Theory’s Autoimmunity: Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy 0810137801, 9780810137806

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Theory’s Autoimmunity

Theory’s Autoimmunity Skepticism, Literature, and Philosophy

Zahi Zalloua

northwestern university press evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Zalloua, Zahi Anbra, 1971–author. Title: Theory’s autoimmunity : skepticism, literature, and philosophy / Zahi Zalloua. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017056208 | ISBN 9780810137783 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137790 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810137806 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | Theory (Philosophy) | Criticism. Classification: LCC PN81.Z29 2018 | DDC 801.95—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056208

To Mounir

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction Toward a Hermeneutics of Skepticism

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Chapter 1 Montaignean Meditations

33

Chapter 2 Ideology, Critique, and the Event of Literature

55

Chapter 3 Irony, Power, and the Death Drive

81

Chapter 4 Queering Difference, or The Feminine Logic of the “Non-All”

97

Chapter 5 Immunizing Ontology: The Speculative Turn

121

Conclusion Desire of the Theorist

139

Notes

145

Works Cited

197

Index

219

Acknowledgments

Theory’s purchase on the world is at the heart of this work. Theory’s Autoimmunity is my attempt to make sense of theory’s relevance and singularity, its profound attraction—why I study it, why I teach it—without simultaneously fetishizing it as a new source of doxa, the privilege of the few. At Whitman College I’ve enjoyed testing out my ideas about theory—about theory’s skeptical propensities, its ambivalent relation to philosophy, and its insatiable hunger for literature—with colleagues and students alike. The classroom— from our first-year general studies course, “Encounters,” to my advanced literary theory course—has served as a laboratory for interpretive risks and explorations. Teaching reminds me again and again of theory’s unpredictability, its elusiveness and unruliness, its refusal to follow a script. At Whitman, I’ve benefited from my conversations with Shampa Biswas, Matt Bost, Chetna Chopra, Tarik Elseewi, Heather Hayes, Tim Kauffman-Osborn, Gaurav Madjumdar, Bruce Magnusson, Lydia McDermott, Libby Miller, and Lisa Uddin. Outside of Whitman, I’m grateful for my brother Mounir’s ongoing encouragement. I had the opportunity to share and test my ideas at numerous conferences and symposia. For many fruitful exchanges, I want to thank Jake Blevins, Katie Chenoweth, Jeffrey Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock, Sophia McClennen, Hassan Melehy, Paul Allen Miller, Christian Moraru, Brian O’Keeffe, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Herman Rapaport, Todd Reeser, Rob Tally, Tom Trezise, and Harold Veeser. Particular thanks go to Gaurav Majumdar, Paul Allen Miller, Christian Moraru, and Brian O’Keeffe for reading and commenting with great generosity on earlier versions of the manuscript. I am also grateful to the two anonymous readers for their comments. I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Nicole Simek, whose close reading and interpretive care shaped immeasurably the structure and thrust of this book. Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere in another form: the introduction in “Theory’s Autoimmunity,” in Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 155–70; chapter 1 in “Montaignian Meditations,” Taula 44 (2012): 101–9; chapter 2 in “ ‘Ideology Is Not All’: Criticism after Žižek,” in Criticism after Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 141–53; chapter 3 in “Žižek with Stendhal: Irony and the Death Drive,” Sino-American Journal of Comparative Literature 2 (2016): 149–71; chapter 4 in “Žižek with French ix

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Feminism: Enjoyment and the Feminine Logic of the ‘Not-All,’ ” Intertexts 18, no. 2 (2014): 109–30; and chapter 5 in “On Meillassoux’s ‘Transparent Cage’: Speculative Realism and Its Discontents,” symplokē 1–2 (2015): 393–409.

Theory’s Autoimmunity

Introduction

Toward a Hermeneutics of Skepticism

Theory begins to supplant philosophy (and other disciplines as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression. — Fredric Jameson

Language is already skepticism. — Emmanuel Levinas

Investment in the value of theory and its skeptical modes of critique would seem, in recent times, to have given way to skepticism of theory, to desires for more affirmative and descriptive modes of interpreting the world. Claims of theory’s demise or compromise radiate from more or less every corner of academia today. Yet despite—or because of—these repeatedly circulated claims, theory (if dead) is constantly conjured up again by its committed readers. It lingers in a zombie-like state, haunting and disrupting any heroic (or nostalgic) narrative of return—be it a return of the subject, referentiality, history, or aesthetics. But why should the death of theory be a precondition for returning to the proper study of, say, literature, philosophy, or politics? Why is theory’s iconoclasm—its unyielding, skeptical questioning of the naturalized given; its intractable impulse to interrogate and complicate—thought to interfere with the experience of literary appreciation, the production of knowledge, or the apprehension of materiality? Whose theory is at issue here? To put the question naively, what is theory? What does this contested term actually name?1 Can we recover—or better yet reinterpret—the promise theory held before its reification by both its detractors and supporters? Returning to theory’s historical beginnings counters the temptation to essentialize Theory, to conceive of it as a timeless, unchanging, and self-evident entity. As Patrick ffrench rightly observes, theory becomes reified when its historicity is forgotten, erased in the process of naming: “the mythic designation ‘theory’ whites out the precise historical chronology of its emergence, as well as the differential detail of this emergence.”2 Rebuilding a genealogy 3

4

Introduction

of theory leads us to fourth-century Greece, where the term theoria initially referred to the pilgrimage from one’s city to oracles or religious festivals.3 After his journey, the theoros shared and reported back to his community what sacred events and spectacles he had witnessed. In philosophy, this act of seeing became an intellectual one, an act of seeing the metaphysical truths of the world (Plato’s myth of the Cave captures well philosophy’s appropriative translation of religious theoria). In ancient philosophy, then, theoria— coterminous with philosophia—became associated with the abstract and was quickly distinguished from practice (praxis) and practical knowledge (phronesis). In Aristotle’s thought, for example, this meaning of theory reaches its conceptual apogee, becoming virtually synonymous with pure philosophy, the life of contemplation (theoria). Practicing theoria leads to the highest state of happiness (eudemonia), since the philosopher cultivates what is most divine in him: his active intellect (nous poetikos).4 More recently, theory has been variously associated with the Enlightenment project of modernity (the search for autonomy and the cognitive mastery of the world) and Marxist philosophy (with its aspirations to be a true science freed from ideology), as well as post-structuralism (Continental philosophy after the linguistic turn, where an awareness of the “structurality of structure”5 conditions all forms of representation) and postmodernism6 (which rejected the metanarratives of emancipation, progress, and legitimation). The last two have come to be known more generally as “French” theory. Of course, Jacques Derrida, perhaps the best-known French theorist, explicitly distanced himself from the label during a 2001 roundtable discussion of “life after theory” at Loughborough University: “Now, I never use the word ‘theory’ in the way that you do here,” he noted. “I don’t use the word ‘theory’ after you, after the Americans and the English speakers. So, I would translate this into French as ‘life after philosophy,’ after deconstruction, after literature and so on and so forth.”7 Be that as it may, terms and labels do have a life of their own. Talk of theory’s end typically relies, for better or worse, on this understanding of the word “theory” as “French theory,” at least in the United States.8 “Resistance to theory,” to borrow Paul de Man’s apt formulation, is similarly a resistance to French theory, a resistance often couched in pedagogical terms.9 At best, detractors argue, theory distracts from the study of literature, the practice of philosophy, and investigations into material existence: seduced by the jargon of the day, eager students neglect traditional disciplinary concerns, and must be reminded to return to the primary text, the referent—the thing-in-itself. At worst, theory, in its hegemonic form, is conceived as antithetical to the university’s liberal goals and values, as a coarse system of thought that fosters corrosive skepticism and suffocates “literary imagination,” suppressing the desire for knowledge and disregarding the readerly cultivation of what Robert Alter has called “a readiness to be surprised.”10

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Resistance to theory—resistance “to the use of language about language,” “to the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language”11—is perhaps felt most strongly by philosophy’s champion, the neo-Aristotelian Martha Nussbaum. Against the threat of interpretive or linguistic unrulinesss, Nussbaum argues for a more sober or measured engagement with otherness and its interpretive challenges. She expresses her critique of theory—or rather, her aversion to Derrida, whose brand of deconstruction functions as a synecdoche for theory12—in somatic terms: “After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us at all.”13 For Nussbaum, whose work straddles the border between literature and philosophy, there is simply no need for theory. While her understanding of philosophy is expansive, taking literature and its differences seriously and insisting on the messiness of literature’s examples, it is also premised on its distinction and distance from theory and its rebellious, skeptical ways. Simply stated, theorists, for Nussbaum, make bad philosophers (they doubt for doubt’s sake), and even worse moral thinkers (nihilism is the logical outcome of what they preach). Her philosophical “hunger for blood” signals a dissatisfaction with theory’s peculiar type of interpretive style, the all-too-playful kind that operates at a superficial level, fascinated by the text’s words or “signifiers” and failing, as it were, to attend to the rich lives of people. Her “hunger for blood” reflects her enduring desire for aesthetico-ethical nourishment—a desire or hunger that is ironically amplified by her reading of Derrida and other theorists. After reading theory, Nussbaum compulsively hungers for more.14 This book interrogates philosophy’s impatience with theory’s skepticism, its questions, and ways of reading, an impatience symptomized by Nussbaum’s (philosophically) sanctioned form of hunger. This “hunger for blood” can putatively only be satisfied by restoring criticism and returning the critic’s attention to the real matter at hand: the meaning of people’s (fictional) lives. The stakes and motivations of such a desire to overcome skepticism become clearer in Nussbaum’s reading of literature’s value to philosophical inquiry: “[Literary] stories cultivate our ability to see and care for particulars, not as representatives of a law, but as what they themselves are: to respond vigorously with senses and emotions before the new; to care deeply about chance happenings in the world, rather than fortify ourselves against them.”15 Here a “hunger for blood” transmutes into a hunger for particulars, which then, in turn, takes the form of a hunger for otherness. Literature becomes the means for philosophy to encounter difference, particulars, to overcome the “barriers”16 that separate us from this otherness that we desire. Rereading Nussbaum, I am reminded of François Rabelais’s famous prologue to Gargantua (1534), in which Rabelais’s narrator, Alcofribas Nasier (an anagram of the author’s name), calls on readers to emulate Plato’s dog— “the most philosophical beast in the world”—in their dealings with books: “Just like the dog, you ought to be running with your educated nose to the

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Introduction

wind, sniffing out and appreciating such magnificent volumes—you should be light on your feet, swift in the chase, bold in the hunt. Then, by hard reading and constant reflection, you ought to crack the bone and suck the nourishing marrow [sustantifique mouelle].”17 Nussbaum’s “hunger for blood” is arguably a hunger for the work’s “substantial marrow”: for its ethical message and the empathetic imaginings that it affords. Like the bone that must be broken to access the work’s “substantial marrow,” Nussbaum’s “barrier,” which leads to the endless deferral of gratification or attainment of the object of desire (the lives of others), must be surmounted. If philosophy begins with a hunger for otherness, a carnivorous wonder, does it follow that this hunger must be converted into moral nourishment? Furthermore, is this really the choice that confronts us: hunger or its gastronomic other, satiety? The opposition between theory’s hunger for words (its alleged indulgence in the endless play of signifiers) and philosophy’s more genuine hunger for otherness must not go unchallenged. Theory’s hunger for negativity and doubt does not constitute a narcissistic retreat from the material world, nor is it a move away from the concrete, that is, from the suffering of others.18 In taking up this view, Theory’s Autoimmunity bears witness to the ambiguity of Rabelais’s own hermeneutic injunction, interrogating his narrator’s warning against the impulse to allegorize—the impulse to seek a “deep” or “higher” meaning at the expense of the bone. What place, if any, does an ironic, skeptical Rabelais19 have in Nussbaum’s philosophy, or in philosophy in general? Is his excessive playfulness, his ironizing of the surface/depth distinction, irremediably at odds with philosophy’s logos, its digestive practices, its will to know? If moral philosophy à la Nussbaum mines literature for its examples,20 and thus might get frustrated by Gargantua’s noncompliance, theory names those critical interpretive practices that instead take an interest in literature’s persistent difference and recalcitrant otherness; theory does not quarantine itself from literature’s excess but revels in “reading as an experience of radical indecision,”21 in the elusive ways that literature conveys meaning and elicits interpretation. Indeed, theory declines to put on the interpretive brakes, to evacuate ambiguity and multiplicity, to rein in semantic excess, to stop reading at a point of decision or understanding (“having understood, or thinking one has understood, stands precisely on a refusal to read”).22 Theory lends instead to the Rabelaisian text, to literature’s difference, a more receptive ear.

Philosophy versus Theory In defining theory in these terms, this book mobilizes a crucial differentiation that Fredric Jameson has made between two orientations toward knowledge and inquiry that he calls philosophy and theory. For Jameson, philosophy names the kind of thinking that “is always haunted by the dream of some

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foolproof, self-sufficient, autonomous system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause.”23 Theory, by contrast, foregrounds the indocility of language and considers the desire to erect an order or transcend the linguistic flux of existence as dubiously phantasmatic and deeply ideological: “Theory is to be grasped as the perpetual and impossible attempt to dereify the language of thought, and to preempt all the systems and ideologies which inevitably result from the establishment of this or that fixed terminology.”24 To be sure, Jameson’s definition of philosophy is selective and heuristic, and relies not on philosophy as such, but rather on philosophy’s dominant image, on what the discipline has come to represent: a closed, self-confirming system.25 This strand of philosophy, which is logocentric and positivist, dreams of plenitude and mastery (this is a familiar refrain that we find in Derrida’s early critique of the metaphysics of presence as well). Theory comes to name instead resistance to systematization, and dedication to a form of thought that is constantly in motion. Elsewhere, Jameson formulates theory’s strength and success in terms of its full embrace of the linguistic turn, of the primacy of the material sign: “Theory begins to supplant philosophy (and other disciplines as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression.”26 Theory’s investment in language also makes it constitutively vulnerable: “It remains only to say that for theory all uses of language, including its own, are susceptible to these slippages and oilspills because there is no longer any correct way of saying it, and all truths are at best momentary, situational, and marked by a history in the process of change and transformation.”27 Theory, time and again, draws on this avowed insight to undermine philosophy’s integrity, its hermeneutic drive: Theory . . . has no vested interests inasmuch as it never lays claim to an absolute system, a non-ideological formulation of itself and its “truths”; indeed, always itself complicit in the being of current language, it has only the never-finished task and vocation of undermining philosophy as such, of unraveling affirmative statements and propositions of all kinds.28

This is not to say that theory has no concern for truth. We might even describe theory’s hunger for truth as excessive or hysterical.29 But still, theory’s truth, as the Nietzschean Foucault puts it, “is a thing of the world.”30 Theory’s opposition to philosophy, then, is not predicated on the acceptance or denial of truth. Both can be said to share a commitment to truth. Philosophy begins with curiosity or wonder—a “pure openness to the extraordinary,”31 or to the truth of the other, we might say—but ends, or ought to end, in knowledge. This is, after all, close to the formulation provided by Aristotle and Descartes. In Metaphysics, Aristotle highlights the cognitive payoff of the contemplative life, that is, a life of doing philosophy:

8

Introduction

The acquisition of [science] must in a sense end in something which is the opposite of our original inquiries. For all men begin, as we said, by wondering that things are as they are . . . ; for it seems wonderful to all who have not yet seen the reason, that there is a thing which cannot be measured even by the smallest unit. But we must end in the contrary and, according to the proverb, the better state, as is the case in the instances . . . when men learn the cause.32

In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes blames the failure to attain a “better state” on an unhealthy excess of wonder: “Astonishment is an excess of wonder which can never be anything but bad.”33 Philosophy is about successful translation: the translation of the new into a mastered and well-digested familiar. Theory for its part is skeptical of any return on its subject’s cognitive investment. Rather, it yearns for and thrives on astonishment, the endless, multiple, and joyful pursuit(s) of its object. In polemically deploying the terms “philosophy” and “theory” in this way, this book aims to jolt and reanimate contemporary thought, to champion and sustain the “theorizing” impulse that has waxed and waned within the philosophical tradition, harnessing its critical, and skeptical, force. Attending to the history of skepticism throws into starker relief the fault lines separating these competing impulses toward closure and critique. From Plato to Descartes, from Kant to Ricoeur to Nussbaum, the relation of skepticism to philosophy constitutes nothing short of a family drama. But rather than speaking of skepticism in the singular, we should assert from the start the plurality of skepticisms in ancient philosophy, namely academic skepticism and Pyrrhonism. After Plato’s death in 347 BC, his Academy fairly quickly became a skeptical school in the third century BC, teaching that knowledge is impossible. Arcesilaus and Carneades were chiefly responsible for enacting this pedagogical shift. Cicero describes the crucial and transformative impact of Arcesilaus on the philosophical ethos of Plato’s Academy: “Arcesilaus was the first who from various of Plato’s books and from Socratic discourses seized with the greatest force the moral: nothing which the mind or the senses can grasp is certain.”34 Pyrrhonism offers an alternative model of skepticism. Pyrrhonism’s founding figure was Pyrrho of Elis (360–270 BC). Like Socrates, Pyrrho never wrote anything at all. But his follower Sextus Empiricus disseminated his ideas in Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes (Outlines of Skepticism), in which he painstakingly differentiated Pyrrhonism from the other dominant sects of philosophy. Sextus begins by differentiating three types of philosophers: the dogmatist, the academic, and the skeptic. The dogmatist is the traditional philosopher, like Aristotle and the Stoics, who claims “to have discovered the truth”;35 the academic negates this possibility, arguing that truth “cannot be apprehended.”36 The skeptic suspends judgment and keeps on “investigating”37 (the term “skepticism” derives etymologically from the Greek skepsis, meaning “inquiry”). The Pyrrhonian skeptic

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in fact sees no genuine difference between the dogmatist and the academic: the former endorses dogmatic assertions, the latter dogmatic negations. So while both versions of skepticism call into question the classical definition of knowledge as true and justified belief, only Pyrrhonism pleads for a cognitive divestment from belief itself. Strictly speaking, the skeptic does not believe in anything. In arguments, the Pyrrhonist displays the technique of equipollence (demonstrating the equal plausibility of mutually conflicting perspectives), thus disabusing opponents of any sense of certainty with regard to the truth or falsity of a given position or argument, which, in turn, clears the way for the suspension of judgment, or epoché. Modern skepticism does not really follow the path of Pyrrhonism, since this ancient school maintains an ambivalent relationship to epistemology as such. As Pierre Lamarche observes, “pyrrhonian skepticism is not essentially an epistemological enterprise; rather, it is an agogē—a way of life.”38 Indeed, Pyrrhonism strips epistemology of its investment in “truth,” substituting it “appears to me” for it “is”; “perhaps and perhaps not” for “perhaps it is and perhaps it is not.”39 Its aim is primarily therapeutic, a way of attaining what classic philosophy called ataraxia, or mental tranquility (in this case, an indifference to belief and cognition that the daily practice of epoché yields, or ought to yield, to its faithful practitioner). Modern skepticism owes much more to academic skepticism and its claim that truth is unattainable. Accordingly, the modern skeptic will always be plagued by the charge of self-refutation or contradiction. The utterance that “nothing can be known” (except paradoxically the truth of that statement) involves the academic and modern skeptic in a performative contradiction. Taking stock of skepticism’s role in philosophical critique, for example, Paul Ricoeur focuses on skepticism’s destructive character and forecloses its interpretive possibilities as an engine of negation by distinguishing it from a “hermeneutics of faith,” on the one hand, and a “hermeneutics of suspicion” on the other. If this latter contests the legitimacy of consciousness and its production of meaning (“After the doubt about things, we have started to doubt consciousness,” he writes),40 it should not, Ricoeur warns, be conflated with the less desirable form of nihilistic skepticism: These three masters of suspicion [Marx, Nietzsche, Freud] are not to be misunderstood, however, as three masters of skepticism. They are, assuredly, three great “destroyers.” But that of itself should not mislead us; . . . All three clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a “destructive” critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting.41

Ricoeur does acknowledge the skeptical thrust of a hermeneutics of suspicion, but he rules out the viability of a hermeneutics of skepticism (destruction for destruction’s sake), seeing it ultimately as devoid of critical force, and thus

10

Introduction

as offering little of value for any serious philosopher.42 In terms of the philosophy and theory divide, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion—or better yet a hermeneutics of “postcritical faith,” a hermeneutics of faith that has traversed suspicion43—would align clearly with philosophy, while a hermeneutics of skepticism, evoked only to be quickly discarded, would fall on the side of theory.44 Skepticism also makes a key appearance in Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, where it plays a more complicated role: To conceive the otherwise than being requires, perhaps, as much audacity as skepticism shows, when it does not hesitate to affirm the impossibility of statement while venturing to realize this impossibility by the very statement of this impossibility. If, after the innumerable “irrefutable” refutations which logical thought sets against it, skepticism has the gall to return (and it always returns as philosophy’s illegitimate child), it is because in the contradiction which logic sees in it the “at the same time” of the contradictories is missing, because a secret diachrony commands this ambiguous or enigmatic way of speaking, and because in general signification signifies beyond synchrony, beyond essence.45

Despite its perpetual undoing and overcoming by philosophy, skepticism returns, on this account, as philosophy’s bastard child. The astute Levinas commentator Robert Bernasconi has objected to the above mistranslation, which replaces “legitimate” with “illegitimate”—though he acknowledges the error is somewhat understandable: One might imagine that the return of skepticism is illegitimate because of the weight of the arguments against it. Indeed this impression is so striking that on the three occasions in Otherwise Than Being when skepticism is referred to as philosophy’s legitimate child, the English translator renders it as “illegitimate”  .  .  . or as “bastard”  .  .  . But skepticism is the legitimate child of philosophy insofar as the question of skepticism is still construed as a question about truth. Levinas attaches some importance to the dignity accorded to skepticism by philosophy in spite of its refutation . . . presumably because it shows philosophy abiding by rules other than those it declares.46

Though skepticism always risks contaminating that which ought to be outside contamination (a chance Ricoeur was unwilling to take, preferring his hermeneutics of suspicion to a virtual hermeneutics of skepticism), it does, for Levinas, contribute to an ethical sensibility, revealing to philosophy a different way of proceeding, exposing philosophy to a different set of rules and freeing it from ontology’s obsession with being (comprehension). As

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Bernasconi notes, “skepticism is witness to reasons that reason does not know.”47 Skepticism potentially infuses philosophy with a concern for the trace of the other, the diachronic, the temporal unruly—the Saying (the desire to communicate) that resists its synchronization with the Said (the message of my communication). This is why “communication” and “comprehension” must not be conflated: “To require that a communication be sure of being heard is to confuse communication and knowledge.”48 In short, skepticism (in its insistence that truth is unattainable) reminds philosophy that something in language always exceeds the purview of the subject, the order of the Said, and the hegemony of propositional discourse. As Ewa Plonowska Ziarek insightfully observes, Levinas’s “revision of skepticism provides a way to dissociate language from the philosophy of the subject, which has dominated the discourse of modernity at least since Kant.”49 Skepticism disempowers the sovereignty of the knower as doubter (the I of the “I doubt”); it exposes knowers to the exteriority of the other, to the time of the other. In this respect, “language is already skepticism.”50 In contrast to Levinas and Ricoeur, Nussbaum finds that the stakes are too high even to entertain skepticism’s potential: rather, today’s skepticism is a philosophical cancer that must be eliminated or, at the very least, contained. The new skeptics—Derrida and other postmodernists—are contagious; their reach and appeal in the humanities must urgently be countered, with (a return to) genuine philosophy as the antidote to their obscurantism and sophistry: What is deeply pernicious in today’s academy . . . is the tendency to dismiss the whole idea of pursuing truth and objectivity as if those aims could no longer guide us. Such attacks on truth are not new: we find them . . . in the ancient Greek skeptics. But they are forms of sophistry whose influence mars the otherwise promising pursuit of Socratic goals on our campuses. Postmodernists do not justify their more extreme conclusions with compelling arguments. Nor do they even grapple with the technical issues about physics and language that any modern account of these matters needs to confront. For this reason, their influence has been relatively slight in philosophy, where far more nuanced accounts of these matters abound. Derrida on truth is simply not worth studying for someone who has been studying Quine and Putnam and Davidson. In other parts of the humanities, however, they exercise a large influence . . . , causing students to think that those in the know have disdain for Socrates and his goals.51

Skepticism, in its reckless quest for, and attacks on, truth, threatens to undermine the subject of philosophy. To Nussbaum’s chagrin, the simplicity of theory’s messages or slogans (doubt all authority, starting with the canon; destroy the foundations of Western metaphysics; deconstruct the categories of representation and reality, etc.)52 delegitimizes the complex wisdom of

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Introduction

Socrates, even calling into question the very integrity and pedagogical mission of the humanities: to deliver moral knowledge and truth.53 Yet, as Bernasconi reminds us, philosophy as a discipline still accepts skepticism into the family fold. It does not banish the skeptics from their epistemic home. As long as skepticism remains instrumentalizable, as long as it serves a useful function—as a necessary obstacle to overcome in founding any conceptual system54—rather than devolving into a form of nihilism, it will continue to have “dignity,” to be philosophy’s “legitimate child.” For philosophy, then, to recognize skepticism as its “legitimate child” is first and foremost an act of discipline, containment, and self-protection. This act seeks to foreclose the possibility of self-contamination, that is, to minimize the poison of skepticism, to avoid the taint of undecidability, and thus to safeguard the idea, and ideal, of unspoiled knowledge. While Bernasconi is absolutely correct in his observation, Alphonso Lingis’s mistranslation is revealing in that it exposes what is at stake in discussions of skepticism, pointing to what I call philosophy’s “disavowed autoimmunity.”

Autoimmune Theory The 1994 essay “Faith and Knowledge” marks Jacques Derrida’s first important engagement with the trope of autoimmunity. In it Derrida focused, in part, on religion’s paradoxical relation to technology: how religion—in its desire to remain pure, sacred—defines itself in opposition to technology, while also needing technology to survive and spread in a global world. But it was in the aftermath of 9/11, and the subsequent “War on Terror,” that autoimmunity gained far more prominence in Derrida’s conceptual analysis, when he enlarged its sense, treating it as a “general logic of auto-immunization.”55 Autoimmunity entails a process through which, as Derrida puts it, “a living being, in a quasi-suicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunise itself against its ‘own’ immunity.”56 Moving from the individual body to the political body, Derrida examines the logic of autoimmunization in America’s response to the traumatic events of 9/11. In its desire to protect itself, to immunize itself against the spreading disease of terrorism, America illustrated all too well the potential “pervertibility of democracy,” “los[ing] itself by itself,” turning against itself, against its own self-protection, against, that is, its immune system: laws aimed at safeguarding the legal rights of its subjects, especially during states of emergency.57 Yet while autoimmunization refers to the attempt to gain pure immunity, the attempt to wall off the self—an individual, a community, a nation—from external forces and influences, autoimmunity also names the condition of the self, the relational self, that makes such attempts at self-enclosure impossible. The autoimmune self is a self exposed to the other, a changeable, permeable self shaped by its relations with others. In describing the self as autoimmune, Derrida redefines the

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term, understanding it not as an illness or disability to lament or overcome, but rather as a condition of malleability and openness—a condition that involves vulnerability to harm but that also makes intersubjective contact and relation possible. As such, autoimmunity in Derrida’s revaluating use of the term describes a state that has no negative or positive value in itself; it is the primordial condition of possibility for modes of relating to the self and otherness. To be sure, Derrida’s definition of autoimmunity—“this strange illogical logic”58 of autoimmunity, as he calls it—does not quite correspond to the term’s meaning in biology. Derrida’s autoimmunity is a particular kind of autoimmunity, since in biomedicine, autoimmunity signifies a disorder, a living organism’s failure to recognize that it is attacking a very part of itself. Autoimmune diseases involve attacks on the body’s organs, tissues, and cells, not on the immune system itself. As one recent critic points out, “Derrida seems to confuse autoimmune disorders with immunodeficiency disorders, such as HIV/AIDS. . . . The latter involves an illness in which the HIV-virus affects the immune system of its host, making people much more vulnerable to disease.”59 But regardless of the questionable accuracy of the biological metaphor, as W. J. T. Mitchell importantly recalls, Derrida’s meditations on autoimmunity should not be seen as a one-way tropological traffic from science to politics: The whole theory of the immune system and the discipline of immunology is riddled with images drawn from the sociopolitical sphere—of invaders and defenders, hosts and parasites, natives and aliens, and of borders and identities that must be maintained. In asking us to see terror as autoimmunity, then, Derrida is bringing the metaphor home at the same time he sends it abroad, “stretching” it to the limits of the world. The effect of the “bipolar image,” then, is to produce a situation in which there is no literal meaning, nothing but the resonances between two images, one biomedical, the other political.60

To define autoimmunity absolutely would be tantamount to purifying the term, immunizing it against the vagaries of power and interpretation: against, that is, the struggle for meaning. Put slightly differently, then, autoimmunity involves a process “from which no region of being, phúsis or history would be exempt.”61 Or to paraphrase Nietzsche, only that which is without history can be immune (from determination, ideology, irony, interpretation, etc.).62 We can also fruitfully compare Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity with Lacan’s logic of the “non-all” or “non-whole” (pas-tout). In Seminar XX, Encore, Lacan introduces the notion of the non-all in his discussion of the formulae of sexuation, and implicitly draws a distinction between two modalities or orientations; a “masculine” logic of exception and a “feminine” logic of the

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Introduction

non-all. Rather than referring to anatomical differences, these terms describe instead the ways a subject’s enjoyment (jouissance) is organized or structured. For Lacan, the masculine logic of exception takes there to be a subject who has unlimited enjoyment (jouissance), who stands outside the law of castration that governs social symbolic existence; it is the sovereign exception (Freud’s example of the primal father in Totem and Taboo)63 that proves the universal rule of castration. The feminine logic, by contrast, sees no exception to the law of castration; it declines the illusion of an uncastrated Man (and with it the possibility of absolute jouissance), but at the same time it takes castration to be non-all, never complete or whole. The non-all articulates the logic of the Real, pointing to what is irreducible to a society’s symbolic representation of reality. Or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “the Real is not external to the Symbolic: the Real is the Symbolic itself in the modality of non-All, lacking an external Limit/ Exception.”64 The non-all gives the lie to society’s phantasmatic and ideological pretension of wholeness. It orients us not only to the harshness of being (the reality of the Real), but also compels us to take an interpretive stance appropriate to a being understood as a becoming (a being that lacks), to a social reality that never coincides with the Real. The Lacanian concept of the non-all can thus help us theorize subjectivity, and the signifying order, differently, calling our attention to the dynamism and mutability of ontology and the need for a skepticism that engages and pursues subjectivity and language in their incompleteness, that introduces an infectious, “fundamental doubt” about what passes for stability in our social reality.65 Analogous to the “illogical logic” of autoimmunity, though drawing on a more explicitly psychoanalytic register, the logic of the non-all delights in the “structural inconsistency” of the Symbolic,66 in the negativity at the heart of being (or rather, becoming). Autoimmunity and the non-all contest sovereignty and its immunitary paradigm. If philosophy, in its investment in certainty and mastery, typically adopts an immunizing logic of the constitutive exception, theory embraces a skeptical logic of the non-all. The inherent incompleteness of being (occasioned or disclosed by the intrusion of the Real) solicits an autoimmune hermeneutics (a mode of response to the intrusion of the Real). Theory’s logic of the non-all keeps the desiring/knowing subject unavoidably split, incomplete, or even monstrous. It saps all dreams of autonomy and plenitude, deconstructing philosophy’s deep investment in the sovereign subject, which, like all sovereignties, is plagued, as Derrida argues, by an “internal contradiction,” a “nondialectizable antinomy.”67 Derrida counters and complicates this model of the immune, bounded, self-same sovereign with “the idea of a divided, differentiated ‘subject,’ who cannot be reduced to a conscious, egological intentionality.”68 Autoimmunity entails vulnerability and agency, self-dissolving and self-constituting movements. Contrary to common opinion, Derrida is thus not rejecting sovereignty tout court, evacuating any possibility for agency or self-determination. For instance, when arguing for the necessity of affirming freedom (especially

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when countering the idea of belonging, the attachment to some phantasmatic “we”), Derrida objects to a freedom that is narcissistically obsessed with only its care (or that of its nation, its allies, etc.), a political sovereignty à la Carl Schmitt defined by its capacity to decide the exception, to determine the friend/enemy dyad.69 He instead calls for a freedom that sustains the self but also opens up to the other: “freedom is the condition not only for being singular and other, but also for entering into relation with the singularity and alterity of others.”70 Derrida prefers the grammar of the “yes, but”;71 he affirms sovereignty, but only on condition that it remain “under erasure” (sous rature), its metaphysical underpinning perpetually scrutinized— whence his paradoxical formulation of the subject as a “sovereign without sovereignty.”72 A hermeneutics of skepticism, I would argue, exerts additional pressures on the conventional sovereign subject. It does this not only through its stubborn recalcitrance to epistemic interpellation (returning to the energy of Pyrrhonism) but also by breaking with the Pyrrhonists’ desire for ataraxia. Like the other sects of Hellenistic philosophy, this ancient skepticism remains committed to the ideals of integrity and self-mastery, to the fortification of the autos (self, same). Skeptical techniques work to immunize and protect the self from epistemic, mental disturbances. The life of the committed skeptic is “a life free of belief, utterly unencumbered by any opinions as to what is, in fact, true or false, lived on the basis of appearances alone, [which] leads to tranquility—ataraxia, literally, freedom from disturbance.”73 Theory’s skepticism goes further. Infected by skepticism, reason—or the life of philosophy—suffers, and risks madness (as Descartes demonstrated). Skepticism weakens the philosopher’s primary mechanism of self-protection: the invocation of universal logic. The knowledge that skepticism generates both protects and harms the philosopher, functioning both as a remedy (it cures arrogance and blindness) and as a poison (it undermines philosophy’s raison d’être). In challenging philosophy’s identity—its very existence— skepticism wreaks havoc on philosophy’s manly values: moderation, self-mastery, autonomy. Skepticism threatens to emasculate, or cognitively castrate, undermining the processes of traditional evaluation: the judgment that something is either good or bad. Skepticism not only reveals the danger of a subject incapable of judging clearly and distinctly, of discerning its own cells (truths) from pathogens (falsehoods), but it also unravels the “phantasmatico-theological”74 character of the sovereign subject: “It is not some particular thing that is affected in autoimmunity but the self, the ipse, the autos that finds itself infected.”75 If for philosophy skepticism is, then, either to be cured or contained, an irritating, if not melancholic, reminder of the impossibility of possessing absolute knowledge, for theory, skepticism proves more elusive. Theory, in its deconstructive guise, is far less preoccupied with disciplining skepticism. Moreover, skepticism, from theory’s perspective, is not a position we have to

16

Introduction

settle for, nor is skepticism so easily instrumentalizable (as Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt aims to be, for example). Theory avows skepticism’s character as autoimmune, as a pharmakon; it accepts and affirms skepticism’s unruly ways, identifying with its heteronomous negativity, embracing skepticism as its own autoimmune core. Such an identification with skepticism effectively problematizes any simple positivity of theory, any thematization of its identity, rendering it unfinalizable and unpredictable. Contributing further to theory’s unpredictability is the promiscuity of its skepticism, its unwillingness to remain tame and confined to the epistemological parameters assigned by modern philosophy, but instead mixing with aesthetics, ethics, or politics. “Unlike Kant’s reason,” Jean-Michel Rabaté writes, “Theory can never be pure because it is always lacking, and this weakness is in fact its strength.”76 Indeed, there is nothing more foreign to theory than the ideal of an “unscathed immunized purity.”77 Thinking theory as autoimmune keeps the consequences of its contagious, self-challenging, skeptical force better in view. Theory’s impurity, we might say, undergoes something of a transvaluation, recalling the metaphor of skepticism as a “bastard child.”78 Theory is a bastard. It is philosophy’s other—it is an other residing both within the philosophical body, and without—subject to the latter’s disciplinary biases, vulnerable to negative judgment and dismissal. Indeed, philosophy views with suspicion theory’s interest in and openness to collaborating with philosophy, literature, psychoanalysis, and politics, among others. Theory’s interdisciplinarity, or “antidisciplinarity,” as Jack Halberstam puts it, yields and creates desire for unruly knowledge, for “more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers.”79 Avital Ronell captures well the precarious condition of theory: “Being of mixed origin and in its own way homeless, hybridized, illicit, off center, theory gets routinely pounced upon.”80 But theory occasionally also pounces back! It returns to philosophy’s founding figure: Socrates. In the beginning, there was not only Socrates the wise, but also Socrates the hysteric. In theory’s counter-narrative, we begin with a different reading of Socrates, not the sanctioned story of Socrates the seeker of the absolute, the endless source of knowledge (Nussbaum’s exemplum for the humanities), but the skeptical subject always asking, “Why do you say that? Do you think that really? What do you mean when you use that word?” and so on.81 This is a doubt-inducing Socrates, a destabilizer of tradition and the status quo, a corrupter of youth.82 Underscoring this side of Socrates counterbalances the received, if not one-sided, image of Socrates as Plato’s mouthpiece. Socrates here is no longer, to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, solely the “conceptual persona”83 of the dialectic, deployed by Plato—the master philosopher—to reform consciousness and rectify public opinion. Or, to put it in different terms, theory finds in Plato’s dialogues a keen attention to the aporetic, and in Plato’s Socrates an inexhaustible resource for “rethink[ing] the self and its limits.”84 We get a glimpse of this virtual Socrates—a Plato before Platonism85—in the Essays of the Renaissance

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author Michel de Montaigne, for whom Socrates becomes the sublime progenitor of the dialogic: “The leader of his dialogues [le conducteur de ses dialogismes], Socrates is always asking questions and stirring up discussion, never concluding, never satisfying; and says he has no other knowledge than that of opposing.”86 Autoimmunity not only contaminates the autos, it also makes the dialogic possible. It opens the dialectical process—the self and thought in general—to the arrival of otherness: “Autoimmunity is not an absolute ill or evil. It enables an exposure to the other, to what and to who comes—which means that it must remain incalculable. Without autoimmunity, with absolute immunity, nothing would ever happen or arrive; we would no longer wait, await, or expect, no longer expect one another, or expect any event.”87 Unlike Roberto Esposito, who views autoimmunity as an absolute evil (as “a surplus of defense . . . with potentially lethal effects”),88 and community— foregrounding the term’s root, munus, the law of reciprocal obligation, our existence in common—as the corrective or antidote to this dangerous overexpansion of immuno-protective measures in contemporary culture,89 Derrida does not argue against autoimmunity in itself, or see calls to curtail society’s responses to insecurity (from the threat of viruses, terrorists, immigrants, etc.), to scale back society’s protective measures, as a sufficient response to the risks of autoimmunity.90 Derrida remains within autoimmunity, acknowledging its devastating force (“so many autoimmunitary movements  .  .  . produce, invent, and feed the very monstrosity it claims to overcome”),91 and exploring its hidden potential, exposing not only what the concept prohibits or forecloses but also what it renders possible or opens up. Like skepticism, autoimmunity is a pharmakon, “at once remedy and poison.”92 It enables as it disables. To fetishize autoimmunity as an ideal, and the dissolution of the sovereign self that it names as an unmitigated good, would thus be to callously ignore the disabling effects that it can bring about, to discount the risk of harm and pain that the term signifies. It would be to treat autoimmunity merely as a trope, detached from embodiment and the referential world, and to neglect its concrete implications. This study adopts the concept of autoimmunity instead for its ability to foreground the very concrete stakes, and the uncertainty of the outcomes, involved. Autoimmunity’s metaphorical weight comes not simply from its capacity for conceptual abstraction, but rather from its very imbrication in matters of life and death, body and body politic, mutability, vulnerability, and risk.93 As Michael Naas comments: “Autoimmunity stems not simply from the fact that we can never know whether we have chosen well or ill, whether something will turn out good or bad, whether it will have shown itself to be a threat or an opportunity, but, rather, from the fact that the opportunity is the threat, and the threat the chance.”94 Without autoimmunity nothing would happen; there would be no presence, no dialogue, no experience of freedom, of the Real, no event of any kind.95

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Introduction

In the psychoanalytic register, the event is that which reveals a “crack in the ontological edifice of the universe.”96 And yet the event is not an exception consistent with the masculine logic. “There is nothing but the order of Being,”97 as Žižek writes, nothing, that is, outside that order. But that order is non-all; the event is not outside the order of Being but rather constitutive of it. The event punctures the psychic shield afforded by our habits, which constitute our lifeless or quasi-mechanistic horizon. In its disruption of everydayness, the event creates a space for thinking singularity as such: The event is what comes and, in coming, comes to surprise me, to surprise and to suspend comprehension: the event is first of all that which I do not first of all comprehend. Better, the event is first of all that I do not comprehend. It consists in that, that I do not comprehend: that which I do not comprehend and first of all that I do not comprehend, the fact that I do not comprehend: my incomprehension.98

Theory and/as Ethics What becomes, then, of philosophy and theory when they are subjected to the “illogical logic” of autoimmunity? What are the consequences of this logic for philosophy and theory’s purchase, for their ability to address the other, to engage in ethical relations? One response to this challenge is to re-domesticate autoimmunity’s subversive potential and to de-theorize deconstruction (“deconstruction as logic not écriture”),99 that is, to bring deconstruction back into philosophy’s fold. Martin Hägglund performs such a questionable move, reading Derrida’s emphasis on the “nonethical opening of ethics”100 as stressing the nonmoralizing and profoundly atheistic strain of Derridean deconstruction. Hägglund’s reading serves as a warning against religious (post-secular) or ethical readings of Derrida. Simply put, there is no “ethics of alterity”; there has never been a Derridean post-structuralist ethics of the other. The event as such is nonethical. We should note, of course, that Hägglund frames his reading of Derrida as analytical rather than exegetical. He is not glossing Derrida, but clarifying his arguments, or rather, pushing them to their logical conclusion. He writes, “I not only seek to explicate what Derrida is saying; I seek to develop his arguments, fortify his logic, and pursue its implications.”101 At the heart of Hägglund’s “fortification” of Derrida’s logic is his desire to save Derrida from Levinas, to save deconstruction from the seductions of the transcendent other. We might also add that he attempts to rehabilitate Derrida for philosophy as such, to save Derrida from skepticism and theory. Against the grain, Hägglund situates Derrida beyond the linguistic turn and its idealist or textualist trappings, and is doubtful about a “religious” or “ethical” turn in Derrida, where ethics would be understood as the event of

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the other, as the unconditional exposure to alterity. For Hägglund, Derrida’s other is not exclusively or primarily another human being. The other is better understood in terms of what Derrida calls the structure of the trace: “[The other] designates the tracing of time that makes it impossible for anything to be in itself and exposes everyone—myself as well as any other—to corruption and death.”102 Derrida associates this “other”—spacing, différance, the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space—with the law of autoimmunity. There is no shielding from this temporal finitude; it is unconditional. It is in Hägglund’s terms an “ultratranscendental” condition, the “condition not only for everything that can be cognized and experienced, but also for everything that can be thought and desired.”103 In such a view, autoimmunity is, then, first and foremost a neutral category. It “appears to name a process that is inevitably and irreducibly at work more or less everywhere.”104 Autoimmunity describes this metaphysical exposure to temporal alterity.105 Accordingly, the event as something unconditional does not, strictly speaking, belong to ethics, that is, it has no “ethical status.”106 There cannot be an ethics of the event, since ethics is firmly situated in the realm of the calculable. As Hägglund puts it, “the ethical is . . . a matter of responding to alterity by making decisions and calculations, whereas the unconditional is the non-ethical opening of ethics, namely, the exposure to an undecidable other that makes it necessary to decide and calculate in the first place.”107 Hägglund is certainly right to question a conception of ethics as the blind embrace of the unconditional. There is indeed something unnerving about celebrating passivity or heteronomy as the ethical mode of preference.108 But ethics as a matter of philosophical calculation and prediction simplifies matters quite a bit.109 Hägglund quotes the following passage from Derrida to make his point: “To be responsible in ethics and politics implies that we try to program, to anticipate, to define laws and rules.”110 The key term for me here is “try.” “Try” qualifies the goals of programming, anticipating, and defining. It records a certain hesitation; it feeds deconstruction’s skeptical energy: “And perhaps deconstruction would consist, if at least it did consist, in precisely that: deconstructing, dislocating, displacing, disarticulating, disjoining, putting ‘out of joint’ the authority of the ‘is.’ ”111 Failure is built into the process, and failure is not merely the absence of success— there is the possibility, as Derrida says, following Beckett, of “failing well.”112 “Try,” then, locates ethics in yet another place—beyond the unconditional and the calculable. We might critically rethink ethics in terms of the relation between the two, rather than conceiving it as falling solely in either one of their jurisdictions. On the one hand, unconditional hospitality posits the exposure to the other as a relation of pure singularity (“tout autre est tout autre” [“every other is completely other”]),113 where the other as event punctures my horizon of intelligibility and expectations; in short, there is no relation, no subject and object split, since a relation would introduce and impose a hermeneutic framework on the event and thus neutralize the event

20

Introduction

as event. On the other hand, the calculable presupposes a relation between subject and object. The other, to whom the ethical subject is responding, may be elusive, but their otherness is always relational to me. The unconditional is perhaps a position that best describes Levinasian ethics (at least, the Levinas of Totality and Infinity), while the calculable does align with Derrida’s insistence in “Violence and Metaphysics” that there is no pure heterology, that the other is other not in itself, but in relation to me. At the same time, there is something missing if this is presented as simply a choice between two models of ethics. Derrida repeatedly moves to unsettle such a framing of ethics. Derrida’s notion of rapport sans rapport—a “relationless relation,” a “relation without relation”114—gets at the difficulties of making him fit Hägglund’s opposition between the unconditional and the calculable. How to respond to the other is an ethical matter—perhaps the ethical matter—but Derrida also clearly derives the force of his argument and his ethical inspiration from the event, from unconditional hospitality and the like. So what is at stake in denying the latter any ethical status? Rather than divorcing the rapport from the sans rapport—or neatly separating the two components of “a non-ethical opening of ethics”—I propose in this study to embrace the double binds of autoimmunity and to flesh out the ethical status of the subject of the event. To that end, it might be useful to think of the relation between the subject and the event in light of Derrida’s reflections on agrammaticality. Derrida ponders the “reality” of agrammaticality. He says: There is no pure a-grammaticality; or rather, there is pure agrammaticality but as soon as it appears as such, or as it enters a text or a situation, it starts to become grammatical. That’s why the transaction is required, why every text is a transaction between a given set of grammatical rules, and this is the case in literature, philosophy and even in everyday language. In short, there is both a given set of hegemonic grammatical rules and something which looks a-grammatical, which pushes or transforms the given power. Then there is transformation of the grammar itself.115

Derrida relates the question of agrammaticality to that of the event: “What we do when we do something, when we write, when we use grammar is invent new grammatical rules which in their turn will be challenged. An event is not simply an interruption, a break in the rules, in what is predictable, it’s already the production of new rules, a new expression, a new text.”116 So the agrammaticality of the event is not reducible to its disruptive effects (it is not fully analogous to the exposure of the other as event). The event is not simply that disruption; the event is always already caught up in and constituted by a set of conflicting injunctions: to be receptive to a language’s otherness, to be hospitable to its agrammatical alterity, and to respond to its inventiveness, to

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probe and struggle with its meanings. Derrida insists on the role of mediation, on the need to see the event as emerging from within a preexisting grammar. This, of course, comes with a risk: one’s response might effectively reinscribe this “other” grammar within the economy of the Same, leaving its digestive logic unaltered. Moreover, violence—hermeneutic violence—is unavoidable; it is constitutive of my relation to the other. As Derrida famously put it in his interview “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject”: “The moral question is . . . not, nor has it ever been: should one eat or not eat . . . but since one must eat in any case . . . how for goodness’ sake should one eat well [bien manger]?”117 Derrida’s phrase “Il faut bien manger” can be translated into English in two ways: “we have to eat, after all” and “we must eat well.” With this formulation—which gestures toward an alternative mode of hunger for otherness than one finds in Nussbaum—Derrida seeks to move beyond the stale and predictable debate over sameness and difference, pointing out that relating ethically to the other is not a matter of opting for either a cannibalistic (purely assimilative) or a non-cannibalistic (purely indigestible) mode of contact. There is no avoiding interpreting others. There is no exception to interpretation that would mythically capture the other as is, without mediation, without the defective tools of language. So the question is how to do it: how to interpret while acknowledging that interpretation is non-all, or, conversely, how to see the non-all of interpretation not as a liability but as the very condition for interpretation. The how will always entail the risk of betrayal or failure, but this is what makes ethics more than a mechanical activity, the application of a rule; it is what makes ethics im-possible. Without such a risk there would be no ethics, no responsibility at all. Trying—attempting, testing, failing—is of course at the heart of essaying. Michel Foucault took the essay as embodying the philosophical enterprise itself;118 the essay—“the living substance of philosophy”—does not legitimate “what is already known,” but rather desires to know “to what extent it might be possible to think differently.”119 Essayistic thinking hungers for and is drawn to moments of disruption and contestation, moments when common sense and the self-evident meaning of terms falter, when the question of what is justice or the good or the beautiful appears both possible and urgent. It is this definition of philosophy—of philosophy as an unsettling curiosity, as a corruptive force that discloses different ways of being and seeing—that theory seeks to revitalize. Liberating in an oblique, rather than straightforward way, the essay does not simply demystify but works to expand thought and to create new ways of thinking: it unavoidably imposes form on thought, but a kind of form that relentlessly refuses its own homogenization—its own fortification and enclosure—and that tries to think beyond its own cognitive limits. It desires to make the “impossible”120 possible. Montaigne’s famous motto—“What do I know?”—the dictum at the heart of his essaying practice, performs, through its interrogative form, the dialogic push and pull of forming and

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Introduction

unsettling meaning. It sustains critical ambivalence. Thinking theory as essay helps elucidate de Man’s observation that “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance.”121 Essaying translates on a formal level the ethical imperative of trying, the double binds of autoimmunity. Essaying works to create meaning, to generalize, to abstract from the particular, while simultaneously gesturing to the limits of mastery, to its inadequacies and imperfections. Attesting to the singularity of its object, its irreducibility to concepts, essaying underlines that interpretation is nonall.122 In its withholding and withdrawal of final judgment, especially when it involves others, the essay also calls to mind the Gospel command “judge not, lest you be judged.” Adapting the ethical imperative not to judge others to the task of hermeneutics more specifically, Montaigne’s essay secularizes and humanizes that Christian injunction, transforming it into a more general call to respect alterity, to forego the ideals of interpretive certitude and textual mastery.

