Untying Things Together: Philosophy, Literature, and a Life in Theory 9780226816487

Citation preview

U N T Y I NG T H I N GS TO GETH E R

UNTYING THINGS TOGETHER Ph i l o soPh y, l i t e rat u re , and a l i f e i n t h e ory Eric L. Santner

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in

the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22  1 2 3 4 5 isBn-13: 978- 0-226-81646-3 (cloth)

isBn-13: 978- 0-226-81647- 0 (paper)

isBn-13: 978- 0-226-81648-7 (e-book)

doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816487.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Santner, Eric L., 1955– author.

Title: Untying things together : philosophy, literature, and a life in theory / Eric L. Santner.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021033646 | isBn 9780226816463 (cloth) |

isBn 9780226816470 (paperback) | isBn 9780226816487 (ebook)

Subjects: lCsh: Theory (Philosophy) | Freud, Sigmund, 1856– 1939. Classification: lCC B842 .s335 2022 | ddC 140— dc23

lC record available at https:// lccn.loc.gov/2021033646 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Preface vii INTROD UC TION

On Some Causes for Excitement 1 C HAPTER ONE

A Life in Theory 15 C HAPTER TWO

Theory and the Jewish Question 46 C HAPTER THREE

Too Much Sad 78

C HAPTER FOUR

Caninical Theory 107 C HAPTER FIVE

The Manafold of Experience 137 C HAPTER SIX

Will Wonders Never Cease: Remarks on Post-Thaumatic Stress Disorder 167 C HAPTER SEVEN

The Stranger Order of Things 188 EPILOG UE  221

Acknowledgments 235 Index 237

PREFACE

A number of years ago, in the discussion following a lecture I gave at the University of California, Berkeley, someone asked me how I would characterize my “method.” The question had a critical edge and seemed in part to be asking how I identified myself in the context of university disciplines, in part to be asking about what struck the questioner as an odd way of working with concepts, my tendency to “distort” them by incorporating them (or parts of them), often through a play on words, into neologisms, each of which thereby takes on the aspect of a disjunctive Aufhebung, one that displays the relative autonomy of its parts. This book is in many ways an attempt to answer those questions even though it was not conceived that way. Indeed, the title of the book, Untying Things Together, is both an example of the “problem” and a way of addressing it. It signals my efforts to bring together literary texts, works of art, philosophical arguments, psychoanalytic concepts in a way that registers their limits, their need for supplementation and support by a “neighbor discourse” without thereby losing their distinctiveness. I am mindful here of the great German-Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig’s account of what he called “the new thinking” that, in his telling, emerges when the insufficiencies and impasses of modern philosophy and theology, their co-involvement in a legitimation crisis of knowledge, open on to a new understanding of what is meant by thinking. In Rosenzweig’s case, the call for a “new thinking” proved to be incompatible with the pursuit of what Max Weber famously elaborated under the heading of Wissenschaft als Beruf, “science as a calling/vocation.” The letter that Rosenzweig wrote in 1920 to Friedrich Meinecke explaining his decision to leave academia could indeed be read as a kind of counterargument to Weber’s 1917 lecture. I will return to this “conflict of the faculties” later in the book. My own work has been in large measure an effort to offer a “third way,” that is, to practice something like what Rosenzweig called the new thinking within the university. My argument will be that this third way has much

   

viii : : P r e f a C e

to do with what, beginning in the 1960s, has been practiced in various humanities disciplines— and not just at North American universities— under the heading of “theory.” A kind of “methodological image” that comes to mind appears in a famous prose text by Kafka that I have addressed in other work and do so again in this book. In it a strange creature called “Odradek” causes a family father to wonder about the integrity and future of his household in large measure because of the questionable ontological integrity of the creature that has intermittently taken up residence there: At first it looks like a flat, star-shaped spool for thread, and in fact, it does seem to be wound with thread; although these appear to be only old, torn- off pieces of thread of the most varied kinds and colors knotted together but tangled up in one another. But it is not just a spool, for a little crossbar sticks out from the middle of the star, and another little strut is joined to it at a right angle. With the help of the second little strut on the one side and one of the points of the star on the other, the whole thing can stand upright, as if on two legs. It is tempting to think that this figure once had some sort of functional shape and is now merely broken. But this does not seem to be the case; at least there is no evidence for such a speculation; nowhere can you see any other beginnings or fractures that would point to anything of the kind; true, the whole thing seems meaningless yet in its own way complete. In any case, it is impossible to say anything more definite about it, since Odradek is extraordinarily mobile and impossible to catch.1

Odradek is an entity that might be said to be untied together, if not exactly into a single entity, then at least into something of one. Furthermore, Odradek is itself a sort of punning neologism in that the “name”— if it even is that— which in the text is said to incorporate both Slavic and Germanic elements, has, in the hands of numerous scholars, ended up “free associating” with multiple series of words in both language families, words that congregate around various kinds of drift and nonbelonging. My own sense of almost familial intimacy with Odradek— at the very least, that we belong to the same congregation— is such that I’ve come to think of my work as contributions to a new “science” of constitutively errant objects, call it “Odradek studies.” 1. Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. and trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 72.

P r e f a C e   : : ix

In his efforts to debunk the “myth of disenchantment” that informs so many accounts of modernity, Jason Josephson-Storm offers his own image of a patchwork of some of the very discourses I will be addressing here. His claim is that, “if one were to assemble a Franco-Frankfurt-Frankenstein’s monster out of oft-taught fragments from German critical theory, French poststructuralism, a dash of feminism, and more than a hint of Heidegger,” the undead creature one would end up with would vaguely resemble the German New Age philosopher Ludwig Klages, whose esoteric teachings appear to have influenced some of the very figures associated with the “myth of disenchantment,” among them, Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.2 As I hope to show in this volume, “Odradek” was made of rather different stuff than Josephson-Storm’s monster, whose testimony is ultimately meant to reinitiate moderns into cosmic mysteries disavowed by modern “hermeneuts of suspicion.” Though I share the basic thrust of Josephson-Storm’s argument, namely, that we have never been disenchanted, I will be arguing in a more Marxist vein that the occult sciences of the moderns are hidden in plain sight, indeed in the very practices of everyday life that count as most secular and most disenchanted. To go back to the Q&A at Berkeley, I recall that I was somewhat flustered by the question for I had never really given a lot of thought to methodology and have always felt a deep resistance to doing so. Some of that resistance has to do with the contingencies of my intellectual biography, the influence of which has become a red thread running through and “untying” together the following chapters. Quite simply, I never fully settled into any discipline, never fully embraced my departmental identity, never felt at home in any single field, never really identified with the title “scholar,” or, as one says in German, Literaturwissenschaftler, “scientist” of literature (thus the lure of Odradek studies as a kind of alternative to Wissenschaft als Beruf ). Surely this is one of the things that helped me “to bond” with Rosenzweig, who, as noted, himself left the university to undertake alternative, “undisciplined” pedagogical and literary projects no longer constrained by the discourse of the university. No doubt it also contributed to my attraction to the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose psychotic break was precipitated by a crisis of investiture, an inability to identify with his sociosymbolic identity and authority as judge. It is, however, Freud’s perspective, his way of engaging with his materials, that has perhaps had the greatest influence on my approach to things, even though I never systematically studied his oeuvre. I never took a course 2. Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 213.

   

x :: Pr e faC e

on Freud and started reading him relatively late in life, even though as an adolescent I had already clocked some time on an analytic couch. At any rate, when I fumbled around for an answer to the question raised at Berkeley, I said, without having thought of this notion before, that my work could be seen as dedicated to the dreamwork of the concept. A more Lacanian formulation would, perhaps, be the instance of the letter in the concept. The thought here is that every significant concept says more than it “knows,” that the life of a concept includes something like an unconscious. Which is to say that the “more” that it doesn’t know that it knows is not more positive knowledge as, for example, when we discover more properties of the thing named by a concept (that, for example, COVID-19 can be transmitted by air). It pertains, rather, to a dimension of stasis, a kind of semantic turbulence or signifying stress immanent to the concept and the forms of life in which it gains its meaning. This turbulence ramifies through the signifying material of the semantic field at issue the way a wish, as Freud demonstrated, ramifies through the displacements and condensations elaborated by the dreamwork. Much of this book addresses the nature of those ramifications for understanding what I would still like to call by that old-fashioned term the human condition. Recalling that Hannah Arendt entitled the German version of her book of that name Vita Activa oder vom tätigen Leben, my argument is, however, that Freud’s discovery points to an intensification of our “active life” that introduces aberrations, errancy, excess into the very domains that for Arendt constitute the human condition. As I discuss in the introduction, this book grew out of an experience of writer’s block, a kind of stasis plaguing my creative capacities. Approaching and then turning sixty-five surely played a role in this. I was not sure if I had another book in me, and I certainly did not want to force it. I did, however, have an idea that I thought might be worth pursuing, one that had a very clear frame provided by the grace of a chiasmus. The project would involve a sort of commentary on Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and be organized by shifting the center of gravity of the concepts so as to read Three Essays on the Sexuality of Theory. This would give me a chance to engage with a question that has preoccupied me throughout my academic career: What is the sex appeal of what we have, in academia, come to call theory? What are we doing when we (as one used to say) “do theory”? As it turned out, Freud’s Three Essays proved to be an unworkable model. What emerged instead was a kind of self-analysis about my own involvement with the intellectual currents linked to a term that, though of ancient lineage, had come, at least since the 1960s, to be sur- charged with world-historical as well as erotic import.

P r e f a C e   : : xi

This retrospective, autobiographical aspect would seem to give these reflections a certain “owl of Minerva” quality; that is, it becomes possible only at the point at which the concepts and practices at issue have begun to lose their salience. The allusion here is to Hegel’s preface to his Philosophy of Right. The full quote is, “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old. . . . The owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.”3 This book might thereby be seen to be part of a larger current in contemporary literary studies that has come to be characterized as “postcritical,” a coming to terms with what Rita Felski refers to in the book of that name, the limits of critique.4 One of the admirable aims of that critique of critique has been to generate a more capacious, more embodied, more lived engagement above all with literature, to deepen our experiential exposure to the charms and resonances of poetic speech. This “more” would allow us, finally, to step out from under the judgmental shadow of the hermeneutics of suspicion that had seemed to turn all acts of reading into so many exercises of ideological unmasking and disenchantment. (As we have seen, for Josephson-Storm, this new suspicion of hermeneutics leads to the claim that disenchantment, rather than being a process of draining culture of its mythic dimensions, turns out to be modernity’s constitutive myth.) That skeptical, not to say paranoid, approach that searched everywhere for the invisible hand of domination behind the enchanting screen of literary language derived much of its considerable intellectual authority and cultural capital from the names of some of the great “master theorists” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud to Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault, among others. My own sense of a properly “postcritical” approach to one’s materials and one’s attachments to them takes a somewhat different point of departure. It was, after all, Hegel himself who most compellingly and consequentially attempted to push thinking beyond the limits of critique in the sense given that concept by Kant (above all in his Critique of Pure Reason). The fundamental gesture of that push was to relocate the Thing-in-Itself that, in Kant’s view, exceeded the grasp of human knowledge— critique was meant to police that threshold against metaphysical trespass— within the world itself and its forms of intelligibility that were, in turn, always part and parcel of a historical form of life, always embedded in our embodied forms 3. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 23. 4. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015). Josephson-Storm’s critique of the “myth of disenchantment” shares in the spirit of this “postcritical” turn.

   

xii : : P r e f a C e

of agonistic sociability. What Kant located in a noumenal realm beyond phenomena becomes, for Hegel, a kind of conceptual agitation immanent to the realm of phenomena that thereby ceases to be a realm at all in the sense of a consistent whole delimited by knowable boundaries. (No doubt one meaning of what Hegel called “absolute knowledge” involves absolution from such boundaries.) In a sense, Hegel’s point was that (Kantian) critique functions as a kind of defensive posture against the at times tragic, at times comedic disorientations of being in the midst of life and the turbulence of history, a way of protecting oneself against the partiality and partisanship at play in our commitments and claims about the world. Partiality and partisanship are seen here not as symptoms of merely subjective perspectives on the world, exercises of a particular will to power, but rather as ways of being in the midst of a world that is itself still undergoing creation, a process that, as I want to argue, is not synonymous with what we have come to refer to as social or cultural construction (the traces of which the “hermeneutics of suspicion” was always at pains to demonstrate). In the chapters that follow, I will be arguing that much of what has, at least in humanities departments at universities in Europe, North America, and beyond, come under the heading of “theory” from the 1960s onward was postcritical in this Hegelian sense (as we will see, for a great many of the thinkers in question, Hegel remained one if not the crucial point of reference in their work). At its best, “theory” was dedicated to inquiries concerning the nature of the work at play— and the play at work— in that work in progress called world, inquiries into the meaning of the creatureliness of what is both subject of and subject to the forces of creation. While studying at the Tübinger Stift, Hegel joined his friends Friedrich Hölderlin and F. W. J. Schelling in the composition of what might be characterized as the first postcritical manifesto, a brief text to which its discoverer, Franz Rosenzweig, gave the title Das Älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus (The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism).5 They conceived their project as one that transforms the impetus of Kant’s critical project and the aspirations of the Enlightenment more generally— and here they include those of the French Revolution— into a new social, cultural, and aesthetic pedagogy guided by what they call a “mythology of reason,” itself grasped as the overlapping of a “Monotheism of reason and the heart . . . [and a] polytheism of the imagination and art.” What interests 5. See Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider, eds., Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels “ältestes Systemprogramm” des deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 11– 14. An English translation of the manifesto has been reprinted in the European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 2 (1995): 199– 200.

P r e f a C e   : : xiii

me, above all, is a statement made in the very first paragraph of the manifesto that essentially asks how the world must be constituted, such that a moral being can emerge in it.6 As we will see, Slavoj Žižek picks up on this question in his debates with major new trends in Hegel scholarship. There he insists, very much in the spirit of this early, postcritical manifesto, that he develops “the topic of ontological incompleteness”— what I have characterized as the dimension of creatureliness— “in order to answer the question ‘How should reality be structured so that (something like) subjectivity can emerge in it?’”7 For Žižek as well as for the authors of the first postcritical manifesto, the answer revolves around and, as it were, pulsively theorizes this point of convergence of subjectivity and ontological incompleteness, this point at which a peculiar sort of deficit is seemingly shared, a nameless gap is jointly occupied, by human being and world. Or as I put it in the discussion that follows, human subjectivity encysts (on) a gap already troubling the Other, whether that is taken to be another human being, a family, a form of life, a tradition, or indeed nature itself. The wager of this book is that those discourses that have, for better or worse, been grouped under the heading of “theory” (or even “high theory”) take part in this circuit of pulsive theorizations that Freud, for his part, had shown to be constitutive of human sexuality and therewith of a distinctively human sort of vital pressure at odds with the homeostatic imperatives that regulate biological life. As I will also argue, this very “oddness”— in theory-speak, “queerness”— is what Freud came to link, to paraphrase E. E. Cummings, to the oddness of God to choose the Jews and thereby to the “cause” of anti-Semitism. Another aspect of the “postcritical” approach that has played a part in my own “life in theory” is the view that every act of reading is at some level transferential in nature and in that sense constitutively unsuspicious, willingly enchantable. I have found that I am unable to fully engage with a work of literature or philosophy— especially demanding ones— unless I at some level presuppose that the author knows what he or she is doing, is in command of their materials. If I get confused, I go on the assumption that I missed or misunderstood something, that I need to go back, reread, and get reoriented. Put somewhat differently, there can be no proper hermeneutics of suspicion without first entering into and finding one’s way through the thicket of the hermeneutic circle, something that requires not 6. “Wie muß eine Welt für ein moral[isches] Wesen beschaffen seyn?” (“How should a world be constituted for a moral being?”). Mythologie der Vernunft, 199. 7. Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 19.

   

xiv : : P r e f a C e

just reading but a great deal of rereading. It’s really only then that one can make genuine discoveries of those tensions, impasses, and enigmas, those “cloudy spots,” to use a term coined by Walter Benjamin apropos of Kafka, that belong to the “substance” itself, whether it’s a fictional world, a philosophical argument, a poem.8 I am tempted to say that it is also at such points that one can experience a kind of intimacy with the author, that one encounters the author as subject (in chapter 2 I give a concrete example of this experience in the context of my “relationship” with Franz Rosenzweig). One might also think, in this context, of Jacques Lacan’s pun used as the title of his twenty-first seminar, les non- dupes errent, which in French can be heard as les noms du père; the formula suggests that those who assume from the start the critical posture, perhaps especially one fortified by psychoanalytic theory, to avoid being duped are the ones who are really duped. Yet another dimension of the “postcritical” stance I assume in my work with theory is what might strike some as a soft pluralism, a willingness to patch, to (un)tie together concepts that would seem to belong to antithetical theoretical paradigms, in a word, that I don’t take sides, don’t assume the very partisanship that I’ve suggested is part and parcel of one’s existential and libidinal implication in a world. Here I can only say that my partisanship is itself only ever partial, only ever made up of parts that hopefully, when placed in the right constellation, allow me to gain proximity to what is really troubling the material in question. This approach is, as I will argue, consonant with Walter Benjamin’s insight about translation, namely, that what is ultimately at issue in a text, what it is ultimately trying to say, only truly becomes manifest in its translation into another language, in what we might call the here and now of the translation. Or to refer to Benjamin’s famous contemporary Carl Schmitt, my approach to the theoretical paradigms and concepts with which I work is not political in the sense that he, Schmitt, gave that term, namely, that it always implies a friend- enemy relation, a division into oppositional camps. But as I also well know, one can never be in control of how one is oneself viewed in the context of a field ridden with polemics. My mother told me that as a child I would sometimes go to sleep with a penny in my hand and hold it all night so that by morning my hand would have turned green from the copper. I have no idea how old I was when I did this, if I did this on a regular basis, only a few times, perhaps even only 8. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927– 1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 802.

P r e f a C e   : : xv

once but recalled by my mother as a recurring eccentricity of what she perhaps perceived as an incipient “anal” character trait. In a sense it doesn’t matter because the story rings so true to me. If not exactly a recollection, it captures something of my own sense of my childhood self. I’m tempted to say that it represents my first attempt to cope with a deficit that did not belong to me or even to anyone in particular; it was, rather, “atmospheric,” and yet I somehow felt it was in me. In a word, I breathed in and struggled to metabolize an impasse, something not working in the world, in the form of life, the big Other to which I belonged. The nature of that peculiar deficit and the work involved with managing, with economizing it (or, rather, imagining that one is doing so), ultimately leads, as I will argue in the following chapters, to the intersection of libidinal and political economy that has been at the core of the researches that have loosely gathered under the heading of theory. As I will further argue, the path toward that point of intersection has a certain Beckettian quality, one that leads into the neighborhood of what Beckett referred to as the “unnullable least” of creaturely life.9 And so: worstward ho!

9. Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1980), 106.

introduCtion

ON SOME CAUSES FOR EXCITEMENT

I

For some time now, I’ve wanted to write a small book with the title Three Essays on the Sexuality of Theory. As noted in the preface, I decided not to pursue that project because of the formal constraints of the frame, the pressure to produce exactly three essays that would more or less directly correspond with Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (“The Sexual Aberrations,” “Infantile Sexuality,” and “Transformations of Puberty”). In lieu of that volume, I want to share the rationale for the project beyond the compelling allure— the sex appeal— of its chiasmic reversal of Freud’s title. My intuition was that the kind of intellectual inquiry that in literary and cultural studies has for a number of years loosely gone under the heading of “theory” had something to do not just with sexuality but with sexuality as understood by Freud and first laid out in systematic fashion in his 1905 essays. The idea was not that all such work directly or even indirectly addressed questions of sexuality as was and continues to be the case, say, in feminist theory, gender theory, or queer theory. My hunch was rather that “theory” at a certain point became a kind of shibboleth for all inquiries concerned with the socialization and acculturation of our embodied being, the ways in which, to use Judith Butler’s formulation, human bodies come to matter, get caught up in, get “sutured” to, signifying operations that invest them with meanings and statuses, endow them with values, entitle— or even enjoin— them to enjoyment of one kind or another.1 One might speak of processes of cultural anthropogenesis in which the entry into the symbolic system of language, the taking up of the role of a player in a culture’s language games, is the core “event,” one in which something of the order of the signifier “gets under our skin” and “intensifies” the body 1. See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 2011).

   

2 :: i n t roduC t i on

even if, as Émile Durkheim put it in a related context, “the role of matter is at a minimum.”2 My guiding thought here was that, when bodies come to matter, the subject matter of sexuality is always at some level called into play. Recalling the etymology of excite from excitare, to summon or call out, we might say that bodies that matter are excited bodies and so, in turn, exciting bodies. “Theory,” in the intellectual tradition that concerns me here, held and continues to hold out the promise of getting in on all that excitement. It does so by in some sense catching the body in the act of its inaugural excitations, in the midst of the emergence of sexuality as a constitutive by-product of our inscription into a historical form of life. One thinks, to take one example, of Foucault’s writings about disciplinary power and biopower, about the ways these modern forms of power intensify the body and enter into the production of sexuality (admittedly in a sense Foucault wished to distinguish from Freud’s).3 How could such theory not itself be a considerable cause for excitement beyond whatever “knowledge production” it might yield? Leo Bersani, a great student of Foucault’s work, used a formulation some years ago that struck me as almost the proper name of the subject matter at issue when bodies come to matter. He characterized the drives as first laid out in Freud’s three essays as pulsive theorizations, a peculiar overlapping of physiological and epistemological/ hermeneutic energies called forth by every child’s exposure to enigmatic messages emanating from the “big Other” of its caregiving environment.4 At a fundamental level, such messages convey inconsistencies and contradictions, a sense of something not working in the Other on which it depends for its physical and psychological survival. 2. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 229. 3. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). There Foucault argues, for example, that nineteenthcentury medicine, as a “power which . . . took charge of sexuality . . . set about contacting bodies, caressing them with its eyes, intensifying areas, electrifying surfaces, dramatizing troubled areas” (44). Foucault’s more general claim here is that “pleasure and power . . . are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement” (48). What Foucault calls the “deployment of sexuality” has its “reason for being . . . in proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in increasingly detailed ways” and “has been linked from the outset with an intensification of the body” (107; my emphasis). 4. Leo Bersani gave the talk as part of his seminar titled “The Subject of Love” during his tenure as a Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, spring 2012. When, some years later, I wrote to Bersani to get a reference for the formulation, he no longer recalled using it but was very happy to be reminded of it.

i n t r o d u C t i o n   : : 3

In previous work I have used the term “creaturely life” to capture the nature of the excitement that splits our life-form into itself and the historically contingent forms of life in which it must be inscribed to flourish, a split that seems to undermine from within the capacity to flourish. “Creaturely,” as I use the term, signifies a mode of exposure peculiar to human life, exposure not simply to the elements or to the fragility and precariousness of our mortal, finite lives, but rather to an ultimate— and ultimately exciting— lack of foundation of the historical forms of life in which it takes place. This crucial missing piece of the world, this lack to which we are ultimately and intimately exposed as social beings of language, is one that we thus first acquire by way of our initiation into these forms of life, not one already there in the bare fact of our biological being (and, thus, one not readily accessible to the biological sciences). We could say that the precariousness, the fragility— the “nudity”— of biological life becomes potentiated, amplified, by way of exposure to the radical contingency of the forms of life that constitute the space of meaning within which human life unfolds, and that it is only through such potentiation that we take on the flesh of creaturely life, the carnal enjoyment that gathers around this missing link. Creatureliness is thus a dimension not so much of biological as ontological vulnerability, a vulnerability that permeates human being as that being whose essence it is to exist in forms of life that are, in turn, contingent, fragile, susceptible to breakdown— that are created and de- created.5 What came under the heading of “theory” thus involved something like a linguistic turn to the body, or perhaps better, into the body; it was always at some level engaged with the mysterious “event” of the word becoming flesh, of, to use Foucault’s terms, “discursive practices” intensifying the body. Here the relevant biblical reference would not only be John 1:14 but also, perhaps more importantly, the Letter to the Romans where Paul explicitly links the notion of the flesh, the sarx— as distinct from the soma, the body— to the autonomy of desire as a supplementary and wayward law, as a kind of deviant imperative at work in one’s members. For Paul, the flesh is a kind of surplus soma attached to the body, an enigmatic bonus— or, rather, malus— excited into being by the commanding letter 5. I take the term “ontological vulnerability” from Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). In his study of the culture and cultivation of coldness in the Weimar period, Helmut Lethen underlines the constant threat of exposure that a new matter- of-factness or neue Sachlichkeit was meant to ward off. The risk at issue was the shame that would come with exposure of one’s creatureliness, a shame the soul- crushing powers of which derived from its relation to Germany’s historical situation after World War I. See Helmut Lethen, Verhaltenslehre der Kälte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994).

   

4 :: i n t roduC t i on

of the law.6 I am suggesting that “theory” has exercised its attractions on its readers and acolytes by way of this “sarxist” dimension that, in light of Paul’s remarks, I would characterize as a hermeneutic inflammation of the soma, a sort of vicious— or better, deliciously vicious— circle secreted within the hermeneutic circle of interpretation. Jacques Lacan and his followers have long linked such a fleshy surplus to what they characterize as the constitutively hysterical status of the subject. As Slavoj Žižek put it very early on in his work, “the hysterical question opens the gap of what is ‘in the subject more than the subject,’ of the object in the subject which resists interpellation— subordination of the subject, its inclusion in the symbolic network.”7 But also expressly antipsychoanalytic theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who, as the latter has said, “have no use for signifiers,” ought, in my view, to be understood as representatives of a kind of sarxist materialism. Their project was, however, to unhinge the surplus soma— the “body without organs”— from its hermeneutic anchorage points and rethink the excitations that bedeviled Paul (and that remain linked to a commanding paternal Other, to God the Father) as pulsations of an impersonal, machinic desire operating in and through individual and social bodies.8 The dimension of the sarx constitutes, we might say, the subject-matter, the virtually real materiality, in the subject matter of sexuality. There was then, as these preliminary remarks indicate, good reason for the perception that “theory,” even when not directly addressing sexuality, was somehow sexier than, say, “straight” philosophy or other forms of literary scholarship. If, as Freud thought, thinking could function as a mode 6. “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but the sin which dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.” Romans 7:15– 23. The Writings of St. Paul, ed. Wayne A. Meeks (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 79– 80. 7. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 113. 8. See Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972– 1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 21 (the second chapter of the book consists of an interview with Deleuze and Guattari about their book, Anti-Oedipus). It’s worth noting that Deleuze and Guattari place their thought in a lineage that links them not to Paul but rather to another heterodox Jew, Spinoza, whose thought uncouples divinity from both commanding paternal and redeeming filial figurations.

i n t r o d u C t i o n   : : 5

of sublimation of sexual drives and desires, the forms of thinking that gathered under the heading of “theory” seemed to offer a particularly concentrated dose of that sublimity. “Doing theory” offered a mode of enjoyment linked to the repetition of the pulsive theorizations that suffuse human sexuality, the particular forms of excitations it involves. There are doubtlessly many at times overlapping, at times competing stories one could tell about the emergence of this mode of intellectual inquiry, this explicit or implicit fixation on a constitutive inflammation of our embodied being linked to discursivity. And indeed, historical introductions to and commentaries on the (largely French) master thinkers who came to be identified with “theory” were for a time a major genre of academic publishing. What is especially difficult to delineate are the temporal signposts of this formation, when it began, when or indeed whether it ended, that is, whether we have entered a period of “post-theory” or, as one refers to it now, “post- criticism.” But it is just as difficult to establish the boundaries of what counts as “theory,” to establish, at the very least, a proper canon of the primary texts of what might be called “high theory.” While wondering about this, I searched my own library for copies of some of those older introductory texts that served sometimes well, sometimes not so well, as orientation during my own initiation into this world but found to my dismay that I had given most of them away. I did, however, find a volume written expressly in the “aftermath” of theory, a study that casts a simultaneously critical and nostalgic glance back at its glory days, Terry Eagleton’s After Theory. The book, which was published in 2003, begins with a historical pronouncement that also gives a good sense of the canon at issue: “The golden age of cultural theory is long past. The pioneering work of Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault are several decades behind us. So are the path-breaking writings of Raymond Williams, Luce Irigaray, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. Not much that has been written since has matched the ambitiousness and originality of these founding mothers and fathers.”9 I am not an intellectual historian and am 9. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 1. One of the most important introductions to the thinkers and concerns of the “golden age” of theory was, of course, Terry Eagleton’s own Literary Theory: An Introduction (London: Blackwell, 1983). His book on Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), was deeply formative for my own intellectual development and sense of sharp and, well, exciting prose. A recent crossword puzzle in the New Yorker had as one of its clues, “Avid reader of Derrida, Spivak, Irigaray, and the like.” The answer: theoryhead (March 8, 2021).

   

6 :: i n t roduC t i on

ill- equipped to do justice to the complexity of the history that culminated in this “golden age.” Instead of a proper intellectual history, I’d simply like to sketch out what I take to be some of the crucial moments and dimensions of the emergence of the intellectual formation that came to be called “theory.” II

Whatever other genealogies one might offer, I think it’s relatively uncontroversial to say that what came to be practiced under the heading of “theory,” even though its master thinkers were of an older generation, forms part of the legacy of the fervor of the 1960s and the various social and political movements that emerged or took on new shape and energy in that decade. Though these movements could vary considerably across national and cultural boundaries, they did generally share an antiauthoritarian and “new left” thrust. Another way of putting it would be to say that much of the political, social, and cultural turmoil of the 1960s led a rich afterlife in the practice of various forms of theoretical inquiry in the academy and beyond. Criticism of this development from conservative voices is epitomized by Roger Kimball’s polemic Tenured Radicals. There Kimball argued that the values of the traditional liberal arts education had come to be, as the subtitle of his book puts it, corrupted by the influx into the academy of these theoretical approaches and their impact on the authority of, among other things, literary canons.10 Much of the criticism of “theory” coming from the left, however, targeted what was seen as a displacement of political energies from the street to the university, a depoliticizing sublimation of revolutionary activity by ostensibly radical thought and cultural critique, the conversion of real political antagonisms into various kinds of “difference” elaborated in writings seen by many to be hermetically sealed off against the uninitiated. The critique was often especially harsh with regard to the kind of textual analysis associated with Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man and referred to as “deconstruction,” a mode of reading that typically targeted regimes of binary oppositions seen as underwriting various forms of, as was often suggested, metaphysically entrenched power relations. Others, of course, experienced the emergence of the new theoretical paradigms and approaches as part of an intellectual rejuvenation of the university, especially of the humanities and social sciences, as a crucial opening 10. Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990).

i n t r o d u C t i o n   : : 7

and exposure of the archives and canons of university disciplines to the conflicts and contingencies of history haunting them from within like so many foreign bodies or “free radicals,” an exposure meant to induce what Derrida, in his reading of Freud’s thoughts on the cultural transmission of trauma, referred to as “archive fever.”11 Derrida was, of course, one of the central figures of the “golden age” of theory, and the reception of his work is in many ways paradigmatic for other of its key figures. In the United States, his work was largely read in departments of literature and largely neglected by philosophy departments. In this sense he was not altogether different from other representatives of the so- called continental tradition that tended to be marginalized in departments of philosophy in the United States and England.12 One thinks in this context of the controversy over the awarding of an honorary degree to Derrida in 1992 by Cambridge University. A number of faculty members— and not only from the philosophy department— published an open letter in the Times of London (May 9, 1992) in which the signatories expressed their derision for the sort of work that Derrida did. In essence, they did not consider him to be a real philosopher at all. “Derrida,” they wrote, “describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy— in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature. . . . In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does 11. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). It’s worth noting that deconstructive reading practices were for the most part brought to bear on canonical literary and philosophical texts of the European tradition. Gayatri Spivak, who studied with Paul de Man at Cornell, wrote a dissertation under his supervision on W. B. Yeats, and went on to translate and introduce to the English-speaking world Derrida’s On Grammatology, would become one of the key figures in the postcolonial turn in theory, a development largely responsible for a global rethinking and revision of the canons of literature, philosophy, and political thought. One should add here that the French thinkers associated with the emergence of theory all lived through the upheavals of decolonization. I return to this point in the next chapter. 12. The division of twentieth- century philosophy into “analytic” and “continental” camps in many ways already prepared the way for the emergence of what I am here calling “theory.” In his book A Parting of Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000), Michael Friedman uses the encounter between these three philosophers at the now infamous conference in Davos, Switzerland, in the spring of 1929 to lay out the fault lines of this disciplinary division that was to prove to be so consequential for the history of modern and postmodern thought.

