal. Ultimately, Taylor insists that theorists take questions of gender, desire, inclusion/exclusion, and problems and possibilities of radical politics seriously. Naomi Silver’s “The Politics of Sacrifice” examines the role of sacrifice as inaugurating community, pointing out that the social relations it constructs are linguistic relations both produced and bound by social law and convention. Lastly, Kirsten Campbell’s “Feminist Communities” explores how affective, imaginary, and symbolic identifications construct political subjectivities and collectivities by considering the “emotional ties” which form feminist subjects and relations. This reconsideration of the formation of a feminist “we” provides a means of rethinking the notion of “political community” for the third wave. I remain grateful to those who contributed early on to my own understanding of the topic, particularly Christopher Fynsk, Frederick Garber, Stephen David Ross, and Dennis Schmidt, my graduate professors at SUNY Binghamton. Since then, students and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Kent State University, the University of Wisconsin (Eau Claire), Davidson College, and Wake Forest University have helped en-

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riched my understanding. A grant from the Research and Publication Fund at Wake Forest helped support work on this project, and I am grateful for the editorial assistance provided by Joy Knopf. I extend particular thanks to Victor E. Taylor for appreciating how this collection could contribute to his Series on Critical Studies in the Humanities, and to James K. Davies, whose vision of a new, independent academic press has made this and other volumes possible. Lastly, I thank my wife, Karen Roper, for her constant encouragement and support, and I dedicate this volume to her and to Claire Abigail, our pride and joy. Michael Strysick

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The Contributors

Kirsten Campbell is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmith’s College, University of London. She received her doctorate in Modern Languages from Oxford University. She has published articles on psychoanalysis, social theory and feminism, including most recently in Angelaki on Jacques Lacan’s theory of language, and in the International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies on Judith Butler’s use of psychoanalysis. Her book on Lacanian and feminist theories of knowledge is forth coming. She is currently working on a study of Foucault’s and Lacan’s theories of subjectivity. Verena Andermatt Conley teaches at Harvard University and is affiliated with the Literature Concentration and Romance Languages and Literatures. Her courses deal with the poetics and politics of space and the body. She is the author of Hélène Cixous (Toronto, 1992). Dennis A. Foster is the D. D. Frensley Profssor of English at Southern Methodist University. His main areas of research and writing are in the literary and cultural implications of psychoanalytic thought. He has published Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature (1997) and Confession and Complicity in Narrative (1987), both with Cambridge University Press. His most recent essay, “‘The little children can be bitten’: A Hunger for Dracula,” will appear in the forthcoming Bedford critical edition of Dracula. Jane Hiddleston is completing her Ph.D. on representations of “community” in recent French and Francophone writing at University College London, where she also teaches part-time. She will take up a post as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ College, Cambridge in September, 2001. She has alos published interviews with Francophone writers in the Journal of the Association of the Study of Caribbean and African Literature in French.

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Alphonso Lingis teaches at The Pennsylvania State University, where he specializes in phenomenology and existentialism, modern philosophy, and ethics. His latest publications include Sensation: Intelligibility in Sensibility (Humanities, 1996), The Imperative (Indiana, 1998), and Dangerous Emotions (California, 2000). Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park teaches film studies at Illinois State University, Bloomington-Normal. He received his Ph.D. in Cinema and Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa. This article is the opening chapter of his dissertation that addrsses the transnational flow of the Hong Kong action cinema outside of Hong Kong proper. He has previously taught at the Unviersity of Paris IV-Sorbonne and the American University of Paris. His overseas research and studies include Yonsei University, Peking University, and the Beijing Film Academy. Robert Mitchell completed a Master’s degree in modern European intellectual history at the University of California, Irvine, followed by a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, focusing on British Romantic literature and twentieth-century French philosophy. He currently holds an Assistant Instructorship at the University of Washington. He has both published and forthcoming articles on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Adam Smith. Mitchell is also interested in the cultural impact of contemporary information, and is co-editor of two forthcoming volumes focused on relationships between information and the human body. Linnell Secomb is an associate lecturer in the Department of Gender Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia where she received her Ph.D. from the University’s Philosophy Department. She has completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Western Sydney and has taught in the Philosophy Program at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses on political and feminist theory within a European philosophy framework. She is currently working on a manuscript for a book entitled “Discordant Community” and has published in various feminist and humanities journals including Hypatia, Australian Feminist Studies, The Australian Feminist Law Journal, and Mortality.

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Naomi E. Silver recently completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation focused on the role played by rhetorics of sacrifice in the literary construction of communities. She has articles appearing in Paroles Gelees and The Henry James Review, and is beginning work on a study of the trope of “family” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings on American Black-Jewish relations. She currently teaches American and African American literature at UCLA. Michael Strysick earned his Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton’s Program in Philosophy, Literature, and the Theory of Criticism. He surrently teaches in the Department of English at Wake Forest University, and has held previous appointments at Davidson College, the University of Wisconsin=Eau Claire, Kent State University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His articles appear in journals such as Cultural Critique, Romanic Review, and South Atlantic Review, he has contributred several entries to the forthcoming Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, and his essay “Emerson, Slavery, and the Evolution of Self-Reliance” recently appeared in The Emerson Dilemma: Essays on Emerson and Social Reform (Georgia, 2001). Astra Taylor, a resident of New York City, studies at the New School for Social Research and works in publishing. A. J. P. Thomson is completing a Ph.D. dissertation on Derrida’s Politics of Friendship at the University of Edinburgh, where he also teaches English and Scottish literature. He has edited the Edinburgh Review and has published articles on such topics as deconstruction and national identity, the novels of Frank Kuppner, and the work of Eduardo Paolozzi.

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Bridges to Past and Future

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Part I Bridges to Past and Future

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Bridges to Past and Future

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More Communal Crisis by Verena Andermatt Conley

Over ten years ago I meditated on the topic of community from the chosen solitude of the North Woods. From the vantage point of my cabin in the wilderness, overlooking the great expanse of the Vermilion River, I wrote of my hopes invested in French theories of sixty-eight, of my discovery of the discrepancy between them, and of a world increasingly subjected to, and run by, what the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called le genre économique, a precursor of present-day finance capitalism and globalization.1 It is this time from the vantage point of my house in the city that, safely positioned in front of my computer terminal, I continue my meditation while watching students go by, talking on their cell phones. In the nearby gym, behind oversized arched windows from a bygone era, I see others pedaling at high speed on stationary bikes in neatly aligned rows. They look at the outside world through glass panes. Their activity is simulated and the links to the world cut. Productivity and efficiency count more than the sensation of being in the world. Listening to the roar of the planes overhead and to the general hustle and bustle of the city, I dream of my distant cabin. Though easily accessible by plane, it is by now the time that, as a harried administrator and professor, I no longer enjoy. Against feminist predictions, chronos has won out over aion in an academic world carried off in a whirlwind of administrative paperwork. A sudden lull punctuates the usual frenzied pace on this Saturday morning flooded with sunlight. In the distance, the waters of the Charles River are glistening. In early February, the ice has already broken, possibly a sign of global warming. I notice that much has happened since our days of communal reverie at Miami University. There, in the late eighties, a year-long colloquium on the topic of community dealt with exploring the complications of a term that had lost its transparency. A number of French philosophers and American academics explored what it meant “to be in common” and how communities could no longer be defined by inclusion/ exclusion or as homogeneous social groups. Communities “at loose ends,”

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as the subtitle of the colloquium read, were now said to have lost their air of stability and be always changing. One of the main questions therefore had become that of linking. Many of the discussions dealt with an undermining of the notion of community inherited from a disciplinary society with its traditional networks of authority and the nation-state. Aware of living at a moment of transition from an older disciplinary society to other social forms dominated by information, a transformation accelerated by the advent of the computerized world, some of the participants, such as Jean-François Lyotard, explored the reconfiguration of communities in a wider epistemological transformation. This transformation could never be thought outside an intensification of capitalism. Already in his political writings, when meditating on decolonization and especially on Algeria, Lyotard showed how a turn in capitalism and the advent of what he called “Big Money” pushed to establish a general equivalence by putting everything under the sign of profit.2 A new form of capitalism was taking over everywhere, rapidly altering notions of the subject, community, and the world. This transformation brought to closure the belief inherited from the Enlightenment in the uncovery (or un-covering) of oppressed voices. Lyotard made it clear that the Western belief in social and political changes that would be made possible through the emancipation of one more voice was now coming to an end. When everything is reduced to input and output, when representation is replaced by simulation, and when art is reduced to a check, humans and objects become more and more equivalent with a circulation of signs, and we witness the advent of a technocratic society based on efficiency. Noting the extreme uselessness of philosophy, Lyotard nonetheless makes a case for it. He restates its importance for assessing a technocratic world of simulation where links are simply cut without being thought through. At a moment of transition between old style communities based on physical proximity and new, often virtual, communities based on function more than form, Lyotard urges people to rethink communal links. An increasingly digital and computerized world does away with traditional symbolic systems of authority. While this helps emancipate some oppressed groups, it leads to new forms of enslavement and does away with human solidarity. Lyotard makes it clear that capitalism, in conjunction with

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technologies that are inherently expansionist, will open spaces and create new communities-as-markets, linking and unlinking for the sake of profit alone. Traditional symbolic links are undone just to be substituted with a new technocratic symbolic. The latter, with the help of teletechnologies, is increasingly ruling the world. While Lyotard seemed to look at the disappearance of an older order with a certain feeling of melancholy, he made it clear that its passing was inevitable. His pronouncements ring even truer today, several years after his death. Finance capitalism, with the help of teletechnologies, now rules the world and shapes human ways of thinking and rethinking community. Today, the fact that I do not have time to fly to my cabin in the woods is irrelevant; I can get on line and communicate with some of the inhabitants of the Vermilion community. Time has sped up and physical space has seemingly been eradicated. I can communicate almost instantly with the inhabitants of the North Wood Community provided they have access to electricity and, a fact easily overlooked, that they have the money to pay for the charges. Use of the Internet is made more difficult in the North Woods since the provider is situated far away so that, to get on line, a long-distance call is necessary, which makes service prohibitive for many. Access is reserved to school children or to the wealthier few. Even a small North Woods community can function as a microcosm of a global world. It shows that in spite of globalization and cyberspace, the local counts and that there is a relation between humans and environment in its largest sense. To this we will return. Since I last meditated on the topic from the point of view of the intersection between poststructuralist philosophers and a world increasingly under the spell of le genre économique or finance capitalism and cybertechnologies, much has happened to communities. Traditional symbolic networks have disappeared. They have been replaced by simulation in a society dominated by structural laws of exchange. At the same time, there has been a decrease in the role of the nation-state but not in favor of the subject as had been hoped; rather, in favor of transnational companies linked to city-regions. With the weakening of the nation-state, religious and ethnic communities have reappeared. So have others, held together by special interests such as women or gay and lesbians. Under the growing influence of

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cyberspace, virtual communities held together by special interests from shopping, to music, film, gardening, and biking are proliferating. Where more and more people do their activities on-line, from shopping to reading the news, to watching films and listening to music, old style notions of community are definitely on the wane. Here, I want to look briefly at the relation between local, global, and virtual communities from the point of view of politics. In addition to a reconfiguration and proliferation of communities, much has happened in the world of politics over the last decade, from wars (the Gulf War, Somalia, civil wars in Angola, the Congo, Algeria, Indonesia, Bosnia, and Kosovo), to the fall of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of communism. With the disappearance of communism, already hinted at in Lyotard who bemoaned the disappearance of the workers’ solidarity under the impact of new economics, the field of resistance synonymous with communism has also disappeared. In the void created, new groups can claim a position in this field. No longer bipolar, the post-communist world sees many special interest groups claim the place vacated by communists. New communities based on special interests, from women to environmentalists, from religious to ethnic communities all over the world, are vying for position in order to resist the onslaught of certain forms of globalism. To make themselves heard, these new communities have increasingly — though not exclusively — recourse to computers to denounce injustices and organize resistance. These new virtual communities can quasi-instantly send messages over great distances and put pressure on governments and companies to defend causes everywhere. Modern-day cybercitizens are no longer tied to geographic location and can act at a distance in a global world. This brings with it advantages and disadvantages. Elsewhere, I show how new forms of technology that cannot be thought outside of an evolution in capitalism do away with traditional symbolic systems upon which societies were founded.3 In the West, this evolution goes along with a shift from representation to simulation, one with a loss of traditional ties. Many oppressed groups, including women, benefit from this shift. They are no longer defined by a pre-assigned place in society. At the same time, the cutting of traditional links threatens to undo all links. While philosophers at the Miami colloquium on community in 1988 were

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mainly intent on the undoing, subverting, or re-marking of traditional links that bound together disciplinary societies exemplified by the state, new communities based on status and profit alone undo all links. Virtual communities based on special interests do not escape this fact. In addition, computers, as Lyotard reminded us, have no childhood.4 They were not born into the world. Where there is no genesis, there are no links. Computers are simply there. They rely on zeros and ones, trial and error. Computers pass along information without creating links, simply as part of a process of input/output, or of information qua information. The totalitarian aspect of this circulation of information has been amply documented and decried by culture critics like Paul Virilio. Where in the wake of poststructuralist philosophers we had explored questions of unlinking, of undoing invisible power relations hidden under what was presented as “natural” links, we can say now that, after a decade of intensified simulation, it is rather a question of how to link. From an emphasis on unlinking, the political question is now once again how to create new communal links in virtual and physical communities. How does one negotiate the virtual and the actual (or the real), the local and the global? To repeat, with the advent of simulation, communities relying on traditional forms of authority and on symbolic networks were undone. New forms of community arose based on special interest groups. This transformation cannot be thought outside of a transformation of capitalism that, in a global age, pushes for one world culture and tries to eliminate the local, seen as archaic and as a form of resistance to progress. For them, as for the Jacobins of the French Revolution, albeit for opposite political motives and goals, the local belongs to tradition and the past. With its own brand of universalism focused more on profit than on equality, capitalism is oriented toward the future, toward the opening of new communities qua markets that often go against local interests or even the recognition of diversity on a local scale. A global discourse of propaganda, with the help of teletechnologies and other forms of networking and artificial intelligence, argues for a unified, global world where differences other than those bestowed by status would but be a sign of the past. A world of optimal circulation and flow, or smooth efficiency with the least amount of resistance or noise, is desired.

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This line of argument, helped by simulation made possible by a world of computers, pixels, and image banks, where words and images not only supplement but replace direct experience, does seem to relegate the second term in the opposition between global and local to oblivion. When reintroducing new links, we can do so without forgetting the lesson provided by poststructuralist philosophers who, like Lyotard and others, questioned earlier forms of linking based on inclusion/exclusion. We can use their lessons of linking that, from spacing to the différend, avoid simple oppositions, the sublation of terms in a dialectic, or the doing away with all links as in simulation. In his ongoing, acerbic critique of information as privileged by capitalism and helped along by teletechnologies and other machines, Paul Virilio decried information as totalitarian before conceding that there were other ways of looking at it. Information, he argues, can be seen as a form of inscription or writing. Seen thus, information undoes boundaries by linking humans and environment, and it does so without obliterating matter. “Later, much later,” he writes, “Gregory Bateson, who was one of the first to think of information as a general process, added that ‘information is a difference that makes a difference’” (Virilio 125). This reference revives the name of the British anthropologist who came to the West Coast in the nineteen-sixties from Oxford University and became one of the first to write about ecology from the point of view of complex systems. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind, Bateson makes it clear that exchange is not just between humans and humans, but also between humans and the world. The entire world — humans, fauna, and flora — is linked as a “community” of sorts, in a complex world of feedback and pressure relations. A community, be it global or local, is, in this view, no longer defined by inclusion/exclusion, but by boundaries and constraints. It is in constant evolution and reaches a threshold where it will reorganize itself. Many of these functions were discovered with the help of computer-generated simulations. Computers, far from only doing away with links in this instance, point to the importance of links. If computers and simulation help to do away with certain more traditional links, they can also show that the absence of links, as argued by overly eager adepts of simulation, never exists. By means of simulation, cloning, and artificial intelligence, experiments have shown that the local

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environment still counts. Humans and their local environment form communities that are not entirely undone by globalism. In addition to virtual communities, there are communities that exist and continue to exist in a physical environment from which they still cannot be entirely separated. Philosophers, when previously declaring that communities were “at loose ends,” reconsidered them in relation to the subject and singularity. The latter continue to have relevance today, though the subject is now increasingly defined by rights and laws in a public sphere. In an era where the private is devalorized as non-productive, the subject becomes more public. Without subscribing to this view, we can say that communities are formed of citizens and cybercitizens who create links to defend their own rights and those of others. Citizens and cybercitizens face a world that is increasingly mobile under the impact of cybertechnologies and transportation. We have tried to show that the local still holds and cannot be subsumed by the global. Now, the local itself is being transformed by cybertechnologies and by easy transportation facilitating migrations that have increased manifold over the last two decades. Defined by new constraints and new ways of linking, the local itself is now too part of the environment in the very large sense. Let me come back once more to assertions about the importance of the citizen in an era of waning traditional forms of authority. It has become clear that citizens have their own rights put in question when the state is no longer the only one that guarantees them. In the proclaimed absence of all links — those of the family or of citizens with the privileging of a generalized form of simulation — it is important to create new links. Drawing on the efforts of poststructuralist philosophers who wanted to subvert symbolic orders based on inclusion/exclusion on the one hand, and adepts of total simulation with an absence of links on the other, we can think of inventing new ways of linking, with recourse to the Internet, that would be global and local. These new ways would use cyberspace to underline the importance of an environment that is at least partly physical. In touch with distant lands by means of virtual communities or even travel, and aware of our own changing spaces as well as those of others, we can go back to the old eighteenth century concept of cosmopolite, emptied of its notion of order and harmony. We can think of ourselves as citizens

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of the world, citizens of the polis, of the city, a term that, in a long relation of rivalry, currently supersedes the state, but in a political sense. As citizens of the polis, we are also citizens of a world that includes humans, fauna, and flora, the interrelation of which was revealed to us through simulation on computers. In addition, though we may be tempted to do so, we cannot think of the world as one community with one culture. With all the promotional talk to that end, the local environment still counts and, with it, the notion of multiple and complex local communities that no longer define themselves by inclusion/exclusion but through shifting boundaries and constraints. What our access to information to the near and far can help understand are the differences between various communities defined less by geographic borders than by constraints in constantly evolving complex systems. Communities thus redefined are always complex and unstable, held together by common interests that are never based on rationality alone. Humans no longer live in an ordered universe, a cosmos, but in a chaosmos where order is temporary. Having reassessed the functioning of communities by means of cyberspace and simulation, we can now militate for local communities and citizens’ rights far away but only by trying to understand their ways of linking. When understanding local communities over a distance, or our own communities, we cannot simply do so according to much cherished notions of good and evil that have recently gained new popularity under the influence of oppositional thinking promoted by computers and shrewd politicians alike. The end of the Cold War has done away with an oppositional world and opened it to multiplicities. Moral arguments imply a complete regression along with an obliteration of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers who, in their critique of communities built on inclusion/exclusion, were the first to advocate the importance of a kind of simulation. By revealing the structures that governed the functioning of societies, they were able to point to historical configuration in which terms once thought to be essential were caught. The recent forgetting of this line of thought, and the return to earlier moral divisions into good and evil, depoliticize the communal scene. In this respect, an over-privileging of ethnic and special interest groups often dangerously posits a group homogeneity that covers up invisible power relations based on economics. As citizens of the world, as chaosmopolites,5 it

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is important that we do not to superimpose our view on others or that, as inhabitants of a virtual community, we forget the local communities that continue to function by the most intricate ways of linking and unlinking and according to feedback and pressure relations. In “A l’insu (Unbeknownst),” his colloquium essay on community, Lyotard bemoaned the loss of solidarity. Today, solidarity has been replaced by compassion. The term smacks of the kind of “United Nations Humanism” decried by Donna Haraway that enables some communities to feel good while imposing their ways on others (Haraway 80). Solidarity, by contrast, gives humans a sense of agency. It is predicated on creating links based on mutual responsibility. As chaosmopolites, we are aware that we have no control over the world. We can strive according to our desires or what we think are our obligations. We cannot avoid that others will think differently. This leads to situations that Lyotard has described as différends. Communities are never defined once and for all. They constantly evolve in an ever-changing field of constraints or, as Lyotard would have it, perception. At the same time, in an age of simulation and cybertechnologies, the contact with the world has been reduced. Similarly, in travel all is done to reduce the presence of the world and the environment to a minimum. Cybercommunities cannot forget the physical aspects of communities and their environment. At the same time, while we strive according to our desires and (what we take for) obligations, we cannot avoid that others will think differently. Yet, while we have to accept this, all modes of thinking are not alike. We have to adhere to those we think will create links in ways that form a temporary community or territory that is always unstable. Solidarity counts but has now been expanded and complicated by cybertechnologies with their own notions of community. Cybercommunities complement rather than replace local communities. They can, as we have tried to show, underline the importance of the local and the environment on a global scale. Paradoxically, experiments with artificial intelligence and with cloning have shown the importance of the environment. The local counts and the environment leads to the production of variations. Capitalism has done away with traditional symbolic forms of authority. This has helped certain groups emancipate themselves. At the same time, it has done away with all links that are not related to money,

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markets, and profit. To increase this, it promotes the idea of a world community and a global culture. While I do not wish to argue against a globalism that is here to stay at least for the time being, I want to argue for another form of globalism that would be turned toward humans rather than away from them.6 It would take into account new virtual communities and the transformation of traditional communities but by keeping certain links and, to quote Bateson once more, take into account feedback and pressure relations. Technologies can help us create and recreate a world that today, under the impact of technologies, has lost much of its naturalness. Yet technologies have also shown that cybercommunities, whether they pertain to business or special interest groups, must take into consideration the existence of a variety of possible communal links as well as their own effect on these links, a fact that, in spite of all the world-wide information, is rarely done. From the banks of the Charles River, I think of my cabin in the small community on the Vermilion, out there in the Great North. I think of it in different terms now than ten years ago. I do not leave the community at one level since I correspond with some of its members in cyberspace. I envision it no longer as a point outside the real, urban world but rather as a local community in a global world where time and space have been urbanized to the point of making the distinction no longer viable. I see it as a community affected, but also overlooked, by those cybercitizens who have no more truck with local environments. The community has kept its natural beauty, though it is struggling economically. Tourism and logging are its only resources. With hotly disputed environmental issues concerning logging, and with global warming that slowly kills boreal forests and reduces the yearly snow falls, its resources are dwindling. Seen by “urbanites” as a hinterland, with little or no access to the Internet, the inhabitants of this small community are linked, however distantly, to our own. Their logging practices imposed by transnational companies may contribute to more global warming; in turn, our ways of using energy produce global warming that compromises their livelihood. Climate changes and predictions are simulated on computers and registered by satellites and digital imagery. A process of simulation that has been celebrated for seemingly doing away with all links suddenly reveals to the

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contrary the presence of new forms of linking. While these findings have been discussed in science, they are often kept silent in the humanities. In the pages above, I have tried to argue that the transition announced by Lyotard from a disciplinary world of traditional forms of authority and the nation-state to a world of simulation and cybertechnologies is well upon us. The latter brings with it forms of emancipation but cannot be thought outside the genre économique I discussed in “Communal Crisis” a decade ago. Old style communities have been entirely transformed. There have been gains and losses. In our new communities, we are inserted less as members of a traditional symbolic network and more according to special groups, as public citizens. When the turn in capitalism is accelerated with the advent of cyberspace, the notion of community changes even further. Humans now live in real time and have seemingly done away with physical space. With the fall of communism, many groups fill the void and advocate resistance to new and more virulent forms of capitalism. To militate, they connect in cyberspace. Again, this brings about another set of gains. Distant places are easily accessible. It is more difficult to hide injustices. There are also losses. When the genre économique avails itself of new technologies as well and announces simulation as the world order, not only are old style communities undone but also all links are cut. Nothing appears to take place when all is said to be simulated. All becomes a game. Links between people and the world are undone while local communities and their environment simply disappear by omission. To prevent this new state of things, and to create new links, I have tried to argue for a return to solidarity and not just compassion, a current buzz word that smacks too much of United Nations humanism that, by making people feel good about their own virtues, helps project their own view on others and makes them blind to different forms of linking. I do not argue for a return to older ways of being. Drawing on the findings of poststructuralism and inserting its findings in a world of cybertechnologies, we can argue for a renewed sense of solidarity that uses simulation to understand better ways in which the world and its inhabitants are interrelated. Even at a time when humans can intervene at the very basis of life, communities continue to exist in a simulated and physical environment, where humans can go on inventing and reinventing new ways of linking.

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Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

See my “Communal Crisis.” See Jean-François Lyotard, “The Name of Algeria.” See my forthcoming essay, “Women-Cybercitizens.” See Jean-François Lyotard, “A l’insu (Unbeknownst).” The word “chaosmos” is used often by Félix Guattari, who also participated in the colloquium on community at Miami University. See his Chaosmose for a fuller explanation of the term. Recent manifestations, from Seattle to Davos, and the gathering for an alternative globalization in Porto Alegre (January 2001), all point in this direction.

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Cues, Watchwords, Passwords by Alphonso Lingis

Community and Communication Rousseau invoked the long nights when hunter-foraging people gathered about the fire and entertained one another by story-telling, singing, and dancing. Nietzsche invoked the artist compulsion that fashioned feasts and ceremonies. Collective work and defense against enemies or environmental dangers bring us together. In the market we are bound together by rights and obligations. At the same time every community is a community of language. So much of that language is non-serious or nonsensical. Greetings, hailing or confirming whatever the other is doing or saying, and jokes, teasing, and banter — much of the talk that goes on among us does not aim at truth but provokes smiles and laughter. Whoever laughs with us — or weeps with us — is one of us. In laughter, as in weeping, we recognize another as our kind, and at the same time are drawn to one another. We speak of what we laugh about, what we weep over: we bless and we curse. Blessing and cursing are fundamental modes of language, and express fundamental modes of community. Philosophers, however, have especially been concerned with serious language. Collective work and common defense require language that formulates truly the way things are and what has to be done. The market requires informed commitments and binding pledges. In addition, philosophers have held that truth-telling — rational knowledge — produces community. The terms of serious language are categories; they record the recognizable features of an entity or an event — features that recur as the moments pass, in this entity or event as in others like it. They thus record what is recognizable by others. What is known rationally, objectively, exists for a community of rational subjects. To formulate an entity or event truthfully is to situate oneself in a series of observers and truth-tellers.

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In addition, rational knowledge consists of statements for which reasons are or can be given. These reasons are not: Because our fathers, who founded our clan, nation, city, have taught us to do thus, or: Because our gods have said this. Rational reasons invoke empirical evidence, or else necessary consequence from other statements. These are available to anyone with insight. The practice of giving and demanding reasons submits every rational statement to question, to criticism, or to acceptance by just anyone with insight. Someone then who speaks rationally admits anyone endowed with insight as the judge of what he or she says. This practice invokes a potential rational community in principle coextensive with the human species — even potentially inclusive of aliens, if they can understand what humans say and are endowed with insight into empirical evidence and into necessary consequence between statements.

The Rational Community To learn a science is to learn a language. It is not simply to learn the set of statements taken to be true within that science, and the statements that formulate the evidence or the reasons that make them true. It is to learn a specific vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric. To engage in a work and to learn a skill are likewise to learn a language. To learn automobile mechanics involves learning a specialized vocabulary, and learning the kinds of reasons that are accepted in the practice of repairing automobiles. To learn Scuba diving involves learning a specific language. Communication within a scientific discipline, or among workers in a collective project, or among skilled athletes or performers, is based on determinations of what could count as observations, what standards of accuracy in determining observations are possible, how the words of common language are restricted and refined for use in different scientific disciplines and practical or technological uses. Further, there are determinations of what could count as an argument — in logic, in physics, in history, in literary criticism or in Biblical scholarship, in economics, in penology, jurisprudence and military strategy, in medical treatment. The more difficult scientific or technological work requires institutions which set up and finance research teams and laboratories to gather informa-

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tion and observations according to professional standards of accuracy and repeatability, institutions which select and train researchers, and certify and evaluate the researchers and technicians. Establishing what can and must be said about things requires institutions that select what research is to be published, and how it is to be judged. In scientific and technological work, the decisions as to what counts as an observation and as an argument are made by experts. The experts do not validate their decisions by a structure of reasons found outside the science or the practice. Instead, they consider what taxonomy has been in use in the science so far, or what standards of accuracy in determining observations have been maintained until now. When they decree that new terms marking discriminations should be introduced, or new standards of accuracy, their expertise is validated by the specific scientific or technological community. In learning a science, learning the language of a science, or in learning a skill, one thus enters into a system of power. One enters into a relationship of command and obedience with the experts. One will be trained in institutions, and the institutions determine who has authority to speak. Individuals are ordered to formulate what they see and experience in the established concepts of the language and in forms that can be verified. Then an individual speaks as one in whose statement is implicated the logic and theories and cognitive methods of the rational community; he or she speaks as a representative, equivalent to and interchangeable with others, of the established truth. She speaks as a veterinarian, an electrician, a computer programmer, a public health nurse. He speaks as a citizen, informed about the traffic code, the banking practices, the dress codes of restaurants and public beaches. He formulates his anxiety attacks in terms of contemporary psychiatry; she names her aches and pains with the terminology of scientific medicine.

Repetition and Loss of Insight This picture of the rational community has been polemically contrasted with communities called traditional, whose common language is charac-

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terized as mythical or religious. The experts who regulate the discourse of these communities invoke the authority of ancestors or deities. The rational community has also been contrasted since the beginning of Greek philosophy with collectivities whose talk has been characterized as common sense, doxa, or opinion. Martin Heidegger has forcefully brought back this polarity in Being and Time. Here there do not seem to be identifiable experts; there is an interchangeability of speakers, to the point that the content of what they say is anonymous. There is just a stock of statements that is passed on from one to another. No one claims responsibility for these statements, no one answers for them, undertakes to supply evidence or reasons. A collectivity that shares a stock of statements taken as common sense and a rational community seem polar opposites. Yet they coexist even at this very late date when citizens are schooled for years in the rational discourse of the sciences and technologies. In fact, there is a dynamic relationship between the two collectivities and the two languages. For intrinsic reasons rational discourse turns into anonymous talk. Insight plays a founding and a verifying function in mathematics. A point, a straight line, a plane, a circle cannot be seen in the environment, which shows only extended spots, edges, surfaces, and round material things. Infinite dimensions, parallel lines that never meet, polyhedrons, the square of the hypotenuse, and the square root of minus one are engendered by a process of abstraction and idealization. A mind then sees what is meant by these terms: there is an insight at the basis of the mental operation that forms the notion of number, point, line, plane. The elementary notions of mathematics — number, point, line — are then formalized; in analytic geometry one substitutes pure empty symbols, markers, for them: a, b, c; x, y, z. One can then calculate, according to rules, with them, losing sight of what they refer to, attending only to visible differences in the forms of the markers. When one does a geometrical proof, one combines axioms according to formal rules; one ends up at a theorem. One proves the theorem by working back from the theorem to the axioms. One does see that each step follows from the antecedents, and one does see what the theorem means. But once one has verified the proof one can use it without reactivating these insights.

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One need only remember that one has once verified it. One can then use it as a pure formula made of markers, to perform further calculations with it. One thus economizes all the time of insight. The great power of mathematics depends on its susceptibility to being used as a pure set of instruments of calculation with symbols whose meaning fades away. A parallel process occurs in every scientific discipline, every technology. The discourse is set up with a set of statements formulating insights, put forth by individuals who have had these insights and can answer for them. But these statements are transformed into a body of anonymous statements that can be used without reactivating the insights, that can be combined like elements of a calculus. The fading-away of insight in the practice of mathematics can bring it about that at the stage of furthest development of mathematics one no longer knows what mathematics is about. Controversies in the twentieth century about the legitimacy of new mathematical concepts such as imaginary numbers and transfinite numbers showed that mathematics had lost sight of what mathematical entities are: subsistent forms? formal properties of real and perceivable things? psychic entities? mental constructs? pure logical possibilities? This loss of the founding insights occurs in every science; physics continues its advances in the midst of unresolved controversies about the real, merely phenomenal, or even merely psychic status of the sense-data at the basis of all its observations. Cultural history constitutes a more and more extensive recording of languages, myths, institutions and a more and more rigorous mapping of the transformations and transmutations that are possible and actualized in the midst of unresolved controversies about the definition of meaning and reference in language, about the transcendent, purely sociological or economic referents of myths, about the ethnobiological, contractual, or power-dynamics reality of institutions. The phenomenological philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl had as its mission to return to and recover the original insights at the basis of rational culture. Mathematicians calculate with their formulas, but they must periodically reactivate the original insights formulated in them. Husserl argued that the words of philosophy’s vocabulary have been repeated so often that their users have lost sight of the original insights they contained; philosophers now only use them to construct arguments, like geometers

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construct theorems out of the given primary terms of the system. Heidegger argued that philosophers must return to the primary words — Being, substance, reason, truth — to rediscover the insights they contained.

The Anonymous Talk in a Society Our societies possess a stock of common knowledge. There does subsist islands of mythical or religious tradition, warranted by the authority of ancestors or deities. But the rest circulates anonymously, as “what is known.” Statements are picked up, passed on, without anyone identified to take responsibility for those statements, to supply evidence or reasons. Heidegger contrasted insightful speech acts with this speaking that makes use of what is said — das Gerede. Insight is proclaimed in an “Aha!”; it is then registered in an utterance that aims to record just this insight. An utterance that codes an insight subsists only by being maintained and verified by a speaker. One has to be able to repeat this utterance so that one can recall the insight when it has passed, in order to ascertain that it has occurred. “I say that S is p” is a statement that is not only a record but a pledge and a commitment. The repeatability results from an idealization operated on the utterance: one takes it ideally to be the same, when repeated, although the utterance cannot really be repeated on the same pitch, with the same tonal length, the same timbre. The utterance will be ideally the same whether repeated by oneself or by another. What happens to observations when they get reformulated in such a way as to render them common, capable of being communicated? When “I say that S is p” is retained and communicated, it is converted into “(It is said that) S is p.” The form “It is said that...” no longer formulates the singular situation about the speaker but the general format of the common world. In addition, the subject that takes responsibility for his own utterance is elided. The speaker constitutes himself as a simple relay of formulations that are taken up from others, passed on to others. His own insight is cast in a form that could be the insight of anyone, anywhere. The individual who no longer answers for his utterances loses sight of himself as a source of insight. And while insights can only function as

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representations of reality by being formulated in fixed and repeatable terms, in the process of becoming common they not only suffer an emptying out, they also begin to function as falsehoods. They no longer put forth the concrete layout of the singular environment about one who sees it, but fix only the general format of environments about anyone, anywhere. “The talk” is, as Heidegger puts it, essentially erring — wandering from one situation to another. It picks up the general lines of things and situations, what anyone can see. It consists of generalities. But the real is always singular, and particular. No leaf in the forest is identical to any other; no two snowflakes that fall in Antarctica have the same form. Every situation in which we find ourselves is different from the situation in which anyone else finds himself. Heidegger then invokes authentic, authentifying speech — the insightful speech acts in the first person singular that formulate the face of the world concretely turned to the speaker. If the talk is an emptying out of original speech acts that were insightful and responsible, if it is thus a fallen state of language, it is nonetheless primary and original. One enters language by picking up what is said — what others say, what one, anyone says, about the food, the furniture, the playground. The talk presents the environment to the child, to the visitor, to the immigrant, as already articulated. The talk formulates the main lines, the recurrent situations in the environment. The effort to formulate what is distinctive to one’s own situation, to speak in the first person singular about the individual faces of things that present themselves to that speaker — this effort comes second. Within the language that outlines the general shapes of things and the recurrent scenes, the individual will try to use language to discriminate what is distinctive to the individual things and events he or she is open to. In addition, the common knowledge a society possesses is actually the basis for the elaboration of rational knowledge. Geology begins with the common knowledge about mountains and jungles, rivers and ocean shores formulated in the course of the inhabitation, migrations, journeys, and nomadism of humans. Biology, botany, pharmacology, and astronomy presuppose the common knowledge that first identified and located other animals, vegetables, minerals, and celestial bodies. The mathematical calculations with which Claude Lévi-Strauss represents the elementary and composite relations of kinship of gender-based societies presuppose al-

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liances and recognitions of descendence with which those societies form, with which individuals associate without having calculated their forms of association mathematically, and interact with the anthropologist who comes to them. Technological operations still and always rewire the common knowledge of body maneuvers and skills of individuals who leave their beds and their homes for laboratories and factories. The common knowledge still locates for the scientific researcher his laboratory, his implements, and his books. Rational knowledge does not only begin with the data formulated in common knowledge; it also derives its form from common knowledge. Scientific objectivity, which requires that every observation be repeatable and verifiable by others, by just anyone with the proper equipment, appears as a refinement of the commonness of common knowledge. Heidegger sees common knowledge as a multiplicity of statements that circulate, that are picked up and passed on from one to another. The speakers then appear to him as simple relay points, equivalent and interchangeable with one another. Statements are taken up and repeated simply because they are what is said, because anyone, everyone says them. No one speaks in his own name, no one takes responsibility for what is said. Society appears as a simple multiplicity. Here we have arrived at the opposite of the reciprocal understanding supposed to characterize the rational community, and the opposite of the reciprocal recognition that was supposed to be exercised by those who speak as its representatives.

Cues, Watchwords, Passwords In fact, the talk does not just circulate in all directions. Speakers are not just relay-points of anonymous refrains. They are ordered. There are directions, directives in the talk. Heidegger has not seen this because he has reduced the function of the talk to that of communicating information. He has taken its purpose to be transmitting what, of what one has seen about something or about some situation, can be seen by just anyone. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus, the talk instead communicates, and is contrived to communicate, not what someone

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has seen, but what someone has heard, what someone has been told to say. Most of what we pass on when we talk we ourselves have not seen at all — that the year 2000 is upon us, that is, in the Christian, not the Islamic or Buddhist calendar, that the Christian calendar is dated from the birth of Jesus, who was born in a province of the Roman empire…. We transmit to others what we have been trained to say in geography class, by the tabloids, by the evangelists and psychotherapists on afternoon radio. Public opinion polls do not summarize what the public thinks about the Panama invasion or the bombing of Iraq; they simply sample the public on how well they have retained what the media news analysts have told them. This is the case even about things we have seen: You some back from a trip to Oregon and tell it: “The coast out there is covered with fir and pine forests. There are gorgeous sand dunes….” What you are recounting is the names you have been told to put on the trees there, and what your milieu expects you to say about the northwest coast. No conversation starts from zero. “Looks like rain.” “Everything going up,” one shopper says to another in the supermarket. Such utterances can be true or false, and even meaningful, when uttered among speakers who occupy a common space in nature and in the social world, and who share ways of looking and ways of selecting details to observe. Their meaning and rhetorical force follows much that has already been said. All that is taken as known and shared among interlocutors is what we call “common sense.” We are appealing to common sense whenever we ask the mechanic what is wrong with our car, whenever we ask the store clerk what kind of shoe we should buy for tennis or for walking. “Looks like rain” is not really a statement that issues out of a selective personal observation of the sky today and a remembered set of such past observations. What is rather remembered is what one has, since childhood, heard people say on days like this. What is this common sense? We take it to be a faculty in our brain that stores and centralizes a great deal of information. In fact, common sense, Deleuze and Guattari say, is a faculty in our brain that receives and transmits the decrees that experts in a scientific domain or in a practical domain have given, the cues, signs, watchwords, slogans, and decrees that “the community” — certain individuals in the group, pack, gang, milieu, or “society” — have given.

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Who are these people who have decreed how we must talk about the weather, California wines, rap music, the football game, cellular phones? These dominant voices can be identified. We arrive at the dorm with a fringed leather jacket painted silver from San Francisco or a pierced and studded tongue we got there one night when we were real stoned. There is a moment of hesitation: the group does not quite know what to say. Then the big man in the group says: “Cool.” Or he says: “Where the fuck did you get that faggoty jacket? And you pierced your tongue — sick!” These words do not convey information to us. They instead impose what we have to say. There are then, at the basis of conversation, a scattering of words that order (mots d’ordre). They are words that both set up a certain order in the course of the conversation and command the other speakers. These cues or watchwords are short and brief: “Cool.” “Sick.” “Faggoty.” To get admitted into the in group, we have to catch on to a set of such words that order the way college jocks, or sorority sisters, or the Trench Coat Gang talk. They are passwords. When we get our Ph.D. and a job, we have to catch on to what vocabulary to use when a department meeting is discussing changes in the curriculum, how long to take to express our opinion, what genial, affable, and serious tone of voice to use, how to glance at the department head and the other faculty members, what kind of small talk to engage in when we run into a senior professor in the hallway. The cues, signs, watchwords, slogans, decrees need not be repeated to order the choice of words and of grammatical and rhetorical form, order the tone of voice and the rapidity or stentorian pace of our sentences. Order-words also command the informative or indicative content of our sentences. A description is not a picture of what it describes. Of course there are names: robin, typewriter, refrigerator. But there is not a word for every separate item in the scene being described — like in a phonograph recording where there is a one-to-one correspondence between every sound and a mark in the grove of a record. Things are described by metaphor and metonymy. In the sentence: “All the evidence must first be sifted with acid tests, or with a microscope,” we take “sift the evidence” to be a metaphor: “sift” would mean literally to put through a sieve. Would the literal version of that sentence be: “All the evidence must first be examined…”?

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But “examine” was in Latin examino, from examen, which designated the tongue of a balance. It thus meant “to weigh.” The word “examine,” as in the sentence: “All the evidence must first be examined…” has been used so often that the transfer of reference has become routine, stale, and is taken for granted. But metaphors are not just formed by fancy; they are ordered. In fact, in a vision of movement, there are multiple visions of multiple movements. Then the word “movement” can be taken in multiple ways. When we use it in a certain kind of discourse — physics, traffic control, the discussion of the changes that occur in springtime, the direction of an argument, or a movement in cyberspace, in the information highway — we obey the cues that direct us to use the term in a specific way in a specific kind of discourse. There is no meaning in words apart from the dominant words, the order-words. In every feeling, every emotion, every passion, there are multiple emotions. At a wedding, the bride feels fear, anxiety, possessiveness, pride, nervousness at being center stage, etc. If she says what seems to be a literal word, “I’m so happy” — in fact a dead metaphor, “happy” originally designating the feeling that something has occurred by happenstance, by chance or by luck — she is obeying the decree that that is what brides should feel. “Aren’t you happy?” is an order. If she says what is commonly called a metaphor — “I’m in heaven” — or what is commonly called metonymy — “My cunt is on fire” — she is obeying other decrees: of what one should say in church, or what one should say among really liberated, body-affirming, patriarchy-defying feminists. The talk does not circulate to an anonymous, faceless multiplicity such as invoked by Heidegger’s Das Man. A group, a pack, a gang, a milieu, “society,” and a community are defined by the attractions and repulsions, the sympathies and antipathies, the alterations, the alliances, the penetrations and expansions that affect bodies coupled on to implements and to other bodies. To envision it, we should envision the emotional map, a passionate map of the neighborhood, the city, the province, as novelists do. William Faulkner maps out the territory for us by identifying the alliances between families and individuals, the expansions of some of them, entry and penetrations of newcomers, the old and new hatreds, the loyalties, friendships, and infatuations. The cues and watchwords that are uttered accompany and advance movements of force in such a map of society.

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The collectives are multiple and overlapping. A man will, in the course of a day, speak “as a father has to” at home; then speak as the boss to his subordinates; then with his lover he will speak a childish lover’s talk, nonsense; then in falling asleep, his sleeping mind will elaborate an oneirotic discourse about things that worried him during the day, or about things that still bug him from his childhood; then, when the telephone rings, he abruptly adopts a professional voice to speak with a business associate about the urgent matter that made him ring so late. In each case, it is a certain community of language, a certain practical collective that he couples onto. Language orders. With its categories, speech identifies, discriminates, and classifies things in the perceived environment. Language can establish relationships between things that were not immediately perceived. Language also orders — commands — speakers to order, that is, to organize. Immanuel Kant said that as soon as we begin to think, we find ourselves under an imperative. Thought finds it must conceive things coherently and relate them consistently. Thought is, from the first, subject to an imperative for the universal and the necessary. But Deleuze and Guattari argue instead that the obedience involved in speaking is an obedience to order-words. In speaking to others, we transmit to them what we have been told to say. The talk is indirect discourse. Language essentially involves the function of telling someone what someone else has said, what someone else has said should be said — about bees, about flowers, about Paris and Moscow and ancient Rome. Everything we say has been ordered by what someone else said.

Ideology The language that accompanies a collective work or a common defense effort or the production and exchange of commodities in a market does not only formulate truly the way things are and what has to be done. It also commands the individuals involved in that collectivity, and justifies what is being done to these individuals and to those outside it. Theorists have studied the common language of collectives, to map out the coherence and consistency of orders given and obeyed or resisted, and the consistency and coherence of the reasons elaborated to justify the collective work, defense

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effort, productive enterprise, or market to those within and those outside of it. The account they produce has been labeled the “ideology” of those that dominate the collectivity. Thorstein Veblen wrote up The Theory of the Leisure Class; he explains how cues, signs, watchwords, slogans, decrees, and also the body language, dress, taste in foods, clothing, and home furnishings all fit together in a consistent and coherent system. Since this systematic theory functions both to distinguish the leisure class from the working close and justify their own leisure, it cannot be taken as a simple representation of society. It functions to mask the real operations of the leisure class within society. Hence it has to be brought to light and interpreted by the sociologist. The over-all vision and the thorough-going cynicism of the theory of the leisure class are themselves powerful instruments of their domination. Karl Marx and now Pierre Bourdieu wrote up the theory of the working class. Neither has written up the theory of inner-city street people, whom Marx pushed aside as lumpenproletariat, totally unreliable in the worker’s movement. For their ideas are naive; they are in fact mystified by the ruling class. Oscar Lewis saw this huge gap in our understanding of what he called the culture of poverty. He set out, during long decades spent in the slums of Mexico City, to discover and write up the world-view of the extremely poor. But his project came apart by itself: what he wrote was The Children of Sanchez, in fact the biographies of the various members of a single family, and what they said in their own words. Street talk is essentially fragmentary. It does not affirm: All the capitalists are exploiters of workers, but: The owner of that gas station has shit for brains. When they drift from New York to Miami or Los Angeles, what they say about New Yorkers no longer applies to Angelinos. And words and expressions are short-lived; they die without leaving a trace. Facial expressions, arid gestures, sticking out one’s tongue, making a farting noise accompanies their words, often takes the place of words. Fights too are expressive. An argument gets settled with a fight. The lumpenproletariat, the inner-city poor, the slum-dwellers do not form a homogeneous class, but instead form packs, gangs, a milieu, and marginals linked by attractions and repulsions, sympathies and antipathies, alliances, and penetrations where individuals are bodies coupled on to a few implements and also to a few luxury objects and to other bodies. Cues,

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watchwords, passwords order these couplings. They are discontinuous utterances. They are not derived from a preexisting world-view. But is not that also true of the leisure class and the dominant classes of history? Michel Foucault does not attribute to the ruling powers of modern societies an overall ideology that would justify and mask their program for domination. It is not simply that that would attribute an improbable cleverness and cynicism in that class. Foucault instead shows that the procedures of surveillance, control, and discipline of the modern institutional archipelago were invented piecemeal. Once mechanisms of social power are invented, they can be used in diverse ways, one of which is dominance. The cues and watchwords that order these uses are also invented piecemeal. What gives consistency and coherence to the language and practice of power is not an overall theory of domination — which the social critique in fact does not unearth but constructs — but precisely the peculiar force of fragmentary, discontinuous order-words in local power-couplings.

Speaking for Oneself In opposition to the talk current in the anonymous multitude, Heidegger invokes authentic, authentifying speech — the insightful speech acts in the first person singular, formulating one’s own situation, that is, the face of the world concretely turned to the speaker. It was anxiety, the premonition of death singling one out, that silences one in the midst of the talk. But this standing forth as a subject, as one who speaks in his own name, occurs when it is called forth by juridic or quasi-juridic acts which assign to individuals the right to speak. Most of the time one does not speak in one’s own name — one passes on the kind of remark that one has been ordered to say: “It’s raining again in State College: grim day….” When one does speak in one’s own name, it is because one has a duty to speak in one’s own name. There are periodic examinations to verify whether the students have mastered the authorities of the discipline. The professor calls upon the student: “What doses Nietzsche say about guilt?” Then she says: “But what do you think?” (How the student resists the question!) “Write an essay.” The sociology, modern languages, or phi-

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losophy professor herself will be expected periodically to give papers at conferences, displaying her expertise of the field, the canonical authorities. But a senior professor is expected to put forth some thesis or judgment in her own name. At infrequent intervals the nurse will be called upon to use her own judgment, make her own diagnosis. The veterinarian normally speaks as a representative of the current state of veterinary science, but from time to time the client demands he formulate his own judgment. His judgment will be critically appraised, perhaps by another veterinarian called upon to give a second opinion. If disastrous, he may be summoned in a malpractice suit. The authentic speech is then not simply a soliloquy before the oncoming night of death. Heidegger emphasizes the recurrent nature of the talk. Phrases, statements pass from one to another without change, on a wave that extends indefinitely back into the past, endlessly into the future. To experience oneself as one crest of that wave is to feel caught up in the timelessness or eternity of these forms. In Portrait of a Man Unknown, Nathalie Sarraute has diagrammed clairvoyantly how participating in the daily talk of the neighborhood functions to obliterate the sense of one’s own mortality. Heidegger then invokes anxiety, which is a premonition of one’s oncoming death, as the force that drives one out of the talk, into the reticence and silence from which one will emerge to speak with one’s own voice. But is not this anxiety, this premonition of death in the talk itself? Every order-word, Deleuze and Guattari say, is a verdict, a death sentence. It threatens an eventual death to the one it orders, or orders him or her to inflict death on someone else: “It always implies a death sentence, even if it has been considerably softened, becoming symbolic, initiatory, temporary, etc.” (Deleuze and Guattari 107). When a father orders his son “You will do this,” “You will not do that,” he is cutting his son down. There is involved a threat of punishment, a partial death. At the same time, every order-word is a cry of alarm, and an incitement to flee. “You will do this,” “You will not do that”: these are warnings. One is still obeying the order-words; that is, regulating one’s action by it, if one flees. Death is not only a limit, an end, in time; it is also a limit in space. One ceases to traverse space. But every order-word limits the space in which we live. The father orders his son: “You keep out of there.” “Don’t touch that.” The cue that orders the talk of the group, pack, gang, milieu, “society,” or

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rational community, scientific discipline or technological team and orders one’s entry into it, threatens exclusion and effacement from it. There is then no question of escaping order-words. Our problem is to escape the death sentence, the verdict they contain, and finding in them a directive of how to flee. America — love it or leave it! Allen Ginsberg finds a way to love it: the America of sharecroppers, hoboes, Jewish immigrants from Russia, the Wobblies, open roads, the Great Plains, the Pacific coast, Walt Whitman…. In coming to speak with his own voice, Ginsberg was in fact obeying the watchwords, slogans, decrees, and verdicts being voiced in the America society about him.