Skeptical Authority Like the just judge—whose legal judgment, as Derrida points out, does not simply consist of “applying the law” like “a calculating machine,”123 but requires that each decision be the result of an invention—the Continental philosopher-cum-theorist judges without any assurance, and is often confronted with a double bind: the ethical scene of undecidability, which is not unlike the experience of essaying. The theorist confronts, and returns to, each event as a singularity, scrupulously asking, “What constitutes a judgment?”124—and answering the event’s interpellation as reader-judge, its call for “an absolutely unique interpretation.”125 As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes it, the double bind is “learning to live with contradictory instructions.”126 In Derrida’s own case, this contradiction is felt in his competing love for presence (he loves to hear the voice of a friend, for example), and the need, or even the compulsion he feels to complicate, to denaturalize, to discomfort, and to (re)introduce or insist on a gap between his thinking and being, “a Necessity,” in his words, “which compels me to say that there is no immediate presence, compels me to deconstruct and say that there is an interruption, there is a possibility for a letter not to arrive at its destination and so on.”127 Skepticism is something that I take on, that I confess,128 something that I cultivate (a skeptical habitus), but also something that interpellates me (“violently elects [me]”),129 that compels me to act ethically. Moreover, skepticism helps to sustain the double bind, the task of eating well, since it keeps me from phantasmatically closing off my world, from becoming too comfortably anchored in my world. Doubt is thus not an obstacle to overcome, a stage in epistemic progression, but defines the ethical scene as such: “having doubts about responsibility, decision, one’s own being-ethical, can be, or so it

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seems to me, and ought perhaps to remain, the indefeasible essence of ethics, of decision, and of responsibility.”130 Skepticism avows my precariousness, sustains my vulnerability, and keeps in check my need for immunization and protection. The humility of skepticism dampers what Judith Butler describes as a “fantasy of mastery,”131 helping to clear a space for an encounter with the other as event. The other as an event (the other as such) can, then, only appear as a breach in my immunological wall. The other can only be experienced as a frightening otherness, a significant disruption of my hermeneutic comfort, my sense of the world. Or as Derrida puts it: “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning them into pets.”132 An ethics of the other worthy of its name does not ignore, set aside, or bracket the alterity of others, but radically avows the unknownness of the arrivant, the Real of the other, making the other’s lack of determination constitutive of the ethical scene: Let us say yes to the who or what turns up [arrivant], before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is the citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, living or dead, male or female.133

Living with the double bind attests to the desire to speak for others (the sans-papiers, or undocumented workers, for example) and to respect their singularity, to be hospitable to their “monstrosity”—their irreducible alterity. Living with the double bind is learning to live out of harmony with time. The time of the other, of the event, is irreducible to mine, to my living-present. Time is “out of joint” (Derrida’s Shakespearean refrain in Specters of Marx). This double bind thus produces its own form of anxiety (as Levinas says: “The just person who knows himself to be just is no longer just”),134 and this is an anxiety that the skeptical mode tirelessly negotiates in every moment of decision: “When there is a determinable rule, I know what must be done, and as soon as such knowledge dictates the law, action follows knowledge as a calculable consequence: one knows what path to take, one no longer hesitates, the decision then no longer decides anything but simply gets deployed with the automatism attributed to machines.”135 A hermeneutics of skepticism fosters and promotes an ethics of hesitation in response to the double bind. But this hesitation should not be confused with quietism, an unwillingness to critique or speak. The question is from where does one speak, and for whom? This line of inquiry opens onto a psychoanalytic register, raising questions of authority and its locus in the self and the other/Other. Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “subject supposed to know” (sujet supposé savoir) complicates the hermeneutic scene of knowledge (savoir) by highlighting the importance

24

Introduction

of relationality and intersubjectivity: the object of knowledge is as important to meaning-making—and unmaking—as the subject who “knows.” In the analytic session, the “subject supposed to know” does not designate the analyst as such but rather denotes his function in the treatment, referring to the patient’s view of the analyst as a figure of absolute certainty who possesses knowledge of the patient’s secret meaning or unconscious desire: the analyst “is supposed to know that from which no one can escape, as soon as he formulates it—quite simply, signification.”136 Lacan contrasts the function of the “subject supposed to know” in philosophy and psychoanalysis. He argues that God, for example, occupies this position for Descartes. God is Descartes’s Other (a figure for the symbolic order) who guarantees the possibility of certainty—legitimizing the philosopher’s desire for certainty (as embodied in the cogito ergo sum)—his yearning to confirm that his clear and distinct ideas do in fact correspond to the external world. Transference is made possible by the patient’s (mis)identification of the analyst as a “subject supposed to know.” Possessing “a certain infallibility,”137 the analyst, in the eyes of the patient, is capable of probing her unconscious desire at will, deciphering the meaning of the latter’s hidden secrets and symptoms. In stark contrast, the aim of the analytic session is to de-suppose the analyst, to strip the analyst of that phantasmatic status. The analyst declines the power attributed to him by the transference: “he is not God for his patient.”138 Rather, the task of the analyst is to guide the patient, through free association, to discover, or rather to come to terms with the fact that there is no ultimate authority; there is no big Other who knows. “The whole psychoanalytic operation,” Jason Glynos argues, “is aimed at deflating the analyst’s own status as Subject-Supposed-to-Know by making the patient him- or herself do the work, only intervening so as to facilitate the subject’s confrontation with his or her truth, namely, that there is no universal symbolic Guarantee.”139 Psychoanalytic hermeneutics is, ironically, an anti-hermeneutics (antithetical to Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, but amenable, I maintain, to Derrida’s ethico-hermeneutics of eating well).140 Psychoanalysis is a skeptical practice that foregrounds the opacity of the signifier, the untranslatability of the patient’s message into the analyst’s preexisting interpretive horizon (that is, the classic Freudian language of typicality or symbols).141 From the perspective of philosophy, this can only appear as an unacceptable demotion of the knower/interpreter, as a forceful blow to the philosopher’s epistemic identity, to the discipline’s investment in the will to know. Perhaps this is why Lacan has on several occasions referred to psychoanalysis as an “antiphilosophy.”142

Manifesting Theory Speaking from a position of authority is what Lacan, Derrida, and a generation of French philosophers and intellectuals actively resisted. Toward the

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end of Rogues, for example, Derrida gestures to an “Enlightenment to come” that would take seriously the challenges of psychoanalysis (which shows us that the knower, as a split subject internally divided by unconscious drives and desires, contaminates the scene of pure hermeneutics—the object of knowledge is itself phantasmatic), and embrace rather than deny its “logic of the unconscious.”143 He associates autoimmunity explicitly with the Freudian death drive, that originary violence, that intractable self-sabotaging impulse or “poisoned medicine”: “this pharmakon of an inflexible and cruel autoimmunity that is sometimes called the ‘death drive’ and that does not limit the living being to its conscious and representative form.”144 A new Enlightenment with psychoanalysis would be an Enlightenment no longer obsessed with self-transparency, sovereignty, and the authority of reason. Michel Foucault, perhaps more than any thinker, documents the transformation of the intellectual, the reconfiguration of the intellectual’s position vis-à-vis power and the hegemony of reason. He writes: “For a long period, the ‘left’ intellectual spoke and was acknowledged the right of speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice. He was heard, or purported to make himself heard, as the spokesman of the universal. To be an intellectual meant something like being the consciousness/conscience of us all.”145 This obituary of the “left” intellectual coincides with the general dissolution of the Kantian transcendental subject. What comes after the political subject (after the Sartrean existentialist-Marxist universal intellectual) is for Foucault the specific intellectual. This new type of intellectual has abandoned the prior lofty rhetoric of universal emancipation; he has done away with “the modality of the ‘universal,’ the ‘exemplary,’ the ‘just-and-true-for-all.’ ”146 The intellectual’s relation to marginalized groups is not one of cognitive superiority. For Foucault, the tumultuous events of May ’68 were in this respect quite illuminating, demanding a radical reconfiguration of the intellectual: “In the most recent upheaval, the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he and they are certainly capable of expressing themselves.”147 The students’ demonstrations and workers’ strikes, which almost brought down de Gaulle’s government, revealed that the old paradigm of critique was inadequate for the task at hand. Foucault’s target in this passage is rather evident here: it is the Marxist model of ideology critique. In this particular manifestation, it is ideology as false consciousness that is being contested. For Foucault, the subjectivity of the intellectual lies not outside of ideology but firmly within it: “The intellectual’s role is no longer to place himself ‘somewhat ahead and to the side’ in order to express the stifled truth of the collectivity; rather, it is to struggle against the forms of power that transform him into its object and instrument in the sphere of ‘knowledge,’ ‘truth,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘discourse.’ ”148 For this reason, power does not mean “that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.”149 What follows from this recognition is not despair or apathy, but a resolve to confront

26

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any configuration of power identified as dangerous, adopting what he terms “a hyper- and pessimistic activism.”150 Žižek’s investment in the role of the committed theorist both complements and contrasts with Foucault’s demotion of the intellectual’s hermeneutic authority: “We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.  .  .  . today, all the main terms we use to designate the present conflict—‘war on terror,’ ‘democracy and freedom,’ ‘human rights,’ and so on—are false terms, mystifying our perception of the situation instead of allowing us to think it.”151 Žižek repeated these exact words during his more recent intervention in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is clear that the masses, on Žižek’s account, still need the public intellectual to theorize their condition. Žižek’s focus on interpretation calls for rewriting Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is, to change it”): “I am therefore tempted to reverse Marx’s Thesis 11: the first task today is precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act, to intervene directly and change things.”152 Action should never be performed at the expense of thinking and interpretation.153 Praxis still needs theory.154 Whereas Foucault does away altogether with the seemingly defunct language of ideology, then, replacing it with his more protean notion of power, Žižek pursues a post-Althusserian revival of ideology, seeking to rescue the concept from hermeneutic oblivion. Writing after and in light of a mixed reception of May ’68 (ranging from unabashed nostalgia to reactionary denial), Žižek understands the uprisings as pointing to the repressed fundamental social antagonism between “the Included and the Excluded” that continues to haunt capitalism. For Žižek, it is the ’68 slogan Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible! (“Let’s be realists, let’s demand the impossible!”) that best captures the revolutionary legacy of this movement. Žižek adds: “Today’s utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely. The only way to be realistic is to envision what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible.”155 While Derrida undoubtedly shares Foucault’s distrust of the universal voice of the intellectual, he is still committed, like Žižek, to changing people’s orientation to reality. For instance, in the aftermath of 9/11, Derrida rigorously rejected the dubious conflation of “comprehending and justifying”156 when dealing with certain acts of terrorism, arguing that understanding is not tantamount to rationalizing violence, that, as a public intellectual, one can both unconditionally condemn acts of terrorism and seek to understand “the situation that might have brought them about or even legitimated them.”157 The gesture of understanding the “root causes” of terrorism, though, is not without its hermeneutic pitfalls. If some reject the project out of hand (with the refrain: we don’t need to understand the enemy to defeat him), others, conversely, are too eager to offer answers. For instance, Laura Westra, in her Faces of State Terrorism (2012), after favorably quoting Derrida’s desire to

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comprehend the terrorists, writes: “Even if one essential general cause of terrorism cannot be found, we can affirm that the root cause hinges on respect for the human rights, but also for cultural and religious rights of all individuals and people. All are firmly entrenched in international law, and basic to the letter and the spirit of the UN charter and other foundational documents.”158 The cure here is tempting but problematic. While willful ignorance of the causes for your neighbor’s resentment and hatred might immunize you from the other’s affective force, from his face (in Levinasian parlance), the cognitive solution reintroduces a universalist framework of rights that reduces the problem of respect for alterity to legalistic recognition, assuming an ontological or essentializing perspective on the problem of the other. As a result of its reinscription in a predictable humanist and idealist narrative, Derrida’s intervention loses its critical edge. To be sure, Westra makes a concession to skepticism—perhaps “one essential general cause of terrorism cannot be found”—and even calls for a recognition of difference: we need “to honor our common humanity and respect our difference.”159 Yet, in Westra’s account, sameness and difference coexist quite smoothly, with hardly a hint of any friction between the two: here our instructions for learning to live with others are precisely not contradictory; our moral being is not at risk of compromise. In sharp contrast, Derrida’s call for comprehending terrorism and terrorists after 9/11 takes place within a hermeneutics of skepticism, where causes and symptoms are not so easily discernible, where no concept becomes seamlessly immunized against criticism. Derrida’s brand of ideology critique is at its best when it depurifies concepts and troubles “the traditional metaphysical tendency to rely on irreducible pairs”;160 when it dislodges settled meanings and disrupts oppressive consensus; when its skeptical energy is deployed in the interest of interpreting otherwise (to interpret, for instance, one’s enemy as a traumatized “subject,” to see the other as a grievable life);161 when it opens up an interpretive space for reimagining new solutions to persistent and familiar problems. In short, the work of skepticism produces conceptual mutation. And this is what is urgently needed today; as W.  J.  T. Mitchell puts it, the “mutation” Derrida calls for must occur “in our entire way of thinking about justice, democracy, sovereignty, globalization, military power, the relations of nation-states, the politics of ‘friendship’ and enmity in order to address terrorism with any hope of an effective cure.”162 While calling for an effective critique—that is, for a critique that will have a positive impact on the world (deconstruction is “anything but abstract and idealist”)163—Derrida is careful to frame his observation in tentative terms as unpredictable, risky, and without guarantee, cognizant that he is not proposing a blueprint for rational political action. Immunization against ideology, against any form of mediation (the dream of a return to the things themselves), remains, indeed, a fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. What Derrida promotes rather is the more modest if not more perplexing therapeutic (illogical) logic: the logic of autoimmunity, of the double bind, along with, of course, a healthy dosage of skepticism.

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Outline Theory’s Autoimmunity constitutes a response to the challenge of thinking theory as skepticism, with and against philosophy. Unlike philosophy, which has always kept skepticism at arm’s length, theory embraces skepticism’s corrosive ways, risking its very identity, its authority and purchase on the world. Yet, while contesting philosophy’s hermeneutic aspirations and biases, theory never fully adopts an anti-hermeneutics, an anti-philosophy, a refusal to understand the world. Rather, theory inventively subjects this desire to know—this curiosity—to the “madness” of the decision.164 In its insistent emphasis on skepticism, Theory’s Autoimmunity moves beyond a purely ontological account of autoimmunity, a descriptive account of any being or concept’s metaphysical exposure to alterity, to the future. Theory’s autoimmunity, I argue, lies not so much in what theory is but in what it does, in its interpretative reticence, or what I call theory’s “hermeneutics of skepticism.” It is a skepticism that does not start with power and mastery but passivity and vulnerability, not with “I doubt” but with “what do I know?” Without both this creative labor and the risks it entails—without autoimmunity—theory becomes reified and programmatic, closed in on itself in a self-protective gesture that ultimately evacuates its critical interpretive force, its ability to receive and respond to the other or the event, to address and produce new meanings. In the chapters that follow, I propose a series of case studies that highlight the labor of theory. Through a hermeneutics of skepticism, I read essaying, the pharmakon, the eventness of literature, irony’s negativity, the death drive, and the logic of the non-all as occasions for theory’s hysteria, as that which provokes a desire for, and proliferates a resistance to, meaning. In chapter 1, “Montaignean Meditations,” I pursue the question of skepticism, through an account of its most exemplary practitioner, Montaigne, and examine skepticism’s relation to philosophy and theory. In stark contrast to the Cartesian obsession with certainty, an autoimmune theory can be said to find an earlier ally in Montaigne, whose skeptical practices short-circuit philosophy’s conceptual machinery and metaphysical doxa. Throughout his book, Montaigne explores the depths of his mind, but his meditations fail to secure a substantial self. Far from it: his Essays fragment and multiply his self, disrupting the Parmenidean unity of being and thinking. Initially tempted by philosophy’s promise of ataraxia—particularly the kind championed by Seneca—Montaigne comes to question philosophy’s traumatophobic ethos, its fear of otherness and attempt to shield and immunize itself against the unknown and unpredictable. His curiosity points to an openness to an autoimmune traumatophilia, an openness to the birth of a new subject, a monstrous subject—an openness, that is, to a cognitive and affective experience of the self as discontinuous, divided, and haunted by an irreducible, constitutive otherness.

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Chapter 2, “Ideology, Critique, and the Event of Literature,” delves further into literature’s eventness, its ability to open readers to the unknown and unpredictable, through an investigation of literary criticism’s vexed relation to ideology critique. While some claim that critique, like theory, has run its course, and venture toward a form of criticism that is descriptive— and otherwise than skeptical—others resist the temptation of a post-political sensibility, arguing instead for the necessity of ideology critique. Žižek, a leading voice in this revival of critique, vigorously insists that “ideology is not all.” This chapter asks what type of literary criticism—what type of critical reading—might emerge after Žižek’s critique of ideology, and, as a correlative, how this form of reading would respond to the event of literature, to the affective and cognitive demands of the literary. To this end, I turn to Baudelaire’s prose poem “To Each His Chimera,” a self-reflexive text that allegorizes the autoimmune process of reading critically, and to two case studies that have sparked theoretical response for the way they test theory’s continuing purchase on the world and literature in the “post-critique” and “post-ideology” age: the 2005 Paris riots, which captured theorists’ attention for the questions they raised about authority, subjectivity, and resistance; and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel that continually spurs theorists to write its eventness, to explain its singularity, but that also complicates the tendency to read it through a hermeneutics of exemplarity or fetishize it. I take up Žižek’s suggestive discussion of Morrison’s Beloved not as an exemplification of what one might call Žižek’s Theory with a capital T (as the latest exemplar of a hermeneutics of suspicion), but rather, as a kind of skeptical testing or essaying of his inventive account of ideology. Literature, this chapter shows, plays a crucial role in making theory’s autoimmunity happen. Chapter 3, “Irony, Power, and the Death Drive,” focuses on the challenges that irony and Freud’s notion of the death drive pose for philosophy and hermeneutics. Like autoimmunity, irony is not an “absolute ill or evil.” Irony both calls for and blocks interpretation; it enables an exposure to the otherness of literature, to what remains incalculable and resistant to determination. Irony’s taste for excess converges with the death drive in their shared hostility toward containment and mastery. Both corrode in various ways the basis of a self-transparent and calculating self. Irony always risks troubling the stability of a given interpretation, while the death drive always risks undermining the predictability of self-interest. But as with skepticism, a theory that embraces autoimmunity is less troubled by the negativity of the death drive and irony. Indeed, theory turns its attention to irony’s unruliness, harnessing its interpretive possibilities. To explore the perplexities of the death drive at both the ontological and hermeneutic level, I turn to Stendhal’s novel Red and Black and its climactic scene of self-discovery, where Julien Sorel, the young hero, finds his “true” self in the solitude of his prison cell once he frees himself from the grasp and demands of power. Against readings of the novel that exemplify Julien as a romantic hero, the chapter ironizes this ending by rereading it,

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Introduction

through the lenses of the death drive, as Julien’s phantasmatic struggle with power, his dialectics of kratophobia (fear of power) and kratophilia (love of power). Building on the discussion of ideology in chapter 2, this chapter interprets Jacques Rancière’s political reading of Red and Black as an occasion of philosophical abstraction (for its redeeming message of the promise of happiness, the universal appeal of equality) that must suppress both irony and any hint of the death drive in order to rescue the novel’s romantic hero. Here, theory cautions against such a move toward exemplarity, maintaining instead a focus on the vicissitudes of power, their ironic figuration, and their impact on how we interpret Julien’s phantasm of transcendence. Extending the psychoanalytic register, chapter 4, “Queering Difference, or The Feminine Logic of the ‘Non-All,’ ” tackles sexual difference, a problematic that highlights theory’s preoccupations with ontology and otherness. The primacy of sexual difference has long been a site of conflict among feminists and queer theorists, who have objected to philosophy’s unmarked universalism and neglect of sexual difference, while disagreeing over the essentialist or constructivist nature of that difference. Against a constructivist model that favors investigations of gender over sex, the French feminists Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva make sexual difference a nonnegotiable ontological issue. These French feminists argue for the singularity of feminine difference and its economy of enjoyment. While similarly contesting philosophy’s effacement of sexual difference, Žižek interprets the oppositional force of feminine enjoyment quite differently, arguing that the non-all is not meant to map neatly onto a biological register, and thus potentially applies to all subjects. In doing so, Žižek “queers” jouissance, ontology, and the notion of difference itself. To understand the implications and theoretical potential of this queer logic of the non-all, I examine Marguerite Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, a novel whose entanglement of grammaticality with agrammaticality, and patriarchy with feminine resistance, discloses symbolic reality and its interpretation as autoimmune, fraught, and infinitely queerable. The final chapter, “Immunizing Ontology: The Speculative Turn,” investigates a dominant philosophical response to the threat of theory—the movement of speculative realism and its variant or subset, object-oriented ontology (OOO), a movement styled as a corrective to philosophy’s Kantian heritage—of which theory (Continental philosophy after Derrida) is but the latest manifestation. What is at stake in this chapter is the return to ontology as a move to quarantine philosophy against the contagion of skepticism and interpretation. Spurred by Quentin Meillassoux’s call to return to the “great outdoors,” a new generation of philosophers is taking on the linguistic turn, and its creation of a confining cage separating philosophy from its objects, with the aim of curing philosophy of its “correlationist” virus, the hegemonic belief that we cannot access the thing-in-itself. Against a perceived obsession with mediation (language and power) and with the human, their message is clear: skepticism is one of the main culprits in ontology’s demotion and

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in the installation of an impoverished epistemology. The return to “reality” can be read as a flight from reading; it is preconditioned on immunizing ontology, on protecting philosophy from skepticism, from the madness of the decision. Yet, this chapter argues, what this phantasmatic account covers over is the non-all of Being, the messy implications and unsettling affective and epistemological consequences of contact, of intersubjectivity, and of the entanglement with the Real. Theory’s response to “the prison-house of language” should not be to immunize ontology but to embrace its autoimmune structure, its non-all, to traverse philosophy’s fantasy of immediacy, its desire for a glacial—hard, pure, and clear—world.

Chapter 1

Montaignean Meditations

That affirmation of a radical heteronomy is what some of our contemporaries make the touchstone of ethics: ethics would properly mean the law of the heteron, a heteron that was constructed at the crossroads of the Levinasian Other and the Lacanian Thing. That conception of ethics substitutes the unconditional law of heteronomy for the Kantian unconditional law of self-determination of the subject. —Jacques Rancière

My own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others. —Judith Butler

In Cartesian Meditations, Edmund Husserl expresses his fidelity to Descartes’s project, to his “turn to the subject,” by adopting the Cartesian cogito for the purpose of transcendental philosophy. Like Descartes, Husserl calls on the philosopher to “withdraw into himself” in order to “reflect on how [he] might find a method for going on, a method that promises to lead to genuine knowing.”1 In Pascalian Meditations, Pierre Bourdieu counters Husserl’s disembodied, solipsistic Cartesian subjectivity with his well-known notion of habitus—that is, the self as embodied history, a history internalized as second nature and thus forgotten as history. Bourdieu turns to Blaise Pascal—the great anti-Cartesian—not only for inspiration but in order to establish a new interpretive ethos that transcends the seemingly intractable dilemma opposing objectivism to subjectivism. “We are as much automatic as intellectual,” Bourdieu favorably quotes Pascal.2 Bourdieu credits his predecessor for refusing to perpetuate philosophy’s self-blindness, exposing the subject of philosophy’s wretched material condition, its deep contradictions and paradoxes. In this chapter, I propose that we look to Michel de Montaigne as an alternative to Bourdieu’s own Pascalian counter-model. This effort is not so much a critique of Bourdieu’s Pascalian model as an attempt to pursue a different type of critical dialogue with philosophy. If Bourdieu’s 33

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Pascalian alternative risks severing a dialogue with philosophy, reducing Descartes’s solipsistic meditations to sociological meditations on symbolic power, Montaignean meditations recover the theoretical impulses within philosophical thinking—be it ancient, humanist, or contemporary. They thus provide a case study for how philosophy and theory relate to and differ from one another. So what would philosophy or theory look like if the “turn to the subject” were conceived as a turn to the Montaignean subject? Any answer must take into account Montaigne’s reflections on the uniqueness of his mode of inquiry. Montaigne did not see himself as merely contributing to a preexisting humanist zeitgeist; in a late addition to his Essays, the essayist, breaking with the modesty topos, insists on the singularity of his book, “the only book in the world of its kind” (II.8: 278c).3 Nor do the Essays merely offer their audience another philosopher, a “French Seneca” as many of his early readers felt him to be.4 Quite the contrary, the Essays open up a new path for thinking in large part by testing and foregrounding the discords and mutations of the self. In a key moment of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (II.12), Montaigne highlights his otherness and newness, portraying himself as “a new figure,” as “an accidental philosopher” (409c). Here we might want to substitute the term “accidental theorist” for “accidental philosopher,” in keeping with the use to which I have been putting these two terms here.

Philosophy and/as Traumatophobia Montaigne’s mutation into a theorist owes much to his critical engagement with Seneca, and the divergent view of traumatic disruption and self-care that he developed through his essaying of Stoic thought. Seneca, one of the authors Montaigne quotes most frequently, exemplifies the cultural tradition of philosophy-as-therapy. In his epistolary exchange with Lucilius, the Roman Stoic foregrounds both the powers of reason (“Love reason! The love of reason will arm you against the greatest hardship”) and the value of selfmastery (“It is a priceless good to be master of oneself”).5 He understands the philosophical life as involving a care of the self, a cura sui,6 the Latin translation of the Greek epimeleia heautou. Foucault points out that this moral injunction has been all but forgotten by post-Cartesian philosophy, which tends to favor another Greek mandate: Socrates’s famous Delphic injunction “Know thyself” (gnothi sauton). Yet in Greco-Roman culture, as Foucault recalls, “the injunction of having to know yourself was always associated with the other principle of having to take care of yourself, and it was that need to care for oneself that brought the Delphic maxim into operation.”7 For Socrates, the ethics of self-care is fundamental, underlying all other preoccupations. In Plato’s Apology, for example, Socrates refers to this moral precept

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in front of his judges, when he accuses them on two occasions of failing to take care of themselves, choosing instead to concern themselves with external matters: Are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul? I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul.8

In Alcibiades Major (also known as Alcibiades I), Socrates elaborates on his philosophical ideal of self-care more fully.9 In this dialogue, Socrates advises the young Alcibiades to take care of his soul—to learn how to govern himself—before turning to a life of politics: the duty of governing others.10 But for Hellenistic philosophers such as Seneca, turning inward has a more limited end. It does not function as a precondition for the loftier goals of caring for others and the city, nor does it involve the philosophical abstraction typically found in Plato and Aristotle: “Attending to the self is not . . . just a brief preparation for life; it is a form of life. Alcibiades understood that he had to take care of himself if he wished to take care of others later. Now it is a matter of taking care of oneself, for oneself. One should be one’s own object for oneself throughout one’s life.”11 As Pierre Hadot observes, for the Stoic, “doing philosophy meant practicing how to ‘live,’ . . . giv[ing] up desiring that which does not depend on us and is beyond our control, so as to attach ourselves only to what depends on us: actions which are just and in conformity with reason.”12 With its emphasis on practical life, Stoicism made therapy one of the defining features of its philosophy; or, in the words of Cicero, it defined philosophy as “animi medicina” (medicine for the soul).13 Philosophy cures and purifies the mind; it aims to prevent trauma from happening in the first place. To do philosophy, then, is to immunize oneself—acting as what Peter Sloterdijk dubs a homo immunologicus14—against the threat of trauma. Philosophy is traumatophobic. In urging his interlocutor and friend Lucilius to concern himself with himself, to turn away from political activity, Seneca emblematizes the ethos of Roman philosophers from the first and second centuries AD.15 What matters to them are strategies that protect the individual’s frail and vulnerable condition. Seneca’s letters abound with “psycho-immunological practices”16 that are ultimately aimed at correcting mistaken dispositions and reorienting one’s precarious relation to self and to the world so as to achieve “a tranquil mind”17 and a happier, more rational life. For the Senecan self, the world represents, at best, a secondary concern, and at worst a potentially devastating

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threat to the self’s well-being (“What then do you think the effect will be on character, when the world at large assaults it!”):18 Suppose that he has a retinue of comely slaves and a beautiful house, that his farm is large and large his income; none of these things is in the man himself; they are all on the outside. Praise the quality in him which cannot be given or snatched away, that which is the peculiar property of the man. Do you ask what this is? It is soul, and reason brought to perfection in the soul.19

The Stoic sage believes that “we ought to retire into ourselves” and abandon any psychic investment in external objects.20 Only by mentally and physically severing the link to the world can the self truly attend to itself (that is, to its rational mind): “the mind must be withdrawn from external interests into itself. Let it have confidence in itself, rejoice in itself, let it admire its own things, let it retire as far as possible from the things of others and devote itself to itself.”21 In “Letter 91” Seneca uses the example of Liberalis, who was devastated by the unexpected fire that destroyed the city of Lyons, as an occasion to meditate on the importance of preparing oneself for the worst, of meditating on future calamities (praemeditatio malorum). Seneca draws the moral conclusion that since “nothing, whether public or private, is stable,” then “nothing ought to be unexpected by us.”22 This philosophical practice corresponds to what Michel Foucault has called “technologies of the self,” that is, techniques “which permit individuals to effect . . . a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”23 As a technique of the self, the practice of meditating on future calamities helps Seneca to indemnify the self, to attain tranquillitas, close in meaning to what the Greeks named ataraxia, a state of mental tranquility resulting from the extirpation of one’s most intense emotions. A traumatophobia informs Seneca’s moral teaching: the fear of disturbance can only be countered by techniques of the self that help to forge a “mental armour”24 and immunize the mind against outside threats. For example, the practice of praemeditatio malorum enables Lucilius, the would-be philosopher, to strengthen his interiority by fortifying what we would call after Freud his “protective shield,”25 and to fashion a sovereign self by minimizing the shock of the unexpected, that is, by limiting the affectability of the contingent world (external stimuli) and thus reducing the self’s vulnerability to whims of fortune. Attaining psychological immunity, a state of tranquillitas is, then, preconditioned on the cultivation of a purposefully phobic self, a successful affective divestment from the external world. Even in an inherently unstable world (Seneca himself was writing under the tumultuous reign of Nero), inner freedom and peace remain for the Roman philosopher a genuine possibility.

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For Foucault, as suggested earlier, the primacy of the injunction “to take care of yourself” became eclipsed by the time of Descartes. The rise of the confessional model (which transformed self-knowledge into a kind of self-renunciation), the increased emphasis on morality as an external, rule-governed affair (against which self-knowledge functioned as a mode of resistance—the individual knower versus the hegemony of social morality), the reduction of self-knowledge to a purely cognitive matter—what Foucault dubbed the “Cartesian moment”26—had all led to the disappearance of the care of the self from philosophical inquiry.27 While Foucault’s untimely death left his genealogical project incomplete, he did briefly speculate about Montaigne’s contribution to this ancient culture of self-care: “I think Montaigne should be reread from this perspective, as an attempt to reconstitute an aesthetics and an ethics of the self.”28 An investigation of Montaigne’s potential role in this culture—as one of its last inheritors—opens up the possibility of radically rethinking the type of subjectivity that has faithfully informed philosophical discourse since the advent of the Cartesian cogito. This ancient precept of philosophy is visible throughout Montaigne’s Essays. Unlike his peers, who concern themselves with reputation and the gaze of others, Montaigne boldly turns inward in order to care for himself: The world always looks straight ahead; as for me, I turn my gaze inward, I fix it there and keep it busy. Everyone looks in front of him; as for me, I look inside of me; I have no business but with myself; I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself. Others always go elsewhere, if they stop to think about it; they always go forward; No man tries to descend into himself; persius

as for me, I roll about in myself. (II.17: 499a)

If others care for their self-image or vana gloria (what he condemns elsewhere as “an extreme concern with prolonging his existence” [II.12: 414c]), Montaigne cares for himself. He also connects this care explicitly to the Delphic injunction in “Of Vanity” (III.9): “It was a paradoxical command that was given us of old by that god at Delphi: ‘Look into yourself, know yourself, keep to yourself; bring back your mind and your will, which are spending themselves elsewhere, into themselves’ ” (766b). But of all the essays, it is “Of Solitude” (I.39) that best showcases the appeal of Seneca and his culture of self-care. Following the Senecan imperative to withdraw into oneself as far as one can29—a withdrawal that is at once mental and spatial, since the author sought refuge in the privacy of his “back shop”30 (177a)—Montaigne assumes the subject position of the Stoic sage,

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“a man of understanding [l’homme d’entendement]” (177a), internalizing the traumatophobic ethical practice of praemeditatio malorum. Concerning the potential loss of his wife, children, and goods, Montaigne writes that when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to him to do without them, since he will have safeguarded the integrity of his self: he “has lost nothing, if he has himself” (I.39: 177a).31 The influence of the Roman philosopher is made even more explicit by Montaigne’s quotation from Seneca’s “Letter 9,” which recounts the popular story of Stilpo, who, after hearing of the actual loss of his wife, children, and property, is known to have confessed that “he had lost nothing of his own” (177a), reaffirming, in the face of these personal calamities, his privileged state of self-sufficiency and self-mastery.32 With his protective shield uncompromised, Stilpo immunized himself successfully against an “excess of stimulation.”33 Montaigne’s admiration for Seneca also stems, of course, from the sage’s actions, which reflected and concretized his philosophy. Ordered by the emperor Nero to commit suicide, Seneca’s will did not falter. The Roman philosopher literally practiced what he preached till the end. His manner of living, thinking, and dying harmoniously coincided. Having effectively meditated on the question of death (“For the mind will never rise to virtue if it believes that death is an evil; but it will so rise if it holds that death is a matter of indifference”),34 Seneca demonstrates the appropriate Stoic attitude of indifference to this ultimate act when the time finally comes. Yet Montaigne was never simply Senecan. Given his affinity for the ancient philosopher, one may well wonder what could have troubled his emulation of Seneca’s self-relation. Was it the essayist’s “skeptical crisis” provoked by his readings of Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Skepticism, recently translated into Latin by Henri Estienne (the well-known thesis championed by Pierre Villey)? Gérard Defaux supplies an alternative explanation, one which argues that the seeds of Montaigne’s doubts about Stoicism were in fact planted before the writing of the Essays. It was the scene of Montaigne’s dear friend Etienne de La Boétie at his deathbed—the traumatic event of August 18, 1563, at Germignan—that marked the birth of Montaigne the skeptic, this self-described “unpremeditated and accidental philosopher” (II.12: 311c). La Boétie, a great admirer of Stoicism, failed, in the final moments, to live up to his philosophical ideal. Far from demonstrating indifference or impassivity to his impending death, the sick La Boétie became agitated, urging Montaigne to give him “a place.”35 This request for a place reflected in the eyes of Montaigne an unexpected and disappointing concern for glory. According to Defaux, Montaigne was to be haunted by this traumatic experience, and struggled with it long after: “If Estienne de La Boétie, this incomparable, superior being, couldn’t stop himself from saying things at the moment of his death that his life had never said, who, then, could?”36 Revealing doubt about the possibility of a harmonious relation between his manner of living, thinking, and dying, Montaigne writes: “If I can, I shall keep my death from

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saying anything that my life has not already said” (I.7: 20c). While Defaux’s argument is highly suggestive, shedding new light on the origins of Montaigne’s skepticism, it risks overemphasizing the example of La Boétie’s death. Comparing this example with Seneca’s calmly confident suicide leads not so much to the conclusion that human beings are fundamentally weak and that Stoic death is a difficult ideal to attain (although these are also positions that Montaigne did endorse), but rather to the primarily epistemological crisis described in “By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End” (I.1), a crisis brought on by the realization that history cannot provide firm examples to follow. In this case, the “lesson” is that while a life of cultura animi, a life that foregrounds the culture of the soul, can result in a beautiful death, it can also very well lead to an ugly one. In any case, we do not have to look only to La Boétie’s death to find disappointment with Stoicism and its promise of psychological immunity. Montaigne himself serves as an example. In his liminal essay “Of Idleness” (I.8), Montaigne stages for his readers his own account of the philosophical scene, initially marked by the dream of solitary contemplation: Lately when I retired to my home, determined so far as possible to bother about nothing except spending the little life I have left in rest and seclusion, it seemed to me I could do my mind no greater favor than to let it entertain itself in full idleness and stay and settle in itself, which I hoped it might do more easily now, having become weightier and riper with time. (21a)

Then came the recognition of his failure to simply translate old age into wisdom, into self-knowledge and self-mastery—into the ideal of stasis, an ideal revered by the Senecan sage: But I find  .  .  . that, on the contrary, like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing [mettre en rolle], hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of them. (21a)

Narrating his withdrawal from society, Montaigne the Stoic philosopher undergoes an internal disruption. His mind does not obey his will. The essayist’s ideas revolt and go astray, threatening to undermine his avowed project of self-knowledge. By describing his mind as a “runaway horse” and its thoughts as “chimeras and fantastic monsters,” Montaigne from the start recognizes the indocility of his mind, the self-destructiveness of his ideas.

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Essaying Skepticism, Essaying Hysteria If Montaigne posits writing as a morally regulating force (the words mettre en rolle connote a legal context), one that shames his mind, he will discover that essayistic writing is anything but a normalizing form or force. It is not ataraxia-inducing.37 The essay form has its own “illogical logic,” to borrow Derrida’s formulation. As a mode of inquiry, the Montaignean essay problematizes; it develops “a given into a question.”38 The essay fosters hysterical excess rather than measured containment, questions rather than answers; its goal is not absolute truth but its endless pursuit: “I put forward formless and unresolved notions, as do those who publish doubtful questions to debate in the schools, not to establish the truth but to seek it” (I.56: 229a). Lacking the soberness of a philosophical approach, the essayist follows—or rather stumbles after—his subject matter wherever it takes him: “I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness” (III.2: 610b). Montaigne’s famous motto, “What do I know?” (Que sçay-je?) both reflects and responds to the becoming of the object of knowledge: “This idea is more firmly grasped in the form of interrogation: What do I know?—the words I bear as a motto, inscribed over a pair of scales” (II.12: 393b). In the Essays, Montaigne’s skepticism often functions as a critical hermeneutics, a remedy for interpretive dogmatism, for the insatiable desire to decipher the world. In “Of Cripples” (III.11), for example, the essayist’s refusal to join the ranks of the “comical prattlers [plaisants causeurs]” (785c)—his contemporaries who delight in speculative investigations into the nature of things—arguably constitutes a refusal to adhere to what Hélène Cixous dubs “masculine interpellation”: As soon as the question “What is it?” is posed, from the moment a question is put, as soon as a reply is sought, we are already caught up in masculine interrogation [interpellation masculine]. I say “masculine interrogation”: as we say so-and-so was interrogated by the police. And this interrogation precisely involves the work of signification: “What is it? Where is it?” A work of meaning, “This means that,” the predicative distribution that always at the same time orders the constitution of meaning. And while meaning is being constituted, it only gets constituted in a movement in which one of the terms of the couple is destroyed in favor of the other.39

Declining to answer that hermeneutic call—Hey you, speculate!—Montaigne expresses his preference for the skeptical interrogative, “ ‘but does it happen?’ ” over the more dogmatic inquiry, “ ‘How does it happen?’ ” (III.11: 785b). He thus troubles, in turn, traditional associations between masculinity and truth.40 Indeed, we could say that Montaigne’s complication of truth, his

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valorization of skepticism, entails a certain “disidentification”41 with philosophy, a hystericization or “feminization” of thought. In “Of Cruelty” (II.11), Montaigne establishes his critical distance from Stoic masculinity, from an egocentric ethics grounded upon the imperative of self-control. Seneca’s phrase, “virtue when challenged takes on much strength” (307c), crystallizes quite well the overcoming of inner strife as the model of virtue. Montaigne counters this model not by simply negating it (anti-identification) but by advancing a weak masculine view of moral selfhood, a weak sovereignty, set off with the seemingly innocuous statement, “to say a word about myself” (311a). Montaigne’s turn to himself as example initiates his resistance, a radical shift from a universal model of self-care (through mastery of the body and perfection of the soul) to a personal caring for others (compassion for victims of cruelty). Montaigne proceeds by feminizing or queering his self, confessing his inability to fully identify with the masculine model of internal management;42 indeed, there is an avowal of a permeable self, of moral softness: “But this is to such a point of softness that I do not see a chicken’s neck wrung without distress, and I cannot bear to hear the scream of the hare in the teeth of my dogs, although the chase is a violent pleasure” (313a). Skepticism here is more than an annoying reminder of the impossibility of becoming a Senecan sage, of possessing absolute knowledge. It enables Montaigne to disidentify with his philosophical tradition and dominant humanist culture, to pursue an alternative form of self-care, a care that reduces the gap between the mind and the body, the human and the nonhuman. But skepticism also comes with a risk. As Montaigne makes clear in the “Apology,” skepticism gives us insight “into the groundlessness of human existence,”43 into the abyss of the Real, and thus can have devastating effects; for this reason it should be practiced only as a means of last resort. [A] This final fencer’s trick must not be employed except as an extreme remedy. It is a desperate stroke, in which you must abandon your weapons to make your adversary lose his, and a secret trick that must be used rarely and reservedly. It is great rashness to ruin yourself in order to ruin another. [B] We should not want to die in order to take revenge. (II.12: 418–19)

During France’s Wars of Religion, skeptical arguments were often deployed by Catholics against the claims of Protestants; they functioned as a prophylactic against social chaos: since our knowledge is limited, since no one is privileged with a direct access to the truth of the world, goes the Catholic argument, we must rely on the authority of the existing order, of the established church. Here skepticism, politically speaking, is a rather conservative position. But doubt, especially as put into practice by Pyrrhonists—and, in a different way, Montaigne—is corrosive. It declines any epistemic stability, even the knowledge that knowledge is impossible (Socrates’s “I know that I don’t know”).

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What makes this type of skepticism dangerous or self-destructive is that it questions not only dogmatic thought but reason itself. Under skepticism, we might say, philosophy becomes cognitively overwhelmed; it suffers a process of autoimmunization. In its immoderate will to critique, philosophy always risks disabling itself. Skepticism both heals and infects our being, illustrating how “our medicine carries infection” (III.12: 796b).44 Skepticism is a pharmakon; it entails, then, a perpetual sense of vulnerability—the risk of self-loss. Moreover, Montaigne perceives a certain limitation, if not contradiction, among Pyrrhonists with respect to their engagement in a cognitive process: I can see why the Pyrrhonian philosophers cannot express their general conception in any manner of speaking; for they would need a new language. Ours is wholly formed of affirmative propositions, which to them are utterly repugnant so that when they say “I doubt,” immediately you have them by the throat to make them admit that at least they know and are sure of this fact, that they doubt. (II.12: 391a)

Unlike the Pyrrhonists, who fear the charge of “performative contradiction,” Montaigne appears to acknowledge that his language is the language of affirmative propositions. From this perspective, Montaigne was tempted by the Pyrrhonists, but the temptation to bypass propositional discourse (the stuff of epistemology), better known as his “skeptical crisis,” was indeed short-lived. But to argue that Montaigne simply overcame his skepticism (for ethical reasons) and opted for coherence and the language of affirmative propositions (for epistemological reasons) is to assume that skepticism and the essay form are conceptually separable, that the former can be discarded or disabled without altering the thrust of the latter. This interpretation effectively downplays or even neutralizes the fundamental elements of paradox and skepticism in the Essays. And it often relies on a dubious evolutionary reading of Montaigne’s work. For example, David Quint, in his influential Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy, claims that “this demonstration of textual unity rests on the conclusion that . . . Montaigne got over his skeptical phase. He had something positive to say and something urgent.”45 An ethical Montaigne is premised, then, on an overcoming of a skeptical Montaigne. Here skepticism is understood merely in terms of a series of propositions that Montaigne ultimately rejects, because, as the argument goes, “he had something positive to say and something urgent.”46 A closer look, however, at the above passage from the “Apology” might suggest a different relation to skepticism. Montaigne’s comment that “they would need a new language” (the conditional “would need” underscores the unreality of this language) functions not only as a critique of the Pyrrhonist position (their use of language involves self-refutation) but as an incitement to imagine the possibility of a different language of skepticism: skepticism as a form of thought inseparable from this language à venir (“to come”).

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While Pyrrhonists themselves were unable to formulate their radical doubt, Montaigne’s reader is obliquely invited to turn to Montaigne’s essay, to his own practice of skepticism, a practice that sustains the open-endedness of the essayistic process and does not transform itself into dogmatism, or “a Pyrrhonism in an affirmative form” (II.12: 376a). In this light, we might think of the passing reference to this absent “new language” as describing the language of the essay, in ways that may have exceeded even Montaigne’s own imagination. The newness of this skeptical language might figure as well in Montaigne’s scandalous question “What do I know?” (393a). Robert Eaglestone aptly sums up the ethical force of the interrogative: “Unlike a statement, a question is to be interrupted: a question starts a dialogue. An idea phrased as a question resists closure and begs not only an answer but another question, an interruption.”47 Montaigne plays the role of Socrates, the role of the hysteric,48 incessantly questioning others, and the questions of others—as he does with those he playfully dubs plaisants causeurs—and hystericizing himself along the way as well. Indeed, the formulation “What do I know?” hystericizes the asker (Montaigne) and answerer (the reader) alike. Montaigne’s irresistible interrogative underpins much of its author’s meditations. Take, for example, the essayist’s thoughts on his relation to La Boétie in “Of Friendship” (I.28). In stark contrast to ancient thinkers such as Aristotle and Cicero who had argued for the voluntary aspect of friendship, Montaigne disrupts their grammar of friendship by placing chance at the origins of his friendship with La Boétie, thus underscoring what was beyond his control and understanding. Montaigne did not choose the circumstances in which he encountered La Boétie for the first time, nor can he explain why he was drawn to him. And when pressured to provide an explanation for his love, Montaigne responds in the initial version of the essay with “I feel that this cannot be expressed” (139a) and then with the following tautology: “Because it was he, because it was I [Par ce que c’estoit luy; par ce que c’estoit moy]” (188c).49 Montaigne’s epigrammatic “answer,” in the form of an alexandrine, dislocates meaning and thinking, interrupting the transfer of information from author to reader. Its sheer brevity is, nevertheless, not without its own rhetorical or sublime force. While the appropriation, assimilation, and internalization of La Boétie may be to a certain degree unavoidable (the essayist writes about his dead friend, speaks of their friendship, sees La Boétie as an alter ego, etc.; all necessary moves for memorializing La Boétie), Montaigne’s utterance “Because it was he, because it was I” figures as an explanatory nonexplanation: it serves as an “explanation” while undermining explanation as such. Montaigne’s addition to his essay short-circuits the movement of comprehension, highlighting a certain “indigestibility” of La Boétie (the absence of cognitive mastery over the lost love-object); in other words, it underscores how the work of mourning fails or remains forever incomplete.50 But what of Montaigne’s warnings about the dangers of skepticism, its potential to do more harm than good? Are we to disregard his earlier

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concerns? Again, the question “What do I know?” enables Montaigne to circumvent the pitfalls of traditional skepticism (paralysis or dogmatism). Montaigne’s skepticism is at once captured and sustained by this interrogative. We might say that the language of the essay is a performative doing that exceeds its philosophical content, irreducible to a constative account (the paradoxical example of “Because it was he, because it was I”). It is a language that puts its practitioner at odds with the philosophical tradition. If Levinas held on to skepticism’s dignity, to its status as philosophy’s “legitimate child” (skepticism, by analogy, reminds philosophy that ethics—not epistemology or ontology—is first philosophy, that the Saying persists in the order of the Said, that the other take precedence over the self), Montaigne comes to value skepticism not only for what it negates/discloses but also for its “logology,” that is, for what it produces—its inventive hermeneutic potential—its ability to unsay and resay ontology, the Said of philosophy. Logology “is not a matter of saying what is, but of making what one says be,” as Barbara Cassin puts it.51 Montaignean skepticism does not only point to the Saying/ Said distinction, but is the “incessant unsaying”52—and the necessary resaying—of the Said. The Saying in/of the essay invariably passes through the compromised and compromising scene of language (the words on the page); but its anarchic character—its “non-synchronizable diachrony”—is never fully digested, or reduced to a “modality of cognition”—it is rather preserved and rearticulated (its being made, unmade, and remade) through the perpetual activity of rereading and interpretation.53 Maintaining the non-all of Montaigne’s Said is not solely the author’s responsibility; the hermeneutic demands of the autoimmune Essays are also felt by the reader. As Michelle Zerba points out, “One of the thorniest problems for an interpreter of Montaigne is to avoid making exclusive statements about him of the sort that he himself discourages.”54 Throughout his book, Montaigne practices a hermeneutics of skepticism; he subjects the workings of his mind to painstaking scrutiny, but his meditations yield no secure foundation, no positive knowledge. He is no example, unless by that we mean a “hazy [vague] mirror, reflecting all things in all ways” (III.12: 834b). His inner “springs” (II.17: 481a) remain opaque, an insurmountable barrier. Essaying has a pharmacotic character, frustrating intentionality at almost every turn: “I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment” (I.10: 26–27c). Indeed, Montaigne tells us, “we are never at home, we are always beyond” (I.3: 8b). His Essays do not immunize the self. The thinking that they engender is neither protective of Montaigne’s ego nor curative, failing to reduce its author’s anxieties. Rather, the Essays fragment and multiply the self: “Myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two” (III.9: 736c). It bears witness to the mutability of its author and others:

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I do not portray being: I portray passing [Je peints le passage]. (III.2: 611b) There is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that of objects. (II.12: 455a)

And more generally, Montaigne’s book radiates a sense of puzzlement, estrangement, and misrecognition—reflecting back to its author a less than transparent self-image: We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others. (II.1: 244a) But we are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn. (II.16: 469a) Our thoughts are always elsewhere. (III.4: 633b)

Jacques Lacan later echoes these Montaignean insights in his dismantling of the cogito: “I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking.”55 In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis Lacan singles out Montaigne, praising the essayist’s remarkable eye for the contingent, the uncanny, and the unconscious, prefiguring, as it were, the psychoanalytic notion of the split subject: Scepticism does not mean the successive doubting, item by item, of all opinions or of all the pathways that accede to knowledge. It is holding the subjective position that one can know nothing. There is something here that deserves to be illustrated by the range, the substance, of those who have been its historical embodiments. I would show you that Montaigne is truly the one who has centred himself, not around scepticism but around the living moment of the aphanisis of the subject. And it is in this that he is fruitful, that he is an eternal guide, who goes beyond whatever may be represented of the moment to be defined as a historical turning-point.56

Aphanisis is constitutive of the subject and its endless source of alienation: “when the subject appears somewhere as meaning, he is manifested elsewhere as ‘fading,’ as disappearance.”57 Whenever the subject deploys language and substitutes meaning for being, you have aphanisis. Catherine Belsey

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contextualizes Lacan’s use of the term aphanisis, clarifying its psychoanalytic relevance and meaning: Aphanisis (disappearance) was a term first used by Ernest Jones, who argued that the subject’s ultimate fear was that desire would disappear. Lacan appropriates the term to discuss the disappearance, or sometimes the “fading,” of the speaking subject itself, as it loses its purchase on meaning. I can disappear from what I am saying, and in the process make apparent the provisional character of subjectivity.58

Lacan’s interest in Montaigne lies in the ways he discloses the provisional character of early modern humanist subjectivity. He credits Montaigne for avoiding both skepticism and the path of the cogito. The skeptics’ “heroic” adherence to the “subjective position that one can know nothing” and Descartes’s grounding of certainty in the self-evidence of the cogito result in the perpetuation of subjectivity. Montaigne offers a radical alternative: a subject paradoxically constituted by its own aphanisis. On Lacan’s reading, what differentiates Montaigne from the ancient and early modern skeptics is that the essayist persists in his self-undoing, troubling the skeptic’s motto, “I cannot know,” converting it, we might say, to the double-voiced question, “What do I know?” which on the one hand questions the fact of my knowing and on the other interrogates the “what” or quiddity of my knowing. Yet Lacan’s brief assessment implicitly decouples essaying from skepticism, ignoring the ways essaying for Montaigne is a form of skepticism, the ways the aphanisis of the subject comes about precisely in the negativity of Montaigne’s skeptical essaying. Lacan is surely correct to distance Montaigne from those who adopt the skeptic’s motto, and in this respect, Lacan is arguably far more sensitive to the unsettling force of the Essays than Pierre Charron, one of Montaigne’s early disciples, who rewrote Montaigne’s motto—“What do I know?”—preferring the more measured, and philosophically acquiescent, skeptical claim “I don’t know [Je ne sçay],” which he engraved on the title page of his revised De la sagesse (1604; Of Wisdom). Lacan, however, overstates the case against Montaigne’s skepticism (a skepticism that presumably repeats, and thus duplicates the limitation of the ancient skeptics). If Charron violently negates Montaigne’s “What do I know?” Lacan conveniently sets it aside—and neglects to take up the ethical force of the interrogative— silencing, in turn, Montaigne’s skeptical voice as well. The challenge here is to apprehend what we could call the “Montaignean moment” of aphanisis in light of Montaigne’s inventive appropriation of the ancient culture of self-care: Can we think the self in Montaigne’s care of the self as otherwise than immunizing, outside the philosophical traumatophobic tradition, one that privileges being as a knowable self-presence? That is to say, can we think Montaigne’s skeptical self as traumatophilic?

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Theory and/as Traumatophilia If Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the “traumatophile type” focused on the artist-theorist of the late nineteenth century in “urgent need for stimuli,”59 a self who craves and centers an aesthetics on the shock experiences of modernity, discussion of traumatophilia today is inevitably informed by postwar theoretical inquiries into what we might describe as an ethics of trauma: an ethics concerned with the effects of the Lacanian Real, the event, or the face of the other, among others.60 Traumatophilia is a key point of contention in debates between theory and philosophy over the centrality of the subject, difference and its ethical implications, and the proper role of affect61 in philosophical and theoretical inquiry. In its disruptive effects, trauma reveals the self’s openness and vulnerability to that which is heterogenous to itself, to that which exceeds its assimilative control—the new, the future: “Traumatism is produced by the future, by the to come, by the threat of the worst to come, rather than by an aggression that is ‘over and done with.’ ”62 What are the consequences of conceiving of trauma and its effects as an obstacle to be overcome or forestalled, a force to be sought or cultivated, or a condition from which to derive an ethics, a politics, or a hermeneutics? What are the fault lines separating philosophy and theory here? At the heart of this rivalry, and what trauma points up, is the question of how to respond to the new, to futurity itself, a question that produces conflicting responses from philosophers and theorists. To answer these questions, I want to turn to the ways traumatophilia in the Essays takes, first, the form of a particular relation to curiosity, to a hunger for the new. Montaigne’s response to the unruly event breaks with the instrumentalization of curiosity and the traumatophobic domestication of its unsettling effects that can be observed in philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. In the first line of Metaphysics, Aristotle affirms curiosity to be a natural impulse: “All men by nature desire to know.”63 Desiring knowledge is not something foreign but rather essential to human beings. Yet the term curiosity alone does not quite capture what Aristotle, and Plato before him, valued in this desire to know, since it makes no reference to what is actually being pursued, that is, to the object of curiosity. It is more accurate to speak of intellectual curiosity, or a cognitive passion, a “feeling of wonder” that awakens the lover of wisdom. “The feeling of wonder,” writes Plato in the Theaetetus, naturally belongs to the philosopher, and “philosophy has no other starting-point.”64 If intellectual curiosity is desirable for its promise of knowledge, curiosity—removed from any sense of self-care or concern for the good life—is “ridiculous” and thus to be avoided. For example, Socrates, in responding to Phaedrus on a common topic concerning the credibility of myths, states: “I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.”65

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The value of intellectual curiosity—the desire for abstract knowledge, such as the order of the cosmos, and the contemplation of the Forms—was not universally upheld, especially by the Hellenistic philosophers, such as Epicurus, who sought to give more emphasis to the therapeutic dimension of philosophy, seeing “intellectual curiosity,” as Hans Blumenberg puts it, as “the disastrous drive that misleads us into violating the boundary settlement between the human and the divine sphere.”66 Augustine goes much further in his condemnation of curiosity, treating it as lustful (“the lust of the eyes”) and distracting—a vain desire “masked under the title of knowledge.”67 In short, curiosity is a sign or reminder of our fallenness. But to be clear, Augustine was not against knowledge as such, only a knowledge, spurred by “the disease of curiosity [morbo cupiditatis],”68 that aimed to decenter God as the sole authority in matters of knowing. Curiosity is therefore both excessive and deficient. It feeds one’s hubris, and because it strives after natural phenomena, that is, works of nature that are useless or do not concern us, it lacks a proper object of investigation. These knowers foolishly fetishize their improper objects of knowledge. Narcissistically thirsting for knowledge for its own sake (“men desire to know for the sake of knowing”),69 they neglect, in turn, questions of salvation and faith. What is needed is a kind of spiritual immunization against the forces or temptations that would lead the self astray. After Augustine, it became commonplace to depict curiosity as a vice and to associate it with vanity, impiety, or evil (vana curiositas, impia curiositas, mala curiositas). This meaning carried well into the Renaissance. In chapter 9 of Rabelais’s Pantagruel, we encounter for the first time the trickster Panurge, whose pathetic state solicits from the Christian humanist Pantagruel the following generous explanation: “By my faith, it’s only fortune that’s made him poor, because I swear that nature made him in some rich and noble mold, and the bad luck that often befalls people with curious minds has reduced him to such beggary.”70 Panurge’s condition is not the result of an ontological wickedness but stems from his ontic weakness and fallibility—or simply, his curiosity. In the seventeenth century, suspicion of curiosity persisted. Blaise Pascal, in Augustinian fashion, defines “restless curiosity” as “the principle malady of man”;71 it is vanity, self-love, the stuff of idle chat.72 He connects this desire for knowledge to the larger problem of concupiscence: “All that is in the world is the lust of the flesh, or the lust of the eyes, or the pride of life: libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido dominandi.”73 In Rule 4 of the Regulae, René Descartes takes stock of curiosity’s epistemic weaknesses, stressing its lack of method: “So blind is the curiosity with which mortals are possessed that they often direct their minds down untrodden paths, in the groundless hope that they will chance upon what they are seeking.”74 Being subjected to the vagaries of chance, curiosity thus proves ineffectual and useless for the philosopher in search of certainty and mastery. To sum up, curiosity’s champions praise its naturalness or intrinsic relation to knowledge production; its critics

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object to curiosity’s fetishization of novelty, to its egoistical underpinning, and to its limited, if any, epistemic value. At numerous points in the Essays, Montaigne seems to lend support to the latter reading of curiosity. For instance, the essayist avows his preference for “incuriosity”75 and credits Christianity for its scrutiny of curiosity, for its recognition of its vicious origins: “Christians have a particular knowledge of the extent to which curiosity is a natural and original evil in man. The urge to increase in wisdom and knowledge was the first downfall of the human race; it was the way by which man hurled himself into eternal damnation” (II.12: 368a). In “Of Cannibals” (I.31), he blames European curiosity for the New World (mis)encounter, writing, “I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity” (150a). On one level, Montaigne’s observation can be read as a philosophical intervention and correction of public judgment. This reading would reinforce a cognitive bias. The bodies of his contemporaries (figured by their “stomachs”) should follow their minds (figured by “capacity”). Simply stated, demystification—the critical practice of philosophy—works to nullify Europe’s cultural fantasies about the radical other. On another level, an eye for the affective register points to those fantasies’ affective pull: how we’re moved to action in ways that exceed and run counter to our given rational makeup. The example of the New World reveals the dangers of “bad affects”: well-circulated fantastic tales of the New World produced affective intensities for their European audience, ultimately to the detriment of the cultural other. To counter the ill effects of that type of curiosity, Montaigne does not only propose a protoCartesian cognitive critique. He develops his own personal form of curiosity, which hybridizes the cognitive and affective registers. In the first line of his last essay from book III, “Of Experience” (III.13), Montaigne makes curiosity constitutive of man: “There is no desire more natural than the desire of knowledge” (815b). Later in the same chapter, Montaigne continues his rehabilitation of curiosity, in his characteristically oblique manner, through his evocation of the “generous mind [esprit genereux]”: “It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A generous mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement. If it does not advance and press forward and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive” (817–18c, translation modified). A generous mind eschews the dictates of self-immunization, forgoes the integrity of the self, and professes an ethical acceptance of (the demands of the) living. As Derrida stresses: The living ego is autoimmune . . . To protect its life, to constitute itself as unique living ego, to relate, as the same, to itself, it is necessarily led to welcome the other within (so many figures of death: difference of the technical apparatus, iterability, non-uniqueness, prosthesis, synthetic image, simulacrum, all of which begins with language,

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before language), it must therefore take the immune defenses apparently meant for the non-ego, the enemy, the opposite, the adversary and direct them at once for itself and against itself.76

To paraphrase Derrida: without curiosity, with absolute self-protection, nothing would ever be experienced. Without affect, with pure ataraxia, there would be no interpretation, no life. We would no longer be open to the future, to the outside world, or available for an encounter with difference. Curiosity, like skepticism, entails a simultaneous sense of vulnerability and generosity. Curiosity entails a risk and an opportunity, an opportunity as a risk, and vice versa. For Montaigne the traumatophile, the other as event can appear only as a frightening otherness, as a paradox, an enigma that disturbs my enjoyment of comfort (libido sentiendi), resists my hermeneutics (libido sciendi), and escapes my mastery (libido dominandi). As Brian Massumi puts it: “Structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox.”77 Or once again in Derrida’s more colorful language: “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning them into pets.”78 Structures cognitively domesticate: they invariably turn raw affect into meaningful emotion, monsters into pets. In “Of Cripples,” Montaigne dramatizes this point by bringing the “monster” even closer to home. Taking stock of his own image, Montaigne ponders the notion that “we become habituated to anything strange by use and time” (787b). But Montaigne discovers that this is not the case with him, since “the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself” (787b, emphasis added). There is no Parmenidean identity of being and thinking. Astonishment, in its immanence, discloses a divided Montaigne, a Montaigne haunted by a constitutive alterity—be it language, the unconscious, or the trace of others. Recalling his consubstantiality thesis (that he has no more made his book than his book has made him [II.18: 504c]), Montaigne has no more affected his writing than his writing has affected him. This prise de conscience shatters the idea of auto-affection, of affect as falling under the jurisdiction of the self. Essaying creates a moment of aphanisis; it gives its author a precarious and monstrous presence: “I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself” (III.11: 787b). This essay sends Montaigne/the reader back to “Of Idleness,” where Montaigne depicted his mind as a “runaway horse” engendering “chimeras and fantastic monsters.” If Montaigne’s retirement failed to produce measured meditations, writing was anticipated to correct this detour, to tame his imagination, and to shame his mind of its monstrous production. Writing is introduced as a psycho-immunological practice, a cure for the mind, an aid

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for its rehabilitation, quarantining its author’s self from the impurity of his mind. But now, late in his project, Montaigne discovers that self-writing does not produce comfortable knowers but contributes further to the making of monsters. Montaigne’s writing turns out to be a “dangerous supplement,”79 that is, an autoimmune supplement; it immunizes and infects, altering the original model of the self that writing sought to protect. This is a shock to the philosopher, a crisis-inducing event for the humanist subject, whose imaginary and symbolic self-image is at stake. Becoming-monstrous is indeed untranslatable in humanist terms. Montaigne’s encounter with his self as other contaminates his self-image; his affective curiosity transforms him substantially, or better yet it desubstantializes him, rendering him a substanceless subject. It unravels the dream of a pure self-presence: the coincidence of subjectivity with consciousness. Auto-affection is hetero-affection. Becoming-monstrous blurs the distinction between ontology and epistemology, between the material and the semiotic. The surplus of affect—synonymous here with the experience of his unruly being, of his semiotic monstrosity—undoes the image of a sovereign or selfidentical Montaigne. It undermines the project of self-knowledge, which should have resulted in self-mastery and produced an image of a meaningful Montaigne (to himself and to his readers). What emerges in the course of essaying, then, is not a causa sui (self-cause), but a becoming-altered—a Montaigne whose boundaries and sovereignty are constantly breached and infected by the affective surplus of meaning generated by the essay.80 Compare with Descartes’s observation about his own epistemic situation: “And as I converse with myself alone and look more deeply into myself, I will attempt to render myself gradually better known and more familiar to myself. I am a thing that thinks.”81 Whereas Descartes’s self-disciplined meditations assume a teleological arc, and “nothing in principle exceeds [their] totalising grasp,”82 Montaigne’s self-study records a cognitive deficiency, an ontological lack or void, a failure to yield a return on his epistemic investment. What the essayist discovers in turning inward is not stability and permanence but incoherence and inadequacy: “Now I find my opinions infinitely bold and constant in condemning my inadequacy [insuffisance]” (II.17: 499a). The word insuffisance (from the Latin sufficere, to give support), should be understood here, as Jean Starobinski suggests, in its etymological sense, that is, as the absence of an inner support, a privileged fort intérieur (heart of hearts).83 But this insuffisance also refers back to the discourse of the Other, to the symbolic order and its inability to guarantee Montaigne’s, or anyone else’s, identity—in the best of times (when the philosophical dreams of self-perfection and self-mastery conditioned the Renaissance imaginary) and in the worst of times (during the raging Wars of Religion, especially after the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre).84 Montaigne does not flee from his insuffisance—he does not cover this “pure void of subjectivity”;85 nor does he mourn or nostalgically yearn for a lost/absent ideal86—but he identifies with

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the insuffisance, with (t)his monstrosity. Monster (monstrum) is etymologically linked to the verb “show” (monstrare).87 Montaigne’s demonstration of his monstrous self—the illustration and enactment of his insuffisance, if you will—is a potentially endless self-revising demonstration, irremediably at odds with the ideals of Senecan self-mastery and indifference. The Montaignean self is constituted by the other, the foreign, the monster. The real Montaigne is monstrous: je est un monstre.88 Ironically, Montaigne’s scandalous, anti-Cartesian answer to the Delphic injunction echoes Socrates’s own speculation concerning the nature of his self. In the Phaedrus, Socrates asks, “Am I a monster more complicated and swollen with passion than the serpent Typhon?”89 Montaigne’s semiotic monstrosity is a Typhonic response to the question of self-knowledge. Unlike Descartes, who will seek to immunize himself against a pathologized, destabilizing experience of astonishment (for astonishment, as Descartes warns, jeopardizes our “free will,” the possibility of becoming “masters and possessors of nature,” “masters of ourselves,” calling into question that which “renders us like God”), Montaigne affirms the affectability and vulnerability of his self.90 The Montaignean essay does not deny or pass over the self’s surplus of meaning or internal otherness, but insists on its “astonishing alterity,”91 its multiplicity and inconsistency, disclosing reason in its utter fragility or lameness, in contradistinction to philosophy’s fantasy of sovereignty and auto-affection. Like the lame, reason limps. The essay fails; it fails to domesticate, to possess meaning, and to secure its own immunity by safeguarding the foundations for self-knowledge. Yet, in its failure, reason paradoxically “succeeds” in gesturing to the impossibility of knowledge, while at the same time revealing to its author a different kind of “knowledge,” a knowledge that does not start with power but passivity. Knowledge of self does happen—“but barely,”92 as Derrida would put it. The event of essaying brings into being a self “beyond mastery,” a self that Montaigne did not foresee: his autoimmune self.