   

8 :: i n t roduC t i on

not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.” The real disdain comes across a bit later in the letter: “Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (‘logical phallusies’ and the like), and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.” When the faculty finally voted on the matter, those in favor of the honorary degree won. The modern continental tradition itself, of course, includes currents of thought that often stand in considerable tension with one another. But in the selective and often French-influenced reception that contributed to the rise of “theory,” this tradition was largely seen as harboring an antiauthoritarian, critical thrust, one that carried forward the energies not only of the social and political movements of the 1960s but also, as the signatories of the Cambridge letter note with disdain, those of the artistic avant-gardes of the first half of the twentieth century. This antiauthoritarian thrust would come to be characterized more broadly as a “hermeneutics of suspicion” grounded above all in the work of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. It’s worth noting that those three thinkers have been seen both as bearers of the Enlightenment tradition (namely, of breaking with tradition) and as profoundly anti-Enlightenment thinkers. As Robert Brandom has recently put it in an effort to distinguish philosophy proper from what he negatively characterizes as “genealogical” thinking, the true legacy of the Enlightenment involves the work of disenchantment by reason, while thinkers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (he adds Foucault to this famous trio) manifest a profound disillusionment with reason.13 For the moment, I want to underline that though all three thinkers practice some form of what Terry Eagleton has recently characterized as “somatic materialism,” a deep commitment to the significance of embodiment, of corporeal existence, in the life of the mind, it was above all Freud who came to see that the “mattering” and “materiality” of bodies invested with meaning, bodies interpellated by and inscribed in some sort of symbolic order, always includes or at the very least edges on the subject matter— and subject-matter— of sexuality. For Freud, the “minded body” is a constitutively and excessively excited body. To return to my “Pauline” idiom, 13. Robert Brandom, “Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity,” in Panoramas of Mind and Meaning, an essay collection published on Brandom’s website: www.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Texts/Panoramas_of_Mind_and_Meaning%20(1).pdf, 206. Paul Ricœur speaks of the “school of suspicion” in his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970).

i n t r o d u C t i o n   : : 9

I would say that if there is a materialism here it would be better characterized as sarxist materialism.14 In more Kantian terms, the sarxist claim is that the conditions of possibility of the experience and knowledge of objects includes the dimension of desire; the transcendentally constituted field of appearance of phenomena is never simply the “space of reasons,” but rather one always shaped by erotic awareness and, more importantly, erotic unawareness. The intentionality of human consciousness is always sustained, always doubled by unconscious mental activity; the subject of reason always “enjoys” the company of a sort of Doppelgänger in the subject of the unconscious. This is, I will argue, a different sort of claim than what has been proposed in recent research in the neurosciences that has focused on the role of affect in the emergence of consciousness, a field pioneered by Antonio Damasio and whose findings, some of have claimed, are consonant with those of Freud.15 It is also different from the claim made by Brandom in his reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, namely, as a story in which erotic awareness comes to be aufgehoben in the specifically human game of giving and asking for reasons. It has been, in my view, the singular achievement of the cluster of inquiries that, for better or worse, have fallen under the heading of “theory” to show that the excess of excitement that “enfleshes” human life pushes beyond both naturalism and rationalism, even if, as in Brandom’s case, that rationalism is cashed out in the embodied practices, the somatic materialism of social life.16 Brandom has famously characterized his investigations of reason in history by way of the formula, making it explicit.17 The approach to which I’ve been guided by way of my engagement with “theory” and that I refer to as sarxist materialism, might be characterized as that of making Id explicit. 14. Terry Eagleton, Materialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). Eagleton includes among his somatic materialists not only Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, but also Ludwig Wittgenstein. 15. I am thinking above all of the work of Mark Solms. I will return to both thinkers in later chapters. 16. It’s worth noting that in the final version of his massive Hegel study, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s “Phenomenology” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), Brandom replaces, in the discussion of the master-slave dialectic, the phrase “erotic awareness” used in earlier drafts he had made available on his website with “orectic awareness,” a word that to my ears serves to reduce the erotic to one among other animal appetites. Though this is no doubt closer to what Hegel means by Begierde at this point in the life of spirit, I think it is symptomatic of a broader tendency. 17. See Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

   

10 : : i n t r o d u C t i o n

III

Since I began these reflections with a formulation coined by Judith Butler, it’s worth noting how her own intellectual trajectory participates in the emergence of theory in the sense I am tracking here. Several years after completing her PhD in philosophy at Yale (with a year at Heidelberg), Butler published her first book, Subjects of Desire, a study of the reception of Hegel in twentieth- century French thought.18 The strong emphasis in that tradition on the notion of desire stems from the profound influence of the lectures given in Paris by the Russian émigré Alexandre Kojève between 1933 and 1939. Indeed, without Kojève’s single-minded focus on the elaboration of desire in the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, modern French thought would be, well, unthinkable. Among those who listened in were Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, JeanPaul Sartre, Georges Bataille, Alexandre Koyré, Emmanuel Levinas, Eric Weil, and Jacques Lacan. Perhaps equally important in the development of “French Hegelianism” was the philosopher Jean Hyppolite, who translated Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit into French in 1941 and published a comprehensive commentary on it in 1947. Among Hyppolite’s students were Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Butler’s intense engagement with this tradition laid much of the groundwork for her own pathbreaking book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), a study of the performative dimension of gender identity that makes innovative use of the work of Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Monique Wittig, among others. That Butler’s appointment, in 1998, at the University of California, Berkeley, was in the departments of rhetoric and comparative literature rather than philosophy is, I would suggest, indicative of the status of the kind of theoretical work she had begun to do in that book. It was a recognition that her attention to the processes of “subjectivation” that make bodies matter and create frames of identification and desire for them led her on a path of inquiry that exceeded the established disciplinary protocols of academic philosophy. Butler’s trajectory also tracks the course of what might be called, to use a Hegelian formulation, the migration of the spirit of theory from Germany to France to North American academia (along with other parts of the world, particularly South America). The mostly French thinkers who formed the pantheon of high theory from the 1960s onward were all deeply informed by their reception not only of Hegel but also of other key representatives of 18. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

i n t r o d u C t i o n   : : 11

modern German thought. The transmission of concepts and modes of thinking from Nietzsche to Deleuze and Foucault, from Marx to Althusser, from Freud (and to a lesser extent Hegel) to Lacan, from Heidegger to Derrida (who also wrote major studies of Husserl, Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud), is explicitly affirmed in the work of the French theorists. This transmission was, however, itself largely filtered through the indigenous development of structuralist thought from Saussure to Lévi-Strauss.19 The further transmission of this body of thought to American academia was in its turn energized by the development of relations between individual French theorists— most importantly, Derrida and Foucault— and various American universities, most importantly Yale and Berkeley. Even more important was the commitment of a number of university presses to translate this work into English (often published in special series dedicated to theory). In 2012, Butler won the Adorno Prize given every three years by the city of Frankfurt for excellence in philosophy, theater, music, or film (Derrida was awarded the prize in 2001). I mention this because I have heretofore neglected the role of the Frankfurt school in my sketch of the emergence of “theory” (the term Critical Theory has established itself as a synonym for this body of work). Adorno’s impact, thanks in part to his return from American exile, on the intellectual, cultural, and political formation of the postwar (West) German intelligentsia, both inside and outside the university, is hard to overestimate. Herbert Marcuse’s impact on the formation of the “new left” in both Germany and the United States is also well known. Though often considered to be antipodes of sorts, both made it possible for the younger postwar generation in Germany to take up the legacy of the Freudo-Marxist orientation shared to different degrees by the Frankfurt school thinkers. It would, however, be fair to say that the Frankfurt school did not have a major impact on the intellectual formation of those French readers of German thought whose work culminated in what Eagleton characterized as the golden age of theory. Indeed, the tensions between these two intellectual formations— one could say that it was really only the Frankfurt school that counts as an identifiable formation with relatively clear ideological and institutional contours— often led those affiliated with German Critical Theory to see in the practitioners of the new, largely French theoretical approaches a tendency toward conservatism, irrationalism, even nihilism (or as Brandom put it, a disillusionment with reason). In a recent history of the career of high theory in Germany, Philipp Felsch 19. Saussure, for his part, had his own German formation. He began his career as a linguist through the study of historical linguistics at the University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig where he earned his doctorate on the vowel system of IndoEuropean languages.

   

12 : : i n t r o d u C t i o n

underlines this divide, writing that “the import of the French to Germany suffered from the smoldering enmity of Critical Theory. For the Frankfurt crowd and their followers, everything that emerged from the heavy mist of poststructuralism represented a dangerous kind of thinking. And in this case, that was not meant as a compliment. It was above all the relation of the French authors to Heidegger that stood in the way of an even tentative and cautious rapprochement.”20 This attitude received its canonical formulation in Jürgen Habermas’s critique of Foucault and Derrida in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity.21 For Habermas, the most important heir of the legacy of the Frankfurt school, the new French theory had taken on the anti-Enlightenment and ultimately antirationalist commitments of two of their primary German precursors, Nietzsche and Heidegger, rather than further elaborating a proper dialectic of the Enlightenment. The case of Heidegger was especially significant in that it seemed to demonstrate the compatibility of a radical critique of rationality and fascism. Habermas had already adumbrated this critique in the speech he gave upon receiving the Adorno Prize in 1980, a point at which his knowledge of the new French theory was largely secondhand. In the speech, published under the now famous title “Modernity— An Incomplete Project,” he characterized the French thinkers as “young conservatives” who essentially “recapitulate the basic experience of aesthetic modernity”: They claim as their own the revelations of a decentered subjectivity, emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness, and with this experience they step out of the modern world. On the basis of modernistic attitudes they justify an irreconcilable antimodernism. They remove into the sphere of the far-away and the archaic the spontaneous powers of imagination, self- experience and emotion. To instrumental reason they juxtapose in Manichean fashion a principle only accessible through evocation, be it the will to power or sover20. Philipp Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie: Geschichte einer Revolte, 1960– 1990 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015), 114; my translation. Felsch’s history largely follows the lives and careers of the publishers of the Merve publishing house, which, along with the more famous Suhrkamp Verlag, was largely responsible for the dissemination of the new theoretical work arriving from Paris. 21. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). For an excellent discussion of Habermas’s engagement with French theory, see Peter Hohendahl, Reappraisals: Shifting Alignments in Postwar Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 131– 55.

i n t r o d u C t i o n   : : 13

eignty, Being or the Dionysiac force of the poetical. In France this line leads from George Bataille via Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida.22 *

My own intellectual itinerary intersected with the migration patterns of the “spirit of theory” at various points. I am usually hesitant to engage in autobiographical reflections in my writing, but in this case I sense that my experience in these matters, precisely in the contingencies that shaped it, share in the larger story I am trying to tell. Perhaps a simpler way of putting it would be to say that one’s thoughts and feelings are never entirely one’s own and that at a certain point what is most deeply personal turns out to be no longer simply personal; the intimate turns out to be always at some level “out there,” or to use a Lacanian formulation, to be extimate.23 So rather than continuing with this piecemeal history of “theory,” I will try to tell a bit of the story of my own engagement with this tradition, of my own life in theory. This mode of exposition demands that along with the presentation of new thoughts and perspectives I revisit arguments I’ve made before, that I “recycle” certain materials— manu-fracture them from other writings— with the goal of creating a new kind of assemblage, my own private Odradek, as it were. 22. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity— An Incomplete Project,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). With this volume, Hal Foster entered the “theory scene” he would later enrich with a series of remarkable studies of modern and contemporary art, studies that have had a significant influence on my own relation to visual materials. It’s worth noting that the reception of Frankfurt school thought in the United States did not involve any significant mediation by or encounter with the new French thinking. The single most important journal for the dissemination of and engagement with Critical Theory in the United States was New German Critique, which was established in 1973 and continues to this day. A quick perusal of the table of contents of volumes published from 1973 on indicates that “French theory” only entered the journal’s sphere of concerns in 1984 with a special issue on modernity and postmodernity. In the editorial statement that frames that volume, what is called “the ‘linguistic turn’ in critical thought in the wake of French structuralism, semiotics, and poststructuralism” is listed among the most salient factors in the debates concerning the meaning and implication of the “postmodern.” New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984): 3. The followers of Critical Theory as well as of French theory all came to participate in a near obsession with the work of Walter Benjamin. But that’s another story, only parts of which I’ll touch on in the body of the text. 23. Lacan coins the term “extimacy” in his seventh seminar. See The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 139.

ChaPter one

A LIFE IN THEORY

I

After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, I went to Oberlin College with the intention of studying math and physics. In my first year there, a wonderful philosophy professor, Thomas Trelogan, turned me on not just to philosophy but to the German philosophical tradition and to Nietzsche and Heidegger, in particular (my openness to philosophy was to some extent amplified by the realization that my talent for math had its limits). I started learning German in my sophomore year so that I would eventually be able to read the material in the original.1 My rapid progress in the language was made possible by Oberlin’s own study-abroad program in Germany, which was led, that year, by Peter Spycher, a wonderful Swiss scholar who combined seriousness of purpose with a kind of impish irony. Two things stand out in my memory of my relationship with Herr Spycher. I no doubt exploited his cheerful generosity by knocking on his door every time I was in the area and happened to see his office light on in order to chat a bit in German (I know that I enjoyed those conversations); when I told him during a walk in Zurich after our program had ended that I had hoped to become a professor one day, he replied that he thought I was zu labil to flourish in academia. I did not know the meaning of the word at the time but knew it was not a good thing. In hindsight, I can say that he was certainly on to something. Perhaps that was one of the reasons that I later came to be concerned with the concept of flourishing and the sources of the lability that can trouble it. 1. My decision to learn German was consolidated on a subway ride with a friend from the Bronx to Manhattan in the summer after my first year at Oberlin. I mentioned to him how exciting my first philosophy class had been. Though I’m not quite sure what he knew about the history of philosophy— we were eighteen years old— he knew enough to urge me to start learning German right away. I enrolled in German 101 when I returned to Oberlin in the fall of 1974. It’s occurred to me more than once: what if I hadn’t taken the subway with Richard Schulman that day?

   

16 : : C h a P t e r o n e

I returned to Oberlin in the autumn of my third year but left again to spend the spring semester (the German Sommersemester) at the University of Bonn.2 I took several classes on Kant— Bonn was at the time a major center of Kant studies— and my first seminar on Heidegger’s Being and Time, taught by Gerold Prauss. It was the year Heidegger died, and I can still remember Prauss asking the seminar group to stand and observe a minute of silence. Back at Oberlin in autumn 1976, I began work on my senior thesis on Being and Time. I insisted on writing it in German, an instance of undergraduate arrogance that can still generate considerable feelings of embarrassment for me (I was rightfully denied honors for my pains).3 After graduating from Oberlin, I spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Freiburg with the aim of continuing my study of Heidegger. I took seminars with, among others, Werner Marx, who held Heidegger’s chair at the time, and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, who had become the editor of the new edition of Heidegger’s complete works. My relationship with both figures was somewhat fraught, particularly with Marx who, after I had called him out on what I saw as egregiously unfair behavior in seminar, said to me— and I can still hear his tone of voice— “Herr Santner, Sie sind überhaupt ein sehr rechthaberischer Mensch!” (“Mr. Santner, you are after all a rather self-righteous individual!”; there was an added poignancy to the tension between us: we were almost certainly the only Jews in the entire group). In a seminar on the concept of “ontological difference,” von Herrmann insisted on employing a method he characterized as properly “phenomenological”; it consisted in reading aloud from the newly published first volume of the Heidegger edition. We— there were somewhere between five and ten students in the class— literally went around the room reading 2. The organization that provided the scholarship for that semester in Bonn had also arranged my housing. The room they found for me turned out to be in a German fraternity house. I knew nothing about German Verbindungen or their troubled history. My often stressful time there put me in touch with a deeply conservative strand of postwar German society I would otherwise never have gotten to know up close. 3. I no longer have a copy of the thing, but the title was something like Zuhandenheit und Vorhandenheit in Martin Heideggers “Sein und Zeit.” In August 1996, while driving from Princeton to Chicago to take up a new position at the University of Chicago, my wife and I stopped in Oberlin so that I could show her the campus. I saw a light on in one of the offices in the Philosophy Department and took a look. It was the office of the professor who had been assigned to supervise my thesis in lieu of my mentor, Tom Trelogan, who had been denied tenure (at that time I had no idea what tenure was). I knocked on his door, and when he opened it, I said something to the effect of, “You may not remember me, but I know I was a bit of an asshole twenty years ago when you became my adviser. Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” His response, to my surprise, was a simple “thank you,” spoken as if he had long been waiting for a well- deserved apology.

A Life in Theory  : : 17

aloud from the book without discussion. I along with another American in the seminar did our best to throw a wrench in the works, raising questions whenever it seemed urgent, much to von Herrmann’s dismay. That year I also struggled with Hegel’s Science of Logic in a seminar taught by Ute Guzzoni who worked on, among other things, Hegel, Heidegger, and Adorno. She was by far the kindest of the three, and I will always remain grateful to her for that. Hegel’s Logic was rather less kind; it blew my mind, but not in a good way. In a word, it became clear to me over the course of that year that something was amiss in my relationship with philosophy or at least with its academic study. There were no doubt contingent personal reasons for this, for my Unbehagen in der Philosophie; most importantly, the trauma of my father’s sudden death just before I began college emerged out of its seeming latency with a disorienting vengeance (the “lability” Herr Spycher had noted was clearly related to this underlying and still largely unaddressed grief ). But I also began to experience the cerebral intensity of philosophical thinking as both overstimulating and emotionally draining. I came to feel that it was simply too spare, cold, and abstract even in this, its most canonical “continental” form, that it didn’t have— and these were the words that came to me at the time— enough flesh on the bone (perhaps the first inkling of my future as a sarxist thinker). I had gotten to know another Fulbright scholar working on her dissertation in art history at the University of Texas (among other things, she introduced me to the work of August Macke). She convinced me that Austin would be an ideal place to take a “sabbatical” from full-time philosophy. I applied at the last minute to the German Department at UT in the hopes of getting a TA-ship to support myself by teaching German— I had become fluent by then— while reading literature, going into therapy, and trying to find a path toward a more fully “incarnated” life of the mind.4 4. The concept of the “flesh,” as already indicated, would come to play a significant role in my thinking over the years. While working on my book The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, a study of the afterlife of the supersensible carnality thought, in the late Middle Ages and early modernity, to supplement the mortal body of the monarch, I read a remarkable book by J. Bernstein on modernist art and aesthetics, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). I dedicated a considerable portion of a chapter of my book to a “debate” with Bernstein on the concepts of embodiment, vitality, and normativity, among other things (we had already once debated “in the flesh” at a conference at Vanderbilt). The disagreement came down, I think, to the difference between, to use Eagleton’s locution, his “somatic materialism” and my “sarxist materialism,” a distinction that runs parallel to the difference between the vulnerability of a living being— a life-form— and the vulnerability of a historical form of life. I’d like to cite a passage from his book that articulates something of what

   

18 : : C h a P t e r o n e

I arrived in Austin in the summer of 1978, began to teach in the German language program— it turned out that I had a talent for this— took my required courses in German literary history and linguistics, and tried, on the side, to keep my hand in philosophy. I took classes with the few people there who engaged with continental philosophy— Robert Solomon, Louis Mackey, Charles Guignon— all of whom had a somewhat marginal status in their otherwise “analytic” department. In my own department, I had the good fortune to study with Leonard Schulze, a comparatist who had grown up in a German heritage community in central Texas but ended up doing his graduate work under the mentorship of Paul de Man at Yale. Like a number of de Man students, Leonard, who arrived in Austin the same year as I after a teaching stint at West Point, was plagued by writer’s block. He was, however, an extraordinary and inspiring teacher and mentor who gave me the sense that the new literary and cultural theory coming out of France (and Yale) allowed one, as it were, to “do philosophy” in a new and indeed exciting way in the sense adumbrated above. With the arrival in Austin, also in 1978, of Gayatri Spivak, who had published her translation of and introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology two years earlier, and the coming together of a small but intense community of faculty and students across the disciplines— the political theorists were especially well represented— who had, as it were, caught the theory bug, it was hard not to have the heady sense that one was part of an intellectual current of considerable, if not world-historical, import, a grandiose thought strongly encouraged by the language and tone of some of the writers we were reading. That being said, I cannot really say that I jumped on the bandwagon. I ended up writing a dissertation on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin with a committee made up of Leonard Schulze, Louis Mackey, and Christopher Middleton, a British poet, translator, and critic whose feel for poetry

I felt that year in Freiburg when I decided to get some distance from philosophy: “It is certainly worth noting how ruthlessly dry and dead are the objects of perception with which philosophy has classically dealt: impressions and ideas, qualia and sense data, synthesizing perceptual manifolds, seeing versus seeing as, interpreting visual information, and so on. Even G. E. Moore’s ‘This hand I see before me’ is more ghost hand than living one. . . . Nothing within these accounts gives a hint that their objects could be living beings subject to not mere breaking apart or destruction, but tearing and flaying, violation and invasion, that unlike mere things where what is outside and what inside remains spatial and contingent, the outside of a living being is the outside of an inside, a skin or flesh protecting and mediating a (heated, palpitating, fluid, viscous, stringy, dense) inside with what is external to it. The constitutive vulnerability and injurability of the perceptual subject and object is voided as irrelevant to epistemology: epistemology is constituted by this elision and suppression, its deadness” (257– 58).

A Life in Theory  : : 19

and ironic stance to academic discourse about it no doubt played a role in keeping me at a certain distance from that world-historical tumult. It also helped that Leonard, perhaps thanks in part to his deep engagement with Romantic irony, had no interest in converting anyone to the cause. Although Hölderlin had been claimed not only by Heidegger but also by a number of brilliant deconstructive critics as “their” signature poet, the conceptual resources for my reading of Hölderlin’s late hymns came above all from Adorno’s essay on them, one of the first texts by Adorno I read.5 Another influence that remained more in the background of my thinking about Hölderlin was a very early work by the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche on the poet’s mental breakdown.6 This was my first encounter with Laplanche’s work, whose concept of the “enigmatic signifier” would later become so central to my thinking. Indeed, it will, I hope, become clear over the course of these pages to what extent “theory” itself functions as a remarkably seductive enigmatic signifier. Laplanche, a student of Lacan’s, based his interpretation of Hölderlin’s mental decline on his teacher’s theory of psychosis, a theory largely elaborated through an engagement with the fate of the German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber about whom Freud had published a major case study in 1911.7 Lacan’s understanding of the case was itself based on the notion he had developed of the “foreclosure” of a key “master signifier” for psychological development— the “Name-of-the-Father”— in Schreber’s psychic structure. Lacan proposed that this peculiar form of negation radically attenuated Schreber’s capacity to feel libidinally implicated in the symbolic order in which he had come to occupy a position of considerable authority.8 In the 5. Theodor Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature: Volume 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 109– 52. 6. Jean Laplanche, Hölderlin and the Question of the Father, trans. Luke Carson (Victoria, CA: ELS Editions, 2007). The study first appeared in French in 1961. Weirdly, not only does the back cover include a blurb I wrote for the edition, the publisher’s name bears my own initials: ELS. 7. Daniel Paul Schreber published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988]) in 1903 after securing his release from the Royal Public Asylum at Sonnenstein outside of Dresden by arguing on his own behalf before the Saxon Supreme Court of Appeals, the very chamber over which he had been called to preside in 1893. The case has been the subject of numerous studies and interpretations, most famously by (after Freud) Lacan, Elias Canetti, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Friedrich Kittler, among many others. 8. For Deleuze and Guattari, the missing Name-of-the-Father in Schreber’s psychic organization ought to have been a potent and potentiating anti- oedipal blessing. Ac-

   

20 : : C h a P t e r o n e

terms I would come to use in my own work on the material, Schreber was unable to metabolize the symbolic investiture that had, so to speak, made his body matter in a substantially new way.9 Recalling Žižek’s characterization of hysteria cited in the preface, one might say that Schreber’s psychosis was an index of his failure to be a proper hysteric. For Schreber, what is “in the subject more than the subject,” the “object in the subject,” was experienced as all too real, as supernatural yet grossly physical intrusions into his bodily being. The delusional system he came to elaborate over the course of his years of confinement at the Sonnenstein asylum centered, that is, not on how his symbolic investiture affected how he mattered in the world but rather on what he experienced as a real and substantial transformation of his bodily matter. Paradoxically, this “realization” in the flesh of a failed symbolic investiture charged Schreber with a soteriological role in a cosmic drama in which the binding force of political, social, cultural, and religious authority, of all normative roles and statuses, was at stake, a crisis of such universal reach that it included God himself. The fact that the Schreber case has itself been an ever-renewed cause for excitement among theorists— and not only of those belonging to the lineage I have been tracking here— suggests that Schreber was not entirely wrong about the world-historical implications of his crisis and heroic efforts at overcoming it. Reading Schreber’s memoirs helped me to begin to develop the approach I have referred to as sarxist materialism, a perspective that disclosed a “secret history of modernity” that had something new to say about what Habermas had characterized as the merely historical “incompleteness” of the project of modernity. Indeed, over time I came to view Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness as the original sarxist manifesto. I should add that the experience of researching and writing up my interpretation of the case came to feel at some level deeply personal. The work on the project largely overlapped in time with my tenure review process at Princeton. Suffice it to say that my initial appointment at Princeton right out of graduate school as well as the stressful but ultimately positive outcome of the tenure process came to resonate with the material I was exploring. In a word, my Princeton experience helped me to better understand the connections between Schrecording to the authors, Schreber’s inability to affirm foreclosure as a liberating opening to new possibilities of human existence is what gave his lived sarxism its paranoid coloration. See their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 1983. 9. Eric L. Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

A Life in Theory  : : 21

ber’s investiture as a presiding judge in the Saxon Supreme Court and the breakdown that followed closely upon it. Before I began my research on the Schreber case, I took on a project that was in its own way quite personal. I had become a “Germanist” without having planned it and along a detour I had never thought would become a career path. After publishing a revised version of my dissertation on Hölderlin, it seemed important to take some time to think about my relationship to German studies and to Germany, the country whose cars my parents had always told me we would never buy. My parents were both born in Eastern Europe, both arrived in New York City in the early 1920s as children with their immigrant families, both spoke Yiddish as their native language, both became involved in leftist politics, and both retained a lifelong disquiet about, not to say animus toward, Germany and Germans as did many of the Jewish families I knew growing up. Most of these families would not have been happy to hear that one of their children had become a Germanist or even learned German (my best friend’s mother implored me to study Yiddish instead; she assured me that Yiddish was the only true global language, that I would always find a Yiddish speaker no matter where I traveled). I was thus open to a project that would give me an opportunity and a framework to think about what had become, in some sense, my new “cultural sphere” and to understand my place in it. At some level I felt the need to work through an Unbehagen in der Kultur (the German title of Civilization and Its Discontents) that had come to have a clear and urgent historical specificity: German society and culture four decades after the Holocaust. I came to believe that the best way of going about this was to explore how those “native” to this cultural sphere— the generation of the perpetrators and the so- called second generation— had attempted this themselves if at all. II

I was fortunate that Austin had a robust film culture that was especially engaged with the New German Cinema of the 1970s and ’80s. Along with films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, and Helma Sanders-Brahms, among others, I had the opportunity to see Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, a film distributed in the United States under the title Our Hitler by, strangely enough, Francis Ford Coppola. I found Syberberg’s film, already notable for its seven-plus-hour duration, to be at the same time utterly compelling and utterly perplexing. The film is a sort of cine-

   

22 : : C h a P t e r o n e

matic Gesamtkunstwerk that stages a conflicted engagement with the “Nazi imaginary”: the images, tropes, fantasies, narratives, music deployed by the Nazi culture industry in the service of maintaining— or perhaps better: entertaining— the mystical body of the Volksgemeinschaft. Syberberg’s cinematic argument, clearly modeled on Siegfried Kracauer’s study, From Caligari to Hitler, is essentially that, as the German title of the film suggests, the community of true Germans was a virtual reality with historical and structural links to the medium of cinema and the kind of aestheticization of politics it so readily fostered— one thinks, in this context, of Leni Riefenstahl— in spite of its seeming promises to generate, as Walter Benjamin had imagined, a new politicization of aesthetics. The film, which is part of a trilogy of films addressing the German cultural heritage in its high and popular forms— one focuses on King Ludwig II of Bavaria, one of Wagner’s major patrons; the other on Karl May, the author of massively popular adventure stories set in the American Old West and Middle East— asks what remains of this heritage, what of it has not been hopelessly contaminated by the Nazis’ appropriations of it.10 At least in this film, Syberberg seemed willing to take this impasse quite seriously, though he would later come to blame, among others, Jewish Frankfurt school thinkers like Benjamin and Adorno for imposing this impasse on the Germans and thereby depriving them of the cultural resources that would have allowed them to come to terms with the past, to mourn the losses they had caused— and suffered.11 I came to understand Syberberg’s film as a powerful but flawed attempt at engaging cinematically with the famous analysis of postwar German society The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, published in 1967 by two of the most important psychoanalysts in Germany at the time, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich. The Mitscherlichs, taking up a line of thought already put forward by Adorno in 1959, argued that the Germans were largely numb to the suffering they had caused because they had failed to mourn the loss of Hitler and all he had represented for them, that they had essentially disavowed the grandiose narcissism he had cultivated 10. A far more poignant and insistent engagement with this question is found in the work of the poet Paul Celan, for whom the German language itself was at some level hopelessly contaminated by the German project of a “final solution” to the “Jewish question” in Europe. 11. My study appeared as Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). I deal in more detail with this later development in Syberberg’s work and thinking in my essay “The Trouble with Hitler: Postwar German Aesthetics and the Legacy of Fascism,” New German Critique 57 (Autumn 1992): 1– 20.

A Life in Theory  : : 23

in their name and, above all, their enjoyment of it (it is admittedly difficult, now, not to link this analysis to Trump and his “base”; I will return to this link in a later chapter). It was, they claimed, this refusal or inability to mourn— which would have meant owning up to that enjoyment— that formed the underside of the manic labors of German reconstruction culminating in the so- called economic miracle of the early postwar period.12 The claim was that the successes of the postwar economy were built upon a libidinal economy that had managed to protect itself from the crisis it ought to have suffered. As Adorno had already put it, “This collective narcissism was grievously damaged by the collapse of the Hitler regime; a damage which, however, occurred in the realm of simple fact, without each individual becoming conscious of it and thereby getting over it. . . . Secretly, unconsciously smoldering and therefore especially powerful, these identifications as well as a group narcissism were not destroyed but continue to exist.”13 While working on this German material— not only Syberberg but also other postwar filmmakers, historians, and authors— it struck me how much the problematic of mourning and what Freud called the “work of mourning,” Trauerarbeit, resonated with the theoretical discourses whose development I’ve been tracking here. Jean-François Lyotard had famously characterized the “postmodern condition” as, among other things, the sense 12. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverly R. Placzek (New York: Grove Press, 1975). See also Theodor Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?,” trans. Timothy Bahti and Geoffrey Hartmann, in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey Hartmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). For a more recent meditation on questions of mourning on the part of Germans with respect to their own losses and war traumas, see W. G. Sebald’s lectures on what he took to be the failure on the part of postwar German literature to come to terms with the firebombings of German cities by British and American forces: On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2004). The original title was much more straightforward: Luftkrieg und Literatur, “aerial warfare and literature.” 13. Adorno, “Coming to Terms with the Past,” 121– 22. Up to this point, I had never dealt in any serious way with psychoanalysis. Strange as it seems to me now, I cannot recall ever reading a work of Freud’s in any class I took at college or even graduate school (though I did read, on a teacher’s recommendation, Ernest Jones’s Hamlet and Oedipus in high school). I came to Freud in large part by way of a detour through readings of Otto Kernberg and, especially, Heinz Kohut, analysts who had informed the work of the therapist I saw throughout graduate school. As I’ve noted, my initial encounters with Lacan’s work also took the form of a detour (through Laplanche’s study of Hölderlin). I tried to read Lacan in the context of various reading groups with fellow students in Austin. At best, I eventually learned how, to use Beckett’s formulation, to fail better as a reader of Lacan.

   

24 : : C h a P t e r o n e

that all grand narratives about historical progress, about the project of modernity as (to paraphrase Kant) the ongoing emancipation of humanity from its self-imposed minority, had lost their grip on the imagination and opened on to a proliferating heterogeneity of language games, aesthetic practices, political and cultural experiments. Ten years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Lyotard fully endorsed what he described as “that severe reexamination which postmodernity imposes on the thought of the Enlightenment, on the idea of a unitary end of history and of a subject. It is a critique which not only Wittgenstein and Adorno have initiated, but also a few other thinkers (French or other) who do not have the honor to be read by Professor Habermas— which at least saves them from getting a poor grade for their neoconservatism.”14 In another essay, also predating the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lyotard explicitly linked the postmodern critique of Habermas’s incompleteness thesis (recall the title of his Adorno Prize speech, “Modernity— An Incomplete Project”) to outstanding tasks of mourning that include, but extend far beyond, the situation of postwar, post-Holocaust Germany. Lyotard alludes not only to the “dialectic of the Enlightenment” elaborated by Adorno and Horkheimer but also to Walter Benjamin’s famous allegory of the angel of history who, swept forward by the storm of “progress” blowing from Paradise, stares back upon the pile of wreckage— the traumas of history— left behind.15 “All these wounds,” Lyotard writes, “can be given names”; they are, he writes, “strewn across the field of our unconscious like so many secret obstacles to the quiet perpetuation of the ‘modern project.’ Under the pretense of safeguarding that project the men and women of my generation in Germany imposed on their children a forty-year silence about the ‘Nazi 14. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 73. The series in which this translation appeared, Theory and History of Literature, was one of the crucial venues for the dissemination of “theory” in North America. 15. The famous allegory is worth citing here (in Harry Zohn’s translation): “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” See Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938– 1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392.

A Life in Theory  : : 25

interlude.’ This interdiction against anamnesis stands as a symbol for the entire Western world. Can there be progress without anamnesis? Anamnesis constitutes a painful process of working through, a work of mourning for the attachments and conflicting emotions, loves and terrors, associated with those names.” He concludes this set of reflections on a melancholic note about melancholy: “We have only gotten so far as a vague, apparently inexplicable, end- of-the- century melancholy.”16 The intersection of my work on this “German” project and the world of high theory acquired a particular urgency through a contingent historical event: the revelation and publication, in 1987, of Paul de Man’s wartime writings. These writings, consisting of some 180 articles and book reviews, were published between 1940 and 1942 by the Belgian collaborationist newspaper Le Soir and the Flemish-language journal Het Vlammsche Land. Aside from expressing his support for collaboration with Nazi Germany, in one notorious article de Man criticized vulgar forms of anti-Semitism only to give voice to a more refined version of the same ideology and stance. In the article de Man even suggests that “the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not entail, for the literary life of the West, deplorable consequences.”17 One of the remarkable things that emerged from the ensuing debates about possible relations between the wartime writings and de Man’s later work as the foremost practitioner of deconstructive literary theory was the claim, made by a number of de Man’s students, friends, and intellectual partners, that the publication of these otherwise troubling texts only brought more fully into relief the depth of de Man’s commitment 16. Jean-François Lyotard, “Ticket to a New Décor,” trans. Brian Massumi and W. G. J. Niesluchowski, Copyright 1 (Fall 1987): 14– 15. In my study of Hölderlin, I read the shifts in the voice and style of the poet’s late hymns as a kind of Trauerarbeit or work of mourning for the loss of the world-historical vision that had given Hölderlin a sense of political and poetical orientation. It was a vision of Germany’s distinctive calling in a narrative of spiritual progress that it was the poet’s task to help to bring to realization. It was a calling to reconstitute, on a new level and in a new idiom, the classical form of life first elaborated in ancient Greece, a form of life unified, as Hölderlin thought, by the experience of beauty. I came to understand the late hymns both as a culmination of that vision and its collapse, its breaking apart into the “stranded objects” that remained from it and that came to mix among the concrete particulars the poet encountered in everyday life and to which he began to bring a new kind of attention. See Friedrich Hölderlin: Narrative Vigilance and the Poetic Imagination (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986) as well as my introduction to the German Library edition of Hölderlin’s works published by Continuum in 1990. 17. Cited in Stranded Objects, 15. The writings, first discovered by a Belgian graduate student, Ortwin de Graef, were published as Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism: 1939– 43, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988).

   

26 : : C h a P t e r o n e

to an antifascist mode of reading consisting in the analysis of the rhetorical operations at work in all “totalizing” discourses.18 As Geoffrey Hartmann, himself a Holocaust survivor and one of de Man’s friends and colleagues at Yale, put it, In light of what we now know . . . his work appears more and more as a deepening reflection on the rhetoric of totalitarianism. His turn from the politics of culture to the language of art was not an escape into, but an escape out of, aestheticism: a disenchantment with that fatal aestheticizing of politics, blatant in his own early articles, that gave fascism its false brilliance. De Man’s critique of every tendency to totalize literature or language, to see unity where there is no unity, looks like a belated, but still powerful, act of conscience.19

Derrida made the same argument in his response to the revelations of the wartime writings, claiming that “deconstructions have always represented . . . the at least necessary condition for identifying and combating the totalitarian risk.” In the end, de Man turned out to be for Derrida the man who most radically resisted the “terrifying desire for roots and common roots,” the regressive, deeply narcissistic longings that contributed so much to the appeal of Nazism. Derrida concludes that “he must have thought that well-tuned ears knew how to hear him, and that he did not even need to confide to anyone about the war in this regard. In fact, that is all he talked about. That is all he wrote about.”20 De Man’s refined attention to the rhetorical operations of literary texts did, indeed, make his work useful as a kind of training ground for the understanding and critique of “corporatist” ideologies and their aesthetic supports. At the same time, I found it difficult to accept that de Man’s mode of literary analysis could simply stand in for the work of owning up to one’s 18. The responses were gathered in Responses: Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988). 19. Cited in Stranded Objects, 16. As I’ve indicated, it was Syberberg’s singular achievement to have performed, in and through film, a kind of spectral analysis of that spectral “brilliance.” Geoffrey Hartmann, for his part, dedicated much of his later research and writing to issues of memory and testimony with respect to the Holocaust. He was a cofounder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies housed at Yale. 20. Cited in Stranded Objects, 18. Here the stakes of the concepts of “disenchantment” and “hermeneutics of suspicion” come to be raised to the level of a moral imperative, as if the practices they signify represented the crucial line of defense against totalitarian temptations.