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Part II Community, Politics, and the Political

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Community, Politics, and the Political

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Pleasure and Community in Cultural Criticism by Dennis A. Foster

At some point in many late night conversations, my friends, most of whom are academics, turn to the problem of community. The intimacy of such moments is no argument against the lament that we have no real community. We are, after all, Americans, which is to say that we spent our youths (or the decade most of us devoted to earning degrees) some place else, where one was not bound to socializing in couples, in office gangs, or within other such social limitations. In those days, it now seems, some deeper, less structured pattern informed social life. So we talk together and weave the mythic narrative of community, which is something more than good-old-days nostalgia. Rather, an ambivalence about community is part of a fundamental American tension — fleeing compulsory society, we find some way to light out for the territories, where an authentic bond can emerge. But, once there, we again draw around us the strictures that had previously driven us from civilization. Having made the trip to the New World, Arthur Dimmesdale saw the surrounding forest compress the village of Salem into a dense mass that somehow was not the new Jerusalem he had hoped for. And, while Hester Prynne’s marginalized house drew to it those who testified to the failure of community, no one should imagine that the talk that took place in that house constituted a truer, alternative community. Nor have my friends talking into the night repaired by some inversion the very loss they pondered. I recently witnessed a version of that loss in the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties. As I watched, my reactions progressed from an amused nostalgia to an increasing anxiety and depression. How hopeful the protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee looked, as did the Free Speech Movement that emerged from it. The rapid slide down the slick marble steps of buildings in San Francisco and Berkeley as the police dragged protesters out looked more like an amusement park ride than police force. Those kids knew what was right because they were the Americans, schooled in the ideals of free speech and individual rights. In many ways

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the hallways full of determined, singing students looked like America at its brightest arising from the darkest period of the cold war and McCarthyite terrorism. The faces of those students glowed with the pleasure of a selfless commitment, having found their moment of American sublimity. They saw themselves assuming the power of their country as a natural blessing. It all made sense. There was no Marxist critique of the social or economic order here but a renewed commitment to an American ideal without any impulse to theorize. My anxiety emerged as this fantasy was turned toward the less tractable problems of racism and the war in Vietnam. One witness remembered that she was walking away from a celebration after the Free Speech Movement victory, proud of her actions, when Mario Savio said, “Now we have a war to stop.” “What war?” she thought — 1965. The sublime moments were still possible, but increasingly they had less to do with that mythic American community of people and land than with the ecstasy of the riot, the militancy of Black America, and the commune of the Woodstock nation. The American themes of justice, equality, and individuality continued to inform the political debate, but as those ideals came up against the other America of wealth and power, the contradictions within the American idea — for example, between spirit and wealth, justice and property — emerged and undermined the common pleasure that politics had previously provided. An uneasy coalition arose between activist idealism and countercultural euphoria, each providing a justification in politics or pleasure for the other, but also concealing each other’s limitations until they collapsed near the beginning of the next decade. There was no unitary position that could address problems of war, race, and poverty. And the hangovers were getting worse with age. It has, some argue, always been the impulse of Americans to see their political aspirations in terms of the sublime, beyond the pragmatic politics of the Old World. The genius, if I may, of Ronald Reagan — who as governor so bitterly denounced the children of the 1960s — was to call for the liberation of the child in corporate and consuming Americans when the 1970s had us feeling old and cranky. But under the cover of a new American innocence, there emerged an unprecedented compulsion to serve the economic machinery in the name of private satisfactions. Jean Baudrillard, America’s cool lover, saw it coming as early as 1970 when

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he identified the pathological obligation to enjoy in the “fun-system” of consumption (48). These narrowly constrained pleasures of consumption, so contemptuous of the pleasures of countercultural excesses of the body, had the unhappy effect of producing wild wealth for those few committed to the material fork of the American fantasy. J. G. Ballard looked at America, also in 1970, and in a scandalous piece, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” identified the governor’s bursting anal joy as his most seductive characteristic, one that was to be realized on a national level in the 1980s. The fun was blinding. Only when consumers “lost confidence,” like aging libertines sadly looking over yet one more virgin, did Americans begin generally to realize that the fun was not properly ours, that our desires were not our own. What I am considering here is the place of pleasure in the formation of communities, particularly of nations, and the consistent inability to understand the relation between them that has been a part of our own recent history and has again taken on disturbing international implications. The pursuit of happiness has a calculable side to it — wealth, security, property — but it has another side that seems, depending on the outcome, sublime or, as in nationalism, obscene. The confusion of these two dimensions appears, for example, at the center of most of Don DeLillo’s work. He has consistently explored the problem of pleasure that attends Western, Enlightenment thought. It is difficult for most Westerners, particularly those with 10 years and more of university training behind them, to imagine that the idea of the rational individual has not triumphed in the world. The businessmen, CIA spooks, insurance agents, and other power brokers in The Names (1982) long for something beyond themselves but can no more imagine that some cult that kills people in accord with an alphabetic scheme represents the majority of the world than we believe David Koresh is the norm of American faith. In The Names, what goes beyond the individual has its most spectacular representation in the image of thousands of people circling the Kaaba in Mecca, a mass of people running for faith. DeLillo opens Mao II (1991) with a similar vision: thousands of couples in Yankee Stadium being married simultaneously by the Reverend Moon to partners they just met. The shadow of that deep pleasure, where some infantile joy inhabits the idea of a community, haunts every attempt by DeLillo’s heroes to construct satisfying lives. No

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evidence of particular failures in Moonie marriages or alphabetic killings eliminates desires for some sublime transformation. Today, following the collapse of the East-West arrangement, an important issue on both domestic and international levels is to figure out what will constitute a national pleasure — how are we going to understand community. And as we have been asked by our national leaders to rediscover America — always a frightening proposition — it might serve us well to think again about the community and the sublime. The essays in Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (Communauté désoeuvrée) and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Inhuman propose that community as we normally think about it is impossible, was probably always impossible. The negation both use in their titles suggests the attempt they are making to find an alternative within an aspect of experience that has been denied or repressed. And yet it would be hard to call either of these strenuous accounts utopic, or even optimistic, and for that reason they present a useful response to the determined attempts to transcend cultural theory’s impasses. The nature of these impasses is the subject of two of Steven Connor’s recent books on contemporary theory and value, and as such the books serve as examples and analyses of the obsessions and repetitions that divide literary and cultural studies. Thinking through these problems in terms of pleasure, Connor locates the divides along the difference between satisfaction (the end of a Freudian death drive) and ecstasy (the jouissance of the sublime), between totalitarianism and anarchy. Connor articulates this opposition in Theory and Cultural Value: “The experience of pleasure in art and culture may be a useful place to start, not because art and culture offer access to any kind of pure or disinterested pleasure, but precisely because of the uncertain and impure nature of pleasure in these areas, poised between the interested and the disinterested, between use-value and exchange-value, between homeostatic ego gratification and the indefiniteness of sublime pleasure” (54). Connor circles variations of this opposition (providing a useful summary of many theorists along the way) in the name of a return to the ripe topic of ethics: so much theory, but what do you do? In his exploration of ethical positions, Connor does not let stand any plea for a paradise of resolutions, no Jürgen Habermas or Fredric Jameson opening a door to utopia, more or less. But he does repeatedly suggest

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that we might live ethically in the center of a vortex. While remaining skeptical of the university as an institution, for example, one could still retain a “principled attachment” to it as a center that holds crisis open for examination (130); feminists might dialectically inhabit both a French field of difference and poetics (Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous) and a more political field of universals directed toward developing a “dynamic interplay” of values (186-87). Theory, that is, should not determine values or evacuate them but chart their passage from one field to the other (257). This is not a simple pragmatism, as much as Connor admires this American school from John Dewey and William James to Richard Rorty. Rather, it is a determined suspension between idealism and daily life. What I find disturbing is that Connor in his pluralist tendency steadily abandons theory. Like many working in historicist and cultural studies, he displays an ultimate distrust of attempts to work a problem through to some usually unsatisfying end, of the impotence of philosophy. Nancy and Lyotard show no such limits. Nancy’s book of essays, written in the mid 1980s, emerges from the dilemma faced by the Left (that part of politics concerned “at least” with “what is at stake in community as opposed to the right’s concern with order and administration” [xxxvi] during the collapse of communism. The topical essays — on democracy, communism, freedom, religion, love — are couched in the difficult, deconstructive gestures of deferral typical of Martin Heidegger or Jacques Derrida and provide few specific historical examples, leaving the philosophy purer than many will like. But what Nancy claims about communism has far-reaching implications, for while communism as a political reality disappears, it ironically reemerges in new forms, emblematic of “the desire to discover or rediscover a place of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical dominion” (1). The most threatening social forms this fantasy takes, Nancy argues, are those of communities that “operate,” that are deliberately “worked” out: religion in its more enthusiastic forms, nationalism, and other political movements that tend toward the production of a unified communal spirit, all tending toward totalitarian impulses. What Nancy values instead is the “inoperative,” “unworking,” désoeuvrée in community, “that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with production

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or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension” (31). That is, the community Nancy imagines is one that emerges from what resists the communal, the gathering of all people in an essential spirit. The community, by contrast with the communal, would be what “exposes” you to the fact of your singular, mortal self in the presence of others. Nancy presses on the contradiction in democratic societies that liberals, at least, have learned to live with, mostly by forgetting it exists: we dwell with, but separate from, others. This forgetting comes not despite the triumph of democracy in the post-cold war world, but as part of it, or of “the consensus of a single program that we call ‘democracy’” (xxxviii). Consensus has replaced the difficult, conflictual process of communication, just as communion (the union of spirit) has replaced community. Americans may assume, as The Life of Brian proclaims, that we are all individuals, but because we exist differentially, the only full individual is, literally, the dead individual (13), someone at last no longer touched by others. At the same time, the idea of a profound communion with other individuals grows out of a fantasy of a lost community, a “lost age in which community was woven of tight, harmonious, and infrangible bonds” (9). Such communities, Nancy argues, suppress all freedom, community, life, as contemporary examples almost anywhere in the world will demonstrate. Real community, by contrast, involves “sharing” (partage), the fact of coming together that distributes, spaces, and places people so that it is not one’s individuality that emerges, but a sense of “finitude”: “Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me, in presenting to me my birth and my death, is my existence outside myself. […] A singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed” (26-28). The skin, the face, the heart are for Nancy the simple physical facts that always limit our ability to merge with others. No fantasy of communion will get past this difference. But these limits are also what open us to communication, to an awareness of our “exposure” before the world, and crucially (lest you think this is all bleak stuff ) ecstasy, “what happens to the singular being” (7).

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Hard work, of course, to face exposure, but this is the way to thought, to the divine, to love, to “the impossible.” It is not wholeness, but limits that Nancy seeks. Two passages on love: Love re-presents I to itself broken […]. [H]e, this subject, was touched, broken into, in his subjectivity, and he is from then on, for the time of love, opened by this slice, broken or fractured, even if only slightly […]. From then on, I is constituted broken. (96) But it is the break itself that makes the heart […]. The beating of the heart — rhythm of the partition of being, syncope of the sharing of singularity — cuts across presence, life, consciousness. That is why thinking — which is nothing other than the weighing or testing of the limits, the ends, of presence, of life, of consciousness — thinking itself is love. (99) Nancy is attempting here to link the social situation of “being in common,” of community and thought, to jouissance. Joy “is to be cut across,” which requires an opening to others in “abandonment,” in “destitution,” without the protection of spiritualism and forgetting. This notion of community as that which separates and places us sounds like Michel Foucault’s description of community under panoptic surveillance, though Foucault’s followers, unlike Nancy, see this state of affairs as having oppressive implications. The Foucauldian subject is not congenitally singular but is created as singular by and for power, created as a subject of knowledge. And, since anything that might exist before or outside of power and discourse remains by definition unknowable, there seems to be no alternative to what power has created, no escape, no freedom. A number of recent theorists, most strikingly Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, have proposed strategies for evading power. Butler proves repeatedly that a sexual body does not exist prior to discourse, but the weight of this repetition suggests a fury at the thought that some piece of nature, as Freud puts it, might be behind our discontent. Insistently, she points to the origin in discourse of culture’s malaise, disavowing organic imperatives and their representation in drives. “The epistemology of drive theory is junk,” one opponent of that nature huffed at me and then turned away when I asked about drives. If our grief is only a consequence of dis-

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course, just bad epistemology, then we might make it all right some day. Butler’s famous solution is drag, the multiplication of gender positions that enables the individual to escape the construction of power, though I cannot get my mind off Paris is Burning and the image of Venus dreaming of the day when he could replace drag with a sex change operation and thereby marry and settle down in the suburbs. He dies first, and meanwhile drag is becoming fashion. But Butler’s strategy has become a common one, suggesting that the way out of the constraints of gender, the marketplace, and technology is to seize the position imposed by social power and exploit it, multiplying marketplaces and commodities, increasing the flow of information, accepting not a single gender but many, until power cannot trace your movements. In all these moves I find a desperate optimism, a hope that happiness may yet be possible. I do not say that pleasure may be possible, because pleasure itself is part of the problem. For Foucauldians like Butler, pleasure in the form of jouissance is a source of resistance to the other pleasures of consensus based, collective community. The displacements implied in ecstasy suggest not only an unbalancing of the self but also an evasion of power’s individuating forces. But when thinking about such pleasure in Western society, we should probably keep in mind the perverse and destructive jouissance that Baudrillard finds in our shopping malls and highways, the compelling repetitions in American history that W. S. Burroughs describes from the moment the first invaders hit Western shores in Cities of the Red Night (1981). Nancy also looks to jouissance as resistance, but he will have nothing to do with any jouissance that looks like fun. He insists, for instance, that the function of literature (as opposed to myth, the lost story, the founding fiction) is to interrupt every myth, community, and thought of mastery. It is all agony, this suspension he describes, and consequently his critique fails to address the real, if covert, pleasures that sustain modern institutions. Beneath the satisfactions of capital, government, science, and even gender lie ancient enjoyments that remain mostly unconscious but vital. What Lyotard adds to this discussion is a description of the dynamics of these unconscious enjoyments. His claims in The Postmodern Condition (1984) about the ubiquity of discursive forces seem forgotten in The Inhuman, where he explores a tension between two different ideas of what constitutes the human in humanity, or the inhuman limits of humanity.

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Lyotard situates the human between two “inhuman” temporal positions. One is the indeterminate movement of “progress,” “development,” or “complex-ification,” a brute, evolutionary drive toward order that produces our cities, industry, communications systems, institutions, no matter what the cost to any species, our own included. Our human desires, the passions that we identify as our humanity, work largely, though unconsciously, in service to this “inhuman” drive, allowing us to imagine that we are fulfilling purely personal needs as we promote a larger complexity. The other temporal position is the static persistence of the lost animal, the “familiar and unknown guest” (2) from our infant past that haunts our dreams, language, and art. This second inhuman informs our humanity and comes back to us in the forms Freud described as repetition, remembering and working through. Anamnesis, as a process of narrative remembering by which one comes to know that past, works counter to progress: “Writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of the unknown thing ‘within’” (2). Lyotard sees us as caught between these two forces but with the possibility of choosing to work in the mode of one or the other. He favors the work of anamnesis, although the direction of the civilized world is otherwise. Complexification, like the unification within Nancy’s “working” (that is, not inoperative) community, like the Foucauldian extension of power, tends toward the reduction of specific humans to the components of a larger task, to the “hardware” of civilization. Not surprisingly, Lyotard’s investigations establish the deep analogy between thinking and what thinks — the body is within thinking as “writing is in language” (17). We think because we have bodies. Jane Gallop offered us all an image of the birth of her son and sparked a wave of personal criticism that denied the independence of the cogito from the bodily experience. The implication seems to be that critical thought has its source in the particular traumas of experience. But for all the sympathy I have for this gesture, I wonder how much we should consider those experiences to be personal: to what extent are individual failures of happiness productive of critical thought? Insofar as personal essays attempt to discover an origin for thought, or for unhappiness, they evade a more basic problem. Judith Butler writes of the trouble gender is, but gender is actually an answer (flawed as it may be) to the real trouble. Psychoanalysis invites us to consider what is at stake

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in having a body: bodies are incomplete, born premature, divided by sex, mortal. These incomplete bodies are incapable of permanent satisfaction, and so we suffer. As Jacques Lacan, always the joker, puts it, there is no sexual relation, and I may as well add that there is no community. Something unavailable to thought — Lyotard, like Lacan, calls it the Real — forever blocks the way to satisfaction. All consolations, from gender to philosophy, for this flaw in the Real are fated to fail, and therefore to be for Butler and others more trouble than they are worth. But that does not keep us from continuing to try to find happiness through them. The irony here is that flawed institutions — family, government, education, et cetera — continue to provide ancient, perverse enjoyments regardless of their ability to make us happy or miserable. The consequence of this enjoyment for the modern world is a fatal repetition. America’s enlightened armies of liberation continue to stumble into colonialism; gender refuses to be freed from romance; nations divorced from communism seek out atavistic identities in the affronts suffered in previous millennia. For literary modernity, too, every now is burdened with the excess of an unspoken past and a future that provokes a “perpetual rewriting” (Lyotard 28) in which every event is subject to a return. For literature and history, the question is how that return occurs. It can be as the obsessive return of an unconscious desire, the crime endlessly repeated as though it were fresh each time. This is the deep horror that links, for example, The New Criterion’s hatred of DeLillo’s un-American novels to the national hatred of the ethnic other. Or the return can come as the desire, like Oedipus’, to control the past by identifying the crime, which always leads one to repeat the form of the crime (Lyotard 29): this is the pathos of liberal pluralism. In both cases there remains the thought that some original fault might be set straight or be so reformed that it ceases to antagonize us. Can there be a way out of this trap? Nancy’s deconstructive suspension has so much renunciation of desire that one might detect the odor of the Kantian perverse in his method. Lyotard, however, suggests something like an attendance, not to the lost body of pleasure, but to the “matter,” the “body” that does speak: “The body is a confused speaker” (38), and because the body speaks unclearly, the orderly world ignores, and thereby loses “the enigmatic confusion of the past, the confusion of the badly built city, of

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childhood […] the disorder of the past which takes place before having been wanted and conceived” (38). The reasoning world has no interest in, and derives no benefit from, knowing such a past. The “inhuman” of complexification manifests itself unconsciously in the Calculations of Enlightenment thought, capitalism, technology, and institutional life: consequently, Lyotard claims, what we experience as desire is “no doubt no other than this process itself, working upon the nervous centres of the human brain and experienced directly by the human body” (71). Any thinking that follows the path of desire (for a stable understanding) is duped. Fortunately, the other “inhuman,” that of the confused body, is not, after all, silent. It exists, for one, in the language where words are the body of thought. Lyotard puts it this way: “Words ‘say,’ sound, touch, always ‘before’ thought. And they always ‘say’ something other than what thought signifies, and what it wants to signify by putting them into form. Words want nothing […]. They are always older than thought” (142). Words are like that old, animal child-body that one can never be rid of: “Always forgotten, it is unforgettable” (143). Writing, then, points toward one kind of thought, jouissance, and the resistance to the inhuman process of capital and complexification. Lyotard makes no claim that this resistance will ever liberate anyone, but here he does suggest an alternative to the “empowering” strategies of most contemporary critical ideologies. Slavoj Žižek, taking up a Lacanian idea, argues that the way to resist the repetitions of desire is to “enjoy your symptom.” That is, if you recognize that it is not your desire but what constitutes your desire that belongs to you, if you can identify with your symptom, then you might find an enjoyment that eschews all promise of power, that recognizes control as a constitutional delusion. This proposal may seem rarefied, but Žižek’s argument appears in the context of the real totalitarian consequences of certain fantasies of mastery, in Eastern Europe during the cold war and in that same region under the new order of emerging nationalisms. Modern communities will, of course, continue to be plagued by too much mindless suffering, boredom, and violence. And always there are the temptations offered by those who would relieve us of the suspense of our lives through ecstasies of religion, consumption, nationalism, family values. But the political solutions suggested by Butler’s stylization of Foucault, or Connor’s pluralism, or the wishing for community that characterizes

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much political discussion lead nowhere. They participate in a pattern of thought that denies what cannot be clearly, positively articulated. Historical and cultural criticism has increasingly avoided theory and interpretation, abandoning textuality in a claim to be sticking to fact. Psychoanalytic criticism, for example, in its turn toward self-psychology and object relations disavows the bodily real and its inarticulate forces in the hope of finding an accidental, hence correctable, cause of unhappiness. As if they can no longer stand the role of interpreting the world, critics of literature, culture, history, and mind have begun to act out an understandable desire to fix things. But they confuse, I believe, the unhappiness that comes from social and economic injustice, which may respond to action, and the unhappiness that arises in the meeting of the human with the inhuman in us. This is not a condition to fix but to understand and turn to useful thought and work. Theory has not run its course: we have taken the first chance to run from it and the limitations it insists on. The inertial power of American institutions, the thrill felt by buyers and sellers worshiping on the floor of the stock exchange, is ultimately every bit as great as that which drives the masses DeLillo describes marrying by the ballpark-full and praying in swirling multitudes in Mecca. Drag is not going to provide a counterpleasure to substitute for the ecstasy these people experience. If we will be happy, it will not be in the community of consumption or in the spurious chaos of drag. Nancy and Lyotard suggest that in an attention to language there may be some relief for the sad animal of humanity, and perhaps here there is the suggestion of another literary and critical practice that is not fated to repetition: We wake up and we are not happy. No question of remaking a real new house. But no question either of stifling the old childhood that murmurs at our waking. Thinking awakens in the middle of it, from the middle of very old words, loaded with a thousand domesticities. Our servants, our masters. To think, which is to write, means to awaken in them a childhood which these old folk have not yet had. (Lyotard 197) These pleasures are, significantly, domestic, the foundation, not the end, of social change.

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The End of Community and the Politics of Grammar by Michael Strysick

We are prisoners of a grammar invented at an early stage of human evolution, and it seems that, since we can think only by using language, our reason too is conditioned by the most primitive notions of reality […]. — Friedrich Nietzsche1

“Change” has been one of the most consistent buzzwords of the current cultural, political, and social moment. With the recent shifts in the executive and legislative branches of our federal government, the battle over who defines that term is being waged, and only time will tell what connotative sense this word will assume. As this period unfolds, however, part of our attention must be directed toward concentrating more intently on what structural forces change confronts, facing the real possibility that we are once more headed in the direction of fulfilling the adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The so-called postmodern era, the broader theoretical term assumed by some for the present moment, is concerned with changing the predominance of metanarratives through attention to narrativity, and its critique informs some of the issues we face in defeating this adage. As we have come to realize, the forms of our discourse demand critical attention equal to that of the contents of such discourse. Fundamental to these discussions is thinking about the very ordering of our relations one with another, which I will call community, and the ways in which we talk about and communicate that being-together. Indeed, the very grammatical or foundational character that underlies the structure of our narratives is in greatest need of our critical attention. Nietzsche’s attention to “grammar,” a trope for the way in which we construct and negotiate structures — discursive, moral, narratival, religious, societal, and otherwise — is fundamental in thinking about not only the death of God and humanity, but of the death or end of community as well

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as we attempt to change and transform community. Jean-François Lyotard’s assessment of narrative, what he calls phrasing, and the discursive practices of narrative that he characterizes by the “differend,” naturally extend Nietzsche’s point. I would assert that much of the recent attention to alterity and otherness — a direct result of our historical inattention to difference — can be understood through Lyotard’s differend; that is, by his insistence that discursive practice operates from the bias of a single grammatical structure. This, in turn, informs how people respond, necessarily determining, even predetermining, the structure of their responses — as well as the very forms of our community. However, community, with its implicit sense of the common, is often conceived of in terms of those things that are merely common among people; or more specifically, through the presence of what is presumably mutual. In the process, a philosophy of community emerges which runs the risk of operating on the basis of convenient oppositions between same and other in which the bias of homogeneity is predominant. If, however, the common within community is reconceived on the basis of an absence of what is shared — our difference — then such convenient oppositions are seriously challenged; individuals must be conceived of in terms of their potentially unregulatable differences. Put simply, community is traditionally defined by what is common among individuals; I am concerned with the negative way in which exclusion functions in community despite a community’s declared goals of inclusion. While it may seem paradoxical to begin by invoking an end, I will do so by employing “end” in both its telic and final sense; that is, by thinking about how the traditional structure and goals of community might be changed. Lyotard’s battle cry in The Postmodern Condition, “Let us wage a war on totality” (82), has its greatest application here, calling as it does for the end of a pretension to speak for all that eradicates difference. He engages this battle through a task of incredulity, in which “the nostalgia of the whole and the one” is challenged, exactly because “The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us as much terror as we can take” (81). I address such a task by examining several recent texts that work to expose this tendency, especially the manner in which totality and nostalgic wholeness fail to express the complexity and potential incommensurability within community.

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A Question of Community: A Community of the Question Does the auspicious declaration “the end of community” require explanation? Our century alone continues to witness the terror Lyotard speaks of through countless events that exhibit an inability to enact and ensure our being-together irrespective of our differences. These events bear recognizable names: Auschwitz, Bosnia, Buchenwald, Chechnya, Hiroshima; apartheid, gay bashing, hate crimes, rape. In saying so, I cannot help remembering those painful words spoken by Max von Sydow in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters. In one scene, von Sydow comments on a talk show in which participants discussed the Holocaust, puzzled at the occurrence of such an atrocity. Why does it not happen more often, von Sydow asks. But then again, doesn’t it? One might argue that the end has been approaching for some time now, that recent events have merely been the manifestation of structural forces — long in the making — pushed to their limits. Change confronts structures whose very foundations, and the cornerstones of those foundations, have been firmly established centuries earlier. Over time these foundations have settled in, whole cities and communities have been built over them, and we are left to consider our plan of alteration. Do we simply remodel the existing structures above the foundations? Do we raze the structures, rebuilding from the foundations? Or do we tear up, literally exhume, these foundations, by building new ones from new blueprints? Like the Max von Sydow character we ask: Why is the impossible continuing to occur on both small and large scales? This is where the question of community must begin, as well as a community of the question. Maurice Blanchot engages this question by insisting that the ethical formulations underlying our social structures have been figured from the bias of homogeneity, what he calls in The Unavowable Community, “the affirmation of the Same” (41). Since he views ethics as a constant relationship with the Other, he calls for moving away from thinking of ethics as a prescriptive Law.2 “An ethics is possible,” he says, “only when […] responsibility or obligation towards the Other […] does not come from the Law,” primarily because the relationship to the Other “cannot be enounced in any already formulated language.” This notion of an “already formulated language” is essential; community traditionally speaks predominantly from

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a sense of the already formulated, presuming that all can be spoken for. In its place Blanchot offers a daunting ethical formulation: “an infinite attention to the Other” (43). It is this type of critical attention that informs Giorgio Agamben’s pronouncement on ethics in The Coming Community: “The fact that must constitute the point of departure for any discourse on ethics is that there is no essence, no historical or spiritual vocation, no biological destiny that humans must enact or realize.” Essentially, nothing is already formulated. “This is the only reason why something like an ethics can exist,” he continues, “because it is clear that if humans were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible — there would be only tasks to be done” (42). Agamben’s point about ethics, when expanded, bears upon the issue of community. For him, ethics exist in the very vacuum of prescribed actions, already formulated actions. We might well ask: Are our relations with one another already formulated as well? If so, we are all automatons of some sort, Agamben would suggest, merely performing prescribed and already formulated tasks. If they are not already formulated, then we are each charged with responsibility to that void, required to act in the absence of prescription. The ethical responsibility demanded by this experience is based on a completely different notion of community. In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas criticizes Western thought as marked by an optical imperative that believes it is able to see everything and achieve complete understanding. This imperative fuels totality and its emphasis upon homogeneity. Yet it achieves this through a neutralization of difference — reducing all relations to that of same and other, with the same preeminent in this hierarchy. Levinas calls for relations of alterity (recognition and respect for difference) marked by what he calls an attention to the “visage d’Autrui,” the face of the Other. It is crucial, however, to recognize that this attention involves a very real staring straight in the face of heterogeneity, and that this heterogeneity is not regulateable by the same, the common, or the strictures of traditional community exactly because attention to the other radically alters the construction of being and existence. In other words, “The ethical exigency to be responsible for the other undermines the ontological primacy of the meaning of being,” Levinas writes, because “it unsettles the natural and political positions we have taken up in the world

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and predisposes us to a meaning that is other than being, that is otherwise than being (autrement qu’être)” (23). Jean-Luc Nancy, in The Inoperative Community, takes the ethical relation further by referring to the political element involved in questions of community. In the preface of his text he addresses the very time line in which we exist in such a community of the question, inferring that community is wandering toward the meaning of its death. He states that “if we do not face up to such questions, the political will soon desert us completely, if it has not already done so. It will abandon us to political and technological communities, if it has not already done so. And this will be the end of our communities, if this has not yet come about” (xii). The last sentence raises several important questions: 1) Has this end come about? 2) If it has, how would it be recognized? and 3) Is this end necessarily good or bad? Ultimately, it seems clear in the texts examined here that the prevailing end of community contains an inherent slow death, largely because of its manifest inattention to issues of difference prominent within its very grammar.

The End of Politics In The Postmodern Explained, Lyotard is careful to point out that the term “postmodern” was first used in an architectural context, denoting a transition from one way of defining space to another (75-80).3 Such a remark invites us to extend the word architecture beyond its traditional association with buildings to a broader realm of structures and the ways in which they inform human interaction. Our lives are characterized by the structures within which we circulate, and these structures are maintained by ominous edifices, architectural in their own way, of power and control. The play of these forces contributes to the political element of societal relations, political defined here not in the ordinary sense of politics (as ideology, governments, etc.), but as “the political,” a distinction that the French language allows through the definite articles of la and le. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy makes this distinction by defining “the political” (le politique) as “The place where community as such is brought into play” [xxxvii].4 To pursue the architectural metaphor, politics (la politique) may

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be understood as concerned with the very construction and maintenance of buildings and edifices, the political (le politique) with critical attention to the effects of structural forces themselves. The latter is concerned with “the politics of ” these relations to the extent that they bear upon human interaction. For Lyotard, the political is seen as inextricably tied to our discursive practices, taking on a new significance through the differend. “As distinguished from a litigation,” he writes, “a differend [différend] would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments” (Differend xi). A new politics must operate outside of a presumed universal rule by recognizing painful silences: not everyone can speak for him- or herself. What Lyotard offers is a manner of thinking that markedly refuses the pretension of speaking for others, or promoting any one authority or solution. In its most terrifying sense, Hitler’s “final solution” earlier this century describes the limits to which such pretension can extend. This extreme marks the germ and grammar of all totalizing discourse. Once the grammar is in place, all utterances are susceptible to its ordering principles, consciously or unconsciously, forcibly or at will. The final solution — and all final solutions before it and those yet to come — did not and will not exhibit the success of a politics that speaks for all but rather the failure of such a system. Unfortunately, that failure is repeatedly enacted in countless areas of community, each further exhibiting its underlying grammar. For Lyotard, at the end are all political programs — left, right, or center — that presume to redeem us from previous prescriptions for community. In fact, the recent publication of Lyotard’s Political Writings provides, says Bill Readings in his Foreword, “The End of Politics,” “a useful empirical corrective to charges that post-structuralism is an evasion of politics, or that Lyotard’s account of the postmodern condition is the product of blissful ignorance of the postcolonial question” (xiii). Furthermore, Readings adds, “Lyotard’s writings […] promulgate […] not so much the heroic militancy of a refusal to submit as a refusal to think that politics will come to an end. The time of ‘big politics,’ the idea of the political as the site where humanity struggles to define its destiny and realize its meaning, may well have passed.” In its place, Readings

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continues, politics becomes “the attempt to handle conflicts that admit of no resolutions, to think justice in relation to conflict and difference” (xxiv). Such conflicts are, of course, differends in Lyotard’s vocabulary. What is necessitated is a new thinking of politics as “not just one sphere among others,” says Lyotard, “but the sphere in which all the spheres are represented and in which social activity is distributed among them” (Political 61). A new notion of the political becomes so important because these pretensions plays themselves out in community and involve our very being-together. In “Of Being-in-common,” contained in Community at Loose Ends, Nancy develops his notion of community by distinguishing between types of orientation. For him, community should be thought outside the bias of homogeneity and be based upon what he calls “being-in-common,” which forms the basis of a question. “We are in common, with one another,” Nancy writes, but “What does this ‘in’ and this ‘with’ mean? (Or, to put it another way, what does ‘we’ mean, what is the meaning of this pronoun which, in one way or another, must be inscribed in any discourse?)” (6). In other words, he continues, “Being, or existence, is what we share […]. But being is not a thing we could possess in common […]. We shall say then that being is not common in the sense of a common property, but that it is in common. Being is in common” (1). Commonality, in other words, should not be understood here as singularity, but instead as radical plurality. If singular, the tendency is toward totality and universality — what he calls immanentism. Nancy makes this clear in his Preface to The Inoperative Community where he provides a poignant example of how this in and with should not be conceived: “The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader […]) necessarily loses the in of the being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truths of community, on the contrary, reside in the retreat of such a being.” Nancy then gives an example of an in which is lost by saying “Nothing indicates more clearly what the logic of this being of togetherness can imply than the role of Gemeinschaft, of community, in Nazi ideology” (Inoperative xxxix).

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Community and the Postmodern Condition But how do we speak to the metanarratival inscription? In answering this question it is necessary to remember that what is discredited in the postmodern condition is not just narrative itself, but rather narrative that assumes the idealistic continuity of beginning, middle, and end; idealistic not only because of this assumed continuity, with implications of linear progression and progress in general, but also because of the assumed comprehensiveness of the story as the story and its ability to completely exclude all other stories. In The Differend, Lyotard addresses how phrases, ways of speaking and linking thoughts one to another, are in dispute. Recognizing the state of the differend would be, ultimately, to accept several conditions: that the rules or regimens structuring a specific way of speaking (phrasing) are by necessity unique and exclusive; that no one phrase or phrase regimen can assume hegemony over all others; and that the genres that generally distinguish phrases from one another themselves cannot assume total hegemony. For Lyotard, a genre is always in quest of its own rules. Lyotard suggests a move away from grand narratives, comprehensive and complete, to small narratives. These petits récits appear by the time of The Differend to achieve the status of the phrase.5 According to Lyotard, as things and events happen we engage, no matter what our response, in a process of enchaînement, of linking, which requires an accountability of the story-tellers in each of us, as myth-makers, as linkers. The act of phrasing is necessary because things happen. However, the phrase, as a necessary, all-encompassing link, is no longer credible, nor is the work, the story. The postmodern condition thus becomes summed up succinctly as incredulity through the strongest link in Lyotard’s book: “To link is necessary, but a particular linkage is not” (80); which is to say, we must say and/or do something (we must answer a phrase with a phrase), but we cannot prescribe a form in which that link must necessarily occur. This condition orients new ways of thinking both of community and what it means to be political. Fundamentally, Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives addresses its incredulity toward the pretense of completion and finality, which occurs only by reducing the complexity of individuals and their competing interests

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to a single story. What must be undone, according to Lyotard, is the belief in “a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres” (Differend xi). At the root of such thinking is the failure to recognize the incommensurability of relations and situations (genres, for Lyotard), followed by the assumption that a universal rule is applicable. Our condition now involves a shifting through the debris of community after the failures of modernity’s metanarratives and community’s attempt to satisfy all desires and affinities. Rather than resurrect past metanarratives, or attempt to assemble any new unifying voice or panopticon, another necessity arises: assuming that narrative will still exist, but with the understanding that narratives are irreducible to each other. Achieving the dissolution of a Manichean ordering of relations is predicated upon our ability not only to re-think but un-think traditional community. A viable alternative is suggested by the two adjectives used in French by Nancy and Blanchot in their important texts to modify the sense of la communauté (community) — désoeuvrée and inavouable, respectively. The term désoeuvrée does not simply mean to be idle or inoperative, as it is often translated,6 but rather actively “unworking” or undoing the traditional structure of the work, the oeuvre.7 The privative in- or unneutralizes avouable or avowable. Avow has feudal connotations deriving from avouer, to call to or to call upon, especially to call on as a defender or patron, derived from the Latin advocare. The noun avoué refers to this patron and defender as advocate; the verb to avow is thus a call in which one is protected by this avoué. Individual sovereignty is lost as authority is transferred to the avoué, with individual identity sacrificed to an immanent totality in a vassal-lord relationship. Blanchot’s sense of the unavowable community as “evasively consecrated to the always uncertain end inscribed within community itself ” clearly distinguishes itself from avowable communities (Unavowable 56). The unavowable would be more attentive to loss since all is valued, language I employ to suggest the metanarrative character of the avowable structure. I see the avowable as a story — with an already formulated beginning, middle, and end — that the avoué demands others to defend and vow allegiance to. Yet avowability is even more, for historically people have been forced to confess to ends very specifically inscribed within their narrative. In an immanent, avowable structure the ends are always certain,

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with individuals merely ends themselves and understood as means of profit (as support) of this end. However, the distinction between avowable and unavowable requires some further explanation, and this can be best achieved by reference to an earlier writer key to the French debate.

Bataille: Traditional and Elective Communities Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, as well as Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, are mediated primarily through the work of Georges Bataille. Blanchot and Bataille did not meet until 1941, but in viewing Bataille’s work before that time Blanchot asserts, “It is clear that (approximately) between 1930 and 1940, the word ‘community’ imposed itself on his research more than during the following periods” (Unavowable 4). The group Acéphale was one of Bataille’s last communitarian endeavors, moving away from an overt politics (la politique) to an interest in the political (le politique). Acéphale, which claimed its members to be ferociously religious, indicated the beginning of the end for Bataille, receding from an essentially exterior engagement in community toward one much more meditative and interior. The claim of religious ferocity was followed in a companion Acéphale text, “Sacred Conspiracy,” by this equally provocative statement: “to the extent that our existence is the condemnation of everything that is recognized today, an inner exigency demands that we be equally imperious. What we are starting is a war” (Visions 178). This is undoubtedly the same war that Lyotard marks alliance with some forty-five years later in his declaration against totality in The Postmodern Condition. Initiated in 1936, Acéphale led to the founding of a College of Sociology a year later, in many ways an extension of Acéphale. In the initial public College lecture, on “Sacred Sociology,” Bataille offers an important distinction between what he calls traditional and elective communities, resonating with the distinction between the avowable and the unavowable. Stated simply, these two types of community differ on the basis of what unites them: facts or affinities. What I would like to do is to excerpt these few comments and expand them, precisely because I find this distinction fundamental to the current discussions on community.

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As I noted, Bataille’s distinction between types of communities is a small part of this larger essay. What little he does have to say amounts to this: “[T]he development of new communities is such that the primary formation itself, when all is said and done, takes on a value equivalent to that of the secondary formations.” Both types of communal formations are necessary, though radically different. He continues: “From then on it [the primary formation] can be regarded as one of the communities forming society and take the name of traditional community, differing from the new communities, the most important of which are the elective communities” (College 81). At this moment Bataille offers an important footnote that bears quoting in its entirety: The College refuses to belong to de facto communities. The elective communities that it opposes to them, communities of persons brought together by elective affinities, could be defined as communities of value. What value? Precisely that of community as such: a community of those for whom the community is a value and not a fact. One’s country is only a fact: it would be stupid to deny it[;] it is morally inadmissible to limit oneself to it. (407n13) This sense of delimiting oneself touches upon the element of individual insufficiency and incompletion that calls for the other as well as community. These insufficiencies and incompletions are, as Blanchot points out, defined by birth and death, our ultimate limits; traditional community is “imposed on us without our having the liberty of choice in the matter: it is de facto sociality” (Unavowable 46). Bataille emphasizes that elective communities choose to utilize energy “to break, partially or fatally, the bonds that unite us with society” (College 81). Although elective communities are secondary, they are of “a form of secondary organization that possesses constant characteristics and to which recourse is always possible when the primary organization of society can no longer satisfy all the desires that arise” (149). In short, Bataille is not convinced that traditional community fully appreciates the complexity and diversity of human experience — precisely because it assumes being is common and not shared.

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Bataille extends this complexity: “The tendency to dissociation does not simply oppose individuals to group; it opposes, even within the same whole, several parts that can be composed of the same elements for that matter” (College 81). In other words, there can be countless forms of elective communities, in addition to elective communities embedded within elective communities. However, it is vital to realize that there can be no single form of elective community; associations by affinity preclude any homogenizing as they epitomize heterogeneity. Admittedly, traditional community seeks to reduce elective community to its grammar (that of an economy of the same), but the elective should not be seen as equally reductive. By differing grammars I suggest that elective communities exist as ends in themselves; they presume to speak only for those involved, by those involved. Traditional communities, on the other hand, attempt to exist as an end for all. To use the language employed above in the discussion of ethics, elective community has as its goal the alteration of traditional community, reformulating what was presumed already formulated. In the end, while society is never exclusively one type of community or another, society’s communifying movement is predominantly based on a type of unity much more traditional than elective — and always for limited benefit. We create problems by privileging the few facts that unite us, and we have been duped into discounting the affinities that might better unite us. Furthermore, more often than not it is characteristics of facts that are hierarchized and then imposed as supposedly traditional; that is, gender or race is a fact, but community traditionally privileges or prefers one type of gender or race. I assume that these characteristics imposed as facts are historically nothing less than the play of force and power, dubious of the fact that certain members of society — on the basis of their culture, economic class, ethnicity, gender, politics, race, religion, or sexual orientation — are necessarily more factual than others. Elective communities necessarily expand the appreciation of these so-called facts. While we must recognize the intractability of traditional community — Bataille admits it is the primary formation — we need not be reduced to it; we must simultaneously realize the extent to which it can be altered and subverted by elective communities oriented by virtue of affinities and not facts.

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Bataille and the Elective Community of Friendship Eventually, Bataille began addressing questions of community through a new elective formulation. “Friendship,”8 his first published text after the end of his various communities, helps define this turn. What this essay reinforced is that insufficiency is at the root of unintelligibility and itself demands community. Bataille describes this as a discovery: “la seul achèvement possible de la connaissance a lieu si j’affirme de l’existence humaine qu’elle est un commencement qui ne sera jamais achevé” [the only possible completion of knowledge takes place if I assert that human existence is a beginning that can never be completed] (OC, VI, 294). Let me pursue the issue of incompletion before getting to friendship, specifically because of how it bears on the importance Bataille came to place on communication. In a section entitled “The Principle of Incompleteness,” Blanchot asks: “I repeat, for Bataille, the question: Why ‘community’? The answer he gives is rather clear: ‘There exists a principle of insufficiency at the root of each being’ (the principle of incompleteness)” (Unavowable 5). For Bataille, insufficiency calls for the other, and the call is answered through communication; yet the connection this engenders is never intended to render the insufficiency obsolete. Here the term unavowable is abundantly meaningful. It describes an indefensible state — that is, a state that is not oriented by prescribed or pre-defined statutes — because there is no central grand narrative, no traditional community that one vows to uphold. For Bataille, sharing, ecstasy, and communication are the experience of incompletion, but not its overcoming. The idea that informed much of Bataille’s thinking was a striking passage by Nietzsche in The Gay Science: “I love the unknowability of the future.”9 Bataille appreciates this quote because of the sense of deferral it implies. The future is omnipresent and the passage of time never really moves one closer to the future; however, one still moves in its direction. Likewise, the move toward completion for Bataille is just that: movement alone, never an expectation that it will be reached. Nancy develops this in The Inoperative Community, acknowledging, “Of course, to not reach an end was one of the exigencies of Bataille’s endeavor, and this went hand in hand with the refusal of project to which a thinking of community seems inexorably linked” (21).

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But how are we to understand all this in terms of friendship, which exemplifies elective community for Bataille in the forties? I think this makes sense by reference to “Of Friendship” in the Essays. Here, Michel de Montaigne is concerned with stating explicit differences between true friendship and common or ordinary relationships — best understood through Bataille’s distinction between elective and traditional communities or Blanchot’s distinction between the unavowable and avowable. Indeed, at the outset Montaigne states very clearly that there are no friends in “all associations that are forged and nourished by pleasure and profit, by public or private needs,” in that they “are the less beautiful and noble, and the less friendships, in so far as they mix into friendship another cause and object and reward than friendship itself ” (136). Refusing to structure relationships based on imperatives of pleasure and profit allows the possibility of reaching friendship. Friendship is most opposed to what Nancy has called immanentist (totalitarian) community, the avowable, by a quality that transcends totality: an open, unlimited, infinite orientation without irreducibility, the unavowable. Friendship is, in short, a self-referential relation particular to its members alone according to Montaigne: “friendship has no other model than itself, and can be compared only with itself” (139). Present in this self-referential relation is loss, occurring in a seamless suturing. “In the friendship I speak of,” Montaigne writes, referring to the ideal relation not marred by an imperative of pleasure or profit, “our souls mingle and blend with each other so completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again.” Montaigne describes this in terms of his friendship with Etienne de La Boétie. “I know not what quintessence of all this mixture,” he writes, “which having seized my whole will, led it to plunge and lose itself in his.” He continues by noting the reciprocity of this relation, as Boétie’s will would “lose itself in mine, with equal hunger, equal rivalry. I say lose, in truth, for neither of us reserved anything for himself, nor was anything either his or mine” (139). The avowable is explicitly and exclusively oriented toward profit, the unavowable toward loss. The unavowable character of friendship, according to Montaigne, would “hate and banish from between them these words of separation and distinction: benefit, obligation, gratitude,

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request, thanks, and the like” (141). Obligation is replaced by necessity because of the responsibility demanded by the friend — this other — in terms of response. I think this is exactly what Lyotard means when he says, in The Differend, “It is necessary to link, but the mode of linkage is never necessary” (29), or “To link is necessary, but a particular linkage is not” (80). The necessity of linking — responding to a phrase — approximates one’s infinite attention to the Other who enunciates the phrase, with the phrase judged in large part by its attention to how the character of the differend may bear on the phrase and/or its links. The response, as link, will be based on one of two structures, each infinite in variety: profit or loss, avowable or unavowable. The unavowable response in its responsibility is structured by an infinite attention in which the friend, as other, is not treated as commodity from whom profit is to be gained or exacted. A profit-oriented structure is not defended or authorized when affinity is present, and the influence of the avoué or advocate is excised from the relation. Profit is at work in the avowable relation, with the achievement of profit as its vow. The immanent is this work’s logic and grammar; profit is its theos, and what is to be gained by the largesse of its totality is authority and power. The unavowable performs, in its intimacy and elective affinities, the unworking of such an imperative. The unavowable community, friendship, is an unworking community; not a utopia to be achieved, nor an ideal to be strived for, but merely an attention to the other within the debris of the crisis of finite inattention.

Incredulity Toward the Grammar of Community Levinas sought to overcome metaphysics by speaking, as one of his titles suggests, Autrement qu’être (that is, otherwise than being); it is vital that we begin to speak otherwise in terms of community, to hear, listen, see, and think otherwise as well. This is the conclusion that Nancy arrives at: “It should be possible to think otherwise […] according to another articulation both of love and of community” (Loose 38). Such a task is not simply to be enacted as a single response but as a continuous responding. Community, with the sense of the common seemingly implicit, has been thought for so long from a vertical standpoint; top down. Perhaps

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the oldest term used to describe this verticalizing of community is the empire, what I believe Nancy means when he uses the term immanentism. An emperor ruled from the very height of the community, and the rest of the world was compartmentalized beneath him. Imperial grammar manifested itself so thoroughly, resulting in the creation of many empires, each smaller (but no less powerful) in nature and size. Community gains nothing from attempting to build and rebuild immanent, avowable empires. Violence is at the root of the immanent mentality; its manifest destiny razes what it will, creating endless trails of tears. Incredulity confronts the immanent with itself, mirroring it in order to undo power, not usurp it. But this entails a change in foundation, in what Nietzsche refers to as grammar. Unless foundations change, what arises from them will not change demonstrably. Rather, we must engage a task to expose totalizing gestures within community. This is the approach community’s altered politics (la politique), by virtue of a new orientation of the political (le politique), must engage. This marks not merely incredulity to metanarratives, but more importantly, incredulity toward the lingering shadow of the grammar of metanarratives.

Broken Grammar The importance of undoing this mentality arises not out of any search for truth, any metaphysical quest, or any religious pilgrimage; rather, it arises from the need for justice as manifest equality. Unavowability itself defines a horizontal community. In the process, difference — upon which avowability and inequality has for so long been based — is not erased but rather becomes the greatest challenge. This requires a radical shift, an overturning of a prevailing mentality that prefers the one to the many, or even the many as mediated through the one. The challenge is to work to understand the many in terms of the many, mediated only by itself. But how could such radical changes take place? Who would take charge of this? Again, even asking the question in this manner belies the point to which empire is embedded in our very thinking, specifically if we seek to answer this through the concept of leaders and followers. Community

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need not shrink the world to a handful, but enlarge it to the many. Rather than scheming about and theorizing on how to achieve such a horizontal structure, it is best to simply undo those vertical elements when they appear. Rather than describing an end point to be reached, with a specific program to that end, we can describe a point from which we wish to flee. Community has endured codes, laws, and plans promising paradise, redemption, and salvation; now, we must conceive of practical ways to move further away from self-created states of emergency. Such a notion of community will not be achieved by some revisionist undoing of past documents but by a real undoing of past practices — incredulity in its strongest form. After all, we cannot change the past, but we need not be anchored in its mistakes nor chained to its insensitivities. We need go no further in thinking about undoing the grammar of community than Lyotard’s first word in defining postmodernism: incredulity. Lyotard’s term describes not merely a lack of belief, but even more, a lack of faith; an inability to invest trust in those past creeds and faiths that have preferred the homogeneous and total at the expense of difference and our shared elective affinities. Now we must be motivated to create new myths in order to reinvest the notion of credibility. The relationship to the past is characterized purely by the necessity of rethinking and restating what has been said. But the post, while commenting on the past — by naming a “post” — also relates to the future, saying not only that we have lost faith in the past, but also its modus operandi. At once, all three tenses are brought into play: at present, in large part because of the past, we do not know what to do in the future, into which we are forever propelled. Of course, progress is called into question in the process — Walter Benjamin has stated this so eloquently in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Despite the passage of time we are no better equipped to avoid the so-called state of emergency in which we persist, nor to repair it or quell the storm blowing us further away from paradise. The continued proliferation of voices and visions in society, and concomitant ways of hearing and seeing those imaginings, have engaged the slow death of community by challenging its grammar. New ends — stressing the plural over and against the singular, the total — are emerging, though perhaps very slowly. The degree to which they succeed will depend upon the ability to undo totality and its grammar such that

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our differences alone are held in common, in which affinities are as important as facts, our discourse marking this alterity. An altered grammar thus directs itself toward nothing short of testifying to the inability to speak for all, of the unspeakable manners in which we have tried to form and enforce such totalizing narratives, and the ultimate demand that we speak and think otherwise. Change can occur, but only to the degree that community begins to mark its end as not simply recognizing and allowing “other” voices to speak,10 and at the point when the grammar of the same and the bias of homogeneity is broken. This will occur only at the moment when we begin to realize that all are other and none are the same.