Theory’s Curiosity as a Passion for the Improper Recovering the Montaignean moment for theory requires troubling philosophy’s colonization of wonder and difference, clearing up a hermeneutic space to hear Montaigne’s anti-Cartesian voice. Montaigne refuses to put a stop to the displacing and dispossessing potential of astonishment. Astonishment is the only kind of non-response response that does justice to his unruly curiosity and to his hetero-affective motto, “What do I know?” This “foolish project . . . of portraying himself [sot projet . . . de se peindre],”93 as Pascal ungenerously put it, proves antithetical to a project of egotistical selflove. Indeed, how could it really be a practice of self-love, when the project of self-portraiture involves undoing the self? Curiosity, in the words of the late Foucault, reflects “a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of

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thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental.”94 This is theory’s curiosity; its essayistic impulse—its “living substance”—which does not seek to legitimize the proper but endeavors to know “to what extent it might be possible to think differently.”95 Montaigne as theorist shows that far from being an impediment to thought, his curious skepticism generates an openness toward alterity: “[A] I do not share that common error of judging another by myself. I easily believe that another man may have qualities different from mine. . . . [C] I more easily admit difference than resemblance between us . . . I consider him simply in himself, without relation to others; I mold him to his own model” (I.37: 169, emphasis added). So cognizant of his own unknowingness, of his unruliness and foreignness to himself, how can Montaigne ever assert the transparency and homogeneity of the other? Judith Butler echoes this Montaignean insight when she affirms that “my own foreignness to myself is, paradoxically, the source of my ethical connection with others.”96 Foreignness (the absence of transparency) is not only an external matter (as in the Levinasian face of the other; the subtitle of Totality and Infinity is “An Essay on Exteriority”). It implicates me and my immunizing project as well as the other (as a potential threat). The question of foreignness renders problematic a strict ethical priority of the self over the other—and vice versa. A care of the self (my relation to self) and a care for the other (my relation to the other) are coterminous. To be sure, Montaigne’s idealized care for the other bears the mark of its own phantasm: the dream of a pure heterology—the plenitude of the other prior or beyond any mediation. Montaigne imagines adopting here the mythical position of the exception. Unlike his contemporaries, who fail to fully grasp the true other, Montaigne dreams of a pure other, whose presence will not suffer the pangs of (mis)representation. But Montaigne’s dream arguably amounts to the flip side of an ethics of self-care grounded in the integrity of the cogito, in the primacy of the sovereign self, who makes allowance only for what Derrida calls “conditional hospitality.” In desiring to preserve the other as he or she is, an ethics of alterity paradoxically works to undermine itself. The Essays effectively counterbalance this phantasmatic impulse with their insistence on process and revision, on the endless becoming or non-all of interpretation: If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions [je me resoudrois]; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial. (III.2: 611b) There is no existence that is constant, either of our being or of that of objects. And we, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established

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about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion. (II.12: 455a)

Montaigne’s essaying is not unlike Derrida’s understanding of deciding. Any decision that is worthy of its name must pass through an unnerving experience of undecidability. As Derrida puts it: If the decision is simply the final moment of a knowing process, it is not a decision. So the decision first of all has to go through a terrible process of undecidability, otherwise it would not be a decision, and it has to be heterogeneous to the space of knowledge. If there is a decision it has to go through undecidability and make a leap beyond the field of theoretical knowledge. So when I say “I don’t know what to do,” this is not the negative condition of decision. It is rather the possibility of a decision.97

As an inventive form of deciding, essaying not only welcomes and engenders “monsters”—that is, whatever does not conform to imaginary and symbolic representations—but also helps to preserve them. That is to say, Montaigne does not stop at affect. Traumatophilia, in the context of the Essays, is not a fetishization of affect—a surrender to non-meaning, to easy indecision, or to what Jacques Rancière disparagingly calls the “law of the heteron,” the “unconditional law of heteronomy.”98 Quite the opposite: the surplus of affect both undoes and creates. If skepticism lays the grounds for the event of the self, for the coming of a monstrous Montaigne, an unpredictable Montaigne, it is important to stress that the essay’s affect of astonishment (of astonishment as trauma) does not mark only a void or rupture with signification and intentionality; it is an imperfection of cognition that the essayistic process also cultivates and prolongs, and identifies with. The essay is an autoimmune form. If essaying yields no comfort, discomfort itself must be conceived not only as “negative” but “generative” as well.99 We might describe this as the shift from a skepticism of ethics to an ethics of skepticism. Montaignean skepticism always works affectively and cognitively. It struggles with the vicissitudes of futurity, with the double bind of the event: to relate to the other as event, without reducing the other to the already known. Moreover, the essayist is keenly aware that his passion for alterity, his hospitality to radical otherness, jeopardizes his immunizing goal of self-knowledge (the purpose of his writing in the first place) and produces its own form of anxiety; indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that the essay hystericizes its “master,” l’homme d’entendement. Not amenable to self-immunization, essaying produces monsters, exploding the ideals of sovereignty and self-containment, astonishing its dutiful practitioner at every turn. The essay form continually grapples with these anxieties of unsettlement and vulnerability. In other words, pure heterology meets the demands of essaying—of interpretation.

Chapter 2

Ideology, Critique, and the Event of Literature

The game is already played, the die already cast. It is already cast, with the following proviso, that we can pick it up again, and throw it anew. —Jacques Lacan

The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel. — Slavoj Žižek

In its ability to contain disruptive affects, to ward off exposure to contingency by organizing and naturalizing meaning, ideology constitutes a powerful immunizing force and obstacle to an ethics of skepticism. Consequently, literary theorists and critics invested in the study of meaning, its production, and its mutability have given a great deal of attention to ideology critique, and the skeptical modes of questioning that underpin it. Yet the question of ideology’s conceptual purchase, and how it relates to criticism, has become a highly contested matter in literary theory today. Two divergent attitudes seem to dominate the current discussion. One faction embraces a post-ideological reality, often coinciding with a celebration of theory’s alleged demise, and praises a return to the text, aesthetics, or more generally, the adoption of a less antagonistic relation to the object of study. In his now classic 2004 article, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” a touchstone for post-political enthusiasts, Bruno Latour decries the arrogance of critical theorists, and critique’s myopic association with demystification and anti-fetishism. For Latour, we know now that this path of critical theory— the path taken by the Frankfurt school, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, among others—is dangerous and unsustainable, doing more harm than good. Skepticism, the will to contest and complicate, has lost its critical edge. Latour himself assumes partial responsibility, making a mea culpa for the current state of affairs: “The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by 55

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moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible.”1 Waving the banner of social constructivism— upholding the distinction between res and verba, reality and how we talk about reality—is no longer in this view a sign of the courageous fight against the hegemony of the given and common sense. No, skepticism is not intrinsically good; it is not good without qualification; the spirit of skepticism is more prevalent in the circles of climate change deniers, or those who would deploy it for an aggressive geopolitical agenda (for example, Dick Cheney, whose one percent doctrine—which reasons that if a group or nation poses any threat to the safety of the United States, then it becomes a legitimate target of American military force—served as the rationale for the second Iraq War). Theory, in this respect, has unwittingly armed the other side, the side of militarism and anti-science. Its damage is also felt closer to home, at the university, where “the Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert.”2 Demystification, denaturalization, defetishization: all have led to a weakening of the humanities. Latour pleads for an alternative model for/to critique, urging critics to move away from a skeptical, debunking ethos—its “critical barbarity,”3 as he calls it—to one of caring and protection, from a feeling of superiority to one of collaboration and generosity. Critics cannot tirelessly repeat Marx’s demystification of the subject as the locus of desire and agency (“it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness”; “our wants and pleasures have their origin in society”).4 They must abandon the Left’s unproductive call for “the ruthless critique of all that exists,”5 and learn to “add” to reality rather than “subtract” from it, generate more ideas rather than destroy existing ones.6 The critics of the postcritical turn will recognize that “sometimes skepticism and suspicion,” as Toril Moi puts it, “will simply be less politically useful than admiration, care, love.”7 Another faction doubles down on the necessity of ideology critique, but also admits the need to retool our understanding of ideology, questioning the standard leftist perspective that the relation of ideology to criticism is one of subordination: that is, if criticism is ultimately reducible to ideology, then one can really talk only of an ideology of reading. A leading voice in that revival is Slavoj Žižek, who, ever since his Sublime Object of Ideology (1989), has reminded his fellow critics of the Left of the necessity of becoming an effective reader of ideology. Indeed, against the twin deceptive attitudes of pessimism and optimism—pessimism about the prospects of transformative critique and optimism about the end of history à la Fukuyama, about, that is, the fantasy of a post-ideological stance—Žižek vigorously insists: “Ideology is not all; it is possible to assume a place that enables us to maintain a distance from it, but this place from which one can denounce ideology must remain empty, it cannot be occupied by any positively determined reality—the moment we yield to this temptation, we are back in ideology.”8

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At the same time, ideology undergoes redefinition, and ceases to mean simply falsification or distortion. What is deemed ideological is no longer restricted to the thoughts that a subject might entertain, but applies to the category of the subject itself. This foundational and cherished category turns out to be an ideological construction, the effect of what Louis Althusser calls “interpellation.” You are first an individual, then you become a subject endowed with agency: “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”9 Your emergence as a subject is predicated on your recognizing yourself as a subject when you are hailed by another (Althusser’s paradigmatic example is the police officer who calls out to you, demanding your response/confirmation).10 Shaping how people understand their relationship to society, ideology through interpellation humanizes the social world. Ideology discloses a meaningful world, in which there is a place for you, where you count and your voice matters. For example, television viewers are repeatedly interpellated as mass viewing subjects, subjects who are polled and asked to weigh in on matters or tweet a response. Or in the case of CNN’s I-Reports, spectators, armed with the latest smartphones, are solicited and given the opportunity to “make” the news. This form of democratizing (or, we might say, “wikipedifying”) the news gives the appearance of empowering audience members—transforming them from passive consumers (individuals) into active coproducers (subjects) of news—but it also risks reinforcing the neoliberal commodification of journalism: channeled through particular media (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), viewer-generated reporting becomes both a means of encouraging viewer consumption of these platforms (platforms whose parent companies in turn commoditize users’ profiles and data) and a monetizable product in itself, generating advertising revenue from free viewer labor. Reports varying widely in topic, depth, and urgency are further visually transformed on the page into standardized blocks of image-text, their fungibility as marketable products coexisting undisturbed with a discourse emphasizing viewers’ individuality, perspective, and initiative. Assessing ideology is thus not so much about determining the truth or falsity of facts but about evaluating their framing, packaging, or staging for comprehension. Ideology is about the interpretation of facts: “The starting point of the critique of ideology has to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth.”11 That is to say, ideology critique should not limit itself to the conscious beliefs of individuals (ideology as false consciousness); it operates most frequently at the level of the unconscious, soliciting and securing our libidinal investment: “the fundamental level of ideology  .  .  . is not of an illusion masking the real state of things but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself.”12 Ideology secures the reproduction of the status quo, reinforcing the attitude that capitalism is the only game in town. Žižek reiterates Fredric Jameson’s sense of urgency mixed with utter dismay at the cognitive state of the public

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at large, noting how “it seems easier to imagine the ‘end of the world’ than a far more modest change in the mode of production.”13 This is ideology at work: it naturalizes and legitimizes as it conceals capitalist relations of power and domination. The naturalization of meaning—the presentation of something contingent as self-evident, something that ought to be contested (whose interest is the narrative serving?) as inevitable—is more or less synonymous with the scene of ideology.14 But as Žižek argues, in a way that both echoes Latour and surpasses him, we cannot conclude “that the only non-ideological position is to renounce the very notion of extra-ideological reality and accept that all we are dealing with are symbolic fictions, the plurality of discursive universes, never ‘reality’—such a quick, slick ‘postmodern’ solution  .  .  . is ideology par excellence.”15 Countering the complacent constructivist position (there is no extra-discursive, no extra-ideological reality) does not mean moving toward the “postpolitical,” which would be the pinnacle of “ideological misconception,”16 but rather recalling that ideology does falter, that the field of ideology is non-all, that it cannot be totalized—no ideological system is ever foolproof. In this chapter, what interests me in this provocation is the type of literary criticism—the type of critical reading—that might emerge after Žižek’s reinvention of ideology critique. If the notion of critique, at least ever since Kant, characterizes the work of philosophers and theorists, criticism is arguably the work of literary critics. Literary theorists might be said to do double duty, troubling somewhat the fault lines separating philosophy and literature. Having said that, theory’s relation to literature remains highly contested. For example, the edited volume Theory after “Theory” (2011) by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge attempts, with relative success, to enlarge the scope and understanding of theory, asserting theory’s hydra-like quality while pushing back against theory’s alleged propensity to hegemonize the field of literary studies.17 Likewise, in examining Žižek’s application of theory to literature or film, Tim Dean argues that while Žižek emphasizes the opacity of the Lacanian Real—what is in excess of symbolization and signification—he nonetheless voraciously consumes any artwork that comes his way, making it adhere, as it were, to timeless Lacanian lessons.18 In the name of ideology critique, Žižek can only imagine the aesthetic work as a cultural symptom, whose meaning requires interpretive exposure, politicization, at the hands of the masterful reader or cultural analyst. This type of ideology criticism remains blind to the event of literature, to the affective and cognitive reconfigurations that the literary work tirelessly elicits. Yet as the first line of my first citation indicates, Žižek insists that “ideology is not all.” Or, as Lacan puts it more poetically, “the game is already played, the die already cast. It is already cast, with the following proviso, that we can pick it up again, and throw it anew.”19 This chapter explores what these claims by Žižek and Lacan might mean both for critique and for criticism. As a corollary, it also asks what forms of resistance to ideology are available through literature. Does literature create the

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conditions for us to pick the die up again, and throw it anew? To this end, I will turn to Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “To Each His Chimera” and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, two texts that induce doubt about hermeneutic mastery while inventively recasting the role of the reader as critic. Within that analysis I also discuss Žižek’s reading of the 2005 Paris riots, in an effort to forge a path for an effective ideology critique—a critique that resists the lure of a programmatic hermeneutics, and self-reflexively scrutinizes an image of critique that would be infallible, seamless, and immune from its own force.

Critics and Their Chimeras As with other proponents of the post-ideological turn, Latour’s argument for a new, more inclusive critique rests on a fairly slanted understanding of the relation between ideology, the critic, and the reader. Latour posits himself as the latter’s savior and redeemer. Whereas critique/theory maligns the reader as a “hapless victim of domination,”20 Latour restores the reader’s rightful dignity, while at the same time succeeding in demoting critics from their Olympian perch. But what if Latour’s picture simplifies too much?21 What if theory facilitated rather than impeded the critic’s demotion? What if cultivating an eye for ideology meant something more? Lastly, what if critique is conceived as otherwise than suspicious or symptomatological? Baudelaire’s poem “To Each His Chimera” invites such a rereading of ideology and critique. It stages critique as a self-reflexive dilemma, or a nuanced negotiation between the critic and the criticized, the reader and the read. The poem opens with what could be described as an allegory of reading, or a reflection on reading’s own procedures: Under a huge gray sky, on a huge dusty plain, without paths, without grass, without a thistle, without a nettle, I came upon several men walking along bent over. Each of them was carrying an enormous Chimera on his back, as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or the rig of a Roman footsoldier. Yet the monstrous beast was not an inert weight. On the contrary, she enwrapped and subjugated the man with flexible and powerful muscles; with her two huge claws she hooked onto the breast of her mount; and her fabled head topped the man’s forehead, like one of those ghastly helmets which ancient warriors hoped would increase their enemy’s terror.22

In other prose poems, Baudelaire’s narrators often tout their hermeneutic skills. In “The Rope,” for example, the second narrator, a friend of the

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speaker, observes: “My profession as a painter prompts me attentively to examine faces, physiognomies, turning up on my path, and you know what delight we gain from that faculty which makes life appear more lively and more meaningful to us than to other people.”23 In this case, however, it is not attentiveness to detail—to the physiognomy of others—that marks the narrator’s interpretive acumen, but an attentiveness to what in principle cannot be mistaken: Chimeras on people’s backs! Yet these individuals seem precisely oblivious to that “reality”: A curious thing to note: none of these travelers seemed bothered by the ferocious beast hanging around his neck and attached to his back. They seemed to consider it as part of themselves. All their weary and serious faces expressed no sign of despair. Under the sky’s splenetic dome, their feet immersed in the dust of a terrain as ravaged as the sky, they made their way with the resigned expression of those who are condemned to hope forever.24

It is tempting to see in the speaker a fellow suspicious mind, a proto-theorist, indulging, as it were, in the work of critique: of making the invisible, visible; the latent, manifest. The Chimeras have been thoroughly naturalized to the travelers trudging along, “part of themselves,” no longer experienced as something foreign or painful, but perversely functioning as a source of drive, fueling their will to hope. Whereas the hapless victims, incapable of seeing their domination (the absent cause of their condition), suffer from a bad case of false consciousness, which converts despair into hope, the speaker can only observe their trek with dismay, with a fleeting sense of curiosity: “And the procession passed by me and descended into the horizon’s atmosphere, at that place where the planet’s rounded surface hides from the curiosity of the human gaze.”25 The symptomatological critic has now only to complete the speaker’s interpretive labor, and assign a symbolic meaning to the Chimera of others. Given Baudelaire’s distaste for the Second Empire, his disenchantment with nineteenth-century life—he describes the impact of Napoleon III’s coup d’état as having “physically depoliticized” him, “physiquement dépolitiqué”26—we can suspect that each traveler’s Chimera is somehow tainted by bourgeois ideology, conditioned by the regime’s normalizing ideal of hope, its fantasy of progress or “cruel optimism,”27 to borrow Lauren Berlant’s formulation, whose everyday effect is to pacify its subjects. So ideology here is clearly not an escape from ordinary reality but, as Žižek would put it, offers the travelers “social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”28 A blind attachment to hope is detrimental to the travelers’ lives; it offers no incentive for self-reflexivity, for confronting their “traumatic, real kernel,” foreclosing the possibility of alternative modes of being and socioeconomic arrangements.

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This symptomatic reading is not without its merits, but it does glide over the conclusion of the poem, the self-reflexive move gesturing to the speaker’s own Chimera: “And for a few moments I persistently tried to understand this mystery. But soon insurmountable Indifference swooped down upon me, and I was more heavily oppressed than they were themselves by their overwhelming Chimeras.”29 We have an abrupt shift here from cognition to affectivity. The speaker, who no longer holds the others as cognitive objects of curiosity and demystification, now confronts his own struggle with the affectless affect of Indifference (the philosophical face of ennui, boredom). But why “Indifference,” especially in its capitalized form? It might be the necessary effect of the speaker’s negative ideal—or ideal of negations—hinted at in the “Stranger”: “Tell me, whom do you love the most, you enigmatic man? your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?” “I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.” “Your friends?” “There you use a word whose meaning until now has remained to me unknown.” “Your fatherland?” “I am unaware in what latitude it lies.” “Beauty?” “I would willingly love her, goddess and immortal.” “Gold?” “I hate it as you hate God.” “So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?” “I love clouds . . . drifting clouds . . . there . . . over there . . . marvelous clouds!”30

The speaker of “To Each His Chimera” shares the attitude and ideal of the stranger. They both are, or better yet, want to be, what we might call undupeable. Cognitive distance and passionate detachment govern the speaker’s ethos. But this self-critical heroism comes at a cost, and serves as a warning to the critic. Indifference—philosophical ataraxia—becomes the speaker’s own self-generated Chimera (it might not be imposed from above but is not any less brutal). What does this realization do to our symptomatic reading? It qualifies, at the very least, the authority that a symptomatic reading imputes to the speaker as it reestablishes some proximity between him and the other “dupes” in the poem. Of course, we might append to our symptomatic reading, and condemn the speaker as well for having fallen short of his hermeneutics of suspicion; we might then reserve interpretive authority solely for the incredulous critic who is not duped by fantasy or ideology. But this is where a symptomatic reading would neglect the full autoimmune force of the poem.

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It is not enough to be distrustful of all the characters (including the speaker); the critique reflects back onto itself, to the readers, suggesting that “les nondupes errent,”31 that “those in the know err.”32 Such readers may enjoy an ironic distance from the illusions or fantasies of the travelers and perhaps from that of the speaker, but they overlook “the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, the way this fiction”—or, in our case, this Chimera—“structures [their] experience of reality.”33 And more importantly, they err in believing themselves free from the lure and pitfalls of ideological fantasy. But the title of the poem and its encompassing landscape, without an outside, implicate us all: to each (reader/critic) his or her Chimera. Conversely, a post-ideological reading of the poem—one that asserts that we all have Chimeras (affective beliefs in the Nation, Aesthetics, Wealth, the Family, etc.), that we no longer need to discriminate between the true and the false, the objective and the subjective, the knower and the dupe, and so on— must equally be resisted. Žižek responds to this by supplementing the classic Marxist symptomatic definition of ideology with a fetishistic one: When we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it is, one should always counter such claims with the question: OK, but where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept reality “the way it is”?34

Isn’t irony the critic’s ultimate fetish? The critic totalizes the world as hopelessly ideological—morally and politically bankrupt—but still holds on to ironic distance, rendering, in turn, reality more tolerable. To abandon this fetish is to confront the full weight of ideology. But this is not an excuse for despair. To reiterate Žižek’s coda, ideology is not all; ideology is not destiny. Ideology, that is, does not encompass and exhaust the totality of the world, nor does it subdue all critical actions within it. What escapes both the closure of ideology and the law of distrust is the speaker’s self-destructive curiosity, this unruly modality, which seizes the new (the Chimera of the other), but which is at the same time misdiagnosed by the speaker as merely a faculty of cognition. True, there is always a risk that curiosity might exceed the capacity of the speaker, that the curious critic might become a dupe, become blind to her own biases and peculiar fantasies. But the remedy to this hermeneutic vulnerability is not ataraxia but the critic’s recognition of what Pierre Bourdieu calls illusio: To understand the notion of interest, it is necessary to see that it is opposed not only to that of disinterestedness or gratuitousness but also to that of indifference. To be indifferent is to be unmoved by the

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game: like Buridan’s donkey, this game makes no difference to me. Indifference is an axiological state, an ethical state of nonpreference as well as a state of knowledge in which I am not capable of differentiating the stakes proposed. Such was the goal of the Stoics: to reach a state of ataraxy (ataraxia means the fact of not being troubled). Illusio is the very opposite of ataraxy: it is to be invested, taken in and by the game. To be interested is to accord a given social game that what happens in it matters, that its stakes are important (another word with the same root as interest) and worth pursuing.35

Embracing the philosophical ideal of ataraxia often eclipses the critic’s affective investment in the intellectual labor of interpretation and critique, or to be more precise, her investment in the game of literary studies, in the belief that literary studies matters, politically and ethically. Like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I am committed to the belief that “if [former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz] had had serious training in literary reading and/ or the imagining of the enemy as human, his position on Iraq would not be so inflexible.”36 This is what we might describe as the theorist’s autoimmune Chimera. Critique feeds and reflects our libido sciendi, our interpretive outlook, and, more generally, informs our engagement with the world. This need not be a blind attachment—the evil of the fetish, the sin of being duped, and so on. We can see it, be critical of it (nothing is immune from critique), without renouncing its value and pleasures—the negativity or Saying of critique. On the contrary, it is critique’s autoimmune openness to its own demise, to self-critique, that prevents its Said and its Saying from ever coinciding. But for its detractors, especially in literary studies, critique has overstayed its welcome. Accordingly, we are increasingly asked to temper our critical mode and mood, asked to decouple skepticism from literary criticism, which is tantamount to purging our illusio of its doubting impulses, of what Rita Felski calls its compulsory “againstness.”37

Depth or Surface? Yes, Please! In emphasizing an investment in skepticism and a renewed commitment to critique, our reading of “To Each His Chimera” cautions against the path taken by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, who, in “The Way We Read Now,” argue that we must turn attention to surfaces and put an end to the quest for hidden meaning, which has allegedly become irrelevant in an era of visibility and wide cognizance of ideology’s workings. In making this argument, Best and Marcus draw from recent political history, which shows that our efforts to cultivate an eye for ideology—for the subtle ways in which it conditions or informs everyday life—are somewhat wasted, rendered irrelevant by the supposed transparency of evil:

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Those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have often found those demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the internet; the real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that required little explication the state’s abandonment of its African American citizens; and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements such as “mission accomplished.” Eight years of the Bush regime may have hammered home the point that not all situations require the subtle ingenuity associated with symptomatic reading, and they may also have inspired us to imagine that alongside nascent fascism there might be better ways of thinking and being simply there for the taking, in both the past and the present.38

As Best and Marcus would have it, Marx’s famous observation from Das Kapital, “They do not know it, but they are doing it,” is obsolete.39 Critical hermeneutics is increasingly becoming anachronistic. Nicole Simek underscores the erosion if not disappearance of hermeneutics within surface reading: “If surface reading purports to correct the failings of a hermeneutics of suspicion by doing away with suspicion, in its strong form it also risks doing away with hermeneutics altogether, in favor of standing back and appreciating what appears evident or given in a text.”40 Description smoothly slides into paraphrase. As Ellen Rooney critically observes: Description as the problematic of surface reading celebrates obviousness, that which (allegedly) lies in plain view; it consequently embraces (the form of) paraphrase. Paraphrase is precisely a reading practice that disavows reading’s own formal activities. . . . It dreams itself free of the distorting presuppositions . . . and foreign forms . . . that inevitably intervene between the reader and the text and thus of the conflicts that emerge when description is defined as always already a matter of interpretation.41

For surface readers, then, the task of the critic consists not in reading antagonistically, and “heroically,”42 for blind spots and absent causes (“the notion underlying all forms of symptomatic reading” is that “the most significant truths are not immediately apprehensible and may be veiled or invisible”),43 but in accepting a more humble role, reading in order to learn what others already know (“reading with the grain,”44 as it were) and to pass that knowledge on in one’s own writings.45 Likewise, Felski, in her Limits of Critique, sets out to reconfigure the goals of literary studies, to exit the “political horizon,”46 the narrow and paranoid horizon of suspicion and its exceptionalist rhetoric (according to which only critique can adequately explain what takes place in literary texts), calling for a shift from “diagnosis” to “dialogue,”47 to

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a phenomenology of reading, to “a care or concern for phenomena, a preference for description over explanation, a willingness to attend rather than to analyze.”48 Echoing Latour, Felski pleads for a postcritical vision: The role of the term “postcritical” . . . is neither to prescribe the forms that reading should take nor dictate the attitudes critics must adopt; it is to steer us away from the kinds of arguments we know how to conduct in our sleep. These are some of the things postcritical reading will decline to do: subject a text to interrogation; diagnose hidden anxieties; demote recognition to yet another form of misrecognition; lament our incarceration in the prison-house of language; demonstrate that resistance is just another form of containment; read a text as a metacommentary on the undecidability of meaning; score points by showing that its categories are socially constructed; brood over the gap that separates word from world. The aim is no longer to diminish or subtract from the reality of the texts we study but to amplify their reality, as energetic coactors and vital partners.49

To Latour’s question “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” which underwrites the position of almost all of the post-ideological models of criticism, we respond with the skeptical question (recalling Montaigne’s preference for “does it happen?” over “how does it happen?”): Has critique run out steam? Even if we agree that ideology often functions in blatant and recognizable ways, this “knowledge” remains partial and insufficient; knowledge alone does not translate into effective change. And if we agree, furthermore, that critique runs the risk of becoming too predictable and thus less effective in prompting such change, we must nevertheless resist the temptation to reify critique, to see it as hopelessly limiting. Felski, for example, is dismayed by the way meticulous objections to critique, like the one offered by the postcolonial critic Talal Asad (who objects to the universalization of Western secularism), mutate into a “critique of critique,” thus reinvesting the term with the same type of authority it allegedly sought to contest: “Why do these various protestations against critique end up reembracing critique? Why does it seem so excruciatingly difficult to conceive of other ways of arguing, reading, and thinking?”50 Part of the problem, as I see it, is Felski’s strong identification of critique with suspicion, with the will to distrust. But if we associate critique with skepticism, with the will to essay (in its Montaignean sense)—and in doing so refuse to define skepticism as nihilism, as an embrace of “the grand abyss of radical doubt”51—then the “critique of critique” is not evidence of critique’s hegemony and colonization of the critic’s mind. Rather, it points to what we might call critique’s autoimmune sovereignty; first, to its refusal to immunize itself against its own tools, to shield itself from

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critique’s negativity, and, second, to its relationality, to its affective and cognitive attachment to what it analyzes. It is never a simple choice between “care” or “skepticism,” as Moi professes. An ethico-hermeneutics of skepticism subtends this version of critique. It is skepticism as a form of interpretive care. This understanding of critique does not suspend critique’s labor of negativity but rather underlines the concept’s autoimmune character, its intrinsic dual paths—destruction and invention, destruction (the ruthless critique of what is) as the condition or opening for invention.52 This is why I think it is more fruitful to approach the question of ideology (the stuff of critique) by returning to and updating Marx’s dictum rather than by jettisoning it.53 Foucault, who is often seen as a rival to Marxist critical theory, carries out such a revision, refocusing critical attention on the agency, rather than the passivity, of individuals but also on the limits of individual foreknowledge of complex webs of causality and consequence: “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.”54 We can see the genesis of this idea already in Marx, who insisted that the subject exists within rather than outside the dynamic forces of history, and that human agency, by extension, is qualified or constricted by these external forces: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”55 Individuals are not docile bodies; they are still agents, but they are not fully cognizant of the long-term impact of their practices. Critique thus remains necessary and urgent; people may well recognize ideological lies as such, yet the question of how to resist them successfully has no transparent and evident answer. Latour’s empiricism— with its demotion of interpretation, its emphasis on description and promise to “get closer”56 to facts—is hardly the answer (if it is an answer at all, since, for Latour and others, the question of resistance is really a false problem, predicated on an inflated belief in the value of critique). Rather, resistance requires adopting new and innovative practices, reforming subjective agency and, in the process, rethinking the locus of blindness and insight, depth and surface. In pursuit of effective modes of resistance—of inventive ways to energize the engine of critique—Žižek opts to rewrite Marx’s saying completely, reconfiguring its psychoanalytic bases and implications by highlighting the problem of disavowal: “They know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still they are doing it.”57 Žižek’s critique of ideology consists of exposing such a disavowal on the part of the allegedly post-ideological subject.58 Žižek takes his inspiration from Virgil’s saying, “Dare to disturb the underground of the unspoken underpinnings of our everyday lives.”59 He does so by critically reframing the relation of fantasy to reality: “If we subtract fantasy from reality, then reality itself loses its consistency and disintegrates. To choose between ‘either accepting reality or choosing fantasy’ is wrong: if

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we really want to change or escape our social reality, the first thing to do is change our fantasies that make us fit this reality.”60 In this sense, Žižek can be said to share Foucault’s definition of critique as “the art of voluntary inservitude [l’art de l’inservitude volontaire],” as a “reflective indocility [l’indocilité réfléchie],” which seeks “desubjectification” in “the politics of truth.”61 In the practice of voluntary inservitude, the subject resists her normalization, engaging, so to speak, in the active unmaking and remaking of her subjectivity. But unlike Foucault, who had deep concerns about its totalizing status, Žižek conceives of psychoanalysis as a skeptical practice, one that is especially hostile to hermeneutics and its attachment to the depth and surface distinction: “The main ethical injunction of psychoanalysis is . . . not to yield to the temptation of symbolization/internalization.”62 That is, if it is to have any resistive value, not to mention basis in truth, psychoanalysis cannot proceed by applying an authoritative interpretive formula, schematically assigning “deep” symbolic meanings to isolatable, identifiable “surface” symptoms. Reactions to the 2005 Paris suburbs riots will serve as a case study for thinking the concrete stakes and pitfalls of a hermeneutics that reads surface and depth, symptom and cause through preestablished grids or frameworks.63 In taking up this case, we will turn to theory’s resources, its critical toolbox, to test its alternative model of understanding and its ability to retain its skeptical edge, while also exploring what happens when theory travels from literary text to social text and back again. On October 27, 2005, Ziad Benna and Bouna Traoré, French youths of North African descent, were electrocuted as they fled the police in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Their deaths ignited almost three weeks of rioting in the suburbs of Paris, causing damage exceeding 200 million euros in torched cars and buildings.64 In turn, the riots generated a series of interpretations from liberals and conservatives alike, interpretations that revolved around the problem of how to properly diagnose and rectify the situation. Liberals argued for the need for better integration of young immigrants into French culture, for an improvement of their social and economic prospects, whereas conservatives underscored the necessity to uphold law and order—to protect France’s republican universalism against what was perceived as an “ethnic-religious revolt,” in the words of Alain Finkielkraut.65 But according to Žižek, each of the dominant readings fundamentally erred in its presuppositions, misconstruing the problem, confusing symptoms for causes, and ultimately failing to attend to the real antagonism of French society. The media rhetoric of violence—how we talk about violence—framed the ideological situation and reception of the rioters, and it is to this that Žižek directs his intervention. Skeptical through and through, this intervention does not follow a straightforward surface/depth distinction. Rather, Žižek distinguishes between two types of violence, one more visible than the other, but both true. What is typically perceived as violence today is what he calls “subjective violence”: it is the violence that is “performed by a clearly

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identifiable agent  .  .  . [and]  .  .  . is seen as a perturbation of the ‘normal,’ peaceful state of things.”66 As a necessary conceptual supplement to our understanding of violence, Žižek adds “objective violence,” which he then divides into, first, “symbolic violence” (the violence of racist rhetoric, for example, or, more generally, language as the hegemonic imposition of a given universe of meaning) and second, “systemic violence” (such as the violence of capitalism—the view of capitalism as a naturalized, oppressive, impersonal, smooth-functioning sociopolitical reality). “Objective violence is invisible,” Žižek maintains, “since it sustains the very zero-level standard against which we perceive something as subjectively violent.”67 As Peter Hitchcock lucidly puts it, objective violence “overdetermines normalcy,” against which any framed act of subjective violence (such as the Paris riots) can then “be posed as extraordinary, spectacular, crazy and out of joint.”68 An effective account of violence would thus not simply complement a critique of subjective violence but demonstrate how a concern for subjective violence, in effect, helps to sustain the existence of this more insidious form of violence. A deep reading cannot settle for exposing the presence of objective violence in daily life; it must attend to the subjective violence on the surface, and examine the ways this surface functions not just to eclipse other forms of violence, but to shape the concerns of critique in constricting ways. Whereas humanists and liberals typically advocate the cultivation of empathetic imaginings, Žižek enjoins his readers to resist the ideological pull of subjective violence: “My underlying premise is that there is something inherently mystifying in a direct confrontation with [violence]: the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking.”69 To think critically about the 2005 French riots is to think about their violence obliquely, to look at it awry, that is, to look at violence from a multiplicity of incommensurable perspectives. In contrast, the media treated the riots as a spectacle, interpreting them exclusively as an instance of subjective violence.70 If the reception of the riots was problematic, the proposed solutions to the situation were no less so. Žižek cautions against the symptomatic approach and its temptation of depth, the temptation to see in the actions of the rioters a hidden, latent political message, awaiting deciphering from the liberalminded cultural critic: What needs to be resisted when faced with shocking reports and images of the burning Paris suburbs is what I call the hermeneutic temptation: the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts. What is most difficult to accept is precisely the riots’ meaninglessness: more than a form of protest, they are what Lacan called a passage a l’acte—an impulsive movement into action which can’t be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration.71

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Drawing explicitly on Lacan, Žižek insists that a passage à l’acte is not a strategic deliberation, but a blind outburst. Yet Žižek also insists, paradoxically, on the need to interpret this ambiguous act non-act: “The fact that there was no programme behind the burning Paris suburbs is thus itself a fact to be interpreted.”72 On the one hand, Žižek maintains that the rioters’ act lies outside the interpretive framework of the symbolic order. On the other hand, Žižek subjects the act to psychoanalytic critique, politicizing its nonmeaning, interpreting the riots as a case of phatic communication: Hey Paris, you have a problem! The violence of the rioters concerns Žižek, but not because it conflicts with any humanist sensibility. Peter Sloterdijk serves as Žižek’s strategic interlocutor in this discussion. Sloterdijk—whom Žižek unflatteringly labels a post-leftist—interprets the riots as emblematic of the rage that permeates today’s culture of resentment. Sloterdijk’s solution, according to Žižek, is the following: “We need to learn to live in a post-monotheist world culture, in an anti-authoritarian meritocracy which respects civilised norms and personal rights, in a balance between elitism and egalitarianism.”73 Only this view will prevent the type of irrational outbursts displayed by French youth in the 2005 riots. Žižek, too, finds the violence of the rioters problematic, blaming the system for failing to manage or develop what Sloterdijk describes as “appropriate measures of rage collection,”74 without, however, endorsing Sloterdijk’s solution. Lamenting the rioters’ impasse, their lack of options, Žižek writes: The sad fact that opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only take the shape of a meaningless outburst, is a grave illustration of our predicament. What does our celebrated freedom of choice serve, when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?75

What Žižek finds even more tragic in the rioters’ actions is their (lack of) effectiveness: passage à l’acte is precisely not a genuine political act, but more often than not a sign of impotence, a failure to change the coordinates of one’s social being.76 Again, Žižek adopts a Lacanian definition of the act: The act differs from an active intervention (action) in that it radically transforms its bearer (agent): the act is not simply something I “accomplish”—after the act, I’m literally “not the same as before.” In this sense, we could say that the subject “undergoes” the act (“passes through” it) rather than “accomplishes” it: in it, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); i.e., the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse, aphanisis, of the subject.77

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The act proper is the only one which re-structures the very symbolic co-ordinates of the agent’s situation.78

The act possesses an autoimmune structure. Without the possibility of radical failure, with the pure guarantee of success, no act could ever take place: “This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate; they want an Act without risk—not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical ‘transcendental risk’ that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire.”79 While recognizing its capacity for both failure and success, Žižek at times merely privileges the sheer negativity of the act, “the act as a negative gesture of saying ‘No!’ ”80 But aren’t the Paris rioters also saying No!? Why is their recalcitrance interpreted as a mere passage à l’acte? Reading for the Lacanian act, or distinguishing it from the passage à l’acte, is indeed not as easy or straightforward as Žižek often pretends it to be.81 As Adrian Johnston points out, there is in Žižek a tendency to abstract the act, to treat it as a “theoretical fetish-object”:82 everything and everyone is compromised by the symbolic order, except for the miracle of the act. As Žižek’s would-be fetish, the act becomes a quasi-object of certainty, its determination immune from (re)interpretation and self-critique. Žižek’s investment in the act is so strong that once he has made a designation—act or no act—hermeneutics comes to a halt. To adapt Montaigne’s skeptical questioning, as discussed in the last chapter, Žižek appears to substitute “how is it that the rioters didn’t act?” for “but did the rioters not act?” Žižek’s deliberations illustrate the necessities and difficulties of maintaining theory’s skeptical edge at the very moment when theory’s purchase on social problems is at stake. The task, as Žižek puts it, “is not to propose solutions, but to reformulate the problem itself, to shift the ideological framework within which we hitherto perceived the problem.”83 What is needed are more questions (a skeptical desire to rethink the situation) and less answers (which seem to be compounding the problem). Yet, far from dismissing or ignoring the rioters’ plight, Žižek does seek to understand and then to formulate a solution, albeit an oblique one, to their predicament. Or rather, to be more precise, what Žižek offers us is interpretive patience—the work of ideology critique—rather than easy and quick solutions. Understanding the rioters’ actions as a “blind acting out,” “carr[ying] with it an intolerable weight of frustration,”84 recalls Simone de Beauvoir’s important qualifier to the Sartrean moral category of “bad faith.” As Beauvoir puts it, “Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is degradation of existence into ‘in-itself,’ of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression.”85 Facticity and immanence have been inflicted upon the rioters. Žižek intimates that social, political, and economic circumstances are the real causes of their shortcomings. Neither passive victims nor autonomous rational beings, the rioters occupy an ambivalent, compromised

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position. Thus, again, while seeking to keep the formulation of the problem open rather than to jump to easy conclusions, the thrust of Žižek’s inquiry still appears to lie in the question “how is it that the rioters didn’t act?” and not the more skeptical inquiry, “but did they not act?” The notion of the political act plays a crucial role in Žižek’s take on the problem at issue here. The rioters’ ressentiment (resentment) may not be purely slavish—(self-)destructive violence is presumably preferable to a servile state of absolute docility—but for Žižek it falls short of being transformative: a true act. A solution, Žižek maintains, must begin with an acknowledgment that the rioters’ refusal was not radical enough. Their violence was necessary but not sufficient for effecting genuine change in the symbolic order: “Their aim was to create a problem, to signal that they were a problem that could no longer be ignored. This is why violence was necessary. Had they organised a non-violent march, all they would have got was a small note on the bottom of the page.”86 The efficaciousness of violence is a double-edged sword, since violence is what registers in today’s society and it is also what is most co-optable as a form of subjective violence by the media, which covers not the socioeconomic conditions (the systemic violence) that gave rise to the problems at hand, but the scenes of destruction and transgression, such as car burnings and looting. Looking awry at the riots enables Žižek to offer his own “belated” interpretation of the rioters’ aims, which were, he argues, to seek greater ideological integration. The rioters did not fully divest themselves from the existing symbolic structure. They were not short-circuiting the republican ideals of égalité, liberté, fraternité, demanding the inclusion of diversité, for instance. Quite the contrary; they wanted to be fully recognized as citizens of France: Within the space of French state ideology, the term “citizen” is opposed to “indigene,” [which] suggests a primitive part of the population not yet mature enough to deserve full citizenship. This is why the protesters’ demand to be recognised also implies a rejection of the very framework through which recognition takes place. It calls for the construction of a new universal framework.87

Unlike “the ‘radical’ postcolonial critique of liberalism,”88 as he calls it with some irony, Žižek insists on the need to push for a universalist framework. Analogous to the ways he demystified the standard interpretation of the riots as a sign of the protesters’ symbolic victimization, as a sign of French society’s failure to recognize their cultural specificity, Žižek’s critical assessment of the postcolonial critique of ideology rests on its one-sided Marxist lesson. Against the postcolonial critique, and more generally the politics of difference, Žižek arguably sees himself as daring to disturb the underground of the unspoken underpinnings of our so-called progressive lives.

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For Žižek, what goes unspoken in the postcolonial critique is its reliance on an overly rigid understanding of surface and depth, appearance and reality—a framework that leads postcolonial critics to limit the scope of their critique to false universality, to abstractions such as man as the bearer of human rights, leaving further resistive work undone. While postcolonial critics are fully justified in denouncing the false ideological universality that masks, naturalizes, and legitimizes a neocolonial condition and agenda, Žižek insists on the need to go further. At best, this intervention constitutes only half of the Marxist critique; at worst, it succumbs to a depoliticized call to respect the other, leaving intact the socioeconomic situation, that is, the symbolic structure of global capitalism. Effective critique requires a dialectical next step. The Left must appropriate and harness the tension or ambiguity between formal democracy and capitalism’s economic reality of exploitation and domination. This appearance—the experience of the gap—must be rearticulated to mean more than illusion: “The authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and  .  .  . is directly experienced as universal.”89 The pursuit of concrete universality—rather than a reactionary defense of difference—is thus posited as the real alternative to ideological universality. In their desire for recognition, the rioters remained within the frame of ideological universality (a universality fully compatible with today’s neoliberal capitalism). They failed—and public intellectuals for the most part failed here as well—to link their local struggle to a common struggle. What they needed was solidarity in their resistance, a recognition of the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded that cuts across capitalist societies: “The conflict that sustains the riots is thus not simply a conflict between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, a conflict between non-society and society, between those who have nothing to lose and those who have everything to lose, between those without a stake in their community and those whose stakes are the greatest.”90 Concrete universality is not simply an ideal but a practice of critique. As Žižek suggestively puts it in The Parallax View, “one practices concrete universality by confronting a universality with its ‘unbearable’ example.”91 Practicing concrete universality and the Lacanian act are obviously connected here: they both exert pressure on the liberal attitude that “wants social change with no actual change.”92 They call for a radical transformation of the subject, for unsettling the subject’s social being, and for short-circuiting her hermeneutic universe. Yet at the same time, this connection risks remaining too abstract, and Žižek is keen to shift registers, to multiply his examples, often in a bewildering but also revealing way. It is not insignificant that in the context of his discussion of a nonideological form of universality, Žižek turns to art, and more specifically to Wagner’s opera Parsifal, couched as an illustration of his view that “perhaps the most elementary hermeneutic test of the greatness of a work of art is its ability to survive being torn from its original context.”93 Žižek disparages interpretations of the opera that seek

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primarily to mobilize the historical codes familiar to those of Wagner’s time. Against the historicist desire to explain the artwork through its alleged context, Žižek argues that “to properly grasp Parsifal, one needs to abstract from such historical trivia, decontextualise the work, tear it out of the context in which it was originally embedded.”94 This is not simply a jab at Fredric Jameson’s imperative to “always historicize,” or worse, a careless disregard for the impact of social forces on the production of aesthetic objects. As the editors of Interrogating the Real put it, “this does not mean an escape from History or the pressures of context, but precisely the attempt to bring out the non-historical or noncontextualizable within context itself. That is to say, to bring out what it means to say that history and context are themselves incomplete, ‘not-all.’ ”95

Literature’s Acts The Lacanian act functions as something of an ultimate reminder of this insight, that “ideology is not all,” provided, of course, that its fetishistic and ultimately immunizing appeal is kept in check. Moreover, how a literary text or artwork stages the act proper—how it must solicit, block, and return meaning—makes the staging of the act fraught with interpretive difficulties. A logic of exemplarity, ready to mine literary examples for their representative value, confronts the autoimmune logic of the literary text. The question, then, is how does theory deal with the pull toward exemplarity (synonymous here with closure and explanation)? Is theory’s reaction to examples really any different from philosophy’s? Or does theory’s pervertibility—its selfcompromising logic and hermeneutic proclivities—make it more receptive to literature’s recalcitrant and transformative ways? I will take Žižek’s reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a case study for thinking these questions. In The Fragile Absolute, Žižek invokes Beloved for its powerful staging of the Lacanian act. He gives the following succinct account of the novel: As is well known, Beloved focuses on the traumatic desperate act of the heroine, Sethe: after she has escaped slavery with her four children, and enjoyed a month of calm recuperation with her mother-in-law in Cincinnati, the cruel overseer of the plantation from which she escaped attempts to capture her by appeal to the Fugitive Slave Law. Finding herself in this hopeless situation, without any prospect of escaping a return to slavery, Sethe resorts to a radical measure in order to spare her children a return to bondage: she cuts the throat of her eldest daughter, tries to kill her two sons, and threatens to dash out the brains of her infant daughter—in short, she commits a Medean act of trying to exterminate what is most precious to her, her progeny.96

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It is useful here to put Žižek’s interpretation of Beloved—of Sethe’s act, to be more precise—in dialogue with Homi Bhabha’s and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contrasting postcolonial readings, which, in turn, allows us to test Žižek’s injunction to decontextualize in the face of postcolonial readings of difference. What is at stake here is theory’s purchase on literature, as well as literature’s purchase on theory and ideology: theorists’ ability to register the demands of the literary (attending to the singularity of the work), to negotiate both these and the demands of critique (attending to its ideological content), and meaningfully engage with literary critics of the “post-ideological” age. Like Žižek, Bhabha does not provide a sustained account of Morrison’s novel, but he does return to it several times in The Location of Culture, giving it prominence by evoking it, alongside other postcolonial novels, as an illustration of what he calls a “literature of recognition,” that is, a literature that takes responsibility for “unhomely lives,” marginal lives that have been historically silenced and excluded from modernity. Bhabha aligns the critic closely with this politico-aesthetic project: As literary creatures and political animals we ought to concern ourselves with the understanding of human action and the social world as a moment when something is beyond control, but it is not beyond accommodation. This act of writing the world, of taking the measure of its dwelling, is magically caught in Morrison’s description of her house of fiction—art as “the fully realized presence of a haunting” of history. Read as an image that describes the relation of art to social reality, my translation of Morrison’s phrase becomes a statement on the political responsibility of the critic. For the critic must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present.97

This shared concern for giving voice to the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the postcolonial other animates Spivak’s reading as it does Bhabha’s. Yet as we will see, where Spivak takes an interest in the silences of Beloved’s rhetoricity, in its paradoxical transmission of an untranslatable story, Bhabha builds a recuperative interpretation of the text and its protagonist Sethe. In his reading, Bhabha posits Sethe as a self in the process of working through her trauma, in the process of reclaiming her history and agency. Following this interpretation, the ghostly return of her daughter, Beloved, enables Sethe, albeit belatedly, to heal from the devastating wounds of slavery, “to read [her] inwardness” from the outside, opening up the possibility of rethinking herself as a full-fledged subject: “Morrison insists on the harrowing ethical repositioning of the slave mother. . . . Through the death and the return of Beloved, precisely such a reclamation takes place: the slave mother regaining through the presence of the child, the property of her own person.”98 What appears at the surface level for the depoliticizing Western gaze

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as an unforgivable, monstrous act (how can a mother kill her child?) is now (re)interpreted historically as an ethical act, for, as we are told and reassured, “infanticide was recognized as an act against the system. . . . Infanticide was seen to be against the master’s property.”99 On Bhabha’s deep(er) account, Sethe is “saved,” redeemed as a mother, recognized in her difference, and thus also rescued from Western moral condemnation. Once Morrison narrativizes this tragic story and the postcolonial critic appropriately contextualizes it, Sethe’s act of infanticide emerges as a courageous act of resistance, an act of self-love and a love of the other, “Eros and Agape together.”100 We might say that Žižek “defends” Sethe as well; yet, his defense is arguably of a completely different order. Practicing his own decontextualization, Žižek allows us a different contact with Morrison’s novel. He interprets Sethe’s infanticide as “an exemplary case of the properly modern ethical act.”101 For Žižek, Sethe’s sacrifice does not follow the traditional logic of sacrificing, where one sacrifices X for the greater Y (that Thing which I value most in life). Faced with the prospect of a return to slavery—and with the even worse proposition of a life of slavery for her children—Sethe acted in a way that “did not compromise her desire, but fully assumed the impossible-traumatic act of ‘taking a shot at herself,’ at what was most precious to herself.”102 She sacrificed her “best thing”103—her object-cause of desire (her objet petit a)104—her child. For Žižek, Sethe’s No! alters the social coordinates of her social being, radically undermining and exceeding the terms of her oppressors: their interpellation and cognitive mapping of the situation. To be sure, Žižek is not oblivious to the “cruel irony” of Sethe’s situation, since her act of destitution merely confirms racist ideology, the view of blacks as animals. Indeed, the overseer Schoolteacher uses Sethe’s infanticide as a pedagogical moment for his nephew by drawing such an analogy: “what would your own horse do if you beat it to beyond the point of education. . . . you just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success” (Beloved, 176). Still, Žižek insists on the radicality of Sethe’s act, on the ways she sustains its monstrosity by refusing to qualify it upon her return to the community: What makes Sethe so monstrous is not her act as such, but the way she refuses to “relativize” it, to shed her responsibility for it, to concede that she acted in an unforgivable fit of despair or madness—instead of compromising her desire by assuming a distance towards her act, qualifying it as something “pathological” (in the Kantian sense of the term), she insists on the radically ethical status of her monstrous deed.105

By stressing the non-pathological character of Sethe’s No! Žižek suggests that Sethe’s act emanates from an autonomous subject (since a heteronomous subject, in a Kantian sense, would be a subject who chooses to act on her pathological feeling). Imagining Sethe as an autonomous subject, however,