A Life in Theory  : : 27

past and making explicit the ostensible historical gravity of the theoretical work one was doing. Without a concomitant labor of remembrance— of anamnesis— it struck me that any work of mourning would remain, at best, purely formal, a performance of that vague melancholy of which Lyotard spoke but now displaced into the impersonal operations of tropes, into “allegories of reading” that rehearse, over and over again, what de Man characterized as “the moment of dispossession in favor of the arbitrary power play of the signifier,” one that, he continues, “can only be experienced as a dismemberment, a beheading or a castration.”21 Those last remarks do, of course, point to certain affinities between de Man’s understanding of deconstruction and psychoanalysis. The emphasis in his work on the varieties of subjective destitution points, as he himself has indicated, to a beyond of the pleasure principle: “The aesthetic,” de Man writes, “is, by definition, a seductive notion that appeals to the pleasure principle.” In contrast to the aesthetic, de Man offers a view of the poetic dimension of language as one that mirrors the working of the death drive. Speaking of the figure of the sphinx in Baudelaire’s poem “Spleen (II),” de Man writes that “he is the grammatical subject cut off from its consciousness, the poetic analysis cut off from its hermeneutic function, the dismantling of the aesthetic and pictorial world . . . by the advent of poetry as allegory,” as “the dismemberment of the aesthetic whole into the unpredictable play of the literary letter.”22 To cite, once more, the title of one of Beckett’s last prose works, poetry grasped as allegory serves, in this view, to clear a path worstward.23 21. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 296. 22. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 64, 70. De Man, Deleuze, and Guattari shared an aversion to the hermeneutic dimension of language— the desire to understand— and an attraction to a thoroughgoingly impersonal, “machinic” view of language in which desire always pushes beyond the space of meaning. De Man, as we have seen, linked this push, this pressure, to the arbitrary play of the signifier while the latter authors who, as noted, had “no use for signifiers,” infused the machinic dimension with a quasi-cosmic vitalism. It was that vitalism that made their work so productive for new materialists, including those working with forms of life indigenous to formerly colonized regions across the globe, particularly in Latin America. See, for example, Suely Rolnik and Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, trans. Karel Klapshow and Brian Holmes (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007). I had the good fortune to meet Rolnik, a practicing analyst, at a summer institute at Lugaradudas, a cultural center in Cali, Colombia, in 2019. 23. In her remarkable study of Beckett, Pascale Casanova characterizes Worstward Ho as the culminating achievement of the author’s career. Unlike other texts that retain a sense of a barely though still existing world outside the frame of what is read or seen on stage, in this text, “there are no longer any concessions to the ultimate conventions

   

28 : : C h a P t e r o n e

The collection of essays from which these passages come, The Resistance to Theory, was published three years after de Man’s death. The title, taken from the first essay in the collection, clearly resonates with the core issue I’ve been grappling with here, namely, the peculiar status of “theory” such that it calls forth, much like the work of psychoanalysis, the defensive force of resistance rather than mere disagreement. We have tracked some of the forms of this resistance, forms that at times touch on a certain Franco-German antagonism (think of Lyotard’s snide remark about Habermas’s dismissal of French theory as a form of neoconservatism). At least in the context of my own intellectual development, the stakes of this antagonism acquired a new urgency and clarity through an intervention from another, call it “minor” or “marginal,” part of Europe to which I’ve already referred. I am thinking of Slavoj Žižek’s entrance on to the “theory” scene in the English-speaking world the very year that the Berlin Wall fell with the publication of his The Sublime Object of Desire. Among the many things that Žižek brought to this scene was a more robust sensibility for what I have characterized as the linguistic turn to or into the body, the ways in which signification intensifies the body, secretes a dimension of enjoyment “beyond the pleasure principle,” a surplus of affect indexing a gap, a glitch, a structural dysfunction in the space of meaning. My sense is that it was a feel for this dimension that was lacking in much of the work associated with deconstruction, at least in its golden age. To use two of Lacan’s other key terms, the allegories of reading staged by de Man— call them Trauerspiele of the signifier— remained within the confines of the imaginary and the symbolic that more or less mapped on to the aesthetic and the poetic/allegorical, respectively; they failed to capture the “subcutaneous” dimension of signification, the ways in which a certain signifying stress gets under the skin, inflames the flesh of the subject, generates the subject-matter that had been— or perhaps better: will

of literary realism, no longer things or places. . . . Beckett accomplishes his project of an absolutely self-sufficient writing, generating its own syntax, vocabulary, self-ordained grammar, even creating terms that respond exclusively to the logic of the pure space of the text.” The term that Casanova uses to capture the quasi-mathematical rigor of this mechanism of self-generation and self- organization is not allegory but algorithm: “So we have the worst, posited in the title as a goal to be reached, as a professed project, and which is to be understood not as an approximate, random evocation of the oeuvre, but precisely as an algorithm, a generative formula from which Beckett has produced the ensuing text.” See Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2006), 21, 16. One should add to this that for Beckett the “worst word” can never be the last word of or on his project. I will return to the concept of algorithm in the last chapter of this volume.

A Life in Theory  : : 29

be seen to have been— the exciting cause and implicit Cause of theory all along. We might say that with Žižek, theory started to get real in new and surprising ways. III

My first encounter with Žižek’s work took place just after the publication of my book Stranded Objects. An old anthropologist friend from Austin, Kristin Koptiuch, told me I had to read this wild philosopher from Slovenia who brought together Hegel, Marx, Lacan, and popular culture. As I’ve noted, my work on that project began, in part, in the context of trying to develop a richer sense of self-awareness with regard to my “implication” in the field of German studies as a first-generation American of Eastern European Jewish heritage. My mother and father were both born amid the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires (both were born in 1918).24 They, like many who shared this history, came to experience their Jewish identity in relation to the radical political movements that captured the imagination of so many immigrant communities in the United States. In the 1930s and ’40s in neighborhoods like Brownsville (Brooklyn) where my father’s family had settled, the commitment to political and social equality, to antifascism, and being Jewish, belonged together, whether this took the form of union organizing, joining the Communist Party, or indeed, enlisting in the armed services to fight the Nazis who, after all, were both anti-Semites and antiCommunists. I was, in a word, a “red diaper baby.” Though my parents became left-liberal Democrats and though the worn booklets of the “Little Lenin Library” were hidden away in a closet, this was a household where the Soviet Union never fully ceased being seen as the great ally in the antifascist struggle, never fully ceased holding the place of a historical vision that, however compromised, retained its validity if not its living meaning. I don’t think that my parents ever really came to terms with the contradictions of this legacy, with the mixture of pride, grief, and shame that working through it would have involved. This mixture would only become more concentrated and potent with the fall of the Wall. To put it somewhat differently, the collapse of socialist states in the “East” opened on to a disorientation that had, at some level, always already haunted the 24. My first publication was an article on Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch, a novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The article, which I wrote in German, grew out of my first seminar paper in graduate school; the German I wrote at the time clearly bears the marks of having read too much Heidegger. See “Geschlossenheit, Geschichte und Welt in Joseph Roths Radetzkymarsch,” Rocky Mountain Review 1 (1982): 45– 59.

   

30 : : C h a P t e r o n e

East-West divide, dividing each side from within though in quite different ways. In my own experience, Žižek’s work has been an indispensable resource for getting one’s bearings in the very midst of, to coin a phrase, such “balkanic” disruptions and indeed for deepening and intensifying them in remarkably creative and compelling ways. My engagement with Žižek’s work and that of the “Ljubljana school” of philosophy and psychoanalysis, more generally, came to assume a variety of forms. Aside from reading the work, there were, over the years, many opportunities for personal encounters in the context of conferences, workshops, and summer institutes.25 With the support of my department and division, I was able to bring Žižek, Mladen Dolar, and Alenka Zupančič to the University of Chicago on a number of different occasions. I am particularly fortunate that I have been able to coteach a series of seminars with Mladen Dolar at Chicago (four thus far). I have also had many opportunities to present my own work in Ljubljana. What is more, the profound intellectual, ethical, and political affinities I felt with the work of the Ljubljana school served as the basis for what have become genuine friendships, friendships that did not, I should note, depend on my becoming a “Lacanian,” a thought quite foreign to me on many levels. These friendships now include members of the second generation of this remarkable intellectual formation, most importantly, Simon Hajdini and Lidija Sumah, who have themselves spent several years as visiting scholars at Chicago. As I’ve indicated, my sense is that what had always been implicitly at issue in the work that converged in various ways under the heading of “theory” in its golden age and beyond became newly and urgently available to thought— in Hegelian terms, became in and for itself— in this “minor” philosophical literature from the margins of Europe. IV

My growth as a literary and cultural theorist found further sustenance by way of a series of aesthetic encounters, above all in the realm of dance and 25. One of these was the School for Experimental Critical Theory, which was created and directed by Kenneth Reinhard and held on the campus of UC Irvine. Such institutes were modeled on the well-known School for Criticism and Theory currently based at Cornell University. That particular summer institute was at one time and continues to be, if to a lesser extent, a major relay point for the dissemination of theory in North America. I had the chance to teach in the program in 2006, long after its heyday. In an essay published in 1994, the founding director of the school, Murry Krieger, uses the curriculum of the first sixteen years of the school to track the mutations of theory during that period. See Murry Krieger, “The School of Criticism and Theory: An Allegorical History,” New Literary History 25, no. 4 (Autumn, 1994): 881– 93.

A Life in Theory  : : 31

theater. During my first year at Oberlin, I took part in an intensive monthlong workshop with Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, and their company. The workshop contributed to the development of what would become their “travelogue” series, “Paris/Venice-Milan/Chacon” (I took part in the rehearsals for the New York premiere of “Chacon” but could not, in the end, perform during the run because of a terrible case of mononucleosis). After that experience, when visiting my mother in the Bronx during breaks from both college and graduate school, I participated whenever possible in classes and workshops with both Monk and Chong in New York. I should also note that I appropriated the phrase “stranded objects” from Meredith Monk, who used it in an interview to describe the aesthetic of her 1976 theater piece Quarry. I am quite sure that working with Monk and Chong and seeing that piece in particular both in rehearsal and performance had a lasting impact on my aesthetic sensibilities. I am also quite sure that these sensibilities played a role in the fact that I fell in love with and married Pamela Pascoe, an actor with a highly developed Spieltrieb (play-drive), to use Schiller’s famous term. While working on My Own Private Germany, another close encounter with theater, in this case the Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, helped me to better understand what Schreber was after in his “sarxist manifesto.” Kushner’s play, a fantastical Trauerspiel set in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in Reagan- era America, resonated on many levels with Schreber’s attempt to make sense of his fin-desiècle Germany, the various political, social, and cultural crises that had seemed to enter into the very flesh of his being. Schreber’s attempt to find meaning in his psychotic break, to write his way through it, elaborate its subject-matter, produced, to use the subtitle of Kushner’s play, a kind of “gay fantasia on national themes” in which he was, by way of a series of quasi-angelic annunciations directly transmitted to his body and nervous system, called to intervene in an ultimately cosmic state of emergency— one linked to epidemics and climactic catastrophes— by metamorphosing into the messianic figure of a feminized Wandering Jew. Among the things that for me linked Schreber and Kushner was my sense that for both there can be no real thinking about politics, culture, and history without touching on the dimension of sexuality, no theorizing that would not resonate with, to use Bersani’s term, the pulsive theorizations constitutive of human sexuality. The first part of the play, set in autumn 1985, begins with a funeral at the “Bronx Home for Aged Hebrews” (from the age of nine to seventeen I lived not far from the Hebrew Home for the Aged in the Bronx). The eulogy is delivered by a rabbi named Isidor Chemelwitz (played in the New

   

32 : : C h a P t e r o n e

York production by Kathleen Chalfant and in the HBO miniseries version by Meryl Streep) who had been engaged by the deceased’s assimilated and secular Jewish children and grandchildren, among them, Louis Ironson, one of the deeply flawed “heroes” of the play. Reading the names of family members off a sheet of notes, the rabbi is startled by the names chosen by the descendants of Sarah Ironson: “beloved grandmother of Max, Mark, Louis, Lisa Maria . . . uh . . . Lesley, Angela, Doris, Luke and Eric. (Looks more closely at the paper) Eric? This is a Jewish name? (Shrugs) Eric. A large and loving family.”26 The rabbi admits to never having met Sarah Ironson yet claims to know her: So I do not know her and yet I know her. She was . . . not a person but a whole kind of person, the ones who crossed the ocean, who brought with us to America the villages of Russia and Lithuania— and how we struggled, and how we fought, for the family, for the Jewish home, so that you would grow up here, in this strange place, in the melting pot where nothing melted. Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America, you and your children and their children with the goyische names. You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes— because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean, in a boat, and she put it down on Grand Concourse Avenue, or in Flatbush, and she worked that earth into your bones, and you pass it to your children, this ancient, ancient culture and home. (16)27

For my part, I have always found the close of the rabbi’s eulogy to be troublingly ambiguous: You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is. So . . . 26. Tony Kushner, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 15– 16. Subsequent references are made in the text. I was also given a Yiddish name, though my family never used it. I personally hated it because it sounded like “Loser.” 27. After arriving in America, my mother’s family settled in the Bronx near the Grand Concourse, my father’s family in Brownsville; my brother and I grew up first in Flatbush and then in the Bronx.

A Life in Theory  : : 33

She was the last of the Mohicans, this one. Pretty soon . . . all the old will be dead. (16– 17)

These remarks could be interpreted as pertaining to an ostensible singularity of the Jewish immigrant experience. That would, however, make them odd and problematic given the waves of willing and unwilling migrations that have gone on across the globe without surcease (and that, with the environmental emergencies caused by global warming, will only increase). They could, however, be the rabbi’s way of saying that with the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis such voyages have ceased for the Jews, namely, that the rabbi is talking about the horizon of possibilities of the Jews in the wake of the Shoah. That reading is itself, at some level, haunted by the perennial question of the singularity of that act of genocide and therewith, perhaps, of anti-Semitism as the negative version of a metahistorical chosenness: to be singled out to suffer at the hands of the nations who fully inhabit the time and execute the violence of history. But they also resonate with Jean-François Lyotard’s remarks concerning the “postmodern condition” as one in which all grand narratives have lost their grip on the imagination. I refer, once more, to Lyotard’s famous invocation of the postmodern as a generalized condition of diaspora that resists being translated into a coherent narrative (one can almost hear in these words an anticipation of the shift to various forms of “digital humanities” as well as the shift, in thinking about social roles and identities, toward the concept of “intersectionality”): Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives. . . . The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements— narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are pragmatic valences specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do establish are not necessarily communicable.28

Originally published a decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lyotard’s remarks seem to anticipate, in turn (though with a considerable difference in tone, valence, and purpose), the now infamous thesis put forth by Francis Fukayama that, with the apparent end of the Cold War, humanity was 28. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, xxiv.

   

34 : : C h a P t e r o n e

witnessing “not just . . . the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”29 This last set of associations resonates strongly, if only in comically dissonant fashion, with the opening of the second part of Kushner’s play, which is subtitled Perestroika. The same actress who played the rabbi now appears in the guise of, as announced by a voice emerging out of the darkness of the hall of deputies at the Kremlin in 1986, “Alexksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarianov, the World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik.” The figure, described in the stage directions as “unimaginably old and totally blind,” speaks at a podium before a great red flag and addresses the status, at this seemingly apocalyptic turning point, of theory: The Great Question before us is: Are we doomed? The Great Question before us is: Will the Past release us? The Great Question before us is: Can we Change? In Time? And we all desire that Change will come. (A little pause, then with sudden, violent passion:) And Theory? How are we to proceed without Theory? What system of Thought have these Reformers to present to this mad swirling planetary disorganization, to the Inevident Welter of fact, event, phenomenon, calamity? Do they have, as we did, a beautiful Theory, as bold, as Grand, as comprehensive a construct . . . ? You can’t imagine, when we first read the Classic Texts, when in the dark vexed night of our ignorance and terror the seed-words sprouted and shoved incomprehension aside, when the incredible bloody vegetable struggle up and through into Red Blooming gave us Praxis, True Praxis, True Theory married to Actual Life. . . . You who live in this Sour Little Age cannot imagine the grandeur of the prospect we gazed upon: like standing atop the highest peak in the mighty Caucasus, and viewing in one allknowing glance the mountainous, granite order of creation. You cannot imagine it. I weep for you. (147– 48)

The “World’s Oldest Living Bolshevik” goes on to evoke the vision of what Nietzsche referred to as the life of the “last man,” that of a happy, ultimately consumerist life, a vision to which Fukayama refers in the expanded 29. Francis Fukayama, “The End of History?,” National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 4. The essay was first delivered as an invited lecture at the University of Chicago.

A Life in Theory  : : 35

version of his original evocation of life at the “end of history.”30 This would be a life ruled strictly by the pleasure principle, one in which the very meaning of life would be the achievement and maintenance of homeostatic balance in all vital individual and collective functions, one in which disruptive enthusiasms would be kept to a minimum. The final words of this ironic yet serious prologue viscerally evoke what would become the “Wild East” of post-Soviet capitalism: And what have you to offer now, children of this Theory? What have you to offer in its place? Market Incentives? American Cheeseburgers? Watered- down Bukharinite stopgap makeshift Capitalism! NEPmen! Pygmy children of a gigantic race! Change? Yes, we must must change, only show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you these blind eyes will see again, just to read it, to devour that text. Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent. If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin? (148)31

As the name Kushner gives to the world’s oldest living Bolshevik indicates, this was a moment that could be seen not so much as the end of history but rather as a paradoxical fall into history. But this would be a history, an experience of historical time, that if not exactly chaotic would be one that no amount of “narrative vigilance” could force into coherence.32 It was the great achievement of Michel Foucault to theorize and to prac30. Francis Fukayama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 31. The scene ends with the same tableau that concludes the first part of the play in which the Angel breaks through the ceiling of Prior Walter’s apartment and, hovering in the air, declaims her great annunciation: “Greetings Prophet. / The Great Work Begins. / The Messenger has arrived.” Prior’s response is a simple “Go away.” 32. I am referring here to the subtitle of my 1986 study of Hölderlin’s later hymns. As noted earlier, I argued there that the breakdown of the grand narrative that had heretofore made the poet’s vocation intelligible opened the way to a new kind of poetic calling and imagination, one no longer sustained and constrained by the vigilance to cleave close to that narrative. It was one that Hölderlin was ultimately unable to sustain.

   

36 : : C h a P t e r o n e

tice a mode of postlapsarian historical research, a new genealogical historicism attuned to the birth pangs, the contingent, conflictual emergence, of institutions, concepts, practices, forms of knowledge, forms of life, ways of being in the world. Foucault’s work served as a remarkably productive prism that placed the light cast by other varieties of structuralist and poststructuralist theory in the service of a spectral analysis of power relations in human life and society. Foucault’s work opened the floodgates— again, think of the name of Kushner’s oldest living Bolshevik— to new research and new research paradigms in the humanities and social sciences attentive to relations and technologies of power in all spheres of life and especially to relations of power in the production of knowledge, the very lifeblood of the university. Along with the cultural and literary studies initially practiced under the heading of “new historicism,” a field that first blossomed around studies of Shakespeare, perhaps the most consequential deployment of the Foucauldian prism was that practiced in a broad area of research that further bent the light cast by the gaze of theory but now toward the reorganization of political, social, cultural, and economic relations generated by the breakup of European colonial empires. The research that fell under the heading of “postcolonial studies” was in part an attempt to push the theoretical innovations under discussion— not only those of Foucault, but also, especially, of Derrida— beyond what was perceived to be its reflexively Eurocentric and, thus, still provincial, focus (recall the ethnocentric reading of the rabbi’s remarks in Angels in America about the end of great voyages). One could, in a word, not go on speaking of the “end of history” in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet empire without addressing its relation to the end of the colonial era.33 To refer to one of the foundational texts of postcolonial studies, Edward Said’s analysis of the cultural construction of the Occident over against its typically feminized, irrational non-European others, even the balkanic disorientation introduced into the theory scene by the likes of Slavoj Žižek was still perceived to be at some level “orientalist.” But on another level, this new research helped to make clear how much “high theory” had itself been shaped not only by the fervor of the 1960s but also by the longer, turbulent history of decolonization. If, as Simon Gikandi has put it, “postcolonial discourse is unthinkable without poststructuralist theory,” it is equally true 33. As one key figure in the postcolonial turn has been arguing, this otherwise salutary “provincialization” of Europe has entered a new phase in which the geopolitical temporality at issue in the “end of history” debates is itself being provincialized in the real, is itself being outstripped by the geological temporality of the end of the Anthropocene. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (Winter 2009): 197– 222.

A Life in Theory  : : 37

that the latter is unthinkable without the challenges to Eurocentrism and the traditional discourses of humanism developed under the pressures of decolonization.34 My failure to engage more deeply with the postcolonial turn in theory has no doubt limited the reach of my work. I feel, however, that a shared engagement with the work of Foucault among other theorists without whom postcolonial discourse would be “unthinkable” has nonetheless kept my thinking in a certain intellectual and ethical proximity to this turn that is, in its own way, another sort of linguistic turn to/into the body.35 V

My first real engagement with Foucault took shape during my research on the Schreber case. Schreber had already played a not insignificant role in the life of French theory. Lacan had placed the case at the center of a year-long seminar on the psychoses and dedicated one of his major pieces of writing or écrits to it; the case had served as a major point of reference for Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipus.36 And though Foucault, for his part, mentions Schreber only in passing, it became clear to me that once one situated Schreber in the context of his relations to his famous father, an orthopedic physician and fitness advocate, and to his two main psychiatrists, one of whom had lauded the triumph of the brain over the soul in the new psychiatry, the other of whom made his name as a forensic psychiatrist, the material became a textbook case for the analysis of what Foucault had come to grasp under the headings of disciplinary power and biopower. These were “horizontally” dispersed forms of power elaborated in medical, public policy, and social scientific discourses that came to displace those that had been organized more “vertically,” that is, in relation to a central, politically transcendent figure of sovereign power and authority whose legitimacy was ultimately sustained by the grace of God. Schreber’s 34. Simon Gikandi, “Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Discourse,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 98. 35. I experienced a personal confirmation of that proximity by way of my friendship with Homi Bhabha, whom I got to know during his years at the University of Chicago. I’d also like to thank other current and former colleagues at Chicago whose global perspectives have helped me to put in perspective my own Eurocentric take on things, among them, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arjun Appadurai, and Jean and John Comaroff. 36. As I’ve noted earlier, I first became aware of the Schreber case by way of Jean Laplanche’s study of Hölderlin. Laplanche made use of Lacan’s notion of the “foreclosure” of the paternal signifier in the etiology of psychosis.

   

38 : : C h a P t e r o n e

Memoirs became legible in large measure as the delusional elaboration of this mutation of power from its sovereign form to its disciplinary and biopolitical form, a mutation he experienced, as one says in German, am eigenen Leib, in his own flesh. What I also came to see was that this same mutation was at issue in what Lacan had theorized as a shift in the discursive and libidinal composition of social bonds from one articulated with respect to the figure of a traditional “master” to one articulated with respect to experts, representatives of “university” knowledge. Both thinkers were, that is, interested in the consequences for social and psychic life of the kind of will to knowledge deployed in modern institutions charged with the care and management of individuals and populations: psychiatric hospitals, prisons, schools, and factories, among others. In Lacan’s “matheme” of the university discourse, disciplinary and biopolitical relations of power are represented as S2 → a, the chain of knowledge directly addressing the “real” of the subject. For Lacan, that vector of power is correlated with the chronic stress of a profoundly attenuated relation between S1 and $, the “master signifier” and the subject. I came to understand that attenuation as a generalized investiture crisis, a condition in which individuals are unable to metabolize, claim as their own, any symbolic mandate/identity, unable to enjoy the entitlements with which they have been invested (one thinks in this context of what has recently come to be referred to as “impostor syndrome,” a term coined by experts who have also proposed a variety of therapies and techniques for overcoming it in books, articles, workshops, TED talks). As I have emphasized in my study of the case, Schreber’s psychotic break occurred shortly after being named as presiding judge, Senatspräsident, of the highest court of Saxony. Unable to identify with the symbolic status with which he had been invested, Schreber felt himself to be invaded “in the real” by particles and rays emanating first from his psychiatrist and then from God, both of whom stood in a series that included Schreber’s father. This was a father who knew too much, expressed his paternal care and authority in the form of expert medical knowledge and treatment. My sense is that Schreber experienced this care as a kind of obscene overproximity, as if his father were trying to directly palpate his soul. Schreber’s word for the effects of these various interventions into his life substance was, in fact, Seelenmord, soul murder. Perhaps even more important than this convergence of Foucault and Lacan on the uncanny dimension of such “surplus knowledge,” its correlation with a kind of obscene doubling of the father— Freud elaborated his understanding of the uncanny apropos of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman, a

A Life in Theory  : : 39

novella largely about various paternal Doppelgänger— was the realization, on Foucault’s part, of the relation of this surplus knowledge to the subject matter of sovereignty. That is, that such doublings derived, in some sense, from what Ernst Kantorowicz had investigated in painstaking detail in his 1957 study of medieval and early modern political theology, The King’s Two Bodies. Foucault addressed the political theological signature of disciplinary power and biopower at various points in his writings.37 In his account of these modern forms of power and authority, Foucault emphasizes, for example, the ways in which they seem to inherit something of the “king’s touch,” the quasi-magical effects of contact with the king’s singular body, the “transferential” materiality of its flesh: “The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himself deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power [ . . .]: a physics of a relational and multiple power, which has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations.”38 The body of the king figures as Foucault’s key point of reference also with respect to the biopolitical administration of populations. In his lectures at the Collège de France in 1975– 76, for example, he opens his account of the postrevolutionary “embourgeoisement” of the nation-state with remarks that could have been taken from Kantorowicz’s King’s Two Bodies. What makes a nation, he writes, is the fact that its members “all have a certain individual relationship— both juridical and physical— with the real, living, and bodily person of the king. It is the body of the king, in his physicaljuridical relationship with each of his subjects, that creates the body of the nation.”39 It is precisely the horizontal dispersal and reorganization of this once vertical “physical-juridical relationship” that is of interest to Foucault. Another dimension of political theology at work in Foucault’s genealogy of modern forms of governmentality is that of the state of exception. As Carl Schmitt famously argued, this is the quasi-legal entitlement to suspend the rule of law, an entitlement the enjoyment of which constitutes the very core of sovereign power and authority— call it sovereign jouissance, 37. I borrow the notion of “signature” from Giorgio Agamben who introduced it in the context of his own efforts to further develop Foucault’s genealogical mode of research. He attempts to elaborate a proper methodology of reading signatures in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009). 38. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 208. 39. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975– 1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 217; my emphasis.

   

40 : : C h a P t e r o n e

the sovereign’s enjoyment in the law’s being beside itself.40 In one of many passages addressed to the relation between disciplinary practices and the rule of law, Foucault invokes this ultimately political theological concept: In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infralaw. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands. They seem to constitute the same type of law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law. They have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities. . . . Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either.41

The characterization of disciplinary power as a counterlaw secreted by and within the law exactly parallels Schreber’s efforts to elucidate what he calls conditions contrary to the Order of the World, conditions under which God, in a kind of travesty of the incarnation, forsakes his place in the vertical order and comes to take an exceptional interest in and have quasimedical knowledge of living human beings (here “quasi” should perhaps be pronounced kwazy). One might say, then, that the chronic state of emergency generating the bizarre array of symptoms and delusions described in the Memoirs was inaugurated by that partial suspension of the law effectuated by the new forms of power— or perhaps better, power-knowledge— to which Schreber had been exposed since early childhood and to which he was exposed again, though in a different form, in the psychiatric institutions that he came to know from the inside. It’s worth noting that Paul Emil 40. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Giorgio Agamben puts it this way: “Being-outside, and yet belonging: this is the topological structure of the state of exception, and only because the sovereign, who decides on the exception, is, in truth, logically defined in his being by the exception, can he . . . be defined by the oxymoron ecstasy-belonging.” See Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 12. 41. Foucault, Discipline, 222– 23; my emphasis.

A Life in Theory  : : 41

Flechsig, who treated Schreber before he was transferred to the Sonnenstein asylum and who figures centrally in his Memoirs, was above all interested in neuroanatomical research rather than clinical care, that is, in literally getting inside your head. Put somewhat differently, Foucault suggests that the disciplines formed a sort of counter-Enlightenment secreted by the Enlightenment and the political demands associated with it. “The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non- egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines.”42 Here one need only think of the handbook of medically proven exercises for the home published by Schreber’s father— he called it Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik— in which he cites the motto that Kant adopted as the watchword of the Enlightenment, sapere aude! (dare to know/think for yourself!).43 As I’ve indicated, Foucault’s most “Schreberian” insight is that exposure to this excess of knowledge that characterizes the disciplines and biopower produces an “intensified” body, one that, in a certain— call it creaturely— sense, recollects and travesties the sublime body of the king. For Schreber as well as for Foucault, such an intensification of the body is grasped as becoming the object of a persistent and sexualizing will to (too much) knowledge. At some level, the cosmic disorder that Scheber experienced and tried to repair was a generalized case of TMI: too much information. Indeed, in some ways he anticipated the chronic and ubiquitous overstimulation of the information and surveillance economy in which one always has more skin in the game than one thinks.44 In still other passages, Foucault characterizes the modern agents of disciplinary power and biopower as avatars of those early modern men charged with the care and administration of lepers and, above all, commu42. Ibid., 222. 43. https://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/arztliche-zimmergymnastik-8435/5. 44. My claim will ultimately be that what is “too much” in TMI exceeds the concept of information. Friedrich Kittler, the brilliant theorist of literature, culture, and media, makes a similar claim (though in rather different terms) in his own commentary on the Schreber material in his groundbreaking book Aufschreibesysteme: 1800/1900, published in English as Discourse Networks, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). I had the good fortune to meet Kittler toward the end of his life at a conference on Schreber held at the Sonnenstein asylum outside of Dresden. Sonnenstein has been transformed into a memorial site commemorating the thousands murdered there during the euthanasia campaign pursued by the Nazis. In that context it was all the more disturbing to recall Elias Canetti’s interpretation of Schreber as a kind of psychotic precursor to Hitler. See his Crowds and Power, trans. Victor Gollancz (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984).

   

42 : : C h a P t e r o n e

nities sickened by the plague. “The plague-stricken town,” Foucault writes, “traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinctive way over all individual bodies— this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power.”45 What Foucault ultimately argues is that the exceptional power exercised over bodies during states of emergency such as the plague comes to be routinized and rendered normal by means of modern techniques of power modeled on the architectural ideal of the panopticon. While “the plague-stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model,” the “panoptic schema . . . was destined to spread throughout the social body; its vocation was to become a generalized function.”46 VI

Several scholars, among them, Giorgio Agamben, have noted that the two small figures placed next to the cathedral in the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan are distinguished by the special mask worn by plague doctors. In a small book on the concept of stasis or civil war, Agamben, who has otherwise characterized much of his own work as an extension and amplification of Foucault’s genealogical investigations of the workings of power in the West from antiquity to the present, fails to mention Foucault in this instance. The link is nonetheless provided by Agamben’s discussion of the image as one signaling the mutation of sovereign rule into a state of exception that has become the biopolitical norm and exposure to which virtually dissolves the people into a heterogeneous multitude. “Like the mass of plague victims,” Agamben writes, “the unrepresentable multitude can be represented only through the guards who monitor its obedience and the doctors who treat it. It dwells in the city, but only as the object of the duties and concerns of those who exercise sovereignty,” an exercise in which the “biopolitical turn of sovereign power” was already beginning to take shape. “Hence the notion of the dissoluta multitudo, which inhabits the city under the Leviathan’s dominion, may be compared to the mass of plague victims, who must be treated and governed.”47 To bring it to a formula, biopower 45. Foucault, Discipline, 198. 46. Ibid., 207. 47. Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 48– 49. Not surprisingly, Agamben has viewed the public response to the COVID-19 virus as a radicalization of this biopolitical

A Life in Theory  : : 43

just is sovereign power exercised in a state of exception that has become the norm, the object of which is not so much the people as the population, which Hobbes characterizes as a multitude. The introduction of Agamben into this story represents another strand in the autobiographical sketch I’ve been laying out here in an effort to “flesh out” my hypothesis about the sexuality of theory, one that has perhaps gotten a bit lost in the course of the account. To put it somewhat differently, it became clear to me that my argument about the “exciting cause/ Cause” of theory in its golden age and beyond required, as least for me, not only the resources coming from the southeastern margins of Europe— those of the Ljubljana school— but also from its somewhat neglected Mediterranean heartland. Agamben has been for me the key thinker among the Italian philosophers who have, over the last decades, found a wide audience in the (still Eurocentric) world of theory I’ve been exploring here. As another member of this group, Roberto Esposito, has argued in his own efforts to give contour to the “Italian difference” in contemporary theory and continental philosophy, what lent “actuality” to at least a subset of the new Italian thought was the special attention it gave to the concept of life, one rooted in a longer philosophical tradition.48 An enduring philosophical preoccupation with the vital sphere was, in a word, what ostensibly made the Italians especially receptive to Foucault’s research paradigm even against the background of intense, long-standing engagements with Heidegger. Or alternatively, it was precisely the Heideggerian background that allowed them to grasp the ontological dimension of Foucault’s thinking about biopower and biopolitics, to locate it within a larger framework of philosophical intelligibility that encompassed life, history, and politics (Heidegger would have said Seinsgeschichte, the history of Being). To put it in the terms I’ve been proposing here, the Italians performed the linguistic turn to or into the body in the context of research on the biopolitical turn of sovereign power and authority. In Agamben’s case, this led to a special emphasis on the imperative mood, on the speech act of the command along with that of the oath and the curse.49 turn of sovereign power. Some of his controversial and, to my mind, misguided statements about the pandemic have been collected in the volume Where Are We Now: The Epidemic as Politics, trans. Valeria Dani (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). 48. See Roberto Esposito, Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 49. See above all his The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Canetti describes the command as that form of language that functions by getting under the skin as a kind

   

44 : : C h a P t e r o n e

In the nearly thirteen hundred pages of the Homo Sacer project, Agamben mentions Deleuze only four times. I have been able to find only scattered if largely admiring references to him in other works by Agamben. Although they seem to share a certain Nietzschean legacy that pushes toward a new sense of the innocence of life, of life in its impersonal immediacy no longer contaminated by law, relations of property, morality, normativity, or even subjectivity, Agamben’s work retains a reticence and even quietism that is, as far as I can tell, alien to Deleuze (or at the very least to Deleuze as coauthor with Guattari). To put it bluntly, compared with Deleuze, Agamben’s “vitalism” barely has a pulse. My understanding of this reticence links his work, perhaps unexpectedly, to psychoanalysis and the nature of the psychoanalytic “cure.” Both Agamben and Freud see the emergence of a distinctively human vitality as a kind of achievement and, indeed, one that is quite difficult and rare. It involves the patient and precarious process of working through the ways in which the possibility of new possibilities for individual and collective life have always already been captured, “undeadened” by demands for work issuing not from the vital sphere as such in the form of homeostatic imperatives aimed at sustaining an optimum level of somatic flourishing— the domain of the pleasure and reality principles— but rather from an enigmatic agency embedded in the forms of life that give human life its intelligibility and meaning. Freud would eventually theorize this agency under the heading of the superego, the demands of which push beyond the pleasure principle and account for a fundamental Unbehagen in der Kultur. Agamben, for his part, situates this agency in the operations of sovereignty that always secrete the possibility of the state of exception as the arcanum imperii of political life. For both Freud and Agamben— and this is what makes them both sarxist thinkers— this patient work attends to the ways in which we have been inscribed in a form of life, the ways in which our lives bear the signatures of the texts and traditions— the archives— that have profoundly informed the matters that make life matter in the historically specific ways it does. The materiality at issue in these matters is constituted by the mutual implications and imbrications of word and flesh, signifier and

of thorn or sting (the German word is Stachel): “the sting sinks deep into the person who has carried out the command and remains in him unchanged. In the whole psychological structure of man there is nothing less subject to change. The content of the command— its force, range, and definition— was fixed for ever in that moment in which it was first promulgated, and this, or rather its exact image in miniature, is stored up in the recipient forever and may remain submerged for years and decades before it comes to light again.” Canetti, Crowds and Power, 305– 6.

A Life in Theory  : : 45

enjoyment. Out of that entanglement issues forth the urgency that Freud first theorized in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and the pressures of which exceed the demands of the homeostatic maintenance of life, those pertaining to what is generally covered by the concept of flourishing. It will, however, require a few detours to develop a better feel for the stasis, the urgency of a kind of civil unrest, in homeostasis.