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Notes 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Will to Power, note written 1886-1887, §522; this quote is taken from Appendice C of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols (191). In using the word Law here I mean it to resonate with that of Franz Kafka. Kafka’s most skeptical discussion of the Law occurs in his “The Problem of Our Laws” when he writes that they are “not generally known [… and are] kept secret by the small group of nobles who rule us,” such that “The Law is whatever the nobles do” (437-8). Here Lyotard comments that “According to Portoghesi, the rupture of postmodernism consists in an abrogation of the hegemony of Euclidean geometry (its sublimation in the plastic poetics of ‘de Stijl,’ for example)” (75). See also Tim Craker, Michael Strysick, and Gretchen Topp, eds. “Links, the Unconscious, and the Sublime: An Inter-Phrase with Jean-François Lyotard,” specifically 114-116. The English translation loses the sense of l’oeuvre, the work, or à l’oeuvre, to be at work, suggested by the term désoeuvrée, more literally meaning “unworking,” “idle,” or even “inert” rather than the chosen “inoperative.” However, the sense of “work,” through opera, is present. Two articles devoted to Nancy and the political should be noted. First, see David Ingram, “The Retreat of the Political in the Modern Age: Jean-Luc Nancy on Totalitarianism and Community.” Ingram discusses the work of Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Center for the Philosophical Study of the Political, which existed from 1980-1984. The work of the Center has been collected in two volumes, not yet available in translation: Rejouer le politique and Le Retrait de la politique. Secondly, a recent article by Todd Way continues this type of investigation: “The Community’s Absence in Lyotard, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe.” In a seminar by Lyotard I attended just after the publication of The Differend in English, he began by emphasizing the etymological derivation of “phrase,” the Greek phrazein. Originally this term referred to communicating without the use of speech, using a kind of sign language. He explained this, I believe, to de-emphasize language as the primary agent of phrasing. For Lyotard, every action, loud, silent, implicit, explicit, and presumably conscious or unconscious, is a phrase. He makes this clear in The Differend, in his “Preface: Reading Dossier,” when he says “There is no non-phrase. Silence is a phrase.” Even emphasizing that “There is no last phrase” (xii). It should be noted here that despite titling the English translation of Nancy’s text, The Inoperative Community, that the French term désoeuvrée is nearly always translated within the text as “unworking.” In her translation of Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature, Ann Smock generally translates this term as “idle” and “inert” (see, for example, 13). Pierre Joris, in his

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translation of Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, prefers to translate désoeuvrée as “unworking.” See his Translator’s Preface for a discussion of this term, especially xxii-xxiv. I will prefer “unworking” throughout this essay. Let me point out that both convergence and divergence exist between the thought of Blanchot and Nancy. Robert Bernasconi addresses this in an insightful article devoted to the topic of community, “On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West: The Debate between Nancy and Blanchot.” 7. There is a famous discussion of this word, of course, contained in the writing of Roland Barthes. See his “From Work to Text.” Recall, too, the active sense of undoing contained in Heidegger’s term “destruction” or Derrida’s “deconstruction.” 8. Titled “L’Amitié” in the original and published under the pseudonym “Dianus” in the journal Mesures, on 15 April 1940. I will draw from the publication of this essay in Bataille’s Oeuvres complètes. 9. My altered translation. In the original: “Ich liebe die Unwissenheit um die Zukunft” (§287). See Bataille’s development of this phrase in Guilty, especially 25-27. 10. See Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” She makes this point much more eloquently when she writes: We are not Isak Dinesen’s “aspects of nature,” nor Conrad’s unspeaking. We are the subjects of our narrative, witnesses to and participants in our own experience, and, in no way coincidentally, in the experience of those with whom we have come in contact. We are not, in fact, “other.” We are choices. And to read imaginative literature by and about us is to choose to examine centers of the self and to have the opportunity to compare these centers with the “raceless” one with which we are, all of us, most familiar. (9)

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Part III Community and French Theory

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Against Community: Derrida contra Nancy by A. J. P. Thomson

In his most explicitly political text, Politics of Friendship, Jacques Derrida makes a surprising and unsettling prohibition on the use of the word community, and claims never to have used it himself. Derrida’s tone seems suspended between confession and command: I was wondering why the word ‘community’ (avowable or unavowable, inoperative or not) — why I have never been able to write it, on my own initiative and in my name, as it were. Why? Whence my reticence? And is it not fundamentally the essential part of the disquiet which inspires this book? (304-305) In what is only a parenthetical comment, made in the closing pages of his final chapter, Derrida’s implication is that the whole of the book might be organized around just this point: that we should not think, write, or propose a politics of community, however we seek to refine or clarify the term. In this essay, I will examine this startling prohibition — for who would set themselves against community? Why is Derrida against community and what are the consequences for thinking the politics of community, or even for thinking politically as such? More is at stake here than just the use of the word community: Derrida’s “avowable or unavowable, inoperative or not” makes clear that he has in mind, perhaps more than any other writers of community, his friends Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot. Yet several commentators, following Nancy Fraser’s influential review article “The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing Politics,” have identified the politics of deconstruction with the work published by Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe’s Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris. If Derrida’s book on politics is to be read, even in part, as a hostile response to Nancy’s work, then the question of the political legacy of deconstruction must be in question. Indeed, Derrida suggests that he has this context in mind when, referring to the work of the Centre,

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he notes elsewhere in Politics of Friendship that “My work here would be, as a sign of gratitude, a modest and belated contribution to work that was important for my own” (137n25). It seems somewhat appropriate that such a contribution should be not only “belated” but also somewhat scandalous. For, doesn’t setting oneself against community mean setting oneself against politics as such? This is certainly how Derrida’s work has been received, by both his friends and enemies. Thomas McCarthy, for example, takes what he calls “Derrida’s withdrawal from the specificity of politics and of empirical social research” (115) to be evidence of a retreat to theology or mysticism (119); his terms are vague and ambiguous (118) and instead of friendship finds only a “politics of the ineffable.” Yet this is fundamentally the same accusation made by Simon Critchley, a much more patient and sympathetic reader of Derrida, who writes in The Ethics of Deconstruction: is there not an implicit refusal of the ontic, the factical, and the empirical — that is to say, of the space of doxa, where politics takes place in a field of antagonism, decision, dissension and struggle? In this sense, might one not ultimately speak of a refusal of politics in Derrida’s work? (200) This complaint, written before the publication of Politics of Friendship is upheld in Critchley’s more recent Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity. Does being against community mean being against politics itself? As I hope to demonstrate in this essay, not only does opposing community not contradict a commitment either to thinking politically or rethinking politics, it is a condition of doing so. My claim will be that we should refuse community not — and I am here adapting a passage from another work of Derrida’s — to oppose it with an end of politics, or an apoliticality, but, on the contrary, in order to show that the concept of community itself locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels politics. (The original sentence is in Spectres of Marx [74].) If challenging community is at least a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition of thinking politically, then this must also be a challenge to the so-called communitarian movement in English-language political thought, despite the apparent resonances between the communitarian insistence that politics and ethics might not be based on universal principles, but should be understood as being bound

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to communities of thought — to specific traditions and cultures — and Derrida’s emphasis on the singularity of any context, his concern with thinking difference. Derrida’s reservations are directly connected to the concept of fraternity, which is not only one of the dominant themes of Politics of Friendship but also provides the immediate context for his rebuke of Nancy and Blanchot. As he comments in a note earlier in the book: there is still perhaps some brotherhood in Bataille, Blanchot and Nancy, and I wonder, in the innermost recesses of my admiring friendship, if it does not deserve a little loosening up and if it should still guide the thinking of community, be it a community without community or a brotherhood without brotherhood. (48n15) Derrida repeats his complaint that Nancy remains attached to fraternal motifs in a more recent text, Le Toucher, Jean Luc Nancy (35-36), and there are indeed references to brotherhood at key moments in both The Experience of Freedom (168) and The Sense of the World (115), as well as in The Inoperative Community (43-44). Perhaps this is not surprising for a thinker whose work on community begins with the explicit reference to the ideal of communism. On one level, Politics of Friendship is nothing other than a long interrogation of the persistence of the figure of the brother in Western political thought, in particular when it comes to theorizing democracy. The two motifs are linked by the question of friendship from Aristotle onwards. In The Nicomachean Ethics, precisely where the question of friendship acts as a hinge between ethics and politics, it is the constitutional form of “timocracy” and its “coterminous” deviant form, democracy, which are compared to friendship modeled on “the association of brothers” (209-210). Derrida argues that this paradigm extends through Western philosophy at least as far as Nancy, via such key figures as Cicero, Augustine, Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Schmitt. Another essay, “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology,” bound with Politics of Friendship in the French edition, adds Heidegger to the list. The focus of Derrida’s argument is the continuity of this lineage, through and in spite of the apparent break in it inaugurated by Nietzsche.

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After all, Nietzsche privileges the enemy over the friend, and rewrites the sentence, attributed to Aristotle, which Derrida traces through the philosophical tradition, “O my friends, there is no friend,” as “enemies, there is no enemy.” This apparent reversal is not what it seems. Attempting to overturn the established values and hierarchies of Western thought, Nietzsche succeeds only in unveiling the possibility which has always governed and conditioned that thought: “Nietzsche’s upheaval would […] interrupt less than recall (and call again for) a rupture already inscribed in the speech it interrupts” (Derrida, Politics 27). In this case, the reversibility of the relationship between friend and enemy. Or, as Derrida describes it, a friend could not be my friend if he was not, at least potentially, capable of being my enemy: “the two concepts (friend/enemy) consequently intersect and ceaselessly change places” (72). In “Force of Law,” Derrida asserts that “deconstruction is generally practiced in two ways […]. One takes on the demonstrative and apparently ahistorical allure of logico-formal paradoxes. The other, more historical […] seems to proceed through readings of texts, meticulous interpretations and genealogies” (20). Here, the name Nietzsche stands for the focal point at which the structural analysis of the conditions of possibility and impossibility of the concept of friendship intersects and interrupts the empirical history of the development of that concept in the writing of democracy. If for Nietzsche the truth of friendship is always the enemy, for Derrida a friend must always be a potential enemy, and therefore in some sense still an enemy. Not only can the two concepts not be rigorously distinguished but also to introduce the possibility of enmity into the heart of friendship destroys the possibility of the ideal of unconditional friendship that governs the concept. From Aristotle onwards, greater value has been attached to the act of loving, rather than to being the object of love, and ultimately to the figure of a love so unconditional that its object would be entirely unaware of it. For Derrida, it is not a question of affirming the enemy over the friend, or friendship over enmity, but of remarking their co-implication. Recalling other similar demonstrations, we might call this supplementarity or contamination, a vertiginous or abyssal logic, or the haunting of one concept by the other. This dizzying position is where Derrida locates Nancy, and the other thinkers of “community without community.”

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Now, Derrida’s objection to community is not simply that it remains within the space of possibility assured by such traditional philosophical and political figures as friendship and democracy. He does not presume that he has somehow escaped what a Heideggerian might describe as the closure of metaphysics. Nor is his complaint against Nancy that fails to do so, either. Rather, Derrida disputes the choice of the name of community as a title for a new thought of the political. For he, too, pursues a hyperbolic and exasperating thought, and also within the upheaval of the Nietzschean reversal. But instead of community, Derrida chooses to think what he calls “a friendship and democracy to come.” Derrida attempts to affirm and perform another reading of friendship, which might displace the traditional paradigm, a friendship “of the order neither of the common nor of its opposite, neither appurtenance or non-appurtenance, sharing or non-sharing, proximity or distance, the inside or the outside, etc.” This friendship would have nothing to do with “community”: Not because it would be a community without community, ‘unavowable’ or ‘inoperative’, etc., but simply because it would have nothing to do, with regard to what is essential in that which is called friendship, with the slightest reference to community, whether positive, negative, or neutral. (Politics 298) The test of Derrida’s text is this effort to think a future politics which does not betray the future itself by presuming or claiming to know what that would be. To this extent, Derrida cannot detach himself from the traditional concepts and paradigms of democracy, of friendship, and of politics. Moreover, he deliberately reinscribes himself into the tradition by his frequent recitation of the phrase which he takes as the very measure of canonicity, what he calls an “immense rumour running through the tradition (Politics 27) — “O my friends, there is no friend” — at the same time as he tries to find other ways of hearing it and of responding to it. But the fact remains that Derrida does not think we should rescue community or brotherhood, but is willing to call for a rethinking of democracy and of friendship. It would appear that thinking “community without community” is too risky: “Affirmed, negated or neutralized, these ‘communitarian’ or ‘communal’ values always risk bringing a brother back” (298).

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Derrida’s problem with fraternity is that it grounds the thinking of democracy problematically by giving rise to at least two consequences which appear to conflict with the emancipatory universal appeal of and for democracy. The first and most obvious is that which Derrida associates with a certain “virility” of political and philosophical thought, in Le Toucher (36), and elsewhere (“Opening Remarks” 7). Since the model for friendship is always exclusively male — the association between brothers — what room is left for friendship between women, or between men and women? “This double exclusion of the feminine in the philosophical paradigm,” writes Derrida, “would then confer on friendship the essential and essentially sublime figure of homosexuality” (Politics 279). At the limit, we might ask, is democracy itself founded on the theoretical exclusion of women? (The concomitant question is whether philosophical or theoretical thought is founded on the same exclusion.) A recurrent question in Politics of Friendship is whether the canonical models of political philosophy, even politics itself, can or could take account of gender difference; Derrida repeatedly draws attention to the traditional silence on the sister. For example, he notes of Schmitt that “not even in the theory of the partisan is there the least reference to the role played by women in guerrilla warfare, in the wars and the aftermath of wars of national liberation today” (156). Derrida emphasizes the hegemony of a discourse which, when it recognizes the existence of the woman, neutralizes her difference. For example, in Kant’s reading of modesty: “It would equalize the sexes by moralizing them, getting the woman to participate in universal fraternity: in a word, in humanity. The modest woman is a brother for man” (274). Derrida’s second objection is that a fraternal model implies that there must be a limit to friendship. Theorizing friendship as brotherhood demands that true friendship be distinguished from false friendship, and Derrida notes that throughout the tradition friendship has had to be defined, not only in distinction to enmity, but as limited in number. There are two consequences. Firstly that the state must treat all subjects as equal, whereas for Derrida “every other is altogether other.” Thus, democratic equality is itself violence: With this becoming political [of friendship] the question of democracy thus opens, the question of the citizen or the subject as a countable singularity. And that of a ‘universal fraternity.’

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There is no democracy without respect for irreducible singularity or alterity, but there is no democracy without the ‘community of friends’, without the calculation of majorities, without identifiable, stabilizable, representable subjects, all equal. These two laws are irreducible one to the other. Tragically irreconcilable and forever wounding. The wound itself opens with the necessity of having to count one’s friends, to count the others, in the economy of one’s own, there where every other is altogether other. (23) An aporetic relation exists between the idea of democracy as an emancipatory and universal ideal and the necessary limit of democracy as negotiation between conflicting positions. This is more than just the failure of any empirical example of a state called democratic to reach an ideal condition; it is a twist in the logic of democracy which means that no democracy will never be fully democratic, never be adequate to the ideals which it expresses. This also recalls democracy to a second limit: that it must be applicable only to the citizens of one state, and not of another state, or even of those without state. (Or those without papers, to recall one of Derrida’s most explicit political interventions, on the question of immigration [cf. “Manquements du droit à la justice {mais que manque-t-il donc aux ‘sans papiers’?}”]). The third and most telling problem of invoking fraternity, however, is that it naturalizes friendship. This is what Derrida insists on in his brief comments on the subject in Le Toucher: “To put it too briefly, what concerns me in the word ‘generosity,’ as in the word ‘fraternity,’ is at bottom the same thing. In both cases, one welcomes some genealogy, some filiation, a principle of ‘birth,’ whether or not they are […] natural” (36). “The brother is never a fact”(159) declares Derrida in Politics of Friendship, for “fraternity requires a law and names, symbols, a language, engagements, oaths, speech, family and nation” (149). Derrida’s aim is not to destroy the family but to draw attention to the “renaturalizing rhetoric” of “the process of fraternization” (202). Fraternization is the naturalization of friendship. All friendship follows the fraternal model: but something within friendship escapes, and it is this to which Derrida clings. For friendship, even if it must function fraternally, names something else. In principle at least, friendship holds the promise of a non-natural decision. Or, the promise of a decision as such, rather than the following

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of a rule, a natural law or a law which presents itself as natural, for example, that of the family. What Derrida appeals for in friendship is that which displaces the natural bond, although it cannot but appeal to it for an analogy. Friendship is based on the principle of a non-necessary decision; brotherhood dictates an obligation owed to the family, an allegiance to one other group rather than another, or within the family, to the privileged place of the brother rather than the sister. I can decide whether or not my brother is my friend, and he will remain my brother either way; a friend, however, will always be like a brother. The question of decision is crucial here. As he argues at length in “Force of Law” and reaffirms in Politics of Friendship, the idea of an unconditional decision is at the heart of his political, ethical, and legal dimensions of Derrida’s work. This is a reasonably simple logical demonstration with devastating consequences. A decision is only responsible — I can only take responsibility for it — if it has not been programmed or determined in advance. A decision is only a decision to the extent that it doesn’t follow a rule. Every decision must pass through what Derrida calls “the ordeal of the undecidable” or else it is not a decision; conversely, as soon as a decision has been made, “once the ordeal of the undecidable is past (if that is possible), the decision has again followed a rule, or given itself a rule, invented it or reinvented it, reaffirmed it” (“Force of Law” 24). In the terms we are pursuing here, as soon as I decide on a friend, I make him a brother, since I prefer him not simply as my friend, but by calling him my friend, I renaturalize and therefore neutralize decision. By analogy, political responsibility itself would be engaged precisely by that in the decision which is excessive to the order of certainty, of knowledge, of obligation, or of law: the ordeal of the undecidable. It might appear from this that friendship would always be political (a matter of choice), but my relationship with my family would not be. However, to the extent that no friendship can avoid the process of fraternization, friendship and the family cannot be so clearly distinguished — both might be said to participate in a complex of politicization and depoliticization. What both democracy and friendship name for Derrida is the tenuous possibility of politicization, rather than the law of fraternization as naturalization and depoliticization. Any law is based on

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the disabling of decision; no law is natural (emerging from undecidability) but every law presents itself as natural (disengaging responsibility). Ultimately, fraternity is the enemy of politics itself, since it disables the possibility of responsibility, but what would friendship be beyond the figure of the brother? As we have seen, this is the question Derrida chooses to pursue. However, I will now turn back to the question of community, and see to what extent Nancy’s thought might be said to be determined by the figure of the brother. Where Derrida is suspicious of the brother, Nancy introduces the figure of fraternity in at least two highly-charged places in his work. In both The Sense of the World and The Experience of Freedom it seems to be a matter of intervening and transforming what is otherwise a politically neutral or empty ontological argument (community as naming the minimal condition of belonging together, the exposure of each to the other in communication) into a political formula. In one case, fraternity names “an additional element, beyond justice, liberty, and equality […] the act of apportioning and interweaving that, as such, has no sense but gives a place to every event of sense (once again, people, country, person, and so forth)” (The Sense of the World 115); in the other, “the communal exposure of freedom,” “being-in-common [as] this free space in which we come into mutual presence,” “the opening of this space — spacing of time, exposure, event, surprise — [which] is all there is of being” (The Experience of Freedom 168-169). This seems to me a revealing maneuver. Nancy’s reconfiguration of Mitsein remains strongly indebted to its Heideggerian origin, and it seems to me that his rethinking of community consequently remains unable to theorize its own political limits. This seems particularly evident in “Finite History,” an essay in which Nancy develops his rethinking of community and Mitsein in the context of twentieth century philosophy of history. Strongly Heideggerian in tone, the essay focuses on history as nothing other than being-in-common, and as a communal achievement: We are not — the ‘we’ is not — but we happen, and the ‘we’ happens, and each individual happening happens only through this community of happening, which is our community. Community is finite community, that is, the community of otherness, of hap-

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pening. And this is history. […] History is community, that is, the happening of a certain space of time — as a certain spacing of time, which is the spacing of a ‘we.’ (156) Nancy admits that his ontological reconstitution of subjectivity as displacement, and disappropriation, is “nothing other than an attempt to comment on or develop […] the Ereignis of Heidegger — that is, Being itself as the happening that appropriates existence to itself, and therefore to its finitude in the sense of nonappropriated existence or nonessentiality” (158). However, in so doing, it seems to me that Nancy’s community without community becomes unavoidably reattached to a logic of history that Derrida has been concerned to question throughout his work. For by linking history and the “we,” doesn’t Nancy reintroduce a teleology of the we? To affirm any “we,” any community, however disparate or minimallyconditioned, establishes that “we” as exemplary, as a model of community as such, to which all other communities are to be compared. This is a logic that Derrida has examined as “exemplarism,” the logic of any particularism. That particular community is projected into the future as a model, predicting a future that would only be a modification of the community, and excluding the possibility of a transformation radical enough to render the community unrecognizable. Other communities only become recognizable to the extent that they measure up to the ideal. This might not be a problem if we could simply accept that Nancy’s inoperative community is to be taken as universal, that its horizon is that of humanity itself. But, several structural reasons exist for thinking this is not an adequate solution. Nancy cannot avoid celebrating a particular community, as he sets out to rethink community, even if that community is simply the one in whose language he speaks. This is a logic set out by Derrida in the opening session of what was to be a three-year examination of the question of philosophical nationality, published as “The Onto-Theology of National Humanism.” He argues there that any philosophical thinking of national identity, and we might extend this to any form of identity, is pre-comprehended and encircled by the language in which it is written. Deconstruction, Derrida claims, has always been a question of idiom, and no statement can be made that is not in some idiom. While ultimately every idiom will be

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individual, each idiom is translatable and potentially understandable from another idiomatic position; to use one rather than another, even if this is not a matter of choice, violently affirms the exemplarity of that idiom. Not only can no survey of national identity claim to be objective since it will be written in one national language rather than another, but no writing on national identity can avoid being an affirmation of the nation in whose language it is written. The consequence, extending the argument to an attempt to think community such as Nancy’s, is that every affirmation of community, however qualified, will unjustly and violently privilege one linguistic community over another. Nancy implicitly makes one community an exemplary, a more advanced, a better, model of a community without community. As Derrida asks in The Gift of Death, “how can you justify your presence here speaking one language, rather than there, speaking to others in another language?” (71). My suspicion that Nancy’s affirmation of a community runs the risk of privileging the site from which it comes seems to be confirmed by another of Derrida’s suggestions as to how we should read Politics of Friendship. “This book,” he says, set itself up to work and be worked relentlessly close to the thing called France. And close to the singular alliance linking nothing less than the history of fraternization to this thing, called France — to the State, the nation, the politics, the culture, literature and language which answers to the name ‘France’ and, when they are called by this name, answer to it. (264) Derrida notes not only the revolutionary invocation of fraternity, but also a series of thinkers from Montaigne to Victor Hugo, Michel Deguy, Blanchot, and Nancy who call for fraternity. Above and beyond the dangers of fraternal logic, Nancy runs the risk of affirming a French-language philosophical tradition as exemplary of all philosophical thought. Derrida, who sets out his own ambiguous relation to the French language at some length in Monolingualism of the Other, wishes to suggest that Nancy’s position is already violent. This is a problem that Simon Critchley passes over too hurriedly when in his recent Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity, as in his earlier Ethics of Deconstruction, he upbraids Derrida for his non-propositional politics.

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Derrida is “unspecific” and “runs the risk of an empty universalism,” Critchley suggests, such that his remains a politics of the incalculable. Assessing Derrida’s call in Spectres of Marx for a New International, Critchley concludes, “who would be the enemy of such a New International? The logic of Derrida’s argument would seem to entail that the enemy would be any form of nationalism, whether French, Israeli, British or whatever” (Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity 279). As we have already seen, I cannot simply oppose nationalism, since I do so from one language or another, one nation or another, and thereby make an implicit claim for the exemplarity of my nation. On the basis of his misreading, Derrida is found guilty of providing only the ineffable politics that Critchley himself has extracted from his work: “An open question for me would be as to the sufficiency of this notion of ‘the enemy’. Namely, that nationalists are fairly easy enemies to have” (Ethics–Politics–Subjectivity 279). Critchley’s universalizing and philosophical approach must risk effacing that movement within Derrida’s work that seeks to inscribe the trace of national identity upon the subject of philosophy. To begin from one national identity — however divided, multiple, or overdetermined — rather than another, is already an act of political exclusion, of forgetting the other in the name of the same. Critchley’s elision of this problem underestimates its complexity. In common with Nancy, Critchley ignores the extent to which there is already blood on his hands, even as he accuses Derrida of a bloodless politics. To return to Nancy, we can compare this difficulty with Derrida’s account of friendship in Heidegger. In “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology,” Derrida establishes that Mitsein presumes limits; it cannot be universal. He adds that, in Being and Time, struggle, (Kampf) is how the power (Macht) of destiny (Geschickes) is set free. This destiny (Geschick) is here the Geschehen of Dasein as Mitgeschehen, the historiality of or as being-with. The Geschehen, the historial event, so to speak, that of which historiality is made, to wit, common or shared historiality under the form of community (Gemeinshaft) and the people (Volk). (177) While Nancy has tried to lift community away from the ideas of destiny or commonality implied in “Volk,” he cannot avoid the structural

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limit Derrida sees at work here. The link between community and struggle confirms that one community can only be defined against another: there can be no universal community (even a community without community), since that would amount to a total neutralization of the concept of community. There is an inevitable limit, a frontier of community: “the friend can be a stranger, but like all Dasein it belongs to a community and a people, is engaged in a history, a Geschehen that is a Mitgeschehen, and in a struggle” (Derrida, “Heidegger’s Ear” 179). This is community as fraternization. It must be linked to some form of naturalized friendship, whether based on family, geography, or culture. It must thus also be based on the exclusion of other communities, and restore a teleological logic that predicts and projects that “we,” however disparate, into the future. Even if intended as a universal, or neutral condition of being human, can community be removed from an anthropocentric frame of reference? Can the boundaries of community be extended universally, without exclusion; even then, what of animals, or inanimate life? Without any principle of selection, the concept of history must become meaningless (can an animal — or a non-animal other — have a history?), or else Nancy’s claim that “history is community” founds his conception of community on the exclusion of some other (“Finite History” 156). Derrida argues in Politics of Friendship that “there is no belonging or friendly community that is present, and present to itself, in act, without election and without selection” (21). Community is performed — “in act” — as exclusion. Without selection, election, exclusion, it is no longer community. If Derrida’s questions seem impertinent, or push the limits of acceptable comparisons — is duty owed to the animal? Or even an inanimate form? Can there be a “universal” community? — this is because politicization for him is founded in this infinitization of responsibility. Only if no principle or rule, of politics or ethics, can be established, can there be a possibility of decision, as he stresses in his “Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism”: “if you give up the infinitude of responsibility, there is no responsibility. […] If responsibility were not infinite, you could not have moral or political problems” (86). It is only to the extent that there remains no law, and therefore the possibility of a decision, that there is politics. If Derrida appears to resign himself to the violence of contending or competing assertions of community, rather than seeking to theorize a

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universal ground of passivity prior to any particularism as Nancy does (on passivity see The Gravity of Thought 69-71), it is only in order to open up the possibility of politicization. By attempting to suspend the naturalization of political entities, whether parties, states, nations or other temporary alliances of interest or identity, he seeks to keep the space of potential politicization, of a decision which would not be programmed in advance, as open as possible. Derrida calls this space “democracy-to-come.” Where Nancy tries to think community as a primordial historiality, within which history as violence is instituted, Derrida stresses an originary violence. This is presumed by the infinitization of responsibility. The denaturalization of decision means that there can be no justification for my choices, nor can I ever have done enough to say “I have done my duty.” The fullest discussion of this is in The Gift of Death: I am sacrificing and betraying at every moment all my other obligations: my obligations to the other others whom I know or don’t know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals that are even more other others than my fellows), my fellows who are dying of starvation and sickness. (69) Derrida adds, slightly melodramatically, “How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years, where other cats die of hunger at every instant?” (71). Derrida invokes sacrifice to acknowledge the violence done to all those to whom I do not fulfill my obligations, all those whom I decide against. Any community, by naturalizing — neutralizing — decision, seeks to program or predetermine my responsibility. Democracy, for Derrida, names instead the possibility of an unconditioned — non-fraternal — decision. But to the extent that a decision always invents a rule, democracy must remain impossible, not present, somehow “to come.” This is another way of putting the aporetic logic of democracy I have already introduced, and in which democracy is conditioned and limited by “the community of friends” (23). We should be careful how we understand the futurity of Derrida’s “democracy-to-come,” and not to confuse it, for instance, with a similar formula

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such as Giorgio Agamben’s “coming community.” Agamben attempts to think singularity and difference together as a minimal condition of a being-in-common that is not dependent on identity or particularism, nor on a condition of belonging or a simple absence of belonging (84). However, unlike Nancy or Derrida, Agamben introduces both a prophetic tone and with it a historicist paradigm. Not only does he make a diagnosis of time and place — this is “the era of the complete triumph of the spectacle” (79) — but he also makes predictions: “the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving towards its own destruction” (64). Differing and antagonistic interests are dissolved in the name of a metaphysical revolution, of the coming community. By contrast, Derrida’s democracy-to-come is already here, but will always remain to come. The coming community is just that, a community we could work toward, or which will come anyway; democracy-to-come names a principle which inhabits every political decision but which inhibits each decision as well. One suspicion remains: is this really only a disagreement over names? For might not a more generous reading of Nancy have emphasized all those moments where he seeks to put into question the problems I have discussed, or that points beyond the fraternal and genealogical structures? Since Derrida has claimed that a politics of the future would be unrecognizable — irreducible to the concept of community, friendship or democracy — and that the logic of fraternization frustrates every decision, does it really matter that we choose one name for it rather than another? Is this just a matter of a name, or can we follow Derrida’s insistence in “Sauf le nom” that names matter? Two examples suggest the latter. The first is that Derrida’s prohibition on community is not without precedent. In a very similar context, and for related reasons, Derrida also expresses deep reservations about the name of “cosmopolitanism.” What Derrida calls for in Spectres of Marx under the name of the New International is to be distinguished from the cosmopolitical, as Derrida argues in his third major text on Levinas, Adieu. Cosmopolitanism remains the principle of an armed peace, a thinking of international relations in which sovereignty is to be reserved, protected. Derrida’s key example here is Kant, whose “law and cosmopolitics of hospitality [...] is a set of rules and conditions, an interstate conditionality that limits [...] the very hospitality it guarantees” (101). Over against cosmopolitanism — like

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community, a thinking which reserves and limits decision — Derrida seeks to “call out for another international law […] a humanitarian commitment that effectively operates beyond the interests of Nation-States” (101). The hyperbolic logic of unconditioned hospitality, in which host and guest would become indistinguishable — since the perfect host would give his home away to the guest, becoming the guest and vice versa — haunts any conditioned or rule-bound hospitality. This is the same structure of politicization (the promise of hospitality as an unconditioned decision, an absolute gift) and depoliticization (the necessary binding of hospitality by conventions or contracts) that we have seen to characterize Derrida’s account of democracy. Appealing to hospitality rather than cosmopolitanism has two consequences. The first is to draw attention to the necessary failure or inadequacy of any thinking of international law, and so to end any complacency, any impression that this is not an endless task. Cosmopolitanism remains a thinking of the self under the guise of thinking the other. As Derrida emphasizes in the key demand in Spectres of Marx, international law must be renegotiated, but must in the process become transformed: “the present state of international law and its institutions” is limited both by a dependence on “European philosophical concepts, and notably [by] a concept of State or national sovereignty,” and by the domination of “particular nation-states” (83). The second consequence is that Derrida does not withdraw from politics. By appealing to hospitality against cosmopolitanism, as in calling for democracy rather than community, Derrida re-places his text within politics, within the agonistic and violent struggle for hegemony of concepts, rather than retreating to an analysis of the conditions or foundations of politics (the political). Moreover, Derrida’s texts enact an experience of hospitality to those texts on which they are parasitic. This involves both a movement of appropriation — appearing to take possession of the texts he allows into his own, as guests — and a movement of expropriation — appearing to say nothing but that which has already been said, allowing his host text to be taken over by the guest. Derrida puts the concept of boundaries, and of sovereignty, into question both theoretically and practically in his writing. My second example of the importance of names is a final clarification of Derrida’s revaluation of democracy. “Democracy-to-come” might appear to

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be one in a long line of terms in Derrida’s writing which appear to substitute for each other in naming something that frustrates and makes possible the closure of a system — which Rodolphe Gasché calls “infrastructures” in The Tain of the Mirror, and it has become common to call quasi-transcendentals. In which case, the future (avenir) to come (à-venir) would be another name for a constitutive alterity, an excessive logic that makes democracy possible and impossible at the same time, and would have no reference to future as we usually understand it. Were something else actually to come, were there to be a future politics, it would have no more relation to what we call democracy than it would to community. But Derrida’s choice of name is not arbitrary. He still intends to mark a qualified futurity; as I have already stressed, it is the universal appeal of democracy that Derrida sets against the fraternity, the unavoidable particularism, of community. “Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal,” writes Derrida in “Force of Law” (27). However, while nothing suggests that there will either be more or less so-called democracy in the future, Derrida chooses to assert that more democracy would be preferable. It is the form of this appeal itself that is important here. For Politics of Friendship also contains a strongly marked performative dimension, and this makes it a political text, as much, if not more than, its theoretical dimension. Presupposing the analysis of what he calls destinerrancy in The Post Card, and which characterizes the general structure of communication as such in “Signature Event Context” and Limited Inc., Derrida highlights the fact that his repeated citation “O my friends, there is no friend” is also addressed to his readers, thus presupposing a minimal relation with them — or even a sort of “minimal community” (Politics 236). The indeterminacy of the message’s destination — in theory it is readable by anyone, translatable into any idiom, even if it can never be wholly translatable — reiterates the universal appeal of democracy itself; even though this appeal cannot avoid the return of fraternization as the question of number, and which Derrida acknowledges by also asking repeatedly, “how many of us are there?” The repoliticizing appeal of and to democracy is limited by the depoliticizing logic of fraternization, by the community of those reading the book, the community of those willing to listen to Derrida. Derrida’s text enacts the very structure that he analyses as the logic of democracy-to-come.

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So, yes, names do matter. The name under which I attempt to rethink politics determines its potential structure and content. Where community forecloses on the universal, democracy maintains an emancipatory appeal, even if it must collapse into a communal logic. If political responsibility depends on an unconditional decision, community as fraternization locks up and neutralizes the possibility of responsibility. The challenge Derrida poses to his readers is to think beyond the old names of politics, without giving up on those names. Derrida maintains and affirms something within democracy, even if no theory or government has, or could have, lived up to the democratic emancipatory ideal. In doing so Derrida affirms a possibility of politicization which is already with us, whereas Agamben risks casting aside the present as merely a shadowy presentiment of a glorious community to come. The very chance of thinking politically in the here and now is at stake. To continue to think community is to abdicate that possibility, and with it all question of responsibility. If Politics of Friendship is to be read as a call, an appeal, what kind of response does it demand? Perhaps only this double thinking of politics: not to stop the ceaseless negotiation of politics, of calculation and violence, in the name of a democracy-to-come, but at the same time, in the same moment, never to believe that we have done enough, or that democracy has happened. The affirmation of any community, real or virtual, theoretical or empirical, as an ideal or a supposedly political reality, can never be adequate to this implacable double-bind. If there seems to be something shocking about this prohibition, it is perhaps only further evidence of the untimely quality of Derrida’s “belated contribution” to political thought.

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Fraternal Anonymity: Blanchot and Nancy on Community and Mitsein by Robert Mitchell

While it is no doubt an exaggeration to claim that all of recent French philosophy of community has articulated itself within a Heideggerian horizon (one thinks of notable exceptions such as Girard’s interdividual psychology or Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology), it is nevertheless fair to say that Heidegger’s philosophy functions as the starting point for much of the more interesting work in this field, such as that of Levinas, Derrida, Lyotard, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe. Yet the recurrent problem that has troubled those working within this horizon has been that of maintaining Heidegger’s basic framework (the substitution of Dasein for the subject), while at the same time divorcing this framework from the problematic political engagements to which Heidegger found himself drawn. I suggest that, to a significant degree, the motor of this effort of reformulation has been the attempt to articulate some modality of “being-together”; that is, some modality of what Heidegger calls Mitsein, that is neither fascist, totalitarian, or nationalist in content. In this paper, I consider two of the more recent contributions to this post-Heideggerian philosophy of community, Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community (1983) and Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (1983).1 I attempt to distinguish the central claims of these two contributions from one another (a task that is more difficult than it might seem, for reasons I consider below), and I suggest that understanding their divergence from one another helps to clarify what is at stake in a post-Heideggerian philosophy of community. I argue that Nancy and Blanchot represent opposing strategies for rescuing Mitsein (and therefore community) from its slippage into the metaphysics of the subject. In implicit agreement with Heidegger’s critique of all forms of Mitsein that involve Dasein’s movement into “anonymity,” Nancy develops the notion of the “com(ap)pearance of finitude” as a modality of Mitsein that successfully avoids the assumption of communal fusion. Blanchot, on the other hand, reverses the polarity of the analysis and attempts to

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articulate a modality of Mitsein in which “anonymity” becomes a valorized and central component. My analysis is divided into four sections. I begin by recalling Heidegger’s analysis of Mitsein in Being and Time and summarizing some of the problems that his formulations have presented for sympathetic readers such as Nancy and Blanchot. In the second section, I outline Nancy’s central claims in The Inoperative Community, considering especially his critique of communism and his development of the notion of com(ap)appearance. I then turn to Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community and argue that Nancy’s and Blanchot’s differences vis-à-vis one another are rendered legible when considered through the lens of an example taken up by both — the uprisings of 1968 — as well as Blanchot’s more extended discussion of the procession for the dead of Charonne. I conclude with a general reflection on the conceptual avenues opened by Nancy and Blanchot’s attempts to rethink community on the basis of a renewed analysis of Mitsein.

Section I. Mitsein in Being and Time The starting point for Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time is not the subject, the ego, the self, or the individual, but rather “Dasein,” a notoriously untranslatable term that might be rendered in English as “existence.” As Christopher Fynsk reminds us in Heidegger, Thought, and Historicity, this does not mean that Heidegger rejects or does away with “all effort to situate or position the subject of self; [rather,] he situates it elsewhere — in relation to the ‘there’ of Dasein” (29).2 Dasein, defined in Being and Time as “[t]his entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being” (27), becomes for Heidegger the only valid starting point for an understanding of the subject, self, ego or individual, for it is only through a prior analysis of Dasein that these other terms can become intelligible. The analysis of Dasein, of which Being and Time was supposed to represent a sizable contribution, consists of the identification and illumination of its complex structure. Thus, although Dasein is not to be understood as composed of multiple “parts,” Dasein’s total structure nevertheless can be understood through an analysis of its fundamental states and their interrelation.

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In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that Mitsein (Being-with) constitutes a fundamental structure of Dasein’s basic state, Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein). Dasein “is,” in other words, only to the extent that it is in-the-world, and it is-in-the-world only to the extent that it is-with others. “The world of Dasein,” writes Heidegger, is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-With Others” (155). Mitsein can thus be defined as “let[ting] the Dasein of Others be encountered in its [i.e., Dasein’s] world” (157). Yet the complete structure of Being-with is one of the more obscure aspects of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, for despite its apparently fundamental status, Mitsein does not receive a particularly extensive analysis in Being and Time. As Fynsk notes, Heidegger’s deconstruction of the “isolated” subject tended to sag whenever the question of the other emerged; Heidegger “seems unwilling or unable to work at this limit in a sustained manner; his analysis of Dasein in Being and Time leads back insistently to the solitary self ” (28). Nevertheless, Heidegger does engage an analysis of Mitsein in at least three contexts. First, Mitsein is a vital component of Heidegger’s discussion of Dasein’s “lostness” in “the they” (das Man). Second, he returns to Mitsein in his discussion of one of the positive poles of “solicitude,” the pole of “liberation.” Third, Mitsein is inseparable from Heidegger’s analysis of the essential connection of Dasein’s fate (Schicksal) to the destiny (Geschick) of a community (or, more precisely, “a people”: ein Volk). I will consider each of these contexts consider in turn, beginning with Dasein’s “lostness” in “the they.” Mitsein, writes Heidegger, means encountering the Dasein of others, for “Dasein as Being-with lets the Dasein of others be encountered in its world.” However, Dasein exists, for the most part, in “the they.” To exist in “the they” means to become forgetful of one’s own Dasein, with the result that both one’s own, and the Other’s, Dasein disappear from view. So, for example, writes Heidegger: In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information services such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of “the Others,” in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit, disappear more and more. (164)

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When Dasein has “fallen” into “the they,” the other is not really encountered at all (that is, is not encountered as such), not because Dasein does not “see” or “respect” the other, but because Dasein has lost itself; it has become anonymous. Thus, while existence in “the they” is a mode of Being-with (for Dasein is, always, Being-with), this mode of Mitsein does not allow Dasein to encounter the other as other. Moreover, this anonymity can engulf Dasein even when it seems that the specific character of the other is of prime importance. This is so, for example, in cases of rivalry, in which Dasein attempts to take the place or object of concern of another, or in cases of paternalism, in which a Dasein attempts to “take over” for the “benefit” of another Dasein. In both of these cases, what Dasein encounters is not the other as other, but rather the difference between one’s own Dasein and that of the other. In these cases, writes Heidegger: there is constant care as to the way one differs from them [i.e. the others], whether that difference is merely one that is evened out, whether one’s own Dasein has lagged behind the Others and wants to catch up in some relationship to them, or whether one’s Dasein already has some priority over them and sets out to keep them suppressed. (163-64) Thus, whether Dasein loses itself in the anonymity of “the they” or in the search for differences between Daseins, it confuses its being with that of the others, and thus fails to encounter the Dasein of others as other. Yet, to move on to the second context in which Heidegger focuses on Mitsein, Dasein may also encounter the other in such a way that it attempts to “free,” or liberate, the other. In this mode of encounter, Dasein engages in a sort of gift-giving, in which it opens and grants to the other a possibility for being. It is, in other words, a kind of solicitude which does not so much leap in for the other [as in rivalry or paternalism] as leap ahead of him in his existentiell potentiality-for-Being, not in order to take away his “care” but rather to give it back to him authentically as such for the first time. (158-59)

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Heidegger argues that this modality of being-with, in which the other is truly encountered as other, is possible only through the mediation of the “scene of death,” whereby Dasein encounters and assumes its own death (or, in more technical terms, its ownmost possibility of not-being). While Dasein’s encounter with its own death is an extreme “individuation,” because Dasein is always Being-with, it still is-with others even in this experience. As a result, even as death constitutes a revelation of Dasein’s own possibilities, it simultaneously reveals the possibilities of others. “[D]eath individualizes,” writes Heidegger, “but only in such a manner that, as the possibility which is not to be outstripped, it makes Dasein, as Being-with, have some understanding of the potentiality-for-Being of Others” (309). This capacity for the liberation of the other’s possibilities is intimately bound up with the third context in which Heidegger discusses Mitsein, his analysis of the essential connection of Dasein’s fate to the destiny of a community. Heidegger argues that the scene of death and Dasein’s assumption of its ownmost proper possibilities enables a collective workingtogether, a possibility articulated in a passage in which Heidegger contrasts inauthentic with authentic being-with-one-another: The Being-with-one-another of those who are hired for the same affair often thrives only on mistrust. On the other hand, when they devote themselves to the same affair in common, their doing so is determined by the manner in which their Dasein, each in its own way, has been taken hold of. They become authentically bound together. (159) Working-together is not to be understood as one “option” among others, for Dasein’s assumption of its own death necessitates such a communality. Dasein’s death reveals its proper possibility — its “fate” (Schicksal) — which first allows it to authentically choose its possibilities. Death illuminates for Dasein its structure of Being-with, for if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-world, exists essentially in Being-with Others, its historicizing is a co-historicizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick]. This is how we designate the historicizing of the community, of a people. […] Only in communicating and struggling does the power of destiny become

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free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its “generation” goes to make up the full authentic historicizing of Dasein. (436) Dasein’s encounter with death, as its ownmost possibility, thus enables a being-with others in which it works together with other Daseins and their collective destiny. To summarize the discussion of Mitsein, then, Heidegger proposes that our being-with others occurs in two basic modalities, one of which he implicitly castigates, while the other is valorized. Heidegger labels as inauthentic all those forms of Mitsein in which Dasein confuses its being with that of the other, such as when it dissolves [löst] into the anonymity of “the they” or when it attempts to assume the being of the other. On the other hand, however, Heidegger presents “liberation” and the assumption of destiny as two authentic positive possibilities for relating to the other. In liberation, Dasein tries to free the other for its own freedom, and in its assumption of destiny, Dasein co-historicizes with a people. In fact, liberation and the assumption of destiny are more properly described as one authentic positive possibility, for every “liberation” occurs on the basis of an assumption of Geschick. The ground for this assumption is Dasein’s individuation down its own death (its ownmost proper possibility of not being), for in confronting its death, Dasein first becomes aware of the other as other (and not merely as rival or double), and it also becomes aware that its possibilities are grounded in a “co-historicizing.” The nationalistic overtones of Heidegger’s description of Dasein’s “authentic” positive possibilities have not been lost on commentators, especially those antagonistic to Heidegger’s general approach. 3 Moreover, even if one grants that co-historicizing need not be tied to any particular political position or project, it is not entirely clear how, or whether, Dasein maintains its own “identity” in its assumption of the community’s “fateful destiny.” Co-historicizing can certainly be taken to imply a sort of collective Dasein in which individual Daseins become sublated in an immanent unity. This interpretation is encouraged by some of Heidegger’s claims, such as his suggestion that co-historicizing involves “the struggle of loyally following in the footsteps of what can be repeated” (437). Does Dasein escape the anonymity and lostness of “the they” only to lose itself again in the working-together of a Volk? The uneasy relationship

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between Dasein’s “identity” (its eignste Möglichkeit) and the community has encouraged later commentators such as Nancy and Blanchot to wonder whether the Heideggerian framework for understanding community must be limited to the interpretation of Mitsein outlined above. Could co-historicizing be understood as something other than a collective work or project? Or, alternatively, can one discover other modalities of positive Mitsein that exceed those outlined by Heidegger?

Section II. Nancy on Community, Work, and the Com(ap)pearance of Finitude Nancy’s attempt to rethink the possibilities for Mitsein in The Inoperative Community has a two part structure of critique and rebuilding. Nancy begins with the deconstruction of the communist reading of community, which he criticizes as philosophically untenable insofar as its preoccupation with “work” and the absolute immanence of community are grounded in an unacknowledged logic of suicide. Yet in a more subtle way, the criticisms that he levels against the communist theory of community are also directed Heidegger’s interpretation of the authentic possibilities of Dasein, which Nancy sees as equally grounded in the desire for a “work of death” that underwrites communitarian longings. Nancy’s critique of communism begins what one might term a phenomenological testimonial of loss. We find ourselves forced to face, claims Nancy, the apparent collapse of community, both in a literal and philosophical sense. “The gravest and most painful testimony of the modern world,” writes Nancy, “the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer [...] is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community” (1). Yet for Nancy, what is even more troubling than this loss of community is our inability even to think this loss. We find ourselves in this situation in large part because of our loss of faith in “communism,” which until recently still stood as perhaps the sole emblem of a desire to think human community as something beyond mere “social” unity. “[T]he word communism,” argues Nancy, stands as an emblem of the desire to discover or rediscover a place

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of community at once beyond social divisions and beyond subordination to technopolitical domination […] and finally […] a place from which to surmount the unraveling that occurs with the death of each of us — that death that, when no longer anything more than the death of the individual, carries an unbearable burden and collapses into insignificance. (1) This loss of our faith in communism thus leaves us unsure whether there can be anything but social divisions and technopolitical domination, and whether death could be anything other than the testimony of the individual’s ultimate insignificance. We have lost our faith in “communism” — and thus our ability to focus the thought and hope of community — for two reasons. First, communism has been “betrayed” by political entities such as the USSR and China, insofar as “the States that acclaimed it [i.e., communism] have appeared, for some time now, as the agents of its betrayal” (2). Yet betrayal is not necessarily an insurmountable problem, for every schema of betrayal always assumes a pure essence that can be betrayed and therefore eventually “saved.” Thus, the second and more crushing problem is that the communist ideal itself has become problematic. This ideal — the goal, or telos, of communism — is determined by the manner in which communism defines human beings, that is, as “producers of their own essence in the form of their labor or their work” (2). On the basis of this definition, the “community” that stands as the telos of humanity is understood as a communion of producers, a collective co-producing of humanity’s essence. Each individual becomes part of a common effort, produces a common work, the final result of which inaugurates an “absolute immanence [i.e., a communion] of man to man” (2). Yet this telos of “immanence absolute” should raise our theoretical hackles, suggests Nancy, for it is suspiciously reminiscent of the nostalgia for absolute presence that has ruled the philosophical (i.e., metaphysical) discourse of community since its inception. The communist ideal of absolute immanence, in other words, threatens to be simply one more expression of the metaphysical desire for presence, and is thus open to the same deconstruction as other variants of this desire. Nancy confirms this suspicion, arguing that the goal of communal immanence deconstructs itself, insofar as “death” (the negation of immanence)

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becomes the only possible truth of communion. For humanity truly to produce its own essence, each individual must be sublated in the collective whole. Communion is achieved only when each individual is negated, which “presupposes, precisely, the death of each and all in the life of the infinite” (13). Absolute community thus requires the death of all individuals, and while specific oommunitarian political movements may not recognize the logic of suicide that underpins their goals, they nevertheless enact it. Citing the example of Nazi Germany, Nancy contends that [t]his is why political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute immanence have as their truth the truth of death. Immanence, communal fusion, contains no other logic than that of the suicide of the community that is governed by it. (12) In order to counter the communist understanding of humans as producers of their own essence, Nancy urges us to think community under the opposed notion of “unworking.” “Community,” writes Nancy, necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called “unworking,” referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do either with production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. […] Community is not the work of singular beings, nor can it claim them as its works. (31) Community, then, whatever it might be, must not be understood as something that is produced via the fusion of producing producers, nor can it grounded in the concept of a collective work at all. While the explicit target of Nancy’s critique is communism, he at the same time has undercut several aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy of community. Nancy fully accepts Heidegger’s substitution of Dasein for the subject, the analysis of death as a revelatory phenomenon (rather than a negation that must be sublated), and the substitution of Mitsein for the notion of “bonds” between otherwise isolated subjects. For Nancy, Heidegger’s analysis of Mitsein cannot be accepted in toto. Nancy suggests that Heidegger too understood community within the schema of work and fusion to the extent that he “figured the collectivity as project, and figured the project, reciprocally, as collective” (15). Heidegger fell into this trap

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because he never effectively integrated his analysis of Dasein’s death with its Mitsein: when it came to the question of community as such […] Heidegger also went astray with his vision of a people and a destiny conceived at least in part as a subject, which proves no doubt that Dasein’s “being-toward-death” was never radically implicated in its beingwith — in Mitsein. (14) Thus, while Nancy accepts Heidegger’s basic framework as the proper means for understanding community, he is unwilling to fully endorse Heidegger’s analysis of Mitsein, and especially its apparently essential connection to collective destinies and projects. Nancy attempts to counter Heidegger’s errancy with Georges Bataille’s notion of “ecstasy.” Bataille, claims Nancy, was among the first to recognize the nostalgia that underpins communitarian understandings of community, for he realized “that the nostalgia for a communal being was at the same time a desire for a work of death” (17). Even more critically, however, Bataille suggested that community is most fully revealed in the “ecstasy” of the individual, that is, the standing-out (ec-stasis) from the self. Nancy notes that one can consider this principle from two perspectives. On the one hand, one can highlight the individual’s movement outside of itself (its “ecstasy,” properly speaking). On the other hand, one can focus on the “communication,” or relation, that the ec-static individual establishes with others, and which Nancy — following Bataille — calls “communication.” In this understanding, communication does not denote a “bond” between subjects, but rather hints at what Nancy calls a “com(ap)pearance of finitude.” “Communication,” writes Nancy, “consists before all else in this sharing and in this compearance (com-parution) of finitude” (29). And yet these two poles of ecstasy (standing-out and communication) must be understood as two perspectives on the same thing; they are not two separate operations, for each reciprocally gives “rise to one another” (20). The “com(ap)appearance of finitude” is thus Nancy’s reformulation of a modality of Mitsein that is meant to surmount Heidegger’s inability to integrate Dasein’s being-toward-death with its being-with. The death of the other is central to the com(ap)pearance of finitude, for, writes Nancy,

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“[a] community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth. […] It is the presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable excess that make up finite being” (15). Nancy thus turns Heidegger’s notion of authenticity on its head, for while it is true, as Heidegger claims in Being in Time, that “[t]he dying of others is not something that we experience in an authentic [genuinen] sense” (282, translation modified), this is precisely the strength of the other’s death in Nancy’s interpretation. We do not “recognize” ourselves in this death, which in turn allows us to avoid the Hegelian dialectic of the “recognition” of the other, and instead experience the alterity of the other. “I do not rediscover myself,” writes Nancy, nor do I recognize myself in the other: I experience the other’s alterity, or I experience alterity in the other together with the alteration that ‘in me’ sets my singularity outside me and infinitely delimits it. Community is that singular ontological order in which the other and the same are alike (sont le semblable): that is to say, in the sharing of identity. (33-34) Pace Heidegger, community is not founded solely on Dasein’s individuation through its assumption of its own death, but also through its encounter with the death of the other: the comp(ap)appearance of finitude. Yet after providing a provocative reading of the relation between Dasein and the death of the other, Nancy appears uncertain of how best to further explain this modality of Mitsein. His explicit solution is the development of what he calls “literary communism” (communisme littéraire), a form of “writing” that continually exposes our “being-in-common.” Literary communism forces the writer to stand-out from him- or herself while in the same movement allowing for a sharing of community, a double action that seems to foreclose a return to the subject. What is “shared” in this inscription is “the unworking of works” (39), and (as Nancy explains in a later essay entitled “Literary Communism”) what takes place in this communication is the articulation of singularities: that is, “what takes place where different pieces touch one another without fusing together, where they slide, pivot, or tumble over one another, at the limit of the other” (76). And yet at the same time, and troubling this first solution, Nancy also seems to want to hold out the possibility of a properly political mode of

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community that might be based on work. Thus, in his original discussion of unworking, he tentatively exempts “the political” (le politique) from the requirement of a désoeuvrement. “Communication,” writes Nancy, “is the unworking of a work that is social, economic, technical, and institutional” (31), and lest the reader wonder whether he has simply overlooked the political, he clarifies in a note that he does not include the political [le politique] here. In the form of the State, or the Party (if not the State-Party), it indeed seems to be of the order of a work. But it is perhaps at the heart of the political that communitarian unworking resists. I will come back to this. (158n26) Nancy does return to this topic in the closing pages of his essay, but only to reverse, apparently, the polarity between work and “le politique,” claiming that the political “would mean a community ordering itself to the unworking of its communication, or destined to this unworking” (40). The term “ordering” clearly bears a huge burden here — it must somehow be distinguished from “working,” lest Nancy slip back into the schema of the oeuvre — yet it is left singularly undefined. Even more obscure is the relationship between literary communism, “political ordering,” and “political work.” Are the three completely separate operations? If not, does one take precedence over the other?4 Christopher Fynsk, in his Introduction to The Inoperative Community, hints at the same suspicion, noting parenthetically that Nancy’s “task of pursuing a thought of community in the face of an unacceptable political reality — which includes an ongoing destruction of much of what we have known as community — is not an unproblematic one” (x). These ambiguities may admit of resolution, but what I want to stress is the extent to which Nancy accepts the basic Heideggerian schema for Mitsein even as he disputes a particular component of Heidegger’s interpretation. Nancy, like Heidegger, objects to any modality of Mitsein that involves a confusion, or fusion, of identity. His criticism of Heidegger is based on the claim that Heidegger fails to maintain the singularity of Daseins in the “authentic” possibility of a collective co-historicizing; where Heidegger thought that Dasein could maintain its singularity even as it

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accepted its place in a communal destiny, Nancy concludes that that this is simply a variant of the communitarian dream of absolute immanence. In essence, Nancy collapses Heidegger’s co-historicizing into the lostness of “the they,” holding out the com(ap)appearance of finitude as the only truly communal mode of Mitsein. Nancy thus remains relatively uninterested in considering the possibility that there might be a positive (i.e., communal) mode of Dasein’s “dissolution”; that is, a mode in which anonymity is a virtue rather than a loss. It is precisely this possibility, however, that forms the basis for the philosophy of community developed by Maurice Blanchot in The Unavowable Community.