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jars with even a cursory reading of the novel.106 And though Žižek acknowledges her difficulties coping with the horror of her act—“Only at the end of the novel does Beloved’s withdrawal signal Sethe’s ability to come to terms with the properly ethical monstrosity of her act”107—Sethe’s agency, in the moment of the act, is surprisingly under-theorized. If Bhabha saves Sethe by transforming the meaning of her infanticide into a traumatic—and historically inflected—act of resistance, Žižek can be said to elevate Sethe to the status of the heroic subject of the pure act, of the uncompromised act.108 I wonder, however, whether Žižek is not engaged in his own simplification and distortion of Sethe, mystifying, if not fetishizing, her powers in the name of the Lacanian act, offering Sethe’s act, and Morrison’s novel as a whole, as a subversive example for the contemporary scene: you too can contest your symbolic identity, decline your interpellation by capitalist society. But the task here as I see it is not simply to correct this Žižekian reading of Beloved—to settle (for) the meaning of Sethe’s infanticide. Rather, the force of Morrison’s novel lies in the way it stages both the scene of trauma and the vicissitudes of its reception, the way it refuses to quarantine the powerful depiction of trauma from interpretive complexities. We may in fact take our interpretive cue from Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law and witness to the traumatic event, who forges a new, (im)possible language in order to relate, and relate to, Sethe and her act. In her description of the event, Baby Suggs suspends moral judgment: “she could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice” (212). Baby Suggs’s judgment non-judgment serves as an interpretive counterbalance to Žižek’s emphatic reading. The “madness” of Sethe’s act (the infanticide) spills over into Baby Suggs’s decision-making, into the interpretation of her act and the language in which she conveys it. Interpreting Sethe’s infanticide as a “rough choice” draws out the presence of choice yet also the absence of freedom. It highlights the ambivalent nature of Sethe’s message— how it is destined to be misread: not only by Schoolteacher, but also by Sethe’s lover, Paul D., who, after hearing about the infanticide, responds cruelly, telling her, “you got two feet . . . not four” (194), a phrase that recalls Schoolteacher’s analogy between Sethe and a horse. In relating Sethe’s conflicted act and her (non)-judgment of it in terms of a double bind, Baby Suggs anticipates the ambivalence and multiplicity of the novel’s concluding refrain, “This is not a story to pass on” (275). We are bearing witness to nothing less than “absolute contingency,” to that which, by its raw formlessness, cannot be translated into literary form.109 Beloved is a story that cannot be retold, passed on to others, and is also one that should not be passed over or passed up, a story that must be told. Just as it is at once possible and impossible to condemn or approve Sethe’s choice, it is imperative to retell this story that cannot be told in any straightforward way or fully encompassed by the telling. Translating Sethe confronts us with what Spivak describes as “an aporia or unbridgeable gulf.”110 Retelling her story can only be enacted with “the mark of untranslatability on it, in the bound book Beloved that we hold in our hands.”111

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The words “rough choice” sustain the alterity of Sethe’s story, this “mark of untranslatability.” They block its appropriation into a message of redemption or condemnation while, at the same time, declining the temptations of indigestibility, the withdrawal from the madness of interpretation, which is tantamount to relinquishing the pressure of the double bind, to abdicating responsibility and responsiveness. Baby Suggs’s words undermine both sovereign judgment and the self-immunizing gesture that comes from making no judgments or translations at all, pointing the reader back to Sethe’s status as a complex and compromised character. James Phelan, in diligently searching for Morrison’s ethical message, cautions against an uncritical reception of the silences in Sethe’s version of the story: “Sethe’s telling [of the infanticide] isn’t definitive because it erases the horror of her murdering her child under its talk of motivations (love) and purpose (safety).”112 But as Heather Love points out, the compromising logic is already at work in the presentation of Schoolteacher’s racist version, which is also, for readers, the first recounting of the infanticide. Attentive to the surface of the novel, Love draws our eye to the narrator’s uncanny presence in the telling of the presentation of the racist perspective: “The point of view in the passage switches back and forth between the slave catcher, the schoolteacher, and his nephew, all of whom cast a dehumanizing objectifying gaze on Sethe. In addition to these discernible optics, the passage moves in and out of another vantage point, a blankly descriptive point of view that is ascribed to no one in particular.”113 What Schoolteacher sees is “a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels of the other” (175), a repugnant perspective for the reader, but Love also remarks that “we are left with the haunting sense of a narrator who looks on this scene and does not care.”114 Love sheds a different light on Morrison’s disruption of racist discourse, one, she claims, that avoids any humanist residue (as in the appeal to empathy, consciousness, or experience). “Rather than reading this scene as an object lesson in failed empathy, we might see it as an instance of a documentary aesthetic in the novel.”115 Yet if we read Phelan’s depth reading and Love’s surface reading dialectically, with an eye for the aporetic quality of this dialectical movement, what we get is a more effective critique of the rhetoric of exemplarity. Love’s insistence on the cold, documentary character of the novel frustrates our impulse to sanitize Sethe’s infanticide (Bhabha), learn from Morrison (Phelan), or celebrate Sethe’s act of subjective destitution (Žižek). But Love overstates the issue in characterizing this documentary approach as nonideological: “Although dehumanization cannot be understood outside of a humanist framework, Morrison renders it here as a technique, a material process, rather than an ideology.  .  .  . Dehumanization, rather than being a kind of false consciousness that can be exorcised through cultivating an inside view, is a process with real effects: it is a fact, if not a truth.”116 It is true that dehumanization is a material reality, and not merely a false racist misperception

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(that needs only to be disproven in order for it to disappear). Yet while Love’s collapse of ideology and false consciousness facilitates her break with the humanist framework, it does this, I believe, at the cost of oversimplifying ideology’s meaning and range. Ideology, as we’ve been using it in this chapter, is much more about the naturalization of meaning and the ways fantasies structure or support reality than it is about the truth or falsity of a given perception. Love’s surface reading aims to elucidate the text’s impact on the reader, but assumes a binary frame that does not exist: “A flat reading of Beloved suggests the possibility of an alternative ethics, one grounded in documentation and description rather than empathy and witness. . . . Less a witness than a documentarian, Morrison conveys the horrors of slavery not by voicing an explicit protest against it but by describing its effects.”117 The choice need not be between the documentarian who describes and the witness who relates and interprets. Or rather, the witness is not necessarily a humanist witness, a moralizing presence that secures Morrison’s message of protest. I agree that the novel resists readerly humanist desires, but it does so, I would argue, by framing choices differently, by both soliciting and blocking relationality (in part by its appeal to the surface), rather than by evacuating witnessing (and its interpretive challenges) as such. In many ways, the example of Baby Suggs painfully reveals the fallibility of the humanist paradigm, pointing to an ethical gray zone, a recognition of the impossibility of moral clarity, of passing a clear and distinct moral judgment.118 She is in principle ideally situated to understand Sethe’s devastation, since it was her teaching—Baby Suggs is described as “an unchurched preacher” (102)—that rejuvenates Sethe’s spiritual being. Baby Suggs called upon the people of her community to cultivate their bodies, to reaffirm a healthier relation to self: “Here . . . in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it” (103). But the text makes clear that her ethics of love has been severely disrupted by whites: “Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed . . . There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks” (105). Baby Suggs’s dream is precisely the fantasy of human dignity, the belief that a runaway slave could become a desiring subject, that she could relate to her body and children as something other than alienated objects. This fantasy structures Sethe’s reality as well. The arrival of Schoolteacher shatters the reality of Baby Suggs and Sethe, their fantasy of personal security, communal safety, and love. Schoolteacher’s traumatizing presence discloses the ideological gap between their celebration of universal self-worth and America as a racist society, between social reality and the Real. And though Baby Suggs and Sethe share a great deal, their exposure to external trauma varies, and their differing legal status— one is legally freed while the other has “illegally” escaped slavery—shapes their experiences, expectations, and actions. Under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, slaveholders could track runaway slaves across free states and claim

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them as their property. As a runaway slave, Sethe experiences what Butler terms “precarity”119 much differently, attesting to the unequal distribution of corporeal vulnerability. Sethe’s reaction to Schoolteacher, to this irruption of the Real, cannot be evaluated in abstraction from this situated experience of vulnerability, which might explain in part Baby Suggs’s agonizing indecision, her hesitation to judge Sethe.120 Žižek, as we have seen, does not hesitate. There is little doubt in his judgment. He judges Sethe positively, but his own reading appears overdetermined, enthralled by a dream of radical subversion, by the purity of the ethico-political act; ontology trumps historicism, and he seems all too eager to enlist Sethe to his cause. This, of course, does not mean that we need to see Sethe’s act as fake, as a “mere” passage à l’acte, a violent, but ultimately impotent, act that does little to change her relation to the dominant racist order. Yet it is also telling that the novel concludes with a significant reenactment of the traumatic scene, one in which Sethe, now reintegrated into the community, mistakes an approaching white man for Schoolteacher and attempts to attack him, retained, this time, by her neighbors. What are we to make of this narrative development? How does it retroactively affect our image of a heroic Sethe? Might we read this scene, Sethe’s flashback, as an attempt to (unconsciously) relativize her act, to distance herself from the monstrosity of her act by directing violence this time toward a more “proper” target? Sethe’s act might have jammed her interpellation by Schoolteacher, but the semblance of her prior symbolic identity does seem to return at the end of the novel. Did her act misfire? Or was it a true act precisely because it did not/could not guarantee success? How, as readers of Beloved, do we decide on Sethe’s act without diminishing the “madness” of her decision, the performative judgment of “rough choice”? For theory, this is a repeatable learning moment, a reminder that theory must avow and embrace the “terrible process of undecidability,”121 that it must continually negotiate meaning, cultivate hesitation, and never be satisfied with easy translation or hermeneutic complacency. Here, literature, in its enactment of the push and pull of relationality, plays a crucial role in making theory’s autoimmunity happen. Literature works to immunize theory against its appropriative and recuperative moments. It teaches and reminds theory to read with contradictory demands. Literature’s resistance to meaning—that is, to the instrumentalization of its examples—enlivens theory, and sparks its hunger to know more, as it frustrates its interpretive endeavors. Literature heightens theory’s pervertibility, sharpening its skeptical impulse, invigorating its labor of critique, its taste for untranslatability. As we have seen, critique is a pharmakon. Critique’s perpetual negativity can energize literary criticism, which often risks becoming a toothless, monotonous, and predictable interpretive practice, yet critique itself runs the same risks. Its inventive interventions can effortlessly give way to the desire for signification and containment, to a neglect of literature’s own negativity, its eventness, relapsing

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into, or aligning itself with, a defunct and ideologically dubious rhetoric of exemplarity. But rather than accept critique’s detractors and condemn theory for its interpretive overzealousness and overreach, ushering in a postpolitical, post-ideological age, we must equally insist on cultivating critique’s skeptical drive, its autoimmunity, its refusal to immunize itself against itself. Why? To paraphrase de Man, nothing can overcome the resistance to critique since critique is itself this resistance. In this last instance, Žižek’s “ideology is not all” must find its counterpart in “critique is not all,” a point that literature, fortunately, never allows theorists and critics to forget—be they liberal, postcolonial, surface readers, or even Žižekian.

Chapter 3

Irony, Power, and the Death Drive

I intend to take the divine out of reading. — Paul de Man

The true opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism, a concern for common good, but envy, ressentiment, which makes me act against my own interests. Freud knew it well: the death drive is opposed to the pleasure principle as well as to the reality principle. The true evil, which is the death drive, involves selfsabotage. It makes us act against our own interests. — Slavoj Žižek

Involving questions of mastery and distance, appearance and reality, irony poses a challenge to the sovereignty of the interpretive subject. Its recalcitrance to semantic containment, its predilection for excess—“words have a way of saying things which you do not want them to say,”1 as de Man aptly put it—aligns irony almost effortlessly with theory and its penchant for aporetic skepticism. We might even consider irony to be theory’s trope par excellence. Irony haunts all narratives: “irony is everywhere, at all points the narrative can be interrupted.”2 That is to say, irony does not discriminate. Irony recognizes no masters. Its unboundedness, its dizzying play of signifiers, makes all readers, all hermeneuts, potential victims. J. Hillis Miller describes irony as a “monster,” upsetting or even ruining his “search for a solid ground on the basis of which . . . [he] could read with a secure mastery one novel or another.”3 For Friedrich Schlegel, irony is “incomprehensibility” (Unverständlichkeit).4 For de Man, it baffles the will to understand, inducing doubt from the start: The way to stop irony is by understanding, by the understanding of irony, by the understanding of the ironic process. Understanding would allow us to control irony. But what if irony is always of understanding, if irony is always the irony of understanding, if what is

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at stake in irony is always the question of whether it is possible to understand or not to understand?5

Not amenable to understanding, easy digestion, nor to reading as a fortification and perpetuation of what is, irony also poses a problem for the symbolic order, which, like narrative, is no less haunted by irony’s threats to consistency and cohesion. Irony, like skepticism, has an autoimmune character. Simply stated, irony may always bite the hand of its owner; its critical deployment may always boomerang back. Doing justice to irony necessitates a hermeneutics of skepticism. Sensitive to the reach of irony’s sabotaging ways, its “disruption of the single,”6 its opposition to “the very logic of making sense,”7 the queer theorist Lee Edelman insightfully links de Manian irony to the psychoanalytic notion of the death drive. What they share in common is a profoundly “corrosive force,”8 a negativity that renders futile all attempts to introduce the “divine” into reading, to arrest meaning, to secure narrative integrity, or simply to ontologize. The death drive, like irony, is a thorn in the side of philosophy.9 Derrida considers the death drive another name for autoimmunity, this illogical logic that rebels “against the autos itself.”10 Indeed, Freud’s death drive—and psychoanalysis as a whole—represents a direct assault on philosophy’s pursuit of knowledge, and its phantasms of autonomy, sovereignty, and self-sufficiency. As Lacan relates, Carl Jung remembers Freud claiming upon his arrival in America in 1909 that he and Jung were “bringing them the plague.”11 The source of the plague was, of course, Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, which he famously aligned with Copernicus’s heliocentrism and Darwin’s evolutionary theory, all three dealing a “narcissistic wound” to philosophy’s humanistic subject, revealing that “the ego is not the master in its own house.”12 But as Adrian Johnston rightly argues, Freud’s own comment potentially dilutes the radicality of psychoanalysis. Following Lacan, Johnston cautions against the recuperative dimension of Freud’s comment: Although the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin lead individuals to reconceive of themselves as insignificant, smaller-than-specks blobs of cosmic dust floating in a disorientingly vast void of incomprehensible dimensions, these same individuals at least can take some pride and joy  in knowing that they are blobs who know just how miniscule and meaningless they are.13

The idea of the death drive renders dubious all curative philosophies. There is really little room for the death drive in the history of philosophy. “What is unthinkable for [Spinoza],” Žižek writes, “is what Freud terms ‘death drive’: the idea that conatus is based on a fundamental act of self-sabotaging.”14 The Freudian death drive is indeed quite foreign to the discourse of philosophy.15

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The death drive discloses human existence itself as a problem, and even worse, as a self-generating problem.16 So just as it welcomes skepticism, theory is far more hospitable to the death drive and to irony, more receptive to each concept’s negativity and interpretive possibilities. Whereas philosophy gentrifies the subject, theory explores the abyss of subjectivity. In this chapter, irony and the death drive are our gateway into that exploration. But far from reflecting an unrelenting nihilism, a bleak view of the world,17 theory’s interest in these concepts, I want to argue, attests to their hermeneutic potential, to what irony and the death drive enable us to see by precisely destroying or disabling other things. So to look only at the negative effects of irony and the death drive would be too reductive. As autoimmune concepts, they are not “absolute evil or ill.” Without the death drive, with absolute submission to the pleasure principle, to the authority of the autos, nothing would ever happen or arrive. No relation to the other—no community as such—would ever be formed.18 Likewise, without the possibility of irony, with absolute linguistic transparency, with pure understanding, no interpretation would ever take place. Stendhal’s novel Red and Black (Le Rouge et le noir) serves as my case study in this chapter. As with Beloved, Red and Black speaks to theory’s concerns; the novel’s resistance to all forms of exemplification—be its translation into a moral or political lesson, its turning some movement or ideal into an example, and so on—keeps theory’s skeptical hunger insatiate and alive, its exegesis incomplete. More specifically, Red and Black enables us to think about irony and the death drive together in a way that stages the perplexities of the death drive at both the ontological and hermeneutic level: what the death drive is and how we (mis)interpret its manifestation. While Red and Black is frequently read as a nineteenth-century romantic novel, celebrating the discovery of Julien Sorel’s “true” self in the solitude of his prison cell, I am more concerned with the phantasmatic underpinnings of the romantic reading, with the ways Julien’s death drive—enacted in the ironic, self-sabotaging moments in the novel—complicates the exemplarity of its hero as one who achieves self-discovery by renouncing desire and transcending social power. The will to exemplify is also present in Jacques Rancière’s reading of Red and Black, which, on the one hand, departs decisively from the traditional romantic interpretation pitting the struggles of the self against society, and, on the other, offers a redemptive political reading that promotes the work’s promise of happiness, its universal appeal of equality. This reading, however, comes at a cost, a silencing of Red and Black’s irony and a blindness to the enactment of the death drive in the novel. Our reading of Red and Black foregrounds the death drive. It is that which happens to Julien, but the force of that happening lies in the novel’s staging of the death drive and its hero’s struggles with the dynamics of power. Power emerges not as an epiphenomenon to the problematic of the death drive, but as a primary cause or trigger that is constitutive, as it were, of the formation

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and destitution of Julien’s autos. Before looking at the meaning, or better yet, the meanings the death drive takes in Red and Black, I want to turn to the history of Freud’s concept of the death drive in order to fully appreciate its challenge to philosophy and its (potential) contribution to theory.

The Scandal of the Death Drive From its inception, the concept of the “death drive” (Todestrieb) has generated controversy. Freud first introduced it in 1920 in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle, describing the death drive metaphorically as a yearning to return to an inorganic state, to a peaceful state, that is, to a state without excitation. This led Freud to famously identify the death drive with the “Nirvana principle”: The dominating tendency of mental life, and perhaps of nervous life in general, is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli (the “Nirvana principle” . . .)—a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.19

Intimately connected to the death drive is what Freud calls the “repetition compulsion,” the compulsion of the human psyche to repeat traumatic events over and over again.20 The repetition compulsion transgresses what Freud had understood as a guiding principle of psychic life: the “pleasure principle.” In the opening line of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud states: “In the theory of psycho-analysis we have no hesitation in assuming that the course taken by mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle.”21 He defines the pleasure principle as that which regulates all mental processes, compelling human beings to seek pleasure and avoid pain (or unpleasure), to control levels of excitation, maintaining homeostasis. The repetition compulsion, however, gestures to a beyond of the pleasure principle, pointing to the latter’s hermeneutic deficiencies, since it offers only a partial explication for human behavior.22 Freud’s discovery of the existence of ineradicable self-destructive impulses in individuals painted a tragic, if not nihilistic, vision of human existence. For this reason, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in the words of Jean Laplanche, “remains the most fascinating and baffling text in the entire Freudian corpus.”23 Many readers of Freud found the death drive difficult to accept. They saw it as excessively speculative, an aberration in thought, or, most importantly, dangerous in its ethico-political implications. William Reich’s reaction is representative. For Reich, a psychoanalysis informed by the death drive is at odds with itself. It makes futile any hope of a psychoanalytic “cure.”

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Rather than providing what was needed, that is, a “sociology of human suffering,” Freud’s theory of the death drive proposed a “cultural philosophy of human suffering,” a pessimistic diagnosis of an incurable social illness, because it “traced the psychic conflict back to inner elements and more and more eclipsed the supreme role of the frustrating and punishing outer world.”24 If aggression comes primarily from within—that is, if its cause is located in unchanging human nature—then psychoanalysis’s therapeutic work is rendered ineffectual.25 Freud’s death drive has, however, had a long hermeneutic shelf life. Other social theorists found explanatory value in the death drive by reading it as a social force rather than an individual drive. In Eros and Civilization, for example, Herbert Marcuse highlights society’s Thanatos, its suicidal tendencies toward aggression, and calls for a stronger expression of Eros, or our sexual drives: “Eros, freed from surplus-repression, would be strengthened, and the strengthened Eros would, as it were, absorb the objective of the death instinct.”26 Increasing erotic satisfaction—and thus reducing surplus repression—does not eradicate the presence of Thanatos but regulates it, keeping it somewhat contained, at bay.27 Later psychoanalysts, especially those following Lacan’s interpretive lead, have effectively downplayed Freud’s so-called biologism,28 and reinterpreted the death drive in relation to the symbolic order and the emergence of subjectivity as such.29 Lacan leaves no doubt about the importance of Freud’s notion of the death drive to a psychoanalytic approach: “To evade the death instinct in [Freud’s] doctrine is not to know his doctrine at all.”30 For Lacanians, the death drive comes to name an ontological lack, a desire for plenitude, a yearning to return to a state of complete enjoyment, to what has been lost as a result of one’s entry into language, one’s symbolic castration. Phantasmatically speaking, the goal is to attain the mysterious, transcendent object (das Ding)—“to reproduce the initial state, to find das Ding, the object”31—that would fully satisfy desire and thus put an end to one’s alienation and the suffering one feels when faced with one’s mortality.32 In the words of Martin Hägglund, “the aim of desire is to not desire.”33 On this account, the therapeutic work of psychoanalysis consists in demystifying the object of desire.34 In exposing its illusory character (in showing that the object is not a timeless or immortal being), psychoanalysis invites us to “traverse” this human fantasy of wholeness. While generally sympathetic to this larger Lacanian framing of the death drive, Žižek gives the Freudian notion still a different twist, highlighting, or better yet, harnessing the drive’s unruly excess and its self-sabotaging or shortcircuiting ways. Two passages illustrate Žižek’s position particularly well: I think that Freud, to put it in fashionable terms, isolates a certain excess. He calls it death drive, a certain excess of destructability that is, as it were, undermining, destabilizing the social order, an excess

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that is ambiguous in the sense that it can be a source of constructive energy or it can be purely destructive. The idea is that Freud isolates this space of excess, which then, of course, opens up the space for possible change. I think Freud’s basic answer would have been: psychoanalysis just does this elementary job of showing how there is a gap, a failure, a nonfunctioning excess in society.35 “Death drive” is not a biological fact but a notion indicating that the human psychic apparatus is subordinated to a blind automatism of repetition beyond pleasure-seeking, self-preservation, accordance between man and his milieu. Man is . . . “an animal sick unto death,” an animal excoriated by an insatiable parasite (reason, logos, language). In this perspective, the “death drive,” this dimension of radical negativity cannot be reduced to an expression of alienated social conditions, it defines la condition humaine as such: there is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to “overcome,” to “abolish” it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it. All “culture” is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize—to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis.36

For Žižek, the death drive is constitutive of the human condition (a mixture of language and automatism). There is no transcending this unruly remainder or excess; there is only acceptance or affirmation.37 Living with the death drive requires us, then, to abandon its identification with the “Nirvana principle.” Like Lacan, Žižek is emphatic about decoupling the death drive from “the craving for self-annihilation.”38 It is in fact quite at odds with the biological desire for self-destruction: The paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is . . . that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny excess of life, for an “undead” urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption. The ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never “just life”: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things.39

Rereading the death drive as “a ‘natural’ glitch in human nature”40 and a hunger for immortality counterintuitively foregrounds the unruly “inhuman” at the core of the human.

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The Immortal Julien Red and Black revolves around ambition and excessive desire as it tells the tale of Julien’s unlikely rise from provincial peasant and fervent admirer of Napoleon to ennobled member of reactionary Paris society. Julien’s trajectory— which ends in his imprisonment and execution—is marked by encounters with a series of prominent figures of power, each embodying the various sociopolitical milieus of Bourbon Restoration France and their differing strategies of normalization. For instance, when Julien becomes tutor to the Rênals’ children, he is exposed to new disciplining or regulating practices. In sharp opposition to his father’s habitual beatings, we discover that M. de Rênal exercises his power over Julien quite differently. He does not manifest it through physical force, but rather invites all to address Julien with complete respect: “By my orders,” he asserts, “everyone here will address you as ‘sir.’ ”41 However, he deploys his authority over Julien by the same means when the latter does not perform according to expectations. The morning after his seduction of Mme de Rênal, for example, Julien—who is waiting to confess his love to her—encounters first her angry husband, who, on returning to the house from a trip away, “made no effort to hide his displeasure that Julien had spent an entire morning without paying attention to the children” (Red and Black, 45). M. de Rênal reminds Julien of the haves and have-nots, of the asymmetrical character of their power relation, through verbal rebuke. The modification of Julien’s behavior is not impelled by coercion but by the experience of humiliation. Under the watchful gaze of Lacan’s big Other, Julien traverses these divergent social fields as a subject both formed—coerced, constrained, or inhibited by power—and yet self-forming; he is never locked into any of his socially given subject positions. His ontologically precarious and strategically shifting positions in such adversarial relations—his power relations with figures of authority, with subjects endowed with symbolic authority by the big Other— highlight the pervasive workings of desire and drive. If, upon “arriving” in Paris high society, Julien asserts that his “novel is finished [mon roman est fini]” (359, translation modified)—suggesting his desires are absolutely satisfied when he finally becomes who he always was and was meant to be—his drive ironically exceeds the novel’s plot and the symbolic identity that it confers on its protagonist.42 Julien’s drive prevents him from enjoying the fruits of his social climbing and the plenitude of his new identity; rather than achieving novelistic resolution in this climax, he can never fully satisfy his desire for recognition and acceptance (his desire to no longer feel or be seen as a “monster” [360]). This drive produces hermeneutic tensions, troubling any hope of narrative and ideological closure, and even contaminating the denouement, Julien’s discovery of his “authentic” self in his prison cell. So let me begin with the novel’s ending. In the solitude of his cell in a Gothic tower at Besançon, where he has been jailed for shooting and wounding his mistress, Mme de Rênal, Julien appears to attain full self-transparency,

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an ultimate sense of his inner self. While meditating on his memories, he experiences a profound sense of happiness about the time he had spent with Mme de Rênal: Ambition was dead within his heart; another passion rose from its ashes; he called it remorse for having tried to kill Mme. de Rênal. As a matter of fact, he was madly in love with her. He found an extraordinary happiness when, in absolute solitude, and without any fear of interruption, he could devote himself entirely to memories of the happy days he had spent at Verrières or Vergy. (379)

Having relinquished mastery and freed himself from his desire for worldly success, immune, as it were, to the tyrannical gaze of society, he can now enjoy the full presence of the moment: “I have been ambitious . . . I was acting in those days according to the code of the times. Now I am living from day to day” (406, emphasis added). Yet Julien’s account of self should give us critical pause. Although Julien’s project has now radically changed, it is problematic to assume that up until his quasi-revelation in the prison, he was merely following the “code of the times.” Even a cursory reading of the novel reveals that Julien’s protean identity was never a mere effect of the “code of the times,” but was simultaneously formed and self-forming as a result of his complex encounters with authoritative figures of power. Julien overstates the matter, then. He does not simply abandon a previously “fake” or “inauthentic” identity for a “true” or “authentic” identity that was always already there. But the sway of his narrative is strong, and critics have frequently upheld the veracity of Julien’s epiphanic self-discovery. As one put it, “only when Julien’s impulses triumph over his will is he truly himself.”43 For another, Julien’s prison is the site where “the ultimate descent into the self takes place,” rendering possible “[Julien’s] fundamental discovery  .  .  . of identity.”44 In this “happy prison,” Julien finds a self or identity no longer needing to be socially performed (“Julien stops performing and starts living” because “it simply is”).45 This reading posits a clear teleological arc, leading to a return to an authentic, self-enclosed, and unmediated identity—recuperating, in turn, the romantic notion of identity, or “identity as a fortress against society.”46 To be sure, the novel does evoke the romantic dimensions of Julien’s character on numerous occasions. We can see it in Julien’s emotional sensitivity, which is contrasted with the brutishness his father displays when, for example, he knocks a book from Julien’s hands: “[Julien’s] eyes were full of tears, less from physical pain than for the loss of his book, which he worshipped” (13). The kind of “spiritual” pain Julien feels at the loss of his “sacred” text (Napoleon’s Memorial of Saint Helena) is emblematic of Julien’s “romantic” expressivity and attachment to contemplative reading practices. His antagonistic relation to society, represented by his father, also hints at a Rousseauistic quality: “an unhappy man at war with his whole society” (263).

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When critics evoke Julien’s rediscovery of his true identity—his self minus the ideologies and corruptions of social life—they thus seem merely to repeat or reaffirm the account of the narrator, who states, “Julien felt himself strong and resolute, like a man who has seen clearly into his own soul” (403). There is arguably nothing controversial about the teleological reading of this ending. Yet from the perspective of the death drive, things become less plain. Julien’s death drive—which functions as a constitutive ironic excess, as that which “sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things”47—both authorizes and thwarts such a reading. The narrator’s qualification “like a man  .  .  .” (comme l’homme qui voit clair) in the statement “Julien felt himself strong and resolute, like a man who has seen clearly into his own soul,” hints at this irreducible difference between the ego (his actual, ambivalent self) and imago (his idealized or reified image of self, a self immune from the social gaze). As Žižek puts it, “The ‘death-drive’ means that life itself rebels against the ego: the true representative of death is ego itself, as the petrified imago which interrupts the flow of life.”48 In this light, rather than bridging the ironic gap separating the two selves, let’s look more closely at the type of power relationship and state of being envisaged by Julien as constituting his “ideal” of happiness. Why Mme de Rênal? Or more importantly, why Mme de Rênal now? The rediscovery and intensification of Julien’s old love is primarily motivated by a negation of the type of amorous relationship he had since struck up with Mathilde, the daughter of the Marquis de La Mole. Prior to his “conversion,” the Parisian Mathilde was nothing short of an alter ego. Indeed, she shares many of Julien’s (old) characteristics. She is depicted as a singular being (“Mathilde is very strange [a de la singularité]” [231]); she desires to transcend her historical condition (her nostalgia for the French Renaissance recalls Julien’s nostalgia for Napoleonic times);49 she conflates amour and amour-propre (“Every day she congratulated herself on her decision to indulge in a great passion. It’s a dangerous game, she thought; so much the better! A thousand times better! Without a great passion, I was pining away from boredom during the best period of a girl’s life, from sixteen to twenty” [255]); she is a calculating subject. And, on this last point, her contrast with the more instinctive Mme de Rênal is quite revealing: “Mme. de Rênal always found reasons to do what her heart dictated; this high-society girl lets her heart be moved only when she has found proofs based upon good logic that it ought to be moved” [340]). It is Mme de Rênal’s provincial character that ultimately triumphs in the eyes of Julien. Julien’s seemingly categorical withdrawal (both physical and spiritual) from the Symbolic at the end of the novel50 is juxtaposed with Mathilde’s excessive concern with the external world: “Mathilde’s lofty soul always had to be conscious of a public and other people” (378). Himself “tired of heroics” (378), Julien is disillusioned about the good of the Parisian lifestyle; he “unplugs”51 from Paris’s interpellative networks, breaks with its system of

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power, and refigures happiness precisely as the exclusion of the desire to govern or direct the behavior and actions of others. Resistance or conformity to the demands of the various social codes is no longer an issue. Faced with his imminent execution by guillotine, Julien “now” conceives of happiness as a state of being: a state of homeostasis and plenitude excluding the possibility of any change, loss, or disruption—social, economic, emotional, and so on. He reinvents his social substance, situating his “happy self” outside the process of subjectivization, beyond the realm of becoming and the flux of human existence. Julien’s imagined happiness is clearly unattainable in the here and now of social life; it expresses his nostalgia for a lost harmony (a state anterior to power), a yearning to return to the pre-linguistic Imaginary. This latent manifestation of the death drive, that is, a desire to return to the pre-Oedipal fusion with the maternal other, the figure of Mme de Rênal, makes his earlier observation—“Mme. de Rênal had been like a mother to me” (387)—all the more truthful and revealing.52 If a romantic reading of the novel privileges Julien’s final recognition of his “true happiness,” an ironic reading unravels the exemplarity of such a scene, pointing to the hero’s lingering anxieties over power, the persistence of his kratophobia. Julien’s fetishized memory would express a hidden desire to transcend power, to eschew the exhaustive demands of the paternal Other, the symbolic Father, and to suppress the potential for displacement and reversibility constitutive of power relations. In short, on this account, Julien desires not to desire. Life after desire is indeed no life at all. Julien succumbs to the death drive, to the fantasy of resolution—stasis and wholeness. This, however, is not the only reading of the novel that the Freudian death drive affords or makes happen. Red and Black also provides a more radical and unsettling image of the death drive, one that insists on the irreducible gap between ego and imago, between thinking and being. If a romantic reading privileged the imago of Julien, an identification with an ambition-free Julien, an alternative reading of the death drive foregrounds the ways in which all investments into selves, into the imago, are subject to disruption and revision. Julien’s death drive is not merely a yearning for an untenable Imaginary, but involves a self-sabotaging impulse that can be traced throughout the novel. Julien’s success in the novel lies in his capacity to fashion himself in a way that meets the desire of the Other—understood in Lacanian terms as “desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and especially desire for what the Other desires.”53 The death drive sabotages this capacity. It is an illogical logic, a “true evil,” according to Žižek, since it “makes us act against our own interests.”54 An obvious example is Julien’s excessive reaction to Mme de Rênal’s letter denouncing him as a hypocrite and seducer of women. Rather than shooting her, he could have managed the situation more rationally, in keeping with his calculating ways. The self-sabotaging logic of the death drive manifests itself in an earlier episode of the novel as well. During his stay in the theological seminary at

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Besançon, the atheist Julien adopts a new self that will act in “accordance” with the seminary model. As the narrator puts it, “His task was to create for himself a whole new character” (144). Julien’s ideal of self-fashioning is tested when he fails to perform his new self appropriately—or more to the point, when he fails to act in accordance with his self-interest. “At a dinner of clerics to whom the old priest had presented him as a prodigious scholar: he found himself babbling frantic praises of Napoleon. He strapped his right arm to his chest, pretended that he had dislocated it while shifting a tree trunk, and carried it in this painful position for two months” (20). This selfimposed violence to the body serves as a corrective to his unruliness, to his libidinal investment in Napoleonic ideals.55 Julien’s practices of self-discipline can be seen as an expression of his life drive, and are meant to preserve and indemnify his autos, and to counter, if not tame, the death drive. They exemplify what Foucault means by “ascetic practice,” “an exercise of the self on the self by which one attempts to develop and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being.”56 For Julien, self-immunization through self-mastery—the project of controlling and adequately channeling his energy—is a prerequisite for worldly success. This project of self-fashioning is indeed clearly indebted to Napoleon. Napoleonic liberalism endlessly fueled Julien’s imagination. With his emphasis on meritocracy, Napoleon jolted the social order of the aristocracy. He disclosed “the inconsistency and/or non-existence of the big Other—of the fact that there is no Other of the Other, no ultimate guarantee of the field of meaning.”57 Napoleon introduced contingency into history: one’s social status was no longer determined by one’s class rank or lineage: one’s (noble) birth was not destiny. Julien believed that he could heroically overcome or transcend his socially given position. And he did. But Julien’s enthusiastic identification with Napoleon’s will to power both follows and exceeds the dictates of the pleasure principle. Adopting a Napoleonic ethos gives Julien purpose, a way of navigating his social obstacles: the decision to seduce Mathilde is a case in point. Julien’s successful seduction and sexual conquest of Mathilde both fulfills the pleasure principle and helps to secure for him a privileged place within the symbolic order, which, in turn, increases his opportunities to satisfy his vital needs and drive for pleasure. Julien’s pleasure principle—in this case, the pleasure of (aristocratic) identity—ironically even overrides, at least momentarily, his attachment to Napoleon. After his genealogy has been “corrected” so that Julien’s birth can be deemed noble, after the abbé Pirard hermeneutically reframes the function of the elder Sorel, repositioning Julien’s father within the social order as someone who merely took care of him, Julien turns inward for evidence of his aristocratic selfhood: “Is it actually possible, he asked himself, that I might be the natural son of some aristocrat exiled among our mountains by the terrible Napoleon?” (360, emphasis added). But, as the novel reveals, this same drive for pleasure can quickly metamorphose into a death drive, a drive at odds

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with “the utilitarian-survivalist attitude.”58 A cost-benefit outlook gives way to erratic behavior and irrational outbursts. Julien’s unruliness and the selfdestructiveness that it unleashes point to the antagonistic logic of the death drive (in him what is more than him). It compels him to act autonomously (Žižek describes the death drive as an indocile force, a “self-destructive freedom”) against his conscious intentions and standards.59 Simply stated, there is more to Julien than his calculating self.60

The Cruel Irony of Power Julien’s kratophilia, his love of power, is, as we have seen, indebted to the phantasmatic figure of Napoleon, which, in turn, must be contrasted with Julien’s kratophobia, the power fatigue that he experiences in his prison cell. I prefer the terms kratophobia/kratophilia to Hägglund’s dyadic formulation chronophobia/chronophilia, which is a theorization intended to displace the death drive, substituting the desire for survival (what we really mean when we desire a state of permanence) for the fantasy of immortality. For Hägglund, “the co-implication of chronophobia and chronophilia” means that “the fear of time and death does not stem from a metaphysical desire to transcend temporal life. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in a life that can be lost. It is because one is attached to a temporal being (chronophilia) that one fears losing it (chronophobia).”61 The hermeneutic focus on the fear/love of time—Hägglund’s subtle analysis of the self’s ambivalent relation to temporal existence—purports to counter the Lacanian account of the death drive insofar as it questions not only the reality of wholeness (a return to das Ding) but the very desire for wholeness: The Lacanian reading stops short . . . of questioning the structure of the traditional narrative of desire. The fullness of pure joy or immortality is deemed to be an illusion, but the desire for such fullness is itself taken to be self-evident. Even while debunking the promise of fulfillment, the Lacanian account thus conforms to the conception of desire that has been handed down to us from the Platonic tradition: we are temporal, restless beings but desire to repose in the fullness/ emptiness of timeless being.62

Yet Hägglund’s dyad chronophobia/chronophilia does not adequately account for the presence of power, for its psychic lure and sublime negativity. It neglects power’s intrinsic potential to repress and produce identities, as Foucault taught us,63 and the ways this unruliness of power correlates with the operations of the death drive (with autoimmunity). By contrast, whereas Hägglund brackets power from his analysis of survival, Jacques Rancière, who more recently proposed his own “political”

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account of Red and Black in Aisthesis, brackets the vicissitudes of temporality, ignoring the ways the novel foregrounds what we might call a “politics of temporality,” the way it makes power—and an ironic ambivalence toward it—constitutive of the structure of time itself. Rancière also turns to the ending of the novel, but draws out a radically different “lesson,” one that neglects an engagement with its protagonist’s death drive and the work’s irony. Rancière reads Julien as a subject confronted with two ways of overcoming his lot, “two manners of exiting plebeian subjection: through role reversal or through the suspension of the very play of these roles.”64 The novel tells the story of the failure of the first option and points to the success of the second. In the solitude of his prison cell, Julien is no longer obsessed with transcendence. Awaiting his execution, he becomes quite attentive to the present, beginning to associate happiness, “the sole happiness of feeling, the sentiment of existence alone,” with idleness, “the pure enjoyment of reverie that subtracts him from time.”65 This form of idleness or otium is not laziness66 (the passivity of doing nothing) but a willful mode of resistance to the status quo, a withdrawal from the economy of ends and means and a relief from the restless gaze of Lacan’s big Other.67 For Rancière, Julien’s moment of reverie short-circuits the logic of plot, the narrative of cause and effect.68 It draws attention to moments of asignification that are pregnant with alternative meanings.69 In its depiction of this scene of happiness, Stendhal’s Red and Black reconfigures his readers’ preexisting horizons of intelligibility, disrupting the rigid order of things under the Bourbon Restoration. This process of reconfiguration defines for Rancière politics as such: politics as the struggle for “a new landscape of the possible,”70 as the unsettling of “the order of the visible and the sayable,” as the questioning of the given “distribution of places and roles.”71 The novel’s image of idleness—enjoying the simple pleasure of existence— reworks and expands our relation to the world, or what Rancière names “le partage du sensible,” “the distribution/partition/sharing of the sensible.”72 As Jeremy Lane puts it, “this aesthetic of idleness represents a form of ‘dissensus’ insofar as it exemplifies the capacity of workers, women, immigrants, or slaves to be something other, to occupy another place, to achieve another destiny than that allotted them in the conventional, consensual distribution of places and roles, the existing ‘partage du sensible.’ ”73 For Rancière, the peaceful moment in the prison reflects a respite from the tiresome narrative of everyday existence, from what had structured and determined the meaning of every instance of Julien’s life. But this does not mean that the politics of aesthetics that Rancière witnesses in Stendhal’s novel is reducible to the individual, to Julien’s happy state of solitude. Quite the contrary: it is not the self freed from society (a romantic cliché) that attracts Rancière, but the scene’s universal appeal, its fundamental, democratic promise of shareability (with Mme de Rênal, with the reader, etc.). On Rancière’s account, Red and Black discloses a neglected

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facet and effect of the French Revolution. The revolution not only unsettled the “hierarchy of occupations”—making Julien’s opportunity for social advancement a possibility—but it also rendered possible “the promotion of this quality of sensible experience where one does nothing, a quality equally offered to those whom the old order separated into men of pleasure [jouissance] and men of work.”74 Julien’s affective potential exceeds the existing sensible configuration. Class—Julien’s social givenness—is thus not destiny. What Stendhal’s novel values is the idea of a sensible, formerly aristocratic moment beyond work and calculation, a sensation that is now, in principle, open to all (it is Žižek’s notion of “concrete universality,” as discussed in chapter 2). The politics of this sensation is that of equality: “Julien triumphs the moment he stops fighting, when he simply shares the pure equality of an emotion, crying at Madame de Rênal’s knees. This happiness presumes that the conqueror should shed any ‘deftness,’ and the loved ‘object’ no longer be object to anything—it too must shed all social determination, and be subtracted from the logic of means and ends.”75 While Rancière is surely right to underscore the ways Julien’s idleness troubles his society’s logic of productive labor and persistent hierarchies—in short, its partage du sensible—his reading, which takes Julien’s words à la lettre, ignores the novel’s ironic staging of its protagonist’s epiphany. By diagnosing Julien’s problem as fundamentally an external one, Rancière also downplays the complexities of Julien’s subjectivity and its libidinal economy. For Rancière, the problem is thus: it is society’s values and its logic of conquest that make Julien unhappy. So once Stendhal’s romantic hero recognizes what happiness truly is in the solitude of his prison cell, he becomes open to a different economy of enjoyment, one that makes equality axiomatic, gesturing to an alternative configuration of the sensible. But as Joseph Tanke points out, Rancière, who does not pay sufficient attention to “the aesthetic as a form of experience,”76 effectively minimizes the tragic outcome of Julien’s epiphanic recognition: “His attainment of happiness is bound to extinction, in much the way that aesthetic happiness is purchased with the dissolution of the subject.”77 Our reading exerts additional pressure on Rancière’s union between politics and literature (on a reading of the novel as promoting democratic sensibility), pushing further the link between happiness (= emancipation) and extinction by foregrounding Julien’s death drive and kratophobia. That is to say, Julien’s problem is not only without, it is also within. This is why readings of the novel that interpret Julien’s refusal to fight strategically at his trial,78 his choice to give up on his life of ambition, as constituting a suicidal act downplay the role of fantasy in the novel’s ending.79 In its Lacanian sense, fantasy, as we saw in chapter 2, is more than a distortion of reality; it in fact supports reality: “everything we are allowed to approach by way of reality remains rooted in fantasy.”80 Fantasy functions, as Alenka Zupančič puts it, as “a screen that covers up the fact that the discursive reality is itself leaking, contradictory, and entangled with the Real as its

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irreducible other side.”81 The authentic Julien who is preserved by the suicide is the fantasy that covers up the Real of Julien, his unruly excess. Rancière’s resistance to irony, his unwillingness to pervert or corrupt the idyllic scenes of the novel, is a resistance to reading, to seeing the aesthetic as an unruly force, “an anarchical rupture that undoes the world of shared meanings.”82 The jouissance of irony, the most anarchical of tropes, undercuts Rancière’s privileged image of Julien as a new man of jouissance. As Roland Barthes put it, the idea of pleasure itself—or rather the insistence on pleasure—“can embarrass the text’s return to morality, to truth: to the morality of truth: it is an oblique, a drag anchor, so to speak, without which the theory of the text would revert to a centered system, a philosophy of meaning.”83 Reading the novel with an eye for irony, Julien’s retroactive idealization of his moment with Mme de Rênal, and the vague alternative social order that it presupposes, appears less a privileging of shareability and/as equality (the basis of a new politics) than a desire to flee symbolic reality, to return to a past devoid of alienation (a pure fantasy to the extent that alienation is constitutive of social existence), immune to the dynamic play of time, language, and power—that is, to the possibility of loss and corruptibility. Irony disables Julien’s phantasm. Closely following the logic of autoimmunity, irony cruelly robs him of his suicide: “[autoimmunity] consists not only in committing suicide but in compromising sui- or self-referentiality, the self or sui- of suicide itself. Autoimmunity is more or less suicidal, but, more seriously still, it threatens always to rob suicide itself of its meaning and supposed integrity.”84 The self yearning to be preserved by Julien is a self cut off from all relationality as such, a relationality that is constitutive of the self and that presupposes power, and hence the intractable possibility of displacement and reversibility. Hägglund would retort that Julien’s fantasy here is still “inhabited and sustained by temporal finitude.”85 What Julien really desires is a mortal Mme de Rênal; he wishes that he could survive with her, but he knows that society cannot allow it—so he can only dream of this possibility. Yes, but Julien envisages this possibility as a fantasy, a reconstructed memory, purified of any traces of struggle. This is to relive the past without the pangs of power, which necessarily transmutes Mme de Rênal’s temporal becoming into a being (the stuff of immortality, not survival). Rancière, for his part, is more attuned to the question of power, suggesting that equality is never affirmed in abstraction; this affirmation presupposes the presence of power, the asymmetrical and hierarchical structures of power. At the same time, the death drive, in its purposelessness, exacerbates this ambivalence toward power. Kratophobia and kratophilia are ironically intertwined in Red and Black, constituting two readings of the death drive (and its correlative versions of immortality). The negativity of its irony thwarts any straightforward interpretation of this drive and its effects: Julien’s phantasm is neither to be celebrated (for its timeless value) nor negated (for its illusory fantasy). This is not a surface/depth distinction. Theory is more concerned

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with the affective power of Julien’s phantasm, in the novel’s staging of that phantasm. Ironizing the phantasm, then, is not to deride it (to correct it, to demystify it) but to attend to its appeal and its hold on Julien/the reader/ the critic.86 Put slightly differently, the novel dialecticizes the death drive, disclosing its destructive and creative facets, its alternating meanings. At the same time, irony disables any resolution to this dialectic, keeping the skeptical thrust of the scene open. On one hand, kratophobia accounts for Julien’s fatigue in playing the cultural game of desire and recognition, for his unwillingness to go on, and most importantly, for his phantasmatic yearning for a “realm that is exempt from time.”87 It “produces identity as mortification,”88 a state beyond power and despair, a reified immortality as/and pure enjoyment, indistinguishable from death—figuratively and literally (a capitulation to the Nirvana principle). On the other hand, kratophilia attests to Julien’s unruly immortality, to his conscious and unconscious “drive to enjoy life in excess,” to his unflinching will to unplug. It helps Julien to overcome his historical givenness, his social determination, that is, the constraints of symbolic reality (it is non-all), but this excess “tears at the fabric of Symbolic reality”89 and thus is not always in the service of preserving his ego. He constantly risks self-destruction, risks sabotaging his interests and plans. In both cases, the integrity of Julien’s symbolic self/selves is jeopardized. Kratophobia dreams of a return to the m/other figure (Mme de Rênal), a return to the primary plenitude and comfort of the Imaginary, whereas kratophilia insists for its part on the productivity of power and on the unruliness of the Real. The novel’s refusal to take a definitive position on the death drive marks literature’s attraction for theory. Its gift of irony helps theorists manage their temptation toward exemplarity, to isolate and fetishize their object of inquiry. Irony’s self-reflexivity sustains theory’s hysterical core. It enables theory to meditate further on its philosophical presuppositions, its various attachments, and its reading practices. In this instance, literature challenges the practice of reading the death drive exclusively as a plague, an ontological hindrance to happiness and transcendence. It is that and more. It is also an occasion for inventive skepticism: for thinking the death drive as autoimmunity, Thanatos with Eros—what disables enables—for thinking the ontological negativity of the death drive as the condition for existential and hermeneutic creativity.

Chapter 4

Queering Difference, or The Feminine Logic of the “Non-All”

It’s about abolishing feeling; yes, that is what interests me the most. — Marguerite Duras

For, after all, if you level out difference, given that it’s difference that’s desirable and provokes sexual pleasure, you could see a kind of sexual anesthesia. —Julia Kristeva

Sensitive to philosophy’s digestive economy, its relentless translation of the new into the known, theory thinks and rethinks difference. Theory yearns for an alternative path to difference; it insists on the irreducibility of difference, and seeks to account for its singularity. But to do so is to open up the toolbox of philosophy, or of ontology, to be more precise. How to read difference? Answering this question brings theory’s reliance on, or, some might say, complicity with, ontology to the forefront. In its efforts to correct philosophy’s universalizing abstractions, theory always risks reinstating ontology differently, hypostatizing difference as a new self-enclosed identity, inadvertently making it the object of fascination and fetishization. Nowhere is this more evident than in treatments of sexual difference, where the ontic (the historically contingent female gender) is prone to slide into the ontological (the eternal feminine), the particular into the universal, becoming into being. As we saw in chapter 3, psychoanalysis has provided theory with skeptical conceptual resources for rethinking these problems of difference and subjectivity, resources that are frequently marginalized if not flatly rejected in philosophy. Against philosophy’s patriarchal bias, its claim of neutrality, and its historical neglect of gender and sexual difference from Descartes’s cogito to Heidegger’s Dasein, a number of feminists—typically, if not unproblematically, grouped under the heading of “French feminism”—have sought to redress this lacuna through psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and to give 97

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body to what Luce Irigaray called this “sex which is not one.” In so doing they professed their own brand of anti-philosophy. Not unlike Lacan, then, who questions the primacy of cognition in Western philosophy—philosophy’s axiomatic insistence on self-knowledge as an expression of self-mastery— French feminist thinkers like Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous affirm the deep interconnection between cognition and affect, thought and desire, if not the identification of the former with the latter. In Kristeva’s words, “the knowing subject is also a desiring subject, and the paths of desire ensnarl the paths of knowledge.”1 In short, the desiring/knowing subject for and of French feminism is decidedly a psychoanalytical one. As Lacan put it, “Desidero is the Freudian cogito.”2 I desire, therefore I am. Žižek echoes his French feminist counterparts when he points out philosophy’s willful disregard for sexual difference and argues for psychoanalysis’s implicit role as a necessary if not dangerous supplement: The crucial difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy concern[s] the status of sexual difference: for philosophy, the subject is not inherently sexualized, sexualization only occurs at the contingent, empirical level, whereas psychoanalysis raises sexuation into a kind of formal a priori condition for the very emergence of the subject. We should thus defend the claim that what philosophy cannot think is sexual difference in its philosophical (ontological) dimension.3

For psychoanalysis, ontology and sexuation cannot be divorced from one another. The subject is sexualized from the start. What Žižek’s psychoanalytic approach also shares with French feminism is a certain appeal to, or concern with sexual difference, particularly feminine enjoyment, as a site of critique and skepticism, as an alternative economy of enjoyment—one that stands in opposition to the dominant masculine phallic enjoyment. Yet what each means by sexual difference, and how each construes feminine enjoyment’s oppositional force, is precisely the subject of their (apparent) disagreements. The point of contention is Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, or more precisely, the contested claim that woman is also “non-all.” This chapter examines what I call Žižek’s “queering” of difference in dialogue with French feminism, and the consequences of this queering for reimagining subjectivity and relationality. To queer difference here means to attend to, and sustain, difference’s internal foreignness, its unruly, or incompletely determined, ontology. Steering the question of sexual difference beyond the constructivist/essentialist debate—difference as the by-product of culture versus difference as intrinsic to the body of men or women—Žižek critically reinterprets the Lacanian logic of the non-all as referring to the ways a subject’s enjoyment is organized, so that this feminine subject need not be anatomically female. Rather, what matters is how this subject’s particular

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enjoyment is structured, its status as a desiring subject, and its susceptibility to queering: its susceptibility to avowing the self’s “open ontology,”4 to declining the privileges of phallic culture, to becoming-traumatophilic, that is, less allergic to the ways an encounter with the Real might unsettle the self’s imaginary and symbolic economy. As Tim Dean puts it, “the Lacanian real, like queerness, is always relational, oppositional in the subversive sense, rather than substantive.”5 Becoming-queer, then, is synonymous with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “becoming a perverse reader”6—a perverse reader of one’s self and others. Montaigne’s “écriture féminine” (feminine writing), to borrow Cixous’s rich formulation, attests, for example, to such a becoming in deploying a style of writing and a hermeneutic jouissance that shatter the ego, mixing joy and bewilderment.7 In becoming-queer, Montaigne reads against the grain of his humanist training; he refuses to have “representation, identity, gender, sexuality and the body . . . line up neatly together.”8 His queer astonishment is unintelligible from the perspective of the masculine side of the logics of sexuation. Montaigne declines the pull to transcend his embodiment, to immunize himself against temporality, joyfully affirming his temporal becoming, or as he puts it, his “temporal greatness” (III.7: 700c). Indeed, as we saw in chapter 1, the essay form thrives on the absence of permanence. It illustrates and enacts this ontological lack hermeneutically. Not conducive to conceptuality, the essay is an “antilogos weapon”;9 it produces semiotic monsters, engenders a messy hermeneutics, thus making it (the essay) and him (Montaigne) unlikely models of and for perfection (in the double sense of full completion and idealization). There is no exception to the law of the signifier. As Verena Conley puts it in relation to Cixous, “everything is language.”10 Yet, we might reformulate this point and say that language—or grammar—is non-all. Such a Žižekian twist to l’écriture féminine, and its anti-normative, autoimmune agrammaticality, reengages, if not revives, this rich feminist concept. To explore the implications of this twist further, I turn in this chapter to Marguerite Duras’s 1964 novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein11 as a case study for reading difference against the immunizing temptations of psychoanalysts and feminists alike: the temptation to read the novel as representing or figuring of one form of difference or another, as offering lessons about difference. Lacan himself devotes a full article to Duras’s literary work, titled “Homage to Marguerite Duras, on Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” a piece that, in turn, prompted numerous responses on the part of feminist critics, particularly feminists of difference. For many critics, Lacan’s reading simply domesticated Duras’s female voice (the publication of The Ravishing of Lol Stein coincided with the rise of a feminism of difference, helping Duras’s promotion as a feminist writer), reducing the novel’s alterity to lessons in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Nothing highlights the identification of Duras’s ostensibly feminist novel with Lacan’s psychoanalysis more forcefully than Lacan’s own words from

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his homage: “Marguerite Duras knows, without me, what I teach.”12 Duras, for her part, is more ambivalent about the Lacan effect. She has expressed both indifference and gratitude in different interviews: “When Lacan found some of his own theories applied in Lol V. Stein, I lay low. I didn’t say: Ah, Lacan thinks I’m brilliant. Not at all. I don’t need critics to know that I’m brilliant”;13 “And who took Lol V. Stein out of her coffin? That was, after all, a man; it was Lacan.”14 By taking up The Ravishing of Lol Stein, this chapter pursues Duras’s ambivalence at the interpretive level, following the ways the novel’s staging of difference both solicits and resists—or dangerously supplements—a psychoanalytic framework. In so doing, this chapter also brings out the stakes of rethinking difference outside the philosophical ontological/ontic divide and in terms of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation.