ChaPter two

THEORY AND THE JEWISH QUESTION

The title of this chapter recalls a famous Jewish joke. A class of international students in zoology at an American university was assigned a paper on elephants. The French student wrote a paper titled “On the Sexual Habits of Elephants”; the German student wrote “A Prolegomena to a Bibliographic Study of Research on Elephants”; the American student wrote “Breeding Bigger and Better Elephants”; and the Jewish student wrote “Elephants and the Jewish Question.” My approach to the coupling of theory and the Jews is informed by the fact that I came to it in the context, first, of thinking about religion in its relations to modern philosophy, literature, and culture in general, and, second, of thinking about the specifically German-Jewish engagement with those relations in particular. By focusing here almost exclusively on German-Jewish thought and, for example, leaving Levinas out of my broader discussion of “high theory,” I have clearly neglected a major chapter in the history of this formation, namely, its French-Jewish dimension. Sarah Hammerschlag, my colleague at Chicago, is no doubt the foremost scholar of this part of the intellectual and cultural history of theory I’ve been laying out, and I can only recommend her work to the reader’s attention.1 With that caveat in mind, I return to the thread of my discussion. I

Another dimension of Agamben’s thought that I’ve found to be especially fertile has been his ongoing engagement with religion, above all with the political theological legacies of Christianity in general and of Paul and the Church Fathers in particular. Whether this was his intention or not, Agamben’s work demonstrates that one cannot be a proper materialist, historical 1. See, for example, her The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 47

or otherwise, without engaging in some way or other with the theological currents of the Western philosophical and political traditions, currents that depend so much on the concepts of incarnation and incorporation. This is also one of the great strengths of Žižek’s work, though it is Agamben who has dedicated the most energy and care to a reappropriation of the theological and political theological legacies that continue to shape our imagination about the possibilities of individual and collective life. More accurately, his work has been in large measure devoted to the expropriation of church intellectual property, its doctrine, dogma, doxa. This includes the forms and modes of our enjoyment or, as Agamben likes to put it, our use of bodies and things. This work has been especially helpful in my efforts to think about the afterlife of political theology in modern, democratic societies in which popular sovereignty has assumed the place formerly occupied by singular sovereigns, where the question looms large as to what of the royal remains, what of the subject-matter of the king’s two bodies persists, in our otherwise secularized, democratic forms of life.2 Though his primary materials are for the most part taken from the Christian tradition, what I have referred to as the materialist dimension of Agamben’s perspective on religion has clearly been informed by his lifelong engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin (he was the primary editor of the Italian edition of Benjamin’s works) and, more broadly, with the German-Jewish intellectual tradition out of which Benjamin emerged. In the first half of the twentieth century, a number of German-Jewish intellectuals were searching for ways to draw on the sources of Judaism not simply to lay claim to it as an exemplary religion of reason, as Hermann Cohen had put it, but also and more importantly as a resource for political and ethical orientation even if that meant beginning, in some sense, from what Gershom Scholem famously characterized as the Nichts der Offenbarung, the nullity of revelation.3 After Benjamin and Kafka, Agamben’s key point of reference in this German-Jewish tradition has been Hannah Arendt, a relatively late representative of it. Indeed, Agamben’s understanding of biopolitics, its Foucauldian core notwithstanding, is unthinkable without 2. This is the primary question of my The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 3. I am referring to Hermann Cohen’s posthumously published Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, trans. Simon Kaplan (Atlanta: American Academy of Religion, 1995). Scholem coins this formulation in a now famous exchange of letters with Benjamin on the trace elements of religion in Kafka’s work. I will return to this notion of a nullity of revelation in a later chapter. See The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932– 1940, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 142.

   

48 : : C h a P t e r t w o

reference to her writings about the “form of life” of stateless peoples. One of Agamben’s great contributions has indeed been the systematic reinterpretation of Arendt’s reflections on the stateless in biopolitical terms, reflections that in their turn strongly resonate with Benjamin’s notion of “bare life,” blosses Leben, as he presented it in his early essay “On the Critique of Violence.” This highly influential essay— at least in the world of “theory”— is composed of a set of reflections on the rule of law, the constitution of the space in which such rule acquires its validity in modern societies, and the quasi-theological differences between state violence and revolutionary violence (Benjamin referred to the former as “mythic” and the latter as “divine”).4 Arendt, who dedicated considerable thought to the relation between revolutionary violence and the constitution of democratic societies, discusses the stateless in the concluding chapter of the second part of her Origins of Totalitarianism; it bears the ominous title “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.”5 Writing in the wake of two world wars and the Holocaust, Arendt argues that the “form of life” whose “natural” environment was found in the various kinds of camps that, over the course of the twentieth century, were charged with concentrating those who had been displaced, deported, or delivered over to extermination has its roots in the convergence, constitutive of modern political life, of the notion of popular sovereignty— self-government— with that of national sovereignty, a notion bearing the full weight of its etymological relation to birth, and so to what is natural and native. It was, she argued, the fateful convergence of the two that allowed for what might be called the unnaturalization of individuals and entire peoples formerly endowed with the juridico-political recognition that comes with being a citizen, a legitimate member of an internationally recognized nation-state. Such statuses, along with the rights they imply, Arendt showed, could, given the right circumstances, be just as easily de-created as created. The stateless were those who were rendered alien and “creaturely” by precisely such acts of de- creation leaving behind not so much natural life— what would somehow remain once one had been stripped of all social predicates— as 4. Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 236– 52. The essay as a whole could be read as a response to Max Weber’s famous lecture Politics as Vocation, first delivered in Munich in 1919. The essay first appeared the year after Weber’s death in the journal he had himself edited, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. 5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975). Subsequent references are made in the text.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 49

unnaturalized life, an uncanny creature with no proper place in the world. As she puts it, “Man appeared as the only sovereign in matters of law as the people was proclaimed the only sovereign in matters of government. The people’s sovereignty (different from that of the prince) was not proclaimed by the grace of God but in the name of Man, so that it seemed only natural that the ‘inalienable’ rights of man would find their guarantee and become an inalienable part of the right of the people to sovereign self-government” (291). But as she continues, “man had hardly appeared as a completely emancipated, completely isolated being who carried his dignity within himself without reference to some larger encompassing order, when he disappeared again into a member of the people. From the beginning the paradox involved in the declaration of inalienable human rights was that it reckoned with an ‘abstract’ human being who seemed to exist nowhere” (291). It was this “abstract nakedness of being human and nothing but human,” she writes, that has, over the course of the twentieth century, “been the calamity which has befallen ever-increasing numbers of people” (297; my emphasis).6 In light of this history, she continues, it is possible to say that “even slaves still belonged to some sort of human community; their labor was needed, used, and exploited and this kept them within the pale of humanity. To be a slave was after all to have a distinctive character, a place in society” (297). Not so with the creaturely life whose “abstract nakedness” emerged as a kind of excess or surplus element at the point of convergence of popular and national sovereignty. “It seems,” as she continues later in the chapter, “that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (300). And as Arendt underlines, it was the Jews who historically found themselves positioned repeatedly at this nonplace of abstract nakedness, who were repeatedly subject to processes of unnaturalization, who became the paradigmatic figure of creaturely life.7 Agamben has effectively argued that it was this surplus element that 6. Arendt’s critical stance toward Marx prevented her, I think, from grasping the family resemblance between such abstract nakedness and the reduction of workers under capitalism to their bare labor power, that is, to their “capacity” to engage in “abstract, homogeneous human labor.” 7. Against this background, the foundation of the state of Israel could not but have a certain tragic dimension: “After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved— namely by means of a colonized and then conquered territory— but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people” (290).

   

50 : : C h a P t e r t w o

had implicitly plagued the agents of biopower at the moment in history in which this convergence began, in fits and starts, to become, as he likes to put it, “operative.” If I might allow myself a series of jarring formulations, Agamben attempted to radicalize Arendt’s insights about the stateless through reflections on the unnature of the politically and socially informe of life that took (a kind of ) shape above all in the death camps, the place where in an unheard- of sense the state of exception had become the norm, thereby transforming biopolitics into a thanatopolitics of everyday life. Following not only Arendt’s work but also Primo Levi’s memoirs of and reflections on life in Auschwitz, Agamben argues that it was the figure of the Muselmann, the seemingly living dead of the camps, who in some sense had fully succumbed to the biopolitical destiny already signaled in the “status” of statelessness, who, as it were, came to embody the “life-form” proper to the informe of life of the camps. Agamben’s own messianic thought points toward a form- of-life— his use of hyphens is meant to signal something new— in which the processes through which life is in-formed, unnaturalized, de-created (and thereby rendered creaturely) are themselves finally made “inoperative.” Here it is more Benjamin’s work rather than Arendt’s that guides Agamben’s thinking. In one of his many attempts at characterizing the forces of de- creation in Kafka’s work, Benjamin focuses quite explicitly on the bodies of Kafka’s figures, so many of which are bent over, contracted, distorted (Benjamin’s word is entstellt). The prototype of the in-formed, cringed body is, Benjamin suggests, a figure who nowhere appears in Kafka’s work but haunts it nonetheless, das bucklicht Männlein or the hunchback: “Among the images in Kafka’s stories, none is more frequent than that of the man who bows his head far down on his chest: the fatigue of the court officials, the noise affecting the doormen in the hotel, the low ceiling facing the visitors in the gallery. In the Penal Colony those in power use an archaic apparatus which engraves letters with curlicues on the backs of guilty men.” The image is quite crucial for Benjamin for he also suggests that redemption can be understood as a passage through and beyond the creaturely life materialized in these cringed bodies. The hunchback, Benjamin writes, “will disappear with the coming of the Messiah, who (a great rabbi once said) will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it [nur um ein Geringes sie zurechtstellen werde].”8 But I’m getting ahead of 8. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927– 1934, ed. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 810– 11.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 51

myself here; thinking about messianic time will do that. I’d like now to pick up once more the autobiographical thread of these reflections. II

I suggested earlier that it was the final solution that stood in the background of the rabbi’s otherwise problematic assertion, in the eulogy that opens Angels in America, that the fate of the Jews enjoyed a kind of singularity in the history of displacements, deportations, and genocidal projects that fill the annals of twentieth- century— and not only twentieth- century— history. The question of the singularity of the Holocaust is one that has haunted much of the research, both inside and outside the academy, on the history of this event and its modes of representation in historiography, literature, film, visual and performing arts, and practices of memorialization. Once settled at the University of Chicago, I was selected to occupy a new chair that had been endowed by a Chicago family, one of whose members had escaped the final solution by way of the Kindertransport, a series of rescue efforts that got thousands of children out of Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940. It was clear to me that even though the chair was ostensibly dedicated to modern European Jewish history, the family wanted the person holding it to contribute to the field of Holocaust studies. The work I had done in Stranded Objects seemed sufficient, according to the university administration, to install me in that chair even though I told the then president of the university that I didn’t think it was a good fit. The small-scale “investiture crisis” that ensued had the effect of pushing me to dedicate more time in my teaching and research to the field of Holocaust studies than I would have otherwise. Of the work I did in this field, I am particularly proud of the introduction I coauthored with Moishe Postone to the volume of essays we edited on representations of the Holocaust, essays that grew out of a conference we had organized together.9 As I’ve noted, the question of the singularity of the Holocaust is one that in one form or another inevitably arises in nearly all accounts of it including those gathered in our volume. It has, however, always struck me as one that cannot be grasped (let alone answered), as it is often done, in the context of “comparative genocides,” with regard, for example, to questions of scale or the technologies of extermination. It cannot, in my view, be separated 9. See Eric Santner and Moishe Postone, eds., Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). I was eventually given a different chair that seemed a better fit for my work. It would certainly not have felt right to pursue the kinds of questions I am pursuing here while holding a chair really intended to foster the study of the Holocaust.

   

52 : : C h a P t e r t w o

from the mythic status of the Jews as a monotheistic God’s chosen people, the people elected to lead the world out of the pagan fog of mere myth. The elaboration of this status as an ethically charged calling in and through the texts and embodied practices of the Jewish tradition inevitably marked the Jews as the object of profound ambivalence, as unenviably enviable.10 I began to address these matters in the context of my struggles with what is surely among the most idiosyncratic texts in the corpus of psychoanalytic theory, Freud’s last (almost) completed book, Moses and Monotheism. Freud’s enigmatic text presents a series of repeated efforts to capture what distinguished the Jews as a historical people and ethico-religious tradition, what seemed to make their alterity, their difference, different from other religious or cultural differences. It has, over the last decades, generated a veritable library of responses from scholars of Jewish history, philosophers, political theorists, anthropologists, Egyptologists, psychoanalysts, and literary theorists, among them, Yosef Yerushalmi, Jacques Derrida, Jan Assmann, Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, Richard Bernstein, Edward Said, Bonnie Honig, Robert Paul, and Ilse Grubrich-Semitis. They all clearly found themselves called to engage with Freud’s relationship to his own Jewish identity and the question as to how that complicated relationship figured in the birth and early childhood of psychoanalysis itself, one spent in the midst of an at least culturally Jewish and bourgeois Mitteleuropa. It did not help that Freud himself presented that relationship in somewhat mystifying terms. As he put it in the preface to the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo, although he considered himself to be “completely estranged from the religion of his fathers . . . and . . . cannot take a share in nationalist ideals,” he nevertheless felt that “he is in his essential nature a Jew.” The man who throughout his life denied knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish as well as any lived experience of Jewish traditions adds that “he could not now express that essence in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind.”11 Freud’s book, completed in 10. In her discussion of the tribal nationalism of the pan-movements of the late nineteenth century, Arendt underlines this dimension of envy with respect to the Jews. “It is a ‘truism,’” she writes, “that has not been made truer by repetition that antisemitism is only a form of envy. But in relation to Jewish chosenness it is true enough. Whenever peoples have been separated from action and achievements, when these natural ties with the common world have broken or do not exist for one reason or another, they have been inclined to turn upon themselves in their naked natural givenness and to claim divinity and a mission to redeem the whole world. When this happens in Western civilization, such peoples will invariably find the age- old claim of the Jews in their way” (Origins, 240). 11. Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), vol. 13, xv.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 53

exile in London, was no doubt an effort to facilitate just such accessibility, one that took the path of constructing a so- called scientific myth accounting for the beginnings and transmission of the uniquely exciting Cause of Jewish singularity among the nations, one distinguished by an obsessive cultivation of ethical and intellectual conscientiousness— Freud’s term is Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit— a paradoxical drive to sublimation that enjoined the Jews to a compulsive repetition of the passage out of Egyptian bondage.12 To use Deleuzian terms, Freud understood Jewish singularity as a kind of characterological tendency to engage in acts and practices of auto- deterritorialization in the midst of life among the nations, a tendency audible in the “minor” key that ostensibly distinguished the Jewish voice in the literary corpus of the nations.13 As to Freud’s Jewish “essence,” one can thus at least say that the repetitions that mark the text of Moses and Monotheism converge with the repetition compulsion that Freud thought to have discovered at the core of Jewish identity/alterity. While working on this text, a number of other things came together in my intellectual life that directly or indirectly linked up with it. Because of Schreber’s own peculiar relationship to “the Jewish question,” his delusional metamorphosis into the messianic figure of a feminized Wandering Jew, I had already found myself in conversation with various scholars active in what, at the time, was understood to be a new kind of Jewish studies, one nourished, precisely, by the efflorescence of theoretical innovations emerging out of the golden age of theory. It was in this context that I got to know two scholars who have, over the years, become dear friends and close intellectual partners, Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Lupton.14 We met at a party at the 1994 Modern Language Association annual convention 12. I discuss the details of that mythic construction in “Freud’s Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 3– 41. Reprinted in Renata Salecl, ed., Sexuation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 57– 105. 13. In a famous letter to his friend Max Brod written in June 1921, Kafka used the pejorative term mauscheln to characterize the vocal signature of this minor key. In what is thought to be his last prose piece, “Josephine or the Mouse People,” this vocal signature is reduced to a squeaky whistling, to a Pfeifen, that only becomes truly audible when repeatedly and imperfectly performed by the mouse- diva, Josephine. One might say that only when the mouse mauschelt is its distinctive vocal signature qua Pfeifen audible. It was, of course, Kafka who served for Deleuze and Guattari as the paradigm of what they referred to as “minor literature.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 14. With Ken I would eventually coauthor The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (along with Slavoj Žižek); Julia’s work on Shakespeare and political theology was a major resource in my work on both On Creaturely Life and The Royal Remains.

   

54 : : C h a P t e r t w o

hosted by Daniel Boyarin to celebrate the convening of a new MLA discussion section dedicated to the new Jewish cultural studies. Boyarin and I had been in conversation apropos of Schreber’s “queer” Jewish self-fashioning and the value and limits of Freud’s work for grasping the issues at play in it. Boyarin had himself entered into a series of exchanges with Tony Kushner about shared questions and concerns at the intersections of Jewish cultural studies and queer theory, matters that animated Kushner’s “gay fantasia on national themes.” Boyarin’s work takes up and extends arguments associated with the prolific and influential writings of Sander Gilman, the literary and cultural historian who originally encouraged me to apply for the position at Chicago. Both Gilman and Boyarin essentially read Freud’s Moses book and Freud’s writings more generally as a series of defensive postures produced under the pressure of an internalized “orientalist” gaze, as Freud’s attempt to assimilate himself and his new science to the gendered norms of a gentile society that figured Jewish men as in some sense effeminate— as feminized Wandering Jews from the East.15 This was, in their view, what led Freud to privilege the notion of Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit, to ascribe to the Jews a quasi-innate tendency toward a more intellectually oriented version of the worldly asceticism that Max Weber had traced to the Protestant ethic. Gilman and Boyarin essentially argue that Freud didn’t convert to Christianity because he had already at some level converted Judaism to it.16 Years later I came to realize that my exchanges with Boyarin had, in a small and, at least for me, funny way, acquired a sort of second- order reality in the Israeli film The Footnote. Aside from indulging in them, as many academics do, a bit too liberally, footnotes had been something of a preoccupation for me. I had argued, in the first chapter of my Schreber book, that Freud acted out a good deal of his anxiety of influence with respect to members of his inner circle— and indeed, with respect to Schreber him15. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Construction of the Jewish Man (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). See also Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) as well as his The Case of Sigmund Freud: Medicine and Identity at the Fin de Siècle (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 16. To put it somewhat differently, from Moses Mendelssohn to Hermann Cohen to Freud we find an effort to harmonize Judaism with Kant’s austere understanding of practical reason. Judaism is on this view to be seen, as Cohen put it in the title of his book, above all as a religion of reason. Perhaps the most radical attack on this view was written by Otto Weininger, who, in his Geschlecht und Charakter, argued that Jews and women, who were both by nature mired in the flesh of their carnal being, were constitutively deaf to the call of reason as Kant understood it. Weininger, a Jew, committed suicide shortly after the publication of his work in 1903.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 55

self— in the form of footnotes meant to document his priority and originality in the development of the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. I later came to understand this dynamic in terms of a wonderfully witty formulation I found in a review of Anthony Grafton’s historical study of the institution of the footnote (which I now properly footnote).17 I came to see that Freud’s own practice of footnoting offered the occasion to imagine an addition to the Freudian canon of metapsychological speculation, one that might be called, The Ego and the Ibid. Such a revision to Freud’s second topology of the mind would allow us, I suggested, to grasp the oedipal drama of influence anxiety as the script of an ambivalent “ibidinal” desire, a desire to honor intellectual debts by way of reference to one’s predecessors— the voice of other authorities— while, as it were, burying the reference below the level of textual consciousness.18 To return to The Footnote: The film, written and directed by Joseph Cedar, appeared in 2011, won at Cannes for best screenplay, and was nominated as best foreign film at the 2012 Academy Awards. The film tells the story of a father and son, both scholars of Talmudic literature at the Hebrew University (we might say that the oedipal drama here revolves around the corpus of classical Jewish literature, the love of Torah and Talmud). The father, Eliezer Shkolnik, is an old-school philologist whose lifelong project was “scooped” by a rival scholar shortly before its publication and whose remaining claim to fame rests, to a large extent, on being acknowledged in a footnote by his famous mentor. Eliezer’s son, Uriel, has himself become an internationally recognized scholar who, in his nine books, integrates into his readings of classical and modern texts the “sexy” theoretical innovations of literary and cultural studies, innovations for which Eliezer has only contempt.19 The film opens with the ceremony at the Israel Museum celebrating Uriel’s election to the National Israel Academy of Sciences (we hear a voice introducing the guest of honor before we see father and son sitting next to one another at the ceremony). In his acceptance speech, Uriel’s attempt 17. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). G. W. Bowersock’s review appears in the New Republic, January 19, 1998. 18. I discuss the notion of “ibidinal desire” in my On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 19. Later in the film, when asked by a journalist to characterize the differences between his work and that of his son, he resorts to the extremely charged metaphor of potsherds— one thinks of the Kabbalistic motif of the breaking of the vessels— which he, with meticulous and methodical care, examines and catalogs for posterity while his son hastily recomposes them into an impressive but only apparent whole, an essentially imaginary and empty vessel.

   

56 : : C h a P t e r t w o

to praise his father as a great teacher who continues to serve as his role model does nothing to change Eliezer’s profound sense of grievance about his failed public recognition and sense of being surpassed by a new kind of scholarship he considers to be superficial. The tension is heightened after Uriel’s speech when, during the reception, the father steps out for air and is stopped by a security guard when he attempts to return; he isn’t wearing his wristband and when questioned by the guard must admit that he is not a member of the academy. Once Eliezer reenters the museum we find ourselves in the midst of the reception where we overhear bits of academic conversation exchanged over food and drinks. As the camera pans back and forth between Eliezer’s sullen face and the reception, we hear fragments of a gossipy debate about the nature and value of Daniel Boyarin’s work: its ostensible derivation of anthropological claims from hermeneutics, its use of discourses of gender and sexuality, its postcolonial affiliations, its linkage of technologies of the body and practices of textual commentary, its theorization of Jewish masculinity. It quickly becomes clear that their discussion is orbiting around Boyarin’s book Unheroic Conduct, in which the author argues that Zionism was, among other things, an attempt to construct a new Jewish masculinity and thereby to repress a long history, anchored in classical Jewish texts and traditions, of what had come to be seen as a shamefully effeminate or “sissy” mode of gender formation cultivated in the quasi- erotic relation to a paternal divinity. The rest of the film turns largely on a fateful instance of miscommunication and misunderstanding culminating in a comedy of errors with an uncertain outcome. As already noted, the father’s claim to recognition in the scholarly community had seemed to rest, to a large extent, on a small but grateful acknowledgment of his work found in a footnote in his mentor’s magnum opus. Eliezer had himself long coveted the far greater recognition of the Israel Prize, one awarded for contributions to Israeli culture and society. When he receives a call from the Ministry of Education that he, Professor Shkolnik, was to be given the prize that year, he naturally but mistakenly assumes that he is meant (it is the younger Professor Shkolnik who has in fact been selected). I meant this digression on The Footnote to be itself only a footnote concerning my engagement with Jewish cultural studies, so I will not pursue the film any further in the body of the text.20 20. An aspect of the film I found to be especially compelling was the way it allowed the tensions between the father and son to resonate beyond the family and the academic milieu to those in the air in the larger society. Because the characters walk so often in and out of important public buildings, we are constantly reminded of the high level of security, of everyday vigilance, that has become the norm around sites

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 57

The amusingly uncanny part of the story, at least for me, is that while watching the scene of the reception I remembered that I had been mentioned in a footnote in the very book being discussed on screen. The further twist is that the footnote concerned my own well-footnoted references to Boyarin’s work in my Schreber book. In academia, the taboo on incestuous relations would seem to have little effect.21 III

Another leg of my “Jewish detour”— there will be much to say about detours in a later chapter— grew out of my growing dissatisfaction with the “culturalist” reading of Freud’s Moses book as an expression of its author’s efforts to fashion himself as a sort of intellectual Muskeljude, a dissatisfaction, that is, with just the sort of readings performed by Gilman and Boyarin. “Muscle Jew” was the term used by the German-Hungarian author Max Nordau as a call to Jewish men to take up not only the moral but also the physical challenges of the Zionist cause, as a warning not to allow their circumcision to circumscribe their sense and expression of their virility, hinder the cultivation of a robust, phallic masculinity. Before his conversion to Zionism under the impact of the Dreyfus affair and almost a half century before the Nazis staged their infamous exhibition of entartete or degenerate art, Nordau published Entartung, a scathing critique of decadence in fin-de-siècle European art, literature, and culture.22 There Nordau cites of entries and exits in Israel (recall the opening scene of the ceremony at the Israel Museum where the father is blocked from reentering the building). Moreover, the father eventually discovers the mistake the Ministry of Education had made when he compares “textual variants” of the language used in the publicity around the prize and the work of both his son and his archrival, Professor Grossmann. The key word that tips him off, the one that points to anomalies of use, is “fortress,” a word connoting not only shelter and shield but one that also, as the father reads in one of the volumes he consults, points to a darker semantic field. Among the phrases we read/hear are “deployed to ambush”; “to destroy”; “a path fraught with danger”; “hunt, mice, trap.” A fortress is a structure that, in other words, both protects against and projects force. 21. In his review of Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct, Paul Reitter characterized me as “one of [the] leading practitioners” of the new Jewish cultural studies. My sense is that I owe this misrecognition largely to the footnote traffic that took place between my work and Boyarin’s and my association with Gilman at the University of Chicago. See Paul Reitter, “Heroic Conduct? Daniel Boyarin and the Future of the ‘New’ Jewish Cultural Studies,” Shofar 17, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 102– 10. 22. The 1895 English translation was reissued as Degeneration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993).

   

58 : : C h a P t e r t w o

the French physician B. A. Morel to introduce the concept as signifying “a morbid deviation from an original type.”23 The definition is especially important in the present context since it was, as Foucault himself emphasized in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Freud who most radically broke with the tradition of medical thought that associated so- called deviant sexualities with the notions of decadence and degeneration. It could even be said that Freud’s singular achievement in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was to establish his new science on the foundation of this very break and to argue that deviation from the norm was, paradoxically, constitutive of so- called normal sexuality. Or as Alenka Zupančič has put it, the Freudian breakthrough was to grasp “(human) sexuality [as] a paradox-ridden deviation from a norm that does not exist.”24 Such considerations are at least part of what makes the “culturalist” readings of Freud unsatisfying. It misses the radical nature of the negativity that Freud had shown to be at work in sexuality that itself (mal)functions as a kind of dreamwork-in-progress moving through and “enfleshing” the body, rendering the soma “sarxist.” At issue is a negativity of which we can never become fully conscious, a negativity that cannot be properly known but only, if I might put it that way, excessively signified, a knowledge, that is, that only becomes manifest in the unconscious mental activity that generates the rhetorical excesses, the distortions of sense we know as dreams, neurotic symptoms, slips of the tongue, and so on. These are, then, distortions not so much of something but rather as that something’s mode of being. This is the crucial point of Freud’s oft- cited remarks about the centrality of the dreamwork for understanding what’s at stake in the interpretation of dreams, remarks that, perhaps not so surprisingly, appear in a footnote to The Interpretation of Dreams added after a period of “latency” of a quarter century. There Freud worries that his own now canonical presentation of the phenomenon of dreaming has led to misunderstandings of his theory, particularly on the part of practicing analysts: I used at one time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts. Again and again arguments and objections would be brought up based upon some uninterpreted dream in the 23. Nordau, Degeneration, 16. 24. Alenka Zupančič, Why Psychoanalysis? Three Interventions (Uppsala: NSU Press, 2008), 15. In this context, I am tempted to propose a corollary formula, namely, that culture is a paradox-ridden deviation from a nature that does not exist, that is, is not fully there as a consistent, ordered totality forming the neutral background for the disorder, the “fall,” introduced by human culture, the Unbehagen in der Kultur.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 59

form in which it had been retained in the memory, and the need to interpret would be ignored. But now that analysts at least have become reconciled to replacing the manifest dream by the meaning revealed by its interpretation, many of them have become guilty of falling into another confusion which they cling to with equal obstinacy. They seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dream-work which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming— the explanation of its peculiar nature.25

My dissatisfaction with the culturalist readings of Freud is that they, too, remain at the level of cultural hermeneutics, work only with the manifest and latent content of cultural formations and miss the dimension of the dreamwork at work in them, in-forming them. The problem is that Freud himself can at times be counted among the analysts he calls to account for missing the essence of dreaming. It’s a problem we encounter very early in the Traumdeutung when Freud introduces his method of dream interpretation apropos of the “specimen dream” we have come to know as the dream of Irma’s injection. I will be returning to Freud’s thinking about the dreamwork in the following chapters. For now, suffice it to say that the reading of the Irma dream Freud offers at this point in the book certainly appears to locate the truth of the dream in his wish to justify himself as a scientist and physician in the aftermath of slights suffered through a comment made in passing by a friend and medical colleague. That is, he reads his own dream as a series of defensive postures pertaining to his status and identity as a man of science. The problem is that there is nothing especially problematic about this wish, nothing about it that offers any real resistance to knowledge or conscious deliberation. This is already clear from the fact that before having the dream Freud went over the case to assure himself that his conduct of it was beyond reproach. In a word, he had already consciously entertained the dream thoughts that then came to be distorted in the manifest content of the dream. But this surely means that the residual feelings of insecurity he still had about his conduct of the case would have been insufficient to set the dreamwork in motion and sustain its operation. My provisional conclusion from this excursus is, to put it in a nutshell, that the culturalist reading of Freud misses what is crucial about the Freud25. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 510.

   

60 : : C h a P t e r t w o

ian reading of culture, the nature of the work, the mode of production involved in its formations. This “missing bit” is what also makes problematic the common culturalist readings of circumcision as the seemingly feminizing slight that Freud and his Jewish male cohort felt compelled to deny and displace by way of various forms of, at bottom, assimilationist self-fashioning, defensive strategies that provided the self-assurance that they, too, enjoyed a masculinity beyond reproach despite a missing bit— that they were not even slightly feminine. Be that as it may, it is clear that the practice of circumcision “touches” on the central issue I’ve been exploring, sometimes directly, sometimes at a distance: the ways in which bodies come to matter, acquire their dense, semiotic materiality, and how the enigmatic core of those processes of symbolic inscription/investiture has functioned as the exciting cause of much of the theoretical work performed over the last decades, including those culturalist readings that, as I’ve suggested, ultimately read over it by filling it in with sexual meaning. IV

The topic of circumcision places us at the cut of the Judeo- Christian divide as first elaborated in Paul’s Letters, a cut between two kinds of cuts: the circumcision of the flesh and circumcision of the heart. The Pauline elaboration of this divide has, over the last decades, itself become a rather exciting Cause of theory. Among the contributors to the new Paul debates have been Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Boyarin, Hent de Vries, and, belatedly, Jacob Taubes, whose lectures on the political theology of Paul from 1987 were posthumously edited and introduced by Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann.26 It was Taubes who, in the final lecture of that series, argued that a careful reading of Freud’s Moses book suggests that Freud identified not with Moses, the culture hero of the Jewish tradition, but rather with Paul. Furthermore, that he “enters into the role of Paul, of the Paul who supposedly brings redemption only phantasmatically, while Freud realizes it through this new method of healing, which is not only an individual method, but also a theory of culture. Freud is a doctor not only of the individual, but a doctor of culture.”27 My own relation to these debates has been colored by my encounter with the work 26. I was “officially” included in the debates by Dominik Finkelde, who discusses them in his book Politische Eschatologie nach Paulus: Badiou— Agamben— Zizek— Santner (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2007). 27. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 95; my emphasis.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 61

of Franz Rosenzweig, an encounter I came to “process” with the help of Freud. The “conversation” I attempted to stage between these two great German-Jewish thinkers from the first half of the twentieth century gave me the tools to elaborate a concept that I have called the psychotheology of everyday life and that, I think, helps to shed some light on Taubes’s perhaps surprising claim. Before sketching out the ways in which this further “detour” through the German-Jewish formation helped me to enter into a tighter orbit around the question of the sexuality of theory, I would like to acknowledge the work of some crucial partners in this enterprise. I don’t recall when I first heard of Rosenzweig, but I read him for the first time in the context of a seminar I taught with Robert Gibbs— a scholar of Rosenzweig and Levinas— my last year at Princeton. The topic was the notion of the uncanny— das Unheimliche— in the work of Freud, Rosenzweig, and Heidegger. Along with Freud’s famous essay on the uncanny and Heidegger’s discussion of uncanniness in Being and Time, the readings included a series of passages Gibbs had selected from Rosenzweig’s magnum opus, The Star of Redemption. At the time I understood next to nothing of those passages. Not only did I find the language to be largely impenetrable; I also had the impression that Rosenzweig did not have full command of his material. On a subjective level, this meant, as I’ve indicated in the preface, that I couldn’t enter into the kind of transference with the author that would have allowed me to go on reading on the supposition that he knew full well what he was talking about and that I just had to put in the work before I would get it. As I’ve noted, I honestly don’t understand how anyone can make the commitment to stick with books of this order of intellectual ambition and difficulty without that sort of trust, without the fundamental presupposition that helps to sustain the author’s authority. When I came to Chicago, I had the good fortune that the divinity school at the university had recently hired Paul Mendes-Flohr, a renowned scholar of German-Jewish thought. When I saw that he was teaching a seminar on The Star of Redemption, I decided to sit in on the class. It turned out to be a life- changing experience. Under Paul’s guidance I came to appreciate not only Rosenzweig’s brilliance but also the Star’s quite stunning if idiosyncratic systematicity, its remarkable and utterly novel way of integrating multiple levels of conceptualization, argument, reference, and allusion. Indeed, I would say that the Star offers a strong paradigm of what it looks like to untie things together, to create a kind of constitutively open or decompleted totality (one that really calls for another word than “totality”).28 28. I borrow the notion of “decompletion” from Kenneth Reinhard who uses it in his contribution to The Neighbor, the book he, Žižek, and I did together on the legacy of

   

62 : : C h a P t e r t w o

Paul and I went on to teach a series of seminars together on a variety of topics in the field of German-Jewish thought and literature.29 In my first years at Chicago, I also developed a close working relationship with two philosophers, Jonathan Lear and Irad Kimhi, both of whom I first got to know sitting in on their joint seminar on Heidegger’s Being and Time. We went on, in changing configurations, to teach classes together, sit in on one another’s seminars, share reading projects, hang out. As I note in the acknowledgments to my book on Freud and Rosenzweig, much of my thinking there grew out of this intense intellectual partnership, the major focus of which was the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis.30 It was in this context that I was led back to the work of Jean Laplanche and his remarkably productive notion of the enigmatic signifier, a concept that has informed my thinking ever since and to which I will return below. My engagement with Žižek’s work in this period, above all with his writings about Schelling, was equally important to me as I struggled to find my own path through Rosenzweig’s Star.31 Schelling’s significance for Rosenzweig cannot be overestimated. It was Rosenzweig who, while researching Hegel’s political philosophy, discovered in the Prussian State Library a short, handwritten text that had clearly emerged out of the friendship and collaboration of Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling, who had all studied together at the famous Protestant seminary, the Tübinger Stift, in the late 1780s and early ’90s. As I’ve noted in the preface, the text was composed as a manifesto for a new philosophy, the biblical concepts of the neighbor and love of neighbor. See The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 29. A “culturalist” reader would perhaps find it of interest that Paul and I are both Brooklyn Jews of Eastern European heritage who gravitated “westward” to the German-Jewish tradition. Another dear friend and fellow Brooklyn Jew, my former colleague at Princeton, Stanley Corngold, followed a similar migration pattern and became a renowned scholar of Kafka’s work. 30. As I came to learn, such intensity can be a challenge to friendships. This was my first experience with conflicts over originality, priority, the “ownership” of ideas, i.e., with what I earlier characterized as the vicissitudes of ibidinal desire. Although I know that this dynamic is not limited to any one discipline or field, my only experiences of it have occurred with philosophers. 31. The two books that proved to be especially helpful were Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996); The Abyss of Freedom/The Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). The second volume includes a translation by Judith Norman of one of Schelling’s Weltalter fragments.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 63

one that took on the revolutionary challenge of Kant’s philosophy, a challenge the three young Swabians experienced as resonant with the impact of the French Revolution. Rosenzweig published it under the title The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism (Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus).32 In his introduction to the document, Rosenzweig argued that Schelling had been its prime author. Views have shifted since then, and it is now generally agreed that the text stems from Hegel though under the considerable influence of Hölderlin. Be that as it may, Rosenzweig’s broader engagement with Schelling provided him with a kind of blueprint for the architecture of the Star, a book whose central concept is, after all, revelation, the topic of one of Schelling’s most important later works. But it was not so much The Philosophy of Revelation that proved to be most generative, not to say revelatory for Rosenzweig, but rather Schelling’s earlier speculative fragments, The Ages of the World (Die Weltalter). Schelling’s attempt to tell the story of the “psychic” life of God before his decision to create the world— to become a creator-God— gave Rosenzweig the concepts he would use to organize his system into three parts, each addressed to a different “age of the world”: Vorwelt, Welt, Überwelt. William Hallo translates these headings as protocosmos, cosmos, hypercosmos; Barbara Galli as primordial world, world, supraworld.33 Rosenzweig saw the Star as part of a larger collective effort to inaugurate what he referred to as a new thinking, a systematic reorientation of philosophy and theology around encounters with their respective limits. For Rosenzweig, those limits mark the points at which modern philosophy is confronted with its need for and dependence on resources and impulses— on exciting causes— from an “outside,” an outside that could not, however, be equated with history or empirical reality, with the subject matters of the natural and social sciences. That is, it was not a matter of disciplining philosophy to cleave closer to reality but rather of opening it to “the real,” to a dimension that in some sense wounds, traumatizes, the sovereignty of 32. The text of the manifesto can be found in Christoph Jamme and Helmut Schneider, eds., Mythologie der Vernunft: Hegels “ältestes Systemprogramm” des deutschen Idealismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 11– 14. An English translation has been reprinted in the European Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 2 (1995): 199– 200. Rosenzweig’s still untranslated introductory essay has been reprinted in the third volume of his collected works, Zweistromland: Kleinere Schriften zu Glauben und Denken, ed. Reinhold Mayer and Annemarie Mayer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984). 33. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005).