Section III. Blanchot on Acéphale, the Other, and Anonymity Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community appeared in the same year as Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, a fact that highlights the rather peculiar, almost symbiotic, relationship of these two texts to one another. The opening sentence of Blanchot’s text hints at this relationship: “In the wake of [A partir d’] an important text by Jean-Luc Nancy, I would again take up a reflexion, never in fact interrupted although surfacing only at long intervals, concerning the communist exigency” (1). In the first clause of this quote, Blanchot seems to present Nancy’s “important text” as the basis of his own essay; The Unavowable Community, in other words, develops in the wake of Nancy’s text and proceeds from (a partir de) a basis established by Nancy. Yet, in the second clause, Blanchot suggests that whatever basis Nancy’s text provides should be understood within an already inaugurated and continuous trajectory of thought established by Blanchot himself (a suggestion that is by Nancy himself, who attributes the notion of “désoeuvrement” to Blanchot). The “complementarity” of Nancy and Blanchot’s texts, in fact, seems to proceed so far as to make of them almost a unity. As Robert Bernasconi notes in “On Deconstructing Nostalgia for Community within the West: The Debate between Nancy and Blanchot,” neither author explicitly suggests that the two are in anything but agreement on a post-communitarian notion of community. Nancy and Blanchot, writes Bernasconi, appear to be in “comfortable community […] about community” (6).

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This unity is especially pronounced in the first half of Blanchot’s text, entitled “La Communauté négative” (“The Negative Community”). In this section, Blanchot essentially reproduces (or, more charitably, further develops) Nancy’s theses from The Inoperative Community. Blanchot repeats Nancy’s suggestion that “communism” and “community” no longer serve to gather the hopes and thought of another, better, mode of existence, and he adopts Nancy’s critique of the immanentist aspirations of communism. Moreover, Blanchot, like Nancy, understands community as a “shared” revelation of death, quoting Nancy’s claim that death is “the presentation to the ‘members’ [of the community] of their mortal truth. […] It is the presentation of finitude” (24). And Blanchot, to perhaps an even greater extent than Nancy, locates Bataille as the thinker whose thought has determined the horizon for the future thought of community. Strangely enough, though, it is in Blanchot’s repetition of Nancy’s adoption of Bataille that one can begin to mark the difference between The Unavowable Community and The Inoperative Community. This difference first manifests itself in Blanchot’s and Nancy’s treatments of Bataille’s “secret society,” Acéphale. Nancy understands Bataille’s engagement with this group in a primarily negative light, presenting it as an abortive attempt by Bataille to realize an “immanent community.” This failure was recuperated only to the extent that it revealed to Bataille his “nostalgia” and allowed him to recognize the logic of suicide that underwrites the desire for communal fusion: Bataille went through the experience of realizing that the nostalgia for a communal being was at the same time the desire for a work of death. He was haunted, as we know, by the idea that a human sacrifice should seal the destiny of the secret community of Acéphale. He no doubt understood at the time, as he was later to write, that the truth of sacrifice required in the last analysis the suicide of the sacrificer. (17) For Blanchot, however, Acéphale has a more positive valence, at least to the extent that its members (or, at any rate, Bataille) maintained both a desire for sacrifice and a refusal to accomplish this work: “the [Acéphale] community, by organizing and by giving itself as project the execution of a sacrificial death, would have renounced its renunciation of creating a work,

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be it a work of death, or even the simulation of death” (14). Thus, suggests Blanchot, the significance of Acéphale — its revelatory power — lies in the fact that it communally maintained both death and désoeuvrement at one and the same time. Yet the example of Acéphale is also important to Blanchot insofar as it allows him to differentiate his “ethical” understanding of the role of the other’s death from that Nancy’s “ontological” reading. Blanchot stresses that even if Bataille eventually concluded that an actual sacrifice would have necessitated the simultaneous death of the sacrificer, the community of Acéphale was nevertheless all about the other’s death (seeing the other die; seeing death present itself ). While the death of the other is essential to Nancy’s understanding of “community” (he writes that “[c]ommunity is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others” [15]), Bernasconi notes that Nancy appears to subordinate this other within the more general project of an “articulation of an ontology” (11). In other words, to the extent that community is defined by Nancy as “that singular ontological order in which the other and the same are alike (sont le semblable): that is to say, in the sharing of identity,” Nancy’s “other” can never be an “Other” that is ontologically asymmetrical with “the same.” Yet it is precisely this possibility of ontological asymmetry that Blanchot hopes to maintain in his reflections on the death of the other, as he indicates early in his text, arguing that if the relation of man with man ceases to be that of the Same with the Same, but rather introduces the Other as irreducible and — given the equality between them — always in a situation of dissymmetry in relation to the one looking at that Other, then a completely different relationship imposes itself and imposes another form of society which one would hardly call a “community.” (3) Thus, for Blanchot, the importance of Acéphale is not its status as a “failed” attempt to realize an immanent community, but rather its status as a “community” in which the relationship between members was always mediated by the irreducible death of an essentially absent “Other.” Bernasconi reminds us (and Blanchot makes it explicit within his text) that this notion of a “transcendental” asymmetry between the self and the Other is Levinasian in origin. What this suggests — from Blanchot’s per-

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spective, at any rate — is that Nancy’s ontological understanding tends to block the possibility of an ethics. Without mentioning Nancy, Blanchot raises this point in the second half of his book, entitled “La communauté des amants” (“The community of lovers”): An ethics is possible only when — with ontology (which always reduces the Other to the Same) taking a backseat — an anterior relation can affirm itself, a relation such that the self is not content with recognizing the Other, with recognizing itself in it, but feels that the Other always puts it into question to the point of being able to respond to it only through a responsibility that cannot limit itself and that exceeds itself without exhausting itself. (43) While Nancy would no doubt object to the implicit suggestion that his ontology of community reduces the other to “the Same,” Blanchot’s suspicion of any philosophy that neglects the Other, or places the Other in the same plane as the Same, leads him to a surprising approach. Rather than stressing the difference between Daseins (differences that might lead a dialectic of sublation), Blanchot privileges situations of anonymity. Thus, while Blanchot maintains a respectful silence towards Nancy’s ontology, he indicates his disagreement through a reading of “May ‘68” that diverges radically from Nancy’s reading of “1968” in The Inoperative Community. Blanchot’s reading of “May ‘68” opens the second half of his text, entitled “The Community of Lovers.” The ostensible “subject” of this section is Marguerite Duras’ short text La maladie de la mort, a récit that Blanchot uses to locate the “communal” dimension of erotic relationships. Though Blanchot rhetorically holds out the possibility that the considerations of “The Community of Lovers” are in fact unrelated to those of “The Negative Community,” his three-section introduction to the second part suggests that the “negative community” and the “world of lovers” have an at least analogous relationship, for both are characterized by what Blanchot (following Régis Debray) calls “the arid solitude of anonymous forces” (l’aride solitude des forces anonymes). In the pages that precede this phrase, Blanchot attempts to provide a content to the concept of “l’aride solitude des forces anonymes” through the use of two examples. The first example is “May ‘68,” which Blanchot

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depicts as a fête-like explosion of “communication.” May ‘68 has shown, argues Blanchot, that without project, without conjuration, in the suddenness of a happy meeting, like a festival [fête] that breached the admitted and expected social norms, explosive communication could affirm itself […] as the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar. (29-30, translation modified.) Three motifs, or themes, determine this example. First, Blanchot presents May ‘68 as an example of désoeuvrement (it occurred “sans projet”). Second, May ‘68 was a sort of fête, for it affirmed, like a festival, “la communication explosive.” Finally, May ‘68 was characterized by an equality and interchangeability of its participants. Each of these three themes serves to establish a sort of “partage” with Nancy’s text; that is, each theme connects, while at the same time marks a distance between, Blanchot’s and Nancy’s understandings of community. So, for example, while Blanchot’s claim that May ‘68 occurred “sans projet” is simply another way of presenting it as an example of désoeuvrement, he selects an example from the clearly political field, precisely that realm that caused so many problems for Nancy (i.e., does “le politique” require works or not?) For Blanchot, the désoeuvrement of May ‘68 is fundamentally political: political because of its refusal to exclude anything and its awareness that it was, as such, the immediate-universal, with the impossible as its only challenge, but without determined political wills and therefore at the mercy of any sudden push by the formal institutions against which it refused to react. (31) Though elements of Blanchot’s description of “le politique” remind one of Nancy’s definition of that term, Blanchot much more explicitly than Nancy joins “the political” to “unworking” in the sphere of popular protest. Blanchot even more fundamentally distances himself from Nancy in his presentation of “May ‘68” as a modality of the “fête.”5 For both authors, “1968” is bound to the fête, but for Nancy this relation is determined solely

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through the mediation of Bataille’s discussions of the festival. What characterized both the actual events of May ‘68 and Bataille’s analyses, suggests Nancy, was an element of “ambiguous nostalgia” (nostalgie ambiguë): For Bataille the pole of ecstasy remained linked to the fascist orgy […] or at least to the festival (whose element of ambiguous nostalgia returned, after him, in 1968) to the extent that it represented ecstasy in terms of the group and the political order. (20) For Nancy, the events of 1968 represented simply a return, at the level of the group, of that nostalgia that originally encouraged Bataille to link the pole of ecstasy to fascism and festivals (i.e., to link it to political forms). Though Nancy does not develop further his analysis of the nostalgia that underwrote 1968 and Bataille’s discussions of the ecstatic festival, one assumes that the common element is the desire for fusion that has been the primary subject of Nancy’s critique. For Blanchot, however, the fête has a more positive valence. May ‘68 is “fête-like,” not because it was motivated by a nostalgic desire for fusion, but rather because it manifested a form of communality that was characterized by an “interchangeability” of participants that not grounded in a desire for fusion. “May ‘68,” writes Blanchot, was “vehiculated [véhiculait] by the requirement of being there [l’exigence d’être là], not as a person or subject, but as the demonstrators of a movement fraternally anonymous and impersonal [fraternellement anonyme et impersonnel]” (32). The mode of existence (être là) that became reality (however fleetingly) in May ‘68 was tied neither to “subjectivity” nor “individuality,” but was instead some third form of common existence — Mitsein — in which identity became fundamentally confused. Yet this “fraternal anonymity” led neither to Dasein’s dissolution of itself in “the they” nor a work-structured Geschick. Anonymity becomes a positive term for Blanchot, indexing a truly communal mode of Mitsein that is not simply a disguised version of the desire for a collective “fusion” of individualities. Yet what remains obscure in the example of “May ‘68” is the role of death, and, more specifically, the death of the Other, and it is this theme that brings Blanchot to his final example, the procession for the dead of Charonne. The discussion concentrates all of the elements of this previously unarticulated modality of Mitsein. Thus, immediately following his

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description of May ‘68, Blanchot turns to “Charonne” in a description that I must quote at length: Presence of the “people” in their limitless power which, in order not to limit itself, accepts doing nothing: I believe that in the still contemporary period there has not been a clearer example than the one that affirmed itself with sovereign amplitude when, to walk in procession for the dead of Charonne, an immobile, silent crowd gathered, whose number there was no reason to count because there was nothing to be added, nothing to be subtracted: it was there as a whole, not to be counted, not to be numbered, not even as a closed totality, but as an integrality surpassing any whole, imposing itself calmly beyond itself. A power supreme, because it included, without feeling itself diminished, its virtual and absolute powerlessness, symbolized accurately by the fact that it was there as an extension of those who could no longer be there (those assassinated at Charonne): the infinite answering the call of the finitude and prolonging it while opposing it. I believe that a form of community happened then, different from the one whose character we had thought to have defined, one of those moments when communism and community meet up and ignore that they have realized themselves by losing themselves immediately. (32) This is a remarkably dense and rich passage, but I want to call attention to the fact that, as in the case of May ‘68, Blanchot presents the procession for the dead of Charonne as marked by a certain anonymity: being-there was not a matter of identity, of numbering oneself amongst others. “Unworking” (désoeuvrement) also reappears, although Blanchot reformulates it here via a strange logic of power/impotence (puissance/impuissance) in which power becomes supreme only through its acceptance of a constitutive impotence. This logic is only intelligible if power is understood not along the axis of production (the capacity to make a work), but is rather figured as a revelatory phenomenon in which “the people” recognize their unity as well as the absence that makes this unity possible. In this example, the enabling absence is precisely the death of others (the dead of Charonne), which cannot be sublated in a riot, “program,” or even a “work of mourning,” but instead makes visible the absence that is constitutive of this community itself. The Dasein (être là) of “the people” is possible only on the basis of the negation of

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Dasein (ne pouvaient plus être là) of the dead, a negation of finitude that is so extreme as to render anonymous and indissociable the Dasein and Mitsein of the mourners. Blanchot’s stress on the anonymity of the mourners is a function of his focus on the “ethical” Other/same relation at the expense of “ontological” same/same relationships, but it has important implications for the analyses of Mitsein. It suggests, for example, that Heidegger’s attempt to develop a vocabulary for speaking of the various modes in which we encounter the Dasein of others was, if not misguided, at most of secondary importance. Such an attempt is exemplified by Heidegger’s attempt in Being and Time to distinguish Mitsein from Daseinmit, the latter term in principle allowing us to “characteriz[e] the Dasein of Others to the extent that it is freed by its world for a Being-with” (157). (So, for example, one can speak of the Daseinmit of others as “missing,” “away,” and so on.) Yet Blanchot’s stress on anonymity hints that the results of such distinctions may obscure a much more fundamental relationship of Mitsein with radically other forms of finitude. This is not to suggest that Blanchot’s “fraternal anonymity” — exemplified by both “May ‘68” and the procession for the dead of Charonne — is equivalent to the anonymity characteristic of Dasein’s absorption into “the they.” In the latter case, Dasein loses sight of the constitutive role of death (its own and the others), while “the people” of Blanchot’s examples exist (are “present”) as an extension of a mode of death that calls from beyond. Anonymity thus becomes an important conceptual tool for the analysis of Mitsein only to the extent that it can incorporate the irruption of a radically Other negativity into a collective finitude. Fraternally anonymous Mitsein: “the infinite answering the call of the finitude and prolonging it while opposing it” (32).

Conclusion. The Future of Mitsein I agree wholeheartedly with Nancy’s contention (and Blanchot’s echo of this claim) that metaphysical understandings of subjectivity and community have become, to put it simply, unbelievable. It seems fair, then, to accept Nancy’s and Blanchot’s suggestion that the turn to Heidegger

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and Bataille stems from a real need to rethink community on a “renewed” basis. Moreover, a reexamination of Mitsein — that “fundamental structure” of Dasein so tantalizingly offered yet mysteriously neglected by Heidegger — seems a promising start for this rethinking. Yet Nancy’s and Blanchot’s philosophies of community highlight the difficulties of such an effort. Even while both agree that Mitsein can only be understood to the extent that its analysis radically implicates both death and the other (and the other’s death), their disagreements point to the obscure nature of these connections. Can the other’s death be thought within the realm of an ontology of community, as Nancy maintains? If so, does that commit one to the Heideggerian schema of anonymity verses authenticity, even if one disputes Heidegger’s particular version of that schema? Or does a post-Heideggerian reformulation of Mitsein in fact require us to rethink the supposed inauthenticity of anonymity? In the wake of our inability to believe in immanence, does anonymity — so universally reviled in this century as the leading index of the loss of community — in fact offer thought a resource for understanding the vexed relationship between Dasein, death, and the others/Other?

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Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

My reading here is based on the French versions of these two texts, but in the interests of space, I have quoted from the standard English translations, interpolating the original French when necessary. Nancy’s essay “La communauté désoeuvrée” originally appeared in Alea #4 in 1983, though it was published as the first chapter of a book by the same name only in 1986. Much of my analysis here owes a debt to Fynsk’s excellent chapter “The Self and its Witness.” I also have found useful his Introduction to The Inoperative Community, the English translation of Nancy’s La communauté désoeuvrée. The literature on the relationship between Heidegger and National Socialism is already vast and continues to grow every year. For a balanced and nuanced introduction to the central issues, see Rockmore and Margolis. For an especially uncharitable reading of Heidegger’s engagement, see Wolin. In his Introduction to The Inoperative Community, Christopher Fynsk suggests that Nancy distinguishes between the masculine le politique (“the political”), and the feminine la politique (“politics”). “Le politique” represents “the site where what it means to be in common is open to definition,” while “la politique” is understood as “the play of forces and interests engaged in a conflict over the representation and governance of social existence” (x). While this distinction is potentially useful, it does not go very far in clarifying Nancy’s understanding of the relationship between work, ordering, and literary communism. And in a rather strange twist, Fynsk claims that Nancy establishes this distinction in his Preface to The Inoperative Community, yet the translator of this Preface — which has not been published in French, and appears only in the English translation of Nancy’s text — has neglected to parenthetically indicate this distinction, leaving both Nancy’s French and English readers at something of a disadvantage. For reasons that are not clear to me, “fête” is rendered as “feast” (rather than “festival”) in the English translation of La communauté inavouable, a (mis)translation that entirely obscures the connection between Blanchot’s and Nancy’s texts.

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Part IV Transnational Communities

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Re-imagining Community and Cultural Difference: Nancy’s Theory and the Context of Immigration in France by Jane Hiddleston

One of the most widespread concepts in recent academic, theoretical discourses is almost certainly that of “difference.” A cluster of writers has been working to unravel and subvert the construction of any totalizing “grand narrative,” drawing attention instead to anomaly, to singularity, and to incommensurabilities between diverse standpoints. This gesture involves a re-evaluation of the notion of the “in-common,” and thinkers such as Nancy, Derrida, and Lyotard have attempted to uncover the limits of discourses of community in order to represent the persistence of irreconcilable diversity. These commentators forecast the end of the notion of community in the sense of resemblance and belonging, emphasizing instead dissensus and incommunicability between different cultural perspectives. It is time to ask, however, on the one hand whether such enunciations resonate in more concrete socio-political descriptions of current collective formations, and on the other hand, whether they contain any helpful political implications. In particular, it is necessary to read French critical theory in relation to its cultural context and to interrogate its relevance to debates on collective identity and immigration in France. What is the relation between critical theories by French thinkers such as Nancy and contemporary discourses on multiculturalism in France? How might theoretical models affect thinking about the formation of and interaction between different cultural groups within the Republic? Critical theory is above all an analysis of discourse and representation. It forms an integral part of socio-political thinking on community and cultural difference because such notions are themselves inevitably discursively constructed. Both “community” and “difference” exist only insofar as they are perceived or believed in by constituent members of society. A sense of community depends on the creation of perceived unity, arising from a discourse of oneness or sharing rather than from innate or non-discursive characteristics. Similarly, any notion of “difference” varies according to

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perception. Two individuals can be described as either similar or different, depending on the sorts of criteria used and the cultural starting-point of the commentator. Critical theories are therefore crucial to any debate on cultural community, since they interrogate and re-evaluate the intricacies of what we mean by terms such as “difference” and “the in-common.” Nancy, Derrida, and Lyotard examine different ways of interpreting the very word “community,” suggesting new emphases that reconfigure the relation between cultural collectivities and singular differences. Their work ties in closely with debates on multiculturalism and cultural difference, since they question the assumptions and implications inherent in the discourse of community and consequently suggest a reinvention of the manner in which collective identity is structured and organized. These theories have far-reaching implications, because political values, priorities, and beliefsystems are based upon such discursive ideas. It is significant, then, that while critical theorists working in France are tracing the limits of the notion of community and pinpointing the illusory nature of myths of perfect social communion, a number of sociopolitical commentators are equally doubtful regarding the adequacy of the concept of a unified community in the national or cultural sense. Since the revolution, the French Republic has set itself up as a self-contained and unified whole, supposedly integrating people of diverse origin into its centralized frame. With recent changes in perceptions of immigration, however, such claims for cultural unity are being put into question. Just as Nancy and Derrida argue that we need to open up the concept of a unified collective structure to account for multiple singularities, so too do many sociological thinkers struggle to uphold the notion of a thoroughly unified state and all its implications. Many scholars are wondering how to imagine the collective identity of manifold diverse individuals and groups of immigrant origin. Philosophical thinking about difference forms part of a wider series of discourses that refute the traditional understanding of community in terms of unity or similarity and re-organize conceptions of collective identity on that basis. Most importantly, this correlation of philosophical discourses with concrete socio-political perspectives brings to the forefront the problems associated with the pronouncement of the end of community and articulates the necessity of new modes of thought. Both discourses remain unsatisfied

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with the construction of unified collective structures, focusing instead on incompatibilities and differences. I want to argue, however, that such a reflection on dissensus and on the separation between cultural identities only perpetuates problems of marginalization and inequality. The affirmation of the failure of discourses of community and the repeated emphasis on difference can slip into a model where alterity becomes an exaggerated quality, implying further exclusion. Consequently, I intend to use Nancy’s later text Etre singulier pluriel as a springboard for further reflection and as a means to problematize arguments that foreclose community altogether. Here, Nancy loosens the category of difference and challenges the philosophical incompatibility between alterity and any collective frame analyzed in the earlier work, as well as in texts by Derrida and Lyotard. He refuses to fetishize concepts of community and difference, and instead rewrites the confrontation between the individual and the community as a set of shifting and plural relations between singular beings and the collective network by which they are structured and defined. Thus, he obliquely criticizes the formulation both of aporetic philosophical models and of self-same political ideologies, inventing a more fluid and critical mode of reflection. In the socio-political context, conceptions of community and cultural difference take a number of different forms. Proponents of the dominant ideology regarding the cultural community in France have for a long time argued that immigrants should be assimilated and that they should be rendered French, both culturally and politically. This gesture could be seen to originate in the discourse of the One and Indivisible Republic, which advocates the integration of people of diverse origins into a unified nation, equal and free, participating in a reasoned social contract. Citizens are equal under the law in a centralized and unitary state, bound together contractually rather than organically by blood or soil. This heterogeneity of origins, however, means that cultural unity is perceived to be all the more important. Immigrants can attain French nationality provided that a number of conditions are fulfilled, but the assimilation of French language, culture, and civilization is very much a condition of exercising political rights in France. According to this ideology, the dialects, practices, and beliefs of cultures other than French are rarely actively recognized. The Republic welcomes immigrants on the condition that any person of non-French

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origin seeking to live in France will be integrated into the centralized state as an individual rather than as a member of any cultural community with particular customs or attitudes. The republican ideology of the integration of differences is accompanied by the particular ethic of the French secular state. In France, the concept of laïcité rules that religion and state are separate; the state is neutral and religion is consigned to the private sphere. This logic, as it was applied to the educational system by Jules Ferry at the end of the nineteenth century, means that schools are a neutral forum where individuals come into contact with one another while leaving their own particular religious beliefs or customs behind. Initially then, laïcité was seen to promote the participation of different groups in a wider, over-arching but non-essential community. At times, however, the concept becomes distorted and interpreted in an excessively dogmatic way, leading to the effacement of cultural differences and a failure to recognize the practices of diverse cultures. The problematic nature of this issue is exemplified by the adverse reactions and ideologies circulating around the practice of Islam in France. From the point of view of some interpretations of the unified and secular state, certain aspects of Islam conflict with the French ideology of assimilation. If laïcité describes the dissociation of church and state, what people perceive to be the Islamic understanding of religion as a public issue is incommensurable with this French ethic. This incompatibility has been played out in everyday occurrences. In a famous case in 1989, three girls were excluded from school for wearing headscarves, creating a tense debate over the question of toleration and also giving rise to a number of reactions against the existence of different religions and cultures in France. Some saw the exhibition of religious allegiance as contrary to the tenets of laïcité, arguing that the veil constituted an unacceptable form of proselytism. Many people perceived school to be a place where pupils could forget their cultural background and where they should be encouraged to think beyond their own identity and origins. The problem here was clearly a complicated one: laïcité was set up in the name of equality and toleration rather than as an attempt to silence or flatten difference. In this case, however, the belief in integration came to entail a failure of recognition, and many perceived the clash between the

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secular republican community and the particularity of Islamic culture to be insurmountable. This heated controversy marked the beginning of prominent doubts regarding the appropriateness of France’s integrative republican ideology. It seems that such a unified community cannot encapsulate adequately the current position of immigrants and their descendants, in particular those from North Africa, nor can it do justice to the coexistence of multiple cultural voices and practices. Sociologist Michel Wieviorka argues that since the eighties, perceptions of immigration in France have changed in nature. If until then immigrants were seen above all as a workforce, the eighties marked a shift in attitude toward an understanding of immigrant populations as a cultural phenomenon. Immigrant groups formed not a collection of individual laborers, but demanded to be recognized as particular ethnic communities. The generation of workers that arrived in France in the sixties has settled more permanently in the Republic with their wives and children, and they need to be thought of not in terms of a transitory workforce but as a specific cultural group residing in France. As a result, Wieviorka argues: Nous ne pouvons plus dire: le modèle de l’intégration est en crise, sauvons-le. Aujourd’hui, il faut accepter l’idée que nous sommes entrés dans une nouvelle période historique, qui suppose la réinvention d’un modèle. Il faut continuer de défendre des valeurs universelles, mais en sachant qu’on ne peut plus faire comme si la poussée des identités culturelles était une maladie épisodique de notre société, un simple phénomène de crise. (154) [We can no longer say: the model of integration is in crisis, we must save it. Today, we have to accept the idea that we have entered a new historical period, which implies the reinvention of the model. We should continue to defend universal values, but with the knowledge that we can no longer behave as if the upsurge in cultural identities were a transitory illness in our society, a simple phenomenon of crisis.] The notion of a unified community has become dissociated from the reality of contemporary cultural diversity and a more flexible mode of thinking is required.

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In spite of these changes, however, many immigrant groups still struggle to identify themselves as any smaller ethnic or cultural community. Little sense of community exists among minority groups living in France. The beur movement of the eighties represented an attempt to recreate a sense of sharing and belonging amongst North-African immigrants and their descendants living in France, but soon it was felt that the unifying term beur masked what was in reality a fragmented collection of people.1 Beur culture initially offered the children of Maghrebian immigrants an alternative form of identification that rescued them from the indeterminacy of the dichotomy France/North Africa. Quickly, however, the term was appropriated by the media, took on pejorative associations, and was seen to fix and stigmatize its heterogeneous referents. Many young “second-generation immigrants” sought to dissociate themselves from the term, perceiving that it amassed under a single heading the diverse experiences of Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian immigrants and arguing that it also homogenized populations living in different conditions in different parts of France. One difficulty here is that the very idea of “community” has become associated with racist discourses, whose proponents hope to label and reduce the “other.” As Azouz Begag pointed out in a private interview, “c’est le racisme qui crée la communauté” [racism creates the community], suggesting that while many immigrants and their descendants lack a sense of solidarity and belonging, certain racist discourses lump them together in a category in order to exclude them.2 The stigmatization of the term beur is a classic example of this problem. Another example might be Western prejudices toward Islam, since many people conceive Islam as pure fundamentalism. Islam can become the signifier of the dangerous Other, diametrically and irreconcilably opposed to a narrow view of French laïcité. Muslims are also frequently made into scapegoats and are blamed for other social problems in France, such as crime, delinquency, and unemployment. Similarly, Arabe can come to represent all that is not “Western,” or, even more crudely, all that resists and exceeds the French status quo. Such views represent a failing at the heart of the discourse of community. On the one hand, the model of integration hopes to unify diverse citizens into an all-encompassing structure, while increasingly, various

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immigrant groups bear witness to the limited scope of that model. On the other hand, those immigrant groups resist any more particular, homogeneous definition, and racist stereotypes gloss over a multitude of varying types of attitude and experience. The centralized and integrative model of community has proved to be outmoded, and at the same time, smaller, relative definitions also provide a distorted and erroneous vision. In these ways, the term “community” in the sense of a unified body is becoming inadequate. For these reasons, an exploration of theoretical configurations of “community” is required, since the problems described above suggest the necessity of a profound re-structuring of the very notion of collective identity and cultural being-together. If “community” in the cultural and socio-political context is struggling to live up to its name, then a profound re-evaluation of collective representational structures is evidently both pertinent and necessary. The questioning of socio-political perceptions of community is continued in a parallel set of theoretical discourses in which communal unity is deconstructed and overthrown. Derrida, in Politics of Friendship for example, theorizes the aporetic relation between singular beings and the collective frame, imagining an open-ended “community without community.” He has also reflected on the question of hospitality, arguing that the host (France?) has to remain unconditionally open to irreducible and unknowable cultural differences, even if it must also paradoxically maintain a sense of the regulations and norms that define actual political organization. Hospitality is caught up in a philosophical aporia for Derrida, due to the incommensurability of these two objectives. More radically than Derrida, Lyotard creates the notion of the differend, implying a conception of radical alterity that even forecloses negotiation or any shared “grammar.” Nancy’s early work, including The Inoperative Community, also belongs to this vein, rewriting community as the formless exposure of irreducibly singular individuals to one another. However, I want to argue that such an emphasis on the extinction of community risks fetishizing difference and upholding a model where incompatibilities are ineluctable and fixed. It also perpetuates situations where specific identities are excluded from dialogue, rather than rendering the categories of difference, sameness, and community more fluid. These theories demonstrate the limitations of the republican community, as

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well as the heterogeneous nature of smaller cultural identities, but this culminates in an over-emphasis on alterity and a denial of possibilities of interaction. In The Inoperative Community, Nancy sets out to undermine any concept of communal unity. His reappraisal of community at this stage stresses disintegration, loss, and separation. Describing the breakdown of communism as one of the most important signs of our time, he argues that this implies the dislocation of “community” itself. If communism figured a holistic community beyond social divisions, then that very emblem has in our era lost its power. Having started by linking the deconstruction of community with the specificity of the contemporary era, Nancy then goes on to explore how community also subtends much of the history of Western thought in the form of an absent myth. He mentions Rousseau’s reflections on the solitary figure within a dissolving society, and traces paradigms of broken communities even further back into Greek, Roman, and Christian thought. Community was itself never lost but exists in philosophy as a figure of loss itself: the notion itself is constituted by loss. Further, community can be defined as myth itself, since it is suggestive of essence and origin but was itself never realized. Community points to the mythical nature of myth, figuring nostalgia for a perpetually receding origin. Evidently, Nancy’s initial goal is to unravel community as Gemeinschaft in order to expose the manner in which immanent, common essences and roots have always been posited as that which has been lost. The republican community discussed above is clearly not built on this notion of origin and myth, forming instead a Gesellschaft founded on social contract. Significantly, however, republican ideology contains a drive for unification that has resulted in the creation of a myth of secular “Frenchness,” and it is these sorts of myths that Nancy is attempting to deconstruct. Most importantly, while Nancy uncovers the illusory nature of the communal myth throughout much of the history of Western thought, the less essentialist drive toward unification exemplified by the republican vision is also now being put into question. Nancy’s rewriting of community undertakes this questioning, since it not only deconstructs original myths but also involves a total reappraisal of the relation between the singular and the collective. It demonstrates the unfeasibility of the concept of a unified community

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connoting sameness and belonging, and stresses instead plurality and irreconcilable differences. Nancy’s thinking points to the emptiness of community in both a mythical and a political sense. Important here is his reflection on Bataille, whose text “La Souveraineté” reconsiders the nature of sovereignty, sharing, and communication. Nancy explores how Bataille’s sovereign being always exists in relation to an outside: it has no immanence, but rather experiences itself in relation to that which is outside itself. The sharing of sovereignty cannot be thought in terms of a shared community. Instead, singular beings are constituted by sharing; they are different from one another but also “spaced” or defined by that relation with alterity. For Nancy, this describes “the modern experience of community as neither a work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as space itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self ” (Inoperative 19). Community is “unworked,” a term that suggests the dismantling of the oeuvre of community in the sense of production or completion and emphasizes the continual process of interruption, fragmentation, and suspension. Community is an empty and indeterminate totality, the formless sharing of the experience of exposure.3 In this way, however, Nancy is focusing on the absence of unity and the separation of identities rather than imagining ways in which differences might interact. Nancy’s discussion of Bataille also leads him to emphasize questions of relativity and mortality. Having undermined the fullness of sovereignty, Bataille concludes that community needs to be thought in terms of the finitude of beings, and that finitude is revealed above all in the death of the community’s members. Community realizes itself through death because it portrays the mortality and non-transcendence of each singular being, and because it draws together around the corpse the community of finite “others”: “chacun est alors chassé de l’étroitesse de sa personne et se perd autant qu’il peut dans la communauté de ses semblables” [each person is pushed outside of the limits of his own person and loses himself as much as possible in the community of those who resemble him] (Bataille, “Limite” 245). In the simplest terms, the death of another reveals to everyone the limitations of her own being and that experience is shared with other singular beings. The association of community with death also occurs in the work of Blanchot and, more recently, Alphonso Lingis, who coins the phrase “the

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community of those who have nothing in common” to evoke the sharing of the experience of nothingness or mortality.4 The problem with this emphasis on death as the only remaining form of communal unity is that it fixes on difference and diversity, and refuses to imagine other sorts of collective identity or interaction. Although the initial philosophical premise regarding the emptiness of subjectivity is convincing, it seems erroneous to take this beyond the context of a discussion on mortality and finitude in order to imply the impossibility of community itself. If the mortality of the members of a community does form a focal point for an understanding of relativity and finitude, the postulation that this is the only remaining unifying figure is too strong. It stresses too unequivocally the absence of communication and linking structures between different identities and implies the breakdown of other forms of dialogue and intermingling. In the abstract, philosophical sense, it underlines separation and otherness and masks possible linkages and connections between singular beings who constantly interact in other ways. In the context of political thinking, it suggests a reflection on violence and sacrifice rather than encouraging a more fluid configuration that would minimize conflict. Similarly, like Derrida and Lyotard’s arguments in this context, Nancy’s model in The Inoperative Community is an aporetic structure positing community without communion. His focus is on absence, loss, and the impossibility of any traditional collective structure. The model of the “community without community” figures a paradox, re-establishing an old configuration while removing its substance and divesting it of its initial meaning. The shortcoming of this theory, however, is that once again it implies that unity is absent and that beings exist in isolation. It turns on the inevitability of the failure and breakdown of collective structures, and leaves “self ” and “other” stranded in a floating space with few points of contact. It upholds difference as a guiding principle or a quality to be affirmed, rather than demonstrating the unsatisfactory nature of aporetic models and problematizing philosophical maxims that state categorically the impossibility of community. In a socio-political sense, it erects barriers between individuals and cultures, perpetuates a model of dissensus, and assumes non-communication to be the norm. While this theory might be set up in the name of openness and increased attention to cultural

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specificities, it ultimately reinforces marginalization and fragmentation since it discredits the inter-relatedness of different cultural entities. This could in turn perpetuate states of inequality by de-emphasizing change and interaction across cultural differences through the mobile relations of a network. Discussions of the failure of the notion of community form a part of the debates about the inadequacy of the universal frame of the Republic, as well as the lack of a sense of origin, resemblance or belonging among some immigrant groups in France. But the configuration of a “community without community” also fails to offer any alternative understanding of the changing interconnections between individuals, groups, and broader structures. A central issue here, as I signaled at the beginning, is how we understand the nature of “difference” and “alterity.” Recent theories of community all hinge on the ways in which these conceptions work against unity and “the in-common.” In this regard, however, Nancy’s thinking retains a different starting-point from that of other contemporary theorists such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Blanchot. As Robert Bernasconi points out, Blanchot’s “other” in The Unavowable Community seems to be different from Nancy’s “other,” and this, I would argue, encapsulates the specificity of Nancy’s thought.5 Bernasconi shows that Blanchot’s thought (like that of Derrida) has a Levinasian strain and for this reason, it is the irreducible, unknowable Other that renders community as communion impossible. In Nancy’s work, however, alterity is secondary; the initial focus is rather the “com-pearance” of singular beings in a structure that excludes exclusion itself.6 This means that the “unworked” community is one where “others” do not confront one another in an oppositional sense, but rather where the structure of inside/outside, self and other, is replaced by a series of relations. In this way, it would seem that Nancy’s deconstructed community is less an impossible community of “others,” like that of Blanchot or Derrida, than one in which differences coexist in a non-exclusive structure. This suggests that the crucial starting-point is not alterity but relationality. Nancy only hints at the importance of relationality in The Inoperative Community, drawing attention to a notion of sharing only fleetingly between discussions of finitude, mortality, and the impossibility of community as communion. Yet it is precisely this idea of a series of

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relations that loosens and complicates the earlier emphasis on difference and criticizes the rigidity of the former model. Rather than remaining locked within the logic of irreducible dissensus, such a reflection on sharing and on the simultaneous existence of singularity and interaction problematizes static models championing either community or difference (or an impossible aporia involving both poles). In the section on “Literary Communism,” for example, although Nancy’s emphasis is on absence and contingency, the notion of plural polyphonic voices can be used to advocate the interaction of different perspectives and a more dialogic structure. The idea that “myth” is interrupted by “literature” implies the simultaneous articulation of coexistent singular voices. Nancy does not yet speak explicitly of relations, but the “worked” (completed or transcendent) community is replaced by a series of “unworked” literary articulations which are voiced alongside one another and which share the absence of an essence. The French term désoeuvrée carries the connotation of the undoing of the oeuvre, the completed work, in favor of a collection of singular, fragmented texts or voices. These voices could then be understood to represent the standpoints of various particularities in a heterogeneous but dialogic forum. In the later text The Experience of Freedom, the conception of the mobile relationality of singular beings is developed more fully. Here, the critique of models promoting difference is furthered by the blurring of the concept of singularity with an awareness of its mobile relations and influences. Nancy argues that the singular being is born into community; it is always in relation and has no substance other than that defined by the network or chain of connections. He simultaneously stresses the cut of the relation, figuring the interconnection between singularities as dynamic, changing, continually creating and recreating itself anew. The singular being depends on its dialogic relations with others and those relations are repeatedly fractured and reformed: The singular being is in relation, or according to relation, to the same extent that its singularity can consist (and in a sense always consists) in exempting itself or cutting itself off from every relation. Singularity consists in the “just once, this time” [une seule fois, celle-ci], whose mere enunciation — similar to the

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infant’s cry at birth, and it is necessarily each time a question of birth — establishes a relation at the same time that it infinitely hollows out the time and space that are supposed to be “common” around the point of enunciation. (Experience 66) Relationality is temporally moderated and defined, implying that the singular being is constantly moving, weaving in and out of different relations and perpetually converging and diverging with others at different moments and through different points of contact. “Community” is emptied of any association with unity and is redefined as the mobile and contingent interaction of particularities. This refutes fixed political ideologies as well as models affirming difference as a principle or quality. Equally, Nancy at times uses the French term partage, which implies both sharing and division, and this complex, fluid notion again loosens and complicates the earlier, more categorical emphasis on difference. This implies not the total dissemination of collectivity but an understanding of the combination of specificity with shared influences. In Etre singulier pluriel, Nancy’s most original text, singularity is not only conceived as multiple in its relations with other singularities but also as plural within itself. This suggests that cultural identities might be particular, yet that particularity also implies multiple internal differences and influences. Nancy argues that any singular being is defined by its own internal fragmentation. Singularity is not the same as individuality, precisely because it is also different from itself. Singularity implies no definite properties and contains alterity within itself: “quant aux différences singulières, elles ne sont pas seulement «individuelles», mais infra-individuelles,” [singular differences are not just “individual,” but infra-individual] (Etre 26-7). Being is singular-plural, meaning that it is both plural in a singular way, that is a unique combination of different influences, and singular in a plural way, since it is specific despite its multiple intertextual relations. Such a conception reinforces specificity while also refusing to fetishize difference and reacting against fixed models. This notion of plurality within the singular being implies the deconstruction of the opposition between self and other, again disallowing clearcut divisions and emphasizing shared influences. Difference is no longer perceived as absolutely separate, isolated, and unknowable. Others for Nancy

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are not the opposite of the self, but they coexist with the singular being as part of the network of plural relations. Singular beings do not confront one another in the form of a set of binary oppositions. Instead, since the singular being is defined by the relations and intertexts into which it is born, plural singular beings coexist or “com-pear.” The relation is defined by the avec rather than by contrast, difference, or absolute dissociation: Les autres «en général» ne sont ni les autres «moi» (puisqu’il n’y a de «moi», et de «toi», qu’à partir de l’altérité en général), ni le nonmoi (pour la même raison). Les autres «en général» ne sont ni le Même, ni l’Autre. Ils sont les-uns-les-autres, ou les-uns-des-autres, une pluralité primordiale qui com-paraît. (Etre 89-90) [Others “in general” are not other “me’s” (since “me” or “you” exist only according to the principle of alterity in general), nor a “nonme” (for the same reason). Others “in general” or neither the Same nor Other. They are one-and-the-others, or ones-of-the-others, a primordial plurality that com-pears.] Much thinking on alterity masks the importance of sharing, since it focuses on difference as absolute rather than as part of a social network of moving relations. In this sense, however, Nancy moves on from Lyotard and Derrida, since he replaces the thought of the other with the thought of the singular-plural, emphasizing interconnections between cultural identities while still deconstructing the essence of the community and self-same communal definitions. This evidently reflects a particular understanding of collective cultural identity. In “Eloge de la mêlée,” a section at the end of Etre singulier pluriel, Nancy describes how every culture is formed from a basis of plurality; culture itself is singular-plural. Furthermore, Nancy distinguishes the idea of mélange (a mixture or blend) from that of mêlée (a more heterogeneous confusion). Culture is not only mixed but also engaged in a process of mixing, of meeting and separating, communication and dispersal. It is the action of one voice confronting another and transforming itself in that process. This sort of thinking offers a critique of any traditional conception of community, in either the Republican or the smaller, more relative sense. Yet it also refuses to replace the concept of community with an overemphasis on difference. Both sorts of model are undermined in favor of an

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awareness of the coexistence of varying degrees of difference in a moving, relational structure. Cultural identity from this point of view can be specific, but it must also be perceived as part of a continuing process and not as a final achievement. Both unity and difference are replaced by the open structure of a network and particular communities are conceived as both heterogeneous and relational. If this thinking on relationality points to a certain way of re-imagining community and difference, then this structure is also crucially seen to underpin the political decision itself. In The Sense of the World, Nancy develops an idea of the political to take into account the notion of the singular-plural and the coexistence of difference with relationality. His theory undermines the possibility of any fixed ideology and advocates instead the participation of different singularities in contingent decisions. Nancy’s argument is that politics so far has been based upon an understanding of self-sufficiency. Taking the concept of the subject and the concept of the citizen, he shows how both fall into the trap of reification and self-enclosure. The citizen, defined by the external, public space of the city, is over-determined by material conditions and contexts. The subject, on the other hand, implies interiority, a “self,” and is based on “the myth of an absolute foundation.”7 The former implies only relative values, and the latter contains a conception of absolute value. Both positions are “self-sufficient” or self-enclosed and are thus bound up in a restrictive logic that disallows the participation of singular, unique beings in a more open-ended series of changing, collective decisions. In response to this, Nancy demands a politics of non-self-sufficiency. By this, he means a politics of relationality that would seemingly take into account the idea of the com-pearance of singular plural beings. This would be a politics of the “(k)not,” implying neither simply a series of self-contained subjects, nor just a set of exterior relations, but linkages between the two. It implies the organization of politics neither around the citizen, nor around the subject, but moves beyond both poles to promote a series of mobile relations between singular/plural beings. The politics of the (k)not also recalls the relation or sharing described above, as the term playfully puns on the coexistence of joining and separation, creation and negation: “the tying of the (k)not is nothing, no res, nothing but the placing-intorelation that presupposes at once proximity and distance, attachment

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and detachment, intricacy, intrigue and ambivalence” (Sense 111). If the singular subject is only singular insofar as it is tied to other singularities, then political organization needs to account for this necessary movement between different entities. Politics must focus on the forming and reforming of relations, on the tying and untying of singular interlacings, because political beings are neither absolute and sovereign, nor are they enclosed in a single community; they are unique but also relational. The political is defined as the undoing of models or ideologies, and involves different, singular voices in a dialogic network. This critique of models depicting unity or difference in favor of an understanding of complex relations between singularities helps to provide an innovative and appropriate understanding of the changing position of immigrant identities and cultures. It implies a more apt conception of the exchange of cultural influences and the constant mutation of cultural identity as one singular being brushes against another. Such a theory suggests that community and difference should not be allowed to freeze into ideologies, and cultural positions should be conceived as open to change and negotiation. Similarly, political decisions are seen to participate in a series of exchanges or strategic conferrals about particular details, rather than through the maintenance of a greater ideology. This proposes a vision of a multicultural society as a set of particular voices and their polyphonic interaction, which does not dissolve into cultural relativism but focuses on interconnection and contingency. Cultural identities are thus not isolated differences but often arise from a combination of relations. Immigrants exist not in opposition to any single national paradigm; instead, they interact with a series of diverse and changing cultural paradigms. Thus, the single national paradigm should be replaced with a broader understanding of the nation as the coexistence of different subjectivities, participating in various collective groups whose specificity can be emphasized at the same time as their dialogue with others. Further, cultural identity should be conceived as hybridized, because each singularity has plural origins and influences. No one individual or group is absolutely “other,” marginal, or excluded from any central, hegemonic category, but each has elements that might participate in different, loose and mobile categories. Such a conception of nationality and identity reduces the risk of any one ethnicity or culture

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being stigmatized, undervalued, or discriminated against, because it suggests that any particularistic definition masks a variety of influences. The “other” is not, in a Derridean sense, so radically other that it becomes both irreducible and unknowable. Rather, it is specific but also plural, coexisting and interacting with various known or unknown mobile cultural perspectives. Most importantly, this sort of critique works against conceptual wholes. If any culture is founded on plural interactions, then the illusions underpinning monolithic cultural ideologies also need to be uncovered. This is pertinent in particular in the debate between Islam and laïcité. A number of commentators might read the conflict between Islam and the secular French ethic as a binary opposition, based on the single over-arching premise that Islam hinges on the unity of religion and state, whereas laïcité separates politics from the church. But the critique of positive models offered in Nancy’s later work suggests that both poles are more complicated than such an interpretation implies. Islam and laïcité are not two fixed, opposed collective cultures, but each can be seen as flexible and plural in its manifestations. Both concepts are open-ended, susceptible to various interpretations. Both have been associated with stereotypical and uncompromising points of view, yet in spite of the myths that have coagulated around them, both positions are looser and potentially more dynamic than certain interpretations suggest. On the one hand, the concept of relationality implies that French secularism should not be perceived as dogmatic. Some have interpreted laïcité to involve an attempt to assimilate and even flatten out differences, and it can connote the uncompromising relegation of religion to the closed, intimate, or private sphere (the headscarves case in 1989 is a fitting example of this). However, it can also on the contrary be read as a gesture toward openness and toleration. Laïcité does not have to signify the non-recognition of difference; it demands simply the separation of religion from the actual governance of the country and it can still actively encourage the expression of religious practices and beliefs in collective cultural and social life. Indeed, as Maurice Berbier points out in his book La Laïcité, as soon as the secular ethic sets itself up as a fixed ideology or system of beliefs, it acts contrary to its own aspirations. By becoming exclusionist and militant, it negates itself. By contrast, a more realistic

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interpretation would argue that laïcité is a position that, by refusing to associate itself with any positivist set of doctrines, encourages diverse different religions to practice alongside one another. Nancy’s later work argues for this sort of dialogic perspective over and against the establishment of an ideological model. Similarly, Muslims in France form not a self-same cultural community, but uphold different interpretations resulting from interactions with other “singular-plural” cultural groups. As sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar demonstrates, the absolutist interpretation of Islam exemplified by some fundamentalists does occur in France, yet far more widespread are other forms of Islam displaying varying degrees of interaction with “French” or “Western” cultures. Many young people born of Muslim parents in France have created a new sort of Islam that exists in dialogue with other cultures in the Republic. This forms not a self-enclosed set of beliefs but rather a symbol reacting against racism and providing young people with a point of identification. It combines aspects of Islamic culture with a more integrated and emancipated life in France and does not hesitate to intermingle one culture with another. As well, it offers a cultural backdrop without encouraging intolerance and inequality. An example of this might be the decision by some young women and girls to wear a headscarf, not necessarily as a sign of their subjugation, but as a memorial of their particular roots in a country where Islam is not always recognized. Such gestures represent the specificity of a hybridized franco-musulman identity, affirming a singular cultural voice while also upholding dialogue as their defining structure. Echoing Nancy’s relational model, they mime the exposure of one “community” to the other in intercommunal spaces with no unchanging identity. If Islam in France and French secularism both have dialogic manifestations, this also suggests that each position is not a unity but rather a set of details. Islam should be seen as a large variety of practices, and should be dealt with as a series of singular-plural interpretations rather than as a cultural whole. The encounter of Islam and laïcité would from this point of view be less a confrontation between communities than a series of dialogues on specific details. In this way, the secular ethic might be able to tolerate Islam by finding ways of allowing particular practices to continue rather than stigmatizing the whole. For example, places for prayer might be accommodated into the workplace, authorized leave might be allowed

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for Islamic festivals, and special schools could provide Muslim children with some religious teaching. Even more obviously, this perception of Islam not as one fixed community but as a series of different practices existing in dialogue with other cultural forms resolves the tension over the wearing of headscarves, since it would allow such a practice to continue without needing to associate it with a wider, more essential ideology. This conception can be seen as a development of Nancy’s thinking in Etre singulier pluriel, as it replaces the myth of community with an open-ended system where specific identities constantly change according to their mobile relations with others. Finally, the critique described here helps to re-imagine the problematic relation between critical theory and socio-political thought. On the one hand, it is notable that Nancy’s texts relate to contemporary thinking on cultural communities, yet at the same time, the manner in which his writing is situated is complex and ambivalent. As I mentioned in the discussion of The Inoperative Community, Nancy at times comments on the contemporary era, while also broadening his scope to refer to “the history of Western thought.” It might be asked then, to what historical period does Nancy believe his thought belongs? Whose experience precisely does he intend to theories? Nancy at once identifies the “unworked community” with all of Western civilization, and with certain specific instances, among which he names May ‘68, the end of communism, Sarajevo, and contemporary multiculturalist thinking. In addition, what Nancy terms the history of Western thought is itself a highly uneasy and blurred category.8 He thus frustrates the identification of any single referent, playing with the very concept of reference and rendering ambiguous the relation between philosophy and politics.9 Nancy is clearly a highly engaged thinker, yet his texts remain slippery, exhibiting their own textuality and the blurring of boundaries between textual concepts. He does make moves between the general and the specific, between philosophy and contexts, but his work also implies that that move is subversive and problematic. For this reason, Nancy’s theory should not be seen as a set of political proposals or projects. The political efficacy of his thinking, on the contrary, lies in the attempt to undermine the formulation of ideologies, models, and fixed perspectives in favor of an awareness of blurred concepts and shifting borders. Nancy’s work offers a critique both of political ideologies

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and of an excessive reflection on philosophical incompatibilities, stressing instead the slippery nature of concepts such as “community,” “difference,” and “singularity.” The texts are highly literary, engaged in challenging existing configurations and uncovering the complex processes involved in the articulation of any cultural identity. Nancy’s is a discursive exercise, describing not particular strategies to be executed in specific contexts, but the re-imagining of discourse itself as open to change and dialogue. In this sense, the text itself does not sit still and offers no positive configuration. It works instead to confound existing models, emphasizing the importance of change and interaction, dialogue and intersection, rather than focusing on the conceptual poles of community and difference.