“Woman Does Not Exist”: Ontologies of Difference The primacy of sexual difference has long been a contested issue within feminism and among feminists. Accusations of biologism or essentialism plague contemporary theoretical debates, which are marked, particularly in the Anglo-American context, by a predominant investment in matters of “gender” over those framed around “sex” and sexuality (the shift from Women’s Studies to Gender Studies departments in the United States points to this trend, for instance). The most famous articulation of this key distinction between sex and gender, and one that generated much contemporary debate over sexual difference, is Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion in The Second Sex that “one is not born, but rather becomes, woman [on ne naît pas femme: on le devient].”15 In other words, while an individual may be born a female (anatomically speaking), she becomes woman; she becomes her gender—a gendered subject—through the process of socialization. Yet what gets lost in this common gloss of Beauvoir’s position is that far from denying the insights of biology, Beauvoir readily accepts biological differences between men and women, underscoring the irreducibility of sexual difference: “Certain differences between man and woman will always exist; her eroticism, and thus her sexual world, possessing a singular form, cannot fail to engender in her a sensuality, a singular sensitivity: her relation to her body, to the male body, and to the child will never be the same as those man has with his body, with the female body, and with the child.”16 The being of woman does not lie merely in the facticity of her sexual difference, yet facticity cannot simply be dismissed. In acknowledging the scientific fact of men and women’s existence and difference, Beauvoir turns our attention to the question of meaning—to the practice of interpretation, or how we interpret and live those facts. She proceeds by exposing the biased logic at work in any philosophical discourse that implicitly takes maleness as the neutral term, as the norm: “She [woman] is determined and differentiated in relation to man,

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while he is not in relation to her; she is the inessential in front of the essential. He is the Subject; he is the Absolute. She is the Other.”17 Beauvoir will formulate this insight in even more striking terms: When an individual or a group of individuals is kept in a situation of inferiority, the fact is that he or they are inferior. But the scope of the verb to be must be understood; bad faith means giving it a substantive value, when in fact it has the sense of the Hegelian dynamic: to be is to have become, to have been made as one manifests oneself. Yes, women in general are today inferior to men; that is, their situation provides them with fewer possibilities: the question is whether this state of affairs must be perpetuated.18

This claim—that women are inferior to men—can appear quite shocking, coming from a thinker who wants to dismantle the values of patriarchy, the values of a cultural system that systematically privileges men over women. But Beauvoir’s interpretation of women’s inferiority cuts much deeper. Beauvoir’s interpretation paradoxically warns against the limits of interpretation, of the danger of remaining at the level of ideas when one tries to refute misogyny. The label of inferiority is not merely a subjective judgment on the part of the misogynist that feminists can dismiss simply by claiming it is not true, that women, in reality, are equal to men. By insisting that women are inferior, Beauvoir is also claiming that representation and reality cannot be so easily separated from one another. Feminism cannot limit itself to demystifying ideas, to claiming that women are equal and that people just fail to see that they are. This, for Beauvoir, is to overlook the ways in which language structures one’s being and it is also to overlook the primary role that others play in forming one’s identity. Recognizing the alterity of women—recognizing women as other—is arguably a first step toward the development of a more egalitarian politics. This is how Beauvoir herself conceives it. Deeply suspicious about anything that presents itself as “naturally” feminine, Beauvoir defines her feminist sensibility in opposition to a cult of feminine difference: “I am radically feminist, in the sense that I radically discount difference as a given that has any significance in itself.”19 Not wanting to fetishize otherness (sexual difference, to be more precise), Beauvoir opts for a universalism that is otherwise than patriarchal. This gesture—this intellectual next step—is precisely what Irigaray calls into question, arguing that sexual difference can never be transcended: “Rather than refusing, as Simone de Beauvoir does, to be the other gender, the other sex, I am asking to be recognized as really an other, irreducible to the masculine subject.”20 Irigaray’s sexual difference becomes the basis for a new ethics where her “two lips” (evoking at once her facial lips and genital lips) “offer a shape of welcome but do not assimilate, reduce, or swallow

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up.”21 Whereas Beauvoir hesitated to write a book about women, Irigaray boldly appropriates the process of othering, affirming the primacy of sexual difference: Now the masculine and the feminine are in no case the inverse or the opposite of each other. They are different. This difference that holds between them is perhaps the most unthinkable of differences— difference itself.22 Sexual difference [is] the most radical difference and the one most necessary to the life and culture of the human species.23

If woman has up till now been conceived only as a negation of man, the goal is to affirm her as a positive being, as a becoming on her own terms. The task of feminism is “to positively construct alterity”24 between the sexes. The logic of sexual difference is not A and ~A, but A and B. Irigaray’s valorization of sexual difference—a difference valued on its own terms and not produced through the negation of the masculine—must be situated in its proper psychoanalytic context.25 Lacan’s “formulae of sexuation” is a touchstone for French feminist theories of sexual difference. In Seminar XX, Encore, Lacan defines sexual difference (though Lacan himself never employs this term, preferring instead to talk about the masculine and feminine sides of his “formulae of sexuation”) in terms of a fundamental difference in the structure of enjoyment. He offers the following table:26 Masculine

Feminine

∃x Φx

∃x Φx

∀x Φx

∀x Φx

Again, “masculine” and “feminine” do not refer to anatomical differences, but to a subject’s relation to the phallus. On the masculine side, we find two formulae: (1) there is at least one x that says “no” to the phallic function, and (2) all x are subject to the phallic function. Together these state the masculine logic of exception—of law and its necessary transgression. While all men are symbolically castrated (they are all subject to the phallic function, the law, the big Other) due to their entry into the symbolic order, into the realm of the signifier (the substitution of things—including oneself—by words), there is always one “Man” who does not sacrifice his jouissance, one Man who must remain immune to the law of castration, holding on to the promise of a phantasmatic return to the full plenitude of a pre-symbolic jouissance. For Lacan, the mythical primal father of Freud’s Totem and Taboo exemplifies such a figure. While the primal father—who enjoyed all women at will, “achieving complete satisfaction”27—had to be killed for the symbolic

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order to emerge, his exceptional subject position persists in the cultural imaginary. Žižek devalues the biological overtones of sexual difference, underscoring the logic of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, so that an anatomical woman might very well occupy the position of the primal father. Lacan makes this point explicit: the “relation between the subject and the phallus  .  .  . forms without regard to the anatomical distinction between the sexes.”28 “Woman as exception”—that is, a biological woman with a male structure of enjoyment—is precisely, Žižek proposes, the case of the merciless Lady of courtly love: As the exemplary case of the exception constitutive of the phallic function, one usually mentions the fantasmatic, obscene figure of the primordial father-jouisseur who was not encumbered by any prohibition and was as such able fully to enjoy all women. Does, however, the figure of the Lady in courtly love not fully fit these determinations of the primordial father? Is she not also a capricious Master who wants it all, i.e., who, herself not bound by any Law, charges her knight-servant with arbitrary and outrageous ordeals?29

This Lady—in comparison to all other women—operates, or rather is imagined as operating, outside social norms, whimsically transgressing society’s moral codes. Renata Salecl describes well the radicality of Lacan’s approach. As she puts it, Lacan . . . moves as far as possible from the notion of sexual difference as the relationship of two opposite poles which complement each other, together forming the whole of “Man.” “Masculine” and “feminine” are not the two species of the genus Man but rather the two modes of the subject’s failure to achieve the full identity of Man. “Man” and “Woman” together do not form a whole, since each of them is already in itself a failed whole.30

Žižek’s project seeks to harness the radicality of this account of feminine difference, and aims to rethink the notion of incompletion as failed wholeness. It offers an inventive way out of the opposition between essentialism and constructionism. Much of Žižek’s innovative reading of the formulae of sexuation emerges in his commentary on the feminine side of Lacan’s formulation. Here too we are confronted with two formulae: (1) there is no x that says “no” to the phallic function, and (2) not all x are subject to the phallic function. Unlike the masculine side, there is no claim of universality rooted in exception here, suggesting that woman (unlike Man) does not constitute a totality. If there is no exception that stands outside the system, then the

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system as such is never whole or complete. And because there is nothing of woman outside the Law (no constitutive exception), woman is also non-all inside of the symbolic order. Or, as Lacan glosses his own formulae, “Woman does not exist [la femme n’existe pas].”31 Lacan’s general account of sexuation generated a fair amount of hostility from feminists. Irigaray, for example, could not resist ridiculing Lacan’s last assertion with the quip, “Fortunately, there are women,”32 though Lacan’s statement is in the singular: woman (as exception) does not exist. Irigaray does nonetheless acknowledge and take up the question of woman’s lack. The title of her book Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (This Sex Which Is Not One) is a play on a woman’s lack (her perception from within the symbolic order that she is not a sovereign, autonomous sex), and on her plurality (she is ontologically more than one). Her multiplicity is linked to her unruly jouissance, to her “disruptive excess.”33 Her enjoyment is a threat to the status quo, to the phallic order; her discursive practice is “somewhat mad from the standpoint of reason.”34 Irigaray does not, however, merely want to update the philosophical model of inquiry; she does not want to convert women into the latest subjects of phallocentric discourse (which, from Irigaray’s standpoint, would be Beauvoir’s position). Her intervention is more decisive, more radical: “The issue is not one of elaborating a new theory of which woman would be the subject or the object, but of jamming the theoretical machinery itself.”35 At one point, Irigaray formulates her opposition to “philosophical discourse” in strikingly Levinasian terms: This domination of the philosophical logos stems in large part from its power to reduce all others to the economy of the Same. The teleologically constructive project it takes on is always also a project of diversion, deflection, reduction of the other in the Same. And, in its greatest generality perhaps, from its power to eradicate the difference between the sexes in systems that are self-representative of a “masculine subject.”36

Against philosophy’s unmarked universalism, Irigaray pleads for sexual difference, an account of the feminine that is irreducible to male conceptuality, to its exclusive association with matter, “rejected as the waste product of reflection.”37 She laments the extent to which a “masculine imaginary,”38 with its systematic eclipsing of sexual difference, has monopolized philosophical discourse. For Irigaray, what makes women women is irreducible to culture, to the symbolic power of the phallus; their specificity as women is ontological, not ontic. Likewise, Kristeva translates this specificity as a negative ontology: “Women cannot be: the category woman is even that which does not fit in to being. From there, women’s practice can only be negative, in opposition to that which exists, to say that ‘this is not it’ and ‘it is not yet.’ What I mean by ‘woman’ is that which is not represented, that which is unspoken, that which

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is left out of namings and ideologies.”39 Against constructivist arguments, Irigaray insists that there is always a part of women that is recalcitrant to the male gaze, to the colonizing logic of masculinist discourse. There will always be a remainder of “woman” which rebels against masculine formation and understanding: “We are women from the start.”40 Sexual difference is arguably pre-discursive to the extent that it precedes the symbolic order (“that repressed entity, the female imaginary”)41 and must be defended against the threat of what Kristeva dubs “sexual anesthesia.” A “blurring” or effacement of sexual difference would result in “the end of a certain kind of desire and sexual pleasure. For, after all, if you level out difference, given that it’s difference that’s desirable and provokes sexual pleasure, you could see a kind of sexual anesthesia.”42

Reading the Other: Hermeneutics and the Non-All For Cixous, the male desire for homogeneity—the reign of the Same— privileges a reductive mode of inquiry. As she notes, “Woman is always associated with passivity in philosophy.”43 Epistemological inquiries are from the start ideological gestures (acts of interpellation) that violently arrest the movement of the object, ironing out, as it were, its hermeneutic perplexities. But as an object of the male gaze, Cixous insists, this jouissance of the other/ this other jouissance never fully complies. It remains defiant before the masculinist will to comprehend, its “masculine interpellation.”44 A feminist/feminine hermeneutics would, then, be one that blocks the desire for meaning—that is, one that short-circuits philosophy’s conceptual machinery—holding out for the possibility of non-meaning. Such feminist readings of female jouissance need not necessarily be considered rebukes of Lacan,45 for, as Žižek also points out, they are by no means incompatible with a certain reading of his work: According to the standard version of the Lacanian theory, the non-all (pas-tout) of woman means that not all of a woman is caught up in the phallic jouissance: She is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said.46

Yet ultimately Žižek finds this reading inadequate. He warns against translating its alterity into “the surplus that eludes the grasp of the phallic function.”47 The non-all of woman does not pertain to her outsideness of the symbolic order, to a site uncontaminated by phallogocentrism, nor to a part of her that remains immune to the phallus. Feminine jouissance is not something

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wholly other—something mysterious that somehow lies outside discursivity or the patriarchal symbolic order. He singles out Kristeva and Irigaray in his critique: “The problem is that all answers (from the traditional eternally feminine, to Kristeva and Irigaray) can again be discredited as male clichés.”48 This move would duplicate the very phallic economy that they seek to escape, since “the very notion of a ‘feminine secret,’ of some mysterious jouissance which eludes the male gaze, is constitutive of the phallic spectacle of seduction: inherent to phallic economy is the reference to some mysterious X which remains forever out of its reach.”49 In other words, one must disentangle female jouissance from the male fantasy (potentially internalized by other women) about female jouissance. There is something unnerving, however, about Žižek’s swift paternalistic reading of Irigaray and Kristeva, which fails to register the affective and cognitive appeal of a “jouissance beyond Phallus” for women.50 Moreover, Kristeva distances herself from a feminism that believes in the category of woman as an identity, an identity taken as “the opposite of phallocratism.”51 And Irigaray’s “two lips” only distorts the logic of the non-all if they are made to stand for an uncolonized part of the female body. Irigaray in fact is quite cognizant that her speech is in a fundamental way the speech of the Other: her critique emerges within the phallic order of the Symbolic. Accordingly, she distinguishes her approach from any essentialist discourse that would posit a female body part as immune from the Symbolic: Trying to find a possible imaginary, or to find one once more, through the movements of two lips touching each other . . . is not a regression to anatomy, nor to a concept of “nature,” any more than it is a call to return to genital norms—women have several pairs of two lips! It is an attempt to open up the autological and tautological circle of systems of representation and their discourses, so that women can speak their sex.52

Ironically, Irigaray rejects aligning her figure of the two-lips with Lacan’s logic of the non-all: “The ‘at least two’ lips no longer correspond to your morpho-logic; they do not conform to Lacan’s ‘not all,’ a model to which the One is necessary. ‘There is One,’ but something escapes it, resists it, is always lacking; there is One, but with holes, faultlines, silences that forbid silence, that speak to each other, whisper to each other, etc.”53 Yet Irigaray’s critique of the One captures much of what Žižek is trying to mobilize with the logic of the non-all. While Irigaray turns to the Imaginary to exert pressure on the Symbolic, Žižek attends to the Real: “The claim that the Real is inherent to the Symbolic is strictly equivalent to the claim that ‘there is no big Other’: the Lacanian Real is that traumatic ‘bone in the throat’ that contaminates every ideality of the Symbolic, rendering it contingent and inconsistent.”54 In both instances, sexual difference is effectively denaturalized, decompleted. Within

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the symbolic order, the ontology of woman remains infinitely becoming (the impetus and source of her plurality), untotalizable, non-all.55 Perhaps more than his feminist interlocutors, Žižek seeks the kernel of subversion in the feminine non-all in the logic of the Real. Queering sexual difference must take place in and through the Real, with the decoupling of desire and identity, with the realization that “the category of desire,” as Tim Dean argues, “is not wedded to identity, but, on the contrary, threatens identity’s closely regulated coherence.”56 Žižek returns to the Lacanian Real to reframe the dual births of the speaking subject (parlêtre) and of jouissance. He gives significant weight to Lacan’s notion of the lamella/hommelette, a metaphor for the libido introduced in Seminar XI. Against philosophy and its humanistic tradition, Lacan asserts that in the beginning we were all hommelettes (a fusion of man and omelet): Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment that something flies off, and that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette, or the lamella. The lamella is something extra-flat, which moves like the amoeba. It is just a little more complicated. But it goes everywhere. And as it is something . . . that is related to what the sexed being loses in sexuality, it is, like the amoeba in relation to sexed beings, immortal—because it survives any division, and scissiparous intervention. And it can turn around. Well! This is not very reassuring. But suppose it comes and envelops your face while you are quietly asleep . . . I can’t see how we would not join battle with a being capable of these properties. But it would not be a very convenient battle. This lamella, this organ, whose characteristic is not to exist, but which is nevertheless an organ . . . is the libido. It is the libido, qua pure life instinct, that is to say, immortal life, irrepressible life, life that has need of no organ, simplified, indestructible life.57

This is not only a fantastic tale of human sexuality, akin to Aristophanes’s myth from Plato’s Symposium. Rather, it takes on an additional mythical force to the extent that it figures or “narrates” life in the pre-symbolic Real. The myth of the lamella evokes the state of an individual prior to the law of castration, prior to intersubjectivity as such. The lamella is the price we all pay for/by entering the symbolic order and becoming speaking subjects: “It is precisely what is subtracted from the living being by virtue of the fact that it is subject to the cycle of sexed reproduction. And it is of this that all the forms of the objet a that can be enumerated are the representatives, the equivalents.”58 As Sarah Kay puts it, this cut into the Real has significant

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ramifications for all of us: “With this cut of the signifier into the libido, our whole biological organism undergoes a massive change. What was physical instinct becomes drive, and what once was whole becomes fragmented.”59 This retroactive account (from within the symbolic order) points up the place of hermeneutics in sexuation. In this account, the lamella stands for what has been “lost” through the process of symbolization. Castration—the figure of loss par excellence60—is a cut in the Real, but this is a cut only from the perspective of the Symbolic, since the Real is “absolutely without fissure.”61 The post-symbolic Real emerges at the limits of the Symbolic, when the Symbolic becomes a question and loses its transparency and grasp on our psyche; as Joan Copjec puts it, “the point where the real makes itself felt in the symbolic” is “the point at which the symbolic visibly fails to disambiguate itself.”62 By extension, the Real of sexual difference is what lingers as unassimilable into the symbolic order and what manifests itself within the fissures of our sexualities and gendered identities. As Žižek writes: For Lacan, sexual difference is not a firm set of “static” symbolic oppositions and inclusions/exclusions (heterosexual normativity which relegates homosexuality and other “perversions” to some secondary role), but the name of a deadlock, of a trauma, of an open question, of something that resists every attempt at its symbolization. Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very “impossibility” that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what “sexual difference” will mean.63

Sexual difference has no positive existence, no inherent meaning or value. Its enigmaticity (its traumatic kernel) is a remainder and reminder of what lies beyond the Symbolic’s assimilative hermeneutics. Sexual difference, as Andrea Margaret Hurst rightly insists, “both calls for interpretation and resists (eludes, exceeds) all interpretations, so rupturing the order of interpretation that the call for reinterpretation never ceases.”64 Again, what Žižek is after when discussing sexual difference is the fact that the masculine logic of the exception is not the only game in town. In his writings, Žižek has continually returned to this feminine logic, expanding its original Lacanian parameters. Adopting and adapting it for his purposes, he deploys the logic of the non-all to rethink the Real of subjectivity and otherness in the context of ethics and politics. Whereas the masculine logic does the work of ideology, projecting the fantasy of social and personal wholeness, and thus covering up the symbolic order’s inherent instability, the feminine logic of the non-all points to its incompleteness and inconsistency, avowing the failure of symbolic identification (a reality that the masculine logic subsequently distorts). In this respect, the non-all mirrors the law of autoimmunity. It exposes the compromising lack in the most dystopian of social orders,

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those dominated by the hegemony of the Same, such as the “sexual anesthesia” resulting from unfettered techno-science that Kristeva fears. As Kristeva insists, “sexual homeostasis” never gives way to “symbolic homeostasis”;65 something within us resists this immobility. The desire for difference persists. If sexual difference were to be neutralized by some “kind of perpetual androgyny,”66 new differences, Kristeva argues, would proliferate in its place. But as Kristeva points out, the creation of such differences would come with a risk: Other differences [other than sexual] might be emphasized, making them extremely heterogeneous and therefore capable of attracting desire as well as a desire for death. These could be racial differences, for example. An extreme version would be that while there’d be no difference between men and women, we’d hear instead, “Arabs are filth; I hate them and I’ll kill them.”67

Differences can be inventive or destructive; they always entail vulnerability or threat. But making the differences of others wholly predictable, reducible to a paranoid horizon of expectations, forecloses a priori the possibilities of relationality. Without autoimmunity, with pure techno-scientific sovereignty, with absolute mastery over human reproduction, there would be no creativity, no pleasure, and no hunger for differences. Without the logic of the non-all, with only the immunizing and self-protective logic of the exception as an organizing principle, Kristeva’s nightmarish idea of “sexual anesthesia” might very well become an intractable social reality, part of a society for which there is no possibility of perfectibility/pervertibility, where no openness for change (for good or ill) exists any longer. As it stands, however, it is a kind of ideological dystopia—it could only truly come to pass if symbolic reality were to coincide with the Real, fully totalized, and thus incapable of change. But the Symbolic is non-all, rendering symbolic homeostasis impossible. The logic of the non-all always leaves open the possibility of reframing or queering the symbolic order. Against the masculine structure of the universal, the all—which, as we have seen, produces images of the primordial father and the merciless Lady of courtly love—the feminine structure of the non-all ultimately provides Žižek with a different model of relationality—a relationality structured by the hermeneutic and affective irruption of the other. Žižek turns to the biblical figure of the neighbor, which he considers the “most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy,” underscoring how the neighbor “remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes.”68 If Greek philosophy neglected this hysterical presence (“Nothing is farther from the message of Socrates than you shall love your neighbor as yourself, a formula that is remarkably absent from all that he says,” Žižek writes, quoting Lacan),69 Jewish law recognizes the Real of the neighbor, the neighbor as

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the “bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor.”70 This neighbor as Real can only appear as a disturbing alterity, a jolt to my hermeneutic comfort: the injunction “to love and respect your neighbor . . . does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.”71 The impossible ethics of the other as real neighbor stands apart from, and always threatens to break up, the tepid everyday social morality of the big Other.72 The symbolic order attempts, if you will, to “normalize” the traumatic Thing, to immunize against its excess and regulate its (non)meaning: In order to render our coexistence with the Thing minimally bearable, the symbolic order qua Third, the pacifying mediator, has to intervene: the “gentrification” of the Other-Thing into a “normal human fellow” cannot occur through our direct interaction, but presupposes the third agency to which we both submit ourselves— there is no intersubjectivity (no symmetrical, shared, relation between humans) without the impersonal symbolic Order.73

If Levinas, Žižek’s key interlocutor in this debate, argued that the concept of the “face,” as “a being beyond all attributes,”74 enabled his philosophy to transcend the realm of sociality and the socialization of the other, Žižek, not unlike Derrida, questions this singularization of the face, underscoring instead how Levinas’s radical alterity is still subjected to mediation, to the workings of the symbolic order. The face of the other could not be experienced as such, as a face, if it were not always already a discursive product; reading the neighbor as a face thus domesticates the neighbor, making the other’s alterity as a resource of infinite responsibility more retrievable. Žižek exposes Levinas’s gentrification of the face (the symbolic neighbor) by juxtaposing it with Primo Levi’s account of the Muselmann, that living-dead, faceless figure of Auschwitz (the real neighbor). For Žižek, the faceless face of the Muselmann discloses the limits of a depoliticizing Levinasian ethics: “When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind wall, lack of depth.”75 The Muselmann, a figure of precarity and bare life, constitutes a disquieting example of the neighbor for whom no relation as such is readily afforded; this “ ‘faceless’ face,” as Žižek puts it, is a “neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible.”76 Stripped of its symbolic veneer, recalcitrant to one’s imaginary projection, denied access to the human realm of intersubjectivity, the Muselmann foregrounds the neighbor as Real, in which “we encounter the Other’s call at its purest and most radical,” and “one’s responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic.”77 It is in this context that the ethical injunction to “love thy neighbor” takes on its full political force.

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Setting himself apart from the Levinasian model, Žižek argues that it is not enough to say that I can never account for the other as other, that phenomenologically the other is always in excess of my idea of him or her. The “Real” of the other is impossible, but it is an impossibility that paradoxically needs to be sustained: The Real is impossible but it is not simply impossible in the sense of a failed encounter. It is also impossible in the sense that it is a traumatic encounter that does happen but which we are unable to confront. And one of the strategies used to avoid confronting it is precisely that of positing it as this indefinite ideal which is eternally postponed. One aspect of the real is that it’s impossible, but the other aspect is that it happens but is impossible to sustain, impossible to integrate. And this second aspect, I think, is more and more crucial.78

The real neighbor happens. And such happening poses a problem for the masculine logic of the all. The real neighbor is neither like other neighbors (Levinas’s hegemonic economy of the Same, the realm of politics) nor a radical alterity mysteriously exempt from symbolic mediation (the privileged Levinasian face, the realm of ethics). Rather, loving the neighbor is an instance of the non-all. It reveals that the whole is incomplete, inherently lacking. “True love” needs to be set apart from love as abstraction or ideology, love as “a lure, a mirage, whose function is to obfuscate the irreducible constitutive ‘out-of-joint’ of the relationship between the sexes.”79 True love is an autoimmune love. It avows incompleteness and/as vulnerability: “Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion.”80 Imperfection is not an obstacle to love but its very condition. This time the “mystery” of love is not some dubious, phantasmatic projection, a narcissistic fantasy of the other that remains to be traversed; rather, it denotes a precarious subject, someone akin to Irigaray’s subject of wonder. As with love, wonder shortcircuits the desirability of sovereignty and mastery; it queers your perception of things, disorients your place in the order of things, and renders what is initially all-too-familiar lacking, surprising: “In order for it to affect us, it is necessary and sufficient for it to surprise, to be new, not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known.”81

Ravishing Otherwise Than Phallic, or Queering Love The story of Lol V. Stein produces such a short-circuit, queering the subject of wonder and love in its writing of ravishment. Foregrounding the imbrication of ravishment and ravishing—and the at once traumatic and blissful character of ravissement’s eventfulness—The Ravishing of Lol Stein stages the

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question of sexual difference. It alerts us to gender mediation in its exposure of the male fantasy about feminine jouissance, while simultaneously disclosing that the Symbolic is fraught, queerable, or non-all. Lol’s ravishment revolves around what might be described as a “primal scene”: the event of Lol’s abandonment by her fiancé, Michael Richardson, who leaves her for another woman—Anne-Marie Stretter, the femme fatale—at a ball at T. Beach, an event that seemingly plunges Lol first into madness, and then, years later, into a voyeuristic love affair with her best friend Tatiana’s lover: the narrator of the novel, Jacques Hold. The novel is not just the story of Lol’s ravishment, however, but also, and perhaps foremost, the story of her ravishing, her captivation of Jacques, whose selfconscious narration highlights its own faltering but persistent attempts to voice, or appropriate, Lol’s experience. In critically staging the intersection of pleasure, violence, and interpretation through the voice of a male narrator, Duras’s work resonated strongly with contemporary feminist discourses, harnessing and directing critical energies toward the questions of sexual difference and the capacity of writing to manifest feminine (anti)logics. Duras is ostensibly rewriting the male fantasy narrative about female madness—the paradigmatic example being the surrealist André Breton’s 1929 autobiographic novel, Nadja. As Jean-Michel Rabaté further notes, “Without calling upon the Zeitgeist or a historical turn in French culture just before the explosion of May 1968, one can speak of a surprisingly auspicious convergence of themes. Duras’s new novel was soon heralded as the best example of what Hélène Cixous and other critics would be calling ‘écriture féminine.’ ”82 The nouveau roman (new novel), with its resistance to meaning, realism, and narration, encapsulated famously by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s observation that “to tell a story has become strictly impossible [raconter est devenu proprement impossible],”83 formally lends itself quite well to a preoccupation with the non-all, with lack and excess, with the refusal of sovereignty. Likewise, Duras underscores writing’s unruly disposition: “Writing isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once. It’s telling of a story, and the absence of the story. It’s telling a story through its absence.”84 RobbeGrillet aligns the preoccupations of the new novel explicitly with those of theory: “In part, it is our novels that brought about Foucault’s reflections on man (and Foucault himself has drawn attention to this). We were almost creating a new philosophy that we ourselves were unaware of, not only as a coherent philosophy, but as any sort of conceptualization of anything.”85 Duras displays this kind of formal inventiveness, her penchant for semantic play, from the start with her novel’s title. The title The Ravishing of Lol Stein sustains a certain ambiguity with respect to the meaning of ravishing (ravissement) and to the object and the subject of the ravishing. As Lacan observes at the start on his “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” ravissement can mean “ravishing” or “being ravished,” rapture or rape.86 Two immediate meanings of the title, as well, come to mind. The title can be read as the

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story of Lol’s ravishment (a story about the traumatic event at the ball); or the story of Lol’s ravishing of Jacques Hold (her profound impact on his life). Three additional readings open up in turn: Duras’s own ravishing of her audience (the affective force of her écriture unsettles the reader);87 the story of Jacques Hold’s ravishing of Lol (a kind of hermeneutic ravishing—the violence of interpretation); and by extension the reader’s ravishing of Lol (our hermeneutic ravishing of Lol/Duras). “Who is Lol?” and “What happened to her?” are one and the same question for Jacques, who is single-mindedly invested in locating and narrating her event of trauma, her abandonment by her fiancé: As for the nineteen years preceding that night, I do not want to know any more about them than what I tell, or very little more, setting forth only the straight, unadulterated chronological facts, even if these years conceal some magic moment to which I am indebted for having enabled me to meet Lol Stein. I don’t want to because the presence of her adolescence in this story might somehow tend to detract, in the eyes of the reader, from the overwhelming actuality of this woman in my life.88

As the intensity of this pursuit shows, a third question, “What does Lol mean to Jacques?” becomes intrinsic to the question of Lol’s identity and her contagious mode of (non)being. Jacques’s avowed resistance to delving into Lol’s adolescence reflects both his desire to attest to the pull of her attraction, the way she fills his present life, to the point of “overwhelming” him, and also perhaps his aversion to the knowledge that this overpowering “actuality” brings not the plenitude of completeness, but the vertigo of absence, negation, and excess, something that his narrative is ill-equipped to accommodate. Tatiana Karl—Lol’s childhood friend and Jacques’s lover—insists on this dimension of Lol, who, she relates, had always struck her as an unconventional subject, as always being not there. Lol’s “not thereness” prefigures Irigaray’s sex which is not one insofar as it recalls the meaning of sex as feminine lack. Unlike Dasein (literally, being-there—Da-sein), Lol emerges as ontologically and ontically lacking, as an incomplete Dasein, a subject without a firm symbolic identity. Interpretation is constitutive of her identity. Duras puts the matter poetically if not more enigmatically: “It does not have any meaning, Lol V. Stein, you see, it doesn’t have any signification. Lol V. Stein is what you make of her, it can’t be otherwise; I think I just now said something about her.”89 Jacques Hold records Tatiana’s view, yet does so, it seems, only the better to conjure its threat away, immunizing his narrative against it, containing it by labeling her view “false”: “I no longer believe a word Tatiana says. I’m convinced of absolutely nothing. Here then, in full, and all mixed together, both this false impression which Tatiana Karl tells about and what I have

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been able to imagine about that night at the Town Beach casino. Following which I shall relate my own story of Lol Stein” (The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 4). In relating his own story of Lol, however, Jacques strays far from “the straight, unadulterated chronological facts” he evokes early on, hinting that the falseness of Tatiana’s version of Lol lies less in the content of her claim and more in its presumption to tell the whole truth of Lol. Jacques, instead, is repeatedly drawn to that which cannot be clearly established and represented, to that which breaks through, exceeds, and upsets the symbolic order, namely Lol’s (imagined) linguistic struggles to name what happened to her. In seeking to understand why Lol “plays dead,” Jacques speculates that Lol fantasizes about an absolute word that could capture the essence of her traumatic ravishing: But what she does believe is that she must enter it [the unknown of what would have happened had the night at the casino never ended], that that was what she had to do, that it would always have meant, for her mind as well as her body, both their greatest pain and their greatest joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe—since I love her— that if Lol is silent in her daily life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would have been hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words would have been buried. (38)

All existing words fail to symbolize Lol’s singular jouissance, this mixture of pain and joy. Silence is thus her only option. This speculation intensifies rather than quenches curiosity, and readers are left wondering, with Jacques, what exactly accounts for the singularity of Lol’s experience, which eludes symbolization. One plausible interpretation would make recourse to the standard version of Lacanian theory (one that Lacan’s reading of the novel at least partially endorses): not all of Lol falls under the law of the signifier. Stripped of her symbolic attachments (she is at once “robbed” [dérobée] of her fiancé and disrobed, “robbed” [dérobée] of the dress that wrapped together the meaning of her self-image), Lol increasingly functions as a trope for the Real.90 While part of her is clearly interpellated into heteronormativity (she is married with children), something in her still exceeds the phallic function. Lol is “not wholly hemmed in”; she “is not altogether subject to the symbolic order.”91 On this account, Lol’s femininity is resolutely self-enclosed and is removed from language tout court. Moreover, Lol’s femininity (her “truer” self, as it were) becomes indistinguishable from an “ineffable feminine secret,”92 with the unforeseen consequence of isolating Lol, removing her from language and mediation as such, that is, from the novel’s circuit of desire.

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With limited recourse to the symbolic order, Lol is ostensibly condemned to relive or “act out” this unfinished scene in her mind; indeed, we are told that the scene of her ravishment will unfold forever “in the eternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein” (39).93 As one critic put it, “all that she succeeds in ‘seeing’ . . . is the vision of a short scene in which Michael Richardson would have been undressing the other woman.”94 Jacques sets out to satisfy Lol’s fantasy, to help her “complete” the traumatic scene of abandonment, reproducing this seductive scene for Lol’s eyes (with Tatiana’s unwitting assistance) as she observes the lovers through the window of their hotel room. At the same time, this fantasy (is it Lol’s or Jacques’s?) clearly shapes Jacques’s own desires, and supports his reality. For him, at the very least, Lol’s voyeurism plays a central part in this fantasy, one that draws something of a perverse enjoyment from seeing her new lover with another woman. Yet, as Lacan points out, Lol’s relation to such a fantasy is complex: “Above all, do not be deceived about the locus of the gaze here. It is not Lol who looks, if only because she sees nothing. She is not the voyeur. She is realized only in what happens.”95 We might say that Lol is less a constituting subject (a voyeur) than a constituted subject (“realized” through the dynamics of the gaze). Agency is not on the side of Lol. For Lacan, it is less a question of Lol’s looking (at Jacques and Tatiana) than of being looked at. The logic of the gaze, as it is thematized throughout the novel,96 foregrounds a profound dissymmetry in the field of vision: “You never look at me from the place at which I see you.”97 The split between Lol’s eye and the gaze makes visible that more is going on in this “voyeuristic” scene than a pathological reenactment of her trauma. The locus of the gaze does not originate in Lol’s subjectivity. Lol figures the Lacanian Borromean knot: the interdependence of the three orders of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. She is constituted by the big Other, while paradoxically also disclosing that there is no big Other, or that the symbolic order is non-all. Her words transform the voyeuristic frame, ravishing its male originator—“[Jacques] does not . . . simply display the machinery, but is in fact one of its mainsprings”98—by infecting his perception of his lover: Only when Lol, with the appropriate words, elevates the gaze to the status of a pure object for the still innocent Jacques Hold is its place revealed. “Naked, naked beneath her black hair,” these words from the lips of Lol mark the passage of Tatiana’s beauty into a function of the intolerable stain which pertains to the object.99

Lol’s elevation of “the gaze to the status of pure object” recalls Lacan’s language from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where he defines the work of

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sublimation as “rais[ing] an object . . . to the dignity of the Thing.”100 Unlike Freud’s account of sublimation, Lacan’s does not involve the subject’s channeling of the libido toward nonsexual activities, but rather repositioning an object vis-à-vis the structure of fantasy in a way that provokes greater intimacy, or rather “extimacy” (a perpetually interrupted proximity—“something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me”),101 with the Real. Sublimation involves, then, making something ordinary into the sublime. This sublime flirts with the Real, hinting at the emptiness at the heart of symbolization, intimating “the beyond-of-the-signified.”102 Tatiana’s imaginary beauty, now disclosed as a “stain,” disrupts Jacques’s scopic drive, shattering his masterful field of vision, revealing it to be incomplete—non-all—that is, vulnerable to interruptions of the Real.103 Lol’s sentence (“naked beneath her black hair” [105]) ravishes Jacques. He repeats it in vain: “It’s true that Tatiana was as Lol has just described her, naked beneath her dark hair. . . . The intensity of the sentence suddenly increases, the air around it has been rent, the sentence explodes, it blows the meaning apart” (106). Overwhelming Jacques’s will to narrate, the sheer excess of meaning generated by Lol’s sentence dislodges his point de capiton (quilting point), undoing the knot tying signifier and signified together.104 Her words de-suture Tatiana’s signified, moving it out of place, obliterating the very distinction between meaning and non-meaning: “I fail to understand it. I no longer even understand that it means nothing” (106). Indeed, the “deafening roar” (106) of Lol’s sentence dequilts Jacques’s relationship to his material reality, both in his perception and in his writing of Tatiana’s body. Her nudity now eludes the containment of Jacques’s I/eye: “Tatiana emerges from herself, spills through the open windows out over the town, the roads, mire, liquid, tide of nudity” (106). After Lol—after Jacques’s exposure to Lol—Tatiana is no longer simply there for Jacques to be seen and loved on his own phantasmatic terms. For Lacan, “this function [of the intolerable stain] is no longer compatible with the narcissistic image in which the lovers try to contain their love, and Jacques Hold immediately feels the effects of this.”105 Lacan reads Jacques’s moment of dispossession as epiphanic: “From that moment on, in their dedication to realizing Lol’s phantasm, they will be less and less themselves.”106 The “epiphany” in fact might be traced to an earlier passage, to Jacques’s Montaignean observation: “to know [savoir] nothing about Lol Stein was already to know [connaître] her. One could, it seemed to me, know [savoir] even less about her, less and less about Lol Stein” (72). The Real of Lol is unontologizable (“savoir” denotes intellectual or conceptual comprehension, while “connaître” is a more familiar and intersubjective—and thus more precarious—mode of knowing). It breaches Jacques’s mode of defense (his fundamental fantasy as lover/knower/possessor of Lol, which covers over his own symbolic castration or lack), undercutting his narratorial authority, his status as a subject supposed to know.

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What is at stake here, then, is Jacques’s exposure to Lol’s open ontology (and his correlative out-of-jointness). Is Jacques astonished by Lol, and rendered queer, less masterful, less sovereign, and hermeneutically impotent? Perhaps. But to see Jacques as wholly vulnerable, as completely transformed by his relation to Lol, his desires re-coordinated—as someone who has traversed his fantasy—would be to grossly overstate the situation. Jacques’s queerness is not linked to who he is—to a snapshot of his being at any given time in the narrative—but to what he does, to his ongoing desires and interpretive practices.107 For this reason, feminist critics have convincingly argued that Jacques’s “progressive” hermeneutics of uncertainty deserves closer scrutiny.108 Jacques’s repeated admission that he is inventing things,109 these critics argue, only masquerades as an absence of mastery. Is his hermeneutic reticence, then, a fake? Jacques slides back under the masculine logic of the all, relapses into an economy of domination and appropriation, into the logic of the subject supposed to know, in asking the clinical question, “But what is it you want?” (102).110 Lol answers this question agrammatically, responding simply “I want” (102), registering her compliance non-compliance with his “masculine interpellation,” to recall Cixous’s formulation. Jacques’s desire is not Lol’s desire at all. Lol’s statements undo Jacques’s making of her image.111 They unravel his logic and deflate his analytical astuteness: “I don’t love you and yet I do. You know what I mean.” I ask: “Why don’t you kill yourself? Why haven’t you already killed yourself?” “No, you’re wrong, that’s not it at all.” (159)

Lol’s speech baffles any curative hermeneutics;112 it unravels Jacques’s logic, deflating his analytical astuteness. But here again we need not opt for a critical reading that privileges—or rather fetishizes—her sexual difference, that would uphold the standard Lacanian reading of the non-all by aligning it too neatly with Lol. A critical reading must not unambiguously oppose Lol’s subversive agrammaticality to Jacques’s familiar grammar, her rebellious femininity to his complacent patriarchy, and raise Lol’s difference to the status of an exemplary, imitable model of the feminine logic of the nonall—as if Duras were answering Irigaray’s call, “what if the ‘object’ started to speak?”113 In an interview shortly after the novel’s release, when asked about Lol’s relatability and exemplarity, Duras replies that Lol is “enviable” and “almost desirable.”114 To make Lol’s devastated character fully desirable would be to court psychosis, to embrace the language of pure madness, to effectuate a total break from the symbolic order. It would be to reify Lol as a figure of the Real—a tendency in Lacan’s “Homage.” By contrast, to make her difference “enviable” and “almost desirable” is to invite readers to

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parody and mine the authority of the discourse of the Other, to remap the coordinates of identity and desire. If Lol is a trope of the Real, it is of a Real that is not external to the Symbolic but the “Symbolic itself in the modality of non-All.”115 Lol’s agrammaticality is not be fetishized, considered immune from anything social or relational. It not about a transcendence of the big Other.116 Her queer grammar holds an emancipatory value only insofar as it relates back to a grammar that it seeks to disturb and decomplete by “inhabiting” it differently.117 In the same interview, Duras also expresses her desire to dissolve the feelings that nurture and fortify the ego: “It’s about abolishing feeling; yes, that is what interests me the most.” It is a desire to weaken the ego, to queer the grammar of the symbolic, to deprive its cherished, fetishistic ego of its meaningful feelings in favor of the raw affect of ravishment, in all its “asignifying intensity.”118 Affect, however, is never simply external to the order of things, somehow immune from signification. What affect does here is to decomplete the sanitized grammar of meaningful feeling. Consequently, in staging this decompletion the novel hystericizes its readers, inviting a shift from a hermeneutics of suspicion (one that casts suspicion on both of the Jacques) to a hermeneutics of skepticism, to a queer feminism that is no longer exclusively oriented toward identification (toward an identification with Duras or Lol).119 Such a feminism autoimmunizes itself, “resists itself, folds back on itself to resist itself”;120 it is a feminism akin to Sara Ahmed’s, which “involves strange encounters—ways of encountering what is already encountered—in order to engender ways of being and acting in the world that open the possibility of the distant in the near, the unassimilable in the already assimilated, and the surprising in the ordinary.”121 Duras’s ravishment, in this respect, functions as a mood, a contagious mood that affects and alters those intimately close to Lol. The non-all infects the symbolic power of the phallus; Jacques testifies to this impact in describing the way he feels after she utters his name: “A dazzling discovery. . . . For the first time my name, pronounced, names nothing” (103). This ravished Jacques discovers that his name no longer has the same quilting effect as it always did in the past, and, at least momentarily, he experiences his self as something more—or rather less—than a “slavish” ego.122 Thus, while exposing male fantasy about feminine jouissance, The Ravishing of Lol Stein demonstrates, in holding out Lol’s infectious ravishing as an example whose exemplarity is simultaneously blocked, that the Symbolic is fraught, queerable, or non-all. We might even say that The Ravishing of Lol Stein illustrates and enacts Lacan’s claim that “there is no sexual relation.”123 There is no symmetry between Jacques and Lol, no harmonious resolution to their amorous relation. Waiting for Tatiana in L’Hôtel des Bois, Jacques perceives Lol in the rye field, and comments: “Lol had arrived there ahead of us [Jacques and Tatiana]. She was asleep in the field of rye, worn out, worn out by our trip” (181). This last sentence of the novel is “not

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an ending but a suspension”;124 “the ending [is] a repetition, not a resolution.”125 Lacking unequivocal closure, resolutely against what Lacan calls a “pathos of understanding,”126 the narrative could go on indefinitely, its futurity undetermined.127 What kind of love affair is this? It is one that foregrounds the Real of sexual difference. As a deadlock in the Real, sexual difference is an interpretive impasse that necessitates its own paradoxical hermeneutics of the Real. Jacques and Lol are not simply different types of beings (Jacques is from Mars, Lol is from Venus). “There is no sexual relation” gives a new twist to the Cartesian problem of other minds. The sexual other’s inaccessibility— the absence of complementarity—produces frustration and anxiety about one’s self. As we saw with Žižek’s discussion of the neighbor, the otherness of the other is traumatizing, but so is the otherness of the self (as is, for example, Montaigne’s semiotic monstrosity). At times, Jacques disavows this internal foreignness, yearning for Lol’s recognition and justification for her love. But to the question of why Lol desires him (why she decided to follow him), he receives the news that “her choice implies no preference” (103). The impersonality of Lol’s desire—the desubjectivization or “depersonalization [la dé-personne]”128 of her love-object—is contagious. While Duras might appear to be coding depersonalization as feminine (by embodying it in the figure of Lol), we need not read the non-all as restricted to women. I would argue that The Ravishing of Lol Stein generalizes this condition. Lol’s depersonalized desire strikes at Jacques’s sovereignty, infecting his being-inthe-world. Her desire clashes with his agonizing obsession and impossible rivalry with Michael Richardson: that original Man—“the eternal Michael Richardson” (103)—who captured Lol’s love and who supposedly enjoyed all of Lol prior to her illness or madness. Michael Richardson embodies for Jacques the masculine logic of the exception, the phantasmatic possibility of wholeness, of boundless jouissance, and of a love for Lol without fissures. He is haunted by the other man’s idealized image. Jacques wants to be the focal point of Lol’s desire, the exception to the other men (including her husband) who have failed to “save” her and to help her work through “her” phantasms. Countering this masculine logic of the exception are moments, as we have seen, framed by a discernable feminine logic of the non-all. Jacques’s scandalous observation (from the perspective of philosophy) that “to know nothing about Lol Stein was already to know her” captures best this feminine logic, the queer, autoimmune logic of theory. Here Jacques’s knowledge of Lol is rendered incomplete by his desire for Lol’s difference, suggesting that “only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love.”129 This reading gains more plausibility when paired with Jacques’s observation about Lol: “Mais qu’estce à dire qu’une souffrance sans sujet?”—meaning first “But what is one to make of suffering which has no apparent cause?” (13), but also, “But what is one to make of a suffering without a subject?” This observation appears early in the novel, when Jacques’s identity as narrator is yet to be revealed.

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Yet retroactively the reader is drawn back to this curious idea of a suffering without a subject. This sets up a relation to the other that is paradoxical from its inception. When Jacques says that to know nothing about Lol was already to know her, he can now, at the novel’s conclusion, be seen as offering a queer response to this subjectless Lol in a way that sustains rather than covers up her lack, thus declining the gentrification of his real beloved. From this vantage point, the phrase “There is no sexual relation” takes on yet another meaning. Love’s failure or impossibility does not prompt a reductively pessimistic assessment of human relations, an unqualified embrace of nonrelationality and antisociality (a retreat from the Symbolic), but enacts the condition for love as such, fostering a relationality otherwise than phallic, an amorous relation without mastery, “without subjection.”130 Put differently, Lol’s ravishment of Jacques is pharmacotic; it is poison and cure. It is both destructive and creative, a self-shattering experience that also facilitates “real” love/queer heterosexuality. “Beyond its fascination with the image of its object,” as Salecl and Žižek put it, “true love aims at the kernel of the real, at what is in the object more than the object itself.”131 As Jacques comes to realize, in those rare and fleeting moments of extimacy, loving/knowing what is more Lol than Lol herself turns out be an endlessly maddening task. This is the task the reader is invited to take up, and, like love, interpretation—the jouissance of reading—is non-all. Only a skeptical being is capable of interpretation: the ultimate mystery of interpretation is therefore that skepticism is, in a way, higher than understanding.

Chapter 5

Immunizing Ontology: The Speculative Turn

The deconstruction of logocentrism and linguisticism and economism (the “own” and home, the oikos of the same), etc., as well as the affirmation of the impossible, have always come forward in the name of the real, of the irreducible reality of the real— not the real as an attribute of the thing (res), objective, present, sense-able or intelligible, but the real as a coming or event of the other, where it resists all reappropriation, even ana-onto-phenomenological appropriation. —Jacques Derrida

Ever since Derrida in particular, materialism seems to have taken the form of a “sickened correlationism”: it refuses both the return to a naive pre- critical stage of thought and any investigation of what prevents the “circle of the subject” from harmoniously closing in on itself. Whether it be the Freudian unconscious, Marxist ideology, Derridean dissemination, the undecidability of the event, the Lacanian Real considered as the impossible, etc., these are all supposed to detect the trace of an impossible coincidence of the subject with itself, and thus of an extracorrelational residue in which one could localize a “materialist moment” of thought. But in fact, such misfires are only further correlations among others: it is always for a subject that there is an undecidable event or a failure of signification. — Quentin Meillassoux

The move to contest or contain theory’s “corrosive” influence in the humanities has often taken the form of pleading for a restorative paradigm shift, for a new turn that would immunize humanities’ objects of study (literature, philosophy, politics, and so on) against theory (often equated with Derrida) and its interpretive excesses.1 If the descriptive turn meant to counter theory’s penchant for critique in literary studies, positing surface reading as an antidote to theory’s symptomatic modes of reading, the speculative turn—with its 121

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unapologetic call to “return” to reality—presents itself as philosophy’s latest response to ills of theory. The editors of The Speculative Turn, for instance, make their intention quite clear: they are pleading for “speculating once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally.”2 They flatly reject the strand of Continental philosophy that gave us theory—the moment in the late 1960s when philosophy, in the eyes of theory’s detractors, took a decisively wrong linguistic turn. The speculative turn shares the descriptive turn’s “flat ontology”3 (a nonhierarchical account of beings) and its promotion of a posthumanist ethos. Posthumanism, unlike theory’s antihumanism, is not primarily concerned with ideology, with demystifying the origins of meanings; it is more interested in diffusing and multiplying its origins rather than recentering them in some impersonal structures.4 Both methodological turns push back against a paralyzing fixation with reading, fueled by an endlessly skeptical ethos. Proponents of these shifts object not so much to the interpretation of objects—at some level, a necessity5—but rather to the unjustified weight given in analysis to the conditions that govern interpretation. Theory’s self-reflexivity—its obsession with itself, with subjectivity, and the question of representation— has come at a great cost: reality itself. Theory stands accused of leading us astray with its preoccupation with mediation; it made us settle for too little, turning our gaze narcissistically inward, away from what Quentin Meillassoux calls “the great outdoors [le grand dehors].”6 Against the “anti-realism” pervading theory, the speculative turn urges a return to the object, a renewed cognitive attachment to the external world. Meillassoux is often credited for initiating this philosophical rebellion against the linguistic turn, against theory. Commenting on the “trenchant force” of Meillassoux’s argument for realism, Peter Hallward writes: “It’s easy to see why Meillassoux’s After Finitude has so quickly acquired something close to cult status among some readers who share his lack of reverence for ‘the way things are,’ ” that is, Continental philosophy under the sway of post-structuralism.7 Meillassoux conducts a severe critique of post-Kantian philosophies. From Marxism and phenomenology to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, Continental thought has suffered the limitations of what Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” Correlationism—realism’s “mortal enemy”8—maintains that “we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”9 Since we do not have a rational access to things-in-themselves, all we have after Kant, all we are allowed to discuss philosophically, are the transcendental conditions for knowledge.10 The limits of my epistemology are the limits of my concepts and categories. Any claims of knowledge must therefore be qualified by “for us,” that is, for us finite beings.11 As a result, Meillassoux argues, we (“philosophers hamstrung by the ‘linguistic turn’ ”)12 have forsaken ontology, have settled for a toothless or impoverished epistemology, and have foreclosed any genuine access to the external world, that

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is, to an absolute reality, to “that outside which was not relative to us . . . existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not.”13 In other words, we have confined ourselves to a “transparent cage” in which we turn endlessly in a linguistic circle, in the old prison-house of language, trapped by unseen, epistemological falsehoods.14 Kant’s Copernican revolution had the unintended effect of feeding our “cosmic narcissism,”15 placing us (our mind, language, social structures, etc.) at the center of our epistemological queries, giving us ultimate jurisdiction over reality and truth. Theory is the latest face of correlationism. Theory has remained preoccupied with these Kantian concerns, removing us further and further away from ontology, enlarging the gap between verba and res, words and things. Meillassoux’s uncompromising indictment of theory’s idealism galvanized an aggressive return to realism, to what John Caputo critically dubs “warrior realism,”16 a subject matter long deemed exhausted if not irrelevant to intellectual pursuits.17 Sparked by Meillassoux’s call to go beyond correlationism, to transcend theory’s age of finitude, the movements of speculative realism and its variant or subset, object-oriented ontology (OOO), have emerged as corrective philosophical responses to theory’s Kantian heritage. To be sure, this movement is by no means monolithic; its members do not share a set of fixed principles. Rather, what they have in common is their shared suspicion of correlationism.18 With a growing sense of urgency, speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists aim to critically adjust post-Kantian philosophy’s misguided trajectory and revive its epistemic ambitions by reasserting the primacy of ontology: ontology as first philosophy.19 Their interest lies in “the nature of being, rather than the human philosopher’s approach to it.”20 They want to return to talking about nature and not about talking about talking about nature.21 In releasing philosophy from its “transparent cage” and opening the door to the “great outdoors,” speculative realism’s goal is to rescue philosophy from its (mis)identification with theory, to cure it of its perceived obsession with mediation (with language and power) and the human (its doomed anthropocentrism and its neglect of objects). In this last chapter, the movement of speculative realism and its variant OOO serve as a case study for philosophy’s ongoing desire to purify itself, to distinguish itself clearly and distinctly from theory. Its return to ontology emerges from a desire to quarantine philosophy from theory’s contagion, from its unhealthy penchant for skepticism and reading. Whereas theory is seen as trapped in its linguistic circle, plagued by its skepticism and selfdefeating hermeneutics, philosophy (driven by a resurgence of realism and object-study) points to an exit from correlationsim. I argue that the appeal of speculative realism’s post-linguistic orientation, which captures so well the aspiration of a new generation of philosophers hungering for a nonhumancentered approach to the world, lies in part in its phantasmatic function. What the call for transparency bypasses or covers up is the problem of mediation, and the attendant problem of the ethical relation to the human and

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nonhuman alike. In the process of opening access to the great outdoors, philosophy, in the guise of speculative realism/OOO, constructs its own idea/l of transparency and immediacy, but one that, in fetishizing the outdoor world as a proper philosophical object, reinscribes the very boundary between interiority and exteriority that it ostensibly seeks to dissolve. Practicing their vision of a hermeneutics of suspicion, speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists seek to expose the transparent, discursive cage of the correlationists as a distortion of the proper philosophical scene. Once we tear away the hermeneutic layers of phenomenology and post-structuralism, once we transcend the limits of subjectivity and finitude, we discover an indifferent universe, a “glacial world.”22 And only then can we return to a philosophical understanding of objects as they are. After finitude really means, then, after mediation: an invitation to go beyond the limits of consciousness, language, and, as we shall see, interpretation. What this phantasmatic account covers over are the deeply unsettling effects of the permeability of the human, of the entanglement of the human, and discourse itself, with the nonhuman and the Real (the Symbolic in the modality of the non-all). We cannot work through the philosophical problem of the “prison-house of language” by immunizing ontology against the virus of correlationism. Rather, the problem is better solved, I contend, through a skeptical approach that avows the autoimmune (“there is no absolutely reliable prophylaxis against the autoimmune”),23 that embraces the perplexities of access, mediation, and interpretation, and that traverses the fantasy of immediate access to a referential world.

Being and Thinking: The Critique of Correlationism With respect to the philosophical tradition, Meillassoux is resolutely antiParmenidean: “being and thinking are not the same.”24 Being—or the autonomy of things—is irreducible to thinking, to language, to discourse and the like. Like Jameson, who famously critiqued the semiotic “prison-house of language,”25 Meillassoux expresses his discontent with what we know as the “linguistic turn,” seeing this emphasis on language—which, with the birth of structuralism, becomes the new constituting subject, displacing the humanist subject as the center of discourse—as a debilitating detour in contemporary philosophy.26 But whereas Jameson sought to historicize this turn through dialectics, to counter its proponents’ penchant for abstraction and synchronicity, Meillassoux is after “the relinquishing of transcendentalism,”27 which is synonymous with “waking us from our correlationist slumber.”28 To be fair, Meillassoux insists that this return is not a return to pre-Kantian dogmatism, to some long-discredited naive realism. He sees himself as completing the correlationist critique, performing what Alain Badiou describes in the “Preface” to After Finitude as “a critique of Critique.”29 Meillassoux

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does so by absolutizing the contingency of things, by “put[ting] back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity of thought.”30 The world is meaningless not because it lacks a decipherable reason, but because everything is contingent, except for contingency itself (the subtitle of After Finitude is “An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency”). Contingency itself is absolutely necessary, noncontingent (Meillassoux refers to this necessity of contingency as the “principle of factuality”).31 Meillassoux here “turn[s] an apparent weakness into an opportunity.”32 Refusing to settle for the correlationists’ avowed ignorance of the things-in-themselves (the in-itself could be anything), Meillassoux argues for a mind-independent reality, of which we can have positive knowledge: we know that “the in-itself could actually be anything whatsoever.”33 This knowledge requires no qualification at all. The correlationist’s lucid—but crippling, lifeless,34 and ultimately erroneous— account of the relation between thought and the world gives way to the lucid picture of an outside world that is thinkable and knowable regardless of our conceptions of it. For Meillassoux, it is especially mathematics that fulfills the epistemic aims of speculative realism. “Philosophy’s task,” Meillassoux contends, “consists in re-absolutizing the scope of mathematics,” in acknowledging “[its] ability to discourse about the great outdoors.”35 Mathematics desubjectivizes the world, giving us access to the world as it is. It allows us to decide between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities “are the properties of the thing as it is without me, as much as it is with me—properties of the initself.”36 They are absolute and independent of how we think about them and for this reason they can be mathematized, whereas secondary qualities are “sensible qualities . . . not in the things themselves but in my subjective relation to the latter.”37 Secondary qualities are relative and the matter of subjective life, thus falling under the purview of the correlationists.38 Though Kant and post-Kantian thought are the main targets of After Finitude, Meillassoux does on occasion enlarge the scope of his critique. He contextualizes further his attack on correlationism with an assessment of the negative impact of fideistic skepticism on the development of modern philosophy. Meillassoux credits, or rather blames, none other than Montaigne for such skepticism (whom he considers fideism’s “founding father”),39 whose effects, he maintains, are still being felt today. Meillassoux even goes so far as to give Montaigne greater importance than Descartes in shaping modern philosophy,40 in introducing doubt with respect to the absolute. Whereas Meillassoux sees philosophy as unsuccessfully scrambling to overcome the plague of skepticism and its infectious correlationism,41 our reading has stressed theory’s receptivity to the unsettling and productive force of Montaigne’s doubt. In “Of Cripples,” as we saw in chapter 1, Montaigne ridiculed philosophers who incessantly discourse about causes (he called them “plaisants causeurs,” punning on the double meaning of causer— “to talk about something/to someone” and “to cause something”). Rather

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than scrutinizing their assumptions and questions, he asserted, philosophers argue for causal reasoning and put forward answers that operate more like phantasmatic projections. But for Meillassoux, this kind of skepticism has been quite poisonous if not suicidal for philosophical thought. By weakening reason, and discrediting speculative inquiries into the nature of things, Montaignean fideistic skepticism helped to legitimize ways of talking about the world that simply suspend rational norms (because the world is unknowable, faith does not acknowledge reason’s historical priority, and therefore does not need the justification of reason), doing away with the fundamental distinction between truth and falsity. Fideism negates thinking about absolutes, but not the absolutes themselves. The results are catastrophic for philosophy: “The more thought arms itself against dogmatism, the more defenseless it becomes before fanaticism.”42 In short, Western philosophy, starting with Montaigne, has crippled itself by being excessively critical of its cognitive powers. Montaigne and others helped to downgrade philosophy’s relevance, displacing reason’s authority and thus creating a space for religion and other irrational discourses to fill. Meillassoux is clear about this. The critique of speculative thought welcomes and “legitimates all those discourses that claim to access an absolute, the only proviso being that nothing in these discourses resembles a rational justification of their validity.”43 Correlationists come “dangerously close to contemporary creationists.”44 Meillassoux insists on a sharp distinction between speculative (rational) thought and dogmatic (religious) metaphysics: “The assimilation of philosophy to a remainder of the religious ought to be firmly rejected. Quite the contrary: every position that consists in limiting the exercise of reason is religious.”45 Meillassoux’s reading here fails to do justice to Montaigne’s position. The latter’s skepticism hardly complies with the former’s account. Montaigne’s mode of inquiry is antithetical to any talk of absolutes—be they metaphysical or speculative. His skepticism does not translate into “the religionizing [enreligement] of reason”;46 rather, he is critical of dogmatism and fanaticism alike. Its negativity (the labor of skepticism) leaves precisely unfilled the space opened up by the correlationist critique.