   

64 : : C h a P t e r t w o

philosophical thinking, its pretensions to being a rigorous science, a strenge Wissenschaft.34 Rosenzweig conceived this opening as exposure to the ontological vulnerability that renders life creaturely, reveals it under the aspect of creation, of, to paraphrase Deleuze, becoming- creature. As Rosenzweig saw it, a shared revelation of the creaturely would enable philosophy and theology to emerge together as, precisely, a new thinking.35 Rosenzweig was not the first or last philosopher to want to replace the word “philosophy” with another, in this case, the new thinking. Fichte, the other crucial contemporary figure for the “Tübinger Three,” called his work not philosophy but Wissenschaftslehre or the doctrine of science and came, at least for a time, to refer to the exciting cause of thinking— what makes thinking think— as its constitutive Anstoss, as, to use Lacan’s locution, an “extimate” bit that impels, pushes, offends, and checks its otherwise autonomous activity. Heidegger, for his part, came more and more to speak of thinking rather than philosophy. He signaled the dimension of dependence that emerges at the limits of philosophy and opens it onto thinking proper by linking Denken and Danken, thinking and thanking (this conceptual pair effaces the traumatic dimension still acknowledged in the early work under the heading of Angst). For Heidegger, that link implied a second one, that of Denken and Dichten, conceptual thinking and poetic thinking. Heidegger addressed the nature of the “excitations” that gather at the limits of thinking and, as it were, make thinking thoughtful, in a series of lectures entitled Was heisst Denken? (What Is Called Thinking?). One could understand the activity that we call thinking only by grasping what addresses thinking, calls it on the scene in the first place, a call that had, Heidegger argued, been muted precisely by philosophy. Much of Heidegger’s work takes the form of 34. Those pretensions are forcefully articulated in Edmund Husserl’s 1910 essay “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” published in English as “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” in The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 2 (2002): 249– 95. Rosenzweig would no doubt have agreed with Husserl’s critique of naturalism and historicism without sharing in his vision for a new beginning of philosophy on the basis of phenomenology. 35. I have much abbreviated Rosenzweig’s account of the historically separate paths of philosophy and theology to the new thinking. As Rosenzweig tells it, the one leads through the breakup of the rational totality synthesized by Hegel, the other above all through the historicist deflation of the sources of religious authority. The new thinking was, in a word, founded upon the legitimation crises of philosophical reason and religious authority. To allude to Beckett once more, before the new thinking could get off the ground, it had to first proceed Worstward Ho toward the “unnullable least” of creaturely life. It is no wonder then that Rosenzweig modeled his method on the infinitesimal calculus elaborated by Hermann Cohen.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 65

repeated efforts to turn and return to this “in the first place,” the unheard (of ) yet somehow ever insistent inaugural call of thinking into being.36 Žižek, for his part, defends himself against critics who claim that he is not really a philosopher, that his work is, as one critic put it, “not exactly in the field of philosophy,” by underlining the break that Kant introduced into philosophy— the very break that led Fichte to search for another name for this activity: “After Kant . . . philosophy . . . as a great rendering of the basic structure of the whole of reality . . . is simply no longer possible. With Kant’s critical turn thinking is ‘not exactly in the field of philosophy.’”37 As I’ve been arguing here, what has gone under the name of “theory” in its golden age and beyond concerns this very border territory that is “not exactly in the field of philosophy.” As I’ve indicated, my own intellectual journey led me very early on into this same border territory without fully knowing what I was getting into. Among the thinkers mentioned here, it is above all Žižek and his Slovene partners, Mladen Dolar and Alenka Zupančič, who have grasped the crucial link between the border territories of thinking and those of bodily life— think of Freud’s notion of the erogenous zones— who have understood that the exciting cause of thinking needs to be grasped in its relation to the excitations that drive human sexuality, in a word, that thinking and the drives emerge in conjunction, come on the scene as, to use Bersani’s formulation once more, so many pulsive theorizations. This link between thinking and sexuality suggests that sexuality is itself always already “sublimated,” already engaged with “higher” things. That Rosenzweig spoke of a new thinking rather than a new philosophy concerns not only what he perceived to be the limits of academic philosophy but also of academia more generally. In the letter written to Friedrich Meinecke to which I’ve already referred, Rosenzweig explains why he decided to turn down his former mentor’s support and encouragement in the pursuit of an academic appointment, of Wissenschaft als Beruf. By the time 36. Based on the reports Rosenzweig received about the famous encounter between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos, Rosenzweig counted Heidegger among the new thinkers. See his “Transposed Fronts,” in Franz Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 146– 52. Among the many crucial differences between the two thinkers is that Heidegger’s thought became ever more singularly preoccupied with the pure impact of the call, demand, imperative of thinking as issuing from Being and so as all that truly matters while Rosenzweig’s main concern was with the elaboration of the call to thinking in the fabric of ordinary life. The final words of Der Stern der Erlösung are ins Leben, into the midst of life. 37. Slavoj Žižek, Incontinence of the Void: Economico-Philosophical Spandrels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 3.

   

66 : : C h a P t e r t w o

Meinecke proposed a lectureship for him in Berlin in 1920, Rosenzweig had already begun to experience the entire academic enterprise as a kind of defense against the exigencies of life and the forms of responsiveness and responsibility he was coming to associate with being in their midst. To use Lacan’s terms, he had become dissatisfied with everything about the discourse of the university: its blindness to the dimension of singularity, its limited way of understanding the freedom of research, its anxious attachment to the “reality principle,” its ostensible universality and objectivity. He had come to the view that the vitality of his thought depended on a kind of radical partiality, one that he now linked to his Judaism, to the contingency of being born into a Jewish family at a particular moment in history. One might say that he chose a (no doubt idiosyncratic) “Jewish detour” over the straightforward path of university knowledge. “The one thing I wish to make clear,” he wrote to his former mentor, “is that scholarship [Wissenschaft] no longer holds the center of my attention, and that my life has fallen under the rule of a ‘dark drive’ [dem ‘dunklen Drang’] which I’m aware that I merely name by calling it ‘my Judaism.’”38 Rosenzweig went on to become one of the central figures in the renaissance of Jewish thought and culture in the Weimar period before his early death from ALS. He is perhaps best known for his new translation of the bible with Martin Buber and for the work he did at the Jüdisches Lehrhaus, the institution for Jewish adult education he cofounded in Frankfurt. It was Meinecke who, in the letter to which Rosenzweig was responding, first used the phrase “dark drive,” an allusion to the Prologue in Heaven from the first part of Goethe’s Faust where the Lord bets Mephistopheles that Faust will ultimately find the right path. The allusion is made more explicit in the next sentence of the letter in which Rosenzweig writes that the “spirit I saw” (der Geist den ich gesehen) was not the devil. Indeed, Rosenzweig contrasts his “dark drive” with what he characterizes as the quasi- demonic imperatives of Wissenschaft, the will to disciplinary knowledge that, like a phantom or specter— his word is Gespenst— consumes one’s humanity with its insatiable, vampiric inquisitiveness until there is nothing left. Rosenzweig compares the difference between spirit and specter, Geist and Gespenst, with, on the one hand, a striving arising from an impenetrable kernel of selfhood— something much closer to the Dämon Goethe invokes in his poem “Urworte. Orphisch”— and, on the other, what he characterizes as the abject servitude of the self to the rule of one’s tal38. Cited in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum Glatzer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 96.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 67

ents, one’s measurable aptitudes. Rosenzweig had lost the ambition to be a “man with qualities” in the sense and according to the standards recognized by the university.39 V

Rosenzweig’s “conversion” from scholar to new thinker— in the letter to Meinecke, he still uses the word “philosopher”— forms the biographical background to his understanding of the Vorwelt and what it means to emerge from it with a new, or at least profoundly renewed, responsiveness to, we might even say love of, the world. Rosenzweig’s account of the “protocosmos” includes some of the most difficult passages in The Star of Redemption; indeed, it was these pages that first put me off from reading further in it. I apologize in advance for what remains obscure in this highly condensed summary. In language particularly resonant with Hölderlin’s passionate attachment to the Greeks, Rosenzweig presents the distinguishing cultural forms of ancient Athens— the vision of the Olympian gods; the figure of the tragic hero; the integral composition of the polis— as “classical” attempts to come to terms with, collectively gather one’s thoughts and feelings, one’s cognitive and affective life, around a void of knowledge with respect to the three “elemental” regions of being: God, man, and world. What distinguished the Greeks is the way in which they structured a form of life, organized their collective enjoyment, in the “neighborhood” of this threefold void. What Rosenzweig calls the metaphysical God, the metaethical self, and the metalogical world represent a series of “differential equations” that allowed the Greeks to “operate” with this void of knowl39. I’ve already suggested that one might read Rosenzweig’s letter to Meinecke as a counteressay to Max Weber’s lecture Wissenschaft als Beruf. The two texts converge in a peculiar way around the “dark drive” that Rosenzweig invokes. Weber concludes his lecture with an allusion to an aphorism from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre pertaining to one’s duty in life and, no doubt thinking about Goethe’s Urwort, an invocation of a kind of demonic force immanent to every true vocation: “We must go about our work and meet ‘the challenges of the day’ [Forderung des Tages]— both in our human relations and our vocation. But that moral is simple and straightforward if each person finds and obeys the daemon that holds the threads of his life.” Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 31. In his letter to Meinecke, Rosenzweig cites the same phrase from the Wanderjahre about the demands or challenges of the day also suggesting that they can only be truly met if one follows one’s “dark drive” rather than “that insatiable, ever inquisitive phantom which like a vampire drains him whom it possesses of his humanity.” Cited in Glatzer, ed., Franz Rosenzweig, 96– 97.

   

68 : : C h a P t e r t w o

edge, create vibrant cultural forms around it that have resounded across history as the “classical” frequency of the vital intensity of human life.40 Rosenzweig’s understanding of such operations resonate with Rilke’s evocation, in the final lines of the first Duino Elegy, of the resonances that constitute what we might call the emergent music of the protocosmos: Is it a tale told in vain, that myth of lament for Linos, in which a daring first music pierced the shell of numbness: stunned Space, which an almost divine youth had suddenly left forever; then, in that void, vibrations— which for us now are rapture and solace and help.41

Rosenzweig’s account of the “pagan” logic of the protocosmic elements, especially his discussion of the metaethical self, resonates as well with Freud’s metapsychological speculations on the drives. Indeed, it was this shared frequency that guided my thinking in On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. Though I discussed his notion of the metaethical self in some detail there, I think it’s worth returning to Rosenzweig’s still compelling language on this matter; these are passages that have served as touchstones for my own thinking since I began reading Rosenzweig in earnest some twenty years ago. I’ve already noted one crucial dimension of this notion in referring to Rosenzweig’s rejection of what he called the rule of his ultimately measurable talents. As I’ve also noted, in his letter to Meinecke, Rosenzweig traces the beginning of his uncertainty about a life in the service of Wissenschaft and the rule of the talents to a kind of nervous breakdown he suffered in 1913, one thought to have been triggered by his attendance of a Yom Kippur service in a small orthodox synagogue in Berlin only days after informing his mother that we would be converting to Christianity (as various friends and relatives had done). Clearly something he experienced in that service aroused in him the “dark drive” that would prove to be stronger than the rule of his talents as a scholar: “In 1913 something happened to me for 40. As I’ve noted, Rosenzweig bases his use of the language of the infinitesimal calculus in the first part of the Star on the writings of his other great (though unofficial) mentor, the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. The phrase “frequency of vital intensity” translates Rilke’s Schwingungszahl der Lebensintensität, a formulation he coined in a letter to the Polish translator of his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I will return to this notion in the next chapter. 41. The Poetry of Rilke, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 289. Rilke composed the Duino Elegies over the period extending from 1912 to 1922, the formative years of Rosenzweig’s development as a “new thinker.”

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 69

which collapse is the only fitting name. I suddenly found myself on a heap of wreckage, or rather I realized that the road I was then pursuing was flanked by unrealities. Yet this was the very road defined for me by my talent, and my talent only!” He associates the compulsion exercised by his talents with a “sinister” and “insatiable” hunger for forms, for Gestalten, “a hunger without goal or meaning, driven on solely by its own momentum.” He goes on to describe the process of introspection that opened him to the dark drive that, as he said, he only names by calling it his Judaism: “Amidst the shreds of my talents I began to search for my self, amidst the manifold for the One. It was then (one can speak of such matters in metaphors only) that I descended into the vaults of my being, to a place whither talents could not follow me.”42 In the language of the Star, what Rosenzweig is pointing to in this letter is the distinction between the person and the self or, more precisely, the personality and the metaethical self. Both, it turns out, are linked to sexuality, though to fundamentally different aspects or dimensions of it. The personality is linked to the ostensibly biological norm of reproductive sexuality, the metaethical self to the swerve from the norm— the clinamen— that Freud discusses under the headings of inversion and perversion in his Three Essays on Sexuality. The sexuality of concern to Freud is born in a deviation from the apparent normativity of nature, from the regularities governing biological birth and death, that is, the life of the species as a lifeform among others. But as we’ve seen, part of Freud’s revolutionary claim was that the so- called perversion of the norm enjoys a kind of logical priority over the norm itself. The personality signifies what is generic about a person, everything about a person that can be subsumed under a concept, that can be subordinated to some sort of universal or genus. As noted, Rosenzweig understands this relation of individuals to their predicates, to the set of properties, aptitudes, and talents that locate them as recognizable personalities within a field of social legibility, on the model of sexual reproduction, the coupling that, as it were, reimmerses the individual into the generality of species life: “Natural birth was . . . the birth of individuality; in coupling [Begattung] it died its way back into the genus.”43 Rosenzweig abbreviates this subsumption by the equation B = A, signifying the entrance of what 42. Cited in Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, 95. It should be recalled that Max Weber also left the university very early in his career after a series of mental breakdowns. He left full-time teaching in 1903 and only resumed it in 1919, one year before his death. 43. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 70; trans. modified. Subsequent references are made in the text.

   

70 : : C h a P t e r t w o

is particular, individual, distinctive (das Besondere), into the general or universal (das Allgemeine): “Many predications are possible about personality, as many as about individuality. As individual predications they all follow the scheme B = A, the scheme in which all the predications about the world and its parts are conceptualized. Personality is always defined as an individual in its relation to other individuals and to a Universal” (69; my emphasis). The personality is what lends itself to classification and so to what can be accounted for within the discourse of the university, the discourse Rosenzweig could no longer profess; it concerns aptitudes and talents that can be tested and measured with an eye, for example, to identifying a suitable occupation or to matching one with a compatible mate. Today we would perhaps say that what pertains to the personality can be translated into algorithms. The metaethical self is, by contrast, what is constitutively recalcitrant to the generality of classificatory schemes, what can never be fully “algorithmitized”: “There are no derivative predications about the self, only the one, original B = B” (69). Because the self pertains to what remains, to that which in some sense persists beyond an individual’s integration into the life of the genus, “we should,” Rosenzweig writes, “be led to the inadequacy of the ideas of individuality and personality for comprehending human life” (70– 71). Rosenzweig tries to capture this remainder of life in excess of the life-form (and form of life) to which it remains attached, by means of the concepts of character and defiance; the self signifies nothing but the defiant persistence of— or perhaps better: insistence on— one’s character, its demonic self-sameness. This is what Rosenzweig tries to capture by the tautology B = B: a distinctive insistence on pure distinctiveness.44 One thinks again of Rosenzweig’s refusal to submit to the rule of his talents and to follow— in defiance of the expectations of his mentor and the institution in which he would have enjoyed considerable recognition— his dark drive. Just as the sexuality of concern to psychoanalysis is born in a deviation from a norm that ultimately concerns the reproduction of the life of the species, the metaethical self has, as Rosenzweig puts it, its own birthday, one that that throws its “bearer” off course, renders it destitute with respect to the predicates that would qualify it, render it fit, for life in the polis: 44. In his commentary on Schelling’s Weltalter, Žižek puts it this way: “That which, in me, resists the blissful submergence in the Good is . . . not my inert biological nature but the very kernel of my spiritual selfhood, the awareness that, beyond all particular physical and psychical features, I am ‘me,’ a unique person, an absolutely singular point of spiritual self-reference.” Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder, 59. Rosenzweig would in this instance have said self rather than person.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 71

Character, and therefore the self which bases itself on it, is not the talent which the celestials placed in the crib of the young citizen of the earth “already at birth” as his share of the commonweal of mankind [am gemeinsamen Menschheitsgut]. Quite the contrary: the day of the natural birth is the great day of destiny for individuality, because on it the fate of the distinctive [das Schicksal des Besonderen] is determined by the share in the universal [den Anteil am Allgemeinen]; for the self, this day is covered in darkness. The birthday of the self is not the same as the birthday of the personality. For the self, the character, too, has its birthday: one day it is there. It is not true that character “becomes,” that it “forms.” One day the self assaults man like an armed man and takes possession of all the wealth in his property. . . . Until that day, man is a piece of the world even before his own consciousness. . . . The self breaks in and at one blow robs him of all the goods and chattel which he presumed to possess. He becomes quite poor, has only himself, knows only himself, is known to no one, for no one exists but he. The self is solitary man in the hardest sense of the word: the personality is the “political animal.” (Star, 71; my emphasis)

Rosenzweig’s language makes absolutely clear that his concern here is with what Freud characterized as the emergence of an individual’s Triebschicksal, the “drive destiny” that endows a life with its singular, demonic torsion, injects it with an exciting Cause it will undyingly bear to its death as what is most “extimate” to one’s being: Thus the self is born on a definite day. . . . It is the day on which the personality, the individual, dies the death of entering the genus [i.e., in progeniture]. . . . This speechless, sightless, introverted daimon assaults man first in the guise of Eros, and thence accompanies him through life until the moment when he removes his disguise and reveals himself as Thanatos. This is the second, and, if you will, the more secret birthday of the self, just as it is the second, and, if you will, the first patent day of death for individuality. . . . Whatever of the self becomes visible to us lies between these two births of the daimon. (71– 72)

For Rosenzweig, what links Eros and Thanatos, the sexual drive and the death drive, is that both can be understood as aspects of the life of a remainder of life, the life of what remains recalcitrant to the homeostatic imperatives of biological and even of the cultural life to which we belong by virtue of our personalities— call it our sociobiological life. To return

   

72 : : C h a P t e r t w o

to the debates around Paul with which I began this discussion of Rosenzweig, I would characterize the dimension at issue in B = B as that of the sarx or flesh, while B = A pertains to what is ultimately translatable into the languages of the natural and social sciences. To use the formulation coined by Terry Eagleton, our sociobiological life, our lives as political animals, can be grasped within the terms of a somatic materialism while the dimension of the metaethical self calls for what I have been calling a sarxist materialism.45 VI

I borrow the term “remainder of life” from Jonathan Lear’s Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (a remarkable book that emerged out of the “ibidinal economy” of the intellectual three-way I related earlier). There Lear offers a perspicacious account of the fort/da game described by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to illustrate the notion of repetition compulsion. I have made use of this account in other work, and I think it’s worth repeating here (what else might one do with a compelling account of repetition compulsion?). Lear emphasizes that in the child’s mastery of the potentially traumatic experience of his mother’s absence— the particular child in question is Freud’s grandson— by way of the invention of (or initiation into) a cultural form, here a rather minimal language game played with a single prop, something goes missing that cannot properly be called a loss. The game, which Lear describes as part of the prehistory of the development of the virtue of courage, is, as he puts it, “prompted by a rip in the fabric of life”: If we are trying to respect the child’s point of view, we cannot even say that the game is prompted by loss. For it is only after the game is installed that the child will begin to have the concept of loss or absence. Only when the game is established will the loss be a loss for him. The outcome of the game is to convert what would otherwise be a nameless trauma into a loss. The child had been inhabiting a less differentiated field of “mother-and- child”: it is this field that is disturbed by the mother’s absence.46 45. Again, Eagleton develops the concept “somatic materialism” in Materialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 46. Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 92. Subsequent references are made in the text.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 73

What this ultimately means, however, is that the form of life the child now inhabits is haunted by a missing link, marked by the namelessness of the rip in the fabric of life that called forth, served as the Anstoss or trigger for, the child’s creative capacities in the first place. I am alluding here, once more, to Fichte’s speculative notion of the Anstoss in the constitution of intentionality that might itself be understood as a transcendental trigger for which there can never be a warning. The form of life in which we have the capacity to lose (because we have the concept and name of loss) is, we might say, not all: The name of loss requires the game of loss: it requires inventing ways of living with the loss that one has just named. Once the game is established, once the child can face his loss courageously, once the mind can function according to the pleasure principle, the question of what lies beyond (or before) gets covered over. What gets hidden is the nonteleological occasion for courage: the disruption of the fabric of life to which courage can only be a retrospective response. Once the child can experience loss as a loss— that is, once the child has established the game— he is no longer experiencing that which was the occasion for the development of the capacity to experience loss. If we think of a name as standing unproblematically for that which it names, then an inaugural act of naming like this always misses its mark. In this sense, “facing reality” always leaves something out. (95)

And it is precisely the insight into this remainder that Lear presents as Freud’s crucial contribution: “What does get left out, to put it paradoxically, is not another ‘thing,’ but a disturbance of the fabric of life which occasioned this further development of the capacity to face reality. Freud’s deepest insight, I suspect, is that, appearances to the contrary, life can never be lived without remainder” (96; my emphasis). My claim is that it is this remainder that, whether one likes it or not, makes sarxists of us all. In her study of the French Hegelians who so profoundly influenced the development of theory in the sense I’ve been tracking here, Judith Butler offers a “hauntological” account of the scenario described by Lear, one that correlates what he calls the remainder of life with Freud’s notion of primal repression or Urverdrängung. For Freud, who never fully developed the concept, primary or primal repression is not the repression of this or that troubling content but what, rather, first divides life into itself and the remaining traces of an immemorial “loss” that persists in life in the form of a seemingly impossible desire, a “fixation” constitutive of subjec-

   

74 : : C h a P t e r t w o

tivity. As Butler puts it, “the subject is . . . split off from an original libidinal unity with the maternal body; in psychoanalytic terms, this is the primary repression that effects individuation. Desire is, then, the expression of a longing for the return to the origin that, if recoverable, would necessitate the dissolution of the subject itself. Hence, desire is destined for an imaginary life in which it remains haunted and governed by a libidinal memory it cannot possibly recollect.”47 VII

As I’ve noted, Rosenzweig characterizes The Star of Redemption as an exercise in a “new thinking” oriented by the revelation of the creaturely dimension of human life. He explicitly introduces the concept in an essay written in 1925 in an effort to help his readers to approach what so many had found to be a rather unapproachable book. Early on in the essay, after claiming that others in his circle of “new thinkers” could have done it better, he notes that many had bought the Star thinking that they would be getting a “Jewish book.” Rosenzweig had no doubt encouraged what he now calls a “social misapprehension” by first publishing the Star with a press known for Judaica. Clearly somewhat ambivalent about this question himself, he first insists that “it is not a ‘Jewish book’ at all, at least not what those buyers who were so angry with me take for a Jewish book. It does deal with Judaism, but not any more exhaustively than with Christianity and barely more exhaustively than Islam. Neither does it make the claim to be a philosophy of religion— how could it do that when the word ‘religion’ does not occur in it at all! Rather, it is merely a system of philosophy.”48 He then goes on to admit that even “philosophy” is a misleading characterization given that what is at stake is “thinking’s complete renewal” (69). The essay is, after all, called “The New Thinking” and not “The New Philosophy.” And yet it is clear that Judaism and Christianity both play a crucial if paradoxical role in this renewal. As strange as it sounds, Rosenzweig presents both as religions intent on working through their own religiosity. “The extraordinary position of Judaism and Christianity,” he writes, “lies precisely in that they, even when they have become religions, find in 47. Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 186– 87. The term “hauntology” is taken from 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). 48. Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking,” trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 68– 69. Subsequent references are made in the text.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 75

themselves the impulse to free themselves from this religiosity of theirs and to find their way back again to the open field of reality from out of their specialization and their fortification” (91).49 Judaism and Christianity function for Rosenzweig, then, as paths that allow the faithful to traverse the religiosity they cultivate, paths that lead, as the final words of the Star suggest, ins Leben, into the midst of life rather than into a special sphere of life let alone an afterlife. Rosenzweig goes on to make a further concession to his audience by acknowledging the historicity of his own thinking about the new thinking, one that endows his language with an idiomatic and, he hopes, even poetic specificity. As he puts it, “I received the new thinking in these old words, thus I have rendered it and passed it on, in them” (92).50 We might say that for Rosenzweig, the “exciting cause” of the new thinking became manifest— was revealed to him— in the language of the faith tradition that made revelation its central, orienting concept, its proper Cause. And so, he admits, the Star is, in some sense a Jewish book. But “not one which deals with ‘Jewish matters,’ for then the books of the Protestant Old Testament scholars would be Jewish books, but one for [which] the old Jewish words come in order to say what it has to say, and precisely for the new things it has to say.” “Jewish matters,” he continues, “are, as matters generally are, always already past; but Jewish words, even if old, take part in the eternal youth of the word, and if the world is opened to them, then they will renew the world” (92; trans. modified). This philological vitalism, if I might put it that way, is surely at issue when he writes to his cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, whose conversion to Christianity Rosenzweig had intended to follow until his experience of the Yom Kippur service in Berlin, that he was no more a specialist in Judaica than Max Weber and that it was above all his method and not his object that is Jewish.51 It is ultimately a 49. In a diary entry from 1922 and one of the few places in his writings where Freud is explicitly mentioned, Rosenzweig— and this is my own admittedly speculative interpretation— even characterizes revelation as a kind of therapeutic “antireligion” aimed at loosening the grip of what he refers to as “religionitis.” See Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974– 84), vol. 1, part 2, 770– 71. 50. Rosenzweig cites, without attribution, a line from Goethe’s dramatic fragment “Pandora,” in which Epimetheus recalls Pandora’s apparition as the form in which beauty itself appeared. “I would like to speak as softly as the poet, when he concludes his powerfully far-reaching fugue on the theme of . . . cosmic beauty with the unforgettable preface: It appeared to me in the form of youth, in the form of woman” (92; the reference is to line 678 of “Pandora”). 51. Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften; Briefe und Tagebücher, vol. 2, ed. Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweig-Scheinmann (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 720.

   

76 : : C h a P t e r t w o

certain exegetical engagement with scripture that serves to unpack the implications of the protocosmic organization of enjoyment, brings movement into the passions in some sense immobilized— in the case of the Greeks, beautifully immobilized— around the threefold void of knowledge of the elemental regions of being (of what God really is, what man really is, what the world really is). Put somewhat differently, Rosenzweig’s engagement with the canonical writings and liturgical practices of Judaism and Christianity are part of his effort to transform— or better, to convert— the pulsive theorizations encircling these voids of knowledge into new or, as he puts it, ever-renewed capacities, for what Paul characterized as the quintessence of scripture, the love of neighbor.52 Here scripture should be heard in its resonance with what I have placed at the center of my concerns from the very beginning of these reflections, namely, the ways in which bodies come to matter, take on the subject-matter of the flesh: through their inscription in historical forms of life and participation in the ways in which each form takes up, elaborates, the remainder of life that pulsates in it. Against this background, I’d like to return very briefly to Arendt’s remarks in Origins of Totalitarianism about the nature of the destitution at issue in the status of the stateless. There she writes, “the more highly developed a civilization, the more accomplished the world it has produced, the more at home men feel within the human artifice— the more they will resent everything they have not produced, everything that is merely and mysteriously given to them” (300– 301). She goes on to make a connection between what is merely and mysteriously given in human life and Augustine’s understanding of love— including, of course, love of neighbor— which was the subject of her dissertation: The human being who has lost his place in a community, his political status in the struggle of his time, and the legal personality which makes his actions and part of his destiny a consistent whole, is left with those qualities which usually can become articulate only in the sphere of private life and must remain unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern. This mere existence, that is, all that which is 52. The everyday practice of neighbor love could thus be understood as the realization of the new thinking. In our volume The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), Kenneth Reinhard, Slavoj Žižek, and I each come to this “realization” along different though interconnected paths. Though it is very much focused on the Judeo- Christian tradition, the Star includes lengthy discussions of Islam and other religious traditions including, though only briefly, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism. His treatment of Islam, in particular, has been the subject of much criticism.

Theory and the Jewish Question  : : 77

mysteriously given to us by birth and which includes the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds, can be adequately dealt with only by the unpredictable hazards of friendship and sympathy, or by the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, “Volo ut sis (I want you to be),” without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation. (301)

She goes on to characterize the mysterious gift of natality as “the dark background of mere givenness,” as “the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is— single, unique, unchangeable” (301). What is so disturbing about this dark background is that it confronts us with “the alien which in its all too obvious difference reminds us of the limitations of human activity— which are identical to the limitations of human equality” (301). Arendt’s insights, conveyed in prose that is somehow matter-of-fact— sachlich— and lyrical at the same time, have remained indispensable for coming to grips with the political and juridical quandaries of refugees and displaced peoples all over the world. What she misses, however, is precisely the difference that was so crucial in Rosenzweig’s account of the metaethical self as precisely what is not merely given to us as a natural endowment but rather emerges in each one of us as a kind of traumatic excess of selfhood that, in its uncanny “extimacy,” has no place either in the polis or in nature. To use Rosenzweig’s quasi-mathematical formula, I would say that what functions for Arendt as the dark background of mere existence remains at the level of B = A. What she argues is essentially that under certain political conditions the range of predicates represented by A is radically reduced; once deprived of social and political qualifications, we are left with the merely “private” predicates of “the shape of our bodies and the talents of our minds.” Rosenzweig, as we have seen, points to a more radical sense of being a “man without qualities,” one that takes, to use Beckett’s neologism, a further step worstward into the dimension of creaturely life, the dimension that, I am suggesting, is what is ultimately at issue, what is the real cause for excitement in theory. My argument will be that what insists in this excess of selfhood must be grasped as a gap or missing link, as something that is out of joint, not working “out there,” in the form of life we inhabit, but that has been encysted “in here,” in my embodied being. The “disturbing miracle” that Arendt associates with “all that which is mysteriously given to us by birth” and, as she adds, “relegated to private life in civilized society” (301), is, as I will be arguing, better grasped as the singular way in which we each encyst (on) a missing link constitutive of “civilized society.”

ChaPter three

TOO MUCH SAD

I

To repeat, my criticism of Arendt’s conceptualization of the stateless is that it fails to capture the creaturely dimension of those positioned, those “deposed” or “deposited” in this “class” beyond predicative classification. But this also means that a significant aspect of their informe of life can’t be the object of a deposition, can’t be transmitted as testimony, in any straightforward way. As we have seen, this is largely what lies behind Agamben’s analysis of the Muselmann as a kind of impossible witness, as the bearer of a testimony pertaining to the radical “deposition” of human being. Agamben refers to Ernst Kantorowicz’s study of medieval and early modern political theology, The King’s Two Bodies, to formulate this thought of a final abdication of what remains of the “royal” dignity in modernity, that of a minimal self-sovereignty. He refers to this zero degree of dignity not as the dark background of our bodies and talents but rather, again following Benjamin, as bare life. With respect to the camps, he lets himself be guided by Primo Levi who characterized those who succumbed to that final indignity as those who “drowned” in the world of the camps. Alluding to Kafka’s Castle in his effort to characterize Levi’s “cartographical” achievement, he writes, “The Muselmann . . . is the guard on the threshold of a new ethics, an ethics of a form of life [what I have referred to, rather, as an informe of life] that begins where dignity ends. And Levi, who bears witness to the drowned, speaking in their stead, is the cartographer of this new terra ethica, the implacable land-surveyor of Muselmannland.”1 Agamben’s understanding of the new terra ethica is, as we’ve also seen, profoundly indebted to Foucault’s genealogy of the forms of governmentality distinctive of European modernity. Foucault had argued that sovereign 1. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 69.

Too Much Sad  : : 79

power was one based on the principle of deduction: “Power in this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately of life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it.”2 But, he continues, “since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. ‘Deduction’ has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (136). Very simply, “the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life” (139– 40). A crucial consequence of this shift in modes of governmental power and authority “was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. . . . The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory mechanisms. It is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility” (144). Against this background, the world of the camps appears as one in which the old sovereign power returns in the guise of an absolute, biopolitical administration of life, or perhaps better, one in which the power of the sword and that of eugenic expertise are (con)fused to the point where biopolitics mutates into a pure thanatopolitics. The Muselmann, Agamben suggests, has drowned in the madness of this confusion, has succumbed to a kind of biopolitical dictatorship in which the sovereign exception has become an administrative norm— call it the biopolitical theology of everyday life.3 This all suggests, however, that to speak of the “world of the camps” is ultimately misleading; it would be more accurate to speak of world destruction, an “event,” as Schreber has testified, tantamount to soul murder. Or in more 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 136. Subsequent references are made in the text. 3. Many on the right and some on the left— including Agamben— saw in the public health measures taken during the COVID-19 pandemic as oppressive forms of the “administration of bodies and the calculated management of life,” indeed, as a form of biopolitical dictatorship at times— crazily— compared with Nazism. One crucial difference between the two sides was, of course, that those on the right were drawn to figures who at least assumed the guise of the old power of the sword, simulated the older form of sovereign power and authority. One thinks not only of Trump but also of Bolsonaro in Brazil. I will return to this apparent “return” of the figure of authoritarian sovereignty in chapter 5.

   

80 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

Rosenzweigian terms, in the camps creation is recanted, is de- created, its inhabitants violently pressed back, violently consigned to and concentrated within the minimal protocosmic neighborhood of zero with respect to what could be known or said about world, human being, or God. Creaturely life is, paradoxically, the life exposed to the forces of de-creation, the life “created” by the de- creation, the unworlding of world. On this reading, the camps represent a kind of experimental creation on a massive scale of the conditions of de- creation. Already in the years before the First World War, Rosenzweig had sensed that forces of de- creation had, in diffuse and almost atmospheric ways, become endemic to modern European societies, forces that Rosenzweig associated with a kind of neo-paganism in which the imperative of the optimization of life, of the cultivation of individual and collective vitality, had assumed the status of a generalized ethical demand, had become the dominant paradigm of Bildung. For Rosenzweig, the new thinking was in large measure an attempt to comprehend, critique, and work through the compelling force of this neo-pagan ethics that had, in his view, become a significant form of religious life, or perhaps better, of religiosity, in modern European societies. This ethics assumed a variety of forms. With his notion of “the last man,” a notion picked up by Francis Fukayama in his reflections on the “end of history,” Nietzsche created the figure of a life lived according to this ethics of pure immanence. For Nietzsche, the last man’s pursuit of happiness in the here and now is a sign of a lack of vitality, of a compromise with respect to human possibilities; it is a life without reference to, without orientation by, a genuine Cause for excitement beyond the cultivation of the pleasure principle (recall the speech of Kushner’s oldest living Bolshevik who warns of a fully globalized ethics of consumption).4 It is a life that is not so much maintained as entertained (in German, the same verb can be used: unterhalten). On the ostensibly “vigorous” side of the new ethics of the vital sphere, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries witnessed an efflorescence not only of philosophical vitalism largely inspired by Nietzsche’s own work and style of writing, but also of social movements that placed the cultivation of health and the body at the center of their programs. One thinks of the back-to-nature ideology of the many youth groups that appeared on all ends of the political spectrum (including young Zionists responding to Nordau’s invocation of the Muskeljude) as well 4. For an analysis of the sort of nihilism at issue in the ethical posture of the “last man,” see Alenka Zupančič, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).