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

The term beur comes from the word arabe in verlan, a form of slang where the syllables of a word are reversed. It became popular fleetingly in the eighties, particularly after the “marche des Beurs pour l’égalité et contre le racisme” which was completed in December 1983. The movement also involved a radio station, Radio Beur, a journal entitled Sans frontière (and later Baraka), and was championed by numerous writers, singers, and artists. This comment comes from a private interview with Azouz Begag held in Paris, 10 May 2000. This description echoes Agamben’s The Coming Community (67). See Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable, and Lingis’ The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common. Blanchot stresses how the death of another takes the individual outside of herself and consolidates community. Lingis discusses the experience of going to the deathbed of a loved one, and he associates this with a sense of brotherhood through the sharing of mortality.

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7. 8.

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See Bernasconi, who hinges his argument on an ambiguous quotation from Blanchot’s text, but broadens this to set up an opposition between Blanchot and Levinas on the one hand, and Nancy on the other. He also criticizes Nancy for paying less attention to the “other,” and he argues that community without exclusion is another form of totalitarianism. I disagree with Bernasconi here, since I understand Nancy’s intention to be not to reject exclusion on the basis of including every entity into a total structure, but to realign “community” in such a way as to focus on blurring and interaction rather than frontiers. The specific reference here is to Nancy’s “Cut Throat Sun.” Nancy imagines community “as if it were no longer the closure that excludes, but the multiple, cut network from which exclusion only is excluded? Neither the integration of nations nor the disintegration of the masses, nor a ‘milieu’ between the two, and always threatened by both” (121). He also explains that exclusion is excluded not through fusion or inclusion, but through “the inscription of cuts” or the incorporation of singularity into an openended, plural structure. This is the explanation of Jeffrey S. Librett in the “Translator’s Foreword” to the English edition of Nancy’s The Sense of the World (xxi). See Bernasconi, who criticizes Nancy’s conception of “the West,” pointing out the tension between what he acknowledges as historical and what he requires for the sake of his argument. Nancy’s referents here are clearly very selective, referring to a few choice authors and not the entire history of Western thought at all. The important reference here is to his work with Lacoue-Labarthe, in Retreating the Political. The original text coincided with the creation of the Center for the Philsophical Study of the Political, which existed between 1980 and 1984. Here Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe distinguish “politics” and “the political,” arguing that we need to withdraw from concrete politics in order to theorize the nature of the political itself. This distinction, however, soon seemed to fall down. Consequently, it is perhaps necessary now to readdress this question and identify ways in which theory can or cannot resonate in the political sphere.

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Haunted Community by Linnell Secomb

Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others. —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community

Community is, for Jean-Luc Nancy, a sharing constituted through exposure of singular beings, each to the other. It is an inclining toward others that is founded, not on commonality, nor on the collective production of a common project, but on the experience of finitude. However, this would not involve a relation to death imagined as a contribution to a greater good and as a fusion or community after death (as in dying for a nation). Rather, it is an experience of death in which the absolute alterity of the other is revealed. The death of the other, the mortality of the other, reveals limit, finality, and alterity to the self. Community is the exposure and sharing of mortal beings. It is the experience of the other as other revealed by the finitude of the other: death reveals community as the community of alterity. If community is, as Nancy suggests, “revealed in the death of others” (Inoperative 15), what significance would this have for a community haunted by the massacre and murder of alterity? Would the formation of a community of alterity be possible in a nation founded on the repudiation, negation, and decimation of the Aboriginal other? Could community be created in this context haunted by deaths and characterized by the denial of, and amnesia about, these deaths? This paper considers the possibility of creating community within a nation haunted by colonial wars and racial enmity. It proposes that the creation of a community which fully recognized difference would require an acknowledgement of murderous deaths, and a consideration of the functioning of grief, the role of the spectre, and modes of friendship possible in a postcolonial context. I draw on Nancy’s reflections on community and Derrida’s works of mourning and friendship, in order to investigate how

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murderous deaths, disavowal of difference, and racial enmity disfigure, subvert, and destroy community. I explore the possibility of refiguring community through a rethinking of friendship and mourning and an acknowledgement of the dead. I speculate that in the Australian context, community may only become possible through the creation of a spectral friendship that acknowledges the dead, the enemy, and the stranger. I trace the possibility of this uncanny and ghostly friendship within the gestures of reconciliation offered by the Aboriginal survivor, and in the living-on of the Aboriginal dead within the troubled and haunted (an)amnesia of the white Australian community. If democracy has been founded, in part, on fraternity and on a fraternal model of friendship (which arguably excludes the feminine and the foreigner), then phantom friendship may disrupt this brotherly community and precipitate an uncanny community of alterity.

“A Cult of Forgetfulness” We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so. —W. E. H. Stanner, “The Great Australian Silence” In his 1968 lecture on “The Great Australian Silence,” the Australian anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner accused Australian historians of forgetfulness, silence, and indifference about Aboriginal existence. This silence, he suggested, obscured and denied a history of massacre, dispossession, and destruction that accompanied white occupation of Aboriginal Australia. In subsequent years this amnesia has been partially reversed through the work of various historians including Roger Milliss, James Miller, and Henry Reynolds, among others. Reynolds’ works of remembrance have been especially influential, perhaps, in part, because his accessible narrative style allowed his books a wide readership beyond the usual academic boundaries. In his recent book, Why Weren’t We Told?, Reynolds specifically sets out to redress the erasure of Aboriginal existence, to overturn the disremembering, to explain the occlusion, and to make a plea for officially sanctioned memorials to commemorate the “fallen tribesmen” as “national heroes.” Reynolds

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examines the “cult of forgetfulness” about Aborigines (95), and outlines both the amnesia and the subsequent anamnesia in Australian history. Reynolds describes how, inspired by Stanner’s 1968 lecture, he and others researched and wrote about the border wars between the original inhabitants and the new colonialists — a war in which, Reynolds conservatively estimates, around two thousand to 2500 Europeans died while at least twenty thousand Aborigines were killed (113). Despite the evidence of guerrilla warfare and massacres in the newspapers and police records of the time, there was little reference to this in Australian histories of the early 1900s that instead promulgated a myth of peaceful settlement and unresisting Aborigines. Today, this drive to repress continues, Reynolds suggests, in accusations about “black-armband histories” which are decried as works that “falsify our history” and as “one of the more insidious developments in Australian political life over the past decade” (153). Reynolds speculates about the “‘mental block’ which prevents Australians from coming to terms with the past” (114), quoting historians who felt that the past was best forgotten and suggested that it was necessary “to draw a veil over the past history of the relationship between the blackfellow and the white man” (114-115). Reynolds also discusses the reactions to his own work, which is seen by some as divisive and traitorous (117). Reynolds develops several theories about this denial of Aboriginal life and death. He points out that evidence of mass murders and atrocities undermines the legend of outback egalitarianism and mateship. He argues that the ideal of (white) equality was enhanced by, and premised on, the exclusion of blacks, mateship constructed through the abuse of black women and men, and larrikin anti-authoritarianism created in a defiant response to concerns about the murders of Aborigines. The treasured view of the Australian character, however, could only be sustained by ignoring the murder, abuse, and abduction of Aboriginal people through which it had been achieved. The “relaxed and comfortable” view of the great “Aussie bloke” and of a noble outback history, for Reynolds, is a “facile triumphalism” which disguises the tragedy and the morally complex story of Australia (132-133). For Reynolds, then, the amnesia about Aboriginal resistance and colonial atrocities is motivated by both the need to disguise conflict, so as to preserve a veneer of peace, and by the desire to maintain the myth of

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egalitarian mateship, which would be destroyed by a recognition that this is founded on the violent exclusion of Aboriginals. In addition, though, Reynolds speculates that the border wars are forgotten so as to expunge the issue at stake in the wars — the fight over land. To remember Aboriginal resistance and the massacres and border wars, which accompanied the occupation and settlement of Australia by Europeans, would be to acknowledge that Aborigines defended their territories against invasion and that the wars and the deaths were the result of a fight for land (146151). This claim to land, and title to land, has been vigorously denied, repressed, and repudiated by the white Australian nation through the myth of peaceful settlement and the legal lie (in recent years overturned) of terra nullius.1 Reynolds proposes that a full reversal of the amnesia about Aboriginal resistance would require not only new histories but also commemoration of those who died in the border wars defending their country. Reynolds argues that had twenty thousand colonialists died defending the nation against invasion they would be remembered and commemorated in histories, monuments, memorials, and national remembrance ceremonies. Instead, commemoration of the Aboriginal dead is controversial. Proposals that the border wars be acknowledged by the Australian War Memorial were rejected because this, it is claimed, would evoke shame rather than honor (175-176). While the Australian authorities reject the idea of officially commemorating the Aboriginal dead, Reynolds argues that such a memorial is required if Australia is to be a unified nation. He proposes that the “fallen tribesmen” (173) be commemorated as “national heroes” (172-173) and as “martyrs” (177) because only this will demonstrate respect and honor for the dead. Reynolds writes: The controversy aroused by the question of the Aboriginal war dead should not come as a surprise. War is central to the experience of nationhood. Death in war is seen as the ultimate sacrifice for the nation. The fallen are revered as martyrs who gave up their lives for the benefit of the community. But the situation becomes complicated when white Australia seeks to incorporate indigenous Australia within the nation, when national leaders proclaim we are all members of one nation. If that is so the logic is inescapable

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— we must treat the Aboriginal dead with as much respect and honour as we treat our own. Nothing less will do. (176) Reynolds’ suggestion, that war deaths are the ultimate sacrifice for the nation, returns us to Nancy’s discussion of death and community. For Nancy, sacrificing life for some greater good is the creation of totality not the creation of community. He suggests that: Generations of citizens and militants, of workers and servants of the States have imagined their death reabsorbed or sublated in a community, yet to come, that would attain immanence. But by now we have nothing more than the bitter consciousness of the increasing remoteness of such a community, be it the people, the nation, or the society of producers […]. (Nancy, Inoperative 13) Nancy’s reflections on community and finitude suggest that the commemoration of a massacred race as national heroes and martyrs would function not as Reynolds would wish, as a means of respecting the dead, but as a sublation of these deaths into a unifying totality which would destroy their difference and alterity. Nancy argues that totalitarian and communitarian mythologies of unified community envisage death as the unification and communion of individuals within the whole community. Like the Hegelian State, whose fullest realization is accomplished in the sacrifice of the individual in waging war for the greater good of the State, totalizing regimes imagine death as a sublation of the individual into an emblem of the State. Nancy argues against this fantasy of death as union and communion: The death upon which community is calibrated does not operate the dead being’s passage into some communal intimacy, nor does community, for its part, operate the transfiguration of its dead into some substance or subject — be these homeland, native soil or blood, nation, a delivered or fulfilled humanity, absolute phalanstery, family or mystical body. Community is calibrated on death as on that of which it is precisely impossible to make a work […]. (Nancy, Inoperative 14-15) While Reynolds hopes to express respect for the Aboriginal dead, his proposed memorials for the “fallen tribesmen” would instead

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transmute the Aboriginal other into a trope for the state or nation and would destroy their difference by subsuming them within the higher unity of “national heroes.” The specificity of these deaths and of the other is obliterated in this act of incorporation. By creating memorials for “warriors,” Reynolds implicitly designates the deaths as honorable deaths in an honorable war. What this gesture occludes and denies is that it was not only tribesmen and warriors who fell in battle but more frequently the unarmed, the young and old, women, and children who were herded together and massacred by settlers, stockmen, and mounted police. As Roger Milliss’ mammoth, detailed, and chilling account of the atrocities at Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek indicate, the expanding occupation of Aboriginal land by the early settlers entailed the near extermination of Aboriginal nations. This was accomplished through both semi-official and unofficial expeditions against Aboriginal groups which involved barbarous massacres that seldom resulted in legal or other consequences for the perpetrators. It is questionable whether treating the Aboriginal dead with respect would involve their incorporation into white forms of memorial and commemoration. This incorporation risks destroying the specificity of Aboriginal resistance. It risks once again eliding the fight over land by representing all Australians killed in war (Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal) as equivalent, as though all were fighting for the same outcome. It would thereby risk obliterating the difference and specificity of the Aboriginal situation, and the right of Aboriginal people to a specific form of land right through native title. Respect for the Aboriginal dead may precisely involve respecting the Aboriginal spectre in its alterity, rather than treating it like a colored permutation of the white Australian war hero. While imagining death as a transmogrification into the higher unity of nation and familial humanity is rejected by Nancy, he does elaborate a relation between death and community that would reveal alterity rather than subsuming this difference. “Community,” he writes, “is revealed in the death of others [… as a] community of others” (Nancy, Inoperative 5). In finitude, the limit and singularity of the other is revealed. The singular place and space of the other, their particularity and specificity, is revealed in death. Death discloses the irreplacability of the other. What death reveals is not a nostalgic fusion or communion but separation, disjunction,

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and incommensurability between self and other. Death reveals an other existence outside the self. Nevertheless, this other that death exposes is an other through which “I” come to be. It is the exposure to the other, the limit between self and other, the distinction and separation that creates singularity: A singular being does not emerge or rise up against the background of a chaotic, undifferentiated identity of beings, or against the background of their unitary assumption, or that of a becoming, or that of a will. A singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning) with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being […]. (Inoperative 27-28) This suggests that there is no singular being without the existence of the other, and that human existence is predicated on a sharing, a beingwith-others, in which distinction, limit, and alterity signify self, other, and their relation. So for Nancy, death represents the limit, distinction, or difference that separates self and other and exposes alterity. This alterity of singular being is, however, only possible through a relation of sharing in which the “I” emerges in distinction from the other. If Nancy’s account of a community of alterity suggests that Reynolds’ proposed memorial for “fallen tribesmen” risks a destruction of difference through fusion within a common figure of nation, then would it be possible to remember the Aboriginal dead otherwise? Would it be possible to acknowledge the ghosts of the dead without subsuming them into a white nation and white ideality? Would a remembrance without assimilation be possible? Derrida’s works of impossible mourning which trace modes of ethical recollection may indicate ways to remember otherwise.

Remembering Otherwise In his Memoires: For Paul de Man — a book which is also about friendship, grief, memory, promise, and responsibility — Derrida attempts to formulate a way to remember an other which would resist an assimilation of the other into the self, and which would avoid undermining the alterity

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of the other by integrating them into the sameness of the self. Derrida’s gesture of ethical anamnesia is both necessary and impossible, and this impossible necessity is evident within this text that turns out to be, at once, a discussion of memory and promise and the performance of making and fulfilling a promise to Paul de Man. Derrida asks whether the most ethical, or most loyal and faithful, response to the death of a friend would be to successfully mourn the other or to fail to mourn for them. He suggests that a successful mourning would involve a process of internalizing memory, “which would interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and lives only in us” (Memoires 6). An impossible mourning, on the other hand, “refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself ” (6). This impossible mourning preserves the other’s alterity and acknowledges and respects the other’s limitless distance from the self. Derrida aligns successful mourning with Erinnerung or interiorizing memory, which is for de Man “recollection as the inner gathering and preserving of experience” (qtd. in Memoires 51). Impossible mourning is associated with Gedachtnis or the thinking, voluntary, mechanical faculty of memorization (Memoires 51). Moreover, Derrida insists that while successful mourning and interiorizing memory are usually valorized and impossible mourning and memorization seen as deficient, it may be that the superficially successful is ultimately inadequate while the seeming failure may accomplish its goal (35). Derrida suggests that the normal work of mourning, which is accomplished through an interiorizing memory, fails because it involves an infidelity to the dead. By internalizing them into us in memory, we make them part of us and no longer other to us. We fail to respect and recognize their alterity. On the other hand, an impossible mourning, achieved through a thinking memorization, succeeds in maintaining the other as other. Derrida’s thought on impossible mourning is informed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic distinction between mourning and melancholia (Abraham and Torok “Introjection” 3-16). For Abraham and Torok, mourning is a process by which death is worked through and accepted by the bereaved. The melancholic, on the other hand, refuses to accept the death. Instead, the dead person is encrypted within a tomb or

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vault constructed outside the psyche. The other is not introjected into the self but is preserved as a foreigner, as an other, in a space strictly separated from the psychic structure of the self. Unable to accept the death of the other, the grieving survivor refuses to assimilate the fact of death, refuses to feel the pain and grief of this death, and so engages in a secret fantasy in which the other is preserved alive and whole in this space outside the psyche. The ego avoids acknowledging the reality of death and avoids the psychical transformations required in order to accept the death. This refusal involves a repudiation of the other, an amnesia that destroys the other by obliterating the other (Abraham and Torok “Introjection” 3-8; Wolf Man 2-26). Derrida’s concept of impossible mourning deconstructs the dichotomy of mourning and melancholia. The successful assimilation and acceptance of death is unethical for Derrida because it transforms the other into a part of the self and relinquishes their alterity. Melancholia, as a repudiation of the other, forgets and obliterates the other. Derrida conceives of another mode of grief that is an impossible mourning that would be a loyal and respectful gesture to the dead because it preserves the other as another, unassimilated into the self. Rather than introjecting them through an interiorizing memory into the psyche, the bereaved friend memorizes and preserves the other as other. Moreover, Derrida suggests that this memorizing of impossible mourning is not a resuscitation of the dead but a thinking of the future (Memoires 3). It is not a preservation of a past but a thinking forward incited by the dead. Impossible mourning involves a responsibility conferred by the death of the other: “Everything remains ‘in me’ or ‘in us,’ ‘between us’ upon the death of the other. Everything is entrusted to me: everything is bequeathed or given to us” (33). This responsibility of impossible mourning, and the distinction of mourning and melancholia, may be elaborated in relation to the issue of Aboriginal resistance, war deaths, and massacres. The obliteration of the dead from early twentieth century histories, and the continuing disavowal of these deaths through accusations about re-writing history and political correctness, exhibit aspects of a melancholic response to death. The Aboriginal dead are not acknowledged, they are repudiated and expunged from the national psyche and forgotten so as to avoid any painful transformations of national identity that recognition would necessitate. In order

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to preserve Australian white male mateship and white land ownership, the deaths are disavowed. On the other hand, Reynolds’ new commemorative histories, which record the border wars, atrocities, and Aboriginal deaths, invoke the necessity for a national mourning and commemoration of the Aboriginal war heroes and martyrs. But this mourning risks an assimilation of the Aboriginal existence into the rituals of white remembrance, commemoration, and memorial. This successful mourning would, as Derrida suggests, interiorize the other, reduce them to a memory created by white history and culture, and confine them to a past now apparently transcended. Derrida’s impossible mourning attempts to remember the other while maintaining their alterity. It remembers, not in order to accept or neutralize the death, but in order to think the future the dead betoken. An impossible mourning would neither repudiate nor commemorate but would remember the legacy left by the dead. However, Derrida’s gesture of impossible mourning, which acknowledges that “Everything is entrusted to me,” is a gesture in response to the death of the loved other: the lover, brother, sister, parent, child, or friend. The white Australian nation did not, and does not, treat the Aboriginal other as friends but as enemies, or at best as a problem to be resolved. How then would Derrida’s mode of remembering the dead beloved by allowing the dead to live on in us be applicable to this situation of enmity, hatred, murder, dispossession, and patronizing assimilation? Would it be possible to experience or to create impossible mourning when white friendship, white Australian mateship, is founded precisely, as Reynolds argues, on the exclusion of Aboriginals, and, indeed, on the camaraderie created in hunting parties which tracked down and killed the Aboriginal enemy? Derrida’s living-on of the other in us and through us seems obviously inapplicable in this context. Yet, if the deaths that haunt (often unconsciously and unrecognized, often denied and repudiated) the white Australian nation are to be acknowledged, if the dead are to live on, and if Australia is to experience community rather than simply a white(washed) national identity, then a response to the Aboriginal dead that facilitates the legacies of the dead seems required. The paradox is how to think a relation of enmity and a history of murder in a context that now seeks to establish friendship, reconciliation, and community. Derrida’s work on friendship suggests that

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the enemy/friendship dichotomy may require rethinking, and I suggest that a deconstruction of this opposition would perhaps facilitate an unworking required for community.

Spectral Friendship On January 26, 1938, Aboriginal people, protesting against the white Australia Day celebration of invasion, organized a Day of Mourning. In a statement, the Aborigines Progressive Association wrote: The 26th of January, 1938, is not a day of rejoicing for Australia’s Aborigines; it is a day of mourning. This festival of 150 years’ so-called “progress” in Australia commemorates also 150 years of misery and degradation imposed upon the original native inhabitants by the white invaders of this country. We, representing the Aborigines, now ask you, the reader of this appeal, to pause in the midst of your sesquicentenary rejoicings and ask yourself honestly whether your “conscience” is clear in regard to the treatment of the Australian blacks by the Australian whites during the period of 150 years’ history which you celebrate? (qtd. in Attwood and Markus 82) In a radio interview, an Association spokesperson added, “You have never extended the hand of real friendship to us” (80-81). On a day of mourning over sixty years ago, the question of friendship was raised, just as today the possibility of reconciliation has been offered. This proposed reconciliation involves, in part, “Improving relations […] between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and the wider community” (qtd. in Attwood and Markus 339). What would it mean to improve relations, and even to create friendship, between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians? What does friendship involve, and would friendship be possible for a nation that has not yet recognized the impossible but necessary responsibility of the legacy, the entrusted bequest, conferred by the dead? In Politics of Friendship, Derrida indicates the links between friendship and the phantoms of the dead. Derrida suggests that friendship, in the

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context of community and nation, is frequently reduced to an equivalence with brotherhood or fraternity. This familial model of friendship converts the friend into “another oneself ” (276). Fraternal friendship excludes not only women but also the other who is outside the familial genealogy. Most obviously, this would be the racial other. Derrida concedes that democratic fraternity may incorporate sisters and cousins but only by disguising or destroying their difference — by neutralizing or forgetting their alterity (viii). The fraternal model of friendship repudiates the other (this seems obvious in the brotherly mateship founded on a solidarity forged through the abuse of the Aboriginal other) and constructs this other as the enemy. This fraternal friendship is evident in the construction of national friends and allies, and in the repudiation of enemy nations. The ally is the brother country; the enemy is the foreigner who is excluded from the fraternal alliances. But, as Derrida points out, this opposition of friend and enemy cannot be sustained, for there are internal animosities between brothers and injunctions to love the enemy and to create a brotherhood of man. The friend/enemy opposition is put in question by brotherly enmities and relations of love and respect with the foreign, enemy other. However, the friend/enemy dichotomy that repudiates the foreign, enemy other, all while embracing fraternal friendship, would not be overcome by a simple reversal implied in the command to love thy neighbor. Rather, the friend/enemy opposition unravels with the recognition of the functioning of the absolute other (the most foreign and alien enemy) in the being of the self. Without this other, without difference, the self would be unable to constitute itself as a separate existence. “Without an enemy,” Derrida writes, “I go mad, I can no longer think, I become powerless to think myself, to pronounce ‘cogito, ergo sum.’ […] Without this absolute hostility, the ‘I’ loses reason, and the possibility of being posed, of posing or of opposing the object in front of it; ‘I’ […] loses existence and presence, being, logos, order, necessity, and law” (175-176). The enemy, then, gives being. In rendering explicit alterity, difference, disagreement, and incommensurability, the enemy provides the distinction and distance the self requires to form its separate existence. The enemy gives being and gives the world as alterity to the self. The opposition of friend and enemy, then, is not overcome (simply) by loving the enemy like a brother (as this would be an act of assimilation), nor in giving in-

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finitely to the enemy. While Derrida argues that “The gift is that which gives friendship; it is needed for there to be friendship” (284), it is not, nevertheless, I suggest, the gift itself that is precious but the exposure to alterity. Moreover, it is not the fraternal friend (my brother who is also, through family ties, blood, and commonality, my self ) who gives alterity, but the enemy. In a strange and unexpected reticulation, the enemy, in giving alterity, may represent the most estimable friend through this gift of incommensurability. Thus, Derrida quotes Blanchot, who suggests: “Friendship is not a gift, or a promise; it is not generic generosity. Rather, this incommensurable relation of one to the other is the outside drawing near in its separateness and inaccessibility” (297). Derrida concludes, however, that this friendship of alterity has nothing to do with community of whatever form. Incommensurable friendship involves particularity — the love of a particular other — while community involves a generalization that reintroduces commonality and thus fraternity. The specificity of the friendship of alterity cannot be converted into the commonality of community: This desire (‘pure, impure desire’) which, in lovence — friendship or love — engages me with a particular him or her rather than with anybody or with hims or hers […] this desire of the call to bridge the distance (necessarily unbridgeable) is (perhaps) no longer of the order of the common or the community, the share taken up or given, participation or sharing […] these ‘communitarian’ or ‘communal’ values always risk bringing a brother back. (298) While Derrida dismisses any connection between community and the friendship of alterity, I will argue later that Derrida’s works of mourning and friendship can inform a rethinking of community so as to create a nonfraternal being-with-others. While a distinction between personal friendship and social existence is important, I suggest that Derrida’s conception of spectral friendship can inform a speculation about a haunted community which would acknowledge finitude, respect for the spectre, and would create a space for the other. Derrida’s discussion of the friend/enemy dichotomy disrupts the priority of fraternal friendship and exposes the gift of alterity provided by the enemy.

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Consequently, Derrida proposes another model of friendship, founded not on fraternal similarity but on love of the most distant, foreign, and strange. This other friendship is expressed in the spectral — both the spectre as the most strange and uncanny other, but also the phantom friend as the friend most distant from us, whose legacy we inherit and for whom friendship is expressed through impossible mourning (288). Both most other and most distant, the phantom friend allows the expression of friendship without an expectation of reciprocity. The phantom friend is the friend to whom we give friendship without expectation of return. This friendship may be expressed, for example, through the act of impossible, interminable mourning. Spectrality is the haunting that disjoins and disrupts both unified, coherent identity and time as the presence of the present. This haunting is a liminal in-between: it is both the ghost of the other and the apparition within the self. As Peggy Kamuf writes in her reflection on Derrida’s Spectres of Marx: “the ghost is an outside inside, an exteriority within. Whose ghost is whose is now a question, since no certain line can be drawn between […]. The ghost is both specified, it is a someone, and at the same time of uncertain location or provenance” (276). This haunting not only disturbs self-identity, it also ruptures time as a trajectory from past through present to a future. It ruptures the pastness of the past, the presence of the present, and their separation from each other and from the future yet to come. As Derrida writes, spectrality is “A living-on [sur-vie], namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possibility in advance comes to disjoin or dis-joint the identity to itself of the living present” (qtd. in Kamuf 272). This spectrality, Derrida suggests, provokes disquiet and fear as it shatters the integrity and boundaries of identity and presence. Violence is motivated by fear of the spectre and results in an attempt to bury the dead, “to rid the living life of the non-living other, or spectre” (276). But justice and friendship would involve a responsibility to the phantoms not only of the dead but also of future generations who haunt us and live now in us. The enemy gives alterity, and exposes difference and incommensurability to the self. This gesture shatters fraternal friendship founded on commonality of blood, family, nation, or ideal and unravels sameness with the unworking of difference. In giving this world of difference, the enemy may be acknowledged as the non-fraternal friend, as an other who gives me

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being and the world. Aware of this opportunity, or not, “I” am haunted by this alterity of the revenant-friend. This friend, who is not of me, of my blood or nation, is the spectral friend whose gift of difference either awakens me to the world or alternately provokes fear of the other, and terror at the fracturing of the self and dis-joining of the world. This fear may precipitate violence, repudiation, murder, and massacre. Closed to the gift, refusing the gift, fearing the gift, “I” construct the other as my enemy. Open to alterity, “I” face the other as a spectral friend. If fear of this spectral other results in an attempt to bury the dead — either by forgetting the dead or by putting them to rest through commemoration — would it be possible to respect and to remember the dead otherwise? If spectral friendship acknowledges the friend as other and allows the spectral friend to live on, then would it be possible to create community from this friendship? Is a haunted community, which would acknowledge the racial or cultural other and their living-on after the atrocities of colonialism, possible? Derrida has suggested that spectral friendship cannot become generalized into community, as this reintroduces commonality and fraternity and so negates the alterity of the spectre. I want to suggest, however, that this phantasm of a unified community may precisely be dis-joined or disunified by the possibility of haunted community. I want to suggest that an unceasing aporetic contradiction operates between the totalizing movement of a phantasmic community and the unbinding effects of haunting in community.

Haunted Community Unlike Derrida, who attempts to articulate a friendship without fraternity, Nancy embraces fraternity within his thought on freedom, community, and sharing. However, this fraternity is, for Nancy, a fraternity devoid of the unification of family and is instead a relation without a common foundation. Community, in this perspective, is a sharing of freedom and this freedom is equality, fraternity, and justice (Nancy, Freedom 72-77). In this conception of community, however, freedom is not to be understood as immunity from interference from others, nor as a right to pursue

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one’s own goals independently of others (Nancy, Freedom 66). It is not an autonomy and isolation form others but rather an expending, dispensing, or dissemination of being which coincides with inter-relation and sharing. Just as being-with-others co-exists with singular being, so too, inter-relation is coterminous with freedom (57-66). Elaborating Heidegger’s conception of Mitsein and Dasein, Nancy suggests that singularity is “immediately in relation.” Singularity, unlike individuality, is always in relation: “Thus Mitsein, being-with, is rigorously contemporaneous with Dasein and inscribed in it” (Nancy, Freedom 67). Yet, this does not indicate a merging into commonality. Rather inter-relation emerges from a differentiation, “the strike and cut of existence,” which facilitates the inception of relation. It is only through the withdrawal of identity and communion, Nancy suggests, that relation and communication become possible (68). The singular existent is always an alterity but also always a sharing. Rather than understanding community as the commonality of individual identities, Nancy proposes that community be understood as alterities, or singularities, who share. Here sharing is conceived not as a dividing up or a sharing out of goods but as the exposure of being, and the on-going and never completed creation of social ties. This sharing avoids conclusion, and resists unification, and instead seeks continual engagement and disengagement, binding and unbinding, interlacing and unraveling. Sharing is a differentiation and an exposure; it is a continual unworking and rupturing of totalizing unifications (Nancy, Inoperative 35). Nancy proposes that freedom emerges in this sharing. Freedom is the “existence of others in my existence, as originary for my existence” (Nancy, Freedom 69). Freedom as sharing is thus immediately associated, for Nancy, with fraternity. However, Nancy explicitly reformulates fraternity in an attempt to release it from the commonality (of blood and identity) that Derrida criticizes. Nancy suggests that fraternity implies the dissolution of common substance and family unity insofar as the father is abandoned in favor of freedom and equality between the brothers. Nancy writes that freedom: is also fraternity, if fraternity […] is not the relation of those who unify a common family, but the relation of those whose Parent,

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or common substance, has disappeared, delivering them to their freedom and equality. Such are, in Freud, the sons of the inhuman Father of the horde: becoming brothers in the sharing of his dismembered body. (Nancy, Freedom 72) Fraternity, for Nancy, is precisely the abolition of the common substance of the “Parent” and the dismembering of any unifying body politic in favor of the freedom and equality found in the sharing of brothers in a fraternal politic. In Nancy’s formulation, then, fraternity undermines commonality, blood ties, and family union through the evisceration of the unifying Father figure. This interpretation, which attempts to salvage fraternity from the functioning of blood and family alliances, however, turns a blind eye to the fate of the mother, sister, and outsider. As Carole Pateman has argued, fraternity excludes the feminine from its confederation; it enables not only a sharing of the father’s body and power, but also a sharing of the women previously monopolized by the father (Pateman, Sexual Contract 77-115). Fraternity, then, does not facilitate community as the experience of freedom that Nancy desires. Instead of sharing as freedom and co-appearing, it constitutes sharing as a dividing up of goods and power among brothers to the exclusion of others. Women are shared rather than sharing; the outsider remains outside, excluded from the sharing of the father’s body, women, and power. Nancy’s formulation of community as the exposure and co-appearing of alterities, as the unraveling of totality, and as the free scintillating bursting of existing (Nancy, Freedom 57), provides a useful refutation of community as communion and union. Nevertheless, his reliance on fraternity as an example of the dismembering of unifying community is disquieting. This reference to fraternity does not, I suggest, undermine Nancy’s project entirely but it does suggest a need for vigilance and indeed for ongoing working and unworking, suturing and fissioning of community both in theory and in practice. While I do not propose to discard Nancy’s community of alterity, I do want to unravel the fraternal in order to open up a space for the feminine and the foreigner in community. This would require constructing sharing and sociality in community not around a figure either of fraternity nor of sisterhood, but of the unassimilable and incommensurable. Sharing would need to be constituted, not in broth-

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erhood or kinship, but in a relation with the spectre who is both beyond and who, as other, inhabits and haunts the self. While the specificity of spectral friendship risks annihilation in any generalization into the sociality of community for Derrida, I suggest that Nancy’s formulation of community as the unworking of totality may be founded on a haunting which dislocates unifying national identity and confounds the progressive succession of narrative histories. If spectrality is “the dis-adjustment of identity, the being out-of-joint, as Hamlet says, of time” (Kamuf 272), then this spectrality may discompose national identity, and its histories, as much as individual identity. Australian national identity rests on histories that either obliterate the lives and deaths of Aboriginals or incorporates these “victims of history” into a narrative of progress, enlightenment, and development of the modern, liberal nation state (Van Der Veer 186-187). But these grand narratives which construct a myth of unified national identity are haunted by and mortified by the other who cannot be laid to rest. This haunting disturbs the phantasm of communal identity. The ghost which, as Derrida says, is “an outside, inside, an exteriority within” (qtd. in Kamuf 276) dislocates the narrative, dismembers the fantasy of unity, and disrupts the pretence of proper, lawful, white citizenship, land ownership, and liberal governance. The ghost ruptures identity and unity and in so doing makes a place for the other in community. Henry Reynolds, in his histories, attempts to remember and commemorate the Aboriginal dead. While I have argued that his advocacy of memorials for “fallen tribesmen” as “national heroes” assimilates Aboriginal death within white rituals, Reynolds’ histories are also, I suggest, haunted by the Aboriginal spectre. This haunting fractures the historian’s sense of self and his vision of Australian nation, and opens a space for remembering and being-with otherwise. Reynolds recounts a dream about an Aboriginal friend who was a land rights activist, and who in a landmark legal action overturned the legal assumption of terra nullius, established the legal existence of native title, and set a precedent for Aboriginal land claims. In the dream, which occurred shortly before the death of the friend, Reynolds meets the friend, they shake hands, exchange a few words, and part again, crying. A few days later, Reynolds learns of his friend’s death and is told by the friend’s

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nephew that the dream was a farewell visit. Reynolds explains that the dream shocked him and destabilized his beliefs. He writes that while this farewell visit was for the nephew “the most normal thing in the world,” for him “it was an awesome occurrence, shaking the solid rock of reason on which I like to stand” (Reynolds 193). For Reynolds, the rationalist historian, a farewell visit by the apparition of his friend may have undermined the demarcations between the living and the dead and thus threatened his prior beliefs and perceptions of the world. The Aboriginal spectre disrupts reason and the rationalist identity on which it is founded. Reynolds also recounts other recurring dreams that had occurred some years earlier, and in these again the Aboriginal other challenges the visions and perspectives of the historian. In one of these dreams the same friend again appears. Reynolds writes: The […] dream was set in the garden. I was standing with a group of Aboriginal men. Somehow my contact lenses had come out and fallen onto a concrete path. Sometimes one man, sometimes several, stamped on them despite my protests and anguish. The men were often strangers to me. Sometimes I knew who they were. One was my friend. (51) While this dream speaks of a general racial tension and fear that haunts many white Australians, it also reflects a specific act of blinding through the crushing of the contact lenses. In an Oedipal-like blinding, the Aboriginal stranger and friend crush the white colonial identity. The ways of seeing of the white man are destroyed by this other, just as the Aboriginal way of life had previously been destroyed. The perspective which sees a history of border wars fought and lost by the Aboriginal other, and the land ceded to whites, is challenged by the destruction of this vision. Crushing the spectacles of the white man, and thereby his vision of white land, may also signify the Aboriginal other’s pursuit of an alternative vision of native land title. If these dreams, of haunting and of the destruction of white historical visions, may be seen as emblematic of white Australian’s dreams and nightmares, then they reveal not just an individual but also an Antipodean spectrality. They reflect a haunting in which the massacres of the past continue

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to reverberate in the now, living-on in the dreams, fears, and confusions of the present, dis-jointing the myth of progressive liberality and unity. This haunting articulates the friend, the enemy, the stranger, and the ghost within the self, “shaking the solid […] I,” and crushing the spectacles of white land and white domination (Reynolds 193). This haunting reflects the fear of the alterity which pervades and inhabits our unconscious which we dread, repudiate, and massacre because it threatens the phantasm of a unified self and a unified, progressive community. If a community of alterity is to be unraveled from the hostilities of national identity, this would require the relinquishing of white visions so as to see otherwise, the recognition of the ghosts of the past who haunt the present, and a respect for the spectre which inaugurates the unworking of the haunted community.

Notes 1.

Under eighteenth-century International Law, the concept of terra nullius (empty land belonging to no-one) justified acquisition of land that was unoccupied. In practice, however, land was claimed to be terra nullius or unoccupied when its inhabitants were judged by the invaders to be without law or government.

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Imagining Communities of the “Yet-to-be-Fully-National”: Hong Kong Action Cinema’s Engagement with a Globalized Transnational Imaginary by Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park

Re-Imagining Community Around Hong Kong and 1997 The continuing rise in global visibility, dissemination, consumption, and incorporation of the Hong Kong action cinema as an active part of world cinema brings into question the dominance of the national paradigm as the preferred trope in addressing imagined communities and cinematic cultures. This arises because as of 1997, Hong Kong has bypassed an independent national phase in its historical development while still maintaining a measure of communal distinctiveness within the international arena. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong’s official political status shifted from that of a former British Crown Colony (BCC) to that of a Special Administrative Region (SAR, tebie xingzhengqu) of the People’s Republic of China. Under the terms of the “one country, two systems” policy (yige guojia, liangge xitong),1 Hong Kong’s new status as an SAR places it as an anomaly in a postcolonial era, which favors a rush toward the formation of independent nations. While formerly a part of the British Empire, Hong Kong was never a part of the British nation. Presently, even as a reunited territory of the PRC, Hong Kong is part of but not yet completely a part of the PRC. This is due to a clause that guarantees a degree of semi-autonomy for Hong Kong until 2047 — the preordained time when Hong Kong will then become a fully integrated part of the PRC. Yet despite Hong Kong’s non-national status, it possesses a culture that is recognized both internally and externally as discernibly unique. Given this condition, addressing Hong Kong and its culture would thus require an approach that is not contingent on the national paradigm. Based on this scenario, I frame Hong Kong as a community of the “yet-to-be-fully-national,” and I extend this rubric to the existing national preoccupation of cultural analysis to argue that even those communities

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that are fully national are in reality also yet-to-be-fully-national themselves. While recognizing the continued primacy of the nation as a privileging imprimatur in validating the legitimacy of imagined communities, it is also possible to bifurcate from this national fixation to address alternative communal forms. As the yet-to-be-fully-national, the case of Hong Kong advances transnational dimensions and opens up the conceptualization of communities that goes beyond national boundaries as the normative mode of communal existence. At issue is to break away from a notion of the localized communal cultural circuit that is conceptualized as a hermetic seal encased by nonporous political boundaries. Namely, the discourse on Hong Kong cinema that is based on its locality of community and culture provides one insight into just that local context. What this approach does not do is address the processes involved whereby some of these same films gain a social life of their own outside of Hong Kong proper. In asking the how and the why in regards to the significance of the transnational flow and popularity of these cinematic works, a process of disengagement with the exclusively national framework becomes necessary. As a non-national entity constrained by both geographic and demographic minuteness, Hong Kong’s film industry continues to operate as a prolific producer and, more importantly, exporter of its cinematic creations on a global scale. In fact, UNESCO includes Hong Kong as one of nine key global sites of cinematic production and exportation.2 Hong Kong’s inclusion on UNESCO’s list reveals a Janus-faced situation. On the one hand, unlike the United States, UK, Russian Federation, Germany, Italy, France, India, and Japan, Hong Kong is not an independent national entity.3 On the other hand, Hong Kong is a “territory” that is effaced from a list of twenty-one officially recognized UN territories. Despite the UN’s official nonrecognition of Hong Kong’s territorial status, Hong Kong remains the sole non-national/territorial entity to possess a viable commercial film industry.4 Hong Kong cinema’s special status within a nation dominated global framework results from the convergence of these two defining elements. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on just one aspect of Hong Kong’s vast cinematic output. The case of the “Hong Kong action cinema” provides an example where a cinematic genre has attained a

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degree of global recognition in an area that has long been considered the sacred playground and the de facto monopoly of Hollywood — the action cinema. Despite Hong Kong’s lack of access to Hollywood’s latest computer-aided special effects production techniques and mega-production budgets, Hong Kong and its initial “HK” have become synonymous with a cinematic action aesthetics that engages an ever increasing transnational community of its own.

The Nation as the Dominant Mode of Community The nation often functions as the primary mode of communal identification and validation because it provides a measure of temporal continuity that unifies past, present, and future within a teleological trajectory grounded on the alleged permanence of the nation. For the group of individuals who occupy the geographical territory in question, their futurescape is guaranteed by the very existence of the nation. Thus, national histories present the past as inevitably resulting in the birth of the nation. Furthermore, the permanence of the nation is encased in a succession of never ending sequence of glorious achievements. The narratives invoked in formulating a national mythos of origins foreground tales that demonstrate the depth of a national fraternity motivated to die together in the creation and defense of the nation. As a consequence, stories of the founding fathers, sacrifices in the fight for liberation and freedom, and victories that have been achieved against those who attempted to conquer or destroy the nation infuse the national mythos from one border to the next. Notions of the end of the nation are not part of this imagining outside of the unwelcome possibility of being conquered by another nation or undergoing self-Balkanization. But, even under conquest, the desire and quest for national liberation is never fully surrendered. The end effect is that the nation takes the form of a perpetual continuity caught in a self-legitimizing and self-aggrandizing circular teleology that celebrates its own rightful place in space and time. Simply stated, the nation becomes the favored trope by which “the longing for immortality becoming a will to membership in an imperishable collective” (Balakrishnan 64) is imagined as attainable.

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The works of Benedict Anderson and Anthony Smith address the nation-centric fixation in legitimatizing communities in the contemporary world. Anderson advances the nation as the favored trope by which communities attain secular immortality and a definitive futurescape. In Imagined Communities, Anderson establishes the nation as the legitimate form of the “imagined community” par excellence. For Anderson, the advent of print capitalism in eighteenth century Europe serves as the primal scene in the rise of the nation as the dominant means of imagining extended communities that go beyond face-to-face contact. Anderson’s concept of print capitalism articulates the union of industrial capitalism, the secularization of vernacular languages, and the dissemination of the printed vernacular on a massive scale. The merger of these three forces accounts for the explosive spread and continued dominance of nationalism. From Anderson’s viewpoint, print capitalism is the catalyst that enables the birth of nationalism because it provides a secularized means to lessen the anxieties associated with human fatality by advancing an enlarged fraternity founded on national affinities. The ultimate criterion in verifying this national fraternity is the motivation to die together in a war on behalf of the nation in question. This national fraternity itself is based on a “deep, horizontal comradeship” (7), which reflects a shift in the conceptualization of time. The former pre-national notion of time revolved around the idea of the sacred and was experienced as vertical. Here, historical events were connected vertically by means of a divine will. This concept of time is epitomized by the mediaeval Christian mind (Auerbach qtd. in Anderson 24) and Judaism’s notion of Messianic time. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin’s deployment of Messianic time, Anderson describes it as “a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present” (qtd. in Anderson 25). The shift from the vertical to the horizontal conceptualization of time replaced the sacred divine will with the secular nation. Within this framework, the nation became the locomotive force serving as the temporal link traversing past, present, and future. The emergence of print capitalism and the systematic dissemination of literacy on a mass scale facilitated this shift with the creation of “reading coalitions” (79). Its homogeneity, emptiness, and the inclusion of the word “meanwhile” demarcate this newer version of time (25).

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Time as secular and horizontal is necessary in the fabric of the nationalized imagined community, for it makes viable the idea of large-scale communion outside of the face-to-face model. This notion of an extended communion structures the “imagined” of imagined communities and overcomes the impossibility of each member of that community to ever meet in person each and every other member within one’s limited lifetime. The constituted and constituting members of this imagined community are thus bound to one particular manifestation of time and space within a nation-centric universe. Anderson illustrates this by means of the novel as the best representative of print capitalism’s textual shift and its promotion of horizontal and secular time. For Anthony Smith, the centrality of the nation as the communal form of choice is situated in its ethnographic dimensions. In National Identity, Smith addresses the creation of collective ethno-histories and their ability to advance three deep satisfactions for those who it interpolates and claims as part of its own. Namely, the nation creates a placebo effect by enabling the overcoming of individual mortality, the restoration of communal dignity, and engagement within a select fraternity. Later, Smith nuances this list of deep satisfactions by foregrounding ethnoscapes. In Myths and Memories of the Nation, the nation serves as the central element for the “territorialization of memory” (151). Effectively, this enables a close association between a given landscape and a particular community, such that a people is felt to belong to a specific territory and a territory to a particular people. On this basis, larger ethnoscapes emerge in which a sense of kin relatedness and emotional continuity is developed through a chain of generations living, working, dying and being buried in the same historic terrain. (151) Where sacred territories already exist, it becomes a simple act of acknowledging this historical fact. Where sacred territories don’t already exist, they are created by the valorization of an ancestral homeland where martyrdom serves as the unifying epoxy. The end effect is that a particular place is transformed into a special place, a place of one’s own community.

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In particular, this community is identified as ethnies: a named human population with myths of common ancestry, shared historical memories and one or more common elements of culture, including an association with a homeland, and some degree of solidarity, at least among the élites. (13) The unifying force of communities across time and space is thus advanced by the selective transmission of certain mythic elements of communal bonding and historical presence. Given Anderson and Smith’s national frameworks, what happens when we encounter an extended community that goes beyond primordial villages of face-to-face contact where its sense of time is not established in everlasting perpetuity? In other words, is the national necessarily a guarantee of communal continuity? Also, is the nation the only satisfactory avenue whereby a place becomes a special place that reinforces communal bonds of belonging? More importantly, is the national a requirement before an enlarged community takes on international validity? By juxtaposing these questions with the case of Hong Kong, the shortcomings of the national framework come to light.