Exteriority, Relation, and Openings If the linguistic turn has been met with deep suspicion on the part of speculative realists, the ethical turn, in its focus on exteriority, has received a warmer reception. In The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Steven Shaviro singles out and praises Emmanuel Levinas’s account of the face of the other (mostly taken from Totality and Infinity) as that which—in its radical exteriority—exceeds any preexisting interpretive horizon or totality. Reinterpreting the “ethical turn” in the humanities spurred by Levinas through the lenses of speculative realism, Shaviro shows how Levinas’s critique of

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epistemology as first philosophy47 (philosophy after Kant) reorients our focus to the world outside of us. Like Meillassoux, Shaviro is attentive to moments of breach in the correlationist circle. For Levinas, phenomenology falters insofar as it accounts only partially for the ways the self dwells in and enjoys its world. In the beginning, there was enjoyment: the self’s appropriation of its surroundings (“the transmutation of the other into the same  .  .  . an energy that is other . . . becomes, in enjoyment, my own energy, me”)48 for the purposes of nourishment, comfort, and familiarity. Then, the exposure to the other—to the face of the other—changes all of this. After the encounter, the self’s relation to the other’s alterity is, as Stella Sandford puts it, “outside enjoyment.”49 The self’s experience of sufficiency gives way to an experience of the other that is unexplainable within the strict parameters of phenomenology. Ethics is always in excess of any correlationism, of any economy of the Same. The transparency of the face disturbs the self’s state of immanence, calling into question its enjoyment and “egoist spontaneity.”50 The face of the other jolts the self out of its hermeneutic comfort. Speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists, though, must find Levinas’s reform of philosophy incomplete, his account lacking to the extent that he limits the excesses of the face to humans, which is typical of the anthropocentric bias of the Western tradition. As Shaviro puts it, “we cannot escape the pervasive sense, endemic to Western culture, that we are alone in our aliveness: trapped in a world of dead, or merely passive, matter.”51 The same holds for Graham Harman: “[Levinasian] ethics cannot be first philosophy, since ethics unjustly divides the world between full-fledged humans and robotic causal pawns, in a manner little different from Descartes.”52 In speculative realism and OOO by contrast, all beings are agential objects, objects whose ontology is more than its epistemological rendering, and thus recalcitrant to our hermeneutic habits. As an alternative approach to social theory, to human-centered frameworks (from humanism to post-structuralism), Latour champions actor-network theory (ANT), which underscores the posthumanist insight that “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor—or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant. Thus, the questions to ask about any agent are simply the following: Does it make a difference in the course of some other agent’s action or not?”53 Felski, who, as we have seen in chapter 2, pleads for the relevance of Latour for literary studies,54 cautions against merely updating or expanding the Levinasian model, where the literary work would now occupy a position analogous to that of the human other: To be sure, not all literary theory manifests an adversarial and distrustful attitude to the literary work. Indeed, quite a few voices—often those associated with deconstruction or with recent Lévinas-inspired work on the ethics of reading—extol the alterity of literary texts, testifying to their radical singularity and enigmatic strangeness. And

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yet suspicion is not so much dissipated in such arguments as it is displaced. We do not need to be suspicious of the text, in other words, because it is already doing the work of suspicion for us, because it is engaged in the negative work of subverting the self-evident, challenging the commonplace, relentlessly questioning idées fixes and idées recus. The literary text thus matches and exceeds the critic’s own vigilance, performing a metacommentary on the traps of interpretation, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders. Critic and work are bound together in an alliance of heightened mistrust vis-à-vis commonsensical forms of language and thought.55

Felski objects to a rescue of the literary object that only enlists it in the critic’s “war on common sense” and thus keeps the object as a kind of metahermeneutic hostage, forced to do the work of suspicion on behalf of the sovereign critic. What an increasing number of social and literary critics appreciate about Latour’s ANT is its posthumanist democratization of reading, its rejection of human exceptionalism. Humans do not hold any special status when it comes to agency or hermeneutics. Interpretation need not be anthropocentric. In a flat ontology, “hermeneutics is not a privilege of humans but, so to speak, a property of the world itself.”56 Objects or actants are on an equal footing; all there is are objects interacting with other objects. Humans delude themselves in elevating themselves to the exceptional and exclusive status of subjects. As a counter to this anthropocentric phantasm, Janet Bennett advances a rethinking of human agency as vulnerable, embodied, and situated within a dynamic material reality, entangled with, and thus dependent upon, other objects/agencies in the world: “Theories of democracy that assume a world of active subjects and passive objects begin to appear as thin descriptions at a time when the interactions between human, viral, animal and technological bodies are becoming more and more intense.”57 Likewise, for Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, objects must be freed from the persistent humanist subject/object prism. Objects are “entities . . . quite apart from any relations with or effects upon other entities in the world”;58 “we’ve become so used to hearing ‘object’ in relation to ‘subject’ that it takes some time to acclimatize to a view in which there are only objects, one of which is ourselves.”59 Object-oriented ontologists seek to push further and transform Rimbaud’s Je est un autre into Je est un objet. Ironically, Levinas’s model of pure heterology, characterized by the transcendence of the face, underwent significant reformulation in light of Derrida’s critique of it in “Violence and Metaphysics,” in which Derrida exposed the fantasy of absolute alterity as opposed to relative alterity.60 In his later Otherwise Than Being, Levinas gives more attention to what might be considered correlationist concerns. While still insisting on the pre-discursive desire to speak (the Saying, the respect for the other as exteriority and mystery), Levinas

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becomes more receptive to philosophy’s grammar, exploring its ethical potential. The language of ontology (the Said) does not adequately translate nor does it effectively foreclose the possibility of an “ethical Saying.”61 That is to say, the ethical does not unfold as “a ‘miracle’ or rupture within the order of being,”62 but signifies ceaselessly within the realm of representation: “The otherwise than being is stated in a saying that must also be unsaid in order to thus extract the otherwise than being from the said in which it already comes to signify but a being otherwise.”63 Declining the dubious choice between Saying and the Said, Levinas opts for an “endless critique,”64 or a skeptical, “incessant unsaying”—and the necessary resaying—of the Said.65 So if “the Infinite passes in saying,”66 its ethical passage still continues in the Said, in its unsaying and resaying: namely, the immanent labor of interpretation. There is no immunizing the Saying against the Said, the nonhuman against the human. We can reformulate this shift in Levinas as a restaging of the scene of autoimmunity. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas presents philosophy as allergic to alterity (“from its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other—with an insurmountable allergy”),67 as constantly defending its ego against the threat of an external otherness. As Matthew Stone puts it, “allergy is  .  .  . a type of autoimmune reaction, whereby the attempt of the body to protect itself against alien matter comes to form an attack on the body itself.”68 Levinas’s message is clear: philosophy must overcome its suicidal immunological paradigm. In Otherwise Than Being, Levinas recasts philosophy’s autoimmune reaction in a more positive light, as an opportunity for ethical resignification. If the Said is the Saying in an arrested mode (and thus the eclipsing of the Saying), skepticism keeps the Saying hermeneutically alive by interrupting and reinventing (unsaying and resaying) the Said. This Derridean dimension of Levinas would seem to disqualify him as a proto-speculative realist or object-oriented ontologist. Now Meillassoux, I think, would very much welcome removing this Levinas (and Montaigne) from the category of philosophers, seeing no distinction between postmodern/post-structuralist philosophy and theory. For Meillassoux, philosophers would be wholly invested in objective reality and its truths, charged with immunizing ontology against the virus of correlationism, and thus devoted to restoring our commitment to absolute knowledge, whereas theorists like Derrida—an heir of Montaigne and perhaps the most compromised of the correlationists, from Meillassoux’s perspective—would be antirealists, skeptical of any truth about a world-without-us.69 In particular, speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists would be purified philosophers, freed from what Simon Critchley describes as “the messier, subjective life of secondary qualities”70 (the stuff of theory). Meillassoux chooses a telling metaphor when he describes Derridean deconstruction as a “sickened correlationism.”71 What sickens it is its

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attempt—though ultimately inadequate—to get outside the circle of correlationism, to break free from its “transparent cage.” But what precisely makes Derrida’s correlationism “sick”—or better yet “autoimmune”? For Meillassoux and other speculative realists, Derrida, who is, interestingly, never mentioned in After Finitude, exemplifies the limits of the linguistic turn.72 His now infamous claim that “there is nothing outside the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte]”73 attests to his alleged textual idealism. Speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists emphatically reject this type of statement, seeing it as neglecting the autonomy of objects, and reflecting a lack of concern for exteriority as such. Harman captures their sentiment with his assertion that “being is deeper than every logos.”74 Despite Derrida’s and others’ numerous rebuttals to the reading of Derrida as antirealist (anti-philosophy), this account still persists. I would only point out that Derrida himself described his deconstructive work as “a protest against” the linguistic turn.75 The “prison-house of language,” or self-enclosed correlationism, is precisely what Derrida was writing against. While Derrida in his earlier works clearly privileged the shift of attention from consciousness to structure, he never endorsed a rejection of the in-itself or referentiality as such. In Limited Inc., he makes as clear as possible that “[the concept of text] does not suspend reference—to history, to the world, to reality, to being, and especially not to the other, since to say of history, of the world, of reality, that they  always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation which contextualizes them according to a network of differences and hence of referral to the other, is surely to recall that alterity (difference) is irreducible.”76 Derrida complicates rather than rules out reference. There is never an unmediated account of the given. The self has never been transparent to itself. Like the statement “there is nothing outside the text,” the claims “perception does not exist” and “there never was any ‘perception’ ”77 were also highly prone to misreading. Derrida’s point is not actually so controversial. Experience is never pure. It is always inscribed in a “movement of interpretation,” but the primacy of interpretation does not exclude a concern for reality. Quite the opposite: any discussion of the other, of the event of the other, “always come[s] forward in the name of the real, of the irreducible reality of the real.”78 Meillassoux might retort that he is acknowledging Derrida’s difference by qualifying his correlationism as unusual, as “sickened.” Indeed, he believes Derrida’s type of correlationism has been infectious, touching even materialists like Badiou and Žižek (two authors typically seen as hostile to Derrida): “Ever since Derrida in particular, materialism seems to have taken the form of a ‘sickened correlationism’: it refuses both the return to a naive pre-critical stage of thought and any investigation of what prevents the ‘circle of the subject’ from harmoniously closing in on itself.”79 Derrida does emphatically reject the pre-Kantian mode of analysis, but it is hardly the case that he ignores any investigation of the latter. Rather, Derrida deploys the notion

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of autoimmunity—the self’s tendency to destroy its own immune system, its protective barriers against the “outside”—in order to undermine from within the prison-house of subjectivity, arguing that man is far from being the measure all of things. Derrida exposes the phantasmatic character of the unitary, sovereign self, the self for whom the “circle of the subject” closes harmoniously in on itself. Autoimmunity makes a break from the correlationist semiotic prison-house axiomatic: without autoimmunity, with complete mediation, signification would remain a closed circle, an unchanging totality into which the new, the Real, or the event could never enter. Autoimmunity sets a dynamic relationality in motion, breaking the stasis of absolute immunity, of a self-same semiotic totality. If Derrida’s illogical logic of autoimmunity troubles Meillassoux’s metaphor of the transparent cage, it is equally resistant to Žižek’s designation of Derrida as a philosopher of the exception, as a “masculine” thinker. In a footnote in Less Than Nothing (2012), Žižek writes: What makes Derrida “masculine” is the persistence, throughout his work, of totalization-with-exception: the search for a postmetaphysical way of thinking for an escape from metaphysical closure, presupposes the violent gesture of universalization, of a levelingequalization-unification of the whole field of intra-metaphysical struggles (“all attempts to break out of metaphysics, from Kierkegaard to Marx, from Nietzsche to Heidegger, from Levinas to Lévi-Strauss, ultimately remain within the horizon of the metaphysics of presence”).80

Here by “masculine” Žižek is of course relying on Lacan’s formulae of sexuation. As discussed in our last chapter, Lacan’s table can be summed up as follows: Masculine formulae

Feminine formulae

There is at least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function

There is not one x that is not submitted to the phallic function

All x’s are submitted to the phallic function

Not all x is submitted to the phallic function

Žižek frames Lacan’s table in terms of ontology rather than sexuation, harnessing the feminine logic of the non-all for a leftist politics. Less Than Nothing, for example, makes the case for an understanding of materialism through Lacan’s formulae of sexuation. Žižek points out that there are two ways of negating the statement that “material reality is all there is.” Drawing on Kant’s distinction between “negative judgment” and “infinite judgment,”

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we could say that “material reality is not all there is” and “material reality is non-all.” The former is a negative judgment in that it negates the predicate (implying some transcendent spiritual reality), whereas the latter is an infinite judgment that expresses the non-all of reality without suggesting any exception. We can see how Žižek aligns the Kantian infinite judgment with the feminine side of the formulae of sexuation. The feminine logic of the non-all reframes materialism, troubles its transparent, if not crude, metaphysics, captured by the simple slogan “material reality is all there is.” Using the feminine formulae of sexuation, we get a less transparent, a less complete materialism: there is nothing which is not material reality and material reality is non-all.81 Drawing on Žižek’s ontologization of Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, Levi Bryant argues that traditional philosophy, which is dominated by logocentric aspirations, aligns itself with the masculine logic while OOO is on the side of the feminine:82 Philosophies of Presence

Object-Oriented Ontologies

There is at least one x that is not submitted to withdrawal

There is not one x that is not submitted to withdrawal

All x’s are submitted to withdrawal

Not all x is submitted to withdrawal

The dream of full presence and transparency is masculine in character (humanism, for example, subscribes to a masculine logic to the extent that it posits the human as exceptional, sovereign, unitary, and self-constituted), whereas the feminine points to the split nature of beings: While it belongs to all beings to withdraw, something of beings does not withdraw. Beings manifest themselves even as they withdraw. In The Democracy of Objects I have characterized this dual nature of objects as the thesis that objects are such that they simultaneously withdraw and are self-othering in and through their manifestations. Something of objects escapes withdrawal.83

But as we saw in chapter 4, this is precisely what Žižek warned against when conceiving of the feminine: According to the standard version of the Lacanian theory, the non-all (pas-tout) of woman means that not all of a woman is caught up in the phallic jouissance: She is always split between a part of her which accepts the role of a seductive masquerade aimed at fascinating the man, attracting the male gaze, and another part of her which resists being drawn into the dialectic of (male) desire, a mysterious jouissance beyond Phallus about which nothing can be said.84

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For Žižek, it is erroneous to translate the non-all of the feminine as “the surplus that eludes the grasp of the phallic function.”85 Likewise, the non-all of an object does not pertain to its outsideness of the symbolic order, nor to a part of it (something) that remains immune from the phallus/withdrawal. Here it might be useful to give Lacan’s graph a further Derridean twist. If Žižek and Bryant read Lacan’s formulae of sexuation in terms of ontology, I propose to reread them in terms of hermeneutics, in terms of the ethico-interpretive questions that they raise. Returning to Derrida’s saying “There is nothing outside the text,” we can see how one might be tempted to translate “There is nothing outside the text” as “mediation is all there is.” But as we saw with the case of material reality, the statement can be negated in two ways: “mediation is not all there is” (mediation is not everything: there is something outside our hermeneutic grasp, a God, a soul, a face, and so forth—this is the masculine side of the formulae of sexuation; a designation more appropriate to the likes of the early Levinas than Derrida) and “mediation is non-all” (it is open, incomplete; so for this reason there is nothing outside mediation). So it is not simply enough to evoke the traditional post-structuralist or constructivist view (the view, that is, that “mediation is all there is”). There is an appreciation of the Lacanian Real: “The Real . . . is supra-discursive, but nonetheless totally immanent to the order of discourses—there is nothing positive about it, it is ultimately just the rupture or gap which makes the order of discourses always and constitutively inconsistent and non-totalizable.”86 Reading Derrida with Žižek we might say: there is nothing which is not subjected to mediation and mediation is non-all. Mediation entails a negative hermeneutics; it is unfinalizable, non-totalizable. This account of Derridean mediation aligns it as well with the feminine side of the formulae of sexuation. Derrida’s anti-masculine logic can also be seen in his discussion of God’s sacrificial command to Abraham. The demand to sacrifice Isaac places Abraham in an asymmetrical relation to God: “What can be said about Abraham’s relation to God can be said about my relation without relation to every other (one) as every (bit) other [tout autre comme tout autre], in particular my relation to my neighbor or my loved ones who are as inaccessible to me, as secret and transcendent as Jahweh.”87 J. Hillis Miller rightly points to the unexceptional, common character of Derrida’s example: “The radical strength of Derrida’s argument here is to say no to this copout. No, he says, each one of us, every instant of every day, is in exactly the same situation as Abraham on Mount Moriah with his knife raised over Isaac. Abraham’s situation is exemplary, paradigmatic, not exceptional.”88 In place of the sovereign Exception we find a potentially limitless series of exceptions.89 Radical alterity is no longer limited only to divine matters, to theophanic encounters, but characterizes my relation to all others.90 Ethics insists on this unsettling question, derailing our propensity for disavowal, for obfuscating decision and responsibility. The ethical—the madness of

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the decision—must pass through the less than transparent feminine logic of sexuation. Contrary to Meillassoux and Žižek, Derrida rejects the correlationalist prison-house of language without positing an outside of discourse, the exception that grounds the universality of the discourse. For Derrida, language is not a closed system; language is non-all.91 An effective critique of correlationist mediation is not to transcend mediation (the fantasy of an unfiltered world, a world-without-me) but to affirm that mediation is non-all, that language is never static nor whole but constantly supplemented by “the movement of interpretation.” By contrast, Meillassoux’s transparent account of the other is one made from the perspective of a world “without me.” It makes available “an access to an eternal reality independent of our specific point of view.”92 This other’s eternal reality entails traversing mediation, suspending relationality, and breaking free from “the correlationist circle  .  .  . which separated thought from the great outdoors, the eternal in-itself, whose being is indifferent to whether or not it is thought.”93 Such an account affirms the value of objectivity and unequivocally rules out the “easy relativisms” of correlationists (to use Donna Haraway’s term), but it makes no room for hesitation, and removes others from the frictions and messiness of intersubjective life. But in what way could this “describe” the other—be it human or not? For instance, what would a speculative realist or object-oriented ontologist make of Simone de Beauvoir’s project in The Second Sex to write a book about “feminine reality” as opposed to “human reality”?94 Does her gendering of finitude merely compound Heidegger’s original error, since he was not describing “eternal reality,” a “world-without-me”? Monique Wittig warns precisely against feminisms that fetishize, by naturalizing/de-historicizing, the condition of women: What does “feminist” mean? Feminist is formed with the word “femme,” “woman,” and means: someone who fights for women. For many of us it means someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. For many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense—for the myth, then, and its reinforcement. . . . Our task . . . is to always thoroughly dissociate “women” (the class within which we fight) and “woman,” the myth.95

In light of Wittig’s materialist feminist critique, Meillassoux’s emphasis on the eternal runs the risk of contributing further to the ideological myth of Woman—the eternal other of Man. In highlighting the notion of “easy relativisms,” Donna Haraway underscores the need to trouble both terms of the binary between relativism and totalization: “Relativism and totalization are both ‘god tricks’ promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully, common myths in rhetorics surrounding Science. But it is precisely in the politics and

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epistemology of partial perspectives that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests.”96 Beyond the false choice between partiality and objectivity, Haraway insists on the model of the knower, a demoted cogito, if you will, whose imperfection is nevertheless the basis of its critical purchase: “The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another.”97 This incomplete knower, however, also resists the lure of “easy relativisms” and is still committed to the goals of objectivity, to giving an account of the referential world: “I want to argue for a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing. But not just any partial perspective will do; we must be hostile to easy relativisms and holisms built out of summing and subsuming parts.”98 Haraway’s “situated knowledges”—which can be characterized as a self-critical correlationist stance—concurs with Meillassoux’s critique of reductive constructivism but also offers an alternative to his call for a world-without-me epistemology.99 A hermeneutics of skepticism similarly develops such an alternative approach by insisting on the responsibility and responsiveness of the interpretive subject. Deconstructive skepticism is not an “easy skepticism”—a cynical exercise in sharpening one’s conceptual tools—but is at once critique and concern, critique as concern.100 Its negativity is always supplemented by “an affirmative exigency”; deconstruction, as Derrida tells us, “never proceeds without love.”101 It entails “a positive response to an alterity which necessarily calls, summons or motivates it”; it is “a response to a call.”102 We can see deconstruction-in-the-making in Derrida’s critical treatment of the animal question. Skepticism fuels Derrida’s deconstruction of philosophy’s rhetoric of the proper, its “timeless” question of “what is proper to man?” and its philosophers’ varied answers: language, thinking, trickery, laughter, awareness of death, the face, and so on. Finding himself interpellated and othered (his animality disclosed) by his little female cat as he was naked and coming out of the shower, Derrida meditates on his feline and the inadequacies of language to account for the cat’s unquestionable singularity: If I say “it is a real cat” that sees me naked, this is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. When it responds in its name  .  .  . it doesn’t do so as the exemplar of a species called “cat,” even less so of an “animal” genus or kingdom. It is true that I identify it as a male or female cat. But even before that identification, it comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, into this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized [rebelle à tout concept].103

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Derrida follows here in the footsteps of the pre-Cartesian or anti-Cartesian Montaigne (or, we might say, the posthumanist Montaigne), who also challenges human exceptionalism (“the most vulnerable and frail of all creatures is man, and at the same time the most arrogant” [II.12: 330a]) by musing on his cat’s understanding and affectivity: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” (II.12: 331c).104 Agentiality—enacted in the cat’s “capacity to respond”105—is on the cat’s side as much as on Montaigne’s. Cognizant of the homogenizing potential of the single category of “the animal”—of the violence in being named, inscribed in the socio-symbolic network—Derrida coins the anti-speciesist term animot, which at once evokes the idea of multiplicity (as a homonym of animaux [animals]) and foregrounds its figuration, its linguistic character: it is a word, a mot, not to be confused with the thing, the nonhuman materiality, that it represents.106 Animot enables Derrida to establish a “relation without relation” with his cat. The word applies to his cat, thematizing this nonhuman animal, but it also reflexively interrupts that designation, simultaneously registering the tout autre-ness of his cat, her feline materiality, the unreadability of her gaze, her refusal “to be conceptualized,” treating their encounter as nothing short of an event, provoking a linguistic, existential, and ethical crisis. We can also detect the “relation without relation” in the original French title, L’animal donc que je suis: which can be translated as both “the animal therefore that I am” and “the animal therefore that I follow.” The semantic excess of the title complicates a straightforward choice between the two translations. The first can read autobiographically as an anti-Cartesian ontological statement of Derrida’s animality (a radical reworking of Descartes’s je pense, donc je suis), while the second suggests the promise of a hermeneutics of difference, an interpretive pursuit of the animot, a pursuit implicating his cat as much as himself—human and nonhuman animals: “Everything I’ll say will consist, certainly not in effacing the limit, but in multiplying its figures, in complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing the line precisely by making it increase and multiply.”107 The general logic of the “relation without relation,” which prefigures Derrida’s reflections on autoimmunity, offers us an alternative way of working through the transparent cage of theory, disclosing that the correlationist circle was always porous, and thus avoiding reintroducing another form of phantasmatic transparency—the other as transparent and pure only in isolation, absent any distorting relations or textual contamination (a “deeply non-relational conception of the reality of things is the heart of objectoriented philosophy,” writes Harman).108 “Relation without relation” eludes the pitfalls and shortcomings of speculative realism and OOO. It declines to immunize ontology, and refuses to fetishize the other/object as an autonomous and self-contained entity with a “definite character” and “subterranean reality.”109 Rather, it foregrounds entanglement, the encounter with others,

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that is, the exposure to the other’s alterity and affectivity: I am not only affecting but also being affected by the other.110 In considering ontology and hermeneutics as coterminous, or even cofundamental, experiencing the other emerges as a complex, dynamic, and messy proposition. The other never comes fully pre-digested (the real other always risks unsettling our understanding of the symbolic/imaginary other) nor totally indigestible (that is, if he, she, or it is to appear at all), whence theory’s skeptical hermeneutics of eating well. This ethico-interpretive injunction answers the external call of the other, my interpellation by the other/ Other. It readily confronts the aporetic demands of the singular other (including the human and nonhuman), who is neither fully subdued nor withdrawn, but unruly and inviting: the demands to be understood, represented, and engaged with, and yet not to be reduced to an object of knowledge, not to be reduced to its relations, to any schemes of thought. To insist on this double bind is to never dissolve the “without” of the “relation without relation” that exceeds and interrupts any fixed correlation while attending to the alterity of the other.

Conclusion

Desire of the Theorist

We philosophers are madmen: we have a certain insight that we affirm again and again. — Slavoj Žižek

Being affected by the other is always a trauma, which is not simply wounding in the bad sense—which it is as well. It is something which affects me in my body, in my integrity; if the other doesn’t transform me in an essential way then it isn’t the other. —Jacques Derrida

Why desire theory? What does theory desire? Theory hungers for alterity and alteration, for movement, for an “unworkable” skepticism that is unamenable to instrumentalization. A skeptical hermeneutic drive underwrites and incessantly supplements theory’s ontological preoccupations, its urge to understand, its desire to know. Skepticism discloses theory’s “excess and lack of power.”1 Autoimmunity describes the condition of theory (its weak sovereignty; its recognition that there is no infallible prophylaxis against the autoimmune) but also characterizes a response to that compromised condition: an effort to explore not only what autoimmunity forecloses but also what it makes possible for thought. Theory’s primal scene is again and again traumatophilic: if otherness does not unsettle me, does not breach my immunitary defenses, then I have not encountered it as other or offered it hospitality. As a limitless source of “pervertibility”2 that skepticism diligently sustains, theory queers the discipline of philosophy, derails it from its straight path and interrupts its norms, opening it up to different voices and concerns.3 “Always-necessarily-pervertible,” Geoffrey Bennington observes, “is the positive condition of the chance of the ethical.”4 Theory perverts (from the Latin pervertere, meaning to subvert, to turn upside down) the business of philosophy, short-circuiting the latter’s conversion of wonder into masterful knowledge, of surprise into lesson: by “ending” in astonishment theory knows even less than when it started—whence its hysterical core, its ethical 139

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push to ask and interpret more. We might call this, after Derrida, the “autoimmune double bind”5 of skepticism. On one hand, doubting is a self-reflexive, defensive, and immunizing move, protecting the self from misinformation and error; on the other, doubting is also an autoimmune, suicidal gesture to the extent that a surplus of doubt—in line with the death drive subtending Montaigne’s “What do I know?”—threatens to corrode the integrity of that very doubting self, astonishing and ravishing that self, robbing the autos of its phantasmatic claim of control, even resulting in a moment of aphanisis or subjective destitution. Still, is aphanisis enough? Is that the end—the destination and demise—of theory? I am reminded here of Spivak’s remarks on the potentially myopic character of self-reflexivity: “the person who knows has all of the problems of selfhood. The person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self. These days . . . only the dominant self can be problematic; the self of the Other is authentic without problem . . . This is frightening.”6 Recognizing the complexity of the self does not preclude homogenizing the other, especially the non-Western other. Heterophilia always risks ending up resembling heterophobia, freezing the other’s being, arresting her movement—and thus symbolically killing the other, whose projected authenticity excludes the possibility of irony and mutability. What we’ve dubbed Montaignean meditations serves as a counter to this solipsistic tendency in (self-)investigation. Essaying—testing, looking awry, critiquing, cultivating irony—is an interpretive mode that never fully settles on its object, never reduces it to an exemplary meaning. Essaying illustrates and enacts theory’s curiosity. Essaying’s taste for the tentative and the improper, its queering passion for incompleteness—the non-all that interrupts, disrupts, and decompletes the big Other—consistently compels theorists to go outside of themselves. This portrait of the theorist—as a vulnerable subject, exposed to the unknown, attached to objects, visited by indecision—jars with the prevalent image of a masterful knower, a “subject supposed to know.” Indeed, figuring the desire of the theorist tends to be more about the reception of that desire: what readers and critics imagine theorists desiring. In this, the dynamic between theorists and readers recalls the analogous relationship Lacan highlights in his seminar, Transference, in discussing the dual meaning of the phrase “the desire of the analyst.” The analysand “supposes” or attributes desire to the analyst (just as the analysand regards him as a “subject supposed to know”), but the analyst also has desires of his own. As the “subject supposed to desire,” the analyst symbolizes the enigmatic voice of the Other. The analysand unconsciously ponders what the analyst (synonymous with the symbolic order) wants from her—Che vuoi? This is the indispensable moment of transference and a crucial piece of the analytical situation. With transference also comes the possibility of countertransference, where it is the analyst’s own desires that affect or mediate the relation to the analysand. The risks for a failed session increase, of course: if the analyst is unaware of the

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ways his feelings are affecting the relation to the analysand, how is the former to effectively intervene in the psychic life of the latter? Yet, Lacan cautions, rather than seeking to simply eliminate countertransference, to evacuate all affective attachments to the analysand—by adopting some impossible “Stoic ideal”7 (or, we might add, a properly philosophical response to the problem of countertransference)—the analyst should creatively incorporate these feelings in the analytical session.8 Shared entanglement rather than cold detachment also characterizes the desire of the theorist. Unlike their caricature as Greek deities pronouncing judgment on the hapless populace (as Latour believes), theorists, we’ve been arguing, struggle with the ethico-political demands of interpretation. But, following Latour, OOO critics and surface readers repeatedly portray the theorist’s countertransference in the most ungenerous light: theorists denounce the fetish of others while masterfully imposing their own on them.9 On this account, there is no entanglement, no hesitation, no genuine openness to the other at all. It is as if theorists are a priori guilty of a hermeneutic sin, of the sin of hermeneutics. Theory’s hermeneutics of skepticism, its labor of critique, turns out be self-serving and self-indulging, a “potent euphoric drug.”10 “What’s the difference between deconstruction and constructivism?” Latour asks wryly.11 The difference, he answers, is clear: constructivism displays a respect for objects (and the people who believe in them) whereas deconstruction does not.12 And fortunately, Latour tells us, objects do not comply with the latter’s interpretive predilections; they refuse to be “ground to dust by the powerful teeth of automated reflex-action deconstructors.”13 Yet deconstruction frequently resists the aggressive hermeneutics attributed to it here.14 The image of theory’s “powerful teeth” going after its targets strikes me as a case of bad transference. Again, the question has never been that of deciding between construction or deconstruction, between meaning (a concern for the other) or the destruction of meaning (the devouring of the other), but how to eat well. Isn’t this the desire proper to the theorist? Isn’t eating well a performance of critique as a form of interpretive care? Moreover, learning to eat well is hardly an isolated, private, narcissistic practice (“one never eats entirely on one’s own”);15 it entails simultaneously questioning one’s relation to the self and to the object, to the other. Against programmatic ways of eating, ways that normalize our interpretive practices and desires, theory insists on “nourishing indigestion”16 (Haraway’s apt rejoinder to Derrida), on feeding a hunger for the agrammatical, the irreducible, the ironic. Theory—not unlike psychoanalysis for Žižek—“asserts a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being.”17 It orients us again and again to the question of hospitality and underscores the limits of an immunitary paradigm. Without autoimmunity, hospitality to the other—to another who is not merely my imaginary double, my alter ego—would be utterly impossible. Hospitality as such presupposes a generalized condition of autoimmunity. This is the pharmacotic character of autoimmunity: its

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destructiveness (the law of autoimmunity spares no sovereign identities) is also what makes hospitality, exposure “to something other and more than itself,”18 happen. At the same time, it is important to note that for theory this hospitality or openness is not just imposed on me from the outside (a relation to the other/ event merely forced on me by exposure), but must also involve an act of selfcare (a relation to self): To be hospitable is to let oneself be overtaken [surprendre], to be ready to not be ready, if such is possible, to let oneself be overtaken, to not even let oneself to be overtaken, to be surprised, in a fashion almost violent . . . precisely where one is not ready to receive—and not only not yet ready but not ready, unprepared in a mode that is not even that of the “not yet.”19

While Derrida does not use the word habitus, the paradoxical injunction to be ready to not be ready is all about training the body and mind to feel something, to desire a certain kind of relationality. But unlike a “typical” habitus, which is more concerned with self-protection, a Derridean habitus, theory’s work on the self, is geared not toward familiarizing the unfamiliar, but toward making us feel less comfortable, more like a “fish out of water,” more queer, more receptive—and by extension more vulnerable—to unforeseeable and potentially menacing events. Theory’s counter to philosophy’s egology, to its immunological self, however, does not lie in the celebration of “unconditional hospitality,” which easily translates into a dangerous fascination with the other’s alleged authenticity. As Derrida insists, unconditional hospitality is both indissociable from and heterogeneous to conditional hospitality.20 Derrida’s claim might serve as a final reminder of the inseparability and yet incommensurability of theory and philosophy, as a warning against the lure to conflate the unconditional (openness, traumatophilia) with theory and the conditional (closure, traumatophobia) with philosophy. Theory’s identity is predicated on its autoimmunity, on autoimmunizing itself, “resist[ing] itself, fold[ing] back on itself to resist itself.”21 Theory must remain at war with itself,22 and thus must always fail to be identical to itself, “to be quite itself.”23 More specifically, for it to be “theory,” theory must continually revisit its distinction from philosophy. What is called for is a perpetual negotiation, a mutual interruption: theory with and against philosophy. In this light, theory should not be understood as philosophy minus its phantasms of self-sufficiency and sovereignty. Theory cannot settle for asserting its passivity and vulnerability to the traumatic ethical encounter, to the unpredictability of the event. Traumatophilic self-indulgence cannot be the business of theory, the desire of the theorist. It is not enough to affirm the neutrality of autoimmunity, its metaphysical reality. Rather, theory, like

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philosophy, must calculate and represent; theory must continue to concern itself with what happens after the event, after the encounter with the abyss of the Real. Yet theory must also continually produce openings, produce its own events; it must be inventive, unsettling, in turn, its own calculations, and setting interpretation in motion again. It needs to maintain its becoming and responsive character, its hunger for what is stubbornly unamenable to the status quo, to the interpretive horizon of the present. Theory, then, must both be attentive to that which happens while also actively engaging in an interpretive doing. It must carefully trace autoimmunity’s irreducible presence in politics, religion, literature, law, and so forth, and see in autoimmunity a political challenge and ethical task: the challenge of bringing about changes in the coordinates of one’s social being, and the task of developing a new hermeneutics, a new habitus, one, in short, that diligently works to sustain— rather than neutralize or fetishize—the other as event.

Notes

Introduction epigraphs: Fredric Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (2003): 403; Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 170. 1. D.  N. Rodowick reminds us of theory’s complex genealogy: “Theory has always been a difficult, unstable, and undisciplined concept, and this history of unruliness reaches back 2,500 years” (D. N. Rodowick, Elegy for Theory [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014], xi). 2. Patrick ffrench, “The Fetishization of ‘Theory’ and the Prefixes ‘Post’ and ‘After,’ ” Paragraph 29, no. 3 (2006): 106. 3. See Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in Its Cultural Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 4. In De anima (On the Soul), Aristotle suggests the immortality of the active intellect (nous poetikos) as that which “does not think intermittently. When isolated it is its true self and nothing more, and this alone is immortal and everlasting (we do not remember because, while mind in this sense cannot be acted upon, mind in the passive sense is perishable), and without this nothing thinks” (Aristotle, On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 8, trans. W. S. Hett [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986], 430a22–24). 5. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 280. 6. Jean-François Lyotard, a chief representative of French theory and author of the influential The Postmodern Condition (1979), ironically saw himself as a critic of theory, calling for a destruction of theory’s totalizing aspirations and epistemological authority: “Theory should become simply a genre among others and be dismissed from its position of mastery or domination which it has occupied at least since Plato. . . . The big issue for us now is to destroy theory” (Jean-François Lyotard, Rudiments païens: Genre dissertatif [Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1977], 9–10, 28, my translation). 7. Jacques Derrida, “Following Theory,” in life.after.theory, ed. Michael Payne and John Schad (New York: Continuum, 2003), 8. He distances himself from the category of theory on at least two other occasions: theory is “a purely North American artifact, which only takes on sense from its place of emergence in certain departments of literature” in the United States (Derrida, “Some Statements and Truisms about Neologisms, Newisms, Postisms, Parasitisms, and Other Small Seismisms,” in The States of “Theory,” ed. David Carroll [New York: Columbia 145

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University Press, 1989], 71); “Theory [is] yet another purely American word and concept. In France, ‘theory’ does not have an accredited conceptual equivalent any more than poststructuralism does” (Derrida, “Deconstructions: The Impossible,” in French Theory in America, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Sande Cohen [New York: Routledge, 2001], 16). 8. For a meticulous account of the American reception of deconstruction, and the media construction of French theory—that is, of “theory and its phantasms” (22)—see Mark Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 9. See Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 10. Robert Alter, “The Recovery of Open-Mindedness and the Revival of the Literary Imagination,” Times Literary Supplement (January 23, 1998): 15–16. See also Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent, ed. Daphne Patai and Will H. Corral (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 11. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, 12, 17. 12. Nussbaum laments the weakening of ethical criticism by deconstruction’s negative impact on the humanities: “Literary theory inspired by deconstruction does produce empty jargon and argument lacking in the rigor that one should demand of humanistic argument” (Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997], 214–15). 13. Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 171. 14. See Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum,” Representations 77 (2002): 52–81. 15. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 184, emphasis added. 16. “We always risk error in bringing a distant person close to us; we ignore differences of language and of cultural context, and the manifold ways in which these differences shape one’s inner world. But there are dangers in any act of imagining, and we should not let these particular dangers cause us to admit defeat prematurely, surrendering before an allegedly insuperable barrier of otherness” (Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion & Terror,” Daedalus 132, no. 1 [2003]: 26, emphasis added). For more sustained critiques of Nussbaum’s model of ethical criticism, see Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997); Zahi Zalloua, Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), especially 149–51. 17. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Norton, 1990), 8, emphasis added. 18. Nussbaum foregrounds empathetic imaginings in her approach to literature, calling for the cultivation of a deeper connection between readers and characters. Take, for example, her brief discussion of Euripides’s The Trojan Women, where Hecuba, the queen of the devastated Trojans, makes a desperate plea to Zeus: “Son of Kronus, Council-President [prytanis] of Troy, father who gave us birth, do you see these undeserved sufferings that your Trojan people bear?” The Chorus laments this abandonment: “He sees, and yet the great city is no city. It has perished, and Troy exists no longer.” Nussbaum praises Euripides

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for his ability to create “moral unease” in his Greek audience, “reminding Athenians of the full and equal humanity of people who live in distant places, their fully human capacity for suffering” (Nussbaum, “Compassion & Terror,” 11). Readers of Nussbaum reading The Trojan Women presumably will feel no hunger, having had their bodily desires and curiosity satisfied through the workings of empathetic identification. 19. There are, of course, some notable readers of Rabelais that interpret the author à la lettre, seeing in the injunction to allegorize an invitation for an evangelical mode of reading. For a survey of the contentious debate over the meaning(s) of Rabelais’s text, see François Cornilliat, “On Words and Meaning in Rabelais Criticism,” Etudes Rabelaisiennes 35 (1998): 7–28; John O’Brien, “Introduction: The Time of Theory,” in Distant Voices Still Heard: Contemporary Readings of French Renaissance Literature, ed. John O’Brien and Malcolm Quainton (Liverpool, Eng.: Liverpool University Press, 2000), 19–20; Todd W. Reeser and Floyd Gray, Approaches to Teaching the Works of François Rabelais (New York: MLA, 2011), 27–29. 20. In her hunger for exemplarity, Nussbaum falls prey to what Leslie Hill critically describes as the “infantile disorder of all literary criticism—which may be the fate of all criticism in general—which, in the guise of enabling access to the text, is to domesticate and normalize it, to reduce it to the horizon of expectation of the already known” (Leslie Hill, Radical Indecision: Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida, and the Future of Criticism [Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010], 12). 21. Hill, Radical Indecision, 336. 22. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 156. In a similar vein, Geoffrey Bennington writes: “let’s just come out and say it, the philosopher as such, the professional philosopher does not read” (Geoffrey Bennington, Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010], 127). 23. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso 2009), 59. 24. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 9. 25. In so doing Jameson ignores, for example, the Greco-Roman culture of self-care (Greek epimeleia heautou, Latin cura sui), a culture which defined philosophy not as an activity of abstract thinking but essentially as an art of living, a way of life. The works of Pierre Hadot, the late Michel Foucault, Alexander Nehamas, and Martha Nussbaum, each in different ways, foreground the image of philosophy as a culture of self-care. See especially Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (New York: Blackwell, 1995); Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), and Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); and Foucault, The Courage of Truth: The Government of Self and Others II: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983–1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2012); Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics

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(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), and Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 26. Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory,” 403. 27. Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory,” 403. 28. Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, 59. 29. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Future of Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 30. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 131. See Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007). 31. Catherine Malabou, “What Does ‘of’ Mean in Descartes’s Expression, ‘The Passions of the Soul’?” in Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, ed. Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 17. 32. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. W. D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941), 983a, emphasis added. 33. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1989), 58. 34. Cicero, De Oratore, 3.67; qtd. in Malcolm Schofield, “Academic Epistemology,” in The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld, and Malcom Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 327. 35. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, ed. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3. The Stoics claim that only the wise man (the Stoic sage) knows the truth, but this sage only exists as a regulative ideal, an aspirational goal that is never fully attained. As Immanuel Kant puts it, the Stoic sage offers “no other standard for our actions than the conduct of this divine human being, with which we can compare ourselves, judging ourselves and thereby improving ourselves, even though we can never reach the standard” (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], A569/B597). 36. Sextus, Outlines of Scepticism, 3. 37. Sextus, Outlines of Scepticism, 3. 38. Pierre Lamarche, “Of a Non-Saying That Says Nothing: Levinas and Pyrrhonism,” in Levinas and the Ancients, ed. Brian Schroeder and Silvia Benso (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 167. 39. Sextus, Outlines of Scepticism, 72, 50, 48. 40. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 33. 41. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 33. 42. Likewise, Jameson operates with a narrow understanding of skepticism, seeing it as a position or interpretive modality lacking political reach or sensibility: “It is a mistake to assimilate this view of theory to relativism or skepticism (leading fatally to nihilism and intellectual paralysis),” he writes (Jameson, “Symptoms of Theory,” 404). This interpretation of skepticism is not limited to the Left, which worries about the politics of skepticism (are skeptics willing to

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act politically?). The Right also considers theory’s skepticism a dubious position: “From the right come cries that it is immoral to shift from a thematic concern with literature, a study of the way literature expresses the values of our culture, to a nihilistic and ‘radically skeptical’ concern with language, to get lost in the sterile meanderings of language playing with itself” (J. Hillis Miller, Theory Now and Then [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991], 314). 43. “The contrary of suspicion . . . is faith. What faith? No longer, to be sure, the first faith of the simple soul, but rather the second faith of one who has engaged in hermeneutics, faith that has undergone criticism, postcritical faith” (Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 28). Such a “postcritical faith” does not come easily but rests on “harsh hermeneutic discipline” (Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 56). 44. While Ricoeur forecloses an inquiry into a hermeneutics of skepticism, Michel Foucault arguably takes up that challenge in his 1964 article, titled “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud.” Lacking Ricoeur’s anxieties about skepticism, Foucault embraces fully the hermeneutic effects of these masters’ critiques. After Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, “interpretation at last became an endless task,” writes Foucault (it would not be an exaggeration to say that Marx and Freud became Nietzschefied in the hands of Foucault). Rather than a yearning for “a more authentic word,” anticipating “a new reign of Truth,” Foucault’s masters perpetually return to “the inexhaustibility of analysis.” Foucault adds his voice to the trio by asserting that “if interpretation can never be brought to an end, it is simply because there is nothing to interpret. There is nothing absolutely primary to interpret, because at bottom everything is already interpretation” (Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Marx, Freud,” in Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy, ed. Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan Schrift [Albany: SUNY Press, 1990], 63–64). 45. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 7. 46. Robert Bernasconi, “Skepticism in the Face of Philosophy,” in Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 160n.10. 47. Bernasconi, “Skepticism in the Face of Philosophy,” 152. 48. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 167. 49. Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 83. 50. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 170. 51. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity, 40–41. Michael Bérubé rightly objects to Nussbaum’s simplistic appraisal of Derrida’s attitude toward Socrates, and her failure to appreciate Derrida’s engagement with the latter in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Michael Bérubé, Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities [Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2006], 118). 52. Hilary Putnam, whom Nussbaum credits, observes that “deconstructionists think that the whole idea of representing reality, indeed the whole idea of ‘reality,’ needs to be deconstructed” (Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992], 108). 53. By claiming to discredit theory—by exposing theory’s abuse of/in the humanities—Nussbaum “reminded everyone that, in fact, a social subject is a free social actor with obligations, responsibilities, and choices to make. In other

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words, she reintroduced that familiar American concept known as the liberated self that has to adapt its behavior to the world around it” (Herman Rapaport, “The Humanists Strike Back: An Episode from the Cold War on Theory,” in Dead Theory: Derrida, Death and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Jeffrey R. Di Leo [New York: Bloomsbury, 2016], 59–60). 54. In this respect, “if skepticism did not exist, it would have had to be invented” (Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change [Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998], 817). 55. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 80n.27. 56. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 94. 57. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 34, 123. In its fight against the virus of terrorism, American democracy, under the willful watch of “homeland security,” thus suppresses its own traditional mechanisms of auto-protection—and arguably compromises its own integrity, its moral core, its ethical ideals—in favor of an alternative, hyper-vigilant mode of selfprotection that must posit America in a state of perpetual war. Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo made explicit, in Machiavellian fashion, this ideological shift in what constitutes military normalcy after 9/11: “The world after September 11, 2001 . . . is very different from the world of 1993. It is no longer clear that the United States must seek to reduce the amount of warfare, and it certainly is no longer clear that the constitutional system ought to be fixed so as to make it difficult to use force. It is no longer clear that the default state for American national security is peace” (John Yoo, “War, Responsibility, and the Age of Terrorism,” Stanford Law Review 57, no. 3 [2004]: 816). In the same spirit, we could say that it is also no longer clear that the default state for the legal American system is due process. To be sure, the U.S. Constitution makes provision for suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, but this option is reserved for truly exceptional situations: only in cases of rebellion or invasion can the writ of habeas corpus actually be suspended. The putative necessity of an open-ended “war on terror” supersedes this fundamental legal protection, transforming an exceptional and temporary action into a far more normal and permanent condition. The “Patriot Act,” more generally, emblematizes this curtailing of individual civil liberties in the name of a greater/est good: American sovereignty. 58. Derrida, Rogues, 123. 59. Inge Mutsaers, Immunological Discourse in Political Philosophy: Immunisation and Its Discontents (New York: Routledge, 2016), 115 60. W. J. T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 47–48. Supplementing the biological with the juridical-political—“the ‘immune’ (immunis) is freed or exempted from the charges, the service, the taxes, the obligations (munus, root of the common of community)”—Derrida draws out the genealogical interconnections between autoimmunity and community, sustaining the dynamic, polysemic character of the term (Derrida “Faith and Knowledge,” 80n.27). See also Roberto

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Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 5–6. 61. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 76. Elizabeth Rottenberg aptly describes autoimmunity as an “enigmatic force . . . that is at work wherever the future (of life in general, of the living being, of democracy, of reason itself) is at stake” (Elizabeth Rottenberg, “The Legacy of Autoimmunity,” Mosaic 39, no. 3 [2006]: 5). 62. “Only that which has no history is definable” (Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1989], 80). 63. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972–1973: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 79. For Lacan, Freud’s primordial father in Totem and Taboo “is the father from before the incest taboo, before the appearance of law, of the structures of marriage and kinship, in a word, of culture” (Lacan, “Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar,” in Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman [New York: Norton, 1990], 88). 64. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 69. 65. Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), 1. 66. Slavoj Žižek, “Holding the Place,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 2000), 310. 67. Derrida, Rogues, 35. Derrida conceives here of dialectics in its traditional sense as a logic that overcomes tension, seeking self-presence and closure. 68. Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 176. 69. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 7; Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26. 70. Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 27. 71. Vincent B. Leitch, “Late Derrida: The Politics of Sovereignty,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 236. 72. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 191n.14. 73. Lamarche, “Of a Non-Saying That Says Nothing,” 168. 74. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 5. 75. Derrida, Rogues, 109. Making an analogy with a body’s need for immunedepressants (functioning as a necessary “supplement” to the immune system) to counter its natural antibodies and render possible “the tolerance of certain organ transplants,” Derrida stresses the self’s lack of self-sufficiency and autonomy (Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 80n.27). 76. Rabaté, The Future of Theory, 9. 77. John D. Caputo, “Unprotected Religion: Radical Theology, Radical Atheism, and the Return of Anti-Religion,” in The Trace of God: Derrida and Religion,

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ed. Edward Baring and Peter E. Gordon (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 154. 78. The virtual bastardization of skepticism is reminiscent of Plato’s designation of writing as an orphaned son of the father-author-philosopher (Plato, Phaedrus, in The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1, trans. Benjamin Jowett [Oxford: Clarendon, 1892], 275e). Lacking the proximity of speech, the immediacy of the paternal logos, Plato considered writing derivative, unnatural, and dangerous. Like writing, skepticism as pharmakon figures as the “combat zone between philosophy and its other” (Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981], 138). Whereas philosophy makes skepticism “other”—subjecting to the threat of expulsion— theory adopts an altogether different relation. 79. J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 10. 80. Ronell, Fighting Theory: In Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. Catherine Porter (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), xi. 81. Jean-Michel Rabaté and Greg Lambert, “Conversation on the Future of Theory,” symplokē 11, no. 1 (2003): 50. 82. See Alain Badiou, The True Life, trans. Susan Spitzer (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). 83. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 63, 65. 84. Paul Allen Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 10. See also Nicole Loraux, Gregory Nagy, and Laura M. Slatkin, introduction to Antiquities: Postwar French Thought, vol. III, ed. Nicole Loraux, Gregory Nagy, and Laura M. Slatkin (New York: New Press, 2001), 1–16. 85. See Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices 144–45; Harry Berger Jr., “Phaedrus and the Politics of Inscriptions,” in Plato and Postmodernism, ed. Steven Shankman (Glenside, Pa.: Aldine, 1994), 76. 86. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), II.12: 377c. Henceforth all references to this edition will be stated parenthetically in the text. Citations refer to book, essay, and page. The letters a, b, c, indicate the three major textual strata corresponding to the 1580 edition (books I and II), the 1588 edition (books I, II, III), and to the manuscript additions made by Montaigne to his personal copy of the 1588 edition of the Essays, known as the Bordeaux Copy (Exemplaire de Bordeaux). References to the book and chapter will be omitted whenever they can be clearly inferred from the context. 87. Derrida, Rogues, 152. 88. Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 62. Esposito sees no real differences between immunity and autoimmunity; the latter is “the logic of the immune system in its pure state” (Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, trans. Zakiya Hanafi [Cambridge: Polity, 2011], 164). 89. “Whereas communitas opens, exposes, and turns individuals inside out, freeing them to their exteriority, immunitas returns individuals to themselves,

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encloses them once again in their own skin” (Esposito, Terms of the Political, 49). Esposito decries the expanding “immunology paradigm” in contemporary culture, a paradigm by which biopolitics is transformed into thanatopolitics when the law does not protect but destroy. Paranoia, the excessive fear of contagion, fuels the immunitary attitude: “Everywhere we look, new walls, new blockades, and new dividing lines are erected against something that threatens, or at least seems to, our biological, social, and environmental identity” (Esposito, Terms of the Political, 59). See also Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), and Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010). 90. This is not to say that Derrida diminishes the importance of resisting nationalistic self-protective measures. For example, he offers a biting critique of France’s right-wing politicians, whose rhetoric only gestures to an openness to immigrants by privileging the latter’s amenability to assimilation: “Le Pen’s organicist axiom . . . only lets in what is homogeneous or homogenizable, what is assimilable or at the very most what is heterogeneous but presumed ‘favorable’: the appropriable immigrant, the proper immigrant” (Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002], 102). 91. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 99. 92. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 124. 93. Anderson Warwick and Ian R. Mackay describe autoimmunity as “a guiding metaphor in understanding the perils of life and identity in the twenty-first century” (Anderson Warwick and Ian R. Mackay, Intolerant Bodies: A Short History of Autoimmunity [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014], 6). 94. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 134. 95. If a life of pure immunity, pure presence, or pure indemnification were possible, it would be indistinguishable from pure death or immortality: “If a living organism could calculate this filtration in advance, it might perhaps achieve immortality, but it would also have to die in advance, let itself be killed or kill itself in advance, for fear of being altered by what comes from the outside, by the other” (Derrida, Negotiations, 102). 96. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 214. 97. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 167. 98. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 90. 99. John D. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (2011): 33. 100. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 140. 101. Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), 11. 102. Martin Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics: A Response to Derek Attridge,” Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (2010): 298. 103. Hägglund, Radical Atheism, 19.

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104. Naas, Derrida From Now On, 124. 105. “Autoimmunity spells out that everything is threatened from within itself” (Hägglund, Radical Atheism 9). 106. Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics,” 302. 107. Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics,” 301. 108. For the use and abuse of theory’s critique of autonomous subjectivity, see Mari Ruti, “The Bad Habits of Critical Theory,” The Comparatist 40 (2016): 5–27. 109. “The ethical is therefore a matter of responding to alterity by making decisions and calculations, whereas the unconditional is the non-ethical opening of ethics, namely, the exposure to an undecidable other that makes it necessary to decide and calculate in the first place” (Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics,” 301). 110. Jacques Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” PLI—Warwick Journal of Philosophy 6 (1997): 6–7; qtd. in Hägglund, “The Non-Ethical Opening of Ethics,” 300. 111. Jacques Derrida, “The Time Is Out of Joint,” trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Deconstruction Is/In America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 25 112. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 144. 113. Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 22. See also Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 78. 114. Following Levinas, as well as Maurice Blanchot, Derrida deploys the formulation of “rapport sans rapport,” or its multiple variations such as “community without community,” “sovereign without sovereignty,” “messianity without messianism,” for its paradoxical logic. 115. Derrida, “Following Theory,” 13–14. 116. Derrida, “Following Theory,” 14. 117. Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 282. 118. Theodor W. Adorno also values the essay-form for its skeptical energy, the ways it “gently defies the ideals of clara et distincta perceptio and of absolute certainty” (Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique 32 [1984]: 161). The essay performs the labor of philosophy, “proceed[ing] interpretively without ever possessing a sure key to interpretation; nothing more is given to it than fleeting, disappearing traces within the riddle figures of that which exists and their astonishing entwinings” (Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31 [1977]: 126). Jean-François Lyotard, for his part, aligns the essay with postmodernism; eschewing systematic thought and the hermeneutic comfort of “grand narratives,” “the essay (Montaigne) is postmodern,” as he succinctly put it (Jean-François Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?” trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 81). 119. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 9. Likewise, Adorno notes: “The object of the essay is the new as something genuinely new, as something not translatable back into the staleness of already existing forms” (“The Essay as Form,” 169).