Too Much Sad  : : 81

as other New Age movements, artist colonies, spiritualist communities. This last grouping aimed, above all, at restoring a sense of the transcendent to secularized moderns, of the supernatural or perhaps better, hypernatural forces of the cosmos to otherwise blasé bourgeois cosmopolitans.5 I think, however, that what Rosenzweig was ultimately sensing without being able to put a name to it was not just these various expressions of human and cosmic vitalism, but rather the social forces that Marx had already analyzed— and indeed praised— as quasi-religious forces of de-creation, of world-unmaking, of a radical and global— or perhaps better, cosmic— mode of negation under the pressure of which all that is solid melts into air.6 In a word, the air was filled with spirits. Marx famously used the “pagan” term fetish to underline the religious dimension of commodity exchange, a dimension further manifest in political economy as the persistence of “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”7 Max Weber, for his part, had linked a certain kind of world-unmaking— he called it disenchantment, Entzauberung— to the Protestant ethic once it became the spectral spirit of capitalism. Under the intoxicatingly disenchanting influence of this spirit— that oxymoron names the constitutive paradox of worldly asceticism— worldly labor itself became doxological, an unceasing, quasiliturgical practice of glorifying God, of producing (always more of ) the sublime substance of glory.8 Some fifteen years after Weber, Walter Benjamin 5. On the proliferation of various forms of spiritualism in this period, see once more Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Enchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Social Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). See also Martin Green, The Mountain of Truth: The Counterculture Begins, Ascona, 1900– 1920 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1986), for a rich cultural history of the most important of the New Age communities that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century. In his efforts to, as it were, reenchant Max Weber’s thinking and undo the image of the austere man of Wissenschaft als Beruf, Josephson-Storm notes, among other things, that Weber was familiar with the Ascona community as a retreat for rest and relaxation. I understand Weber completely in this respect. For many years, my wife and I were regular visitors to Harbin Hot Springs, a New Age community in Northern California. 6. This famous phrase— alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft— comes, of course, from The Communist Manifesto. 7. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 163. 8. Josephson-Storm’s analysis of the various forms of magic, spiritualism, mysticism, and neo-paganism that he presents as counterexamples to the “myth of enchantment” misses the force of the dialectic of disenchantment at work in figures like Weber. The point is not that Weber also flirted with mysticism, also had a place in his thinking for mystical experience alongside everyday life in a disenchanted modernity, but that disenchantment, at least as performed under the pressures of capitalist modernity, itself produces spirits, is itself a mode of intoxication.

   

82 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

developed, if only fragmentarily, the notion of “capitalism as religion,” as the cult of an all- encompassing immanence that has systematically absorbed all traces of transcendence, normalized the exception, economized the miraculous. If the biopolitical mutation of the political theology of sovereignty served as a relay for the de- creation of world that culminated in the camps, these accounts— those of Marx, Weber, Benjamin— point to a different though related trajectory of modernity as a force of de- creation. Here, the “pagan” intensification of an economic theology already inherent in capitalism serves as a relay for a de- creation of a more impersonal and global kind. The convergence of the two trajectories culminates in a zone in which bare life— the distorted mirror image of the sovereign— and bare labor— the distorted mirror image of capital— become indistinguishable. I will return to this convergence later in the discussion; I would first like to retrace the path that led me there. II

My next book, On Creaturely Life, brought me into an at times confusing proximity to a field I’ve alluded to in passing, that of animal studies. After the book’s publication, I received several invitations to participate in conferences dedicated to one aspect or another of this important new line of inquiry. I am very interested in animals, in the lives of animals, and have spent thirty years (and counting) in the close company of dogs (I admit, this sounds a bit like saying, some of my best friends are dogs). My book, however, does not really represent a contribution to this field; it is, rather, a further elaboration of the “psychotheological” perspective developed in my work on Freud and Rosenzweig. This work does indeed attend to the boundaries of the human but not so much where they touch upon animality as where they reveal the constitutive impasses, the improprieties proper to being human. To put it in Rosenzweigian terms, I am interested in what follows from the birth of the metaethical self and not that of the personality, the sociobiological being whose ultimate point of reference is the life of the species as one among others across a natural historical continuum of life-forms. To borrow one of Arendt’s fundamental concepts, I am interested in the natality proper to the emergence of the life of the “dark drive” (and not that of our bodies and talents), of the life of that remainder of life, the insistent/encysted pressure of which Rosenzweig abbreviated in the formula B = B and which he elaborated apropos of the aberrant “lifeform” of the hero of Greek tragedy. Recalling Rosenzweig’s claim that the personality is the political animal, the book attempts to track the creaturely

Too Much Sad  : : 83

insistence of what remains beyond our “political animality” in our political life, a remainder largely and, I would argue, intrinsically recalcitrant to the (university) discourse of political science, even one informed by new materialisms and animal studies. I am furthermore arguing that it is precisely in the struggle over this remainder that our political destinies are to a large extent decided.9 My guiding hypothesis throughout this discussion has been that it is this remainder that is ultimately at issue in Freud’s conceptualization of sexuality, that our sexuality is what defiantly remains in excess of its functional nature, its place in nature, that is, in the life of the species. And this is precisely where Rosenzweig’s concept of the protocosmos is especially helpful. For this excess is not simply a quantitative amplification of instinctual energy, motivation, playful inventiveness still basically performing its good services in the preservation of the species; the “oomph” of sexuality— what is sexy about sexuality— is, in addition, the mode of being of a void of knowledge with respect to the being of the human. What Rosenzweig tried to capture with the notion of a “second birthday” in human life, the birthday of the metaethical self, (birth)marks the exciting intrusion into human life of a void of knowledge that, once encysted— Freud called this Urverdrängung— insists as unconscious mental activity. The claim behind Rosenzweig’s “classicism” would then not be that Athens had achieved a kind of full and beautiful harmony of the human faculties in its collective life, but rather that ancient Greek culture managed to organize itself around and indeed on the very basis of this exciting intrusion, that they made it its proper Cause.10 I am anticipating here my discussion of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s critical engagement with the notion of mana in the “university discourse” of Marcel Mauss and Émile Durkheim. In his efforts to “disenchant” that notion, LéviStrauss explicitly invokes this dimension of excess: “we do say of a person that he or she ‘has something’; and when American slang says that a woman has got ‘oomph,’ it is not certain, if we call to mind the sacred and tabooladen atmosphere which permeates sexual life, in America even more than 9. Giorgio Agamben has tried to capture one instance of the struggle over the remainder of life in his discussion of the differences between Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt in their respective approaches to the concept of the state of exception. He tellingly entitled the chapter in which he staged this debate “Gigantomachy Concerning a Void.” See Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 52– 64. 10. I think this is also the way to understand Nietzsche’s argument in The Birth of Tragedy, a book that surely influenced Rosenzweig’s discussion of the Greeks.

   

84 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

elsewhere, that we are very far removed from the meaning of mana.”11 What all three French social scientists sensed is that what is ultimately at issue in the discourse of the university pertains to a dimension that exceeds the grasp of the “normal” social sciences, that this discourse is always caught up with a remainder of life that is not so much known as excessively signified. But as we have seen, that is how Freud presents the dreamwork, namely, as the elaboration of a void of knowledge gaping between the latent dream thoughts and the manifest content of the dream. The dreamwork carries over the void— call it, with Beckett, the unnamable— in the translation from the one to the other. Though certainly not a confirmation of this hypothesis, it’s nonetheless worth noting that in his “return to Freud,” Lacan felt the need, much as Rosenzweig did, to develop a quasi-mathematical notation to “operate” with this void/remainder, to track where and how it is carried over into the various articulations of sexual difference, how it splits that difference into the multiples and divisions of our sexually engendered being, the sums of our sexuality that never quite add up. III

In an exhilarating— I’m tempted to say, enchanting— exploration of the human-animal difference, Brian Massumi argues that the complexities generally associated with human life— the capacity for self-reflection, for entertaining possibilities always in excess of any actuality, for improvisation, imagination, innovation, and even for aesthetic experience— are all present in even the most primitive forms of nonhuman life. The term Massumi uses to capture the plasticity of a living being’s capacity to improvise responses to ever- changing environmental situations is play, a concept with a more logical than phenomenological significance in that it marks the minimal difference between a capacity or power and its exercise in contingent, concrete situations: Every instinctive act, no matter how stereotyped it normally seems to be, carries a margin of maneuver. . . . Every instinctive act holds a power of variation that we are well within our rights to call ludic, in the widest sense of the word. Or aesthetic, given the nature of the yield produced. For play’s margin of maneuver is “style.” . . . All of this obliges us to recognize expression as a vital operation as primordial 11. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 2002), 55.

Too Much Sad  : : 85

as instinct itself. There is no life without surplus-value of life. There is no instrumentality without expressivity. Adaption never comes without inventiveness. Expressivity and inventiveness are the cutting edge of the genesis of forms of life. It is through their margin of maneuver that the operational parameters of modes of existence are enlarged.12

The German word Spielraum nicely captures this sense of a space or margin of improvisational adjustment to contingencies in any application of a rule or move in a game. As we will see, this claim is fully consonant with Antonio Damasio’s recent efforts to make use of the neuroscience of affect to locate human “exceptionality”— the invention of culture— on a continuum of differentially responsive life-forms that begins with single- cell organisms. Both Massumi and Damasio take pains to argue that animals flourish precisely by inventing flourishes, by improvising an added something to the instinctive action programs specific to a species, flourishes that can ultimately provide an evolutionary advantage to the “innovative” animal. This is why Damasio, while placing homeostatic imperatives at the very core of life, of what it means to be a living thing, speaks not only about the regulation of life— maintaining the living being within a range of homeostatic set points (e.g., a certain range of body temperature)— but also about its “upregulation,” a potentially beneficial alteration to the range itself or its mode of management.13 Massumi, for his part, deploys the notion of the “supernormal,” a term that marks the capacity of a living being not simply to undergo random genetic mutations but rather, in epigenetic fashion, to pass beyond the normal functional operations of the instincts, their stereotyped action programs, and, essentially, to invent new ways of living. Massumi’s more radical view would seem to generalize to all of life, indeed to the very concept of life, the deviations and aberrations, the constitutive perversions of the norm that Freud had shown to be intrinsic to human sexuality. The swerve of the drive with respect to object or aim that opened the domain of human sexuality for Freud is for Massumi the (super)normal mode of operation of animal life as such (the difference between instinct and drive thereby becomes superfluous; “drive” has no entry in the book’s index). What, in Freud’s view, distinguished human sexual12. Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 13. 13. Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Culture (New York: Pantheon, 2018). I will return to Damasio’s concept of homeostatic upregulation in chapter 6.

   

86 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

ity, is thereby absorbed into the ever-ramifying ludic capacities common to all living organisms; for Massumi, this is just how innovation works in the world of living things. Put somewhat differently, there is no remainder of life here that cannot be converted into, cannot be economized as, what Massumi refers to as the surplus-value of life. A perhaps more familiar way of approaching the question of the human distinction places the emphasis on the difference between, on the one hand, the differential responsiveness of living things to the environment, one that can operate within a broad range of contingencies— what Massumi characterizes as the margin of maneuver played out in any action whatsoever, however instinctively programmed— and that typically falls under the heading of sentience, and, on the other hand, the kind of rational responsiveness that involves claims, commitments, and the free assumption of responsibility in the specifically human game of the giving and asking for reasons and that typically falls under the heading of sapience. Sapient beings are, on this view, responsive above all to the claims of reason, to the peculiar authority of the better reason. They are subject to the ought of this responsiveness, that is, they are answerable to the way things are and to the community that holds one responsible for the claims one makes about them. They are furthermore responsible for the implications of their claims, that is, for the inferential relations among them, whether one is aware of those relations or not. Part of what it means to learn is to take on the responsibility of synthesizing one’s claims about the world into an everchanging but consistent inferential whole. As Robert Brandom, the most ardent contemporary proponent of this view, has put it, human beings are discursive creatures, meaning that they are both normative creatures and rational creatures: We undertake discursive commitments and responsibilities, and what makes them discursive commitments and responsibilities is that they stand in inferential relations to one another: relations that codify what a reason is for what. Because our commitments are inferentially articulated, they are conceptually contentful. The space of reasons is the space of concepts. What discursive beings as such do is apply concepts, undertaking cognitive commitments as to how things are and practical commitments as to how things shall be. Such discursive activity is the exercise of a distinctive kind of consciousness. It is sapient, rather than merely sentient, consciousness or awareness. For it depends on the sort of conceptual understanding that consists in practically knowing one’s way about in the inferentially articulated space of reasons and

Too Much Sad  : : 87

concepts, rather than the sort of organic feeling we share with animals that are not rational animals.14

As I have been arguing, the transition from mere sentience to sapience never comes off without a hitch, without a remainder; it is always accompanied by the exciting intrusion into human life of a void of knowledge, a void that we for the most part forget that we (unconsciously) know. Subjectivity is itself grounded in the “encystance” of this void. To put it somewhat differently, human sentience is potentiated by a peculiar sort of knowledge foreclosed from and “repulsive” to sapience, a limit that, to use the Fichtean locution, is not simply anstossend but also “in theory” abstossend. This peculiar intensification of feeling through a “repulsive” gap in the chain of knowledge is what Freud theorized as unconscious mental activity. To use a by now familiar formulation, that activity might thus be characterized as so many pulsive theorizations apropos of nothing (of no-thing of knowledge).15 14. Robert B. Brandom, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 10. One of the most disturbing aspects of the Trump presidency was the nearly complete suspension of the ought of discursive commitments and responsibilities in Trump’s relation to what he said, much as if he had mutated into a nonsapient, purely sentient being oriented by instinct alone. His ostentatious disregard for the rule of law and the norms of political life— and of civility, more generally— would thus seem to have been grounded in a deeper and broader indifference with respect to the normativity that informs the space of reasons. It was, no doubt, precisely his extravagant display of such indifference, his claim to enjoying exceptional freedom from the bonds of reason and morality, from any “ought” whatsoever, that contributed to his authoritarian “charisma.” 15. For Rosenzweig, the proto- cosmos or Vorwelt emerges on the “foundation” of a threefold series of repulsive remainders, of pulsive theorizations apropos of the “nothing of knowledge” concerning the fundamental “elements” of reality: divine being, worldly being, human being. As he puts it, “The Nought of our knowledge is not a simple but a triple Nought [Das Nichts unseres Wissens ist kein einfaches Nichts, sondern ein dreifaches].” Once again, the distinction enjoyed by ancient Greece— what accounts for its “classicism”— is, on this view, that of cultivating a form of life on just such a foundation. As I’ve also noted, it was Hermann Cohen’s infinitesimal calculus that allowed for the production of knowledge in the neighborhood of “zero,” of a void of any positive knowledge. For Rosenzweig, this pointed the way for a “drive theory” of cognition, cognition repulsed by a void: “He [Cohen] replaced the one and universal Nought, that veritable ‘no-thing’ which, like a zero, really can be nothing more than ‘nothing,’ with the particular Nought which burst fruitfully onto reality.” See Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 21– 22 (my emphasis). To use the example of falling in love, one could say that what happens there is that a particular nothing- of-knowledge, a certain unnameable in the Other— rather than a knowable bundle of predicates— bursts into one’s reality.

   

88 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

Ultimately, what distinguishes sapient from nonsapient animals is that the former are, in addition, also unsapient. Among Freud’s achievements was to have established the correlation between human sexuality and the primordial establishment of this dimension of unsapience and the varieties of its encystance in human life and culture. The word that Lacan would come to use for those varieties of encystance is jouissance, enjoyment. IV

This void of knowledge is also key to understanding the stakes of Walter Benjamin’s early essay “The Task of the Translator.” Much as Freud argued in the footnote to the Traumdeutung discussed earlier, Benjamin argued that translation is essentially a sort of dreamwork where the place of the unnamable is occupied by what Benjamin characterizes as a pure language of truth presupposed and carried over— über-setzt— in fragmentary fashion in the passage from one language to another. A work’s translatability is, we might say, already the index of a “cause for excitement,” a kind of pressure immanent to the work calling to be discharged and elaborated in translation (and criticism). The image Benjamin uses for the relation of translation to original, namely, that of fragments of a broken vessel that match up without resembling one another— translation as a kind of repair— alludes to the mythic language of (Lurianic) Kabbalah, a tradition that his close friend, Gershom Scholem, had by 1921 already begun to study and to which he would dedicate his life as a scholar; the semantic field of life and organic growth invoked in the text is no doubt indebted to Goethe— also a crucial and mostly unnamed point of reference throughout The Star of Redemption— with whose Elective Affinities he was at that time preoccupied. Benjamin’s language in the essay is at times extremely close to that of the Star, which Benjamin read, at least in part, in 1921, the year he composed his essay. He characterizes translation much in the way that Rosenzweig characterizes revelation, as an ever-renewed unfolding of a remainder of life “secreted” within and pushing beyond the life lived in the space of reasons and meaning, the life that Rosenzweig characterized as that of the personality qua “political animal.” Benjamin characterizes this unfolding as part of the survival or afterlife— Fortleben— of the original in its translations. What lives on is, in a word, this remainder of life that, Benjamin suggests, is what is ultimately at issue in the fame or glory— Ruhm— of a work: “Translations that are more than transmissions of subject matter [die mehr als Vermittlungen sind] come into being when a work, in the course of its survival [Fortleben], has reached the age of its fame. Contrary, therefore,

Too Much Sad  : : 89

to the claims of bad translators, such translations do not so much serve the work as owe their existence to it. In them the life of the original attains its latest, continually renewed [stets erneuerte], and most complete unfolding.”16 Again anticipating my discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s critique of Mauss and Durkheim, we might say that translations serve to unfold a manafold secreted within the original as that which ultimately issues in and as Ruhm. Benjamin’s discussion of translation comes closest to Freud’s account of the dreamwork when he directly addresses our capacity and need for symbolization with respect to what, in a work, remains in excess of meaning, of language understood as communication: In all language and linguistic creations, there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated; depending on the context in which it appears, it is something that symbolizes or something symbolized. It is the former only in the finite products of language; the latter, in the evolving of the languages themselves. And that which seeks to represent, indeed to produce, itself in the evolving of languages is that very nucleus of the pure language; yet though this nucleus remains present in life as that which is symbolized itself, albeit hidden and fragmentary, it persists in linguistic creations only in its symbolizing capacity. (261; my emphasis)17

And like Rosenzweig, Benjamin, in his own way also a student of Hermann Cohen, resorts to the mathematical sublime of the infinitesimally small to 16. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913– 1924, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 255. Subsequent references are made in the text. The second part of the Star, which is dedicated to the concept of revelation, is entitled The Path, or The Ever-Renewed World (Die Bahn oder die Allzeiterneuerte Welt). 17. Slavoj Žižek offers a nice example of the logic at work here, one he models on Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of repetition. Žižek refers to the experience of disappointment he had watching the film version of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate, characterizing it as “a failure which nonetheless evokes in the viewer the specter of a much better novel. However,” he continues, “when one then goes to read the novel on which the film is based, one is disappointed— this is not the novel the film evoked as the standard with regard to which it failed.” The conclusion is that “the film does not ‘repeat’ the novel on which it is based; rather they both ‘repeat’ the unrepeatable virtual X, the ‘true’ novel whose specter is engendered in the passage from the actual novel to the film. This virtual point of reference, although ‘unreal,’ is in a way more real than reality; it is the absolute point of reference of the failed real attempts.” Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 617.

   

90 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

capture this approach of a translation to the nucleus of pure language as what linguistic creations can only touch upon as a tangent to a curve, that is, where, in a translation, the communication of meaning approaches an edge, neighbors on “the infinitely small point of the sense.”18 Translation— and Benjamin for the most part means the translation of literary works— is a way of operating with language at the edge of meaning, that is— to slightly vary the mathematical image— where the slope of signification approaches zero. Benjamin singles out Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and Sophocles to serve as exemplars of what it means to strive for fidelity to the remainder of life in the life of a work, a fidelity that demands a kind of suspension of concern with meaning— we might say, a state of exception of meaning. As Benjamin is quick to note, this can push the translator to the edge of life in the space of meaning. “For this reason,” he writes, “Hölderlin’s translations in particular are subject to the enormous danger inherent in all translations: the gates of language thus expanded and modified may slam shut and enclose the translator in silence. Hölderlin’s translations from Sophocles were his last work; in them meaning plunges from abyss to abyss until it becomes lost in the bottomless depths of language” (262).19 Or as Freud might have said, in the navel of the dream. 18. “Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point— establishing, with this touch rather than with the point, the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity— a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense [dem unendlich kleinen Punkte des Sinnes], thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux” (261). This language is, as is often the case where Benjamin’s metaphysical imagination is at work, admittedly rather obscure. That is precisely why I try to “untie” it together with other texts, the work of other authors. 19. Benjamin’s language here echoes that of the final strophe of Hölderlin’s poem “Hyperion’s Song of Fate,” first published in the latter’s novel Hyperion: But we are fated To find no foothold, no rest, And suffering mortals Dwindle and fall Headlong from one Hour to the next, Hurled like water From ledge to ledge Downward for years to the vague abyss. Cited from Friedrich Hölderlin: Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger, ed. Jeremy Adler (London: Penguin, 1998), 27.

Too Much Sad  : : 91

V

In the opening chapters of On Creaturely Life, I try to further clarify the stakes of the struggle over the remainder through a discussion, first, of Rilke, Heidegger, and Agamben on the subject of the human-animal difference and, second, of Benjamin’s melancholic gaze as a resource for bringing into focus the creaturely dimension of political, cultural, and economic life. Finally, I turn to W. G. Sebald, an author whose body of work struck me as a stunning poetic archive of creaturely life. Though I discuss Rilke’s early novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge in detail only in subsequent work, I am quite sure that I would not have been able to orient myself in that archive, that I would have been unprepared for the encounter with Sebald, were it not for my previous “training” as a reader of Malte. I feel equally sure that I would not have been able to write up that exposition of Rilke’s novel had I not first traversed Sebald’s “natural history of destruction.”20 I read Malte for the first time in autumn 1978 in my first graduate seminar in Austin (it was the first book assigned in a survey course on twentiethcentury German literature).21 I somehow knew that this would be a book I would live with for a long time and in fact only really felt ready to write about it in depth relatively late in my career. But I actually first “met” Malte, if only in passing, in a seminar on Heidegger in my emotionally turbulent year at the University of Freiburg, the year in which, as I noted earlier, I decided to take a sabbath from philosophy in Austin (as I’ve also noted, I did not strictly observe this particular sabbath). The seminar was conducted by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann, the general editor of Heidegger’s complete works, and focused on the first published volume of the edition, The 20. That is the title used for the English translation of Sebald’s lectures on the treatment of the allied aerial bombardment of German cities by postwar German authors. The original title is simply Luftkrieg und Literatur, “aerial warfare and literature.” 21. The professor teaching that seminar, A. Leslie Wilson, was primarily known for his work as a translator and editor of the journal Dimensions, a bilingual journal of contemporary German literature, some of it published for the first time there. I am grateful to Wilson for encouraging me to publish my seminar paper for the class— my first publication as a “Germanist.” See (if you must) “Geschlossenheit, Geschichte und Welt in Joseph Roths Radetzkymarsch,” Rocky Mountain Review 1 (1982): 45– 59. Every year, Wilson also brought to Austin a visiting German writer. I ended up becoming close to one of them, Hans-Jürgen Fröhlich. Indeed, he became something of a father figure for me. It was thus disturbingly uncanny that he died at the same age as my father, fifty-four.

   

92 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

Basic Problems of Phenomenology, a set of lectures Heidegger delivered in 1927, the year of the publication of Being and Time. I won’t repeat my frustrations with von Herrmann’s so- called phenomenological method of reading aloud, though the memory can still arouse a certain bemused annoyance. (Von Herrmann’s defensive, essentially apologetic responses in various public forums about Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” have been even more annoying.) What I most remember from the seminar or, rather, what stayed with me, was something else entirely: a section of the book in which Heidegger cited a long, stunning passage from Malte that described in detail the lives the protagonist imagined had been lived in a demolished tenement building of which only a single wall remained. “Notice here,” Heidegger writes, “in how elemental a way the world, being-in-the-world— Rilke calls it life— leaps toward us from the things.” He goes on to argue that it’s ultimately misleading to speak of poetic imagination or projection with respect to the narrator’s revelation/ recuperation of the remainders of the lived lives still legible on the surface of the wall (Heidegger makes no distinction here between Malte and Rilke): What Rilke reads here in his sentences from the exposed wall is not imagined into the wall [nicht in die Mauer hineingedichtet] but, quite to the contrary, the description is possible only as an interpretation and elucidation of what is “actually” [“wirklich”] in this wall, which leaps forth from it in our natural comportmental relationship to it [im natürlichen Verhältnis zu ihr]. Not only is the writer [Dichter] able to see this original world, even though it has been unconsidered and not at all theoretically discovered, but Rilke also understands the philosophical content of life [das Philosophische des Lebensbegriffes] . . . which we have formulated with the aid of the concept of existence as being-in-the-world.22

What Heidegger says here about the “actual” or real in contrast to the imaginary is perhaps more relevant and revelatory with respect to Sebald’s representations of the ruined cities, landscapes, and lives that populate his writings; Sebald’s books, which make liberal use of documents, photographs, attributed and unattributed citations, wander along the boundaries between fiction, historical essay, biography, and autobiography. Rather than repeat the details of my readings of Sebald’s work, I’d like to underline what I think Heidegger intuits yet misses in his reading of Malte, some22. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 173.

Too Much Sad  : : 93

thing that touches on what made Rilke’s novel such good preparation for the encounter with Sebald. Rilke does not, as Heidegger suggests, confuse the concepts of world, being-in-the-world, and life. What Heidegger misses is that the real subject matter of the novel is what I have referred to as the informe of life created through exposure to the forces of de- creation, of the unworlding of world. Heidegger coined the term Geworfenheit or “thrownness” to capture the dimension of the forced choice with respect to the parameters of our worldly being; we always already find ourselves “situated” in particular historical circumstances not of our choosing. We don’t choose but are rather “thrown” into kinship relations, the name by which we are called, the language we come to speak, the place on earth in which we are born. Our realization of these determinations is always belated, always comes after the fact. In the very novel that Heidegger cites to flesh out his concept of being-in-the-world, Rilke’s protagonist invents a locution meant to capture a more radical dimension of human existence, the possibility inherent in human life to be in some sense thrown out of the world, to be cast out of the predicates and determinations that provide the fundamental coordinates of one’s being-in-the-world. Or more accurately: to be thrown into an outside immanent to the constitution of world, an outside the “encystance” of which may become manifest in dreams and neurotic symptoms. Malte realizes, through his wanderings around Paris, that the city is populated by an array of uncanny figures who seem to have been deprived of the last vestiges of human kinship and kindness, of a recognition of being kindred. He refers to them as die Fortgeworfenen, the “thrown-away,” the “outcasts.” Malte clearly senses that he is faced with a form of life that escapes classification. “For it is obvious,” he writes in his notebooks, “that they are outcasts, not just beggars; no, they are really not beggars, there is a difference. They are human trash, husks of men that fate has spewed out. Wet with the spittle of fate, they stick to a wall, a lamp-post, leaving a dark, filthy trail behind them.”23 In one of his more sustained portrayals of an outcast, Malte describes the moment he perceives a man entering this uncanny zone of ontological deprivation, succumbing to becoming a “husk” of a man. Though Malte first sees him as someone in the process of dying, it is clear that what he 23. Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1990), 39. Subsequent references are made in the text. Agamben reads the outcasts as harbingers of the figure of the Muselmann, the emblematic figure of a life violently included in the radical outside, the exceptional extraterritoriality in principle immanent to every politically constituted space. See his discussion of Malte in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 62.

   

94 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

witnesses— the setting is a Parisian crémerie— is a man suffering not so much a biological death as an ontological one: dying to a world that has already abandoned him to its outer edges, or perhaps better: realizing this abandonment in the flesh. The connection between Malte and this outcast is characterized as a non- encounter of peculiar intimacy and intensity; what he registers is a kind of existential stasis: “But then I felt him, though he didn’t move. It was precisely this immobility of his that I felt, and I understood it in an instant. The bond between us was established, and I knew that he was numb with terror” (51). The German conveys the intensity of this non- encounter still more powerfully. Malte grasps what is before him “mit einem Schlage,” a phrase that suggests an electric shock. This is equally true of the formulation that follows, suggesting the sudden establishment of an electrical connection: “Die Verbindung zwischen uns war hergestellt.” Malte serves as a kind of witness— offers a “deposition”— regarding this silent “event”: “Yes, he knew that he was now withdrawing from everything in the world, not merely from human beings. One more moment, and everything would lose its meaning, and this table and the cup and the chair he was clinging to would become unintelligible, alien and heavy. So he sat there, waiting for it to happen. And no longer bothered to defend himself ” (51). What Malte finds so disturbing is not merely the existence of such creatures but that he is becoming one of their unkindred kind; indeed, his notebooks are largely taken up with the day-by- day realization of this kinship relation that leaves him, with die Fortgeworfenen, beyond the reach of human kindness. But as I’ve indicated, such kinship pertains neither to a blood relation nor to one legible according to the elementary structures of kinship. It is rather one pertaining, to use Bataille’s locution, to an accursed share in the life of the remainder of life, the pulse of which is transmitted along its own frequencies. In a letter to the Polish translator of his novel, Witold Hulewicz, Rilke tries to explain the dimension of kinship at stake in Malte’s relation not only to the outcasts but also to the literary and often obscure historical figures he refers to in the novel, among whom count more than a few suffering sovereigns. In his response to Hulewicz’s series of queries concerning such references and allusions, Rilke underlined the value they had for Malte in the context of the protagonist’s ever-worsening existential crisis (Rilke speaks of the Notzeit, the time of distress, even emergency, of his protagonist). In the novel, Rilke writes, “there can be no question of specifying and detaching [zu präzisieren und zu verselbstständigen] the manifold evocations. The reader should not be in communication with their historical or imaginary reality, but through them with Malte’s experience: who is himself involved with them only as, on the street, one might let a passer-by,

Too Much Sad  : : 95

might let a neighbor, say, impress one. The connection,” Rilke continues, “lies in the circumstance that the particular characters conjured up register the same frequency of vital intensity [Schwingungszahl der Lebensintensität] that vibrates in Malte’s own nature.”24 VI

The kinship relations between Malte, the outcasts, and the series of sovereigns he conjures who find themselves in one state or other of political, psychological, and physical decline, became a crucial touchstone in my next project, The Royal Remains. In Malte, Rilke represented these sovereigns as Schreber-like figures experiencing a crisis of investiture am eigenen Leib, in the flesh of their being. What I took Rilke to be “documenting”— again, that word is no doubt better suited to Sebald’s work— was something like a democratization of the sort of crisis that had heretofore afflicted— at least officially— only those who enjoyed royal sovereignty, those who had a legitimate share in the life of a second, sublime body whose well-being was administered through the rituals, ceremonies, liturgical practices of the court.25 As indicated in my earlier discussion of Foucault, this liturgical labor previously devoted to the “strange material and physical presence” of the king was passed on to the biopolitical experts charged with the welfare of the people’s two bodies.26 This with the crucial caveat I’ve taken pains to emphasize, that they— the representatives of what Lacan called the discourse of the university— did not and, perhaps, could not really know what they were dealing with, what frequency or dimension of vital intensity was 24. Letter of November 10, 1925, in Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1910– 1925, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 371; trans. modified, my emphasis. One thinks in this context of a later literary outcast, one of the many who occupy the landscapes of Beckett’s fiction. At one point in his wanderings, the protagonist of Molloy describes himself as having a sensitive ear such that “sounds unencumbered with precise meaning were registered perhaps better by me than by most. What was it then? A defect of the understanding perhaps, which only began to vibrate on repeated solicitations, or which did vibrate, if you like, but at a lower frequency, or a higher, than that of ratiocination, if such a thing is conceivable.” Samuel Beckett, Molloy, trans. Patrick Bowles (New York: Grove Press, 1955), 66. 25. In his study of the mode of production of the “substance” of majesty— the subjectmatter of the king’s two bodies— Kantorowicz puts it this way: “the vision of the king as a persona geminata is ontological and, as an effluence of a sacramental and liturgical action performed at the altar, it is liturgical as well.” Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 59; my emphasis. 26. See again, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 208.

   

96 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

at issue. In a word, they did not know that they were dealing with the twobody problem of politics. I’d like to note in passing that in my thinking about such kinship relations I’ve been guided in part by a formulation from Paul Celan, who, in the speech he gave upon receiving the Büchner Prize in 1960— the so- called Meridian Address— characterized Georg Büchner as a poet of creaturely life, namely, as “someone who does not forget that he speaks from the angle of inclination of his very being, his creatureliness [dem Neigungswinkel seines Daseins, dem Neigungswinkel seiner Kreatürlichkeit].”27 Toward the end of Malte, we find a scene that Celan may have had in mind when he wrote these words. In it, Rilke’s protagonist finally encounters the blind newspaper salesman whose Fortgeworfenheit he had worked so hard at not truly observing: “Immediately I knew that my picture of him was worthless. His absolute abandonment and wretchedness, unlimited by any precaution or disguise, went far beyond what I had been able to imagine. I had understood neither the angle of his face [den Neigungswinkel seiner Haltung] nor the terror which the inside of his eyelids seemed to keep radiating into him.” In words that profoundly resonate with Rosenzweig’s thinking, Malte registers this moment as a kind of ontological proof of the existence of God; its demonstration takes place not by argument but in and through the revelation of the creature as neighbor: “My God, I thought with sudden vehemence, so you really are. There are proofs of your existence. I have forgotten them all and never even wanted any, for what a huge obligation would lie in the certainty of you. And yet that is what has just been shown to me” (210– 11). Here Rilke brings together two aspects of what it means to be observant. The capacity to be truly observant of one’s neighbor qua neighbor seems here to go hand in hand with a minimal sort of religious observance. For Rilke, these two modes of being observant are brought together by way of what we might call poetic observance. In the Meridian speech, Celan cites various passages from Büchner’s writings that testify to the dimension of creaturely life at issue in poetic creation, in Dicthung, in contrast to art, to Kunst. Art, we might say, is produced and consumed at the level of an individual’s talents, of the personality, while the writing and reception of poetry are rooted in the metaethical self, in what can be revealed of and in relation to it. Among the passages Celan cites are the penultimate lines of Büchner’s play Danton’s Death, in which the figure of Lucile, whom Celan refers to as die Kunstblinde, someone blind to art, in a suicidal gesture at the foot of the guillotine at the Place 27. Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 409.

Too Much Sad  : : 97

de la Révolution, cries out, “Es lebe der König!” (“Long live the king!”). I propose to translate this utterance that Celan calls the “counterword,” das Gegenwort, that breaks with the theatricality, the art and artfulness, of the political animal, as “The Royal Remains!”28 As Celan further clarifies, “here there’s no homage to monarchy or to any preservable Yesterday. . . . Homage here is to the Majesty of the Absurd, testifying to human presence [die Gegenwart des Menschlichen].” He further adds, “And that, ladies and gentlemen, has no fixed name once and for all time, yet it is, I believe . . . poetry.”29 The “rhyme” of Gegenwort and Gegenwart, counterword and presence, along with the use of the verb zeugen, though rightly translated here as “testifying” also signifies the act of procreation, suggests that poetry is the site of a kind of natality, an emergence to presence, of what, with respect to the rule of social classifications and statuses, can only be registered as anarchic and “royally” absurd.30 Furthermore, for Celan, the clearing of a uniquely human Gegenwart by way of a Gegenwort is where poetry and politics make contact: “it is an act of freedom. It is a step.”31 VII

In a small study from 1956— a year before the publication of The King’s Two Bodies and four years prior to Celan’s Meridian speech— Carl Schmitt attempted to account for the special status of Hamlet in the Western canon, one he characterizes as that of a “living myth.”32 What interests Schmitt 28. See ibid. 402– 3. 29. Ibid., 403; my emphasis. 30. Just before invoking the presence of the human as offspring of the majesty of the absurd, Celan reminds his audience that he grew up reading the writings of two anarchist authors, Gustav Landauer and Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin wrote the entry for “anarchism” in the famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The entry begins by defining anarchism as “the name given to a principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government— harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a civilized being” (https://archive .org /details/encyclopaediabri01chis rich/page/914/mode/2up?q=anarchism). 31. Celan, “Meridian,” 403. In the next chapter, I will return to the question of freedom in the context of a reading of Kafka’s story “Researches of a Dog.” 32. Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer Rust (Candor, NY: Telos Press, 2009). Subsequent references are made in the text.