Ruptured Futurescapes of the “Yet-to-be-Fully-National” As a community occupying a geopolitical site, Hong Kong experiences time within a political framework based on definitive timescapes. Here the national futurescape of guaranteed continuity experiences pre-ordained ruptures because of Hong Kong’s lack of complete national certitude. This held true for Hong Kong both as a BCC and as an SAR. As a colony of the British Empire, Hong Kong held the unenviable distinction of being the sole colony founded as one that was “à durée déterminée” [a predetermined timeframe] (Rose 59). The terms of the ninety-nine year lease for the New Territories, designed to serve as a buffer zone between the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), would, under the 1984 Joint Declaration, be extended to all of Hong Kong proper.5 In effect, the Joint Declaration ruptured Hong Kong’s communal timescape three times. First from “in perpetuity,” then to 1997, and finally to 2047 — the date when Hong Kong will become a full and equal member of the PRC.

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Given geopolitical significance as a territorial concession to the British Empire by the Qing Dynasty of China, Hong Kong’s definitive timescape as a British colony ended with the countdown toward July 1, 1997 — the re-negotiated time when Hong Kong would no longer be a BBC. On this date, Hong Kong was officially returned to mainland China under its new status as an SAR under the “one country, two systems” policy.6 This policy was advanced by Deng Xiaoping and officially formalized by the September 26, 1984, Sino-Anglo Joint Declaration on Hong Kong. Under the terms of this agreement, Hong Kong would remain a free port with an independent customs and international banking system. Hong Kong would thereby retain a high degree of economic and social autonomy for another fifty years. However, matters related to foreign affairs and defense would be outside of Hong Kong’s diplomatic jurisdiction. Effectively, Hong Kong is part of the nation of China but not yet completely an integrated part of that same nation. As such, the thirty kilometer Bamboo Curtain that demarcates their shared border continues to exist despite their political and territorial reunion.7 Under this scenario, Hong Kong continues to exist within geopolitical limbo as a quasi-state of the yet-to-be-fully-national. Hong Kong’s yet-to-be-fully-national status cannot provide its community with a trope toward attaining an Andersonian derived secular immortality with a definitive futurescape simply because it does not have complete recourse to full nationalism. As the yet-to-be-fully-national, neither can Hong Kong advance its own articulation of a Smithian inscribed ethno-history to deliver the three deep satisfactions of nationhood or share in the full ethnie based inclusiveness by being ethnically Chinese. The most evident consequence of Hong Kong’s yet-to-be-fully-national status was the mass scramble to attain foreign passports and thus gain connection to a fully national entity as insurance against the possibility of mainland Chinese designs to radically transform Hong Kong into the PRC mode. This sense of anxious premonitions of an uncertain futurescape surfaced in Hong Kong’s cinema. Ackbar Abbas identifies this cinematic ambiance as the cinema of the déjà disparu, the already disappeared. Matters affecting Hong Kong’s temporality began to surface as early as 1982. In that year, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher paid an official state visit to China to discuss the 1997 issue. Based on this historic dip-

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lomatic face-off, Abbas fixes this event as the catalyst that disrupts the quotidian tempo of Hong Kong life and finds its explicit expression in its cinematic practices both at the commercial and auteur levels. In his formulation, Thatcher’s visit to China is the landmark by which Hong Kong’s status became one of a “space of disappearance where ‘imperialism’ and ‘globalism’ are imbricated with each other” (16). By situating Hong Kong cinema as that of the déjà disparu, Abbas takes on the “slippery nature of Hong Kong’s cultural space” (22) by privileging its negative spaces. Abbas’ approach brings to the surface the flux under which the rubric of “Hong Kong,” as imagined and experienced, is undergoing a rapidity of change. This rapidity of change is so pronounced that there is an uncanny possibility that it has already undergone that change without the conscious registry of its very passing. In theorizing this speed of change, Abbas cites Paul Virilio’s observation of a “‘hyper-anticipatory and predictive’ society, where time is experienced very much in the future perfect tense” (qtd. in Abbas 22).8 Starting in 1982, a fifteen-year countdown fever toward July 1, 1997, gripped Hong Kong and the world. The erection of the Hong Kong Clock (Xianggang zhong) in Tiananmen Square provides a monumental vision that focalizes this state and serves as a visual metaphor to Abbas’ notion of the déjà disparu. In “The Hong Kong Clock — Public Time Telling and Political Time/Space,” Hong Wu argues that the Hong Kong Clock was conceptualized on the need to display “political time — a temporal order based on political concepts and serving political agendas” (331). As a consequence, the Hong Kong Clock in Beijing is designed differently from Big Ben in London. Eschewing a mechanical verification of the immediacy of a concrete present, the Hong Kong Clock featured just the days and seconds before July 1, 1997. By doing away with hours and minutes, this clock worked to “convey the impression of the quickly disappearing present, and hence the quick approach of an anticipated future” (338). Giving visible presence to this political objective, the face of the clock featured the following caption: The Chinese Government Resumes Exercise of Sovereignty over Hong Kong Clock Counting Backwards To July 1, 1997

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Days

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Seconds

Thus, the traditional face of the mechanical clock featuring hours and minutes was replaced by the steadfastness of the remaining days and a blur of speeding seconds. Maoist historiography centers on 1840.9 This date marks the start of the First Opium War, the resulting loss of Hong Kong, and the commencement of a “century of shame.” It serves as the temporal nexus dividing the ancient era from the modern. The return of Hong Kong then acts as a validating moment in the PRC’s fulfillment of its mandate for the modern era. The historical significance of the return of Hong Kong would thus warrant the erection of a monument such as the Hong Kong Clock. However, it is not until ten years after the signing of the Joint Declaration before it is erected. The circumstances under which this ten-year discrepancy unfolded reveals a lack of congruency regarding what 1997 symbolized for both Hong Kong and the PRC. By being excluded from the political and diplomatic negotiations leading up to the Joint Declaration, the people of Hong Kong began to take a keener and more active interest in creating a sense of themselves as a community in their own right.10 Empirical evidence of a change in the selfidentifying strategy of the people of Hong Kong is reflected in two polls, one taken in 1982 and the other in 1988 (Lau qtd. in Wu 351). Before 1984, more than sixty per cent of the population used to identify themselves as “Chinese.” This reflected an identification strategy of subaltern solidarity in line with Hong Kong’s colonial status. Here it is a clear choice between that of the colonizing British and that of the colonized Chinese. But after 1984, this changed to one between that of mainland China and Hong Kong itself. Thus, over sixty-seven per cent of the people in Hong Kong now identified themselves more with Hong Kong and no longer as merely “Chinese.” This sea change reflected a growing sense of uncertainty and ambiguity in Hong Kong with its imminent future prospects as an SAR of mainland China. Furthermore, these uncertainties were not alleviated despite the PRC’s fifty-year promise. With memories of the June 4, 1989, military crackdown of the prodemocratic movement in Tiananmen Square still fresh, Hong Kong’s first

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Legislative Council sought to secure a legal precedent that placed democratic principles as the foundational basis of Hong Kong society as an SAR. This took the form of the Patten Proposal. Despite Beijing’s heated objections, it came into law in December 1993 to take effect on June 30, 1994. Viewing this act as a threat to undermine the communist foundation of China, Beijing immediately invalidated the Patten Proposal by threatening to dismantle the Legislative Council after July 1, 1997, and replace it with a “legal representative union” of Beijing’s own choosing. To provide visible proof of its determined stance, Beijing erected the Hong Kong Clock on Tiananmen Square on the very day that the Patten Proposal went into effect: June 30, 1994. By taking this approach, Beijing acknowledged the de facto passage of the Patten Proposal while simultaneously disavowing the permanent legitimacy of its very passage. As a monument situated on the largest public square in the world, the Hong Kong Clock was strategically situated to reflect the epochal nature of the return of Hong Kong to mainland China. Erected in front of the Museum of History, it faced the entrance to the Great Hall of the People located across the square. At the center of the square is the Monument of the People’s Heroes. Dedicated on the eve of the proclamation of the PRC with an inscription written in Mao Tsedong’s own handwriting, the Monument of the People’s Heroes commemorates those “who from 1840 laid down their lives in the many struggles against internal and external enemies for national independence.” Serving as the historical central nodal point, its four directional axes are composed of Tiananmen Gate to the north, Mao’s Mausoleum to the south, the Great Hall of the People to the west, and the Museum of History to the east. In this spatial arrangement, Tiananmen Gate and the Great Hall of the People represent the present. The other two monuments represent the past. By situating the Hong Kong Clock on the steps of the Museum of History and facing the gateway to the Great Hall of the People, the clock faced the present with its back to the past and rapidly counted down the seconds before re-union with Hong Kong. While the return of Hong Kong is viewed in a victorious light in mainland China, the Hong Kong Clock’s monumental symbolism took on a different dimension in Hong Kong itself. Here, the Hong Kong Clock was far away. Nevertheless, the experience of the passing days and seconds entered into the daily pace of Hong Kong life as a lived experience. By

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choosing to measure the passage of time away from hours and minutes, the Hong Kong Clock also eclipsed the many colonial clocks that were build in Hong Kong. In effect, these colonial clocks and the units of time that they measured, however regulatory and precise they may be, did not reference the units of time that were of heightened importance based on a countdown toward 1997. Their mechanical precision in measuring hours and minutes in fact could not reference the temporal shift that occurred for Hong Kong. More importantly, the regulatory comfort that these mechanical clocks once provided no longer fulfilled their regulatory function. In effect, the Hong Kong Clock accentuates a view of life based on the future perfect tense by “convey[ing] the impression of the quickly disappearing present, and hence the quick approach of an anticipated future” (Wu 338). In this conceptualization of time, gone is Benjamin’s notion of Messianic time. Gone too is Anderson’s secularized national time of the “meanwhile.” Also absent are Smith’s ethnie driven deep satisfactions via the territorialization of memory. What we have with Hong Kong is time blurred by the on-rush of seconds where the anxieties associated with human fatality cannot be suppressed by the consoling narratives of a national mythos. With Hong Kong as the yet-to-be-fully-national, the comforts of a national mythos are lacking since Hong Kong does not have one of its own. Furthermore, the adoption of the national mythos of mainland China by Hong Kong situates Hong Kong as an object, rather than a subject, in history. Under this scenario, Hong Kong is just another trophy that validates the timescape of the PRC in its quest to end a century of unfair treaties. In the ensuing temporal maelstrom, the possibilities for both stability and comfort become ambivalent as one’s perspective alternates between the progressing days and seconds as depicted by the Hong Kong Clock. What we have left is a reinforced permanence of a rapidity of change towards a future without an assuaging trajectory. For Abbas, the consequence of this experience of time in the future perfect tense is that it creates a situation in which the past is reconsidered by way of nostalgia that is then deployed to counteract the uncertainties of an unpredictable future. With Hong Kong’s own history as “one of shock and radical changes,” the Hong Kong response to this situation was to “have little memory and no sentiment for the past” (26). In describing this situation, Abbas refers to Benjamin’s notion of “love at last sight” to

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accentuate the temporal reversal outside of a secular nationalized time (23). This re-visioning of the past, complete with the powers of nostalgia, foregrounds a new danger, namely “that Hong Kong will disappear as a subject, not by being ignored but by being represented in the good old ways” (25). The dynamics by which this dis-appearance is enacted is that of the déjà disparu: “the feeling that what is new and unique about the situation is always already gone, and we are left holding a handful of clichés, or a cluster of memories of what has never been” (25). Here, I would like to advance a reversal on Abbas’ concerns on the dark side of the déjà disparu by dislocating it from its Hong Kong moorings. The dangers of a misapplied nostalgia effect on the past may emerge as a new danger to Hong Kong as it addresses the issue of 1997 and its aftermath. However, this danger already exists in the imaginings of fully nationalized communities because of their Andersonian legacy of already being imagined.11 What we have under the imagined nationalized mythos of origins are in fact the very representations of the “good old ways,” the “handful of clichés,” and “cluster of memories of what has never been” that Abbas fears will infect Hong Kong society. Thus, by way of Hong Kong, we in fact come to question the very foundations under which the national paradigm purports to assuage the fears associated with human fatality through a futurescape based on its perpetual teleology. By rupturing the very foundations of the nationalized imagined community as envisioned and articulated by Anderson, I place the active imaginings of Hong Kong as the yet-to-be-fully-national as a force that directs us to re-imagine communities outside of our customary dependence on the trope of the nation. By taking this position, I bring to the fore a paradigm shift of my own by asking if the trope of the nation has ever come close to addressing in full the complete range of imaginative desires of its own community as it so aspires and purports to do. Put another way, is the national necessarily fully actualized as the national? In fact, is it not the case that even nations themselves share and occupy a similar space as Hong Kong by being yet-to-be-fully-national themselves? In this case, the attempt under which the national paradigm invokes a teleological trajectory that forwards a secularized salvation on human fatality for its own community then fails. If the nation cannot live up to its own aspirations in addressing in full the imaginative needs of its own self-purported

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community by delivering Smith’s three deep satisfactions, then we must look beyond the national. Here, the case of Hong Kong as the yet-to-be-fullynational via its by-passing of a national stage in its historical development opens up an investigation into trans-national connections in the formation of actively imagining communities that go beyond their national boundaries by participating with a globalized transnational imaginary.

Visual Capitalism In addressing the creation of imagining communities based on their involvement with the cinema in a transnational framework, we need to return to Anderson’s logocentric bias in forwarding his idea of the nationalized imagined community. Central to Anderson’s thesis is the formation and dissemination of print capitalism as the enabling technological phenomenon that makes the proliferation of the nation possible. Anderson asserts that the conversion of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. (46) Complementing the formation and dissemination of the nation, print capitalism also provided a means to express the cultural dimension of the community within a national framework. In foregrounding the consequences of print capitalism, Anderson’s logocentric orientation neglects to address visualized forms of communication. In keeping with his logocentric fixation, Anderson devotes in passing a mere mention of non-print media such as radio and television while devoting one of two new chapters in his second edition to maps and photographs.12 Noticeably absent in Anderson’s media horizon is the cinema. If we want to foreground the cinema as a technologized medium enabling the creation of communities that may not be so nation specific, we need to modify Anderson’s print bias. Here, I forward visual capitalism as a means to prioritize the cinema and its role in creating communities that are not so nation specific. The fundamental shift that occurs with visual

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capitalism is that print capitalism’s “fatality of Babel [… namely that] no one lives long enough to learn all languages” (Anderson 134), does not apply, or if it does, then not to the same degree. By taking this position, I recognize that a process of mediation is involved even with visual capitalism. Nevertheless, with visual capitalism, there is a greater degree of immediacy between the juxtaposition of image and sound that can bypass the linguistic barriers so formidably inherent in print capitalism. By concentrating on visual capitalism, this section investigates the presence of the Hong Kong cinema outside of Hong Kong proper. By convention, the cinématographe publicly entered the world on December 28, 1895, when the Lumière brothers held their first public screening in Paris at the Grand Café on Boulevard des Capucines. Emboldened and encouraged by the public’s love for the new art form, the Lumière brothers sent traveling projectionists around the world to introduce their invention to each locality. While a verifiable written source on the first arrival of the cinema in Hong Kong remains in doubt (Law 23), most historians are in agreement with the first locally produced films. From the beginning, film production in Hong Kong demonstrated transnational connections. Hong Kong’s first locally produced films were completed in 1909. The two-reeler comedies Right a Wrong with Earthenware Dish (Wa Pen Shen Yuan)13 and Stealing the Roasted Duck (Tou Shao Ya) were directed by Liang Shaobo with Benjamin Polaski,14 an American theater owner, acting as producer. The next historically important Hong Kong film is Zhuangzi Tests His Wife (Zhuangzi Shi Qi). Released in 1913, it was directed by Li Minwei. By 1923, Liang and Li merged their cinematic efforts by co-founding the Minxin Company (China Sun Motion Picture Company) in Hong Kong. Their first joint film venture was Rouge (Yanshi).15 This project had to be filmed in neighboring Guangzhou because their application to rent land for the construction of a film studio was refused by the Hong Kong government in 1924. Rouge was released in 1925 and screened in Hong Kong’s New World Theatre. The universal standardization of the basic cinematic apparatus established a base under which all films, regardless of where they were produced, technically could be screened in any other location. The cinematic strategies of the Silent Era took advantage of the visuality of the early cinema to produce films that were translinguistic. When cultural and linguistic

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mediation was required, the replacement of mimimalistic intertitles or the employment of a benshi16 placed the cinema as a medium that was less constrained by the fatality of Babel. Needless to say, the introduction of sound changed all this by inserting the fatality of Babel into the cinema as dialogue took on increasing importance as a central element in the development of narrative cinema. The establishment and protection of national markets for the cinema also aided this process. For the Hong Kong film industry, the fatality of Babel produced a cinematic practice that was primarily split between Cantonese and Mandarin. As the spoken vernacular that predominates in southern China, Cantonese reflects the linguistic foundation for local Hong Kong culture and society. Yet the influx of immigrants from mainland China due to war, natural disasters, politics, and the establishment of the PRC in 1949 saw the arrival in Hong Kong of the displaced Shanghai film industry for whom Mandarin was their preferred spoken vernacular. Although each spoken vernacular produced its own preferred cinematic styles and genres, the incorporation of subtitles in both Chinese characters and English allowed a degree of linguistic inclusiveness in the cinematic practices of the Hong Kong film industry.17 In fact, by featuring both Chinese and English subtitles, the Hong Kong film industry availed itself to two of the most widely spoken languages in the world. Despite this double linguistic subtitling practice, the circulation of Hong Kong’s cinematic works were mainly concentrated on an extended Chinese and Asian sphere of community focused in Asia, especially Southeast Asia, and the various diasporic huaqiao (overseas Chinese)18 communities all over the world. Effectively, Hong Kong’s miniscule geographic size and population did not automatically exclude its entry as a prominent global force in international cinema. In Asia, contemporary Hong Kong’s population density of 5,758 inhabitants per square km is second only to that of its sister SAR of Macao, which tops this category with a population density of 23,194.19 Be that as it may, the local population of Hong Kong is far from that which is enjoyed by the other prolific national centers of film production. What is surprising about Hong Kong’s prolific cinematic endeavor is that it never had the luxury of a large domestic market as a dependable and protected source of a return on production investments. If we compare population figures for a fifty-year period beginning with

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1950 and ending with 2000 for UNESCO’s nine film exporting sites, the numerical disadvantage that Hong Kong experiences vis-à-vis its national competitors becomes self-evident. Population Data for UNESCO’s Nine Film Exporting Sites20 1950-2000 (Inhabitants as expressed in thousands) 1950

1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

India

357,561

442,344

554,911

688,856

850,785

1,013,662

USA

157,813

186,158

210,111

230,406

254,076

278,357

Russian Federation 102,192

119,906

130,392

138,660

148,292

146,934

Site

Japan

83,625

94,096

104,331

116,807

123,537

126,714

Germany

68,376

72,673

77,709

78,304

79,365

82,220

France

41,829

45,684

50,772

53,880

56,718

59,080

UK

50,616

52,372

55,632

56,330

57,561

58,830

Italy

47,104

50,200

53,822

56,434

57,023

57,298

1,974

3,075

3,942

5,039

5,705

6,927

Hong Kong

As early as 1950, Hong Kong cinema’s numerical shortcoming for its domestic base was glaringly clear. With barely two million inhabitants, its more populous national film competitors dwarfed Hong Kong. By 2000, Hong Kong’s population had more than tripled to seven million but this still places Hong Kong at the bottom of the rankings. As a general rule, Hong Kong could not hope to independently augment its population base via exponential growth due to its geographic constraints. This lack of a large domestic population alone marks Hong Kong as different from other major sites of nationally driven cinematic production such as Hollywood and Bollywood. More often than not, in these national cinematic sites, the domestic box-office continues to be large enough to guarantee a secure domestic sphere in which the majority of the costs associated with film production are recoverable without the necessity of, or dependence on, export revenue. In this respect, foreign markets provided

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pure profits outside of variable costs related to distribution and exhibition campaigns. In Hong Kong’s case, Hong Kong itself could not offer the population base that its national associates could count on as a given. Based on these population realities, the overseas markets were a necessary part of Hong Kong cinema’s mode of existence. In fact, Hong Kong proper (Hong Kong island, Kowloon peninsula, and the New Territories) is just one of several important markets of an extended “domestic” sphere which relied on expanded notions of ethnic and cultural Chinese-ness and Asian-ness to overcome its geographic and demographic shortcomings. Hong Kong cinema’s expansion beyond the borders of Hong Kong proper addressed regional and huaqiao connections toward becoming the regional cinematic powerhouse such that it is referred to as “the Hollywood of the East.”21 As a diasporic entity, the huaqiao population’s concentration in Southeast Asia is no random event. Instead, through disruptions caused by famine, war, and economic collapse, groups of Chinese departed from the mainland and reterritorialized themselves in both East and Southeast Asia. In Southeast Asia alone, the huaqiao numbered an estimated 100,000 prior to the mass migrations in the early nineteenth century (Limlingan 28). Within a global framework, the Taiwanese Overseas Affairs Commission estimated the huaqiao population at seven million by the start of the twentieth century.22 This number increased five-fold by mid-century and by 1993 was estimated at 36,128,000. Of this total, 31,054,000 or eighty-six per cent were located in Asia (both East and Southeast Asia combined). Gérard Chaliand and Jean-Pierre Regeau provide a more conservative set of figures. In The Penguin Atlas of Diaspora, they present a figure of five million circa 1910 (excluding Hong Kong and Macau which would add a further one million) for the global huaqiao population (Chaliand and Regeau 132, originally from China Yearbook). By 1989, excluding the populations of Hong Kong and Taiwan, the number of huaqiao in Southeast Asia alone amounted to twenty million. Of the twenty million huaqiao situated in Southeast Asia, 6.5 million were in Malaysia, 4.2 million in Indonesia, and four million in Vietnam. A third set of huaqiao population figures are presented by Pierre Gentelle. In Chine et “Chinois” outre-mer à l’orée du XXIe siècle, Gentelle presents an updated contemporary global huaqiao community numbering 27.1 million with 62.7% of this figure, or seventeen million, located in

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greater Asia. The specifics are as follows: seven million huaqiao in Indonesia, five million in Malaysia, two million in Singapore, three million in other Asian and Southeast Asian countries, two million in the USA, one million in Latin America, six hundred thousand in Canada, and half a million in Europe (71). In effect, each huaqiao community represented a population that was as large as, if not larger than, that of Hong Kong itself. In fact, seventy-seven per cent of Singapore’s entire population is composed of the huaqiao community (Kidron and Segal 31). Other notable concentrations of the huaqiao in Southeast Asia include Malaysia with thirty to thirty-five percent and Brunei with sixteen per cent (Kidron and Segal 31). Thus, the importance of the huaqiao population located across extended Asia cannot be underestimated as an important exhibition venue for the Hong Kong cinema.23 Faced with the demographic immensity of this community concentrated in the Asian region, the expansion of the Hong Kong cinema into this region was an astute and synergetic business strategy. Yet even if we add Gentelle’s most favorable Chinese diasporic population figure of 27.1 million (circa the late 1990s) to Hong Kong’s 2000 population figure of 6.9 million, the combined figure is only thirty-four million. This would still place an expanded Hong Kong “domestic” sphere a good 23.3 million inhabitants below Italy’s 57.3 million. Notwithstanding, Hong Kong’s regional dominance was facilitated by the region’s weak national film industries and Hollywood’s emphasis on expanding into Europe and the Americas as its key continental overseas markets. America’s engagement with film exports to Asia was led by Universal. Universal established branch offices in Japan and Singapore in 1916. Within a year, an office was also established in Calcutta. However, prior to World War I, the Asian market was largely dominated by Pathé. Japanese distributors partook in this market by offering reduced rental rates but their market share did not seriously undermine Pathé’s dominant position (Thompson 74-6). Rather than focusing on Asia, Hollywood focused on Europe, the real market of choice. In The International Film Industry: Western Europe and America Since 1945, Thomas Gubank documents the means by which Hollywood gained hegemonic position vis-à-vis the international cinema by dominating both film production financing and international film

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distribution. The close relationship between the Motion Picture Export Association, appropriately known as the “Little State Department,” and the United States State Department created a legal cartel designed to dominate the international film market. As early as 1953, Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, acknowledged Hollywood’s dependence on foreign markets. In a testimony given before the United States Senate, Johnston claimed that nine out of ten American films were dependent on overseas receipts to recoup their production costs (3-4). Data collected as recently as 1992 attests to the continuing importance of Europe as the most important market for American cinema. The top three markets for global cinema are, in order of importance, US/Canada, Europe, and Japan. The US/Canada market covered a good half if not more of the global market in video, theater, and pay-TV receipts for a combined 51.3% of the total market. Combining all three exhibition formats, Europe held 26.4% and Japan 14.5% of the world market. The next seven markets combined only covered 7.8%. Based on this data, Terry Ilott transforms this market reality to that of the mantra underlying global film distribution strategy by reminding aspiring film producers to concentrate on these three markets above all others to realize maximum profitability (9). Based on this global market reality, Asia, outside of Japan, remained a minor market. Hong Kong cinema operated under this global film market context. Grace L. K. Leung and Joseph M. Chan document the extent of Hong Kong cinema’s regional dependence and dominance. In “The Hong Kong Cinema and its Overseas Market: A Historical Review, 1950-1995,” Leung and Chan assert that, in fact, the very existence and proliferation of the Hong Kong film industry happened because of this extended “domestic” market. In the post-World War II era, Hong Kong’s film export earnings of $3.24 million in 1952 boomed to $12.59 million in 1969 (144). In the same time period, the number of export countries rose from twenty to thirty with British Malaya and Singapore, French-controlled Vietnam, Dutch-controlled Indonesia, and the American colony of the Philippines serving as the core markets. Secondary markets included Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, and the Chinatowns outside of Asia. On a studio level, this expansion into the huaqiao markets served as the economic engine that secured the fortunes of companies such as Shaw

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Brothers and Golden Harvest. The Shaw Brothers Studio, founded by the four Shiao brothers,24 originally began in Shanghai as the Tan Yee Company. Before World War II, they focused on film exhibition in Singapore. The company’s official involvement with Hong Kong does not occur until 1934 when Runme Shaw was dispatched there to set up a branch office. By 1939, their pre-World War II vertically integrated entertainment empire included at least 110 theaters, nine amusement parks, and theater operations in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Borneo, Java, and Thailand as well as in Hong Kong (Lent 98). Upon recovering some buried family treasures after World War II, the Shaw Brothers Studio became not only the leading film studio in Southeast Asia but also the largest of Hong Kong’s twenty-four companies. By 1976, its cinematic empire commanded one hundred fortythree theaters spread across Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Canada, and the USA, as well as hotels, banks, real estate, insurance, and the TV station HK-TVB (Lent 98). The other major players of the Hong Kong film industry also pursued similar export oriented strategies with the various huaqiao communities Asia. Thus, Cathay too operated in Malaysia and Singapore. Likewise, Golden Harvest utilized Cathay’s regional network early in its career as a key element in implementing its export oriented business policy. Just five years after starting operations, Golden Harvest held the top position in Hong Kong film exhibition with twenty-four theaters. Outside of Hong Kong, the number reached five hundred theaters spread across Southeast Asia and Japan. Golden Harvest’s search for a world-wide distribution arm was achieved in 1978 with the purchase of Cathay Films Ltd. of London. Hong Kong cinema highlighted shared cultural affinities centered on expanded notions of “Chineseness” in addressing the huaqiao communities as a commercially driven popular cinema. These include philosophical, artistic, historic, and linguistic bonds that are encompassed by a continuous 4000-year legacy as ethnic Chinese. Especially important for the Hong Kong film industry in the pre-World War II period was the Kuomintang’s ban on dialect language films in favor of an exclusive Mandarin policy. As a result, Shanghai focused on Mandarin films while Hong Kong became the bastion of Cantonese films. With these Cantonese films, Hong Kong addressed its own population and the predominantly Cantonese speaking diasporic communities. Also important to Hong Kong cinema’s transnational reach was the

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avoidance of direct political critiques and assertions due to the continuous Cold War discourse from 1949 onwards between the People’s Republic of China (mainland China) and the Republic of China (Taiwan). In addressing the appeal of the Hong Kong cinema outside of Hong Kong proper and by extension outside of the huaqiao communities, the national basis of the cultural imperialism thesis comes to light. Since Hong Kong is not a national entity, how does the fact that its cinematic works exist prominently outside of its borders destabilize the colonialist underpinnings of cultural imperialism? Does Hong Kong’s lack of independent national selfhood change the dynamics of cultural movement? Ding-Tzann Lii forwards a conceptualization of the Hong Kong cinema’s mode of address that recognizes its colonial legacy. Reflecting the dynamics of a colonial binary model, Lii positions Hong Kong as the binary opposite to Hollywood. With the binary divides of colonizer/colonized, core/margin, and self/other, Hong Kong takes on the role of the colonized and marginal other. As such, would the same concerns leveled against Hollywood’s global domination of the cinema also apply to Hong Kong as it too emerges into international prominence? Toward this end, Lii forwards marginal imperialism and its yielding mode of articulation to differentiate a colonized basis for the creation of a regional cinematic empire that is markedly counter to that of Hollywood’s incorporating mode. Lii applies Michael Taussig’s technologically redemptive vision of yielding as a process that can reverse the dominating mode of address that predominates from the Enlightenment onwards. Here, it is the rigid binary divide between self/other and its deployment of imperial power in the dominant/dominated framework that is redeemed (127). Furthermore, working through Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, Lii references Ashis Nandy’s assertion of the colonial experience as similar to that of the slave’s experience (127) in order to situate Hong Kong’s objectified position in the imperial imaginary as a redemptive situation. Lii applies Nandy’s vision of “Asianization” to situate the West and Westernization as models that have gone amiss. For both Nandy and Lii, Asianization provides a redemptive alternative model because owing to colonial experience, the colonized have learned to actively yield to, and blend into “others.” In this sense, the experience of

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being colonized can have a radical meaning in our discussion of marginal imperialism. Being a colony, if this argument is plausible, Hong Kong would have developed a cognitive orientation of yielding, which different from the one developed in the West, the master-never-being-a-slave. It is here that we see how Hong Kong cinema goes out of itself, and blends into its others (the Asian countries), thus creating a synthesis-form with a higher cognitive order. (Lii 128) Conceptualized on a more local level, emphasizing Chinese society and a regional Asian focus, Lii contends that Asianization works as a counter discourse to the universal address that drives Hollywood’s cinematic address. The danger of Lii’s overvaluation of Nandy’s theory of Asianization is the rapidity under which it can fall into a geocentric continental chauvinism of its own with the continent of Asia occupying a new privileged center of the universe. More importantly, Lii reveals a case of selective historic amnesia by forgetting the fact that the United States also began its own history as a former colony of the British Empire — the same empire that colonized Hong Kong. Thus, the existence of a community under colonialism does not automatically exclude it from enacting colonial and imperial power maneuvers of its own once it ends its colonial status. While Lii’s idea of marginal imperialism and its deployment of Asianization offers a limited explanation for Hong Kong cinema’s regional hegemony, it does not explain the explosive popularity that the kung fu films attained in the early 1970s outside of their regional domain. Because in this case, shared cultural affinities of “Chineseness” and “Asianness” cannot be readily assumed.

Imagining Communities within Imagined Communities When the Hong Kong cinema finally gains prominent international visibility in the early 1970s outside of its historical huaqiao zones of circulation, it is via the action dynamics of the gongfupian. Better known in the Western world simply as the kung fu film, the gongfupian was epitomized by the films of Bruce Lee such as Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon. Reflecting

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a production context lacking access to Hollywood-level production values and often dismissed for wooden dialogues that further suffered from even poorer dubbing techniques, these films still managed to spark a core in cinematic audiences around the world. Called “chop-sockey Easterners,” these films provided action sequences based on unarmed combat or the use of traditional weapons. Stuart Kaminsky recuperates these films from their blanket dismissal as “junk” by framing their thematic appeal within African-American urban youth audiences as a modern day “ghetto myth.” Here, the rhetoric of survival that expressed life on the streets was transformed to “metaphors for the downtrodden” (134). In this context, personally applied violence provided resolution in a social order where the rule of law was compromised. However, to focus just on the thematics would neglect the equally important dimension of performed actions. In addressing the composition of the kung fu film, Kaminsky associates this genre of films with the musical. Like the musical’s song and dance routines that serve as the rationale for the existence of the musical genre, it is the kick and punch routines of the wuxiapian that serve as this genre’s raison d’être. Whereas the gongfupian of the 1970s played largely in the inner cities of the United States, the audience that it attracted was not limited to AfricanAmerican urban youths. The shift in exhibition venue from Chinatown to downtown meant that these films attained a larger and more inclusive slice of the cinematic audience that crossed ethnic, class, and gender divisions. Nevertheless, with Bruce Lee’s early death in 1973, the genre fizzled into obscurity. A second and more sustaining resurgence occurs in the mid-1980s when the films of directors such as John Woo and Tsui Hark attained international visibility with their reworking of the traditional gongfupian through a synergetic mixing of genre thematics, cinematic techniques, and cultural hybridization. In many cases, such as The Killer and Once Upon a Time in China, this involved the introduction of firearms as a central aspect of the featured action dynamics plus greater use of a modified Hollywood style special effects répertoire for their own ends. An important factor in this second wave of gongfupian globalization is the introduction of videocassettes and fanzines. The technological wonder of the videocassette, despite its technical drawbacks in replicating celluloid’s

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crisp fidelity, is that it provides an alternative means of distribution and exhibition that bypasses the more traditional and cost prohibitive celluloid film exhibition circuit. Videocassettes facilitate the movement, sharing, viewing, and reproduction of an increasing number of cinematic offerings at the behest of the viewer’s initiative. On a fundamental level, films, in the form of videocassettes, could now overcome national barriers of entry via the household VCR. This became the main route by which this second wave of wuxiapian is experienced. Paralleling the videocassette revolution is the rise in fanzines that forward a communal voice and presence for films that did not regularly circulate within their respective national contexts. In the case of the wuxiapian, it underwent a change in nomenclature in the 1980s to reflect the addition of gunplay in the action sequences. Overseas in the English speaking world, the “Hong Kong action cinema” took on the role as the inclusive umbrella genre term that addresses all aspects of the classical, modern, and postmodern manifestations of the traditional wuxiapian. Fanzines such as England’s Eastern Heroes, America’s Asian Trash Cinema, and France’s HK: Orient Extreme Cinema came into existence due to the merger of these two technological enablers. In these cases, the mere mention of “Hong Kong” or just the initials “HK” was enough to clearly signify an over-the-top depiction of action dynamics that eclipsed the latest Hollywood blockbusters. As fan initiated projects created by individuals who are not members of the huaqiao community, all three manifestations document the cross-over appeal of the Hong Kong action cinema beyond Hong Kong cinema’s former huaqiao circuits. More importantly, they bemoan the genre predictability of Hollywood’s offerings in this area as tired and insufficient. However, all three fanzines could easily be dismissed for commodifying an Orientalist exoticism of Hong Kong cinema. Nevertheless, to do so would imply relegating the global circulation of these films back to the former huaqiao circuits of yesteryears. More importantly, such a critique is based upon an essentialist identity politics of rigidified mimicry in which individuals are confined to the cultural specificity of their identity formations based on an over-determined “proper” definition of what this can or cannot be. The danger of this mode of cultural critique is that it neglects to address culture and identity formations as historical constructs that undergo multiple

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changes across time. Very often, these changes progress in ways that are unsettling because of their very unpredictability. Such is the case with the Hong Kong action cinema’s life outside of Hong Kong. The cultural significance of the emergence of the Hong Kong action cinema as a key component to patterns of global film consumption is that it challenges the very basis of the national framework by which communities, the cinema, and culture is taken as a de facto natural state. This questioning of the national brings to light the inability of the national as already imagined to address in full the wide range of imaginary needs that the community it calls its own seeks to satisfy. In other words, the nation as the imagined community of choice is not sufficiently imagined. As such, it opens up the necessity to re-imagine community anew as something that is not constrained by the national framework. The transnational appeal of the Hong Kong action cinema, based on Hong Kong’s status as the yet-to-be-fully-national and its deployment of visual capitalism via its cinema, may very well serve as a litmus test to reveal the stiltedness of the nation as imagined. Since Hong Kong is the yet-to-be-fully-national, its active imaginings do not forward another national framework to adopt. Instead, it undermines the national mythos of origins and its corresponding timescape that aims at assuaging human fatality and provide some temporary stop-gap deep satisfaction by means of the national. By investigating the communities within pre-existing nations that are formed out of their connections to the Hong Kong action cinema, it then becomes possible to envision this phenomenon as a welcomed process in dislodging communities from their own intrinsic national moorings. Ultimately, Hong Kong’s historical status as the yet-to-be-fully-national brings into question the primacy of the nation as the chief imprimatur of communal validation. Concurrently, Hong Kong also brings into question the historical necessity of undertaking a national phase in a community’s development. As a place within geographic space inhabited by individuals who call Hong Kong their home, Hong Kong makes possible the existence of a legitimate community without recourse to complete nationalism. In effect, Hong Kong undermines the centrality and universality of the nation as an a priori component of communal validation. Thus, statements such as “[r]ien de plus international que la formation des identités nationales”

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[{n}othing is more international than the formation of national identities] (Thiesse 11) and “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (Anderson 2) lose their hegemonic value as universal givens. This is the case because even without recourse to the national, Hong Kong exists as a recognizable and valid community of its own in an international context fully enriched with its own inflection of communal identity that materializes through its cultural expressions. While recognizing the continuing power and legacy of the nation in defining international relations, we can nuance our relationship with the nation without having to completely disavow its continuing legacy. In this case, Hong Kong and the global impact of its action cinema forwards a context under which even the imagined communities of the fully national will have within its borders communities that exercise the right to continue imagining and re-imagining itself anew because even fully imagined communities of the national remain yet-to-be-fully-imagined themselves.

Notes 1. 2.

3. 4.

“One country” of the PRC, “two systems” of communism and capitalism. Starting in 1956, UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics began publishing cinema data documenting the total annual production of long films, the number of cinemas, and annual attendance rates with its first edition of The Statistical Yearbook. These three sets of cinematic data are then augmented in 1970 to reflect export figures for the nine chosen cinematic production sites and cross-referenced by the importation data by country. However, this export/import data is not officially published as a regular practice until the 1976 edition. For UNESCO’s statistical database, information on Hong Kong is listed separately from the nation that exercises sovereignty over it. This situation holds true for Hong Kong both as a BCC and an SAR. The political issue surrounding “territory” in relation to Hong Kong revolves around interpretations on how the British and the Chinese viewed Hong Kong’s status as a BCC. The implication of the term “colony” is that it implies territorial sovereignty once the colony’s colonial status ends. This would open up the possibility of Hong Kong to transform itself into a post-colonial independent nation. Another implication of colony is that

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it implies a complete abandonment of the territory by the Chinese side. Both of these implications were repugnant to the Chinese. The Chinese insistence on the term “dependent territory” over “colony” is that it placed British sovereignty over Hong Kong as a temporary phenomenon that the Chinese were willing to “allow” until it saw fit otherwise. Nevertheless, while Hong Kong SAR is a “territory” within the British/Chinese divide, it is not a “territory” within UN parameters. In 1972, the PRC requested that the UN remove Hong Kong from its official list of territories. Since that time, the UN replaced “colony” with “territory.” For the UN, “territory” designates a political entity that does not exercise full sovereignty. The division between nations and territories is that territories do not exercise sovereignty over matters related to foreign affairs and defense. These two matters are exercised on their behalf by fully sovereign nations. With the PRC exercising sovereignty over matters related to foreign affairs and defense on Hong Kong’s behalf, Hong Kong would then qualify as a UN defined “territory.” However, this would be anathema to the “one country” clause of the Joint Declaration. To resolve this diplomatic catch-22 over Hong Kong’s status as a “territory,” Hong Kong, SAR, is not listed as an official UN territory. Hong Kong proper as we know it today came about in three distinct phases to encompass Hong Kong island, the Kowloon peninsula, and the New Territories. The British gained Hong Kong island in perpetuity following the end of the First Opium War (Yapian zhanzheng) via the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing. Kowloon peninsula south of present day Boundary Street and Stonecutter’s Island were also obtained in perpetuity after the Second Opium War with the 1860 Convention of Beijing. The New Territories and two hundred thirty-five islands were leased to the British for ninetynine years under the Convention of 1898. For the PRC, there were three geopolitical sites that it wanted to re-incorporate back into a greater unified China with itself serving as the core element. In order of priority, they were the Republic of China (Taiwan), Hong Kong, and Macau. In the late 1970s, Premier Zhou Enlai voiced this position as the “Three Stages Strategy.” The “one country, two systems” policy was originally formulated to create a political framework to entice the return of the ROC and thus end the existence of two separate claims on Chinese legitimacy. The first application of the “Three Stages Strategy” presented itself at the initiative of Portugal over Macau. In 1974, a military coup d’etat overthrew the Portuguese monarchy. The resulting center-left government desired to end the vestiges of their colonial empire. Thus, in 1976, it offered sovereignty over Macau back to the PRC. Not wanting to cause undue political perturbations in either Hong Kong or Taiwan, Beijing re-affirmed its sovereignty over Macau but kept the Portuguese administration of Macau intact. The application of the “one country,

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9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

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two systems” policy first on Hong Kong resulted from British desires to receive a clear-cut answer on the question of Hong Kong. This occurred in 1979 between the governor of Hong Kong, Murray MacLehose, and Deng Xiaoping (Chan 4). This formulation has since been extended to the former Portuguese colony of Macau on December 20, 1999, such that Macau too has become “yetto-be-fully-national” itself. The future perfect tense serves two functions. It either indicates that an action will be finished by a certain future time or it indicates that one action will be finished before another occurs in the future. “By Tuesday the transit authority will have run out of money “is an example of the first case. “By the time a commercial fusion reactor is developed, the government will have spent billions of dollars in research” is an example of the second case (Kirszner and Mandell 373). This is in opposition to British historiography that favors 1841 as the starting date of the First Opium War. The official chosen act of hostilities differs between Chinese and British accounts. This position does not disavow a prior praxis of political self-engagement and resistance in Hong Kong history. Besides the 1967 riots, a historical precedence can be traced as far back as April 23, 1926, with the formation of the Heung Yee Kuk (New Territories Rural Committee). The HYK was originally formed to obtain colonial representation for the rural New Territories in an era that privileged Hong Kong’s urbanized regions. See Chiu (185-215). Partha Chatterjee makes a similar argument with the case of India. Here Chatterjee wants to re-empower India’s already existing imaginative powers and see it applied such that the community and the nation are reunited as one. This in effect would reverse the current situation where India as currently imagined is “overwhelmed and swamped by the history of the postcolonial state. Here lies the root of our postcolonial misery: not in our inability to think out new forms of the modern community but in our surrender to the old forms of the modern state” (11). For radio and television, see Anderson (135). The later two are given a chapter in the second edition. This has also been translated as The Pot Pleads Innocent. The exact family name of this individual and the Romanization of his name are not historically clear. Other forms that Benjamin’s family name has taken form include Brodsky and Brasky. I have decided to adopt Jay Leyda’s version since it is the first English language version to cite this individual. For a full account of the various applications of his family name, see Stokes and Hoover (322n4). This film is sometimes translated as Lipstick. Benshi is the Japanese term for the moving picture lecturer who fulfilled two

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19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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key functions in early cinema before the advent of sound. First, the benshi served as the technical expert who explained the mechanical intricacies of the new, foreign, and modern invention of the cinema. Secondly, the benshi provided narrative commentary on the film along with translations of foreign intertitles for his domestic audience. The institution of the benshi in the history of the Japanese cinema commenced with Ueda Hoteiken, the first official benshi, starting with the first introduction of the cinema in Japan in 1896 and continued well into the 1930s (Komatsu and Loden 33-52) The Hong Kong film industry’s application of this process is itself a continuation of a practice that was begun by the Shanghai film industry in response to its own cosmopolitan treaty port ambience. The term huaqiao is composed of hua “one of the ancient characters used to signify China” and qiao “a person living abroad.” I am using huaqiao to refer to anyone of Chinese ethnic descent who currently resides outside of “China” as defined by the territorial spaces of mainland China (including Hong Kong and Macao) and Taiwan. I use the term huaqiao to also address the legacy of the two main historical modes of Chinese emigration, namely the huashang (Chinese merchants) and huagong (Chinese laborers who are more commonly referred to as “Coolies”). United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistical Division. World Statistics Pocketbook. Series V, Number 18. (New York: United Nations, 1998). The population figures from 1950 to 1999 are revised estimates. Data for 2000 are medium-variant projections. See United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. World Population Prospects: The 1998 Revision, Volume I: Comprehensive Tables. (New York: United Nations, 1999). Needless to say, this nickname excludes the equally important and prolific cinema of India (Bollywood) which is also a part of “Asia.” The Republic of China. Overseas Chinese Affairs Statistics. Taipei, Taiwan: Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, 1994, p. 8. On a similar level, the twenty-five million strong Indian diasporic community boosts Indian cinema’s financial viability. The Indian diasporic community in UK and the United States alone account for 55% of Bollywood’s total foreign box-office revenue. See Powers and Mazumdar (52). The four brothers modified their family name when their decision to enter the movie business was met with disapproval from their father. See Lent (98).