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120. “When the impossible makes itself possible, the event takes place (possibility of the impossible). That, indisputably, is the paradoxical form of the event: if an event is only possible, in the classic sense of this word, if it fits in with conditions of possibility, if it only makes explicit, unveils, reveals, or accomplishes that which was already possible, then it is no longer an event. For an event to take place, for it to be possible, it has to be, as event, as invention, the coming of the impossible” (Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005], 90). 121. De Man, The Resistance to Theory, 19. Derrida names deconstruction theory’s resistance to theory: “deconstruction resists theory . . . because it demonstrates the impossibility of closure, of the closure of an ensemble or totality on an organized network of theorems, laws, rules and methods” (Derrida, “Some Statements,” 86). 122. “Since theory is supposed to account for the unique, particular, and singular, its success in achieving generalizations . . . is at the same moment its failure to achieve the goal of theory” (J. Hillis Miller, Others [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001], 258n.32). 123. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 252. 124. “If there is to be something like a judgment, it must in a strict sense, that is, beyond a calculable and predictable operation, it must be the happening of an impossible decision” (Rodolphe Gasché, Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence: Together with “Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?” [Albany: SUNY Press, 2016], 107). 125. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 251. “It is to the extent that knowledge does not program everything in advance, to the extent that knowledge remains suspended and undecided as to action, to the extent that a responsible decision as such will never be measured by any form of knowledge, by a clear and distinct certainty or by a theoretical judgement, that there can and must be responsibility or decision, be they ethical or political. I am a citizen, too. It happens that I take politicoinstitutional initiatives, that I ‘intervene,’ so to speak” (Derrida, Negotiations, 178). 126. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 3. 127. Derrida, “Following Theory,” 8–9. 128. For Montaigne, skepticism is an exercise in humility: “[b] Many abuses are engendered in the world, [c] or to put it more boldly, all the abuses in the world are engendered [b] by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, [c] and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute” (III.13: 788). 129. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 3. 130. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 119. 131. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 29. 132. Derrida, “Some Statements,” 80. The animal is always more than its symbolic and imaginary rendering; it is also real, irreducible either to its phantasmatic projections or to society’s gentrification of the animal into a “pet.”

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133. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 70. 134. Emmanuel Levinas, “Transcendence and Height,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 17. 135. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 134. 136. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1977), 233. 137. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 234. 138. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 230. 139. Jason Glynos, “Psychoanalysis Operates upon the Subject of Science: Lacan between Science and Ethics,” in Lacan and Science, ed. Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis (New York: Karnac Books, 2002), 60. 140. In a conversation with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Derrida gestures toward a deconstructive psychoanalysis when marking his preference for a Freudian reason shot through with the aporetic, an autoimmune reason, if you will: “I prefer in Freud the partial, regional, and minor analyses, the most venturesome soundings. These breaches and openings sometimes reorganize, at least virtually, the entire field of knowledge. It is necessary, as always, to be ready to give oneself over to them, and to be able to give them back their revolutionary force [puissance]. An invincible force. Finally, whatever the inequalities of development, the ‘scientific’ incompleteness, the philosophical presuppositions, this force always involves the reaffirmation of a reason ‘without alibi,’ whether theological or metaphysical. This reaffirmation of reason can go against a certain state or a certain historical concept of reason” (Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 173). 141. See Jean Laplanche, “Psychoanalysis as Anti-Hermeneutics,” Radical Philosophy 79 (1996): 8. 142. See, in particular, Jacques Lacan, “Peut-être à Vincennes . . . ,” in Autres écrits, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001), 314–15. On the question of Lacan’s anti-philosophy, see Jean-Claude Milner, “L’Antiphilosophie,” in L’Oeuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 146–58; François Regnault, “L’Antiphilosophie selon Lacan,” in Conférences d’esthétique lacanienne (Paris: Agalma, 1997), 57–80; Colette Soler, “Lacan en antiphilosophe,” Filozofski Vestnik 27, no. 2 (2006): 121–44; Bruno Bosteels, “Radical Antiphilosophy,” Filozofski Vestnik 29, no. 2 (2008): 155–87; Adrian Johnston, “This Philosophy Which Is Not One: Jean-Claude Milner, Alain Badiou, and Lacanian Antiphilosophy,” S 3 (2010): 137–58; Justin Clemens, Psychoanalysis Is an Antiphilosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Like anti-philosophy, theory rejects what Lacan terms a “religious” view of meaning (the view that the world is meaningful, and that meaning awaits the philosopher’s faithful deciphering). But anti-philosophy remains in some measure a “reactive” category, in the Nietzschean sense of the term, to the extent that it defines itself strictly in opposition to philosophy. I am also sympathetic to Jameson’s concern that anti-philosophy, despite the oppositional logic of its proponents, “tends to restore a certain centrality to that very philosophy of which such thinking was alleged to have been the critique or the negation” (Jameson,

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Valences of the Dialectic, 10). Žižek’s gloss of Lacanian anti-philosophy nuances Jameson’s objection, making psychoanalysis—and I would also add theory— “stand for the excessive core of philosophy itself, for what is in philosophy more than philosophy” (Žižek, The Parallax View, 389n.15). 143. Derrida, Rogues, 157. See also Jacques Derrida, “Three Questions to Hans-Georg Gadamer,” in Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter, ed. Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 53. 144. Derrida, Rogues, 157. 145. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 67. 146. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 68. Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard notes: “The decline, perhaps the ruin, of the universal idea can free thought and life from totalizing obsessions. The multiplicity of responsibilities, and their independence (their incompatibility), oblige and will oblige those who take on those responsibilities, small or great, to be flexible, tolerant, and svelte” (Lyotard, “Tomb of the Intellectual,” in Political Writing, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul Geiman [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 7). 147. Michel Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 207. 148. Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” 207–8. The specific intellectual “no longer claims to speak for another group or to give voice to an oppressed consciousness.” Rather, his task is “to facilitate, for a subordinate social group, its ability to speak for itself . . . The specific intellectual represents nothing and no one” (Mark Poster, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989], 37). 149. Michel Foucault “On the Genealogy of Ethics: A Work in Progress,” in Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 231–32. 150. Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 232. 151. Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 2. See also Žižek, “Occupy Wall Street: What Is to Be Done Next?” The Guardian, April 24, 2012, https:// www.theguardian .com /commentisfree /cifamerica /2012 /apr /24 /occupy -wall -street-what-is-to-be-done-next. 152. Slavoj Žižek, Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (New York: Verso, 2002), 170. 153. Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 6–9. 154. Similarly, Adorno objected to the “primacy of praxis,” to what he called “actionism,” when action is performed for its own sake, giving the semblance of critique but in fact doing little to disrupt the social order of things (Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005], 268–69). 155. Slavoj Žižek, “The Ambiguous Legacy of ’68,” In These Times (June 20, 2008), http://inthesetimes.com/article/3751. Likewise, for Alain Badiou, May ’68 offers us lessons in ideology; the aftermath of 1968 revealed the emergence of the so-called nouveaux philosophes, philosophers who unambiguously disavowed

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the antihumanism of the previous generation, wanting to return philosophy to its more traditional role, as a defender of “human rights,” for example. The call to return to Kant mixed with an utter fascination with Levinas and his philosophy of the other inaugurated what Badiou calls an “ethical ideology,” which effectively neutralized the role of the political in contemporary philosophical discourse. See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2002). 156. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 106. 157. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 107. 158. Laura Westra, Faces of State Terrorism (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 75. 159. Westra, Faces of State Terrorism, 75. 160. Giovanna Borradori, “Deconstructing Terrorism: Derrida,” in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 151–52. 161. Butler has insightfully pursued this line of inquiry in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), and Precarious Life. 162. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, 48. 163. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 94. To put it in Foucauldian terms, nothing is more material, physical, corporeal than the deconstruction of power (Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 57–58). 164. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 255. Chapter 1 epigraphs: Jacques Rancière, “Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 284; Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 84. 1. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991), 2. 2. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 12. 3. Addressing his readers directly, Montaigne cautions them not to take his additions for corrections: “Reader, let this essay of myself run on, and this third extension of the other parts of my painting. I add, but I do not correct” (III.9: 736b, emphasis added). 4. François Garasse, qtd. in Olivier Millet, La Première Réception des Essais de Montaigne (1580–1640) (Paris: Champion, 1995), 199. Similarly, Estienne Pasquier described Montaigne as “another Seneca in our language” (Millet, La Première Reception, 146). 5. Seneca, Epistles, 74.21, 75.18. The desire for self-mastery, an aspiration originating in Plato’s Socrates, is perhaps as old as philosophy itself, but it is a desire that is especially prevalent in ancient Stoicism. 6. Seneca, Epistles, 49.12. 7. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 20. 8. Plato, Apology, trans. G.  M.  A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1997), 29e, 30b. 9. Although the paternity of Alcibiades I is today a contested issue, it is clear that in the Renaissance its authorship was undisputed and considered highly

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relevant for the teachings of Plato. See Proclus’s translation of and commentary on Alcibiades I (Proclus: Alcibiades I, trans. William O’Neill [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971]). 10. Plato, Alcibiades I, trans. D. S. Hutchinson, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1997), 124b-d. 11. Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 494. 12. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 86. 13. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Loeb Classical Library, trans. J.  E. King (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950), 2.6. 14. Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 10–11. 15. “The accent is placed more and more readily on the weakness of the individual, on his frailty, on his need to flee, to escape, to protect and shelter himself” (Foucault, The Care of the Self, 67). 16. Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 9. 17. Seneca, Epistles, Loeb Classical Library, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 37.11. 18. Seneca, Epistles, 7.7. 19. Seneca, Epistles, 41.7–8. 20. Seneca, De tranquillitate animi, in Moral Essays, vol. 2, Loeb Classical Library, trans. John W. Basore (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928), 17.3. 21. Seneca, De tranquillitate animi, 14.2. 22. Seneca, Epistles, 91.7, 91.4. 23. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 18. Foucault contrasts “technologies of the self” with “technologies of domination,” which are identified with the ubiquitous mechanisms of normalization and the mode of subjectivization. Foucault’s late (re)turn to the subject, however, did not reflect a naive wish to return to quasitranscendental origins, a yearning to resurrect a monadic ego, a transhistorical subject whose demise or dissolution he had celebrated in The Order of Things. On the contrary, Foucault still rejected an a priori understanding of the subject (“the individual is not a pre-given identity” [Power/Knowledge, 73], but now turned his genealogical focus from the formation of the subject to the self’s own active self-formation as subject through specific technologies. This view of the subject accounts for social constraints (the legitimation and production of selfhood) without, at the same time, denying agency or foreclosing any sites of resistance. 24. Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life, 9. 25. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 33. 26. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 17. 27. Foucault, “Technologies of the Self,” 22. 28. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 251. See also Nehamas, The Art of Living, 101–27. 29. Seneca, Epistles, 7.8. 30. It is not without irony that at the moment when Montaigne wants to stress his self-detachment and private turn inward, signaling his suspension of all social ties, he can avoid referring to the public space—his “back shop”—a highly charged mercantile term, denoting private property, a business and commercial

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space. This subtle complication of the private and the public suggests that Montaigne’s philosophical relation to Stoicism itself needs to be seen as mediated by the specificity of the early modern socioeconomic situation. 31. In “That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die” (I.20), another essay that bears the influence of ancient thought, Montaigne warns that individuals who do not meditate on the potential of future traumas open themselves up to devastating and unbearable suffering: “When it [death] comes, either to them or to their wives, children, or friends, surprising them unprepared and defenseless, what torments, what cries, what frenzy, what despair overwhelms them!” (59a). 32. Seneca, Epistles, 75.18. 33. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 29. 34. Seneca, Epistles, 82.17, emphasis added. 35. “My brother, my brother, do you refuse me a place?” (Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade [Paris: Gallimard, 1962], 1359, my translation). 36. Gérard Defaux, “Montaigne, la vie, les livres: Naissance d’un philosophe sceptique—et ‘impremedité,’ ” MLN 117, no. 4 (2002): 807, my translation. 37. Elizabeth Guild, Unsettling Montaigne: Poetics, Ethics and Affect in the Essais and Other Writings (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), 175. 38. Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 389. 39. Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7, no. 1 (1981): 45. 40. Sarah Kofman describes the pursuit of Truth as a typically “masculine enterprise”: “For ‘truth,’ that metaphysical lure of depth, of a phallus concealed behind the veils, that lure is a fetishist illusion of man.” Women, in contrast, do not share men’s obsession with narcissistic mastery; as Kofman puts it, “Women are not concerned with Truth, they are profoundly skeptical” (Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985], 105). 41. “Disidentification is about recycling and rethinking encoded meaning. The process of disidentification scrambles and reconstructs the encoded message of a cultural text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications. Thus, disidentification is a step further than cracking open the code of the majority; it proceeds to use this code as raw material for representing a disempowered politics or positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture” (José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], 31). 42. Elsewhere, Montaigne muses on the unruliness of his sexual organ—the “unruly liberty of this member” (I.21: 72c). Attributing sovereign agency to the penis exacerbates further the precariousness of the human will. 43. Michelle Zerba, Doubt and Skepticism in Antiquity and the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 226.

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44. Interpretation, Montaigne points out, suffers a similar autoimmune condition. Rather than elucidating the object in question, interpretive commentaries often make it more obscure: “Who would not say that glosses increase doubts and ignorance, since there is no book to be found, whether human or divine, with which the world busies itself, whose difficulties are cleared up by interpretation?” (III.13: 817b). 45. David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), xiv. Quint bases his reading on Pierre Villey, Les Sources et l’évolution des “Essais” de Montaigne (Paris: Librairie de Hachette, 1933), in which the author argued that Montaigne’s thought evolved through three stages: Stoicism, Skepticism, and Naturalism (Epicureanism). 46. Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy, xiv. 47. Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism, 139. 48. Rabaté and Lambert, “Conversation on the Future of Theory,” 50. 49. We know that Montaigne’s famous post-1588 addition was written at two different moments. On his Bordeaux Copy, Montaigne added the first part of the phrase (“par ce que c’estoit luy”) and then added the second part (“par ce que c’estoit moy”) in different ink. Philippe Desan’s color reproduction of the Bordeaux Copy has greatly facilitated an evaluation of Montaigne’s style and compositional practices. See Montaigne, Reproduction en quadrichromie de l’Exemplaire de Bordeaux des Essais de Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan (FasanoChicago: Schena Editore, Montaigne Studies, 2002). 50. My reading differs from that of Penelope Deutscher, who argues that in Montaigne’s essay “there is no account of the perfect friend who resists recognition” (Penelope Deutscher, “Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism, and the Politics of Friendship [Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray],” differences 10, no. 3 [1998]: 178). While offering an insightful interpretation of Derrida’s and Irigaray’s views on the work of mourning, Deutscher makes selective use of Montaigne’s text, failing to consider the ethical force of the essayist’s skeptical formulation “because it was he, because it was I.” 51. Barbara Cassin, Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 2. 52. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 181. 53. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 93, 48. 54. Zerba, Doubt and Skepticism, 212. 55. Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 430. 56. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 223–24. 57. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 218. 58. Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 26. 59. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, trans. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), 191.

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60. “Contemporary theory is traumatophilic,” writes Michael S. Roth (Michael S. Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past [New York: Columbia University Press, 2012], 99). 61. Affect theorists contest the dominance of the mind over the body, the primacy of hermeneutics and intentionality, and the value of rationality and reason in the act of judgment. Brian Massumi, for example, draws a sharp distinction between affect and emotion, and its corollary event and structure. In his translation notes for Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Massumi gives a concise and influential account of affect: “affect/affection. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattari). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body” (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], xvii). For Massumi, affects follow a “different logic” than emotions and feelings; they belong to a different order. Affects are not determined, nor even qualified, by culture. They are uncontaminated by the law of the signifier. Affects stand in excess of social discourse. They function as a remainder, pointing to what lies before and beyond culture’s digestive economy. 62. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 97. 63. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, trans. W. D. Ross (New York: Random House, 1941), 980a21. 64. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 155d. 65. Plato, Phaedrus 229e–230a, emphasis added. 66. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern World, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 264. 67. Saint Augustine, Confessions, Loeb Classical Library, trans. William Watts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 10.35. 68. Augustine, Confessions, 10.35. 69. Augustine, Confessions, 10.35. The twelfth-century theologian Bernard of Clairvaux similarly reprimands those who seek out knowledge as an end in itself: “There are people who want to know solely for the sake of knowing, and that is scandalous curiosity” (qtd. in Jan Aersten, “Aquinas’s Philosophy in Its Historical Setting,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 28). 70. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, 160. 71. Blaise Pascal, Thoughts, trans. W. F. Trotter (New York: Collier, 1910), 13. 72. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger underscores the affinities between curiosity and idle talk: “Curiosity is everywhere and nowhere . . . Idle talk controls even the ways in which one may be curious. It says what one ‘must’ have read and seen. In being everywhere and nowhere, curiosity is delivered over to idle talk” (Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh [Albany: SUNY Press, 1996], 161). 73. Pascal, Thoughts, 155.

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74. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 15. 75. “Oh, what a sweet and soft and healthy pillow is ignorance and incuriosity, to rest a well-made head” (III.13: 822c). 76. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 141. 77. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 27. 78. Derrida, “Some Statements,” 80. 79. “The supplement adds itself; it is a surplus, plenitude, enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. . . . But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144–45). 80. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 25. 81. René Descartes, Meditations, Objections, and Replies, ed. Roger Ariew and Donald Cress (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2006), 19. 82. Belsey, Shakespeare in Theory, 27. 83. Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 223. 84. The massacre originated in Paris on August 24, 1572, when about 2,000 Huguenots, including their leader Admiral Coligny, were slaughtered, and then spread to the provinces (thus one should speak of massacres in the plural), resulting in approximately 3,000 additional deaths. 85. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 144. 86. According to Freud, objects of mourning are not limited to the loss of a concrete object but can refer as well to “the loss of some abstraction . . . , such as one’s country, liberty, and ideal, and so on” (Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957), 243. 87. See Richard Regosin, Montaigne’s Unruly Brood: Textual Engendering and the Challenge to Paternal Authority (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 165; Lawrence Kritzman, The Fabulous Imagination: On Montaigne’s Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 16. 88. I am of course adapting here Rimbaud’s famous formulation, “Je est un autre [I is an other]” (Arthur Rimbaud, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Rolland de Renéville and Jules Mouquet [Paris: Gallimard, 1963], 268). 89. Plato, Phaedrus, 230a. 90. “Free will,” “masters of ourselves,” and “renders us like God”: Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, 103; “masters and possessors of nature”: Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1998), 35. 91. Levinas, Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 101.

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92. Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 52. 93. Pascal, Thoughts, 23, translation modified. 94. Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 328. 95. Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 9. Thomas Flynn also has remarked on the affinities between Montaignean skepticism and the skeptical attitude informing Foucault’s critique of rationality: “[Foucault’s] is a skepticism more in line with Montaigne’s ‘Que sais-je?’ than with the obviously self-defeating form, ‘I can’t be certain of anything’ ” (“Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at Collège de France,” in The Final Foucault, ed. James W. Bernauer and David Rasmussen [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988], 113). 96. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 84. 97. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” in Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, ed. Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley (London: Routledge, 1999), 66, emphasis added. 98. Rancière, “Ethics and Politics in Derrida,” 284. 99. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 155. Chapter 2 epigraphs: Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), 219; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1991), 45. 1. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 231. 2. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 239, 248. 3. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 240. 4. Karl Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994), 211; Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1933), 33. 5. Karl Marx, “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher,” in Collected Works  of Marx and Engels, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 142. 6. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 232. Elsewhere, Latour compares the labor of critique to the purely destructive function of a hammer: “With a hammer (or a sledgehammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together” (Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,”’ New Literary History 41, no. 3 [2010]: 475). As we shall see in this chapter and throughout the book, that which destroys is often the condition for inventiveness. This is both conceptually and practically the case. As Benjamin Noys keenly points out, hammers are not exclusively destructive but, in fact, do add, construct: “With an actual hammer what you can, precisely, do is ‘assemble’ and ‘reassemble,’ as anyone who has used a hammer well knows” (Benjamin Noys, “The Discreet Charm of Bruno,” in (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental

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Philosophy, ed. Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014], 198). 7. Toril Moi, “ ‘Nothing Is Hidden’: From Confusion to Clarity; or, Wittgenstein on Critique,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 32. 8. Slavoj Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1994), 17. 9. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York: Verso, 1994), 130. 10. Jodi Dean has called into question this all-too-familiar Althusserian framing of capitalist ideology. Dean takes from Žižek the critical diagnostic of the postmodern condition as one of fundamental crisis in the symbolic order (“the quasi-transcendental Master-Signifier that guarantees the consistency of the big Other  .  .  . is ultimately a fake, an empty signifier without a signified” [Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso, 2000), 106]). With this new era of uncertainty come new forms of political subjectivization, which are, however, not any less controlling or oppressive. In light of the sheer diffusion of new disciplinary sites, which have severely weakened symbolic prohibitive norms but significantly increased the production of imaginary ideals, Dean urges us to recalibrate our analysis: “So neoliberal ideology does not produce its subjects by interpellating them into symbolically anchored identities (structured according to conventions of gender, race, work, and national citizenship). Instead, it enjoins subjects to develop our creative potential and cultivate our individuality” (Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009], 66). While making a compelling case for taking a more critical look at interpellation as an adequate notion to elucidate the workings of ideology, Dean’s dismissal of interpellation tout court (it is just too outdated) strikes me as unwarranted. Here, Žižek’s own engagement with the Althusserian concept seems preferable. Approaching the question of interpellation from its putative other—disidentification (what happens when one refuses the “hail” of interpellation, when one refuses to assume the symbolic place imposed on us by the big Other)—Žižek deconstructs the latter’s subversive aura. He perspicaciously asks: “Is disidentification necessarily subversive of the existing order, or is a certain mode of disidentification, of ‘maintaining a distance’ towards one’s symbolic identity, consubstantial with effective participation in social life?” (Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, “Questions,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek [New York: Verso, 2000], 9). It is precisely the oscillation between success (identification) and failure (disidentification) that makes interpellation as such all the more irresistible and powerful, duping confident critics who think they have de-masked, blocked, or explained away interpellation’s originary mode of identification. 11. Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” 12. 12. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 33. 13. Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” 1. 14. “An ideology is really ‘holding us’ only when we do not feel any opposition between it and reality—that is, when the ideology succeeds in determining the

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mode of our everyday experience of reality itself” (Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 49). 15. Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” 17. 16. Žižek, “The Spectre of Ideology,” 16. 17. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge, eds., Theory after “Theory” (New York: Routledge, 2011). 18. Tim Dean, “Art as Symptom: Žižek and the Ethics of Psychoanalytic Criticism,” Diacritics 32, no. 2 (2002): 20–41. David Bordwell also laments Žižek’s interpretation of films as “allegories of theoretical doctrines” (David Bordwell, “Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything” [2005], http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/zizek .php). 19. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, 219. 20. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 243. 21. I concur here with Alexander Galloway that Latour unjustly reduces ideology to a question of cognitive deficiency, resulting in “fighting a straw man . . . [since] the ‘false consciousness’ position was refuted and amended decades ago within critical theory by any number of thinkers” (Alexander Galloway, “History Is What Hurts: On Old Materialism,” Social Text 34, no. 2 127 [2016]: 138n.4). 22. Charles Baudelaire, “To Each His Chimera,” in The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 9. 23. Baudelaire, “To Each His Chimera,” 9. 24. Baudelaire, “The Rope,” in The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 77. 25. Baudelaire, “To Each His Chimera,” 9–10. 26. Baudelaire, Correspondance, vol. 1, ed. Claude Pichois and Jean Ziegler, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1975–76), 188. 27. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011). 28. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 45. 29. Baudelaire, “To Each His Chimera,” 10. 30. Baudelaire, “The Stranger,” in The Parisian Prowler, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 1. 31. Jacques Lacan, “Le Séminaire, livre XXI: Les non-dupes errent, 1973– 74.” Unpublished. “Les non-dupes errent” is a pun on “Les Noms-du-Père” (the Names-of-the-Father). 32. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 517. 33. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 2000), 323. In “Les non-dupes errent,” Lacan addresses the analysts and the academic in his seminar about the lure and trappings of religious ideology: “I know quite well you’re not believers, right? But you are all the more conned, because even if you aren’t believers . . . you believe. I’m not saying that you assume it: it assumes you” (qtd. in Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 73). 34. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 15.

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35. Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc J. D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 116. 36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching,” Diacritics 32, no. 3–4 (2002): 23. 37. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 17. Felski urges theorists, devoted and active practitioners of critique, to democratize their craft, to “de-essentialize the practice of suspicious reading by disinvesting it of presumptions of inherent rigor or intrinsic radicalism—thereby freeing up literary studies to embrace a wider range of affective styles and modes of argument” (Felski, The Limits of Critique, 3). See also her coedited volume with Elizabeth S. Anker, Critique and Postcritique (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017). 38. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 (2009): 2. 39. Qtd. in Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 32. 40. Nicole Simek, “On Data, Givens, and Generosity,” symplokē 24, nos. 1–2 (2016): 467. 41. Ellen Rooney, “Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form,” Differences 21, no. 3 (2010): 116. 42. For the proponents of symptomatic or deep reading, “professional literary criticism [is] a strenuous and heroic endeavor, one more akin to activism and labor than to leisure, and therefore fully deserving of remuneration” (Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 5–6). 43. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 5–6, 4. 44. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 11. 45. The descriptive turn in literary studies reorients the reader’s attention back to the text; as Heather Love observes, the object no longer “depend[s] on the ethical exemplarity of the interpreter or messenger” (Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41 [2010]: 375). 46. In his immensely influential The Political Unconscious, Jameson foregrounds “the political perspective” as “the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation” of literary texts (Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981], 17). 47. Felski, The Limits of Critique 6, 156. See also Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–52. 48. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 107. 49. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 173, 185. Even Donna J. Haraway—who is by no means unsympathetic to theory, Marxism, or deconstruction—concedes too much to Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” which she describes as “a major landmark in our understanding of the corrosive, self-certain, and self-contained traps of nothing-but-critique” (Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016], 178n.32; see also Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe, “Companions in Conversation,” in Manifestly Haraway: The Cyborg Manifesto, The Companion Species Manifesto, Companions in Conversation (with Cary Wolfe) [Minneapolis:

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University of Minnesota Press, 2016], 211). Again, nothing prevents critique from “cultivating response-ability” (Haraway’s push for “tentacular thinking,” for a more inclusive—that is, not limited to humans—form of engagement with the world [Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 30–57]). The formulation “nothingbut-critique” decides in advance what critique is and does (can do), foreclosing the possibility of a hesitating critique, that is, a critique otherwise than exhaustive and masterful. 50. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 149. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003); and Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, eds., Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 51. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 36. Felski basically repeats Ricoeur’s silencing of skepticism. 52. Nicole Anderson, “Auto (Immunity): Evolutions of Otherness,” Parallax 23, no. 1 (2017): 103. 53. As Carolyn Lesjak puts it, if surface readers are justified in their objections to the Marxist neglect of surfaces, “what is needed is a better way of reading surfaces . . . more interpretation, more dialectical complexity, a more rather than less invested critical position” (Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55, no. 2 [2013]: 251). 54. From a personal communication to Herbert Dreyfus; qtd. in Herbert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, eds., Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 187. 55. Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 188. 56. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 231–32. 57. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 33. 58. “The contemporary era constantly proclaims itself as post-ideological, but this denial of ideology only provides the ultimate proof that we are more than ever embedded in ideology” (Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce [New York: Verso, 2009], 37). 59. Žižek, Violence, 168. Žižek is alluding to Freud’s use of the following line from book 7 of the Aeneid: “If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions [flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo],” qtd. as the epigraph to his first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953– 74), ix. 60. Slavoj Žižek, “Return of the Natives,” New Statesman, March 4, 2010, emphasis added, http://www.newstatesman.com/film/2010/03/avatar-reality-love -couple-sex. 61. Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, in What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 386. In “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault describes the labor of critique as “work on our limits, that is, a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty” (Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Catherine Porter [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 50). This type of critique

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“will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think” (Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 46). 62. Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (New York: Verso, 2007), 94–95. 63. The U.K. riots of August 2011, sparked by the suspicious police shooting of Mark Duggan, replicated for Žižek the outbursts of frustration witnessed in Paris in 2005. As with the earlier riots, Žižek underscores their hermeneutic challenge, their irreducibility to the already known: “There was an irony in watching the sociologists, intellectuals, and commentators trying to understand and to help. Trying desperately to translate the protests back into their familiar language, they only succeeded in obfuscating the key enigma the riots represented” (Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously [New York: Verso, 2012], 54). 64. See http://riotsfrance.ssrc.org/, a website devoted to the 2005 Paris riots. 65. Qtd. in Žižek, Violence, 77. 66. Žižek, Violence, 1–2. 67. Žižek, Violence, 2. 68. Peter Hitchcock, “Revolutionary Violence: A Critique,” symplokē 20, nos. 1–2 (2012): 16. 69. Žižek, Violence, 3–4. 70. As Paul A. Taylor insightfully observes: “The media is symbolically most violent when it presents itself as a neutral conduit for reporting actual physical violence like the banlieues riots. That explicit subjective violence is presented with a misleading sense of urgency. Misleading because the very urgency with which you the viewer/listener are asked to respond is the very thing that will prevent you from recognizing the causes (objective violence) of the scenario you are witnessing” (Paul A. Taylor, Žižek and the Media [Cambridge: Polity, 2010], 179). 71. Žižek, Violence, 76. 72. Žižek, Violence, 75. 73. Žižek, Violence, 188. 74. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans. Mario Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 207. 75. Žižek, Violence, 76. 76. In the words of Lacan, the rioters as subjects were not “entirely transformed by the act” (qtd. in Ed Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject [New York: SUNY Press, 2007], 102). 77. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 44. 78. Žižek, On Belief, 85. 79. Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! 152–53. 80. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 169. 81. See Yannis Stavrakakis, “The Lure of Antigone: Aporias of an Ethics of the Political,” Umbr(a) (2003): 117–29; Stavrakakis, “On Acts, Pure and Impure,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 4, no. 2 (2010): 1–35; Slavoj Žižek, “ ‘What Some Would Call . . .’: A Response to Yannis Stavrakakis,” Umbr(a) 1 (2003): 131–35. 82. Adrian Johnston, “The Cynic’s Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 9, no. 3 (2004): 275.

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83. Žižek, “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters” (2005), http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance.htm. 84. Žižek, Violence, 75, 76. 85. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2010), 16, emphasis added. 86. Žižek, Violence, 78. 87. Žižek, Violence, 78. 88. Žižek, Violence, 148. 89. Žižek, Violence, 152. 90. Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, 60. 91. Žižek, The Parallax View, 13. 92. Slavoj Žižek, The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously (New York: Allen Lane, 2017), 186. 93. Žižek, Violence, 152. 94. Žižek, Violence, 153. See Todd McGowan, “The Bankruptcy Historicism: Introducing Disruption into Literary Studies,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek, ed. Russell Sbriglia (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 89–106. 95. Slavoj Žižek, Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005), 5. 96. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 142. 97. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 17–18. 98. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 23, 24. 99. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 24. 100. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 24. 101. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 144. 102. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 144. 103. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 321. Henceforth, references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text. 104. Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 170. 105. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 146. 106. Žižek’s account of an autonomous Sethe also jars with Žižek’s own reading of black facticity in Violence. While defending Simone de Beauvoir from a recent detractor who objected to Beauvoir’s comments about the “inferiority” of blacks, Žižek writes: “But her critical solution, propelled by the care to avoid racist claims on the factual inferiority of blacks, is to relativise their inferiority into a matter of interpretation and judgement by white racists, and distance it from the question of their very being” (Žižek, Violence, 72). To be sure, facticity is not destiny—ideology is not all. But Žižek seems to ignore his own critical insight and falls prey to the belief that “racist discourse” does not affect Sethe’s “very core of being,” and that she “can (and do[es]) resist as [a] free autonomous agent through [her] acts, dreams, and projects” (72). 107. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 144. 108. Similarly, Todd McGowan observes: “Morrison creates a narrative designed to deliver a traumatic shock to the reader, and this trauma resides in the eruption of the impossible as possible. When confronted with returning to the horror of slavery, Sethe makes an impossible choice: killing her daughter.

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Morrison’s novel shows the appropriateness of this act, and its positive depiction in the novel forces the reader to confront the possibility of the impossible act in the contemporary world” (McGowan, “The Bankruptcy Historicism,” 100). 109. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, 171. 110. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, 170. 111. Spivak, An Aesthetic Education, 170. 112. As James Phelan observes, “Sethe’s telling [of the infanticide] isn’t definitive because it erases the horror of her murdering her child under its talk of motivations (love) and purpose (safety)” (James Phelan “Sethe’s Choice: Beloved and the Ethics of Reading,” Style 32, no. 2 [1998]: 327). 113. Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 384. 114. Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 385. 115. Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 385–86. 116. Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 386. 117. Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 375, 386. 118. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi problematizes an absolute division between the guilty and innocent when discussing the complicity and collaboration of some victims with their aggressors in concentration camps. Though he acknowledges that there is culpability in their behavior, he warns against “hasty moral judgments” and “know[s] of no human tribunal to which one could delegate the judgment” (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal [New York: Random House, 1989], 44). 119. Butler, Frames of War, 25–26. 120. Baby Suggs displays what Dominick LaCapra calls “desirable empathy,” an empathy that “involves not full identification but what might be termed empathic unsettlement in the face of the traumatic limit events. . . . It involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognizing the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place” (Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], 102, 78). 121. Derrida, “Hospitality, Justice and Responsibility,” 66. Chapter 3 epigraphs: Paul de Man, “An Interview with Robert Moynihan,” in The Paul de Man Notebooks, ed. Martin McQuillan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 153; Žižek, Violence, 87. 1. Paul de Man, “The Concept of Irony,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 181. 2. De Man, “The Concept of Irony,” 179. 3. J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 178. 4. Friedrich Schlegel, “On Incomprehensibility,” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 32–40. 5. De Man, “The Concept of Irony,” 166. 6. De Man, “An Interview with Robert Moynihan,” 154. 7. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), 24.

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8. Edelman, No Future, 23. 9. Philosophy, for example, tends to read “Socratic irony” as “saying something but meaning its contrary.” But as Alexander Nehamas points out, this interpretation minimizes Socrates’s enigmatic quality, reducing our understanding of Socratic irony by evacuating the complexity of what Socrates actually says (Nehamas, The Art of Living, 51). 10. Derrida, Rogues, 123. In the same vein, Kevin Newmark generalizes about irony’s “deviant grammar,” its stubborn refusal to conform to a thesis-centered discourse: “Irony is a kind of language that speaks without obeying the laws dictated to it by philosophical meaning” (Kevin Newmark, Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man [New York: Fordham University Press, 2012], 50). 11. Jacques Lacan, “The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 334–66, 336. 12. Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., vol. 17 (London: Hogarth, 195), 141. 13. Adrian Johnston, “Guilt and the Feel of Feeling: Toward a New Conception of Affects,” in Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, by Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 83. See also Jacques Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 671–702. 14. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 34. For Spinoza, the notion of conatus denotes each thing’s inherent tendency toward self-preservation and activity: “Each thing, insofar as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being” (Spinoza, The Essential Spinoza: Ethics and Related Writings, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley [Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2006], 66). 15. Žižek, however, does insist that the death drive has “philosophical dignity” and tries to read it back into German idealism and its notion of subjectivity as a “self-relating negativity” (Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 61). But such a reading is met with resistance from within philosophy. Take, for example, Robert Pippin, who, in his review essay of Less Than Nothing, complains about Žižek’s “gappy ontology” in his characterization of Hegel (Robert Pippin, “Back to Hegel?” Mediations 26, nos. 1–2 [fall 2012–spring 2013]: 12). 16. Žižek’s critique of Spinoza follows a radically different path than the one Levinas lays out: “In the conatus essendi, which is the effort to exist, existence is the supreme law. However, with the appearance of the face on the inter-personal level, the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ emerges as a limitation of the conatus essendi. It is not a rational limit. Consequently, interpreting it necessitates thinking it in moral terms, in ethical terms. It must be thought of outside the idea of force” (Levinas, “The Paradox of Morality: An Interview with Emmanuel Levinas,” in The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood [London: Routledge, 1988], 175).

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17. See Leo Bersani’s introduction to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (Leo Bersani, introduction to Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud [London: Penguin, 2002], vii–xxii). 18. In “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida refers to “this death drive that is silently at work in every community, every auto-co-immunity, constituting it in truth as such in its iterability, its heritage, its spectral tradition. Community as common auto-immunity: no community [is possible] that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival” (Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87). 19. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 67. 20. For Derrida, the compulsion to repetition “remains . . . indissociable from the death drive” (Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], 11–12). Similarly, Todd McGowan points out that “Freud makes no explicit distinction between repetition compulsion and the death drive even as he shifts from one to the other. In light of this structure, one can see the concept of the death drive as Freud’s way of theorizing repetition compulsion rather than as an altogether new concept. If one doesn’t read it this way, the death drive seems to emerge out of thin air, since none of the examples with which Freud begins the book involve seeking out death itself” (Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013], 295n.26). For a sustained engagement with Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, see also Derrida, Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 21. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 3. 22. Martin Hägglund downplays the transgressiveness of Freud’s death drive, seeing it, in fact, as wholly compatible with the pleasure principle: “The aim of the pleasure principle is thus inseparable from the aim of what Freud calls the death drive. The death drive seeks to restore the living organism to a supposed primordial state of total equilibrium, which is exactly the aim of the pleasure principle. As Freud himself points out, both the pleasure principle and the death drive operate in accordance with ‘the most universal striving of all living substance— namely to return to the quiescence of the inorganic world’ ” (Martin Hägglund, “On Chronolibido: A Response to Rabaté and Johnston,” Derrida Today 6, no. 2 [2013]: 191). This objection, however, is more difficult to uphold once the death drive is disassociated from the principle of Nirvana, which, as we shall see above, is the avenue taken by Lacan and post-Lacanian theorists like Žižek. 23. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 106. 24. Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 232–33. Heinz Hartmann considered the death drive of limited value, since it was based on “biological speculation” (Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation [1939], 11), while Eric Fromm deemed Freud’s account unbalanced and totalizing: “The assumption of the death-instinct is satisfactory inasmuch as it takes into consideration the full weight of destructive tendencies, which had been neglected in Freud’s earlier theories. But it is not satisfactory inasmuch as it resorts to a biological explanation that fails to

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take account sufficiently of the fact that the amount of destructiveness varies enormously among individuals and social groups” (Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom [New York: Henry Holt, 1969], 180–81). Fromm did not see the death drive as an implacable reality but as something that could be neutralized, if not overcome, by the life drive. 25. In “A Critique of the Death Instinct,” Otto Fenichel also objected to the biological reductionism implicit in the death drive: “Such an interpretation would mean a total elimination of the social factor from the etiology of neuroses, and would amount to a complete biologization of neurosis” (Otto Fenichel, “A Critique of the Death Instinct,” in The Collected Papers of Otto Fenichel: First Series [New York: Norton, 1953], 370–71). This contrasts with the understanding of neuroses as being “generated by disturbances in human relationships,” as Karen Horney argued (Karen Horney, Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis [New York: Norton, 1945], 12). 26. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 235. Marcuse can be seen as historicizing the eternal antagonism between Eros and Thanatos that Freud evokes in the ending to Civilization and Its Discontents: “And now it is to be expected that the other of the two ‘Heavenly Powers,’ eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can foresee with what success and with what result” (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey [New York: Norton, 1961], 112). 27. As McGowan observes, “by eliminating the repression of eros, a society lessens the aggression that subjects experience because much of this aggression arises in response to a lack of erotic satisfaction, though this aggression would not disappear altogether” (McGowan, Enjoying What We Don’t Have, 12). 28. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 261. 29. The English translation of Freud’s Todestrieb as “death instinct” undoubtedly overstressed the concept’s biologism. But, as Jean-Michel Rabaté points out, Lacan was adamant that “one should not talk of a ‘death instinct’ but of a ‘death drive.’ His philological precision differentiating Freud’s Trieb from his lingering Darwinism had a critical agenda. It attacked the second-generation Freudians who had dropped the idea of a ‘death drive,’ who had blamed it on what they took as Freud’s innate pessimism, his tragic view of life” (Jean-Michel Rabaté, Crimes of the Future: Theory and Its Global Reproduction [New York: Bloomsbury, 2014], 129). 30. Lacan, “The Subversion of the Subject,” 681. 31. Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 53. 32. The ontological status of das Ding is a slippery issue. Lacan asserts the existence of a primordial jouissance, a scene of unity and plenitude. In the beginning, prior to any subject/object distinction, the child is said to experience the mother directly (in the fusion of the child and the mother’s breast) as a pure satisfaction. After the formation of subjectivity such an experience becomes unrepeatable: all we have access to are partial objects, with partial satisfaction. For Žižek and

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others, however, matters look more complicated after the entry into the Symbolic, “after the letter,” as Bruce Fink puts it (Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995], 27). Žižek cautions against “substantializing” das Ding, and foregrounds the role of language in our conceptualization of das Ding, seeing it thus as an effect or fiction of the Symbolic: “What we experience as ‘reality’ discloses itself against the background of the lack, of the absence of it, of the Thing, of the mythical object whose encounter would bring about the full satisfaction of the drive. This lack of the Thing constitutive of ‘reality’ is therefore, in its fundamental dimension, not epistemological, but rather pertains to the paradoxical logic of desire—the paradox being that this Thing is retroactively produced by the very process of symbolization, i.e., that it emerges from the very gesture of its loss. In other (Hegel’s) words, there is nothing—no positive substantial entity—behind the phenomenal curtain, only the gaze whose phantasmagorias assume different shapes of the Thing” (Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993], 37). William Egginton and Yannis Stavrakakis also make a similar point: “Das Ding is . . . the product of a retroactive abstraction from the phenomenal world” (William Egginton, Perversity and Ethics [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005], 42), and “no doubt, it is common sense to think that something was there before exclusion, otherwise exclusion would make no sense at all; the only problem is that we can’t really know what it was. To think that it [the Thing] was a state of fullness is a retroactively produced fiction” (Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political [New York: Routledge, 1999], 43–44). 33. Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 132. 34. “What is supposed to be found cannot be found again. . . . It is to be found at the most as something missed. One doesn’t find it, but only its pleasurable associations” (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 53). 35. Slavoj Žižek, “Unbehagen and the Subject: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek,” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 15 (2010): 422. 36. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 4–5. 37. The death drive does not entail “literal fixations upon death per se, but the insistent demand for an absolute enjoyment, a demand without consideration for the welfare of either the ego or the physical organism housing these drives” (Adrian Johnson, Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive [Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2005], 238). 38. Žižek, The Parallax View, 62. 39. Žižek, The Parallax View, 62. 40. Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 183. 41. Stendhal, Red and Black, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1969), 25. Henceforth, references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text. 42. Julien’s transmutation from a poor peasant to a prestigious member of the nobility is not instantaneous but takes place in several stages. First, Julien’s duel with the chevalier de Beauvoisis puts into motion the drastic transformation of Julien’s identity. In an attempt to protect his aristocratic status—since he cannot be interpreted as having dueled with a mere commoner—the chevalier

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of Beauvoisis reconfigures Julien’s paternal origins. Likewise, the Marquis de La Mole helps in (re)making Julien’s identity when he offers him the symbolic blue uniform of the aristocracy. His transformation reaches its apogee when the Marquis de La Mole confers a new identity on Julien by renaming him “M. le chevalier Julien Sorel de la Vernaye” (490) in what amounts to a bewildering onomastic metamorphosis: “The change in name struck him with wonder” (359). 43. Elizabeth Brody Tenenbaum, The Problematic Self: Approaches to Identity in Stendhal, D. H. Lawrence, and Malraux (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 11, emphasis added. 44. Victor Brombert, The Romantic Prison: The French Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 97, 98. 45. Sandy Petrey, “Julienned Identities,” in Approaches to Teaching Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, ed. Dean de la Motte and Stirling Haig (New York: MLA, 1999), 128. 46. Petrey, “Julienned Identities,” 129. Contrary to Petrey, I do not divide Julien’s relation to identity into three different phases: first, Julien the hypocrite (a master performer, one who effectively manipulates the signs around him—Julien at the Seminary); second, Julien the interpellated subject of aristocracy—Julien as the Chevalier de La Vernaye; third, Julien as he is—Julien in his cell (Petrey). The dynamics of the death drive complicate such a division while still allowing for the radical fluctuations in Julien’s identity. 47. Žižek, The Parallax View, 62. 48. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 179. 49. Mathilde vacillates in her opinion of Julien as a revolutionary subject, as a new Danton. We first read: “Good lord, is he going to be another Danton, said Mathilde to herself; but he has a noble expression, and that Danton was so horribly ugly, I suppose he was a butcher” (234), while later she contemplates this same parallel with admiration, seeing in it “the highest possible praise” (253): “Could he become another Danton? she added, after a long, vague reverie” (253). Mathilde is fascinated with the idea of Julien as a heroic figure, someone capable of complementing her own heroic aspirations: “The wars of the League were the heroic days of France . . . I love that century” (245–46). In stark contrast, Mme de Rênal, who is worrying about the well-being of her children, expresses a profound concern regarding the future of her class in light of a revolution: “If there is a new revolution, the aristocrats will have their throats cut” (126). And rather than seeing Julien as a quasi-heroic figure, she asks him to take care of her children if something tragic were to happen to her. 50. From a Lacanian perspective, Julien’s withdrawal must be qualified, since to be fully withdrawn from the Symbolic, to deny or “foreclose” the Name-ofthe-Father entails psychosis (see Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg [New York: Norton, 1993]). This is clearly not the case with Julien. Julien is not psychotic; he remains quite lucid and cognizant of his surroundings in the prison cell. Nevertheless, Julien does come to question the authority of the Symbolic, lessening its pull on him. As Christopher Prendergast observes, “the prison represents above all a withdrawal from the Other . . . , a withdrawal from the communicative situation and hence from the language of social exchange [a move away from the Symbolic]” (138). Prendergast speculates further about “the implications of

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that withdrawal for Julien’s attitude to language itself” (138), and suggests that “the refusal of the world is also in part refusal of the word [a return to the Imaginary]” (Prendergast, The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 138). 51. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, 121. 52. In The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan links the figure of the mother to das Ding: “the maternal thing, of the mother, insofar as she occupies the place of that thing, of das Ding” (Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 67). 53. Žižek, Violence, 87. 54. Žižek, Violence, 87. 55. Julien’s unruly emotions ironically can momentarily transform Julien the atheist into a fervent soldier of God. After having been moved by the display of religious conviction in a church, the narrator discloses Julien’s inner thoughts: “At that moment he would have fought for the Inquisition, and with full conviction [de bonne foi]” (86, emphasis added). Julien’s affective dispositions—the unpredictability of his psychic attachments—threaten to disrupt the ideal of homeostasis. 56. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for the Self,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 282. 57. Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 200. 58. Žižek, The Parallax View, 231. 59. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 1991), 206. 60. “Thanks to ‘the death drive’ (as disruptive negativity), the human individual isn’t entirely enslaved to tyranny of the pragmatic-utilitarian economy of well-being, to a happiness thrust forward by the twin authorities of the pleasure and reality principles” (Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology, 185). 61. Hägglund, Dying for Time, 9. 62. Hägglund, Dying for Time, 152. 63. As Foucault famously put it, “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: Vintage Books, 1977], 194). 64. Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (New York: Verso, 2013), 46. 65. Rancière, Aisthesis, 44. 66. Rancière, Aisthesis, 46. 67. “Such happiness can be summarized in a simple formula: to enjoy the quality of sensible experience that one reaches when one stops calculating, wanting and waiting, as soon as one resolves to do nothing” (Rancière, Aisthesis, 44). 68. “Otium is specifically the time when one is expecting nothing, precisely the kind of time that is forbidden to the plebeian, whom the anxiety of emerging from his condition always condemns to waiting for the effect of chance or intrigue” (Rancière, Aisthesis, 46). 69. Joseph J. Tanke, “Why Julien Sorel Had to Be Killed,” in Rancière Now: Current Perspectives on Jacques Rancière, ed. Oliver Davis (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 136.

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70. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York: Verso, 2009), 103. 71. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 29, 28. 72. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004). 73. Jeremy F. Lane, “Emancipation from Work or Emancipation through Work? Aesthetics of Work and Idleness in Recent French Thought,” Nottingham French Studies 55, no. 1 (2016): 86. 74. Rancière, Aisthesis, 46. 75. Rancière, Aisthesis, 44. 76. Tanke, “Why Julien Sorel Had to Be Killed,” 123. 77. Tanke, “Why Julien Sorel Had to Be Killed,” 140. 78. At the trial, Julien stresses his class difference, politicizing his case, assuming his “natural” identity as a revolted peasant: “Gentlemen, I have not the honor to belong to your social class, you see in me a peasant in open revolt against his humble station” (387). This is tantamount to suicide; “his speech amounts,” as Juliet Flower MacCannell notes, “to a denunciation of their unholy alliance [church, nobility, bourgeoisie] and a pronouncement of his own death sentence” (Juliet Flower MacCannell, “How Julien Loses His Head; or, Stendhal and the Politics of the Imaginary,” in Approaches to Teaching Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, ed. Dean de la Motte and Stirling Haig [New York: MLA, 1999], 78). 79. For Georg Lukács, Julien, lacking a political solution to his alienation, chooses suicide; he preserves his “mental and moral integrity from the taint of [his] time by escaping from life” (Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism [New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964], 73). See Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 200. 80. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 95. 81. Alenka Zupančič, “Realism in Psychoanalysis,” Jep European Journal of Psychoanalysis 32 (2011): 33. 82. Tanke, “Why Julien Sorel Had to Be Killed,” 124. 83. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Noonday, 1975), 64–65. 84. Derrida, Rogues, 45. 85. Hägglund, Dying for Time, 88. 86. See Michael Naas, The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 58–60. 87. Hägglund, Dying for Time, 22. 88. Edelman, No Future, 25. 89. Edelman, No Future, 25. Chapter 4 epigraphs: Marguerite Duras, Dits à la télévision, entretiens avec Pierre Dumayet (Paris: E.P.E.L., 1999), 17, my translation; Julia Kristeva interviewed in Alice Jardine and Anne M. Menke, eds., Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 117.

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1. Julia Kristeva, “Psychoanalysis and the Polis,” Critical Inquiry 9 (1982): 81. In this same essay, Kristeva also asserts her hermeneutic preference for psychoanalysis over deconstruction. Unlike the latter, whose skeptical propensities undermine the very labor of interpretation by doing away with the subject/object distinction, the former occupies a more measured critical ethos: “The Freudian position on interpretation has the immense advantage of being midway between a classic interpretive attitude—that of providing meaning through the connection of two terms from a stable place and theory—and the questioning of the subjective and theoretical stability of the interpretant which, in the act of interpretation itself, establishes the theory and the interpreter himself as interpretable objects” (Kristeva, “Psychoanalysis and the Polis,” 81). 2. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 154. 3. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 747. 4. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 741. 5. Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 231. 6. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 4. 7. For Cixous’s discussion of “écriture féminine,” see her feminist manifesto, “The Laughter of the Medusa,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93. Cixous herself names male authors—James Joyce and Jean Genet, for example—as performing feminine writing. 8. Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” 13. 9. Cixous, “The Laughter of the Medusa,” 880. 10. Verena Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 57. 11. The English translation inexplicably eliminates the middle initial “V.” from the title. 12. Jacques Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras, on Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” in Critical Essays on Marguerite Duras, ed. Bettina L. Knapp (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 18. 13. Qtd. in Judith Ryan, The Novel after Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 88. 14. Marguerite Duras and Xaviere Gauthier, Woman to Woman, trans. Katharine A. Jensen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 117. 15. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 283. See Bonnie Mann and Martina Ferrari’s edited volume, “On ne naît pas femme: on le deviant . . .”: The Life of a Sentence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 16. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 765. 17. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 6. 18. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 12–13. 19. Francis Jeanson, Simone de Beauvoir ou l’entreprise de vivre (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 235, my translation. 20. Luce Irigaray, Democracy Begins between Two, trans. K. Anderson (London: Athlone, 2000), 125. 21. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984), 18.

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22. Luce Irigaray, The Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluháček (London: Continuum, 2002), 106. 23. Luce Irigaray, Elemental Passions (London: Continuum, 1992), 3. 24. Luce Irigaray, I Love to You: Sketch of a Possible Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996), 62. 25. Derrida’s deconstructive account of difference also informs the deployment of sexual difference among French feminists. As Elizabeth Grosz comments: “It is Derrida who demonstrated that difference exceeds opposition, dichotomy, or dualism and can never be adequately captured in any notion of identity or diversity (which is the proliferation of sameness or identity and by no means its overcoming or difference)” (Grosz, “Derrida and Feminism: A Remembrance,” differences 16, no. 3 [2005]: 90). 26. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 78. 27. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 123. 28. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 576. 29. Slavoj Žižek, “Woman Is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or How Not to Misread Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation,” Lacanian Ink 10 (1995), available at http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm. 30. Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1994), 116. 31. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 7. 32. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 90. 33. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 78. 34. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 29. 35. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 78. 36. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 74. 37. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 77. 38. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 121. 39. Julia Kristeva, “Interview—1974,” trans. Claire Pajaczkowska, m/f 5, no. 6 (1981): 166. 40. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 212. 41. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, 28. See Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, “Toward a Radical Female Imaginary: Temporality and Embodiment in Irigaray’s Ethics,” Diacritics 28, no. 1 (1998): 60–75. 42. Jardine and Menke, Shifting Scenes, 117. 43. Hélène Cixous, “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan D. Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 149. 44. Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” 45. 45. See Paul Allen Miller, “Lacan le con: Luce Tells Jacques Off,” Intertexts 9, no. 2 (2005): 139–51; Elizabeth Weed, “The Question of Style,” in Engaging with Irigaray, ed. Carolyn Burke, Naomi Senior, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 79–109. 46. Slavoj Žižek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act,” Lacanian Ink 14 (1999): 29. 47. Žižek, “Woman Is One of the Names-of-the-Father.”

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48. Žižek, “Woman Is One of the Names-of-the-Father.” 49. Žižek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act,” 29. 50. I am reminded of Frantz Fanon’s response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s lecture concerning the limitations of the négritude movement: “When I tried to claim my negritude intellectually as a concept, they snatched it away from me. They proved to me that my reasoning was nothing but a phase in the dialectic” (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox [New York: Grove, 2008], 111). Sartre’s cold dialectical reading of négritude completely ignored the movement’s affective force, the utter joy “in the intellectualization of black existence” (Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 116). 51. Kristeva, “Interview—1974,” 166. 52. Luce Irigaray, To Speak Is Never Neutral, trans. Gail Swab (London: Continuum, 2002), 221. 53. Irigaray, To Speak Is Never Neutral, 221. 54. Slavoj Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference,” in Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Continuum, 2005), 323. 55. See Luce Irigaray, “Divine Women,” in French Feminists on Religion: A Reader, ed. Morny Joy, Kathleen O’Grady, and Judith L. Poxon (London: Routledge, 2002), 42; Marcus Pound, Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2008), 113. 56. Tim Dean, “Lacan and Queer Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 238–52, 244. 57. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 197–98. 58. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 198. 59. Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 97. 60. For a rich look at alternative metaphors for loss, see Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality. 61. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1988), 97. 62. Joan Copjec, “The Phenomenal Nonphenomenal: Private Space in Film Noir,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1993), 178. 63. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 110–11. 64. Andrea Margaret Hurst, Derrida vis-à-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 239. 65. Jardine and Menke, Shifting Scenes, 117. 66. Jardine and Menke, Shifting Scenes, 116. 67. Jardine and Menke, Shifting Scenes, 117. 68. Slavoj Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 140–41. 69. Qtd. in the introduction to The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 4.