   

98 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

are the ways in which contingent historical realities (rather than a poetic counterword) intrude or “break into”— his word is Einbruch— this particular play and into the realm of theatrical play more generally, thereby disrupting the ostensibly autonomous realm of aesthetic play and invention, introducing into it a degree of constraint, inhibition, unfreedom that, paradoxically, endows the play with what Schmitt characterizes as an aesthetic surplus value. I discuss Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet in detail in The Royal Remains; in the present context, I’d like to recall just a few points. After discussing some familiar ways that theater can take up and reference the historical situation of its production and performance, Schmitt turns to what he refers to as genuine intrusions— again, his word is Einbruch— of historical time into the space of theatrical play: “next to the fleeting allusions and the true mirrorings, there is yet a third, highest kind of influence from the historical present. These are the structurally determining, genuine intrusions. They cannot be common or ordinary, but their consequences are that much deeper and stronger” (25). For Schmitt, the generative source of such intrusions is the figure of James I whose coronation both resolved and complicated the long-standing struggles over the Elizabethan succession— the question as to who would come to enjoy the force of the (not yet absurd) acclamation, “Long live the king!” For Schmitt, James “embodied . . . the entire conflict of his age, a century of divided belief and civil war” (25). “The unhappy Stuart lineage from which James descended,” he continues, “was more deeply involved than others in the fate of the European schism of belief.” As Schmitt finally puts it, James, the figure who would seem to have exercised the greatest single influence on the shaping of the play’s protagonist, “was thus literally from the womb immersed in the schisms of his era” (27). Schmitt argues that the schisms that, as it were, traverse the royal person, account for the ways in which the plot of the play swerves from that of “normal” revenge stories and engenders that “deformation and refraction in the character of the hero of a revenge drama” (22) that he refers to as the “Hamletization of the avenger” (21).33 We might say that precisely as the embodiment of the fundamental 33. Among Schmitt’s examples of such deformations is what he calls the taboo of the queen, the need to keep open— to approach while swerving from— the question of Gertrude’s guilt in the murder of her husband. Mary Stuart, who had been executed by Elizabeth in 1587, was thought to have been behind the murder of her second husband, Lord Darnley, the father of James. “Out of consideration for James, the son of Mary Stuart, the expected successor to the throne, it was impossible to insinuate the guilt of the mother in the murder of the father. On the other hand, the audience for Hamlet, as well as all of Protestant England and particularly of course London, was convinced of Mary Stuart’s guilt. Out of consideration for this English audience, it was absolutely impossible to insinuate the innocence of the mother. Thus, the question of

Too Much Sad  : : 99

schisms of his era, the homeostatic apparatus of this particular monarch’s body was one that included the dimension of stasis, a civil strife or antagonism only precariously contained, at least in part, by the management of the second royal body. Schmitt adds to this “corporate” tumult an additional factor. It concerns a certain out- of-jointness of time with respect to England’s passage out of feudal social and political relations, its historical status compared to political developments on the Continent. Those developments transform “men-at-arms, the existing good order, alimentation, and lawfulness into organizations characteristic of the state: army, police, finance, and justice. Through these organizations, the state establishes what it calls a ‘civilized existence’ (polizierte[s] Dasein). In this way, politics, police, and politesse become a remarkable troika of modern progress opposed to religious fanaticism and feudal anarchy— in short, to medieval barbarity” (63). By comparison, above all with France, England remains barbaric. “Measured in terms of the progress toward civilization that the ideal of continental statehood . . . signifies, Shakespeare’s England still appears to be barbaric, that is, in a pre-state condition” (65). This lingering medieval barbarity is reflected in Shakespeare’s theater, something that no doubt contributed to its considerable appeal to the young Goethe along with other German Sturm und Drang writers: In Shakespeare’s Elizabethan England the baroque theatricalization of life was still ungrounded and elementary— not yet incorporated into the strict framework of the sovereign state and its establishment of public peace, security, and order, as was the theater of Corneille and Racine in the France of Louis XIV. In comparison with this classical theater, Shakespeare’s play in its comic as well as melancholic aspects was coarse and elementary, barbaric and not yet “political” in the sense of the state- centered politics of the time. (41; my emphasis)

But as Schmitt also suggests, England’s temporal out-of-jointness concerned not only a belatedness with respect to political developments on the Continent; paradoxically, it also involved a revolutionary advance beyond them with respect to modes and relations of economic production. Continuing his remarks regarding England’s lagging progress toward the guilt had to be carefully avoided. The plot of the drama became unclear and inhibited as a result. A terrible historical reality shimmers through the masks and costumes of the stage play, a reality which remains untouched by any philological, philosophical, or aesthetic interpretation, however subtle it might be” (18).

   

100 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

civilization represented by the ideal of continental statehood, Schmitt writes, However, measured in terms of the progress toward civilization that the Industrial Revolution . . . signifies, Elizabethan England appears to be involved in a phenomenal departure from a terrestrial to a maritime existence— a departure, which, in its outcome, the Industrial Revolution, caused a much deeper and more fundamental revolution than those on the European continent and which far exceeded the overcoming of the “barbaric Middle Ages” that the continental state achieved. (65)

We might say that England leapfrogs from a condition in which society, at least as measured by French standards, does not yet exist to one in which, as Margaret Thatcher would later famously put it, it no longer exists but has, in the language of the Communist Manifesto, melted into the air of capitalist economic relations. I take Schmitt to be arguing that Shakespeare’s play is (dis)organized around this very void, this “nonexistence” of society; what distinguishes it, what elevates it to the status of a living myth is, ultimately, its singular way of “encysting” (on) this void with the added twist of hinting at a shift in England’s governing modes of “encystance”: from one whose center of gravity is primarily political— or political theological— to one in which economic rationality along with its intoxicating forces of disenchantment, has become dominant. In Marxist terms, the former mode involves a fetishism of persons— the king’s two bodies— while the latter shifts to a fetishism of things— the commodity’s two bodies (use value and exchange value). VIII

In his study of medieval and early modern political theology, published only a year after Schmitt’s book, Kantorowicz turns not to Hamlet but rather to Richard II to “document” the precarious composition of the twinned body of the royal person. Kantorowicz reads the play as the dramatic unfolding of a reversal or undoing of the liturgical labor that had served to constitute and sustain that twinned body. To cite Kantorowicz once more on that labor, “the vision of the king as a persona geminata is ontological and, as an effluence of a sacramental and liturgical action performed at the altar, it is liturgical as well” (59). The undoing of that liturgical action is what Kantorowicz characterizes as “the tragedy of the king’s two bodies” (26). It

Too Much Sad  : : 101

enjoys the status of a kind of “inverted rite . . . a long agonizing ceremony in which the order of coronation is reversed” (36); it is a rite performed with “sacramental solemnity, since the ecclesiastical ritual of undoing the effects of consecration is no less solemn or of less weight than the ritual which has built up the sacramental dignity” (35). Richard’s deposition does not simply strip him of his kingship; it effectively invests him with the uncanny “office” of what Agamben has analyzed with reference to the figure of the homo sacer, of bare or sacred life (as Foucault would have said, power here does not simply negate but is also in some sense productive).34 The tragedy of Richard’s royal destitution reaches its climax in the mirror scene in act 4 in which, as Kantorowicz puts it, “dissolves both his bankrupt majesty and his nameless manhood” (39). Richard shatters the mirror when he can no longer recognize himself in it, when he is no longer able to see in it “the pompous body politic of king, of the God-likeness of the Lord’s deputy elect, of the follies of the fool, and even of the most human griefs residing in inner man” (40). What remains at the end of Richard’s “catoptromancy” is too horrible to bear, “the banal face and insignificant physis of a miserable man, a physis now void of any metaphysis whatsoever.” It is, Kantorowicz continues, “both less and more than Death. It is the demise of Richard, and the rise of a new body natural” (40). But again, this deprivation of “any metaphysis whatsoever,” this reduction to bare life, this being rendered “merely human,” results not in the rise of a new body natural but rather in becoming something less than human and yet not simply animal, the emergence of something that barely belongs to either culture or to nature. Kantorowicz himself says something along these lines when, speaking of what he sees as Richard’s assumption of the role of the fool in the scene at Flint Castle, he writes, “therewith, he becomes somewhat less than merely ‘man’ or . . . ‘king body natural’” (33). The extremity of the deprivation at issue is indicated by Richard’s horror at the namelessness of the thing he has become: “I have no name, no title . . . And know not now what name to call myself ” (4.1.255– 59).35 34. Kantorowicz’s formulation of the dramaturgical rhythm of the king’s deposition echoes Benjamin’s characterization of Hölderlin’s language (in the context of his translations of Sophocles) as it “plunges from abyss to abyss until it becomes lost in the bottomless depths of language,” a formulation that itself, as I have suggested, alludes to Hölderlin’s poem “Hyperion’s Song of Fate.” Kantorowicz describes the negative rite to which Richard is subject as a process “cascading from kingship to kingship’s ‘Name,’ and from the name to the naked misery of man” (27). 35. Citations are from the Oxford Shakespeare edition, ed. Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

   

102 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

In a crucial scene left unaddressed by Kantorowicz we find, I think, a key to the dimension opened up by this tragedy of the king’s two bodies.36 It is a dimension that Benjamin, who would devote one of his major works to the suffering sovereigns of baroque theater, referred to as the “bottomless depths of language” and that Freud, on the royal road to the unconscious, referred to as the “navel of the dream,” the point, that is, where it “reaches down into the unknown,” into a void of knowledge. At the opening of act 2, scene 2, we witness an exchange between the queen and Bushy, a member of Richard’s inner circle. Bushy castigates the queen for being “too much sad” and her apparent refusal to “entertain a cheerful disposition” as she had promised the king who has gone off to Ireland to put down a rebellion. The queen responds by speaking of a sorrow she acknowledges as being out of proportion to its ostensible occasion (the separation from Richard), a sorrow that would indeed seem to have no determinate content: To please the King I did [promise], to please myself I cannot do it. Yet I know no cause Why I should welcome such a guest as grief, Save bidding farewell to so sweet a guest As my sweet Richard. Yet again, methinks Some unborn sorrow, ripe in Fortune’s womb, Is coming towards me, and my inward soul With nothing trembles; at something it grieves More than with parting from my lord the King. (2.2.5– 13)

Bushy, for his part, offers a complex optical metaphor for the queen’s sorrow that first suggests that the queen’s tears serve as a prism that “Divides one thing entire into many objects,” but immediately shifts to another optical phenomenon, that of anamorphosis: Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon Show nothing but confusion— eyed awry, Distinguish form. So your sweet majesty, Looking awry upon your lord’s departure, Find shapes of grief more than himself to wail Which, looked at as it is, is nothing but shadows 36. For some reason, the filmic adaptation of the play in the series, The Hollow Crown, cuts this scene entirely. By chance, I had the occasion to ask Ben Whishaw, the wonderful actor who plays Richard, why the scene had been omitted. He seemed to remember that the scene had been filmed but was for reasons he could no longer recall left on the cutting-room floor. In hindsight, he too seemed perplexed by the omission.

Too Much Sad  : : 103

Of what it is not. Then, thrice-gracious Queen, More than your lord’s departure weep not. More’s not seen, Or if it be, ’tis with false sorrow’s eye Which for things true weep things imaginary. (2.2.18– 27)

The queen nonetheless insists on the truth of her sorrow even if it appears to be a response to nothing, though a nothing with a certain density and weight: I cannot but be sad: so heavy sad, As, though on thinking on no thought I think, Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink. (2.2.30– 32)

Responding to Bushy’s charge that the cause is merely imaginary, a mere conceit, the queen persists in her insistence on the truth of this nothing as in some sense less than the nothing of a lack that, even if only imagined, still remains tied to a determinate content: ’Tis nothing less. Conceit is still derived From some forefather grief. Mine is not so, For nothing hath begot my something grief, Or something hath the nothing that I grieve— ’Tis in reversion that I do possess— But what it is, that is not yet known; what I cannot name, ’tis nameless woe I wot. (2.2.34– 40)

Though it could certainly be argued— as the metaphor of possession in reversion suggests— that the queen’s grief is to be understood as a premonition of Richard’s coming deposition, that the “symptom” of disproportionate sorrow, of being “too much sad,” does have a determinate content, one that will very soon be known to all. And yet Bushy’s own use of the metaphor of anamorphosis would seem to support the queen’s sense that a more radical kind of nullity is at stake. When she, as it were, looks directly at her “lord’s departure” and there sees what Bushy characterizes as “nothing but confusion,” she indeed sees something real, sees something of the nothing that occasions her nameless woe and that takes on imaginary forms when looked at awry.37 Recalling Jonathan Lear’s commentary on the fort/ 37. We might say, with Beckett, the queen’s eyes are gazing worstward, toward the unnullable least of her sorrow. See, once more, Samuel Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1980), 106.

   

104 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

da game (in German, Spiel means both game and play) discussed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the queen would seem to be insisting on an unnameable disturbance or tear in the fabric of being rather than some determinate loss, some “forefather grief.” Her nameless woe encysts (on) this disturbance; it is, we might say, where the majesty of the absurd breaks into this sorrowful play of royal succession, the violent fort/da of sovereigns. Recalling the title of Schmitt’s essay, one might say that the queen chooses Hamlet over Hecuba, that is, insists that any compromise with respect to her surplus sorrow, her being “too much sad,” would be to shed tears the way an actor does who plays Hecuba on the stage rather than as someone registering the opening of a void that has begun to “remainder” not just Richard’s kingship but royalty as such. Richard himself evokes this nothing in his famous speech upon landing on the Welsh coast and hearing of Bolingbroke’s victories and growing power. What is at issue here is not simply the precariousness of royal power and authority, its constant exposure to violence, but rather what becomes manifest in and through that violence, namely, a void or hollowness paradoxically covered over by one understood as only a provisional, determinate vacancy, by the fort/da of particular sovereigns: For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings, How some have been deposed, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed— All murdered. For within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps death his court, and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene To monarchize, be feared and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable, and humoured thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall— and farewell king. (3.2.155– 70)

A line, if not exactly a straight one, leads from this antic grin to what Celan referred to as “the majesty of the absurd” and what Rilke was after in Malte with his evocation of suffering sovereigns, of the Schwingungszahl der Lebensintensität they manifest.

Too Much Sad  : : 105

Slavoj Žižek’s remarks on this speech take the doctrine of the king’s two bodies as his point of reference and underlines the paradox touched upon earlier, namely, that Richard’s deposition, his being stripped of the symbolic trappings of his office, leaves behind not his merely human body, a “new body natural” such that he would now be able “to live as a common human being divested of the royal charisma.”38 Essentially reiterating the lesson that Arendt drew from the condition of the stateless, namely, that to be reduced to the merely human is to be rendered disturbingly less than human, Žižek argues that “the lesson of the play is that this operation, simple and elementary as it appears to be, is ultimately impossible to perform.” Here Žižek returns to the metaphor of anamorphosis, emphasizing that it is ultimately the illegible blur or stain of the image that bears the truth of the subject matter at issue: “Richard starts to perceive his kingship as an effect of anamorphosis, a ‘shadow of nothing’: however, getting rid of this insubstantial specter does not leave us with the simple reality of what we effectively are” (71). Citing the later exchange between Richard and Bolingbroke at Flint Castle culminating in the mirror scene, Žižek concludes that “what we get after we are stripped of symbolic identifications, ‘demonarchized,’ is nothing,” but a nothing that is “less” than the nothing of a determinate lack or loss. As Žižek puts it, “The ‘Death’ figure in the middle of the crown is not simply death, but the subject himself reduced to the void . . . Richard’s position when, confronted by Henry’s demand to resign the crown . . . basically replies: ‘I know no “I” to do it!’” (70; my emphasis). Here the subject matter of the crown and the subject-matter of its bearer— the uncanny materiality of what is less than nothing— perfectly coincide in absurd majesty. This reading of the exchange between Bolingbroke and Richard offers a good example of what I’ve been describing as the overlapping of a void of knowledge and a surplus of signification. When asked by Bolingbroke whether he is contented to resign the crown, Richard responds: Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be: Therefore no no, for I resign to thee. Now mark me how I will undo myself. . . . (4.1.201– 3)

As Žižek emphasizes, when heard, the first line conveys at least three different meanings: a redoubled refusal in which the “ay” functions as exclamation; simple ambivalence or oscillation (“Yes, no; no, yes”); and finally, a quasi-philosophical pronouncement concerning the nonexistence of the 38. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 70. Subsequent references are made in the text.

   

106 : : C h a P t e r t h r e e

“I” or, rather, its overlapping with a void of knowledge: “I know no I” (72). The last reading generates the performative paradox left hanging in the air in the play: an “I” reduced to (less than) nothing is really in no position to transfer royal authority since the performative force of his utterance would be null.39 The more important paradox, however, is that the void named in the third variant is manifest in and as the very multiplication of readings of which it is only one; the subject’s “encystance,” its status as the encystance of a hollow, registers as an antic excess of signification. We seem to have reached here something like the navel of the dream of royal sovereignty.

39. The paradox resonates with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in which the realization emerges that recognition by a slave is no recognition at all.

ChaPter four

CANINICAL THEORY

I

In summer 2019, Kenneth Reinhard and I were invited to give keynote lectures at a conference titled “Neighbor-Love: Poetics of Love and Agape,” at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History, and Antiquities. The conference was scheduled to be held in April 2020 but was, of course, canceled in the wake of the pandemic. As I’ve indicated, Agamben’s perspective on the pandemic implicitly classified such measures as part of a more general, ideologically driven “cancel culture.” Seen from my own perspective, it just turned out that the best way to love one’s neighbor in the time of COVID was to isolate oneself or, if that wasn’t possible, to maintain “social distancing” while the face of the Other was, ideally, covered by a mask. Ken and I owed our invitation to the work we did together, along with Slavoj Žižek, on a book devoted to the topic of the neighbor. The invitation gave me an opportunity to revisit that work and to think how it might fit together with my current thinking on the “sexuality of theory.” That coauthored volume attempted to revisit the biblical injunction to love one’s neighbor but to do so in a Freudian spirit, that is, to see what psychoanalysis might have to offer with respect to the meaning and stakes of this imperative in general and for our contemporary moment in particular. We were well aware of Freud’s own considerable skepticism about this commandment, a skepticism that pertained to a neighbor in one’s own community as well as— and no doubt more strongly— to a stranger or foreigner who enters our midst, who appears right next to us (much, of course, depends on the nature of the proximity indicated by this little word; in German, the neighbor in the biblical sense is der Nächste). In both instances, the neighbor remains utterly and even threateningly alien, utterly other, to Freud. One could, of course, say that Freud’s attitude should not be surprising considering that what is at issue here is, after all, a divine commandment, one that truly carries force only for a person of faith, for someone who recognizes the word of God

   

108 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

in the commandment. For a nonbeliever like Freud, it represents a moral generosity toward one’s fellows who are for the most part undeserving of love or special kindness. As Freud writes, I must honestly confess that he [the neighbor] has more claim to my hostility and even my hatred. He seems not to have the least trace of love for me and shows me not the slightest consideration. If it will do him any good he has no hesitation in injuring me, nor does he ask himself whether the amount of advantage he gains bears any proportion to the extent of the harm he does to me. Indeed, he need not even obtain an advantage; if he can satisfy any sort of desire by it, he thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me and showing his superior power; and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me.

The commandment remains especially alien to Freud against the backdrop of what he had at this point in his thinking concluded about the psychic makeup of human beings. As “creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness,” he writes, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus.1

These words are taken from the 1930 essay Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, where Freud puts forth the paradoxical thesis that man is a wolf to his fellow man not because of some failure on the part of civilization to fully tame his bestial nature; the bestial element in man is seen, rather, to be in some sense— Adorno and Horkheimer called it a dialectical sense— a byproduct of the civilizing process itself. Civilization, whose fundamental aim is typically seen as the development of a degree of immunity against dangers assailing life from the outside, is, Freud argues, so constituted that it inevitably begins to attack itself in autoimmune fashion (much like the disease entity that goes by the name lupus). To put it in different biblical 1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 66– 69. In the following, I will use the German title of the book, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which a more literal translation might render “Uneasiness in Culture.”

Caninical Theory  : : 109

terms, what makes man a lupus to his fellow man is precisely what sets him apart from the animal kingdom: his sinful, fallen nature, his primordial, his “original” deviation from his divinely created nature. As the biblical traditions would have it, this is, of course, what also makes possible the emergence of the kingdom of God— I am tempted to say, the royal neighborhood of God— in which our various immune systems against external and internal aliens have been finally rendered inoperative. This language has particular resonance against the backdrop of the crisis that led to the cancellation of the conference, the global spread of a virus itself bearing a kind of crown. Some eight years before Freud wrote Unbehagen, Franz Kafka, a fellow German-Jewish survivor of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, wrote a remarkable prose text published posthumously under the heading “Forschungen eines Hundes,” “Researches of a Dog.” As in all of Kafka’s animal stories, this one, too, serves as a kind of allegory that makes visible something distinctly human, which in Kafka’s case typically overlaps with traits associated with assimilated Central European Jews. It’s a dense and difficult text, and I won’t venture any sort of comprehensive reading here but try instead to underline a few features that will hopefully bring us into greater conceptual proximity to the neighbor.2 II

The story is presented as a kind of memoir of an aging dog reflecting on his choice as a young dog to pursue the life of the mind, one dedicated to research, to a certain kind of theoretical activity, rather than sharing in the common life of dogs. He confesses that this choice set him on a difficult path: “Why won’t I behave like the others, live in harmony with my kind, silently accept whatever disturbs that harmony, overlook it as a little mistake in the great reckoning, and turn forever toward what binds us happily together and not toward what, time and again, irresistibly, of course, tears us out of the circle of our kind?”3 In hindsight, the narrator- dog seems to realize that such disturbances to the harmony of dogdom, of Hundeschaft, 2. For a comprehensive philosophical engagement with the text, see Aaron Schuster, How to Research Like a Dog: Kafka’s New Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, forthcoming). 3. Stanley Corngold, trans., ed., Franz Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 133; Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke in Zwölf Bänden, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), vol. 7 (Das Ehepaar und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlass), 50. Subsequent references are made in the text with the page number of the translation first.

   

110 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

point not to contingent and determinate errors, but to a more fundamental errancy grounded in a structural glitch in the constitution of the species: “on closer scrutiny I soon find that something was not quite right from the beginning, that a little fracture [eine kleine Bruchstelle] was in place.” He notes that a “a slight uneasiness,” ein leichtes Unbehagen, would come over him not only in the midst of the collective but also in more intimate settings, indeed that the mere sight of another dog could throw him into a sense of helplessness and despair (132/48). Call it Unbehagen in der Hundekultur (with a touch of canine self-hatred). He goes on to recall the event that first set him on the course of his researches. It was an encounter with a group of seven dogs who engage in a kind of dance set to a clamorous music that seems to come from nowhere, a music ex nihilo. “They did not speak, they did not sing, in general they held their tongue with almost a certain doggedness [mit einer gewissen Verbissenheit], but they conjured forth music out of the empty space.” He recalls “the way they raised and set down their feet, certain turns of their heads, their running and their resting, the attitudes they assumed toward one another, the combinations they formed with one another like a round dance” (134/51– 52). At a certain point the music becomes overwhelming: “you could attend to nothing but this music that came from all sides, from the heights, from the depths, from everywhere, pulling the listener into its midst, pouring over him, crushing him, and even after annihilating him, still blaring its fanfares at such close range that they turned remote [in solcher Nähe, daß es schon Ferne war] and barely audible” (135/52– 53). The young narrator- dog retreats to a pile of wooden planks and from his hiding place observes how the performance takes a new and horrifying turn; the seven dancing dogs “had truly cast off all shame” and stand upright on their hind legs. “They were exposing themselves and openly flaunted their nakedness, they prided themselves on it, and whenever they obeyed their better instincts for a moment and lowered their front legs, they were literally horrified, as if it were a mistake, as if nature were a mistake, and once again they rapidly raised their legs, and their eyes seemed to be asking forgiveness that they had had to desist a little from their sinfulness [daß sie in ihrer Sündhaftigkeit ein wenig hatten innehalten müssen]” (136/54– 55). The young narrator- dog’s obsession with this for him deeply enigmatic, not to say, traumatic, encounter is what ultimately alienates him from dogdom and sets him on his course as a researcher with the aim of, as he puts it, solving it “absolutely by dint of research, so as finally to gain a new view of ordinary, quiet, happy, everyday life.” As he then adds, “I have subsequently worked the same way, even if with less childish means— but the difference is not very great— and I persist stubbornly to this day” (138/57).

Caninical Theory  : : 111

Be that as it may, the dogged pursuit of a sort of absolute canine knowledge begins with questions close to hand, questions pertaining to the most basic needs of canine life. “I began my investigations at that time with the simplest things. . . . I began to investigate what dogdom took as nourishment” (138/58). The research concerns the question of the source of food, where food comes from. Does it come from the earth? Does it come down from the sky? Can dogs influence the appearance of food? Though these are questions that have apparently concerned canine scholars for generations, our young researcher, admitting the limits to his capacity for proper scientific study, pursues such questions more or less on his own without consulting the authoritative, call them caninical, sources. A first conclusion would have it that dogs’ main foodstuff indeed comes from the earth but that, for still unknown reasons, the earth needs dogs to help with its production: “we find this food on the ground, but the ground needs our water.” He adds that the appearance of food has been known to be accelerated by means of “certain incantations, songs, and movements” (139/59). Later in the story, our canine researcher entertains an opposing opinion, one seemingly supported by empirical evidence, that food comes not from the ground but rather from above and is only brought down to earth by way of said canine rituals (151/77). At this point in the story if not much sooner, the reader recognizes its fundamental conceit, namely, that the dogs live amid human beings who for some reason remain invisible to them. Put another way, the dogs live as if human beings did not exist and are thus forced to contend with a multiplicity of phenomena that must remain enigmatic to them or can be explained only by way of empirically noted regularities: Dogs pee; dogs find food on the ground. Dogs bark, howl, moan (so- called incantations); dogs find food on the ground. The story’s conceit becomes completely obvious when the narrator- dog, discussing the odd variety of occupations in which dogs are employed, mentions the air dogs, the Lufthunde. This Yiddish expression for a dreamy, impractical person with no visible means of subsistence clearly refers here to small lapdogs who instead of being walked are carried around by their invisible masters. Known to the narrator only by hearsay, he expresses his incredulity that “there was supposed to be a dog, of the smallest breed, not much bigger than my head, even in advanced age not much bigger; and this dog, naturally a weakling, to judge by appearances an artificial, immature, overcarefully coiffed creature, incapable of taking an honest jump— this dog, the story went, was supposed to move about most of the time high in the air while doing no visible work” (143/66). In hindsight, it becomes clear that the encounter that set him on his path as a researcher was with a group of trained dogs performing, per-

   

112 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

haps in a park or public square, to the accompaniment of human musicians. We feel confident that the answer to that first enigma, “Who was forcing them to do what they were doing here?” (136/54), is a straightforward one: their human masters. Returning to the main question the narrator-dog pursues, namely, where food comes from, the story would seem to suggest that the Bruchstelle or fracture in the constitution of dogdom is connected to the lack of a concept of providence, that is, that food is provided for them by the good graces of human beings, that they are, as domestic animals, dependent on human care and nurturance. One might think of it as a thought experiment: what happens when a region of being is foreclosed from one’s picture of the world? Kafka seems here to be revealing the sorts of uncanny enigmas and paradoxes that emerge once divine being— once revelation— has been foreclosed from human life, no longer figures as a central point of reference and orientation in the world, once man becomes, to coin a phrase, ungodded. The texture of ordinary life comes to be ruptured by a series of impossible questions that, as it were, hound human life without hope of “domestication” by either the natural or human sciences. This is, I want to suggest, at least part of what is in play in Freud’s perplexity with respect to the neighbor and the commandment of neighbor-love; it’s as mysterious as the spectacle of the seven dogs dancing to a music that seems to come from nowhere, as the appearance of food for a dog whose “ontology” has no place for the being of human being and who barks and howls into an empty sky. III

As I’ve noted, the narrator- dog in Kafka’s story considers himself to be poorly trained and without special talent for the researches he undertakes (he later speaks of his “lack of propensity for science, scant intellectual power, poor memory and, above all, inability to focus consistently on a scientific goal” [160– 61/92]). Nonetheless he devises a series of experiments meant to grasp the causal chain that leads to the appearance of food, to catch it in action, as it were. After several efforts with uncertain outcomes, he decides to undertake a more radical experiment: to withdraw from the society of his fellow dogs and, more importantly, to fast, as if only the most radical ascetic practice—starvation—could clear the space for true knowledge about what keeps dogkind alive.4 At the point where 4. I’m alluding here, of course, to the Brecht-Weil song “What Keeps Mankind Alive?,” which would be sung some six years later at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm. The German title is “Ballade über die Frage: Wovon lebt der Mensch?”

Caninical Theory  : : 113

our canine hunger artist—Kafka wrote the story bearing that title the same year, 1922—has reduced himself to a minimum of bare life—we might say, to life in the neighborhood of zero—he awakens to find himself confronted by another dog who demands that he remove himself from the area. In the course of the dialogue that ensues the strange dog declares his breed— “I am a hunter” (158/89)—and continues to insist that our narrator- dog is interfering with his work and must leave. At a point of stalemate something remarkable occurs that, though the narrator- dog will later attribute it to his “overstimulation at the time . . . nevertheless had a certain grandeur and is,” he adds, “the sole reality, even if only an apparent reality, that I salvaged and brought back into this world from the time of my fast” (159/90). It was a moment of ecstasy, of Außer-sich-sein, accompanied by “infinite anxiety and shame” produced by a second encounter with music ex nihilo: “I noticed through intangible details . . . that from the depths of his chest this dog was getting ready to sing” (159/89–90). Though the hunting dog appears to remain silent, a music emerges nonetheless: “What I seemed to perceive was that the dog was already singing without his being aware of it—no, more than that: that the melody, detached from him, was floating through the air and then past him according to its own laws, as if he no longer had any part in it, floating at me, aimed only at me” (159/90). By this point in the story, the reader is already clued in, already prepared to attribute the music not to the narrator- dog’s hypersensitivity brought on by fasting but rather to human hunters blowing their hunting horns. And though this musical epiphany remains empty of content, the narratordog, as already noted, nonetheless registers its uncanny force as an interpellation addressed to him only, now as a kind of overwhelming Orphic voice (one is here reminded, perhaps, of the man from the country standing before the law, Vor dem Gesetz, the gates of which, as he learns in his last moments of life, were meant only for him): “I could not resist the melody that the dog now quickly seemed to adopt as his own. It grew stronger, there may have been no limits to its power to increase, it was already on the verge of shattering my eardrums [schon jetzt sprengte sie mir fast das Gehör]. But the worst of it was that it seemed to be there for my sake alone, this voice, whose sublimity made the woods grow silent, for my sake alone” (159/90). At this point it is hard, at least for me, not to hear in this voice resonances with the debate between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem concerning the status of “revelation” in Kafka’s writings. The central point of contention between the two friends concerns the status of theological trace elements in Kafka’s work. Scholem insists that Kafka’s work is suffused with the radiance of revelation, but a revelation, as he puts it,

   

114 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

“seen from the perspective in which it is returned to its own nothingness.”5 Scholem will later characterize this “nothingness of revelation” as “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance [in dem sie gilt, aber nicht bedeutet],” a revelation “reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak.”6 For Kafka, what I said earlier with respect to Freud’s relation to the commandment of neighbor-love needs a slight but significant revision. A divine commandment, I said, is one that only truly carries force for a person of faith, for someone who recognizes the word of God in the commandment. Kafka seems to offer another possibility, namely, that it is possible to register the force of a commandment the content of which approaches zero.7 The canine version of this Nichts der Offenbarung, this “nothing of revelation” conveyed by a disembodied voice, a floating signifier of transcendence (that could nonetheless take residence in a particular dog, become the music of the Other in it), leads to a new turn in the researches of the narrator- dog. After this second musical encounter of the story— call it a Musiktrauma— he feels new life entering his body and, more importantly, a new sense of his proper vocation, a call to engage in a new branch of scientific research: musicology, Musikwissenschaft als Beruf. More importantly, he finally realizes that the science of nutrition and the science of music overlap at a crucial juncture, one about which he already had some inklings at the time of his first musical encounter: “Of course, there is some overlap between the two sciences [ein Grenzgebiet der beiden Wissenschaften] that even then aroused my suspicions. I mean the doctrine of the song that calls down food from above” (160/92). Again, the both more and less mysterious reading would be that the various sorts of vocalizations produced by domestic animals can move their owners to feed them. The mystery here is, of course, that it is a mystery for the dogs how this works once the domestic 5. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932– 1940, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 126 (letter of July 17, 1934). 6. Ibid., 142 (letter of September 20, 1934). Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho to which I’ve referred provides an entire series of “worst words” for what Scholem was after, for example: “Least never to be naught. Never to naught be brought. Never by naught be nulled. Unnullable least.” See Beckett, Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 106. 7. In a brilliant lecture on Heidegger, Dieter Thomä argued that Heidegger’s entire philosophical project could be understood as a series of attempts to distill into a pure imperative, into a pure call without content, the force of Being in history. See “Heideggers Philosophie im Lichte der ‘Schwarzen Hefte,’” University of Freiburg, December 11, 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1OXL1xWTiQ).

Caninical Theory  : : 115

sphere has become the site of a humanitas absconditus. These last thoughts about the border zone of the two sciences— where the two sciences neighbor on one another— lead immediately to the narrator- dog’s concluding words that repeat the theme of his lack of talent for proper science. But now, at the very end of his autobiographical reflections, he seems ready to fully embrace this lack as rooted in an instinct for a different mode of inquiry, for the development of an entirely new kind of science, a kind of new canine thinking: “It was my instinct that, perhaps precisely for the sake of science but a different science than is practiced today, an ultimate science, led me to value freedom above all else. Freedom! Of course, the freedom that is possible today— a stunted growth [ein kümmerliches Gewächs]. But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession” (161/92– 93).8 IV

At the conclusion of his inspiring reading of Kafka’s “caninical” text, Mladen Dolar suggests that it was Kafka’s neighbor, Freud, who had already begun to develop the warp and woof— hard not to say woof-woof— of this ultimate science of at least a kind of freedom, a freedom rooted in that border territory where nutrition and music, food and voice, seem to converge and diverge at the same time, where the locus of nutrition, the mouth, tongue, teeth, become, by a kind intermittent fasting, the locus of the articulation of sounds (as every child is taught, one shouldn’t speak with one’s mouth full). Giving a psychoanalytic twist to Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of this “deterritorialization” of the mouth, Dolar puts it this way: “By speech [the] mouth is denaturalized, diverted from its natural function, seized by the signifier (and . . . by the voice which is but the alterity of the signifier). The Freudian name for this deterritorialization is the drive. . . . Eating can never be the same once the mouth has been deterritorialized— it is seized by the drive, it turns around a new object which emerged in this operation, it keeps circumventing, circling around this eternally elusive object.”9 Our efforts to reterritorialize this object, to integrate the alterity of the voice into our life in the space of meaning never comes off without a remainder. As Dolar puts it, “But this secondary nature can never quite succeed, and the bit that eludes it can be pinned down as the element of 8. One will recall in this context Celan’s characterization of Lucile’s counterword in Büchner’s Death of Danton: “it is an act of freedom. It is a step.” Paul Celan, “The Meridian,” in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 403. 9. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 186– 87.

   

116 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

the voice, this pure alterity of what is said. This is the common ground it shares with food, that in food which precisely escapes eating, the bone that gets stuck in the gullet.”10 Here Dolar is more or less repeating with respect to the voice Freud’s famous account of thumb sucking first presented in his 1905 treatise Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the book that “triggered,” gave the Anstoss for, this project in the first place. There Freud locates the birth of sexuality in the way in which a semiautonomous autoerotic activity splits off from its place and purpose in the homeostatic regulation of the organism. Before homing in on the “event” of that split, Freud first calls into question what, with respect to sexuality, we seem naturally to see as the norm and normally see as natural. In the first essay, which addresses what he refers to as die sexuellen Abirrungen, the sexual aberrations, Freud offers a rather stunning formulation of an errancy he’s discovered to be constitutive of sexual “object choice,” of the drive’s deviation from its ostensibly destined natural object (a member of the opposite sex): It has been brought to our notice that we have been in the habit of regarding the connection between the sexual instinct and the sexual object as more intimate than it in fact is. Experience of the cases that are considered abnormal has shown us that in them the sexual instinct and the sexual object are merely soldered together— a fact which we have been in danger of overlooking in consequence of the uniformity of the normal picture, where the object appears to form part and parcel of the instinct. We are thus warned to loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object. It seems probable that the sexual instinct is in the first instance [zunächst] independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to the object’s attractions.11

The cause of the drive’s attachments would thus seem to be something other than the object, or rather an otherness in the object itself, something in the object that exceeds that object’s properties, that is, all that can be accounted for by one predicate or another (think of Rosenzweig’s formula, B = A). The drive functions, we might say, according to a kind of “negative anthropology” (in analogy with the doctrine of negative theology, which 10. Ibid., 187. The “anal” complement to this “oral” object might be characterized as the indigestible remainder that we always at some level retain whether we want to or not. 11. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 13– 14; my emphasis.