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Part V Community and Identity

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Reclaiming Radical: Hegemony, Rhetoric, Community by Astra Taylor

During the years 1945-1965 […] there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one’s dreams stray too far from Freud. And one had to treat sign-systems — the signifier — with the greatest respect. These were the three requirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one’s time acceptable. Then came the five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years. At the gates of our world, there was Vietnam, of course, and the first major blow to the powers that be. But here, inside our walls, what exactly was taking place? —Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus

My first introduction to radical as a concept was probably the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. At that time I was maybe ten years old, and in my mind, which had recently been colonized by The Simpsons, radical lent indisputable coolness to my vocabulary. While some of the slang of my early youth has stayed with us, such as cool or awesome, a few words — I am remembering the hideous expression gnarly — thankfully fell out style. Reflecting on the vocabulary of my early years, it strikes me as strange that radical has crept into my speech again. Only now I am not using to appeal to my mischievous cohorts, but instead within the academy, under the guise of being erudite: after disappearing from my vocabulary for years, radical has emerged as a legitimate term. Though I did not immediately draw a connection between my mediasaturated childhood and my interest in theory, it just occurred to me that this is why the idea of radical philosophy and politics had instant appeal. At the time of my introduction to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, for example, I was aware of the double meaning of radical employed in most contemporary theory; at once signifying the extreme and uncustomary views while still implying roots or foundations. I recognize these more learned definitions of the term, and yet my early associations with

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the idea of radicalness still inform me, influencing my understanding of philosophic discourse, for better or worse. Radical is more than an adjective or adverb signifying the unbounded, revolutionary, or uncompromising. It is a mood, a fashion, a manner, an affect. Radical is cool, awesome, hip, tremendous, overwhelming, awe-inspiring, astounding, and breathtaking. Radical is style. One of the essays reprinted in this collection conveys a certain sentimentality for the 1960s, if only briefly. Evoking a degree of nostalgia and incredulity towards the past, Dennis A. Foster relates the social mood and movements of their youths in order to better decipher the present historical moment. Recounting the state of activism and extent of social engagement during that period, Foster’s reaction to his remembrances is twofold: forced to recollect the past as he watches the documentary Berkeley in the Sixties his reaction “progressed from an amused nostalgia to an increasing anxiety and depression” (371). This hybrid of nostalgia and depression that Foster conveys is a common symptom of many theorists who experienced the social revolts of the 1960s and later became key players in the development of postmodernism. Many of these individuals have since evoked images of student revolts and confessed their optimism that came from inexperience. In doing so they supplement the popular mythology of the 1960s. As far as popular culture is concerned, the 1960s are beyond a doubt the pinnacle of youthful idealism, activism, revolt, creative discontent, naive optimism, and progressive thinking. However, the 1960s weren’t all seriousness, political upheaval and fervor, especially not according to popular opinion. The 1960s were also bellbottoms, beads, black turtlenecks, marijuana, acid trips, swingers, and scene makers. The 1960s weren’t just civil disobedience and Vietnam. The 1960s were style. Growing up, I revered the symbols of the 1960s for their fusion of social awareness and trendiness. As a young kid I made tie-dyed t-shirts and protested for animal rights and against the Gulf War. However, as I became more engrossed in postmodernism, I began to learn that the political nature of 1960s culture reached beyond the hippies and even outside of the United States. The French communists and anarchists had not wholly succumbed to the fad of flower power, though they were equally chic. I read everything I could about this culture and the historic moment in which it emerged. Written by the anarchist Angelo Quattrocchi and the author

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Tom Nairn, The Beginning of the End tells of the explosive time that was 1968 through two eyewitness accounts of “the year that shook the world.” Quattrocchi’s piece is a lyrical prose-poem, written on the barricades in Paris, an impassioned description of the political landscape. Nairn’s essay was composed during a strike and student occupation at the college where he taught. Both works are intelligent, seductive, and optimistic. The front cover and inside flap are graced with photographs of the demonstrators. They are almost unvaryingly dressed in form-fitting black pants, pointy leather boots, tight jackets, and black sunglasses. Don’t forget the lit cigarette. There is no doubt: May 68 was style. The parable the 1960s conveyed by the discourse of postmodernism is situated somewhere in relation to the popular conception of this certain era as both stylistics and politics. The backdrop of the 1960s sets a mood of mounting unrest and burgeoning social and intellectual revolution, imbibing the narrative of postmodernism with these attributes, infusing theory with a hint of recklessness, deviance, and defiance. Some thirty years later, in introductions to postmodern thought, students are told and retold the story of one month of a specific year in France that changed the course of philosophy, linguistics, sociology, and, one could argue, reality. The student revolts of May 68 are credited with altering the lives and work of brilliant people, leaving the impression of experiences so intense they still inspire work decades later. In participating in postmodern discourse, even today, there remains a trace of social upheaval and transformation, a specter of 68, the suggestion of style. I watched them almost as pin-up pictures, as pornography, because the kids looked so cute! They had such good looks! Such good haircuts! Really good accessories! They were really dressed well for the riot, for the photo ops with the big magazines. All good terrorists have good fashion. I really respected that generation for that. —John Waters on the WTO protesters in Seattle September, 1999 What I am beginning to consider here is not only the role of style in the formation of group identity, as a set of cultural artifacts, as clothing or behavior, but also as a subject of discourse in recent years, particularly

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within a field that could broadly be defined as cultural studies. I would like to reevaluate the role of radical style, even the radical itself, in the ordering and re-ordering of our relationships with one another. Essentially, I am asking this series of question: What is the relation between radical and style, assuming there is one? What are the functions and possibilities of radicalness in our being-together? How do recent theoretical investigations of radicalness affect the possibility of being radical? Does the abundance of discourse on and invocations of radical amplify or nullify its potential as a way of being in the world? How does the possibility of self-styling relate to the invention of social relations? These questions emerge from the observation of the profusion of the term radical as a modifier in theoretical writing. Commonly situated in front of any one of myriad words signifying concepts that postmodernism claims to have called into question, inserting the word radical allows recourse to problematic ideas such as individual, difference, tradition, good, and evil: words that would otherwise be torn to shreds by fellow critics for indicating foundations or fundamental natures that have long been determined to not exist. Tucked away in a footnote, Slavoj Žižek briefly addresses the implications of this barrage of radicalness. Žižek examines Richard Rorty’s argument with what Rorty refers to as a “radical” elitism within cultural studies. Rorty advocates participation in the political process as it is, as opposed to “doing the impossible,” which is how he characterizes the goals of many postmodernists. Žižek points out that Rorty’s engaged pragmatism is “ultimately the complementary reverse of the ‘radical’ Cultural Studies stance, which abhors actual participation in the political process as an inadmissible compromise” (qtd. in Butler et al. 130). Žižek’s observations provide an opening into the problem that I believe surrounds the frequent offhand invocations of radicalness in contemporary writing. In many ways, radical has become almost a paralyzing term, on a certain level, serving to neutralize the possibilities of enactment. In Žižek’s example, and in line with Rorty’s criticism, the call to radical action actually radically limits opportunities for political engagement instead of making engagements radical. The difference between these two scenarios is critical. I am neither advocating Rorty’s call for “engaged pragmatism,” nor do I believe theories of radical politics may be dismissed as simply “doing the impossible,” which essentially means doing nothing at all. However, I do think that these insights should

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be taken as warnings, as extreme examples of what happens when we do not take the question of being radical in the world seriously. If the cost of staying true to radical ideas is that one can never compromise because to do so would be unradical, the price is too high. With this warning in mind, I attempt to call into play a second meaning of the word radical; implications of radicalness that I believe are possibly being ignored and may be necessary to enact anything radical in its more conventional sense. I am talking about radical as style. The almost pristine concept of radicalness I invoked above, in that it is specific to postmodern theory, has its roots in the unrest of 68, though it has been transformed. One of the slogans used by French activists was “Act practical, demand the impossible.” I believe the sentiment of this slogan is fundamentally correct: activists usually get less than they ask for. Demand the impossible — you may at least get something. While the students of 68, in the US and abroad, shouted for the impossible, their demands did not preclude action. On various levels, they enacted their ideals. These levels ranged from inventing a subculture to the fact that political organizing was in vogue. Considering radical as style is necessarily considering radical as it functions in the world; that is, this consideration prevents abstracting radical ideas and stifling them in the realm of nonaction under the pretenses of protecting their integrity. It is because of the fact that social movements, the beginnings of a radical transformation of community and politics, usually begin on a local level, between people in the exchange of information and behavior, initiating the creation of a new group identity, that I begin with a consideration of the conventional meaning of style. As I move through structuralist and poststructuralist rendering of radical style, through the work of Dick Hebdige and then Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I hope lead to a definition of style less bounded by common limitations of the terms. A forerunner in the field of cultural studies and the question of subversion and cultural transformation, Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style points to the importance of style in the formation of social bonds, particularly focusing on its subversive implications. Hebdige relates the use of style to the subversion of hegemony, taking a cue from Stuart Hall: “Hegemony […] is not universal and ‘given’ to the continuing rule of a particular class. It has to be won, reproduced, sustained. Hegemony is, as Gramsci said, a ‘moving

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equilibrium’ containing relations of forces favourable or unfavourable to this or that tendency” (Hebdige 18). Hebdige’s influential work examines the underground youth cultures of the 1970s, the teddy boys, mods, rockers, skinheads, and punks. These groups were sharply differentiated from the “straight” world through their manner of dress, ideology, and behavior. Hebdige performed the innovation of expanding our vocabulary for expressing the relationship between culture and subculture, the modes of communication and mutual transformation of the two. Hebdige acknowledges that the subcultures represented in his work are never stable, that there is a constant interplay of cultural forces, and coding and recoding of cultural symbols. These processes of signification, though they may be “revolting,” are signification nonetheless, and so can be uncoded and analyzed if one takes the time. Though only for fleeting moments, it remains possible to uncover the logic of systems of style, as though they function as a grammar, and deduce their meaning. Interesting points of overlap may be exposed between Hebdige’s Subculture and Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, though overall the works are extremely divergent. Both texts are concerned with the processes of hegemony and with the role of the sign. The emphasis on signification particularly relates to the later work of Laclau. It is true that Hebdige and Laclau work within very different veins of analysis: Hebdige works as a demystifier in the tradition of Roland Barthes’ Mythologies, whereas Laclau’s analyses are informed by the work of Jacques Derrida. Hebdige writes: The challenge to hegemony which subcultures represent is not issued directly by them. Rather it is expressed obliquely, in style. The objections are lodged, the contradictions displayed at the profoundly superficial level of appearances: that is, at the level of signs. (17) Though not articulated directly as such, Hebdige’s use of hegemony expresses the perpetually shifting field of culture, which may be linked, at least partially, to Laclau and Mouffe’s later reinvention of the concept. I would like to take time to do a deeper analysis of the work of Laclau and Mouffe and their call for radical democratic politics. I have chosen them for two reasons: (1) the term radical appears with noticeable frequency

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throughout Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and in so is representative of many strains of contemporary theory, and (2) I believe that their work very clearly articulates a logic that could be used to develop and think about a form of community appropriate to this postmodern era. The modifier radical is implicitly one of the most important concepts in their work, serving to transform preexisting political and social articulations and to restructure them to serve an innovative political intervention. Laclau and Mouffe trace the genealogy of the term hegemony, ultimately reforming it as a mode of social articulation that is anti-foundational and non-essentializing. Though Hebdige’s use of the term hegemony coincides on certain levels with the definition set forth by them, there is little doubt that the theory of hegemony articulated by the latter is far more nuanced. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy the reformation of the term hegemony presented is dependent on two major movements. First, Laclau and Mouffe work from the position that the subject is not a unity. Second, they reformulate the category of the universal. The polarity between the universal and particular is done away with; as a result, the social field is far more complex. Hegemonic movements can only be conceived once this dichotomy has been overcome: there is hegemony only if the dichotomy universal/particularity is superseded; universality only exists incarnated in — and subverting — some particularity, but, conversely, no particularity can become political without becoming the locus of universalizing effects. (Contingency 56, italics in original) Thus, the universal is an empty place, a void that can be filled only by the particular, a movement through which the particular acquires attributes of the universal without being totalized. In the Ticklish Subject, Žižek gracefully conveys this ambiguity: “The Universal is empty, yet precisely as such always-already filled in, that is, hegemonized by some contingent, particular content that acts as its stand-in — in short, each Universal is the battleground on which the multitude of particular content fight for hegemony” (100). The positivity of the content of the universal is the contingent result of hegemonic struggles. Hegemony is of such great importance in this formulation because it serves as a conceptual apparatus with which to conceive our being-together without recourse to foundations or absolutes.

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The concept of hegemony provides a degree of consistency, or social glue, while simultaneously depending on its own flexibility and contingency. This uncertainty of the universal relates to the dissolution of the category of the subject. The fractured nature of the subject that Laclau and Mouffe insist on is now so commonplace that many of us cannot help but reflexively contemplate our own constructedness. The important question is, to what end? That is, what are the potentials that surface as we ponder our discursivity? Renunciation of the category of subject as a unitary, transparent and sutured entity opens the way to the recognition of the specificity of the antagonisms constituted on the basis of different subject positions, and, hence the possibility of the deepening of a pluralist and democratic conception. The critique of the category of unified subject, and the recognition of the discursive dispersion within which every subject position is constituted, therefore involve something more than the enunciation of a general theoretical position: they are the sine qua non for thinking the multiplicity out of which antagonisms emerge in societies in which the democratic revolution has crossed a certain threshold. (166) For Laclau and Mouffe, the explosion of discursively formed subject positions enables the possibility of conceiving the diversity of social forces that may coalesce to commence a unique democratic revolution. The dispersion of the binary of universality and particularity does not just transform the nature of identity, but affects the entire social field through the refiguring of the subject. Just as the subject is not fixed, social mechanisms and practices are also free-floating, loosely connected through hegemonic articulations. Laclau and Mouffe utilize their analysis of hegemony to speak of a new, radical form of democracy. It is implicit throughout Hegemony and Socialist Strategy that the entire social field, consisting of both grandiose and banal social logics and practices, is affected by the unfixity of social antagonisms and forces. Thus, emphasis is placed on forms of resistance and unification that are explicitly political. Though no aspect of social life is reducible to a universal position, Laclau and Mouffe are primarily concerned with the implications of the unfixity of social organization as opposed to the character of these formations: “it is clear that the consti-

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tution of a hegemonic Left alternative can only come from a complex process of convergence and political construction, to which none of the hegemonic articulations constructed in any area of social reality can be of indifference” (174). What this means is that no aspect of social reality, no hegemonic articulation, is without political implications. However, Laclau and Mouffe do not make an effort to understand the infinite content and variations of these articulations. Instead, it is the fact that these articulations are unbounded and unstable that intrigues them; to use a vulgar distinction, they are most concerned with revealing the form of hegemonic articulations as opposed to their content (at least in realms that are not overtly political). The project of tracing the genealogy of hegemony as concept and unpacking its present implications is a large and laborious one. What Laclau and Mouffe achieve through this process is to point out some of the potentials for democratic politics and the reformation of the Left present in the concept of hegemony. The lack of specific cultural elements pertaining to the democratic revolution they call for, however, makes the idea of enacting their philosophy difficult. While they reiterate the form of this democratic movement (residing in the ambiguous space between the particular and the universal), there is little discussion about the specific social logics, practices, and objects that will provide its content. In many ways this is because there are no elements proper to the radical democracy they are attempting to describe. In other words, this democratic revolution they call for lacks foundation and thus no cultural symbols necessary reflect or pertain it. There is no doubt, though, that some form of cultural transmission and signification will have to take place if we are ever to witness this theory in action. The hegemonic nature of these social antagonisms must be articulated, but how? What are the signs of radical politics? Just as “the multiplication of political spaces and the preventing of the concentration of power in one point are […] preconditions of every truly democratic transformation of society” (Laclau and Mouffe 178), so too must the multiplication of signs prevent the amalgamation of culture into a homogenous whole. The dispersion of political forces cannot be separated from the dispersion of cultural forces; or, politics cannot be disentangled from our being together and being in the world. We must return to Hebdige: “The struggle between different discourses, different definitions and mean-

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ings within ideology is therefore always, at the same time, a struggle within signification: a struggle for possession of the sign which extends to even the most mundane areas of everyday life” (17). These struggles are essential to the transmission and reinvention of ideas and artifacts. What Laclau and Mouffe urge us to remember about this transmission is that there is “nothing inevitable or natural in the different struggles against power, and it is necessary to explain in each case the reasons for their emergence and the different modulations they adopt” (152). This statement acknowledges that there exists the potential for a multiplicity of forms and causes of struggles against power. Thus, these struggles do not simply come to us in the package of a neatly articulated political logic or grammar. What Hebdige points out, and what I would like to underscore, is that this struggle for power, for the sign and its alteration, infiltrates even the mundane areas of existence. However, the fact that these areas inform our lives everyday does not make them inconsequential; rather, they may be the most potent transmitters of information known to us. Hebdige does a wonderful job of articulating the massive variation in the cultural field and in ways of communicating. In accordance with the philosophy of Laclau and Mouffe, we could take the social antagonism Hebdige expresses to prove the point of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: that “the terrain of hegemonic practices is constituted out of the fundamental ambiguity of the social” (170). In the domain of politics, hegemonic practices and the radical unfixity of social codes and human identity “makes it impossible to consider the political struggle as a game in which the identity of the opposing forces is constituted from the start” (170). Rather, the political is a much more complex field of various antagonisms of different proportions, a field in which there is no absolute bad or good and no single utopian vision to work towards. If we are no longer functioning in a social world built on stable foundations, how are we to understand our world or decode the signs around us? That is, how are we to articulate our being-together? Is it at all possible to communicate our community in the situation of extreme unfixity, if the significance of cultural symbols cannot be determined as precisely as Hebdige hoped? Laclau and Mouffe point to a new way of conceiving our social order, and the possibility of a new way of comprehending the social by stating “it is no longer the case of foundations of the social order, but of social logics” (183):

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Between the logic of complete identity and pure difference, the experience of democracy should consist of the recognition of the multiplicity of social logics along with the necessity of their articulation. But this articulation should be constantly re-articulated and renegotiated, and there is no final point at which a balance will be definitely achieved. (188) These overlapping and diverging social logics provide the content of the experience of radical democracy. In many ways, the process alluded to parallels the processes documented by Hebdige. No totality of culture is immune to modification, and no culture lacks room for the addition of a supplement. These social logics inform social practices in turn, and so concern the “mundane” actions of everyday life. Thus, social logics relate to but are not limited to conventional notions of logic: We are not, of course, talking about formal logic, or even about general dialectical logic, but about the notion which is implicit in expressions such as “the logic of kinship,” “the logic of the market.” And so forth. I would characterize it as a rarefied system of objects, as a “grammar” or cluster of rules which make some combinations and substitutions possible and exclude others. It is what, in our words, we have called “discourse.” (76) Most importantly, this serves to rearticulate the fact that Laclau and Mouffe do not provide a program for political organization or the blueprints for a radically democratic community. Instead, they underline the contingency of social organization and in doing so illustrate the immense potential for the development of various forms of more tolerant and egalitarian unions. The quote above has two implications I would like to tease out: (1) It points to the multiplicity of logics while illustrating the fact that they still may be interpreted as simultaneously coherent and open systems, and (2) through the concept of “grammar” it brings us back to the notion of the sign and the practice of signification, and in doing so to the interplay of action and linguistics. In relation to the first point, Laclau and Mouffe argue, “no hegemonic project can be based exclusively on democratic logic, but must consist of a set of proposals for the positive organization of the social” (189). This “positive organization of the social” consists of those elements that con-

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stitute everyday life. A theory of radical democracy alone does not suffice. Various forms of social logic, and thus a multiplicity of contingent and evolving social practices, must supplement the theorization of the political. I have illustrated that Laclau and Mouffe’s call for a multiplicity of social formations relates to Hebdige’s analysis of subculture. My point in doing so is to call attention to the importance of the mundane in shifting the foundations of the social. In everyday life, in the changing of fads, the development of technology, the altering of social relations, is where we witness the contingent at work. It is this realm where individuals have the ability to transform their relationships and in fact do so perpetually. The call for radical democracy demands that people are participants. The most critical position for this participation is the domain of the everyday, and yet it goes unmentioned by Laclau and Mouffe. Another series of questions has emerged: How does one actively participate in and shift the hegemonic formations that exist? Can active participation vary be distinguished from our everyday behavior? If not, are we left reading the process of everyday life as social resistance, negating the difference between conformity and subversion, nullifying the distinctive elements of political action? On a different note, what are the implications for our community, if present-day communities consist of individuals who conceive of themselves as discursively constructed? Assuming the dissolution of the unified subject, the social field ceases to be pluralistic; that is, it is made up of a multitude of discrete groups. “Only if it is accepted that the subject position cannot be led back to a positive and unitary founding principle,” Laclau and Mouffe claim, “only then can pluralism be considered radical” (167). What we have instead is various social groups with varying social logics, and thus diverging hegemonic practices, none of which are absolute. The question of how these various groups communicate is a serious one. Laclau and Mouffe state, “the equivalential articulation between antiracism, anti-sexism and anti-capitalism, for example, requires a hegemonic construction which, in certain circumstances, may be the condition for the consolidation of each of these structures” (182). Though the “condition for consolidation” is a hegemonic construction, and thus is contingent, this method of communication appears to be based on systems of equivalencies; that is, in sameness. It is worth pursuing this point further. Laclau and

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Mouffe are two of the most fervent proponents of the unfixed position of the subject. It is interesting, then, that they make the assumption that the mode in which various social groups communicate is via traditional alignments of goals and, in a way, identity. They posit the establishing of a chain of equivalencies through which divergent groups can align themselves in order to supplement their own positions. I am making this point only to illustrate why the particularities of Laclau and Mouffe’s philosophy must be examined more closely. How does communication between various social groups, with different social logics, function? If a call is made for radical difference, then can we assume that structural elements of these groups will be found in common? Even if identity is unfixed, does it still work through processes of affinity? Obviously, not all these questions will be answered in a way that is satisfactory in this short space. However, I believe we may come closer to an understanding of the convergence of various groups through an examination of language and the possibility of the concepts of grammar and rhetoric. Within Laclau’s formulation, many of his theoretical movements have analogies in the field of linguistics: “if we accept the relational character of identity, the ideal conditions of closure for a system are never achieved and therefore all of identity is more or less a floating signifier” (“Politics” 340). Within the field of linguistics, before and after deconstruction, the sign has played a pivotal role. Whether hooked to the signified or floating through discourse, the concept of the sign is our primary means of thinking knowledge and communication. While Laclau often draws analogies from the political field to the domain of linguistics, I believe what we need to do, specifically at the level of the particular, is precisely the opposite movement. That is, in the spirit of Hebdige and Barthes before him, we must pay attention to the significance of objects and artifacts in the world around us, and expand upon real-world experiences as we interpret their significance, as opposed to reducing something as complex as identity to linguistic terminology. In a traditional sense, grammar is a system of language: it provides the rules of articulation. However, if we take seriously Laclau and Mouffe’s insight into the nature of hegemony, grammar can never be formalized or regulated. This is part of the difficulty of attempting to conceive of heterogeneity: grammar will always be shifting, as will the signs it attempts to orga-

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nize. Another way of phrasing this is to say that grammar is never perfect; however, the critical point is that we don’t necessarily want it to be. At this juncture, we have the model of a social field consisting of antagonisms and convergences, always contingent and renegotiating. Within it exists a multiplicity of social logics and practices. Nothing is universal and yet, as subjects, we still bare some sort of responsibility to others and to exigencies; that is, we must be responsive to contingencies and open to communication. There must still be some sort of ethical space and social logics, however informal, which express our being in the world together. Earlier, I mentioned the ordinariness of the concept of the constructedness of the subject. Theorists, with Michel Foucault and Judith Butler at the forefront, have unveiled some of the astounding implications of taking seriously the idea of discourse in constituting our selves. What makes conceiving of the subject as groundless interesting, the shock of which is perhaps lost as theories of discourse become more commonplace, is that unfixing the subject greatly complicates the possibilities of human engagement. Rather than portraying the human experience in the either/or of human nature or total atomization, it yields the potential of new plateaus of interaction, and, following Laclau and Mouffe, the potential development of a radical democracy. Though the names I just dropped are all contemporary theorists, the problem of the radical subject is not new. In 1844 Karl Marx wrote, “To be radical is to grasp the matter by its root. Now the root for mankind is man himself ” (Marx 137). Marx’s sentiment, which must inform Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, conveys precisely the double meaning of radical I would like to examine. Radical branches off in two directions, as I pointed out earlier: toward the root and to a stable and singular meaning, and also toward the extreme and unbounded. These movements are not exclusive. It seems that in recent theory to invoke the radical nature of something is to invoke an articulation so extreme and yet specific to its subject (be it politics, democracy, difference) that it cannot ever be practiced. Radicalness is both rooted and unbounded, and for many theorists, though not necessarily those I named in the previous paragraph, this means that it is imagined but never practiced. Let us take the concept of radical democracy as an example of the paradox of radicalness: Does radical democracy exist? Would we know radical

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democracy if we saw it? If we did, how would we communicate it? These questions are reminiscent of the Sophist Gorgias’ influential argument: (1) Nothing exists, (2) if anything did exist it could never by known, and (3) if anything did exist and was known, it could never be communicated. This perplexing fragment is oddly appropriate here. It has been reclaimed in recent years as a precursor to postmodern theories of language, particularly in the field of rhetorical studies. In addition, it conveys a meaningful critique of philosophy in a parodic style. However, even with this element of absurdity the fragment has had mystifying and inspiring effects on people; that is, its implications have not simply been dismissed as “humorous.” Parody, a concept popular in contemporary cultural theory thanks to the philosopher Judith Butler, fuses comedy and seriousness. It provides a way of transforming language and social reality in a way that is neither dogmatic nor bleak. I would argue: Parody is style. Laclau writes, “I prefer not only to speak of parody but of the social organized as a rhetorical space” (qtd. in Butler et al. 78). Though Laclau makes this move to underscore the fact that parody is not equivalent to play (a motive I do not find entirely necessary), his mention of rhetoric is extremely intriguing. I believe that it is through rhetoric that we may begin to conceive of a mode of communication proper to groundless community. Rhetoric has a long history as the marginalized counterpart to philosophy: Plato condemned the sophists, and condemned rhetoric for not being a techne. Rhetoric was conceived as the incompetent complement to the dialectic, a method concerned with probability, leading to multiple determinations, not just a single truth. Rhetorical practice was also long dismissed as mere style, a criticism that relates to rhetoric’s roots in oratory; thus in speaking, in practice, in performance. Socrates angrily states in Plato’s dialogue Gorgias, “Thus, rhetoric, it seems, is a producer of persuasion for belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong” (qtd. in Bizzell and Herzberg 24). While in the context of the dialogue this statement is meant to be quite derogatory, in this day and age, one in which theorists claim right and wrong cannot be untangled, a method for producing persuasion sounds rather appealing. The stylistic implications of rhetoric are intriguing as they serve to accentuate not only the playful elements of speech, but the possibility of adding flourishes, of speaking emotively, of calling to action, of transforming ideas and people

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through dialogue. Style is what makes rhetoric a more affecting mode of communication, historically locating speech in the domain of the arts as we now conceive of them. Laclau argues, and I believe accurately, “The only democratic society is one which permanently shows the contingency of its own foundations” (qtd. in Butler et al. 86). But what does reminding ourselves of our own contingency entail? How do we ensure that we will explore the creative potential of having the power to invent our communities and our selves? My concern with issue of style relates to the possibility of taking full advantage of the potentials enunciated by postmodern theories of identity, communication, and community. Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity and of parody have achieved a level of popularity rare for academic discourses. Michel Foucault provides a compelling portrait of Baudelaire’s dandy, one who both endures the responsibility and enjoys the possibility of producing himself. This is “not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truths; he is the man who tries to invent himself ” (“Enlightenment” 118). This issue of self-invention has served as a central topic within critical discourses of recent years. However, the notion of performativity as it applies to our being together has not been fully articulated. In other words, while many people may conceive of themselves as constructed and attempt to live their lives performatively, an analogous conception of freedom, invention, and playfulness in relation to our social interactions and organization has not yet entered public discourse with the same force. My examination of the term radical at the start of the essay began an attempt to rearticulate some of the implications of radicalness that may get lost by the now common and casual invocations of the term in theoretical discourse. It was my intention to convey postmodern theory’s historicity, its roots in a particular stylishness, from which the theoretical impact cannot be separated. The idea of radicalness also relates to the work of Hebdige, and his convincing argument that cultural phenomena are effective signifiers and that style is not meaningless phenomena. However, it is my hope that discursive space can be opened for a conception of radicalness that encompasses local enactments, such as Hebdige points to, without limiting our conception of radical style to outlandish clothing or slang-filled speech. Style is not simply fashion, apparel, or design, and patterns of speech but

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everything from these elements to social behaviors, ways of interacting in space and through technologies, methods of organizing and demonstrating: style is a way of being in the world. In other words, style is not limited to self-invention, but necessarily relates through the invention of the self to the re-invention of social relations. By locating radical within style, we necessarily take radical to the realm of everyday experience, to the level of performance, instead of insisting that it remain unbounded and uncompromising; in other words, unacted. If we are to make a radical democracy feasible, then Laclau and Mouffe are correct: a democratic logic is simply not enough. There must be some elements that make this logic appealing, interesting, noticeable, and culturally transmissible. It is through the mundane, through the objects and concepts of the everyday, that ideas and manners spread. So it is in the mundane, at least in part, that radicalization will have to take place. I must emphasize that this implies radical in its double sense: radical as politics and style that cannot be dissociated. Style, though it transmits meaning, does not quite obey a grammar; perhaps it functions as a rhetoric. Style is a way of communicating with others, of forming social bonds with a flourish. Style provides a framework for conceptualizing the creative ways to invent and reinvent hegemonic politics that will have an impact at this historical juncture to. At the same time, it is imperative that I emphasize that style itself is never enough. The counterpart to insisting on immaculate radical ideals instead of localized practices is reading commonplace fads and arbitrary actions as politically consequential. This is why it seems imperative that style reach beyond the domain of apparel and accessorizing to encompass various social behaviors, invoking its implications beyond fashion and moving toward those of method or technique. Yet, this caveat does not negate the potential of attempting to conceive of style’s importance. Style, simply put, is something both tangible and transformative, a way to locate radicalism in the world, to communicate it, and possibly transform communities.

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The Politics of Sacrifice by Naomi E. Silver

Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail […], the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. These deaths bring us face to face with the central problem posed by nationalism: what makes the shrunken imaginings of recent history (scarcely more than two centuries) generate such colossal sacrifices? —Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

To say that “the personal renunciation of their property by individuals or groups” in sacrificial rituals is what “nourishes social forces”; to say that “the social is defined by what is given up in order to reproduce it”; and to say that “sacrificing may be considered essential for the continuity of the social order” because “it is the social relations of reproduction […] that sacrificial ritual can create and maintain,” is to participate in two common assumptions about sacrificial ritual: first, that sacrifice generates and maintains communities, and second, that these sacrificial communities function as social bodies — organisms produced out of some alleged allegorical likeness between blood flowing in veins and blood ritually shed, organisms needing nourishment and generating offspring.1 In this paper, I will agree with the first of these assumptions and argue with the second. Sacrifice, I will propose, does indeed inaugurate community, but the social relations it constructs — emerging out of ritual performance — are linguistic relations both produced and bound by social law and convention. As the performative effects of ritual, these relations are subject to infelicity, instability, and disruption; they are provisional relations, equally powerful and vulnerable as both bearers and objects of performative force. By figuring sacrifice within an organicizing rhetoric of nourishment and reproduction, the analyses of Hubert and Mauss, Mizruchi, Jay, and

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others like them, risks occulting the provisional status of ritual social relations, as well as their performative dimension, and ascribing a misleading stability to the form of the sacrificial community. On a textual level — if not on the level of authorial commitment — the uninterrogated replication of this rhetoric runs the danger of an ideological confusion of linguistic and organic categories. Even in their explicit understanding of “culture” as a production of human ritual rather than a genetic inheritance, the narratives these critics unfold implicitly retain a model of community as generated through blood rather than in language. In doing so, I argue, they cooperate in the reification of existing social structures and relations of power, and in the perpetuation of acts of violence carried out in the name of community. In what follows, it will be my aim to interrogate the way community and sacrifice are articulated around the categories of blood and language. In its joining of ritual bloodshed with rituals of communal relation, and in its articulation of “nature” and “culture” as equivalent modes of communal self-definition and self-understanding, the sacrificial economy allows the tropological exchanges of rhetoric to be mistaken for the biological “exchanges” of kinship. The organic figure of the “social body” is a forceful product of this ideological confusion. But while the structure of joining and separating that makes sacrifice a ritual of contact as well as a ritual of purification may produce this figure, I will argue that a reimagination of this structure, informed by recent attempts to redefine community as a matter of language rather than blood, offers the possibility of diminishing this figure’s force, and the excess of violence that, as my epigraph suggests, is the regular effect of an organic conception of communal relations.

Imagined Communities In introducing imagination into what begins as a study of nationalistic violence in Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explores the fact that in a nation-community one’s relations with most other members of the community will never be realized in face-to-face contact. As he writes, a community “is imagined because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of

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them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). “In fact,” he continues, “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (6). Imagination thus designates here those representations that stand in for the absence of an empirical experience of human connectedness. The experience of being “face-to-face,” and the recognition of communion such an experience ostensibly entails, constitutes the base-level of our understanding of community. When empirical communion becomes impossible, it is replaced by an “image” of communion that “lives” in our minds. This “image” carries the status of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “the unique speech of the many, who come thereby to recognize one another, who communicate and commune in myth” (50). That the mythic image of our communion by which we “recognize one another” in our likeness and our shared communal character should be characterized by Anderson as “living” in our minds is no accident. We begin to see in Anderson’s analysis that an “imagined” community is not imagined only because an empirical communion can, for logistical reasons, never take place, but that the very promise of communion, as well as its apparent empirical manifestation, is never anything but representation, never anything but mythic symbolizing. It is only by narratively and ritually creating this representation as an organic, living image that the “deep, horizontal comradeship,” the “fraternity” of communion that for Anderson defines the nation, can be sustained (7) — the impossibility of organic unity is compensated by a “living” image. This ideological construct of the “living image,” and the social body that breathes life into it, so to speak, belong to an historical narrative, culminating in the modern sacrificial community, that is marked by a profound nostalgia for the always lost immediacy of communion. Anderson, for instance, focuses on the “creation” of the nation beginning “towards the end of the eighteenth century” (4), as dynastic and religious communities began to give way to more “relativized” and “territorialized” (17) notions of relatedness. One interesting subtext to his analysis is the idea that it is only when a conception of community belonging that is mediated — by a religious structure and sacred language, or by a “divinely” appointed monarch — begins to disintegrate that the immediate recognition of belonging signaled by a face-to-face communion becomes necessary to the imagination of community membership.

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In Keywords, Raymond Williams supports this account in his description of the temporal movement of the changing usage of community since its introduction into the English language in the fourteenth century. Williams describes a shift from a model of community based in a legally constructed mutual obligation to a model founded on a shared sense of unity based in alleged likeness. Indeed, both of these forms of community may be traced in the word’s etymology. Community derives from the Latin root word communis (common), which itself breaks down into two possible derivations identified in the OED. The first, com plus munis (what is indebted, bound, or obligated together), is thought to be more philologically accurate, while the second, com plus unus (what is together as one), carries the status of a folk-etymology. The story of our modern sacrificial community is the story of the gradual privileging of the second, “folk” derivation over the first. As Williams explains: From [the seventeenth century] there are signs of the distinction which became especially important from [the nineteenth century], in which community was felt to be more immediate than society […] although it must be remembered that society itself had this more immediate sense until [the eighteenth century], and civil society […] was, like society and community in these uses, originally an attempt to distinguish the body of direct relations from the organized establishment of realm or state. (75) By the nineteenth century, then, the division that we associate largely with Ferdinand Tönnies’ 1887 study Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (translated as Community and Association) — which sought to distinguish relations based in “natural will” (“the relationships which come to us from nature [and] are in their essence mutual”) from those based in “rational will” (“the purest and most abstract contract relationship” in which “Do, ut des [I give, so that you will give] is the only principle”) (Tönnies 17, 20) — had become the industrialized world’s central ideological distinction between forms of community. This distinction is characterized as one between the mediated relations brought about by “the organized establishment” of public institutions, relations that are “more formal, more abstract and more instrumental” (relations of “obligation”), on one hand, versus, on the other hand, the “immediate” relations of face-to-face contact, relations that are “more

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direct, more total and therefore more significant” (relations of “oneness”) (Williams 70, 75-6). The semantic history of the word community, then — moving from law to likeness, we might say — signals a transformation in the collective valuation and hierarchization of community relations: immediate over mediated, direct over abstract, inherently meaningful over more broadly instrumental, or, to put it somewhat differently, relations of continuity over relations of contiguity. The prevalent nineteenth-century sense of a general loss of Gemeinschaft to industrialization and nation-building is thus shown by Williams’ semantic history to be both ahistorical and nostalgic. As he points out, the earliest definitions of community describe “abstract” relationships: “(i) the commons or common people, as distinguished from those of rank […] (ii) a state or organized society” (75). We can see, then, that the sense of a loss of earlier communal forms that must somehow be reclaimed constructs a false history of community as something that had always been immediate and meaningful and was only now, under contemporary social changes, becoming more instrumental and anonymous. If the myth of community is, as Nancy writes, always “of and from the origin” (45), as a “myth of a communion” (51), it seems always to tell the story of that origin’s loss. Anderson’s organic “living image,” which must compensate for the impossibility of true face-to-face relations, can be seen to be the outgrowth and counterpart of Tönnies’ “natural will” as it is ostensibly pushed aside by the modern, calculating “rational will.” The conflict between these dual notions of community is explored further by Georges van den Abbeele in his introduction to the collection Community At Loose Ends, and with it a sense of the political stakes of this distinction. As he makes clear, a more questioning look at both the semantic and the political histories of community shows both of the senses Williams outlines — ”obligation” (com plus munis) and “oneness” (com plus unus) — to result in their own particular kinds of violence. He argues that these diverging etymologies may be linked to two central branches of Western political theory: [T]he stakes involved in choosing between a community that is mutual indebtedness and a community that is absorption into oneness are more than just philological. As if by coincidence,

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the rival etymologies point to the two classic ways the West has tried to theorize community, between the organicist notion of the “body politic” most colloquially linked with the name of Hobbes and the idea of the social contract popularized by Locke and the Enlightenment philosophes. (xi) Van den Abbeele uses the opportunity of this link to critique both forms of community — what he refers to as “organicist” and “contractual” theories of community — as being overly dependent on the Western philosophical notion of the “self-generating subject” (xii, ix). Neither “organicist” nor “contractual” theories of community are truly communal, he suggests, since their starting-point is not the communal relation as such, but a primary, autonomous subject who only subsequently enters into community, either through being absorbed into a larger “whole” or through entering freely into contracts with other such subjects. “[B]oth organicist and contractual theories of community conceal the essentialism of a subject immanent to itself,” he writes, “which speaks either for and as a whole that would precede the parts (com-unus) or as a part that is itself already a whole before its encounter with other ‘parts’ (com-munis)” (xii). For Van den Abbeele, however, the problem of taking the immanence of the subject as the springboard for thinking community is not only that it fails finally to think community — it is instead one more attempt to assume the individual subject — but more importantly that the kinds of collectivities that can be thought in this way lead to specific forms of violence. On one hand, the “organicist” theory can lead to the “nightmarish […] reduction of social differences” found in various forms of authoritarianism, absolutism, statism, totalitarianism, and fascism (the potential endpoints of thinking community in terms of “the one who stands for the multitude”); and, on the other hand, the “contractual” theory can imply the “brutal” and “strategic” leveling of differences, in the name of a presumed equality, between those who own the means of production and those who own only their own labor (xi). The essential violence signaled by the forms of community constructed from these rival etymologies resides in their reliance on the notion of immanence — of universalizing self-presence — that reduces all

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difference to a “unity” of sameness, effectively showing both definitions of community to come down to a form of com plus unus. Thus, “Both of these forms of social essentialism,” he writes, “vitiate the very condition of the communal relation […] even as those essentialisms take place in the name of preserving some mythic ‘community’” (xii). The myth of the com plus unus or social body is shown here to construct the privileged locus for sacrificial violence.

Sacrificial Communities The word sacrifice is regularly and broadly invoked to denote any kind of loss, but it is possible to define sacrifice in a more narrow and technical way. Etymologically, the act of sacrifice is the act of making something sacred; it derives from the Latin word sacrificium, a compound of sacer (sacred, consecrated) and facere (to make, to render). To be sacred, according to the OED, is to be dedicated or to be set apart for a specific religious purpose or deity. In Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity, Nancy Jay notes that sacrifice “unites worshipers in one moral community and at the same time differentiates that community from the rest of the world” (19). This double structure of joining and separating she calls the “logic of sacrifice” (17-29). On this model, the act of sacrifice inaugurates something like a “holy” community that defines itself as set apart from and in opposition to the profane, the impure, that it excludes definitionally in the performance of the ritual. The act of sacrifice thus institutes a taxonomy whose boundaries delineate sacred from profane, insider from outsider. The “logic” of sacrifice, then, appears to carry some of the responsibility for the essentializing violence of sacrificial communities. Such communities, in being generated by this dichotomizing cut of taxonomy, find their mythic origin in a necessarily violent act of differentiation and exclusion. Samuel Weber explores this process in his introduction to the volume Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination. He argues that, while “Violence […] has been widely understood as violation of the self-same in its purity by an external other,” in the face of an increase in violent acts “practiced in the name of self-determination,” we may conclude that “violence is not

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necessarily the exclusive characteristic of the other but rather, and perhaps even above all, a means through which the self, whether individual or collective, is constituted and maintained” (1-2). In particular, he suggests, this violence of self-constitution inheres in the very assumption that defines the self as self-identical — that of “the mutual exclusivity” of self and other. If this is so, Weber concludes, “violence would come to pass not in the passage from self to other, much less in that from other to self, but perhaps in the very attempt to delineate the borders that separate self from other” (2). In the act of defining the community’s form, violence takes place and finds a place. According to this ideology, the passage from self to other, man to deity, and vice versa, briefly opened up by the sacrificial exchange must be violently closed off again to avoid potential contamination. Indeed, the requirement of exclusivity is one way to explain the role of the sacrificial victim and its destruction. Within the logic of sacrifice, the sacrificial victim functions as the nodal point around which the joining and separating of the spheres of sacred and profane, god and man, insider and outsider take place. In the do ut des, the traditional narrative of sacrificial exchange, the loss or destruction of the sacrificial object both breaches and marks the communal boundary, conveying “goods” at the same time that the negativity of the victim’s death appears sublated in communal renewal.2 On the level of religious experience, for instance, the destruction of the sacrificial victim is understood to allow contact between the divine and human spheres without threat of contamination, thereby conferring the benefits of the sacred without unleashing its more dangerous elements. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, in their seminal Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice, describe this practice in the following formulations: “the thing consecrated [the sacrificial victim] serves as an intermediary between the sacrifier […] and the divinity to whom the sacrifice is usually addressed. Man and the god are not in direct contact” (11); “This is the purpose of the intermediary. Thanks to it, the two worlds that are present can interpenetrate and yet remain distinct” (99). The “mutual exclusivity” of these “two worlds” must be maintained by the violent destruction of the “intermediary” that would bring them together — the mutual interdependence of these “worlds,” however, is quickly covered over.

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I want to turn now to a specific example of an organic sacrificial community, in order to examine more carefully these acts of border-drawing and exchange, and the ways that the rhetoric of nature and culture becomes confused around them. In The Religion of the Semites, a series of lectures delivered at the University of Aberdeen from 1888 to 1891, the Victorian social anthropologist W. Robertson Smith offers a theory of sacrifice that reproduces the narrative of communal nostalgia and violence glossed by Anderson, Williams, and Van den Abbeele at the same time that it seems to stage something of a conflict between an organic model of community and a linguistic one. Smith makes the argument that in ancient times religious affiliation and belief were one and the same as family and political affiliation. “The circle into which a man was born,” he explains, was not simply a group of kinsfolk and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the family and of the state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of the particular community with which they stood connected as the human members of the social circle. (29) For this reason, he asserts, “the parallelism in ancient society between religious and political institutions is complete. […] [T]hey were parts of one whole of social custom” (20-21). The relation of god to man, just like the relation of man to man, is here described as one of intimate interconnection — men and gods seem to regard each other “face-to-face.” For Smith, then, the inquiry into “The origin and meaning of sacrifice,” which, he claims, “constitute[s] the central problem of ancient religion” (27), is by definition an inquiry into the origin and meaning of ancient communal forms — “small communities, which at the dawn of history had a political system based on the principle of kinship, and were mainly held together by the tie of blood, the only social bond which then had absolute and undisputed strength” (32). As he goes on to explain, “the bond of religion was originally coextensive with the bond of blood” (47), and “religious like political ties were transmitted from father to son” (37), such that “Traditional religion is handed down […], and therefore is in great measure an affair of race. Nations sprung from a common stock will have a common inheritance of traditional belief and usage in things sacred as well as profane” (5). The contractual, political ties of a

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com plus munis are here portrayed as coextensive with the organic unity of the com plus unus — both religious and political ties, on this model, become genealogical and get transmitted through the blood, so to speak, along with the ties of kinship in an apparently perfect congruity of linguistic and organic categories. Nonetheless, even relations such as these — relations so apparently natural and internal — seem to require an external expression in order to be fully substantiated. Indeed, suggests Smith, the public shedding of blood in sacrificial acts of devotion (“a mere vow,” he asserts, “was not complete until it was fulfilled by presenting a sacrifice” [264]) operates to reiterate these communal ties by reminding men both of their responsibilities to one another and to their god. “Thus,” he writes, “every act of worship expressed the idea that man does not live for himself only but for his fellows” (264-5), such that when “all the members of the community meet together to eat and drink at the table of their god [in a sacrificial meal] […] [they] renew the sense that he and they are altogether at one” (266). Having eaten together the synecdochal parts of the whole sacrificial animal, they momentarily do contain — and, since you are what you eat, they momentarily do become, as it were — parts of one communal whole. In the ritual of sacrifice, the community’s communion is complete. According to Nancy Jay, Smith’s work “was the first English attempt to escape the positivists’ […] impasse by focusing on the symbolic meaning of ritual and its purely social, or moral, consequences” (3). Indeed, Smith does emphasize here the function of sacrificial ritual to bring about an ethical sense of mutual responsibility among a community’s members. Specifically, the act of eating together as part of this ritual confirms the bond: “Those who sit at meat together are united for all social effects; those who do not eat together are aliens to one another” (269). In good symbolizing fashion, Smith argues that the kinship relation — the “bond of blood” holding the community together — ”is not purely an affair of birth” (273). Rather, those who eat together become entered into “a duty of perfect obligation” to one another, wherein “each man’s life is sacred to all his comrades,” and each carries for all the others “the duty of blood revenge” (272). Consequently, Smith writes, “the members of one kindred looked upon themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of

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blood, flesh and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering” (274). It is not difficult to see in these passages the emergence — one might say the birth — of an organic rhetoric within Smith’s analysis of symbolic structures, alongside a governing logic of mutual exclusivity defining kinsman and alien. Initially, ancient men and gods stand “connected” within a single “social circle” such that the relation among family, law, and faith seems to be a synechdocal one — parts that together constitute “one whole of social custom.” However, this linguistic relation becomes weighted down, as it were, over the course of Smith’s narrative, as the kindred’s esprit de corps becomes figured as the “animated mass of blood, flesh and bones” comprising the body politic. The kinship trait that unifies this community, then, is located in both the sharing and the shedding of blood: those with the “same” blood in their veins have the privilege of shedding blood together in a sacrificial ritual, and of sharing in this blood in a communal sacrificial meal; and reciprocally, those who share in this meal come to share in this “same” blood as well. The sacrificial ritual thus brings the community into being around the body of the sacrificial victim, and in the dividing and eating of it — following a careful etiquette in which, as J. Z. Smith explains, “The animal’s corpse is butchered and divided according to strict rules of rank and prestige so that its body becomes a social map of the [community]” (60) — a sort of transubstantiation takes place wherein the sacrificial body becomes transformed into a social body, and, in exchange, the social body becomes animated by the natural life-force of the shared offering. But what is the status of this organicizing rhetoric of nourishment and reproduction within Smith’s ostensibly symbolizing discourse? Is its insistence a kind of ideological aberration, or is it in fact central to the aims of his text? In partial answer to these questions, Smith offers a theory of language. He writes: To us all this [talk of blood kinship] seems mere metaphor, from which no practical consequences can follow. But in early thought there is no sharp line between the metaphorical and the literal, between the way of expressing a thing and the way of conceiving it; phrases and symbols are treated as realities. (274)

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Smith here offers his own conceptual dividing-line between “early thought” and contemporary thought that organizes a kind of evolutionary development precisely according to the degree to which organic categories and linguistic categories have been confused or differentiated. Smith clearly places his own discourse at the latter end of this spectrum, and the history he offers wants to shore up the scientificity of his analysis; but yet, the organic figures persist, and in this persistence, evince a kind of nostalgia for the “practical consequences” of metaphor and symbol. According to his narrative, we can imagine that “at the dawn of history,” when Smith’s ancient communities populated the Semitic world, if one man turned to another after a sacrificial meal and exclaimed, “You are my brother!” (or, “‘Thou art my bone and my flesh’” [274]), practical consequences would indeed follow. Certainly, as we have seen, the man so addressed would find himself caught up in a binding web of obligation, perhaps requiring his self-sacrifice in defense of the life of his new kin. But more importantly for our purposes, within Smith’s linguistic theory, such an exclamation — in bringing about a reality, or “being” a reality — exhibits the performative force of an illocution: it does what it says. But once the possibility of a performative and inaugural dimension of ritual is admitted into Smith’s ancient universe, it is quickly covered over by his privileging of the material reality of the symbol for his avatars of “early thought” (that is, its ostensibly organic status) over this symbol’s materializing potential (its linguistic effect on the organic world). Curiously, then, Smith gestures toward a modern conception of linguistic efficacy in his discourse only to relegate it once again to the far remove of “the dawn of history.”

Performative Rituals In an attempt to understand Smith’s apparent oscillation between a nostalgia for the material consequences of ancient symbolizing, on one hand, and an insistence on the irretrievable pastness of this mystified relation to language, on the other, I want to linger for a moment on the cultural and linguistic work performed by ritual. Ritual practice, like that of sacrifice, has often been understood by critics to perform the function of maintaining the established order of the community — as Bobby C.

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Alexander puts it, for instance, it performs the function of “keeping things in place or restoring things to their places” when “daily life [becomes] interrupted or threatened by crises, conflicts, and other disruptions” (141). Within the terminology employed by philosophers of language, and that J. L. Austin develops in How to Do Things with Words, this work of maintenance would appear to be ritual’s constative function — referring a community back to the stable truth of its origin and existence, of its being “altogether as one.” However, in his Introduction to Violent Origins, Burton Mack points out that ritual constitutes an event that seems to “happen ‘as if not for the first time,’” and as such, it may be said to repeat or reenact not some originary action, but rather its “own precursory occasion(s)” (66). To follow up on Mack’s formulation, then, we can say that, as repetition or reenactment, ritual is always engaged in a structure of citation — it is always, in effect, “quoting” an earlier enactment. But as Mack also proposes, the fact that a ritual like sacrifice must be repeated suggests that such a “theory of ritual is actually an account of ritual’s inadequacy” (65). From this point of view, a community’s repeated enactment of the sacrificial ritual becomes not simply a “nourishment” or “reproduction” of something definitively established, but rather an attempt to institute something that has never fully coalesced into being (a structural problem already located in the double work of the sacrificial victim that both marks and breaches the communal boundary). To perceive ritual as simply the constatation or mimesis of an already stable communal structure is thus to fall prey to the ideological trick whereby an inaugural and performative act “masquerades,” as Austin puts it, as a straightforward statement of fact (4). I understand the apparent failure of ritual repetition to perform the communal work it promises to be an effect of what Austin calls performative infelicity. “Infelicity,” he writes, “is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts” (18-19). One way to understand performative infelicity is as a failure of linguistic reference: in a ritual citation the significations and associations brought to bear by a speech act do not exclusively and reliably refer back to their prior context, despite the historical traces sedimented in the citation. In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Judith Butler

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explains this referential “unreliability” by turning to the temporality of ritual repetition. She writes: The illocutionary speech act performs its deed at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment. The “moment” in ritual is a condensed historicity: it exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance. (3) Performative infelicity, then, results from a kind of uncontrollable historicity proper to conventional, ritual speech, such that “the past and future of the [performative] utterance cannot be narrated with any certainty” (3). To return, then, to what I called Smith’s oscillation between an attempt to capture performative linguistic efficacy in his own discourse and to distance it as a symptom of “early thought,” I discern two conflicting impulses. In the first place, as I suggested earlier, Smith’s organic rhetoric evinces a kind of nostalgia for the material consequences of symbolization he attributes to the ancients — a nostalgia that sits uneasily side by side with his scientificity. One way to understand this nostalgia is by contrasting his view of ancient communities with the implicit view he offers of his own times. In his theory of linguistic development, for instance, when he writes that “To us all this seems mere metaphor,” he seems to suggest a certain emptiness to the modern conception of language, however “rational” it may be — an emptiness that finds its corollary in modern communities. He writes, for instance, that To us kinship has no absolute value, but is measured by degrees, and means much or little, or nothing at all, according to its degree and other circumstances. In ancient times, on the contrary, the fundamental obligations of kinship had nothing to do with degrees of relationship, but rested with absolute and identical force on every member of the clan. (273) By contrast with this modern circumstantial and contingent mode of relation, “early thought,” though “primitive,” seems in its “literality” to promise a more truly communal experience and understanding of relatedness.3

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If nostalgia for a more stable and efficacious ritual communal form is one impulse behind Smith’s oscillation regarding the proper relation of symbol and reality, another may be a sense of a loss of control implicit in the breakdown in the critic’s discourse of the neat conceptual distinction between language and matter. The scientificity of an anthropological discourse like Smith’s has the apparently regrettable consequence of causing what we might call the “magic” at the heart of ritual to disappear the more closely focused its microscopes become; however, it also promises to ward off a kind of “magical” or “divine” ritual effect that threatens to escape its control — an effect already hinted at in Smith’s theory of language. In a religious context, an act of sacrifice is said to “unleash” the disruptive power of the sacred — what Hubert and Mauss refer to as the potential “havoc” produced by “the religious energy released” in the act (12). The disruptiveness of this force is attributed to the impossibility of fully controlling the action of the divine power, despite the ritual precautions taken to channel it toward a desired outcome. Transposed into a secular context, this ungovernable “divine power” names the performative force — and potential infelicity — of a speech act. In both a religious and a secular context, then, this ungovernable performative force disrupts a community’s ability to ground a stable knowledge of its origin and boundaries in a ritual act of sacrifice that would reliably refer it back to that origin. The organic body politic provides for Smith an apparently stable object of study that linguistic relations — with their insistent risk of infelicity and loss of control, their unreliable and aberrant referentiality — can never do. Unlike the ritual performative utterance, whose “past and future […] cannot be narrated with any certainty,” Smith’s critical narrative of sacrificial communion appears to remain neatly contained within an ancient past — close enough to recognize and to desire, yet far enough away ostensibly to pose no threat.