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70. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 162. 71. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 140. 72. To be sure, Levinas does formulate the ethical encounter in the language of traumatism: “Persecution reduces the ego to the self, to the absolute accusative whereby the Ego is accused of a fault which it neither willed nor committed, and which disturbs its freedom. Persecution is a traumatism, violence par excellence, without warning, without a priori, without the possibility of apology, without logos” (Levinas, “Substitution,” in Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996], 183n.44). 73. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 143–44. 74. Emmanuel Levinas, “The I and the Totality,” in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 28. 75. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 161. 76. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 162. 77. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 162. 78. Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 71. 79. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, ed. Gaze and Voice as Love-Objects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 2. 80. Slavoj Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference,” in Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Continuum, 2005), 308. 81. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 74–75. Irigaray turns to Descartes’s The Passions of the Soul for her inspiration for wonder, yet her account, I would argue, recalls more strongly Montaigne’s Essays, in which its author discovers himself as an object of monstrous wonder, that is, astonishment. 82. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Ravishing Duras, or the Gift of Love,” in Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis and the Subject of Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 117. 83. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1966), 33. 84. Marguerite Duras, Practicalities, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Grove, 1987), 27. 85. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “Discussion avec Jean Alter, Renato Barilli, Joseph Duhamel, Françoise Gaillard, G. W. Ireland, Jean Ricardou, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Karlheinz Stierle,” in Nouveau Roman: Hier aujourd’hui, ed. Jean Ricardou (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1972), 128, my translation. 86. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 16. 87. Lacan posits himself in the position of the ravished reader (Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 17). 88. Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 4. Henceforth, references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text. 89. Marguerite Duras, Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977), 101, my translation. 90. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 18. 91. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 107.

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92. Renata Salecl, introduction to Sexuation, ed. Renata Salecl (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000), 8. 93. On Duras’s uses of the techniques of cinematography, see Elisabeth Lyon, “The Cinema of Lol V. Stein,” Camera Obscura 6 (1980): 6–41. 94. Kimberly Philpot van Noort, “The Dance of the Signifier: Jacques Lacan and Marguerite Duras’s Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” Symposium 51, no. 3 (1997): 191. 95. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 19. 96. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 19. 97. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 103. 98. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 17. According to Leslie Hill, Lacan’s privileging of Jacques Hold is gained at the expense of both Lol (who is “reduced to a kind of unseeing vacancy who may look but sees—and thus desires—nothing”) and Duras, “by largely ignoring the process of narration and constituting Jacques as a psychoanalytic subject” (Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires [London: Routledge, 1993], 71). I disagree with Hill here. Foregrounding Jacques Hold goes hand in hand with his problematization, through an attentiveness to the ways the novel subjects the narrator’s status as a subject supposed to know to close scrutiny, corroding its phantasmatic roots. 99. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 19. 100. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 107. 101. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 71. 102. Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54. 103. “Since sexuality is the domain in which we get closest to the intimacy of another human being, totally exposing ourselves to him or her, sexual enjoyment is real for Lacan: something traumatic in its breathtaking intensity, yet impossible in the sense that we cannot ever make sense of it. This is why a sexual relation, in order to function, has to be screened through some fantasy” (Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan [New York: Norton, 2006], 49). 104. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, 1955–1956, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 268. 105. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 19. 106. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 19. 107. Elizabeth Grosz, “Experimental Desire: Rethinking Queer Subjectivity,” in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (New York: Verso, 1994), 140. 108. See, for example, Karen McPherson, Incriminations: Guilty Women/Telling Stories (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 71; Martha Noel Evans, Masks of Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 131. 109. For examples: “what I have been able to imagine” (Duras, The Ravishing, 4); “Here is my opinion” (35); “I see this” (45). 110. While the novel never states Jacques’s profession, it hints that Jacques is a psychiatrist: “I’m thirty-six years old, a member of the medical profession. I’ve been living in South Tahla only for a year. I’m in Peter Beugner’s section at the State Hospital” (66). 111. Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” 46–47. 112. Martin Crowley, Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 78.

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Notes to Pages 117–119

113. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 135. 114. Duras, Dits à la télévision, 17. Elsewhere, Duras describes Lol as a paradigmatic model for all of her female characters: “All the women in my books, whatever their age, derive from Lol V. Stein. Derive, that is, from a kind of selfforgetting” (Duras, Practicalities, 27–28). 115. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 69. 116. Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Jack Halberstam are among the dominant voices within queer theory who argue for the desirability of pure transgression, for the resistance to any form of normativity (including homonormativity). Tempering such an emphasis on negativity’s destructive character, or what has been called the “antisocial thesis” in queer theory, Sara Ahmed and other queer/feminist theorists contest the framing of the problem as a simple choice between “assimilation or transgression” (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 155), and seek alternative ways to harness the powers of the negative without evacuating agency, creativity, and relationality. Our emphasis on autoimmunity’s dual aspects—its destructive and creative paths—situates us closer to the latter wing or current in queer theory. See Edelman, No Future; Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure; Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 197–222; Lynne Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); and Mari Ruti, Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017). 117. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 155. 118. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 41. 119. See Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Queer Turn in Feminism: Identities, Sexualities, and the Theater of Gender (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 120. Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 242. 121. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), 164. 122. “And the subject, while he may appear to be the slave of language, is still more the slave of a discourse in the universal movement of which his place is already inscribed at his birth, if only in the form of his proper name” (Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter,” 414). 123. Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, 71, 144. “There is no automatic, unmediated, or untroubled connection between sexual partners, whether of the same or the opposite sex” (Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, “Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis: An Introduction,” in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 26). 124. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the AvantGarde (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 114. 125. Emma Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 182. 126. Lacan, “Homage to Marguerite Duras,” 20. Lacan’s injunction jars with what he reportedly shared with Duras after a meeting with her: “Lacan had me meet him one night in a bar at midnight. He frightened me. In a bar in a basement. To talk to me about Lol V. Stein. He told me that it was a clinically

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perfect delirium” (Duras, Destroy, She Said, trans. Barbara Bray [New York: Grove, 1970], 129). By arguing against the “pathos of understanding” and for “a clinically perfect delirium,” Lacan appears either to be hedging his bets or counterbalancing his own inclinations toward a hermeneutics of containment. 127. The Ravishing of Lol Stein begins what has been dubbed Duras’s “India cycle,” which includes two other novels, The Vice-Consul and L’Amour, along with three films, La Femme du Gange, India Song, and Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Desert. By obliquely reworking the material of the first novel—the scene of betrayal at the ball—the “India cycle” prolongs the incompleteness of The Ravishing of Lol Stein. As Judith Ryan notes, “Duras’s entire ‘India cycle’ can be understood as an undoing of the fiction of stable identity. In these works . . . outlines that have almost begun to coalesce are repeatedly shattered into multiple versions” (Judith Ryan, The Novel after Theory, 85). 128. Duras, Dits à la télévision, 17. 129. Žižek, “The Real of Sexual Difference,” 308. 130. Luce Irigaray, Conversations (London: Continuum, 2008), 160. 131. Salecl and Žižek, Gaze and Voice as Love-Objects, 3. Chapter 5 epigraphs: Derrida, Paper Machine, 96. Quentin Meillassoux, “Interview with Quentin Meillassoux (August 2010),” trans. Graham Harman, in Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, by Graham Harman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 166. 1. Susan Hekman sums up clearly this commonplace, albeit erroneous, reading of Derrida and the linguistic turn: “Derrida’s concern is exclusively with language—its ‘difference,’ its deconstruction, the play of language in writing and speech, the death of ‘man.’ But at several points in his work Derrida turned his attention to the ethical/political realm, applying his deconstructive theory to these spheres.” And yet, she continues, “nowhere in any of these discussions is there any reference to the real, material consequences of these political concepts or to the political world that they inhabit. True to his deconstructive theory, Derrida’s text does not venture beyond the linguistic” (Susan Hekman, “We Have Never Been Postmodern: Latour, Foucault and the Material of Knowledge,” Contemporary Political Theory 8, no. 4 [2009]: 436). 2. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 3. 3. See Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006). 4. For Cary Wolfe, posthumanism “challenge[s] the ontological and ethical divide between humans and nonhumans” (Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010], 62). Nonhuman others— such as plants, animals, and machines—share the same ontological playing field as humans. 5. “There is no such thing as a ‘pure’ description, since every description entails an interpretation of some kind” (Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 380). 6. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 7.

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7. Peter Hallward, “Anything Is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 131. 8. Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 184. 9. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5. Meillassoux elaborates further on his concept: “Correlationism rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X. If you speak about something, you speak about something that is given to you, and posited by you. Consequently, the sentence: ‘X is’ means: ‘X is the correlate of thinking’ in a Cartesian sense. That is: X is the correlate of an affection, or a perception, or a conception, or of any subjective act. To be is to be a correlate, a term of a correlation. And in particular, when you claim to think any X, you must posit this X, which cannot then be separated from this special act of positing, of conception. That is why it is impossible to conceive an absolute X, i.e., an X which would be essentially separate from a subject. We can’t know what the reality of the object in itself is because we can’t distinguish between properties which are supposed to belong to the object and properties belonging to the subjective access to the object” (Meillassoux, “Speculative Realism: Presentation by Quentin Meillassoux,” Collapse 3 [2007]: 409). 10. Meillassoux distinguishes between two forms of correlationism: a weak version and a strong one. Weak correlationism rules out knowledge of the noumenal real, of the in-itself, yet without dismissing its thinkability. Strong correlationism excludes the possibility of even its thinkability: “According to Kant, we know a priori that the thing-in-itself is non-contradictory and that it actually exists. By way of contrast, the strong model of correlationism maintains not only that it is illegitimate to claim that we can know the in-itself, but also that it is illegitimate to claim that we can at least think it” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 35). 11. Meillassoux decries a certain fetishization of the prefix “co-” from Kant to Derrida: “The ‘co-’ (of co-givenness, of co-relation, of the co-originary, of copresence, etc.) is the grammatical particle that dominates modern philosophy, its veritable ‘chemical formula.’ Thus, one could say that up until Kant, one of the principal problems of philosophy was to think substance, while ever since Kant, it has consisted in trying to think the correlation” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5–6). 12. Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of ObjectOriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (2011): 169. 13. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 7. 14. The expression “transparent cage” belongs to Francis Wolff, whom Meillassoux quotes favorably in After Finitude: “We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out” (7). 15. Lee Braver, “On Not Settling the Issue of Realism,” Speculations 4 (2013): 11. 16. John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 188. 17. Starting with phenomenology, Continental philosophy treated the realism/ anti-realism problem as “a pseudo-problem” (Harman, Quentin Meillassoux,

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7)—a problem that would disappear once we began asking the right kinds of questions. Meillassoux reframed the question of realism as a legitimate if not mandatory philosophical topic again. 18. Graham Harman, a leading figure in both speculative realism and objectoriented ontology, describes the differences between the two in the following ways: “The two central features of correlationism are (a) the priority of the human-world relation over all others and (b) the finitude of human knowledge. What is interesting is that Meillassoux rejects (b) but preserves (a), while objectoriented ontology rejects (a) but preserves (b). That is to say, Meillassoux’s obsession is with finding some way to bring back absolute knowledge, the ability to know a thing exhaustively” (Harman, “Another Response to Shaviro,” in The Allure of Things: Process and Object in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Roland Faber and Andrew Goffey [New York: Bloomsbury, 2014], 39). The opponents of correlationism, despite their internal differences, “seek to elaborate new ways of grasping the world, outside of anthropocentric paradigms and grounded in a firm commitment to realism” (Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014], 11). 19. Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Open Humanities, 2011), 51. Similarly, Shaviro observes: “Epistemology must be deprivileged, because we cannot subordinate things themselves to our experiences of them. I do not come to know a world of things outside myself. Rather, I discover—which is to say I feel—that I myself, together with things that go beyond my knowledge of them, are all alike inhabitants of a ‘common world’ ” (Shaviro, The Universe of Things, 3). 20. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 31. 21. For example, Iain Hamilton Grant rejects “the linguistic idealism that represents ‘nature’ as determined solely in and for language” (Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling [London: Continuum, 2008], 15). 22. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 115. 23. Derrida, Rogues, 150–51. 24. Correlationism is obviously not limited to the thought/being opposition but conditions a series of binary formulations. It is “the philosopheme according to which the human and the non-human, society and nature, mind and world, can only be understood as reciprocally correlated, mutually interdependent poles of a fundamental relation” (Ray Brassier, “Concepts and Objects,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman [Melbourne: re.press, 2011], 53). 25. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). 26. This sentiment is shared by the editors of The Speculative Turn, for whom “ ‘the Speculative Turn’ ” functions “as a deliberate counterpoint to the now tiresome ‘Linguistic Turn’ ” (“Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” 1). The “activity of ‘speculation’ . . . aims at something ‘beyond’ the critical and linguistic turns. As such, it recuperates the pre-critical sense of ‘speculation’ as a concern with the Absolute, while also taking into account the undeniable progress that is due to the labour of critique. The works collected here are a speculative wager on

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the possible returns from a renewed attention to reality itself” (3). Bruno Latour echoes this sentiment as well: “Are you not fed up at finding yourselves forever locked into language alone . . . ? We want to gain access to things themselves, not only to their phenomena. The real is not remote; rather, it is accessible in all the objects mobilized throughout the world” (Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993], 90). 27. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27. 28. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 128. Tom Sparrow calls for a similar intellectual awakening, an escape from the Kantian orbit. Indeed, “only speculative realism can actually get us out of Kant’s shadow” (Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014], 1), and actually deliver on the phenomenological promise to get us “back to things themselves.” 29. Alain Badiou, preface to After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, by Quentin Meillassoux, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), xii. 30. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 53. 31. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 75. 32. Hallward, “Anything Is Possible,” 136. 33. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 65. 34. Sparrow characterizes phenomenology—what exemplifies for him most clearly the ills of correlationism—as “undead”: “[Phenomenology] is extremely active, but at the same time lacking philosophical vitality and methodologically hollow” (Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology, 187). 35. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 2. 36. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 75. 37. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 75. 38. Peter Hallward rightly questions whether Meillassoux’s use of mathematics allows him to adequately map the great outdoors: “Meillassoux seems to confuse the domains of pure and applied mathematics. In the spirit of Galileo’s ‘mathematization of nature,’ he relies on pure mathematics in order to demonstrate the integrity of an objective reality that exists independently of us—a domain of primary (mathematically measurable) qualities purged of any merely sensory, subject-dependent secondary qualities. Pure mathematics, however, is arguably the supreme example of absolutely subject-dependent thought, i.e., a thought that proceeds without reference to any sort of objective reality ‘outside’ it” (Hallward, “Anything Is Possible,” 140). In a similar vein, Adrian Johnston objects to Meillassoux’s pre-Kantian, a priori rationalism: “Meillassoux’s style of philosophizing is, in many ways, Leibnizian, discounting the empirical, experiential, and experimental in favor of the logical-rational and leading to the formulation of an entirely unreasonable worldview that is both incontestable and yet counter-intuitive, utterly at odds with what empirically informed reasoning tells investigators about the reality of the world” (Adrian Johnston, “Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman [Melbourne: re.press, 2011], 109). 39. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 46.

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40. Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 17. 41. Lee Braver rightly considers skepticism as a response to our epistemic ambitions: “The quest for knowledge has three options: finding a way to expand our mind to reach the world out there, giving up that attempt as futile, or shrinking the world to what is within our reach. Pre-Critical Metaphysics attempted the first, skepticism the second, and Continental Anti-Realism pursued the last option” (Braver, “On Not Settling the Issue of Realism,” 11). While Braver’s description has the merits of clarity, it also risks misrepresenting the persistence of skepticism in antirealism, or in its refusal to fully adhere to the terms of the realism-antirealism debate. 42. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 49. 43. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 44–45. 44. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 18. 45. Meillassoux, “Appendix: Excerpts from L’Inexistence divine,” trans. Graham Harman, in Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, by Graham Harman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 230. 46. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 47. 47. Levinas himself contrasts his approach with Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. In “Is Ontology Fundamental?” (an inquiry into the question: Is Heideggerian fundamental ontology first philosophy?), Levinas answers the question with a categorical no, showing how Heidegger’s approach is still one of power and mastery (reducing alterity to the Same—ignoring that “the face signifies otherwise” [Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” in Entre Nous: Essays on Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, 10)], and thus continuous with philosophical tradition rather than a radical break from it). 48. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 111; qtd. in Shaviro, The Universe of Things, 20. 49. Stella Sandford, The Metaphysics of Love: Gender and Transcendence in Levinas (London: Athlone, 2000), 116. 50. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43. “A calling into question of the same— which cannot occur within the egoist spontaneity of the same—is brought about by the other. We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the Other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I, to my thoughts and my possessions, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, as ethics” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 43). 51. Shaviro, The Universe of Things, 46. 52. Graham Harman, “Aesthetics as First Philosophy: Levinas and the NonHuman,” Naked Punch (2012), http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/147. 53. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71. See also Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 122. The posthumanism of Latour and others is not incompatible with theory’s critical practices. Žižek, for example, does not object to a focus on nonhuman factors in a critique of ideology. On the contrary, he credits Jane Bennett’s wider account of how actants relate to one another at a polluted trash site: “how not only humans but also the rotting trash,

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worms, insects, abandoned machines, chemical poisons, and so on each play their (never purely passive) role. There is an authentic theoretical and ethico-political insight in such an approach” (Žižek, Disparities [New York: Bloomsbury, 2016], 60). Developing an ecological eye, Žižek argues, will serve critique much better than a human-centered perspective, which has not been able to mobilize adequate resistance to capitalism’s ruling ideology. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 4–6. 54. On Felski’s account, ANT promotes a politics of the literary work that is otherwise than suspicious: “Politics . . . is no longer a matter of gesturing toward the hidden forces that explain everything; it is the process of tracing the interconnections, attachments, and conflicts among actors and mediators as they come into view” (Felski, The Limits of Critique, 171). 55. Rita Felski, “Suspicious Minds,” Poetics Today 32, no. 2 (2011): 217. Collapsing deconstruction with Levinas-inspired criticism, suggesting that they are both doing a similar kind of interpretive work, can only lead to overgeneralizations: a homogenization of Levinas (the face to face of Totality and Infinity as the sole paradigm for a Levinas-inspired literary criticism) and a neglect of the differences between Derrida and Levinas. 56. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 245. 57. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 108. 58. Harman, “The Well-Wrought,” 187. A philosophy that does justice to objects cannot be “a philosophy of access to the world” (Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object [Winchester, Eng.: Zero Books, 2011], 136). 59. Morton, “Here Comes Everything,” 165. Again: “It is Kant who shows . . . that things never coincide with their phenomena. All we need to do is extend this revolutionary insight beyond the human-world gap. Unlike Meillassoux, we are not going to try to bust through human finitude, but to place that finitude in a universe of trillions of finitudes, as many as there are things—because a thing just is a fit between what it is and how it appears, for any entity whatsoever, not simply for that special entity called the (human) subject” (Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013], 18). 60. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 151. 61. Levinas hints at this formulation of the Saying in Totality and Infinity: “It belongs to the very essence of language, which consists in continually undoing its phrase by the foreword or exegesis, in unsaying the said, in attempting to restate without ceremonies what has already been ill understood in the inevitable ceremonial in which the said delights” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 30). 62. Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 59. 63. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 7. 64. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 44. 65. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 181. 66. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 147. 67. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 346.

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68. Matthew Stone, “Life Beyond Law: Questioning a Return to Origins,” in New Critical Legal Thinking: Law and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2012), 210. 69. Harman puts the matter in disparaging terms: “Derrida and Foucault would rather die than call themselves realists” (Harman, Towards Speculative Realism [Winchester, Eng.: Zero Books, 2011], 171). Likewise, though not in the same condemnatory fashion, Lee Braver situates Derrida firmly with the antirealist camp (Braver, A Thing of This World, 431–96). For more generous accounts of Derrida’s realism, see Peter Gratton, “Post-Deconstructive Realism,” Speculations 4 (2013): 84–90; Michael Marder, The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); and John D. Caputo, “For Love of the Things Themselves: Derrida’s Hyper-Realism,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 1, no. 3 (2000), http://www.jcrt.org /archives/01.3/caputo.shtml. 70. Simon Critchley, “Back to the Great Outdoors,” Times Literary Supplement (February 28, 2009), 28. 71. Meillassoux, “Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,” 166. 72. Even critics like Rosi Braidotti who are by no means unsympathetic to deconstruction still associate it with excessive linguisticism: “I have great respect for deconstruction, but also some impatience with the limitations of its linguistic frame of reference” (Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman [Cambridge: Polity, 2013], 30). 73. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 158. 74. Harman, “The Well-Wrought,” 196. 75. Derrida and Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret, 76. In a similar vein, Judith Butler, another icon of the linguistic turn, complicates her relation to linguistic constructionism. In Senses of the Subject, she argues for a more subtle understanding of the body and its relation to language and ontology: “Although the body depends on language to be known, the body also exceeds every possible linguistic effort of capture.  .  .  . The body escapes its linguistic grasp, but so, too, does it escape the subsequent effort to determine ontologically that very escape” (Butler, Senses of the Subject [New York: Fordham University Press, 2015], 20–21). While the body is never reducible to language, it is not simply before or beyond meaning. The body’s relation to meaning is complicated, but it is still a relation to meaning, to a grammar of meaning, and ontologizing its nonsignification is hardly a solution. 76. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 137, emphasis added. 77. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 45n.4, 103. 78. Derrida, Paper Machine, 96. 79. Meillassoux, “Interview with Quentin Meillassoux,” 166. 80. Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 742n.7. 81. Žižek finds the Lacanian non-all more productive than Meillassoux’s principle of factuality for thinking about material reality: “I think Meillassoux’s assertion of radical contingency as the only necessity is not enough—one has to supplement it with the ontological incompleteness of reality” (Slavoj Žižek

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and Ben Woodard, “Interview,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman [Melbourne: re.press, 2011], 408). 82. Levi Bryant, “Lacan’s Graphs of Sexuation and OOO,” Larval Subjects (June 28, 2010), https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/lacans-graphs -of-sexuation-and-ooo/. 83. Bryant, “Lacan’s Graphs of Sexuation and OOO.” 84. Žižek, “Femininity between Goodness and Act,” 29. 85. Žižek, “Woman Is One of the Names-of-the-Father.” 86. Žižek and Woodard, “Interview,” 409. 87. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 78. 88. J. Hillis Miller, For Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 219. 89. See Pound, Žižek, 35. 90. In what Derek Attridge calls the “radical quotidianisation” of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Derrida offers his hauntingly memorable example of cats: “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 day for years, whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant?” (Derrida, The Gift of Death, 71; Derek Attridge, Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010], 56). 91. See Žižek, Disparities, 69. 92. Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming” (May 8, 2008), 7, https://specu lative heresy.files .wordpress .com /2008 /07 /3729 -time_without_becoming .pdf. To be clear, Meillassoux’s world-without-me should not be conflated with what Thomas Nagel calls a “view from nowhere.” His speculative realism complicates all hierarchical positions (including God’s): “The successive upheavals brought about by the mathematization of nature are better understood as resulting from the loss of every privileged point of view and from the dissolution of the ontological hierarchization of places” (Meillassoux, After Finitude, 136). See Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 93. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 63. Harman also advocates a retreat from relational ontology, preferring instead to attend to individual substances, but ones that are rehabilitated and no longer conceived as timeless entities: “The wager of object-oriented philosophy is that th[e] programmatic movement towards holistic interaction is an idea once but no longer liberating, and that the real discoveries now lie on the other side of the yard. The problem with individual substances was never that they were autonomous or individual, but that they were wrongly conceived as eternal, unchanging, simple, or directly accessible by certain privileged observers. By contrast, the objects of object-oriented philosophy are mortal, ever-changing, built from swarms of subcomponents, and accessible only through oblique allusion. This is not the oft-lamented ‘naïve realism’ of oppressive and benighted patriarchs, but a weird realism in which real individual objects resist all forms of causal or cognitive mastery” (Harman, “The Well-Wrought,” 187–88). While Harman does not share Meillassoux’s aspiration for cognitive mastery of the great outdoors, his suggestive notion of a “weird realism” does little to overcome the latter’s fantasy of transparency: by excluding

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any relationality with the objects, Harman can only speak of the existence of positive objects in the world that are formally transparent in their ontological recalcitrance or withdrawnness. 94. Beauvoir relies on Henri Corbin’s mistranslation of Heidegger’s Dasein (literally Being-there) as réalité-humaine (“human reality”). In “The Ends of Man,” Derrida describes Corbin’s rendering as a “monstrous translation” (Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 115), but in the hands of Beauvoir this mistranslation arguably takes an innovative turn in its juxtaposition with “feminine reality.” 95. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 14–15. 96. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 584. 97. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 586. Despite downgrading human consciousness (Lacan considers its powers “irremediably limited” [Lacan, The Four Fundamentals Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 82]), Haraway stays with the subject, resisting the temptation to exit humanism, declining an antihumanism or a posthumanism that would do away with subjectivity altogether and leave the human dispossessed, with nothing to offer others. This is why Haraway argues that she is not a posthumanist: “I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still needs to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences” (Haraway, When Species Meet [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008], 17). 98. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 585. 99. To his credit, Levi Bryant cautions against a categorical dismissal of correlationism: “Blanket condemnations of correlationism risk undermining decades of hard-won emancipatory victories in the name of justice and equality” (Bryant, “Politics and Speculative Realism,” Speculations 4 [2013]: 17). For a fruitful discussion of the ways a feminist critique of correlationism converges and diverges with those of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, see Rebekah Sheldon, “Form/Matter/Chora: Feminist New Materialism and Object Oriented Ontology,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 193–222. See also Katherine Behar’s edited volume, Object-Oriented Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 100. Heather Love discusses the temptation of skepticism in Haraway, the appeal of the destructive tools of critical discourse that she successfully counterbalances with her commitment to objectivity and science. Heather Love, following Haraway, aligns skepticism with a purely destructive deconstruction, neglecting to consider skepticism as an inventive intervention, that is, as much a making as an undoing. See Love, “The Temptations: Donna Haraway, Feminist Objectivity, and the Problem of Critique,” in Critique and Postcritique, ed. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017), 50–72. 101. Jacques Derrida, Points  .  .  .  : Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992),

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83. Elsewhere, he expresses a similar idea: “I love very much everything that I deconstruct in my own manner; the texts I want to read from the deconstructive point of view are texts I love” (Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985], 87). 102. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” in Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 149. 103. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Willis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 9. 104. Derrida, The Animal, 6. 105. Derrida, The Animal, 163n.8. 106. Derrida, The Animal, 41. 107. Derrida, The Animal, 29. 108. Harman, “The Well-Wrought,” 187. Bryant’s object-oriented ontology allows for more friction among things than Harman’s: “For Harman objects are withdrawn from all relations and we are to think of objects independent of their relations. As he argues, objects never touch. While I hold that objects can be severed from the relations they currently entertain—though in many instances this can lead to death or destruction—it seems to me that what is most important is what happens when entities encounter one another” (Levi Bryant, “Agential Objects: Towards an Ontology of the Act,” Objects as Actors Symposium (September 14, 2013), https://larvalsubjects.files.wordpress.com/2013/09 /pasadenaagentialobjects.pdf. Likewise, Adam S. Miller’s OOO approach leaves more room for contact with objects, describing them as having a “resistant availability” (Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 49–54). Bogost levels the opposite objection to Latour’s ANT, seeing it as too invested in relationality, coming, as it were, at the expense of the things-in-themselves: “entities are de-emphasized in favor of their couplings and decouplings. Alliances take center stage, and things move to the wings” (Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, 7). 109. Harman, “The Well-Wrought,” 195, 186. 110. Gilles Deleuze’s thinking on affect is obviously informing my reading of Derrida: “If you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things change. You will define an animal, or a human being, not by its form, its organs, and its functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the affects of which it is capable” (Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley [San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988], 124). Conclusion epigraphs: Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 41; Derrida, “Perhaps or Maybe,” 15. 1. Derrida, Who’s Afraid of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy 1, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 16. 2. Derrida, Rogues, 34. 3. Rabaté, Crimes of the Future, 52. 4. Bennington, Not Half No End, 60.

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5. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 144. 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 66. 7. Jacques Lacan, Transference: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 183. 8. See also Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953–1954), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988), 32. 9. Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski promote this reading of the psychoanalytic theorist: “It is a fundamental premise of this line of thinking [that of a generation of Lacanian critics] that a patient cannot adequately diagnose herself; the thirdperson perspective of the critic/analyst will always trump the self-understanding of the text/patient” (Anker and Felski, introduction, 5). 10. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 239. Latour names critique “this most ambiguous pharmakon,” yet at the same time he evacuates all its ambiguity when actually discussing it, confirming that the critic is the authority, that he or she is “always right” (Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 239). 11. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 232. 12. “We can see why there is no question, if we want to restore meaning to constructivism, of giving ourselves over to the temptations of the critical spirit [deconstruction and the likes]” (Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, trans. Catherine Porter [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013], 156). See also Latour, “The Promises of Constructivism,” in Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality, ed. Don Ihde and Evan Selinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 41. 13. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” 243. 14. Caputo even alerts us to the affinities between Latour and Derrida: “Latour reaches conclusions [about hybridity, presence, and humanism, for example] that are exactly the ones that deconstruction would have predicted and would find congenial” (Caputo, The Insistence of God, 209n.17). Caputo’s conciliatory gloss is welcome, but I would still stress the difference in focus between Latour’s ANT and Derrida’s deconstruction. If Latour’s flat ontology highlights “the messy practices of relationality and materiality of the world” (John Law, “Actor-Network Theory and Material Semiotics,” in The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, ed. Bryan S. Turner [Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009], 142), Derrida—in foregrounding the “madness” of decision (with all its hermeneutic implications)—conveys the aporetic character of my hospitality—a relationality understood as a “relation without relation”—to objects (human and nonhuman) in the world. 15. Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ ” 282. 16. Haraway, When Species Meet, 300. 17. Slavoj Žižek, “Lacan’s Four Discourses: A Political Reading,” in Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism, ed. Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 81. 18. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87.

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19. Jacques Derrida, “Hostipitality,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 361. 20. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 27. 21. Derrida, Without Alibi, 242. 22. The original title of Derrida’s Learning to Live Finally—Derrida’s last interview—was “I Am at War With Myself.” See Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Hoboken, N.J.: Melville House, 2007). 23. Bennington, Not Half No End, 109.

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———. How to Read Lacan. New York: Norton, 2006. ———. The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. New York: Verso, 2007. ———. Interrogating the Real. Ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London: Continuum, 2005. ———. “Lacan’s Four Discourses: A Political Reading.” In Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism, ed. Greg Forter and Paul Allen Miller, 81–98. Albany: SUNY Press, 2008. ———. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso, 2012. ———. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. New York: Verso, 1994. ———. “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, 134–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ———. “Occupy Wall Street: What Is to Be Done Next?” The Guardian. April 24, 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/apr /24/occupy-wall-street-what-is-to-be-done-next. ———. On Belief. London: Routledge, 2001. ———. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. The Parallax View. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. ———. Philosophy in the Present. Ed. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. ———. The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1997. ———. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. ———. “The Real of Sexual Difference.” In Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, 304–27. New York: Continuum, 2005. ———. “Return of the Natives.” New Statesman. March 4, 2010. http://www .newstatesman.com/film/2010/03/avatar-reality-love-couple-sex. ———. Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917. New York: Verso, 2002. ———. “Some Politically Incorrect Reflections on Violence in France & Related Matters.” 2005. http://www.lacan.com/zizfrance.htm. ———. “The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek, 1–25. New York: Verso, 1994. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso, 1991. ———. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993. ———. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology. New York: Verso, 1999. ———. “Unbehagen and the Subject: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 15 (2010): 418–28. ———. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. New York: Picador, 2008. ———. Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. New York: Verso, 2002.

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———. “ ‘What Some Would Call  .  .  .’: A Response to Yannis Stavrakakis.” Umbr(a) 1 (2003): 131–35. ———. “Woman Is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or How Not to Misread Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation.” Lacanian Ink 10 (1995). www.lacan.com /zizwoman.htm. ———. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. New York: Verso, 2012. Žižek, Slavoj, and Glyn Daly. Conversations with Žižek. Cambridge: Polity, 2004. Žižek, Slavoj, and Ben Woodard. “Interview.” In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, 406–15. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. Zupančič, Alenka. “Realism in Psychoanalysis.” Jep European Journal of Psychoanalysis 32 (2011): 29–48.

Index

Abraham, 133, 192n90 actor-network theory (ANT), 127–28, 195n14 Adorno, Theodor, 154n118, 154n119, 157n154 aesthetics, 16, 37, 47, 62, 73, 74, 77, 94–95; as cultural symptom, 58; desire for, 5; of idleness, 93; politics of, 93; return to, 3, 55 affect theory, 161n61 Ahmed, Sara, 118, 184n116 allegory, 6, 29, 59, 147n19, 166n18 Alter, Robert, 4 alterity, 23, 77, 99, 102, 105, 130, 139, 189n47; absolute, 128; agrammatical, 20; allergy to, 129; astonishing, 52; constitutive, 50; ethics of, 18, 53; exposure to, 19, 28; of literary texts, 127; openness toward, 53; of others, 15, 23, 137; passion for, 54; radical, 110–11, 133; relative, 128; respect for, 22, 27; response to 19, 135, 154n109; of women, 101 Althusser, Louis, 26, 57, 165n10 agrammaticallity, 20, 30, 99, 117–18 analysts, 24, 58, 85, 99, 140–41, 166n33, 195n9 Anderson, Nicole, 66 anti-fetishism, 55. See also fetishism anti-Parmenidean, 124 antiphilosophy, 24, 156n142 antisocial thesis, 184n116 aphanisis, 45–46, 50, 69, 140 aporia, 76, 77, 156n140; of demands, 137; of hospitality, 195n14; in Plato’s dialogues, 16; of skepticism, 81 Aristotle, 4, 7, 8, 35, 43, 47, 145n4 Asad, Talal, 65 astonishment, 117, 139, 140, 154n118; as excess of wonder, 8, 182n81; as

experience of alterity, 50, 52; queer, 99; as trauma, 54 ataraxia, 40, 50, 61; Bourdieu on, 62–63; desire for, 15; as mental tranquility, 9, 15, 36; philosophy’s promise of, 28 Attridge, Derek, 58, 192n90 Augustine, Saint, 48 Badiou, Alain, 124, 130, 157n155 Barthes, Roland, 95 Baudelaire, Charles, 29, 59–62 beauty, 61, 115–16 Beauvoir, Simone de, 70, 100–102, 104, 134, 170n106, 193n94 Beckett, Samuel, 19 Behar, Katherine, 193n99 Belsey, Catherine, 45–46 Benjamin, Walter, 47 Bennett, Jane, 128, 189n53 Bennington, Geoffrey, 139, 147n22 Berlant, Lauren, 60 Bernasconi, Robert, 10–12 Bersani, Leo, 173n17, 184n116 Bérubé, Michael, 149n51 Best, Stephen, 63–64, 167n42 Bhabha, Homi, 74–77 big Other, the, 24, 87, 93, 102, 110, 118, 140, 165n10; absence of, 24, 91, 106, 115 Blanchot, Maurice, 154n114 Blumenberg, Hans, 48 Bogost, Ian, 194n108 Bordeaux Copy, 152n86, 161n49 Bordwell, David, 166n18 Borradori, Giovanna, 27 Bosteels, Bruno, 156n142 Bourdieu, Pierre, 33–34, 62 bourgeoisie, 60, 178n78 Braidotti, Rosi, 191n72 Brassier, Ray, 187n24

219

220 Braver, Lee, 189n41, 191n69 Brombert, Victor, 88 Bryant, Levi, 122, 132–33, 193n99, 194n108 Butler, Judith, 23, 33, 53, 79, 158n161, 191n75 Calarco, Matthew, 129 cannibalism, 21 capitalism, 26, 57, 68, 72, 190n53. See also neoliberalism Caputo, John, 16, 18, 123, 195n14 Cassin, Barbara, 44 Charron, Pierre, 46 Cicero, 8, 35, 43 Cixous, Hélène, 30, 98, 99, 105; on l’écriture féminine, 112, 179n7; on masculine interpellation, 40, 117 Clemens, Justin, 156n142 cogito, 24, 33, 37, 45, 46, 53, 97, 98, 135 Collins, Randall, 150n54 community, 4, 72, 75, 78, 79, 83, 154n114; Esposito on, 17; relation to autoimmunity, 12, 83, 150n60, 173n18 Conley, Verena, 99 Copjec, Joan, 108 Cornilliat, François, 147n.19 correlationism, 121, 122–31, 134–37 Critchley, Simon, 129 Crowley, Martin, 117 curiosity, 28, 47–53, 60, 61–62, 114, 120, 147n18, 162n69, 162n72, 163n75; as beginning of philosophy, 7; as hunger for the new, 47, 49; theory’s relation to, 21, 28, 52, 140 cynicism, 62, 135 Dean, Jodi, 75, 165n10 Dean, Tim, 58, 99, 107 deconstruction, 18, 64, 97, 127, 141, 146n12, 167n49, 190n55, 195n12, 195n14; as antirealism, 149n52, 158n163; as correlationism, 129; as critique, 27, 55; and linguistic turn, 121–22, 185n1, 191n72; resistance to, 4, 155n121; skepticism of, 19, 135, 179n1, 193n100; as synecdoche for theory, 5, 146n8 Defaux, Gérard, 38–39

Index

Deleuze, Gilles, 16, 162n61, 194n110 de Man, Paul: 4, 22, 80, 81–82 demystification, 49, 55–56, 61 Derrida, Jacques: 5, 7, 11, 22, 30, 40, 52, 121, 133, 139, 149n51, 151n67, 151n75, 152n78, 153n90, 161n50, 163n79, 180n25, 185n1, 186n11, 191n69, 192n90, 193n94, 194n83, 194n110, 195n14; and the animal, 135–36; on autoimmunity, 12–15, 17, 19, 49–50, 82, 131, 136, 140, 150n60, 153n95, 173n18; and correlationism, 129–31, 134; concerning ethics, 18–21; on decision, 54, 155n125; and the event, 17–21, 23, 130–31, 136, 142; on hospitality, 53, 142; on Levinas, 110, 128–29, 190n55; and metaphor of “eating well,” 21, 141; on monstrosity, 50; and psychoanalysis, 24–25, 156n140, 173n20; and “relation without relation,” 20, 136–37, 154n114; and skepticism, 22–23, 135; on terrorism, 26–27; on theory, 4, 145n7, 155n121 Descartes, René, 7, 33–34, 48, 97, 125, 127, 136, 163n90; and care of the self, 37; on curiosity, 48; and desire for certainty, 24, 46; difference from Montaigne, 51, 52; on skepticism, 8, 15–16; on wonder, 8, 182n81 descriptive turn, 121–22, 167n45 destitution, 75, 77, 84, 140 Deutscher, Penelope, 161n50 dialectics, 72, 77, 124, 132, 151n67, 168n53, 181n50; and autoimmunity, 17; of death drive, 96; of power, 30; and Socrates, 16 dialogic, 17, 21 disidentification, 41, 160n41, 165n10 double binds, 22–23, 27, 76–77, 137; of autoimmunity, 20, 22; of the event, 54; of skepticism, 140 Duras, Marguerite, 30, 97, 99–100, 111–20, 184n114, 184n126, 185n127 Eaglestone, Robert, 43 écriture féminine, 99, 112, 179n7 Edelman, Lee, 82, 96, 184n116 Egginton, William, 175n32 egocentrism, 41. See also narcissism

221

Index

Elliott, Jane, 58 empathy, 68, 77–78, 171n120 Enlightenment, the, 4, 25, 168n61 epistemology, 31, 39, 105, 122–23, 135, 148n34, 175n32, 187n19; as first philosophy, 44, 127; versus ontology, 51, 127; and skepticism, 9, 16, 31, 42 epoché, 9 Eros, 75, 85, 96, 174n26, 174n27 Esposito, Roberto, 17, 152n88, 152n89 ethical criticism, 146n12, 146n16 exemplarity, 29, 30, 73, 77, 80, 83, 90, 96, 117–18, 147n20, 167n45 Fanon, Frantz, 181n50 fantasy, 49, 57, 61–62, 66–67, 78, 94–95, 115, 116, 134, 183n103; fundamental, 116–17; of human dignity, 78; of immediacy, 31, 124; of immortality, 92; of immunity, 27; male, 106, 112, 118; of mastery, 23; of the other, 111, 128; of postideology, 56; of progress 60; of resolution, 90; of sovereignty, 52; of transparency, 192n93; of wholeness, 85, 108; of a world-without-me, 134 Felski, Rita, 63–65, 127–28, 167n37, 168n51, 190n54 Fenichel, Otto, 174n25 fetishism, 55, 62, 73, 118, 160n40 ffrench, Patrick, 3 Fink, Bruce, 175n32 flat ontology, 122, 128, 195n14 Flynn, Thomas, 164n95 formulae of sexuation, 13–14, 98, 100, 102–4, 131–33 Foucault, Michel, 7, 66, 112, 149n44, 158n163, 159n15, 164n95, 191n69; on ascetic practice, 91; on critique, 67, 168n61; on curiosity, 52–53; on the essay, 21; on the intellectual, 25–26; on power, 92, 177n63; on selfcare, 34, 37, 147n25; on technologies of the self, 36, 159n23 Frankfurt school, 55 freedom, 14–15, 17, 36, 70, 76, 182n72; of choice, 69; from disturbance, 15; as unfreedom, 26 Freud, Sigmund, 36, 98, 121, 156n140; and anti-hermeneutics, 24; and death

drive, 25, 29, 81–86, 90, 173n20, 173n22, 173n24, 174n26, 174n29; as master of suspicion, 9, 149n44; on primal father, 14, 102, 151n63; on sublimation, 116 Fromm, Eric, 173n24 Galloway, Alexander, 166n21 Gasché, Rodolphe, 155n124 generosity, 48–50 Glynos, Jason, 24 God, 24, 37, 48, 52, 61, 133, 134, 163n90, 177n55, 192n92 Grant, Iain Hamilton, 187n21 Gray, Floyd, 147n19 Grosz, Elizabeth, 117, 180n25 Guattari, Félix, 16, 162n61 Guild, Elizabeth, 40 habitus, 22, 33, 142–43 Hadot, Pierre, 35, 147n25 Hägglund, Martin, 18–20, 85, 92, 95, 154n105, 154n109 Halberstam, J. Jack, 16, 184n116 Hallward, Peter, 122, 125, 188n38 Haraway, Donna, 134–35, 141, 167n49, 193n97, 193n100 Harman, Graham, 127, 128, 130, 136, 186n17, 187n18, 191n69, 192n93, 194n108 Hegel, G. W. F., 101, 172n15, 175n33 Heidegger, Martin, 97, 131, 134, 162n72, 189n47, 193n94 Hekman, Susan, 185n1 hermeneutics, 70, 99, 123, 128, 133, 136, 137, 141; as allegory, 6; autoimmune, 14; curative, 117; depth/ surface, 67; of difference, 136; of faith and suspicion, 9–10, 29, 61, 64, 118, 124, 149n43, 162n61; and Gospel command, 22; and human exceptionalism, 128; jouissance of, 99; as libido sciendi, 50; negative, 133; new, 143; of philosophy, 7; psychoanalytic, 24, 105, 108, 185n126; pure or masterful, 25, 59; of the Real, 119; of skepticism, 15, 23, 27, 28, 44, 66, 82, 118, 135, 141, 149n44; of trauma, 47; of uncertainty, 117

222 heterology, 20, 53, 54, 128 Hill, Leslie, 6, 147n20, 183n98 historicism, 73, 79 Hitchcock, Peter, 68 homo immunologicus, 35 homonormativity, 184n116 Horney, Karen, 174n25 hospitality, 53, 54, 139, 141–42, 195n14; unconditional, 19–20, 142 Huffer, Lynne, 184n116 Hurst, Andrea Margaret, 108 Husserl, Edmund, 33 hysteria, 7, 16, 40, 41, 43, 54, 109, 118; essaying, 40; theory’s, 28, 96, 139–40 Imaginary, the, 54, 99, 103, 104, 105–6, 110, 116, 137, 141, 155n132, 165n10, 178n78; and the humanist subject, 51; and interdependence with the Symbolic and the Real, 115; as pre-linguistic, 90; plenitude of, 96 immortality, 36, 86, 92, 95–96, 145n4, 153n95 immunology paradigm, 13, 129, 153n89 imperfection, 22, 54, 111, 135 indecision, 6, 54, 79, 140 interpellation, 22, 57, 75, 76, 79; and disidentification, 165n10; epistemic, 15; of the event, 22; masculine, 40, 105, 117; by the other, 137 Irigaray, Luce, 30, 98, 106, 113, 117, 161n50; on sexual difference, 101–2, 104–5; on wonder, 111, 182n81 irony, 30, 71, 93, 95–96, 140, 159n30, 169n63, 172n10; and autoimmunity, 13, 29; cruel, 75, 92; as fetish, 62; as incomprehensibility, 81–82; jouissance of, 95; negativity of, 28, 83; Socratic, 172n9 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 6–7, 57–58, 73, 124, 148n42, 157n142, 167n46 Jeanson, Francis, 101 Johnston, Adrian, 70, 82, 156n142, 188n38 jouissance, 14, 30, 95, 102, 99, 102, 105–7, 114, 132; absolute or full, 14, 102, 119, 174n32; female/feminine, 105–6, 112, 118; hermeneutic, 99; of irony, 95; phallic, 105, 132;

Index

pre-symbolic, 102; of reading, 120; unruly, 104. See also enjoyment Jung, Carl, 82 Kant, Immanuel, 16, 25, 30, 75, 127, 130, 148n35, 158n155, 188n28, 188n38, 190n59; Meillassoux’s critique of, 122–25, 186n10, 186n11; on negative/infinite judgment, 131– 32; and notion of critique, 58; and philosophy of the subject, 11, 33; and skepticism, 8 Kay, Sarah, 107–8 Kofman, Sarah, 160n40 Kristeva, Julia, 30, 97, 98, 104–5, 106, 109, 179n1 La Boétie, Etienne de, 38–39, 43 Lacan, Jacques, 33, 47, 55, 58, 87, 90, 93, 94, 98, 118, 121, 169n76, 173n22, 174n29, 174n32, 175n34, 176n50, 177n52, 183n98, 183n103, 184n122, 184n126, 193n97, 195n9; on aphanisis, 45–46, 69; on death drive, 85–86; on Duras’s The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 99–100, 112, 114, 115–16, 117, 119; and the formulae of sexuation, 13–14, 98–99, 102–6, 131–33, 151n63, 191n81; and the lamella, 107–8; on neighborly love, 109–10; on notion of the act, 68–69, 72, 73, 76; on psychoanalysis as antiphilosophy, 24, 156n142, 157n142; on psychoanalysis as plague, 82; on the “subject supposed to know,” 23–24; on transference, 140–41 LaCapra, Dominick, 171n120 Lamarche, Pierre, 9, 15 Lane, Jeremy, 93 Laplanche, Jean, 24, 84 Latour, Bruno, 55–56, 58, 128, 141, 164n6, 166n21, 167n49, 188n26; and ANT, 127, 128, 194n108, 195n14; concerning deconstruction, 55, 141, 195n10, 195n14; and empiricism, 66; as model for literary studies, 65, 127; on posthumanism, 127, 189n53; and post-ideological turn, 59 Law, John, 195n14

Index

Leitch, Vincent, 15 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 153n90 Lesjak, Carolyn, 168n53 Levi, Primo, 110, 171n118 Levinas, Emmanuel, 3, 18, 20, 23, 27, 33, 53, 104, 110–11, 126–28, 131, 133, 154n114, 158n155, 172n16, 182n72, 189n47, 189n50, 190n55, 190n61; and acts of unsaying and resaying 128–29; on skepticism 10–11, 44 Leys, Ruth, 38 linguistic turn, 4, 7, 18, 30, 122, 124, 126, 130, 185n1, 187n26, 191n75 logocentrism, 121 logology, 44 logos, 6, 86, 99, 104, 130, 152n78, 182n72 Love, Heather, 77, 167n45, 193n100 Lukács, Georg, 178n79 Lyotard, Jean-François, 145n6, 154n118, 157n146 MacCannell, Juliet Flower, 178n78 Mackay, Ian, 153n93 Malabou, Catherine, 7 Marcus, Sharon, 63–64, 167n42 Marcuse, Herbert, 85, 174n26 Marx, Karl, 26, 56, 64, 66, 131, 149n44; and Marxism 4, 9, 25, 62, 66, 71, 72, 121, 122, 167n49, 168n53 Massumi, Brian, 50, 162n61 mastery, 28, 29, 38, 39, 48, 81, 88, 111, 120, 145n6, 160n40, 189n47; absence of, 117; absolute, 109; beyond, 52; of the body, 41; cognitive, 43, 192n93; dream of 7, 23; hermeneutic, 59; investment in, 14; as libido dominandi, 50; limits of, 22; self-, 15, 34, 38, 39, 51, 52, 91, 98, 158n5; textual, 22; of the world, 4 May ’68, 25, 26, 157n155 McGowan, Todd, 170n108, 173n20, 174n27 Meillassoux, Quentin, 30, 121–27, 129–31, 134, 135, 186n9, 186n10, 186n11, 186n14, 187n17, 187n18, 188n38, 190n59, 191n81, 192n92, 192n93

223 Miller, Adam, 194n108 Miller, J. Hillis, 81, 133, 149n42, 155n122 Miller, Paul Allen, 16 Milner, Jean-Claude, 156n142 Mitchell, W. J. T., 13, 27 Moi, Toril, 56, 66 monsters, 23, 39, 50–52, 54, 81, 87, 99 Montaigne, Michel de, 28, 33–54, 65, 70, 116, 154n118, 155n128, 158n3, 158n4, 159n30, 160n31, 160n42, 161n44, 161n45, 161n49, 161n50; and aphanisis of subject, 45–46; on curiosity, 49–50; and écriture féminine, 99; and La Boétie, 38–39, 43; Meillassoux’s critique of, 125–26, 129; and motto “What do I know?,” 21, 40, 44, 46, 140, 164n95; posthumanist, 136; on queering self, 41, 99; relation to culture of self-care, 37–41; on self as monster, 50–52, 119, 182n81; and Socrates, 17; as theorist, 34, 53; and theory as essay, 22 Morrison, Toni, 29, 59, 73–79, 170n108 Morton, Timothy, 128, 190n59 Muñoz, José Esteban, 160n41 Muselmann (Primo Levi), 110 Mutsaers, Inge, 13 Naas, Michael, 17, 19, 96 Nagel, Thomas, 192n92 narcissism, 6, 15, 48, 82, 111, 116, 122, 123, 141, 160n40. See also egocentrism Nehamas, Alexander, 147n25, 172n9 neighbor, 27, 79, 109–11, 119, 133 neoliberalism, 57, 72, 165n10. See also capitalism Newmark, Kevin, 172n10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7, 9, 13, 131, 149n44, 151n62, 156n142 Nirvana principle, 84, 86, 96, 173n22 nouveau roman, 112 Nussbaum, Martha, 5–6, 8, 11, 16, 21, 146n12, 146n18, 147n20, 148n25, 149n51, 149n53 object-oriented ontology (OOO), 30, 123–24, 127, 132, 136, 141, 194n108 O’Brien, John, 147n19

224 passage à l’acte, 68–70, 79 patriarchy, 30, 101, 117 phallogocentrism, 105 pharmakon, 16, 17, 25, 28, 42, 79, 152n78, 195n10 Paris riots, 29, 59, 68, 169n64 Pascal, Blaise, 33–34, 48, 52 Petrey, Sandy, 88, 176n46 phallocentrism, 104 Phelan, James, 77, 171n112 phenomenology, 65, 111, 121, 122, 124, 127, 186n17, 188n28, 188n34 Pippin, Robert, 172n15 Plato, 16–17, 34–35, 92, 107, 145n6, 149n51, 158n5, 159n9; on curiosity, 47; and myth of cave, 4; Platonism after, 16; Rabelais’s relation to, 5; and skepticism, 8, 152n78 postcolonial, 65, 71–72, 74, 75, 80 Poster, Mark, 157n148 posthumanism, 122, 127, 128, 136, 185n4, 189n53, 193n97 postmodernism, 4, 11, 58, 129, 158n118, 165n10 precarity, 79, 110 Prendergast, Christopher, 176n50 Putnam, Hilary, 11, 149n52 Pyrrhonism, 8–9, 15, 41–43 Quint, David, 42, 161n45 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 16, 43, 112, 174n29 Rabelais, François, 5–6, 48, 147m19 racism, 68, 75, 77–79 Rancière, Jacques, 30, 33, 54, 83, 92–95, 177n67, 177n68 Rapaport, Herman, 150n53 Real, the, 52, 55, 60, 67, 78, 106, 119, 120, 121, 124, 131, 133; abyss of, 41, 143; cut in, 107–8; effects of, 47; encounter with, 99; entanglement with, 31, 94–95; experience of, 17; extimacy with, 116; and interdependence with the Imaginary and the Symbolic, 115; interruptions of, 116; irruption of, 79; logic of, 14, 107; of neighbor, 109–11; opacity of, 58; of other, 23, 111, 137; of sexual difference, 119; trope for, 114, 117– 18; unruliness of, 96

Index

Redfield, Mark, 146n8 Reeser, Todd, 147n19 Regnault, François, 156n142 Reich, Wilhelm, 84 Ricoeur, Paul, 8, 9–11, 24, 149n43, 149n44, 168n51 Rimbaud, Arthur, 128, 163n88 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 112 Rodowick, D. N., 145n.1 Ronell, Avital, 6, 16 Rooney, Ellen, 64 Roth, Michael, 162n60 Rottenberg, Elizabeth, 151n61 Ruti, Mari, 154n108 Ryan, Judith, 185n127 Salecl, Renata, 103, 114, 120 sameness, 21, 27, 104, 105, 109, 111, 127, 180n25, 189n47, 189n50 Sandford, Stella, 127 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 25, 70, 181n50 Schlegel, Friedrich, 81 Schmitt, Carl, 15 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 99 Seneca, 28, 34–38, 39, 41, 52, 158n4 Sextus Empiricus, 8, 38 sexual anesthesia, 97, 105, 109 Shaviro, Steven, 126–27, 187n18, 187n19 Sheldon, Rebekah, 193n99 Simek, Nicole, 64 Sloterdijk, Peter, 35, 69 Socrates, 8, 11–12, 16–17, 34–35, 41, 43, 47, 52, 109, 149n51, 158n5, 172n9. See also Plato Soler, Colette, 156n142 Sparrow, Tom, 188n28, 188n34 speculative realism, 30, 123–30, 134, 136, 187n18, 188n28, 192n92 Spinoza, Baruch, 82, 162n61, 172n14, 172n16 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 22, 63, 74, 76, 140 Starobinski, Jean, 51 Stavrakakis, Yannis, 175n32 Stendhal, 29, 83–84, 87–94 Stone, Matthew, 129 “subject supposed to know,” 23–24, 117, 140, 183n98 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 118–19

225

Index

Symbolic, the, 69, 70, 71, 82, 85, 89, 91, 104–8, 110–11, 114–15, 117–18, 133, 140, 165n10, 175n32, 176n50; beyond, 108; God as figure for, 24; inconsistency of, 14, 51; and interdependence with the Imaginary and the Real; and law of castration, 14, 102; as non-all, 14, 96, 109, 112, 118, 124; phallic order of, 104, 106; retreat from, 120. See also big Other, the Tanke, Joseph, 93–95 Taylor, Paul, 169n70 temporality, 93, 99 Tenenbaum, Elizabeth, 88 Terada, Rei, 51 Thanatos, 85, 96, 174n26 transference, 24, 140–41 untranslatability, 24, 76, 77, 79 vanity, 48 Van Noort, Kimberly, 115 Villey, Pierre, 161n45 violence, 26, 69, 71, 79, 91, 112, 136, 182n72; hermeneutic, 21, 113; originary, 25; subjective/objective, 67–8, 71, 169n70 vulnerability, 13, 14, 17, 28, 35, 42, 50, 52, 54, 79, 109, 111, 117, 128, 136, 140, 142; constitutive, 7; corporeal, 79; hermeneutic, 62; of the other,

110; and the Real, 116; of the self, 23, 36, 47 Wagner, 72–73 War on Terror, 12, 26, 150n57 Warwick, Anderson, 153n93 Westra, Laura, 26–27 Wilson, Emma, 119 Wittig, Monique, 134 Wolfe, Cary, 185n4 wonder, 6, 7, 8, 47, 52, 111, 139, 182n81 Yoo, John, 150n57 Zalloua, Zahi, 146n16 Zerba, Michelle, 41, 44 Ziarek, Ewa Plonowska, 11 Žižek, Slavoj, 14, 18, 26, 29, 55, 60, 81, 94, 99, 105, 120, 130, 134, 139, 141, 157n142, 165n10, 166n18, 168n59, 169n63, 172n16, 174n32, 183n103, 189n53; on act/passage à l’acte, 68–71, 75–76; on death drive, 82, 85–86, 89, 90, 92, 172n15, 173n22; on ideology, 56–59, 62, 66–67, 80, 165n14, 168n58, 170n106; on Lacanian non-all, 30, 73, 98, 103–4, 106–8, 131–33, 191n81; on Morrison’s Beloved, 73–76, 77, 79, 170n106; on neighbor, 109–11, 119; on postcolonial difference, 71–72; on Wagner’s Parsifal, 72–73 Zupančič, Alenka, 94–95