Linguistic Communities But in “scientifically” foreclosing the potential messiness of his own conceptual risk-taking, Smith, in essence, repeats the sacrificial gesture of

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purification and boundary stabilization.4 The challenge Smith’s oscillation poses for us is how to give play to the materializing linguistic potential he identifies in his subjects’ communal sacrificial rituals without falling prey, so to speak, to an organicizing ideology that simply reproduces the sacrificial social body. Smith wants to limit sacrificial ritual to its ideological appearance as constatation or mimesis of an existing reality — to its ostensible function of “keeping things in place or restoring things to their places” when disorder or disruption threaten. Sacrificial ritual becomes here a means for warding off a loss of control. As long as ritual must perform such stabilizing work — as long, that is, as our idea of community requires the reliability and the self-referentiality of communion — we can expect that the organic rhetoric of the social body will persist. But perhaps we can also turn more and more to an analysis of ritual’s performative dimensions, and to the promise — rather than the peril — of the provisional and destabilizing contacts inaugurated in a linguistic relation. To this end, let us take a closer look at the sacrificial structure of joining and separating. As we have seen, this “logic” of sacrifice functions according to a dichotomy of self and other that violently imposes a border and an identity in its attempt to control communal purification and safety. Yet this control is always only partial at best, interrupted both by the double work of the sacrificial victim, the ritual’s structural center, as well as by the iterative dimension of ritual itself. But if sacrifice is a ritual of contact as well as a ritual of purification, what happens to the community it inaugurates if we place our emphasis on this moment of contact, rather than on its sublation in the service of the community’s greater communion? Is it possible for this sacrificial structure of joining and separating to be resignified for more ethical and less violent — for linguistic rather than organic — communal ends? In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy offers one way to approach these questions. In his own attempt to counter the familiar communal narrative of communion, he writes that “What is at stake is the articulation of community. ‘Articulation’ means, in some way, ‘writing,’ which is to say, the inscription of a meaning whose transcendence or presence is indefinitely and constitutively deferred” (80). The act of joining and separating centered in the object of sacrifice is an act of articulation; it is only in the ideological sublation of this act that the inscriptional force

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of the sacrificial cut is given a transcendent terminus. Considered in this way, the linguistic dimension of the sacrificial ritual comes to displace its bloodier modes, allowing the sacrificial boundary to be thought not as an absolute division but as a limit or threshold that opens out to an exterior otherness rather than enclosing an immanent self-sameness. What comes to define community here is its persistent openness — openness not to an other identity, but to a commonality that is never completed or closed off. As Giorgio Agamben suggests in The Coming Community, what lies on the other side of the communal boundary — what has in fact been its constitutive outside — may, now that our emphasis has shifted, no longer be identified as a determinate other community, profane, foreign, dangerous, but as a “pure exteriority” that “must remain empty” (67). He writes: “The outside is not another space that resides beyond a determinate space, but rather, it is the passage, the exteriority that gives it access […]. The threshold is not, in this sense, another thing with respect to the limit; it is, so to speak, the experience of the limit itself ” (68). The community at this limit can no longer occur between subjects immanent to themselves, but between singularities stripped of their attributes of self-sameness and existing in common “devoid of any representable identity.” Such existence “form[s] a community without affirming an identity,” a “co-belong[ing] without any representable condition of belonging” (86). The singularity so constituted has no stake in defending the “purity” of the individual or collective self, because the identity which fixed that self as self-same makes no appearance and has no place at this threshold. If we are bound together in our common linguistic being and our exposure to this limit, it is a commonality that necessarily resists the immanence of essentialization and totalization. What is offered here is a new mode of imagining the communal ritual of joining and separating. What, then, is the relation articulated at this boundary? It is no social body, for such an organism requires the attributes of identity. Agamben describes the community enabled here as one not of being, but of “beingcalled”: “Being-called — the property that establishes all possible belongings (being-called-Italian, -dog, -Communist) — is also what can bring them all back radically into question” (10). What Agamben marks here is the provisional nature of such a community. It is called into being in moments of contact, but that contact is never reified into identity. But if this com-

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munity is inaugurated in response to a call, Butler notes that this response must also inaugurate a responsibility to both the powers and limits of linguistic being, that is, to our shared ritual history of linguistic relatedness. This ritual performative moment of being-called, she writes, “founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility, one that more fully acknowledges the way in which the subject is constituted in language, how what it creates is also what it derives from elsewhere” (15-16). It would be inaccurate, however, to view this linguistic communal relation as free of violence. While it operates otherwise from the violent joining and separating of the sacrificial social body, this linguistic relatedness, in its very ritual interdependence — its state of creating what it also derives from elsewhere — perhaps paradoxically exposes the subject of this relation to what Butler calls a “linguistic vulnerability” (30). The linguistic communal relation, according to this analysis, has the possibility of violence built into it — the moment of being-called, Butler notes, can be experienced as a violent interpellation into sacrificial identity and a kind of linguistic death (163). We can perhaps sympathize here with Smith’s oscillation regarding the proper alliance of organic and linguistic categories: a genuinely communal relation appears at this point to be a tenuous and vulnerable mode of being, always at risk of succumbing, on one hand, to the ideological violence of an organic sacrificial logic, and on the other, to the dissolution of linguistic life. The communal narrative of linguistic openness and interdependence we have begun to imagine here does not sustain itself on the “blood” of sacrificial exchanges and compensations around a social body. Rather, the linguistic death that this form of social relation always risks marks the site of a ritual moment of response and responsibility that we might call community — the site of a communal exposure we might call ethics.

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Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

The quoted passages are from, respectively, Hubert and Mauss (102), Mizruchi (23), and Jay (37). My aim in citing them here is not to single these critics out for particular censure — their work on sacrifice is among the best — but rather to show how commonplace and unthought this organic rhetoric remains. As Jacques Derrida notes in “The Law of Genre,” the law of generic or taxonomic purity itself engenders “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” because “The trait that marks membership inevitably divides […]. It gathers together the corpus and, at the same time […] keeps it from closing, from identifying itself with itself. This axiom of non-closure or non-fulfillment enfolds within itself the condition for the possibility and the impossibility of taxonomy” (227, 231). This peculiarity of the taxonomic trait describes the structural function of the sacrificial victim. On this topic, Susan Mizruchi writes, “The most revealing aspect of [Smith’s] Lectures on the Religion of the Semites from an historical point of view is its nostalgia” (61). “Lectures can be read,” she claims “as a variation on [Ferdinand] Tonnies’s [sic] Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, now applied to an ‘antique’ past and its sacrificial rites. Once expressive of close ‘natural’ bonds, these rituals gradually receded into complex expressions of social interdependence and rivalry” (61). See also her gloss of Smith’s modern notion of kinship “by degrees” in her recent article, “The Place of Ritual in Our Time” (473). Commenting on the positivistic approach to their material of many anthropologists, Nancy Jay remarks that “To bring ‘sacrifice’ under our control as a perfectly defined object of analysis, to cut out and classify its constituent elements, is more like doing sacrifice than understanding it” (xxvi).

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New Feminist Communities For The Third Wave by Kirsten Campbell

Third wave is a member-driven, multiracial, multi-sexuality national nonprofit organization devoted to feminist and youth activism for change. Our goal is to harness the energy of young women and men by creating a community in which members can strategize, and ultimately, take action. By using our experiences as a starting point, we can create a diverse community and cultivate a meaning response. —Heywood and Drake, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism

My political generation — that generation born after the 1960s — has been typically characterized as suffering a “general lack of cohesiveness or continuity, as well as a lack of political conviction in the face of a more politically conservative environment” (Alfonso and Trigilio 11). Yet this same political generation has begun to mobilize as “third-wave feminisms.”1 Emerging from the work of the first and second feminist movements, the third wave represents a sense of a renewed activism and a rethinking of identity and sexuality within a politics of coalition.2 Third-wave feminisms “emphasize ambiguity, contradiction, multiple identities, and hybridity [and] strategically collect these voices together in the name of continued struggle” (Zita 2). This continuation of the feminist project represents an engaged and active political movement whose pluralist approach is committed to developing a heterodox politics. Third-wave feminisms have begun to reformulate their politics using the insights of postmodern theory and feminisms of “difference.” Because of these theoretical and political positions, the second wave “has become a source of rebellion and regeneration for a newly emerging third wave” (Zita 1). Third-wave feminisms have rejected the apparent essentialism that appeared to inform much second-wave praxis. They argue that the fixed properties assigned by the second wave to its concepts of subjectivity and collectivity prevent a new configuration of politics.

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For the third wave, the political community of feminism already exists but is extremely problematic. The third wave contestation of the second wave draws upon the call by feminists of color “for a ‘new subjectivity’ in what was, up to that point, white, middle-class, first world feminism” (Orr 37). This new political subject of feminism, which reflects “our multiple positionalities,” requires “broadening our view of who and what constitutes ‘feminist community’” (Walker xxxiii, xxxv). JeeYeun Lee argues that “this is one of the primary hallmarks of young women’s activism today: We realize that coming together and working together are by no means easy” (211), yet are essential for feminist politics. For this reason, the problem of how to reconceive the idea of a “feminist community” is central to the third wave project. The third wave undertakes this reconception of “feminist communities” in order to produce new feminist subjects, projects, and politics. Elissa Marder argues that “when one ‘speaks as a feminist’ in the name of the feminist project, one must say ‘we’” (163). In the thirdwave anthologies, there are “successive invocations of the pronoun ‘we’.” For example, Deborah Siegel analyzes the use of “we” in the third-wave anthologies, such as Barbara Findlen’s Listen Up. She argues that Findlen deploys a feminist “we” “in outer-directed proclamations of postfeminist feminist defiance, or in descriptions of the historical conditions that shape contributor’s lives.” In this way, “the third wave ‘we’ is frequently mobilized as a strategic essentialism” (59). However, that mobilization of a strategic essentialism is not only, as Siegel claims, a representation of a political generation. Rather, it represents membership of a political movement and invokes a political community. For this reason, in order to reconceive the notion of “feminist community,” it is first necessary to consider the problem of “[h]ow do we construct a feminist ‘we’?” (Bauer and Oliver 1). That problem involves addressing the constitution of political communities. To address this question requires an account of feminist communities that considers the production of political subjects and the formation of their relations to other subjects in political movement. Judith Butler argues that the feminist “we” has a “phantasmatic status” (Gender Trouble 142), implying that it is psychically constituted. If a political community is “phantasmatic,” then it is a phantasm that has political

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effect in that it forms political subjects and collectivities. A theory of the production of feminist communities therefore needs to consider the psychic construction of that political and collective “we.” In psychoanalysis, “identification” is a key concept for understanding the construction of the relationship between an “I” and an “other.” This concept lies at the center of the psychoanalytic account of the production of the subject, because it is “the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted” (Laplanche and Pontalis 206). For Freud, identification is the “earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person” (“Group Psychology” 134). It constitutes and establishes a relation between the inner and outer worlds of the subject, establishing a dialectical and mobile relation between inner and external reality. The earliest form of emotional tie to others is identification, which also forms the social tie between subjects. In his study of the psychical dynamics of groups, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), Freud argues that identification is the key psychic mechanism of the group. It produces the libidinal ties between a leader of the group and its members, and between each member of the group (124). For Freud, those emotional ties form the relationship between members of a group, because “social feelings for other persons rest on identifications with other people” (“The Ego” 377). In this way, it forms a relationship between subject and others, constituting both the subject and its relation to other subjects. If this process establishes subjectivity and collectivity, then it is necessary to consider what sort of identification or “emotional tie” forms feminist subjectivity and intersubjectivity. To consider the production of feminist communities in terms of identification is not to ignore the material history of feminist politics and hence to reduce the social to the psychic. Feminist politics are produced by androcentric social orders that privilege masculine subjects. This history of oppressions founds feminist politics — and those oppressions are demonstrably material. Nor does such an argument entail claiming that the foundation of politics is identity, or that identification is the only route to political activism. Such an argument would reduce the political to the psychic. Nevertheless, it is important not to argue a theory that offers an exclusionary choice between politics and identification, since while identification is political, politics is also identificatory. To understand the

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formation of political community it is necessary to understand the politics of identifications.

Loving The Other As Self: The Identificatory Relation Gayatri Spivak points out that feminism asks “not merely who am I? but who is the other woman?” (150). This question suggests the production of an emotional tie to another: an identification with other women. In that process, a subject recognizes a relation to other women. The identificatory relation forms an emotional tie to, and affective relation with, other women. In the affective relation, a subject identifies her self in the other woman. This affective relation to others is a particular type of identification. According to Freud, it is “direct and immediate,” and is an operation of primary identification (“The Ego” 370). In that operation, the identificatory object is incorporated into the ego of the subject, changing the structure of the ego and, hence, changing the self of the subject (“The Ego” 368). Diana Fuss describes identification as “the detour through the other that defines a self ” (2). In that process, the other woman becomes part of the self. Using Freud’s account, an identification with other women can be seen as a primary identification of a feminist subject that forms the nucleus of that subject. In that assimilatory process, the figure of the other woman is brought from the “outside” to the “inside” of the subject, changing the subject in terms of its relation to both self and other. The incorporation of the figure of the other woman grounds the production of that subject in an identification with other women. It unsettles and disrupts a phallic identification that would otherwise constitute the subject. That process can be characterized in another, more obviously political, way. An identification with other women is disruptive because, to use Luce Irigaray’s evocative phrase, “what if these ‘commodities’ refused to go to ‘market’?” (196). With this metaphor, Irigaray imagines the possibility that women refuse to participate in the symbolic and real exchange economies that constitute our social order. In her construction of a relation to an other woman, a feminist subject refuses to go to market, and so refuses to compete against other women. Instead, she sees her relation to them. This

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insistence on a relation to other women disrupts a Symbolic order that predicates the subject as masculine. This primary feminist identification of a relationship to other women can be linked to the production of the female subject. In the psychoanalytic account of the formation of female subjectivity, a relationship to another woman, the mother, constitutes the female subject. The relation to the “lost” maternal object thereby structures that subject. A primary identification with other women reproduces the originary relation of the young girl and her mother, because it reproduces that affective relation to the mother as an other woman. In this way, an affective relationship to other women finds its antecedent in the formation of a female subject position. Kaja Silverman argues that “without activating the homosexual-maternal fantasmic, feminism would be impossible” (125). This affective relation is possible because of the production of the female subject in relation to the maternal. The psychoanalytic account of the formation of the female subject provides a means of understanding how an identificatory relation to the maternal permits mobility of identifications. Crucially, this relation to the maternal permits a non-phallic identification with other women, because that identification can be constructed not through a relation to the father but through a relation to another woman, the mother. Because female subjectivity is not defined by the phallic function nor secured by the paternal figure, the female subject has the structural possibility of a non-phallic relation to other women. For example, Bhargavi Mandava and Lisa Bowleg offer typical third wave accounts of the relationship between their identification with their mother as a woman and their sense of feminist community. For Bowleg, “[i]f alliances between women symbolize feminism in its broadest sense, then my entire girlhood was a lesson in feminist training” (48). However, these primary affective relations invoke the incorporation of a relationship to another woman, rather than a loving pre-Oedipal symbiosis. This affective relationship does not reproduce pre-Oedipal maternal relations without symbolic mediation, since the subject is already produced as subject and is therefore already within language. Rather, it reproduces the structure of maternal identification, such that the operation of primary identification constructs an affective relation to another subject. For this reason, a primary identification with other women reproduces the maternal

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relation in all its complexity and difficulty. That complexity and difficulty is evident in the conflict between self-described second-wave mothers and third-wave daughters (Detloff ). A primary affective relation to other women does not itself produce a feminist subject. This relation does not guarantee or secure a political subject, because it does not necessarily produce political commitments to feminism. Aminatta Forna points out that “[s]isterhood is not a natural bond or empathy, it simply requires a sufficient number of shared political concerns” (151). However, a primary identification permits a relation to other women that disrupts the operation of phallic identification, and thereby opens the subject to other possible models of the subject, including those of feminism. For this reason, it is possible to politicize that affective relation and then to reconstruct it as a political identification with the feminist project.

Political Identifications Freud’s theory of intersubjective identification in “Group Psychology” provides a useful way to begin to elaborate the construction of those political identifications. In “Group Psychology,” Freud describes two identificatory relations within groups: a vertical relation to the leader and a horizontal relation between the members of the group (124). For Freud, vertical identification secures the relation of the leader to the members of the group. Each member of the group adopts the perceived attributes of its leader, and in doing so replaces his or her ego-ideal with that of an idealized model of the leader. In this way, each member of the group comes to possess the same ego-ideal. Horizontal identification secures the relation between members of the group, as each member of the group identifies with the ego-ideal of other members. However, within a feminist “group” there is ideally no leader. While it is possible to nominate a set of “leaders” of the political movement, their status as “leaders” is not equivalent to the prescribed, fixed status of a Pope of the Church or a General of the Army that Freud describes. Further, the status of such “leaders” is extremely mobile. The feminist movement cannot be said to have a leader of the type that Freud describes. Rather, it generally

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rejects “leaders” because it insists upon an anti-hierarchical politics, in which “groups” attempt to organize themselves within models of co-operative and collective decision-making. In this sense, feminism attempts to resist the vertical tie of group member to leader while emphasizing the horizontal tie between members of its communities. How then is it possible to account for the operation of collective political identifications within the feminist movement? Freud suggests that what he calls “leading ideas” can serve in the place of the ego-ideal provided by the leader of a group, and as such can secure the intersubjective relations of the members of a group (“Group Psychology” 125). Drawing on Freud, Teresa Brennan suggests that a feminist “body of writing” can serve as an ego-ideal (10). In terms of the subject, then, the “leading ideas” of feminism can serve as the ego-ideal of the vertical tie of identification. According to this model, each subject identifies with, and thus incorporates, the “leading ideas” of feminist politics. In this way, the body of ideas that form “feminist politics” serve as the ego-ideal for the subject. They function as the object that the subject identifies with and “wants to be like” (Freud, “Group Psychology” 135). For example, Veronica Chambers offers a typical third-wave description of her encounter with feminist ideas, in which she discovers “a context for my political existence. A vocabulary for my situation. An agenda to empower myself and others” (21). However, Brennan suggests that this process is more complex than the assimilation of the abstraction called “feminist politics.” Brennan perceives not only a body of ideas but also “a person, people” as objects of feminist identifications (10). For instance, Rebecca Walker describes how “[l]inked with my desire to be a good feminist was [also] a deep desire to be accepted, claimed and loved by a feminist community that included my mother, godmother, aunts and close friends” (xxx). This relationship to her “feminist community” is one of an identificatory “wanting to be like.” Functioning in a very concrete and literal way as role-models, these people are also the objects of vertical ego-ideal identification. The subject takes both the ideas of the feminist movement and also its members as its identificatory object. Findlen notes in her introduction to Listen Up, for example, that “many of the writers in this anthology cite the writings and actions of older feminists as an integral part of their own development and beliefs” (xv). The vertical

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tie to a politics and to persons forms a feminist subject. In this way, the incorporation of those feminist politics and persons into the ego of the subject form feminist subjects. However, the feminist movement is not simply constituted in a series of identificatory ties of each member to an “ideal.” The collective nature of a political movement implies more than each individual’s commitment to a set of ideas or role-model. It also implies that these individuals perceive themselves as members of a political movement and that these individuals identify with each other as members of that movement. Membership of the feminist movement involves identification with the other members of the movement, as well as with the ideals that produce political engagement. Although the community of feminism and its ideals are subject to contestation, the relationship between its members forms the movement itself. There is, it seems, another “emotional tie” at work in the formation of the political community of feminism. How, then, do we understand that emotional tie? In his discussion of the psychology of the group, Freud argues that in addition to the vertical tie of identification to the “ideal,” there is also a tie between group members. Freud argues that in this relation between group members, each member has “put one and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” (“Group Psychology” 147). This horizontal tie between members of a group can be seen within the feminist movement. Members recognize others as “feminists” because of a shared commitment to a political project. Each member identifies in others a shared ego-ideal of “feminist politics”. In this sense, each subject has put “one and the same object” — feminism — in the place of their ego-ideal and “have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego.” That identification creates a relation between subjects as members of a collective movement. For example, in the introduction of To Be Real, Walker argues that “these thinkers stake out an inclusive terrain from which to actively seek the goals of social equality and individual freedom they all share” (xxxv). As a result, political identification between feminist subjects constructs a feminist community. These ego-ideal identifications form a feminist “we.” Brennan suggests that the ego-ideal identification of feminists offsets the categorical imperatives of the patriarchal super-ego, thus permitting

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an evasion of the commands of the Father, and making it possible to think “outside” patriarchy (10). In terms of a psychoanalytic account of political identification, a feminist ego-ideal substitutes for that of the patriarch’s. However, the possibility of such a process also suggests that the Father’s intervention may not be as effective as he would wish. In psychoanalytic theory, the paternal super-ego is not necessarily effectively secured in, nor secures, the formation of the female subject. However, that failure of the paternal super-ego permits the subject to evade its normative injunctions and hence creates a possibility of feminist ego-ideal identification. The formation of the political community of feminism therefore involves three forms of identifications. The first is an affective primary relation with other women. The second and third involve ego-ideal identifications with the “ideals” of feminist politics and with others as members of a political movement. In Freudian terms, both horizontal and vertical ties form feminist subjects. An example of this process can be seen in Elissa Marder’s description of the label “feminist” as “seemingly personally conferred (I declare myself a feminist) and collectively confirmed (I am acknowledged by others as participating in feminism)” (149). This personal conferral — “I identify myself as” — and that collective confirmation — “I identify myself with others and others identify me as” — produce feminist subjects and the relation between them, forming the political communities of feminism. Feminist identifications thus serve important functions within the feminist movement. If identification is “the detour through the other that defines a self,” then that process forms a feminist “self.” Primary identification enables a feminist subject to engage with other women. It institutes a relation between female subjects, and enables a recognition of, as well as a relation to, other women. In this way, it enables feminists to identify with other women and to imagine a relation to them. Fuss describes how Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic theory repeatedly calls for “‘an ethics of mutual identifications’ […] a world of reciprocal recognitions” (144). The construction of an affective relation to other women provides the possibility of an ethics of mutual identifications, and reciprocal recognitions of, other women. The operations of ego-ideal identifications enable feminist subjects to recognize and imagine themselves as a political movement. After all,

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feminism is a movement of people, an imagined community that coheres in demonstrations, writing, meetings, actions, projects, conferences, and other forms of activism. The mechanism of ego-ideal identifications enables feminists to perceive themselves as members of a movement. A “political community” in this sense is constituted as a collectivity through the identifications of its members, both with the ideals of feminist politics and with other feminists as members of that community. This political relation enables feminist conversations to take place, because it forms a feminist “I” and a feminist “we.” Feminist subjects are not therefore “autonomous, self-making, self-determining subject[s]” (Alarcón 141). Rather, they are produced in their relation to other subjects and to feminist politics.

Loving The Self As Other: Imaginary Identification This description of identificatory relations between political subjects should not be mistaken for a dream that has haunted feminism from its second-wave inception — the myth of a “sisterhood” of women united by their identity as women. Identificatory ties are a means of establishing both commonality and difference. Identification is a complex process that works to produce both imaginary unity with and differentiation from the other. Lacanian theory provides a means of further understanding this complicated process. While drawing on Freudian theory, Lacan’s account provides a more complex theory because of his distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification. This distinction allows the understanding of the different identificatory processes at work in the production of feminist communities, and to draw out the politics of feminist identifications. Like Freud, Lacan recognizes the importance of identification in the formation of the subject, but inflects the Freudian theory through his own theory of the mirror stage. Malcolm Bowie points out that Lacan understands primary identification as being formed in the mirror stage, and accordingly emphasizes its narcissistic and egoistic aspects (33-34). The mirror stage can be understood “as an identification” which forms the ego-ideal and hence precipitates the ego (Lacan, Écrits 2). For Lacan,

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identifications are always situated in the imaginary order because they reflect the ego’s narcissistic perceptions. This Lacanian theory is crucial to understanding feminist identifications because it describes the other side of identification — the desire of the ego that the other mirror the self.3 Lacan argues that in imaginary identifications, the object is caught in the ego’s méconnaissance or misrecognition of the other as self. The ego misrecognizes the other in its specular reflections, perceiving the other as identical to itself. The identificatory object is known only as the same as self, and with that misrecognition comes a refusal of difference. In a desire for sameness, the ego perceives only those qualities that are identical to it, so that it refuses difference in the object. The identificatory object functions not as an Other but as an imaginary counterpart, an other which is imagined by the self to reflect it. Those imaginary misrecognitions can be seen at work in the feminist movement when a feminist subject, while identifying with other women, does not perceive another woman’s difference, but instead only her similarity. An example of a literal méconnaissance can be seen in Quandra Prettyman’s description of her experience of a second-wave feminism in which “a large number of white women wish to look at us without observing that we are black” (240). The third-wave feminist Veronica Chambers offers a similar critique of the classical liberal feminism of Naomi Wolf (27). Such imaginary identifications produce the effect of a refusal to recognize the differences between women. In refusing the differences between women, imaginary relations do not recognize other identifications that women may themselves have. The third wave emerges from the political effects of such a refusal of difference. It contends that feminism cannot reflect only the concerns of white, middle-class women. Instead, it must “come to terms with the multiple, constantly shifting bases of oppression in relation to the multiple, interpenetrating axes of identity” (Heywood and Drake 3). The imaginary refusal of the difference between women is symptomatic of the relation of aggressivity to, and mastery of, the others of imaginary identification. In this relation to others, the other is appropriated to the self in an act of violence against it, which reduces the other to an imaginary counterpart whose difference has been mastered. If the other insists upon its difference, it is greeted with a hostility born of an anxiety in relation to difference to the egoistic self. Such an identificatory

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operation “is itself an imperial process, a form of violent appropriation in which the Other is deposed and assimilated into the lordly domain of self ” (Fuss 145). The relation of aggression to, and mastery of, the other is evident in feminist identifications. For example, in 1981 bell hooks described how: as I moved from one women’s group to another trying to offer a different perspective, I met with hostility and resentment. White women liberationists saw feminism as “their” movement and resisted any efforts by non-white women to critique, challenge or change its direction. (190) In hooks’ description of the aggression and hostility that greeted her, the other side of feminist identifications are revealed. Hooks describes imaginary perceptions of commonality in which the feminist subject is constructed as “white” and a woman of “color” as an other to the white feminist. When the “other” insists on her difference, she is met with the aggression of an imaginary identification that seeks to master difference and reduce it to identity. Typically of the third wave, Chambers (27) and Lee (209) identify the aggression and fixity of such imaginary identifications as one of the most difficult problems facing the third-wave reconstruction of feminist community. As Lee also points out, an acknowledgement of the multiple axes of oppression is crucial to the contemporary rearticulation of feminist politics (211). Because an imaginary relation to the other refuses to acknowledge the politics of the differences between women, it fails to rearticulate a contemporary feminist politics. For example, third-wave feminist Aminatta Forna argues that “middle-class women have the luxury and capability of deciding that feminism is over” (151). However, other groups of women cannot afford to make that decision (and indeed, one could suggest, neither can middle-class women). Forna argues that: [a] third wave of feminism […] will witness other groups of women, such as black, Asian and/or immigrant women, disabled women, impoverished women or mothers who still have concerns to be met, successfully recreating the movement in their own image. (150)

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The imaginary mastery of an other reproduces the social relations of power which enable a subject to enact that mastery. That reproduction leaves the operation of power within the feminist movement unchallenged. Some feminists are more privileged than others in terms of material and cultural capital, and some have racist, classist, and homophobic relations to others, including other feminists. In her discussion of discursive competence, Sara Mills points out that “factors (both actual and perceived) such as education, family background, age, gender, race, general self-confidence, knowledge-base, voice quality, past interactive experience, and others can lead to a person being interactionally in a position of power” (6). Of course, “a person” includes women. The feminist movement is not exempt from the operations of power any more than the broader social world is, just as a feminist identification does not necessarily render its bearer less likely to participate in those operations. The operations of power enable some subjects rather than others to insist that is their self, and not another, that constitutes feminism, and enables certain identifications to be privileged over others. In its refusal to recognize the politics of power within the feminist movement, imaginary identification condemns feminists to reproducing rather than resisting those politics of power. A feminist identification that operates in the imaginary order thus reproduces the violence of contemporary social relations. The feminist movement is imagined as the relation of a woman to another identical to herself, rather than as formed in the negotiated relations between women. That woman treats her relation to other women with all the contempt that power gives — the power to refuse another’s subjectivity. An imaginary feminist identification that leads a subject to refuse the particularity and specificity of another subject condemns her to participation in “the same falsely universalizing pretensions as the masculine knowledge originally critiqued [by feminist theory]” (Lennon and Whitford 3). In an identification in the imaginary register, “feminism” shifts from being an identificatory object to an object of idealization. The discourses of feminism are rendered in the singular, so that feminisms are rendered as feminism, and conceived as producing not many feminist subjects but a universal “feminist” subject. Feminism becomes fixed in the narcissistic gaze of a subject who is able to gaze at others in this way because the social order gives her the power to do so.

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Such an act of aggression and mastery militates against an ethics of mutual recognitions. Without a recognition of the difference of an other, a feminist subject cannot have an ethical relation to that other because the other is denied its existence as other and as such is allowed to exist only as the subject desires it to. Reciprocal relations require two subjects, not one. The other woman is not allowed to be herself, but only to reflect the self of the powerful subject. Imaginary identifications constitute the possibility of the recognition of, and relation to, others because they form relations between subjects. However, in the relation of self to other women, there also needs to be recognition of the alterity of the other woman. She must be recognized not only in her similarity and commonality but also in her difference and non-identity.

A Symbolic Relationship To The Other: Symbolic Identification Lacan proposes another form of identificatory relation besides that of narcissistic, imaginary incorporation: symbolic identification. For Lacan, identification in the symbolic register is both part of the formation of the subject, and a psychic process of the subject. Lacan’s theory draws on Freud’s description of the process of the assimilation of an aspect or characteristic of another outlined in “Group Psychology,” in which the subject identifies with a trait of another subject. In terms of the development of the subject, Lacan argues that symbolic identification is a process of introjection of the trait unaire — the unitary trait — of the symbolic Father (Four Fundamentals 256-57). In that process, the subject identifies with the phallic signifier as the mark of the Father, and thereby incorporates the Symbolic father as an I. In Lacan’s account, the child’s assimilation of the figure of the Symbolic father enables it to separate from the mother, because it introduces a symbolic break in the imaginary and dyadic relationship of infant and mother. The process of identification with the signifier enables the subject to perform the psychic and discursive operations of differentiation and symbolization of difference between the subject and its objects and between those objects (Lacan, Écrits 65). The signifier enables the subject to separate from its objects through a substitution of signifier for signified, and so the subject

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enters the field of representation. In this way, the separation, differentiation, and “naming” of the subject is posited in signification. Its entry into the Symbolic order of language produces the subject as subject. Symbolic identification thus also marks the subject’s entry into the social order. By the process of introjection of the signifier, the subject enters the chain of signifiers that constitute the discursive tie between subjects. This process produces the subject within discourse and hence within the symbolic relation between subjects. Symbolic identification is a process which produces the subject as “être parlant,” a subject of symbolic exchange in the social order. In the operation of symbolic identification, the subject introjects a signifier (Lacan, Freud’s Papers 141). In this process, it incorporates the signifier into its ego, where it forms its ego-ideal (Écrits 306). The subject also thereby introjects the signifying chain of discourse that is attached to the signifier. The operation of symbolic identification can be seen in Lacan’s description of the production of the subject in the Discourse of the Master (his reformulation of the Oedipus complex) in which introjection of the Master signifier produces the subject. The Master signifier functions as the symbolic element which represents the subject as subject (L’envers 178). In the four discourses, that identification with the Master signifier pulls with it the signifying chains (S2) or discourses which are attached to it. However, in primary and secondary feminist identifications, there does not appear to be an introjection of the paternal signifier as a representative of the Father’s Law. Therefore, either symbolic identification is absent from the production of feminist subjects, which condemns that subject to the narcissistic reflection of imaginary relations, or else it does operate, but not as an identification with the paternal signifier. While Lacan proposes that symbolic identification is an assimilation of the paternal figure, he also describes it more generally as a process of introjection of a signifier. Rather than reducing all signifiers to the phallic signifier, symbolic identification can be reformulated in these more general terms as the psychic assimilation of a symbolic element. That symbolic element is a master signifier, which shapes the structure of the discursive chain and produces the subject. Reformulating symbolic identification in this way permits us to understand its role in feminist identificatory relations, and thus to provide a fuller account of those relations. In particular,

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the reconception of this process of introjection of a master signifier further explains the operation of ego-ideal feminist identifications. The ego-ideal identifications with feminist politics and persons are a process of introjecting the signifier “feminism.” In that process, a subject identifies with its master signifier “feminism” and introjects the signifier as an ego-ideal. This explanation provides a theoretical basis for Brennan’s description of the feminist ego-ideal, because a concept of symbolic identification explains the process by which the subject assimilates the signifier “feminism,” thereby changing the patriarchal super-ego. Lacan argues that the Master signifier represents the subjects as a subject, both to itself and to others. Therefore, the horizontal tie of identification can be reformulated as a process in which “feminism” functions as a master signifier which represents the subject to itself and to other subjects, and by which those subjects recognize each other’s master signifier. In this process of symbolic identification, the subject introjects the master signifier “feminism,” and the signifying chains which attach to it. In that process, the subject enters the signifying chains of feminist discourses. These discourses represent a different order of signifiers to that of the Symbolic order of the Law of the Father. Because these discourses represent a different means of symbolizing the relations between women, the subject is able to represent her relationship to women in ways other than that dictated by a phallic Symbolic order. By constructing feminist discourses, a subject enters into a discursive relation to other women. Symbolic identification thus permits the subject to engage in a process that exteriorizes affect in intersubjective dialogue. Feminist discourses enable the subject to enter into symbolic and political exchange. The signifying elements of these discourses provide the representational material for that exchange. This intersubjective dialogue renders in signification the affective identifications between women that form the nucleus of feminist identifications. Those affective relations thus shift from being an emotion of the individual subject to being a dialogue between subjects, and from object relations to subject relations. In this way, symbolic identification permits the subject to acknowledge the differences between herself and other subjects. The relation between subjects is not constructed in an imaginary desire for unity which entails a méconnaissance of others, but from the representation of the difference of an other which enables a re-

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lation to the other. Symbolic identification thus forms political relations that do not require that an other is loved as self, but rather that subjects engage with each other as speaking subjects. Imaginary identification is a means of seeing the self in other, and the other in the self. Symbolic identification marks an entry into discourse with the other. Discourse is a means of speaking with, and listening to, the other in intersubjective dialogue. Feminist discourses are a means of articulating a relation to other women because they enable the articulation of a symbolic relation between subjects. Discourses mediate the relations between women because they represent a relation to others. In the recognition of the other as a speaking being, conversation can take place between two subjects who have equal entitlement to take up a position in a discursive exchange. Discourses are opened to negotiation and so to change rather than being frozen in imaginary relations. An intersubjective dialogue between feminists does not resemble the liberal humanist dream of pluralist conversation. Instead, feminist discourses permit subjects to articulate the distinctions between their speaking positions, not only in terms of the differences between women that mean they desire different conversations, but also in terms of the social operations that facilitate or make more difficult participation in those conversations. If symbolic identification makes possible the recognition of an other woman, it also makes possible the recognition that at least two subjects participate in a dialogue. Importantly, that recognition moves past an ethics of reciprocal identification to the mutuality of negotiated coalitional politics, founded in a symbolic identification with the other as speaking subject. These intersubjective dialogues enable the articulation of new and different discursive relations between women. Feminist communities are phantasmic and labile. They are not already existing entities nor are they established once and for all. Rather, affective, imaginary, and symbolic identifications make and remake these communities. Those identificatory relations form feminist subjects and collectivities. For this reason, these identifications have political effect: the formation of the political community of feminism.

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Feminist Communities Heywood and Drake argue that a “third wave goal [is] the creation of a coalitional politics” (3). For this reason, third-wave feminisms “embrace the notion of coalitions and affinities” (Arneil 218). This notion of the coalitional nature of feminism can be seen in third-wave calls for the necessary “work of coalition” (Lee 210); the recreation of “a new kind of sisterhood, based on pragmatic aims” (Forna 151); and, for “structures and networks which will allow women from all classes of society the possibility of meeting and communicating” (Michael 166). The creation of a coalitional feminism requires understanding the political community of feminism as a coalitional collective. The political community of feminism is not a unified community that represents a homogenous constituency. Rather, many communities, which are not themselves homogenous, constitute the coalitional movement (Hammonds). Affective, imaginary and symbolic identifications construct that collective, forming the coalitional relationships between members of the feminist movement. The members of these different coalitional communities share an identification with other women, with feminist politics, and with the political community of feminism. The relation between these communities is coalitional, since it is an engagement between different communities who act to secure their shared feminist goals. Defining the feminist movement as a coalition, rather than as a unified community, envisions the possibility that its members may act together to achieve certain political ends, but may also choose not to participate in other political projects. For example, feminists of equality and of difference (to use Irigaray’s categories) might find coalitional aims in resisting amendments to abortion laws that make abortion more difficult to obtain, even while their idea of what feminist politics signifies remains quite different. This shift to a concept of a coalitional movement permits the making of strategic decisions to pursue particular projects, while negotiating with others as to the meanings of the signifier, “feminist politics.” The reconceptualization of the political community of feminism as coalitional provides the possibility of the negotiations of politics and the enactments of practice that are produced in strategic and contingent alliances between feminists.

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By conceiving the feminist movement as political alliances between its members, those members can undertake collective action that recognizes the differences between women. A coalitional politics permits strategic action that engages many women, thereby opening the political movement to the many identifications that produce feminist subjects without a demand for a unifying identification with a singular politics. In this way, the feminist movement can engage those women who identify with feminist politics but who do not identify with the constitution of the political movement at that present moment. The political community of feminism can thereby constitute and reconstitute itself, constantly negotiating and renegotiating feminist subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Third-wave feminists recognize the difficulty of this work of forming political communities: “[w]e realise that coming together and working together are by no means natural or easy” (Lee 211). Part of that coalitional work is the recognition of the importance of feminist practice. Gina Dent argues that “evidence of the continued impact of feminism” lies “not in the women’s movement but AIDS activism, rape crisis centres, discussion of unequal health care, and even more importantly […] the smaller things we do on a daily basis that form the patterns of our lives” (72). A coalitional politics is always a politics in process.

Feminist Politics This reconception of “feminist communities” permits a reconsideration of “feminist politics” as an identificatory signifier. “Feminist politics” functions as the pivot of political identifications, but it can only be posited as an open term. As Marder describes, “[t]he term ‘feminist’ is not a proper name. It denotes no precise group, race, class, or even gender” (149). As an identificatory signifier, “feminist politics” has a shifting and contingent signified and no referent, unless that referent is considered to be a future utopian possibility. The operation of “feminist politics” as a shifting signifier can be seen in feminist symbolic identification. This identification involves a process of identification with the signifier “feminist politics.” It functions as a symbolic element whose conceptual content is contingent and changing, and which has different meanings for different subjects.

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To claim that this signifier does not have a referent does not mean that it signifies nothing or that it is meaningless. Rather, it redefines the signifier “feminist politics” “as an impersonal, performative pronoun whose political force is neither dependent upon, nor derived from a knowable link to a particular referent” (Marder 164). In this way, it is an identificatory signifier which is an open term, representing a contestatory project to those who identify with it, momentarily fixed in its content in relation to its enactment. Butler offers a useful definition of a performative as “one which brings into being or enacts that which it names, and so marks the constitutive power of discourse” (“Careful Reading” 134). “Feminist politics” performs the action it describes in the practices of its subjects and their movement. These practices name and enact the signifier “feminism,” marking the constitutive power of feminist discourses. In this sense, feminism comes into being in feminist practice. The importance of this conceptual shift can be seen in Butler’s discussion of the term “homosexual.” Butler argues that the term “homosexual” has no referent, but instead is a performative term. It is a practice. Butler argues that this formulation of the term “homosexual” provides a space to resist closure by acknowledging the instability of the term, which in turn enables its future rearticulation (Excitable Speech 107). Restating Butler’s point in terms of the feminism movement, feminist communities can be seen as sustaining the difference between “feminist politics” as a performative term and as a referential term. Feminist communities constantly renegotiate the content of the term “feminist politics” and hence what that term might mean, allowing the reformulation of political objectives. By sustaining the difference between the reference and the performance of “feminist politics,” feminist communities resist the closure of that term, and so allow for the possibility of its future rearticulation. This conception of “feminist politics” as an identificatory signifier permits a new understanding of the operation of “feminist community” itself as an identificatory signifier. This signifier can be also understood as an open term. Like “feminist politics,” the feminist movement can be reconceptualized as a performative defined by its practice. As Marder describes, “the feminist ‘we’ is defined in each moment of feminist thinking by its answer to who is named by the term ‘feminist’ and what such a naming implies” (149). As feminist politics shift, so too does the “we” of the political

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movement. It changes according to that set of politics with which women choose to identify. This feminist “we” has a phantasmic and shifting status. However, as Butler points out, “[t]he radical instability of the category sets into question the foundational restrictions on feminist political theorising and opens up other configurations, not only of genders and bodies, but of politics itself ” (Gender Trouble 142). The possibilities offered by the creation of new political identifications by third-wave feminist communities are only now opening up before us.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

The term “third wave” emerged in the mid-1980s in America to describe a new direction for feminist politics. For an extended discussion of third-wave feminisms, see Hypatia, 12.3 (1997), Special Issue: Third Wave Feminisms. See, for example, Barbara Findlen, ed. Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation and Rebecca Walker, ed. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism. The term “other” is used here in the psychoanalytic sense of an other to the subject, rather than in the sense of a culturally constructed Other.

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Part I Works Cited In Verena Andermatt Conley, “More Communal Crisis” Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine, 1972. Conley, Verena Andermatt. “Communal Crisis.” Miami Theory Collective 49-69. ———. “Women-Cybercitizens.” Living in Cyberspace. Ed. John Armitage. London: Athlone, forthcoming. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmose. Paris: Galilée, 1992. Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 80 (1985): 65-108. Lyotard, Jean-François. “A l’insu (Unbeknownst).” Trans. James Creech and Georges Van Den Abbeele. Miami Theory Collective 42-48. ———. “The Name of Algeria.” Political Writings. Trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 165-70. Miami Theory Collective, ed. Community at Loose Ends. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991. Virilio, Paul. The Art of the Motor. Trans. Julie Rose. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995.

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Part II Works Cited In Dennis A. Foster, “Pleasure and Community in Cultural Criticism” Ballard, J. G. “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” The Atrocity Exhibition. 1969. San Francisco: Re/Search, 1990. 105-07. Baudrillard, Jean. “Consumer Society.” Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. 29-56. Berkeley in the Sixties. Kitchell Films in assoc. with P.O.V. Films. Prod. and dir. Mark Kitchell. Written Stephen Most, Kitchell, and Susan Griffin. Dist. California Newsreel, 1990. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Connor, Steven. Theory and Cultural Value. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Paris is Burning. Dir. Jennie Livingston. Academy Entertainment, 1992. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. In Michael Strysick, “The End of Community and the Politics of Grammar” Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Allen, Woody, dir. Hannah and Her Sisters. With Allen, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Max von Sydow, and Diane Weist. Orion, 1986. Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Image — Music — Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Noonday P, 1977. 155-164.

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Part III Works Cited In A. J. P. Thomson, “Against Community: Derrida contra Nancy” Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. David Ross. Rev. J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998. Bennington, Geoffrey. “Forever Friends.” Interrupting Derrida. London: Routledge, 2000. 110-127. Critchley, Simon. The Ethics of Deconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. ———. Ethics — Politics — Subjectivity. London: Verso, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Adieu: To Emmanuel Levinas. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

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In Linnell Secomb, “Haunted Community” Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok. “Introjection-Incorporation: Mourning or Melancholia.” Psychoanalysis in France. Ed. Serge Lebovici and Daniel Widlöcher. New York: International Universities P, 1980. ———. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy. Trans. Nicholas Rand. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Attwood, Bain, and Andrew Markus. The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1999. Derrida, Jacques. Memoires: For Paul de Man. Trans. Cecile Lindsay et al. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. ———. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV. London: Hogarth, 1978. Kamuf, Peggy. “Violence, Identity, Self-Determination, and the Question of Justice: On Specters of Marx.” Vries and Weber 271-283.

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Index

261

Index Abbas, Ackbar, 157-158, 161-162 Abraham, Nicolas, 138-139 Adorno, Theodor, vii, viii Agamben, Giorgio, ix, 48, 80-81, 84, 128, 217-218 Alarcón, Norma, 230 Alfonso, Rita, 221 Allen, Woody, 47 Anderson, Benedict, ix, 154, 156, 161, 162, 163-164, 176, 178, 201, 202-204, 209 Aristotle, 69,70 Arneil, Barbara, 238 Attwood, Bain, 141 Auerbach, Erich, 154 Augustine, 69 Austin, J. L., 213 Balakrishnan, Gopal, 153 Ballard, J. G., 35 Barthes, Roland, 63, 188, 195 Bataille, Georges, ix, x, 54, 55, 56, 57, 63, 94, 98-99, 102, 105, 117 Bateson, Gregory, 8, 12 Baudrillard, Jean, 34 Bauer, Dale, 222 Begag, Azouz, 114, 128 Benjamin, Walter, 61, 154, 161 Berbier, Maurice, 125 Bernasconi, Robert, 63, 97, 99, 119, 128, 129 Bizzell, Patricia, 197 Blanchot, Maurice, vii, ix, 47, 48, 53, 54, 55, 57, 63, 67, 69, 77, 85-106, 117, 119, 128, 143 Bordieu, Pierre, 27, 85 Bowie, Malcolm, 230 Bowleg, Lisa, 225 Brennan, Teresa, 227, 228

Burroughs, William S., 40 Butler, Judith, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 186, 196, 197, 198, 214, 218, 222-223, 240-241 Chaliand, Gérard, 167 Chambers, Veronica, 227, 231, 232 Chan, Joseph M., 169, 178 Chatterjee, Partha, 178 Chiu, Fred Y. L., 178 Cicero, 69 Cixous, Hélène, 37 Connor, Steven, 36, 37, 43 Conrad, Joseph, 64 Craker, Tim, 62 Critchley, Simon, 68, 77-78 Debray, Régis, 100 Deguy, Michel, 77 Deleuze, Gilles, 22, 23, 26, 29 DeLillo, Don, 35, 42, 44 De Man, Paul, 138 Dent, Gina, 239 Derrida, Jacques, vii, viii, x, 37, 63, 67-84, 85, 109, 110, 111, 115, 118, 119, 122, 124, 131, 137146, 148, 188, 219 Detloff, Madelyn, 226 Dewey, John, 37 Dinesen, Isak, 64 Drake, Jennifer, 221, 231, 238 Duras, Marguerite, 100 Eliot, T. S., vii, viii Fanon, Frantz, 229 Faulkner, William, 25 Ferry, Jules, 112 Findlen, Barbara, 222, 227, 241

262

The Politics of Community

Forna, Aminatta, 226, 232, 238 Foster, Dennis, A., x, 184 Foucault, Michel, 28, 39, 41, 43, 183, 196, 198 Fraser, Nancy, 67 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 183, 223, 224, 226-227, 228-229, 230, 234 Fuss, Diana, 224, 231-232 Fynsk, Christopher, 86, 87, 96, 105, 106 Gallop, Jane, 41 Gasché, Rodolphe, 82 Gentelle, Pierre, 167-168 Ginsberg, Allen, 30 Girard, René, 85 Gramsci, Antonio, 187-188 Guattari, Félix, 14, 22, 23, 26, 29 Gubank, Thomas, 168-169 Habermas, Jürgen, 36 Hall, Stuart, 187 Hammonds, Evelynn, 238 Haraway, Donna, 11 Hark, Tsui, 173 Hebdige, Dick, 187-188, 189, 191-192, 193, 194, 195, 198 Hegel, G. W. F., 95, 135, 171 Herzberg, Bruce, 197 Heywood, Leslie, 221, 231, 238 hooks, bell, 232 Hoover, Michael, 178 Hubert, Henri, 201, 208-209, 215, 219 Hugo, Victor, 77 Husserl, Edmund, 19 Ilott, Terry, 169 Ingram, David, 63 Irigaray, Luce, 37, 224, 238 James, William, 37 Jameson, Fredric, 36

Jay, Nancy, 201, 207, 210, 219 Johnston, Eric, 169 Joris, Pierre, 63 Kafka, Franz, 62 Kaminsky, Stuart, 173 Kamuf, Peggy, 144, 148 Kant, Immanuel, 26, 42, 72, 81 Khosrokhavar, Farhad, 126 Kidron, Michael, 168 Kirszner, Laurie G., 178 Komatsu, Hiroshi, 179 Koresh, David, 35 Lacan, Jacques, 42, 43, 230-231, 234-236 Laclau, Ernesto, 183, 187, 188-199 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 63, 67, 85, 129 Laplanche, Jean, 223 Lau, Siu-Kai, 159 Lee, Bruce, 172, 173 Lee, JeeYeun, 222, 232, 238, 239 Lennon, Kathleen, 233 Lent, John A., 170, 179 Leung, Grace L. K., 169 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 21 Levinas, Emmanuel, 48, 59, 81, 85, 99, 119, 128 Lewis, Oscar, 27 Leyda, Jay, 178 Librett, Jeffrey S., 129 Lii, Ding-Tzann, 171-172 Limlingan, Victor Simpao, 167 Lingis, Alphonso, ix, x, 117, 128 Locke, John, 206 Loden, Frances, 179 Lyotard, Jean-François, viii, ix, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 498, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58, 61, 62, 63, 85, 109, 110, 111, 115, 118, 122

Index

Mack, Burton, 213 MacLehose, Murray, 178 Mandava, Bhargavi, 225 Mandell, Stephen R., 178 Marder, Elissa, 222, 229, 239-241 Markus, Andrew, 141 Marx, Karl, 27, 183, 196 Mauss, Marcel, 201, 208-209, 215, 219 Mazumdar, Sudip, 179 McCarthy, Thomas, 68 Michael, Livi, 238 Miller, James, 132 Milliss, Roger, 132, 136 Mills, Sara, 233 Minwei, Li, 164 Mizruchi, Susan L., 201, 219 Montaigne, Michel de, 57-58, 69, 77 Morrison, Toni, 64 Mouffe, Chantal, 183, 187, 188199 Nairn, Tom, 184-185 Nancy, Jean-Luc, ix, x, 36, 37-38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 49, 51, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 63, 67, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 85-106, 109-129, 131, 135, 136-137, 145-148, 203, 205, 216-217 Nandy, Ashis, 171-172 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15, 28, 45, 46, 57, 60, 62, 69, 70, 71 Oliver, Kelly, 222 Orr, Catherine, 222 Pateman, Carole, 147 Plato, 197 Polanski, Benjamin, 164 Pontalis, J. B., 223 Powers, Carla, 179 Prettyman, Quandra, 231

263

Quattrocchi, Angelo, 184-185 Readings, Bill, 50-51 Reagan, Ronald, 34 Regeau, Jean-Pierre, 167 Reynolds, Henry, 132, 133-136, 137, 140, 148-150 Rorty, Richard, 37, 186 Rose, Alexander, 156 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 15, 116 Sarraute, Nathalie, 29 Schmitt, Karl, 69,72 Segal, Ronald, 168 Shaobo, Liang, 164 Shaw, Runme, 170 Siegel, Deborah, 222 Silverman, Kaja, 225 Smith, Anthony, 154, 155-156, 161 Smith, J. Z., 211 Smith, W. Robertson, 209-212, 214-216, 218, 219 Socrates, 197 Spivak, Gayatri, 224 Stanner, W. E. H., 132, 133 Stokes, Lisa Odham, 178 Taussig, Michel, 171 Thatcher, Margaret, 157, 158 Thiesse, Anne-Marie, 175-176 Thompson, Kristin, 168 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 204 Topp, Gretchen, 62 Torok, Maria, 138-139 Trigilio, Jo, 221 Tsedong, Mao, 160 Van den Abbeele, Georges, 205207, 209 Van Der Veer, Peter, 148 Veblen, Thorstein, 27 Virilio, Paul, 7, 8, 158 Walker, Rebecca, 222, 227, 228

264

The Politics of Community

Waters, John, 185 Way, Todd, 63 Weber, Samuel, 207-208 Whilford, Margaret, 233 Wieviorka, Michel, 113 Williams, Raymond, 204-205, 209 Wolf, Naomi, 231 Woo, John, 173 Wu, Hong, 158, 159, 161 Xiaoping, Deng, 178 Zita, Jacquelyn N., 221 Žižek, Slavoj, 43, 186, 189