Caninical Theory  : : 117

posits God’s essence beyond propositional knowledge). What arouses sexual desire is something in the object that is strangely independent of the object, a part that has no part in it, in a word, a partial object to which desire finds itself to be singularly partial. In the second essay, which is dedicated to infantile sexuality, Freud uses the example of thumb sucking— the German words Freud uses, Lutschen, Ludeln, and Wonnesaugen, are translated as sensual sucking— to illustrate the way in which a new and surprising satisfaction emerges at the site of nursing, an activity that satisfies the demands of a homeostatic imperative of the organism. With Kafka’s dog in mind, we might say that the object of the science of food thereby becomes the object of Freud’s new science, the science of libido and its modes of production and circulation, the science of libidinal economy. Here it is not a question of object choice but rather of the splitting of the object into itself and something “in it” that bears its libidinal value, a something that, as Freud earlier suggests, can wander, can come to light upon seemingly aberrant objects endowing them with “it,” the real thing that really satisfies. As Freud proposes, at the point of its emergence, thumb sucking represents the infant’s attempt to recapture a sensation of pleasure already experienced. “It is easy,” he writes, “to guess the occasion on which the child had his first experiences of the pleasure which he is now striving to renew. It was the child’s first and most vital [lebenswichtigste] activity, his sucking at his mother’s breast, or at substitutes for it, that must have familiarized him with this pleasure. The child’s lips,” he continues, “behave like an erotogenic zone, and no doubt stimulation by the warm flow of milk is the cause of the pleasurable sensation.” That pleasure, as noted, gains a kind of semiautonomy, becomes wayward. “The satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated [vergesellschaftet], in the first instance [anfangs], with the satisfaction of the need for nourishment. To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to [lehnt sich zunächst an] functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent until later. . . . The need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need for taking nourishment.”12 Freud’s account of the emergence of the libidinal object, the object invested with libidinal value, more or less maps on to the way in which Aristotle describes the emergence of chrematistics, the art of making money. There too something detaches itself from its own purpose, from its functional role in the management of the household, the oikos. For Aristotle, making money for the sake of making money represents a deviation from, a perversion of, the primary function of money, that is, to enable the com12. Ibid., 47– 48; my emphasis.

   

118 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

merce necessary for the provision of the household.13 For Marx, of course, chrematistics acquires a new source of energy in modern capitalism, the possibility of exploiting so-called free labor, of consuming that unique commodity, “labor power,” for the production of surplus value (for Marx, this marks the shift from merchants’ capital to capital proper). The capitalist qua capitalist must at some level be indifferent to the use values of the commodities he produces, for what is at issue here is the repetition of the production of surplus value, a supplementary satisfaction that attaches itself to, that “leans on,” the production of commodities the use values of which fulfill some need or want. More precisely, capital discovers a new satisfaction at the point at which the laborer has, by adding use value to raw materials, earned what allows for living and working another day. The capitalist, however, discovers that he can continue sucking more labor out of the laborer and that the additional use value thereby produced becomes surplus value accruing only to the capitalist. Sucking more, more sucking, comes to be the primary activity, the raison d’être, of the capitalist’s existence. In a word, capitalism really does suck. V

I want to work my way back to the question of the neighbor by way of some reflections on another text by Kafka. It’s one I’ve touched on in the preface and that explores disorders of the domestic sphere— an enigmatic excess in the oikos— caused not by the absence of the human but by the presence of the inhuman, a strange creature called by the name— or is it just a word?— “Odradek.” In his contribution to the volume on the neighbor to which Ken and I also contributed, Žižek invokes this figure resistant to figural representation— Odradek would seem to be a sort of cubist entity or animate collage— as the proper name for a dimension of the neighbor that, in his view, constitutes a fundamental challenge to the Levinasian understanding of ethics as the just response “before the law” manifest in the commanding presence, the face of the Other (recall Celan’s invocation of the Gegenwart des Menschlichen). Žižek asks, “is the ‘neighbor’ in the JudeoFreudian sense, the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor, the same as the neighbor that we encounter in the Levinasian experience of the Other’s face? Is there not, in the very heart 13. While revising this chapter a relevant anniversary took place. Fifty years had passed since the publication of Milton Friedman’s seminal essay “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” in the New York Times Magazine (September 13, 1970). The essay has been credited with inaugurating a new era of corporate greed, a pure ethos of chrematistics.

Caninical Theory  : : 119

of the Judeo-Freudian inhuman neighbor, a monstrous dimension which is already minimally ‘gentrified,’ domesticated, once it is conceived in the Levinasian sense?” (In Celan’s terms, this might be thought of as the difference between art and poetry, between what is registered in Kunst and what is conveyed in the Gegenwort of Dichtung.) “What if,” he finally asks, “the Levinasian face is yet another defense against this monstrous dimension of subjectivity?”14 The concern with domestication is so crucial because the text, published under the title Die Sorge des Hausvaters, is itself the story of something that can’t be domesticated, can’t be economized, by the “father of the house,” the master of the oikos (Corngold translates the title as “The Worry of the Father of the Family”). In my own previous engagement with the text, I have tried to challenge what I see as another strategy of domestication, one that also presents itself as a more radical opening to the true alterity of Odradek, an opening that could be said to represent the stakes of a true life, one fully responsive to the “face” of such alterity. In her contribution to the so- called new materialism in the cultural and social sciences, an intellectual movement that promotes a more capacious understanding of the various forms of “vibrant matter” that neighbor on the human and that shares in the ethos of the “postcritical” turn, Jane Bennet writes, “Odradek exposes this continuity of watery life and rocks; he/it brings to the fore the becoming of things.”15 Odradek becomes Kafka’s name for self-organizing matter, for spontaneous structural generation in the interstices between inorganic and organic vitality: “Wooden yet lively, verbal yet vegetal, alive yet inert, Odradek is ontologically multiple. He/it is a vital materiality and exhibits what Gilles Deleuze has described as the persistent ‘hint of the animate in plants, and of the vegetable in animals.’”16 As many scholars have noted, the word “Odradek,” which Kafka’s narrator suggests might have Germanic and/or Slavic roots, seems to signify, on the basis of family resemblances with words from these and other linguistic “households,” a figure of radical rootlessness and nonbelonging— Od-radix, Od-adresa. The meanings scholars have adduced for this word that, as the narrator indicates, may not have a meaning at all, include deserter from one’s kind; apostate; degenerate; a small creature whose business is to dissuade; a creature that dwells outside of any kind, rank, series, order, class, 14. See Slavoj Žižek’s contribution to The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 163. 15. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 8. Odradek’s preferred pronouns would seem to be “he/it.” 16. Ibid.

   

120 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

line, or use; a creature beyond discourse or Rede; waste or dirt— Unrat— and so, to use a well-known characterization of dirt, “matter in the wrong place.” All this suggests, I think, that Odradek’s ontological statelessness— this is what Bennett emphasizes— cannot be separated from the sense of political statelessness evoked by the linguistic and historical overdetermination of its name (if it even is a proper name). It was precisely through the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the state of statelessness came to be, as Hannah Arendt argued, the political symptom par excellence of modern Europe. And it was the particular “tribe” to which Kafka belonged— a tribe associated, of course, with a peculiar hybrid language between Germanic and Slavic— that came to embody a kind of foreignness that had no natural fit within any state. This was a tribe whose members could never be fully “naturalized,” absorbed without remainder, and indeed thought by many of its own members to be, at its core, passionately detached from any historical nation-state. Think of it as a tribe whose very form of life in some sense mattered in the wrong place. It is, then, not so much a “newish self ”— Bennett’s phrase— forged on the basis of a vital materiality and new sense of self-interest that Kafka’s text helps us to envision but rather the uncanny dimension of the “Jewish self ” that he himself no doubt experienced as profoundly linked to a series of other historical and existential dilemmas. For Kafka himself, perhaps the most important of these was the dilemma of a writerly existence, an existence lived in passionate detachment from other social bonds and one apparently incompatible with being a Hausvater, the head of a household or oikos. It’s worth adding one more association to Odradek. The creature’s “statelessness” is underlined in the text when the narrator notes that when asked where it lives Odradek replies, “unbestimmter Wohnsitz,” an expression with a distinctly bureaucratic tone signifying the lack of a fixed address. But “unbestimmter Wohnsitz” might also be read as a German translation of the word utopia; Odradek would thereby come to figure additionally as an abiding spirit or specter of utopia.17 Žižek for his part goes on to equate Odradek with the substance of human sexuality understood as a kind of errant remainder of our inscription in a normative order, as a spectral surplus matter that emerges when bodies come to matter: “Odradek is thus simply what Lacan . . . developed as lamella, libido as an organ, the inhuman-human ‘undead’ organ without a body, the mythical pre-subjective ‘undead’ life-substance, or, rather, the 17. Odradek’s laughter that immediately follows seems to emphasize the spectral over the spiritual: “it is a kind of laughter that can only be produced without lungs. It sounds more or less like the rustling of fallen leaves.” See, once more, Kafka’s Selected Stories, ed. and trans. Stanley Corngold (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 72– 73.

Caninical Theory  : : 121

remainder of the Life-Substance which has escaped the symbolic colonization, the horrible palpitation of the ‘acephal’ drive which persists beyond ordinary death, outside the scope of paternal authority, nomadic, with no fixed domicile.”18 In light of these reflections, I am tempted to characterize the new science that Kafka’s narrator- dog hoped to develop as the anticipation of what I referred to in the preface as “Odradek studies,” the science of constitutively errant objects, of uncanny remainders, the “original” of which is the object of the drive as first elaborated by Freud apropos of the pulsive theorization at play in sensual sucking. If we read Kafka’s Researches of a Dog at least in part— with Kafka, readings only come in parts— as an allegory of the collapse of transcendence into a space of pure immanence— in the story, of human transcendence into canine immanence— we see that a new dimension emerges, one I have elsewhere characterized as a surplus of immanence, as an informe remainder that now attaches itself to every form of life. There is now, on the plane of immanence, an enigmatic and uncanny sort of excess, a too-muchness inaccessible to the natural or human sciences generally on offer in the secular world (and thus demanding a new science). If we want to try to reconstruct the figure of the neighbor, the love of whom is commanded in the biblical texts, we need to begin here, with this remainder of life that never quite fits in to a form of life and that, under conditions of modernity, cannot be reabsorbed by divine being. My argument has been that Freud’s skepticism about neighbor-love notwithstanding, his theory of human sexuality in fact provides the resources for just such a reconstruction, one that attunes us to what I have called the psychotheology of everyday life. VI

As I have noted, in his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduced his approach to dreams by analyzing a dream of his own that he presents as an exemplary “specimen dream,” one now generally referred to as the dream of Irma’s injection. The dream took on such importance for Freud that he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess about a recent visit to the house where he had the dream. “Do you suppose,” he writes, “that someday a marble tablet will be placed on the house, inscribed with these words?— In This House on July 24th, 1895 the Secret of Dreams was Revealed to Dr. Sigm. Freud.” “At the moment,” he adds, “there seems to be little prospect of it.”19 18. Žižek, The Neighbor, 166– 67. 19. James Strachey added this material in a footnote at the end of Freud’s initial interpretation of the dream. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans.

   

122 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

My hunch is that most readers of Freud’s initial interpretation of the dream find themselves disappointed and certainly in no frame of mind to see in it a worthy cause for such grandiose memorialization. The dream, as Freud understands it, is the elaboration of preoccupations triggered by a chance encounter with a friend and colleague— named Otto in the dream— who hints in passing that Freud’s patient— named Irma in the dream— has not been doing well. In his preamble to the dream, Freud himself notes that he had only had modest success in healing Irma of her hysterical symptoms and that she had been resistant to some of his interventions (“I proposed a solution . . . which she seemed unwilling to accept” [131]). The treatment was suspended for the summer in the very midst of their standoff. Otto, like Freud also a friend of Irma’s family, had been staying with her family at their summer retreat and had firsthand knowledge of her condition. Otto’s brief response to Freud’s inquiry about Irma— “She’s better, but not quite well” (131)— very clearly got under Freud’s skin. Upon returning home, he wrote out Irma’s case history with the intention of sharing it with another colleague “in order to justify myself ” (131), as Freud puts it. The dream he has that night represents, according to Freud’s own reading of it, the persistence of the narcissistic injury caused by Otto’s remark and his mind’s attempt to overcome it, to repulse any reproach concerning his professional conscientiousness with respect to Irma’s treatment. What is disappointing for the reader prepared for great revelations about the secrets of dreams is that the latent thoughts Freud discovers through his interpretation of the dream’s manifest content, though no doubt disconcerting to a man struggling to establish a new science on the basis of the treatment of hysterical symptoms, are thoughts that seem to have no deeply repressed and certainly no sexually scandalous component, nothing not already available to conscious thought and reflection. There is a considerable library of commentaries on the dream and Freud’s reading of it, commentaries that attempt to fill in the true scandal, the real stumbling block— der Stein des Anstosses— still hidden in and by Freud’s own account.20 Freud himself openly admits the limitations of his initial reading of the dream, first implicitly, then explicitly. His implicit admission comes in the form of his use of a famous witticism about self-justification (with respect James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 145. Subsequent references are made in the text. 20. Among the many commentaries, Mladen Dolar’s essay “Irma,” to which my own reading is much indebted, is among the very best. The essay is forthcoming in a new collection of his essays with Bloomsbury Press. The phrase “der Stein des Anstosses” is used by Luther in his translation of Isaiah 8:14.

Caninical Theory  : : 123

to one’s neighbor). Addressing the multiple ways in which his dream attempts to assert his competence and conscientiousness, Freud writes, “The whole plea— for the dream was nothing else— reminded one vividly of the defense put forward by the man who was charged by one of his neighbors with having given him back a borrowed kettle in a damaged condition. The defendant asserted first, that he had given it back undamaged; secondly, that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it; and thirdly, that he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbor at all” (143– 44). The thought here is that this excess of reasons functions as an index of a lack of reasons and so an admission that with the thought of self-justification we are far from being finished with this dream. At the end of his discussion of the dream, Freud becomes explicit about this. “I will not pretend,” he writes, “that I have completely uncovered the meaning of this dream or that its interpretation is without a gap. I could spend much more time over it, derive further information from it and discuss fresh problems raised by it. I myself know the points from which further trains of thought could be followed” (144). At this point, Freud indicates that considerations of discretion prevent him from pursuing the interpretation further.21 Discretion seems also to be in play when he writes in a footnote apropos of a scene in the dream concerning Irma’s mouth and throat, “I had a feeling that the interpretation of this part of the dream was not carried far enough to make it possible to follow the whole of its concealed meaning. If I had pursued my comparison between the three women [in the dream], it would have taken me far afield.— ” But immediately after this dash he goes on, “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable [unergründlich]— a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown” (135; my emphasis). Freud returns to this thought of the navel of the dream in the final chapter of Interpretation of Dreams: There is often a passage in even the most thoroughgoingly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown [die Stelle, an der er dem Unerkannten aufsitzt]. The dream-thoughts to 21. In their Freud’s Women (New York: Basic Books, 1992), John Forrester and Lisa Appignanesi have managed to identify all the people in the dream. Their account certainly clarifies the nature of the many considerations of “discretion” mentioned by Freud. Among the most disturbing events alluded to in the dream is the botched operation performed by Freud’s friend Wilhelm Fliess on Freud’s patient Emma Eckstein.

   

124 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings; they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom of its mycelium. (528)

To put it differently, the navel of the dream is the point of transition from a nameless lack, the occasion of a “nameless woe” that can never be known, to a determinate lack that can now become the source of a wish, a wish the satisfaction of which, however, leaves something to be desired. Somehow that was not it. Freud’s argument is that “it” exists only in and as the rhetorical energy, the “excessive signification” of the dreamwork responsible for the form of the dream. In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud returns to the multiple dimensions of psychical “irritants” that call the dreamwork on the scene. (Following Heidegger’s formulation of the question of thinking— Was heisst Denken?— the question here is Was heisst träumen?: what is dreaming/what calls dreaming into being?) Here, as in the famous footnote added to the Interpretation of Dreams in 1925, Freud scolds those who succumb to a tempting but “foolish misunderstanding,” who, because they focus exclusively on the discovery of the latent thoughts, the meaning embedded in distorted form in the manifest content of the dream, forget what Freud sees as the crucial dimensions of the dream: wish fulfillment and dreamwork. Just as we saw in Freud’s account of the Irma dream, in sleep we are often preoccupied, even anxiously so, with many of the worries and concerns that preoccupy us when awake, that are, in a word, perfectly available to conscious thought. As Freud insists, however, it is “these intentions, preparations, reflections, and so on, out of which the dreamwork then makes the dream.”22 As Freud continues, “the latent dream-thoughts are the material which the dreamwork transforms into the manifest dream. Why should you want to confuse the material with the activity which forms it?” (277). I am tempted to see this very question as a sort of self-reproach that repeats, in another form, the self-reproach Freud had posited as the key to the meaning of the Irma dream. Be that as it may, Freud goes on to emphasize that the “only essential thing about dreams is the dreamwork that has influenced the thought-material” (277). But as he then notes, the dream22. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 276; my emphasis. Subsequent references are made in the text.

Caninical Theory  : : 125

work is itself called on the scene by another dimension of psychic life, the force of a wish. Or rather, the dreamwork makes use of the wish that calls it on the scene, excites it into action: “Analytic observation shows further that the dreamwork never restricts itself to translating these thoughts into the archaic or regressive mode of expression that is familiar to you. In addition, it regularly takes possession of something else, which is not part of the latent thoughts of the previous day, but which is the true motive force for the construction of the dream. This indispensable addition is the equally unconscious wish for the fulfillment of which the content of the dream is given its new form” (277– 78). Keeping in mind the readily understandable motives of the sort uncovered in the Irma dream, Freud goes on, A dream may thus be any sort of thing in so far as you are only taking into account the thoughts it represents— a warning, an intention, a preparation, and so on; but it is always also the fulfillment of an unconscious wish and, if you are considering it as a product of the dreamwork, it is only that. A dream is therefore never simply an intention, or a warning, but always an intention, etc., translated into the archaic mode of thought by the help of an unconscious wish and transformed to fulfil that wish. (278; my emphasis)

To clarify the distinctions in play here, Freud offers an analogy borrowed from the realm of entrepreneurial capitalism, an analogy first used in Interpretation of Dreams: “In every undertaking there must be a capitalist who covers the required outlay and an entrepreneur who has the idea and knows how to carry it out. In the construction of dreams, the part played by the capitalist is always played by the unconscious wish alone; it provides the psychical energy for the construction of the dream. The entrepreneur is the day’s residues, which decide how this outlay is to be employed” (281). Though the analogy is no doubt imperfect— one wonders, for example, about the “laborers” employed in the carrying out of the dreamwork— it does lead Freud to make a distinction that will eventually pressure him to revise his topology of the “psychic apparatus” in the coming years. Addressing his audience, he admits to them, “Your suspicion is correct. This is the salient point of the whole business [der springende Punkt der ganzen Sache]. They are not unconscious in the same sense. The dream-wish belongs to a different unconscious— to the one which we have already recognized as being of infantile origin and equipped with peculiar mechanisms” (281– 82). Freud is fully aware of the difficulties raised by such a splitting of the difference between conscious and unconscious and admits, “People

   

126 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

consider a single unconscious as something fantastic. What will they say when we confess that we cannot make shift without two of them [daß wir erst bei zweierlei Unbewusstem unser Auslangen finden]” (282). But as we have seen, Freud makes yet a further distinction, namely, that between the navel of the dream and the wish that emerges from it, which means that the wish itself is already a minimal interpretation of something constitutively withheld from possible knowledge, a withholding that Freud refers to as Urverdrängung, primal or primary repression. Whatever wish emerges is, thus, one that includes in its composition a remainder of a nothing of knowledge that can never be fully translated into a determinate wish.23 A dream is born when the pressure of this remainder passes into and energizes the excessive signification of the dreamwork that in its turn, as Freud puts it, “takes possession” of a determinate wish by transforming the day’s residues into the manifest content of the dream. The wish thus belongs among the “pulsive theorizations” called forth by an originally missing bit of knowledge, a void “heard” as a question addressed to you alone: What is your wish? What is it that you really want? In this context, one will recall the narrator- dog’s shattering experience of being interpellated by the disembodied voice— of a music ex nihilo— seeming to take up residence in the hunting dog: “I could not resist the melody that the dog now quickly seemed to adopt as his own. It grew stronger, there may have been no limits to its power to increase, it was already on the verge of shattering my eardrums [schon jetzt sprengte sie mir fast das Gehör]. But the worst of it was that it seemed to be there for my sake alone, this voice, whose sublimity made the woods grow silent, for my sake alone” (159/90). VII

In The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig claimed that under conditions of secular modernity, a “new thinking” was called for, one that needed to reconstruct the conditions of possibility of neighbor-love understood as the ethical force behind any fundamental transformation of the world. He proposed to do so on the basis of a philosophical understanding of the notion of creation. I have tried to show— and am attempting to do so again here with, as it were, more “caninical” material— that creation as Rosenzweig understood it must be seen to include the dimension that Freud would 23. Recall Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the translator’s responsibility to the remainder of something primordially missing in both languages at issue. The task is to carry over— übertragen— the encystance of the missing Ursprache from one language to another, to let its idiomatic resonance in one language vibrate in another.

Caninical Theory  : : 127

theorize under the heading of the drive. As I argued in On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, the new thinking would thus have to be one with, at least implicitly, a certain psychoanalytic orientation. It would indeed be an exemplary kind of theory in the sense I’ve been investigating throughout this volume. Put somewhat differently, creation must be understood such that it includes the existence of dreams, that something like the dreaming subject can emerge in its very midst.24 For both Freud and Rosenzweig, our capacity to dream emerges on the basis of our becoming unconscious of a repulsive void of knowledge. The encystance of this void, manifest not only in dreams but in everything that Freud addressed under the heading of unconscious mental activity, is what sustains our libidinal implication in the world, what subjectifies the space of meaning such that it becomes meaningful for us, becomes, we might say, very first personal. Rosenzweig addresses this “very,” this intensification or potentiation of the space of meaning, by way of a commentary on Genesis 1:31 (one will recall Rosenzweig’s claim that he “received the new thinking in these old words”). Joining a larger tradition of rabbinic exegesis, Rosenzweig notes that it is only after the creation of man that God uses for the first time the comparative form by proclaiming creation to be “very good”: Within the general Yea of creation, bearing everything individual on its broad back, an area is set apart which is affirmed differently, which is “very” affirmed. Unlike anything else in creation, it thus points beyond creation. This “very” heralds a supercreation [eine Überschöpfung] within creation itself, something more than worldly within the worldly, something other than life which yet belongs to life and only to life, which was created with life as its ultimate, and which yet first lets life surmise a fulfillment beyond life: this “very” is death. The created death of the creature portends the revelation of a life which is above the creaturely level. For each created thing, death is the very consummator of its entire materiality.25 24. As I’ve noted, this thought returns in Slavoj Žižek’s argument with Robert Pippin, Robert Brandom, and other representatives of what he refers to as the “deflated” Hegel. Žižek repeats a refrain with clear Rosenzweigian resonances, namely, that he pursues “the topic of ontological incompleteness [of reality] in order to answer the question ‘How should reality be structured so that (something like) subjectivity can emerge in it?” Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 19. 25. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Halo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 155; my emphasis.

   

128 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

I understand this “created death” in relation to the nameless woe I’ve been tracking; I see it as one of the names of the remainder of life that adds to life not additional content but rather a void of possible knowledge around which the drives, their pulsive theorizations, orbit and on the basis of which the dreamworld, itself a kind of “supercreation,” emerges. Where Rosenzweig differs from Freud is in his insistence that the “very” at issue here can only be verified in a “true life,” one that strives to be observant with respect to this creaturely encystance of a gap. For Rosenzweig that meant to be religiously observant, to take part in individual and communal prayer, in the rituals and liturgical practices that, as he saw it, attune us to the Schwingungszahl, the rate of vibration of vital intensity, that we encounter, to use a Levinasian formulation, in the face of the void of knowledge encysted— made flesh— in the neighbor. Whatever else it might be, this “true life” appears to be rather different from the notion of living well one associates with ancient ethics. As Rosenzweig puts it, Truth in this way ceases to be what “is” true, and becomes that which, as true— wants to be verified [bewährt]. The concept of the verification of the truth becomes the basic concept of this new theory of knowledge, which replaces the old theories of noncontradiction and of objects and introduces in place of the static concept of objectivity of those theories, a dynamic one. . . . From those least important truths, of the type “two times two is four,” on which people easily agree, without using up more than a little brain grease— for the multiplication table something less, for the theory of relativity a little more— the path leads over the truths that have cost man something on toward those that he cannot verify except with the sacrifice of his life, and finally to those whose truth can be verified only by the commitment of the lives of all generations.26

Rosenzweig characterized this new theory of knowledge as messianic; it pertains to the difference and relation between historical time and the time 26. Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Franz Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking,” trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara Galli (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999), 98– 99. Subsequent references are made in the text. It would be well worth the effort to explore the similarities of and differences between Rosenzweig’s messianic theory of knowledge and Alain Badiou’s theory of the truth-event (along with the nature of the work that serves to elaborate one’s fidelity to it, to what is revealed in it). Had I the patience to work through the dense mathematical parts of Badiou’s writings I would no doubt have included him in this intellectual history of theory.

Caninical Theory  : : 129

of the coming of the kingdom, a difference vorweltlich, “protocosmically,” manifest as that between the personality and the metaethical self, each of which, Rosenzweig argued, had a distinct birthday and temporality. These divisions culminate in the split between the two messianic traditions, the two religious formations dedicated to the revelation and redemptive elaboration of that protocosmic division in the world. As he puts it, “This messianic theory of knowledge, which evaluates truths according to the price of their verification and to the bond that they establish among human beings, cannot . . . lead beyond the two eternally irreconcilable expectations of the Messiah: the one to come and the one to come again,— it cannot lead beyond the And of these two final commitments on behalf of the truth” (99). This “And” challenges the supersessionist logic according to which the antagonism or “nonrelation” of Judaism and Christianity would be aufgehoben in the full universalization achieved in the latter. For Rosenzweig, “Only with God himself does the verification reside, only before him is the truth One. Earthly truth thus remains split— split into two, like the extradivine factuality [außergöttliche Tatsächlichkeit], like the primal facts [Urtatsachen] of world and man” (99). Insofar as the messianic theory of knowledge is one that remains doggedly observant of the protocosmic division generated by the birth of the metaethical self, its intrusion into the life of the personality— the life of the political animal— it is a theory neighboring on the new science, the dogma of which Freud was elaborating in his metapsychological writings. For as we have seen, Rosenzweig himself places the disorienting birth of the self under the sign of Eros and then under that of Thanatos, the two faces of the pulsive encystance of a void of knowledge that Freud theorized as drive. For Kafka, the third inhabitant of this particular German-Jewish neighborhood, this new science would at some level always remain a dog’s dinner, but one that nonetheless promises to yield a kind of freedom. VIII

Foucault’s last lectures at the Collège de France were dedicated to, among other things, an attempt to think through the legacy of the “courage of truth” associated with ancient Cynicism. The Cynics, whose name, whatever its real origin, was understood in relation to kunikos, a word signifying “doglike,” became important to Foucault because of the way in which they shifted the locus of parrhêsia— forthright truth-telling, frankness, free-spokenness— from that of true discourse and knowledge to that of the true life. The Cynics, by the very way they lived, insisted on “the per-

   

130 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

manent, difficult, and perpetually embarrassing question,” namely, “that of the philosophical life, of the bios philosphikos.”27 Whereas “all philosophy increasingly tends to pose the question of truth-telling in terms of the conditions under which a statement can be recognized as true, Cynicism is the form of philosophy which constantly raises the question: what can the form of life be such that it practices truth-telling?” (234). The radical nature of the answer given by the Cynics was sufficiently scandalous that their efforts to conduct what they took to be the true life, the bios philosophikos, acquired, to resort once more to my hopefully not too annoying pun, caninical status. Paraphrasing an ancient source on the bios kunikos of the Cynics, Foucault writes, First, the kunikos life is a dog’s life in that it is without modesty, shame, and human respect. It is a life which does in public, in front of everyone, what only dogs and animals dare to do, and which men usually hide. The Cynic’s life is a dog’s life in that it is shameless. Second, the Cynic life is a dog’s life because, like the latter, it is indifferent. It . . . is not attached to anything, is content with what it has, and has no needs other than those it can satisfy immediately. Third, the life of the Cynic is the life of a dog, it received the epithet kunikos because it is, so to speak, a life which barks, a diacritical (diakritikos) life, that is to say, a life which can fight, which barks at enemies, which knows how to distinguish the good from the bad, the true from the false, and masters from enemies. . . . Finally, fourth, the Cynic life is phulaktikos. It is a guard dog’s life, a life which knows how to dedicate itself to saving others and protecting the master’s life. Shameless life, adiophoros (indifferent) life, diakritikos life (diacritical, distinguishing, discriminating, and, as it were, barking life), and phulaktikos (guard’s life, guard dog’s life). (243)

Foucault locates the Cynics in a tradition articulated by Plato in his dialogue on courage, Laches, a tradition he contrasts with the one articulated in Alcibiades. Foucault uses the dialogues to distinguish two senses of the Socratic notion of epimeleia heauto, “care of self,” that he sees as “two great lines of development emerging along which Western philosophy stretches out” (246). The questions of concern in the latter tradition, one consolidated and amplified in Neoplatonism, “led the dialogue 27. Michel 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: Palgrave, 2011), 234. Subsequent references are made in the text.

Caninical Theory  : : 131

to the discovery of the soul as what we must attend to.” What comes into view in “the mirror of the soul contemplating itself,” Foucault continues, is “the pure world of truth, that other world, which is the world of truth and the world to which we must aspire.” The claim here is that this selfreflective, self- contemplating mode of care of self “founded the principle of the other world (l’autre monde) and marked the origin of Western metaphysics” (246). The line of development leading from Laches, by contrast, is one concerned not with the true nature of the being I must care for but rather “what a life must be that claims to care about self.” This displacement of the locus of care of self from the realm of contemplation to the conduct of life means that it is no longer oriented toward an elsewhere, the other world, but aims, rather, at questioning, “what, in relation to all other forms of life, precisely that form of life which takes care of self must and can be in truth” (246). For Foucault it was the Cynics who most doggedly observed this second understanding of care of self; their displacement of the contemplative pursuit of the other world by the practice of an other life (vie autre) became a cause not only for excitement in the Greek world but also of considerable scandal; it was a sign that philosophy had gone to the dogs. To lead this other life was to be a martyr of truth in the sense of bearing witness to truth in the conduct of life. “It involves someone who, in his very life, his dog’s life, from the moment of embracing asceticism until the present, in his body, his life, his acts, his frugality, his renunciations, and his ascesis, has never ceased being the living witness of truth. . . . The very body of the truth is made visible, and laughable, in a certain style of life. . . . From its emergence in the fourth century in the Hellenistic period until at least the end of the Roman Empire . . . Cynicism practiced the scandal of the truth in and through one’s life” (173– 74). Or as Foucault repeatedly puts it, Cynicism came to figure “as the grimace of the true life” (227), a distortion that rendered it all the more compelling as a demand, as an imperative aimed at all others to change their lives. This demand— call it Cynicism’s tough (neighbor-)love— was encapsulated in the formula said to have been addressed to Diogenes at Delphi to “change the currency,” that is, to undertake, to put it in Nietzschean terms, a transvaluation of values. Among the many aspects of Cynicism Foucault addresses, two are especially significant in the context of the questions I’ve been pursuing here. One concerns the status of animality, the other that of kingship. For the Cynics, the meaning of animality goes beyond what we have noted about the bios kunikos and concerns what Foucault refers to as the “straight life,” a life in conformity with the laws of nature: “No convention, no human prescription may be accepted in the Cynic life if it does not conform exactly

   

132 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

to what is found in nature and in nature alone” (263). The Cynics pushed the straightness of the straight life to the point where it allowed for free sexual union, even incest. Foucault cites Dio Chrysostom’s portrait of Oedipus, offered in a discourse on Diogenes, according to which the mythic king failed to truly know himself insofar as he failed to see that his crimes, rather than perversions of nature, were in perfect conformity with its laws; had he only looked around he would have realized, “But this is what I see every day in my hen house, it is what happens with all animals, where in fact one kills one’s father, marries one’s mother, and ends up both father and brother to one’s children, to one’s brothers and sisters” (264). The Cynics’ positive valuation of animality runs counter to the fundamental commitment of ancient thought concerning the human-animal distinction, the fact “that in ancient thought animality played the role of absolute point of differentiation for the human being. It is by distinguishing itself from animality that the human being asserted and manifested its humanity. Animality was always, more or less, a point of repulsion for the constitution of man as a rational human being” (264). Paradoxically, however, the overcoming of that repulsion with respect to animality was itself understood in normative terms. “In order not to be inferior to the animal, one must be capable of taking on that animality as reduced but prescriptive form of life. Animality is not a given; it is a duty.” Foucault immediately adds a crucial qualification: “Or rather, it is a given, offered to us directly by nature, but at the same time it is a challenge to be continually taken up. This animality, which is the material model of existence, which is also its moral model, constitutes a sort of permanent challenge in the Cynic life. . . . Animality is an exercise” (265). In the terms I have been proposing, the Cynics’ version of “becoming-animal” demands the vigilant observance and verification of one’s very creaturely condition. Such observance was part of a more general turning away from the values of honor, good reputation, and glory, part of a transvaluation of values such that bad reputation, adoxia, “now forms part of the Cynic’s bare life” (260). One effect of this transvaluation of glory— call it a paradoxological effect— was that the bearers of (very) creaturely life could now lay claim to the title of true kingship. “The king and the philosopher, monarchy and philosophy, monarchy and sovereignty over self are frequent themes. But in the Cynics,” Foucault continues, “they take a completely different form, simply because the Cynics make the very simple, bald, utterly insolent assertion that the Cynic himself is king” (274– 75). This paradoxological claim to kingship was understood as a critique of and challenge to what we might call really existing royalism, a challenge threatening to expose the imposture of those enjoying “official” entitlement to their crown. “The Cynic

Caninical Theory  : : 133

is the only true king. And at the same time, vis-à-vis kings of the world, crowned kings sitting on their thrones, he is the anti-king who shows how hollow, illusory, and precarious the monarchy of kings is” (275). As the true yet unrecognized king, as a king whose royalty remains hidden, as the “king of poverty . . . who hides his sovereignty in destitution,” he becomes, as Foucault puts it, “the king of derision” (278). Though Foucault never makes the connection, it is hard not to hear in this brief account echoes of Richard’s famous speech on the Welsh coast in act 3 of Shakespeare’s Richard II, which I cite again here: For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings, How some have been deposed, some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed, Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed— All murdered. For within the hollow crown That rounds the mortal temples of a king Keeps death his court, and there the antic sits, Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a breath, a little scene To monarchize, be feared and kill with looks, Infusing him with self and vain conceit, As if this flesh which walls about our life Were brass impregnable, and humoured thus Comes at the last and with a little pin Bores through his castle wall— and farewell king. (3.2.155– 70)

Foucault twice makes use of the metaphor of the broken mirror, one that recalls the scene at Flint Castle where Richard requests a mirror to view, as it were, the royal remains of his unkinged face: Is this the face which faced so many follies, That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? A brittle glory shineth in this face; As brittle as the glory is the face, [He throws down the glass] For there it is cracked in a hundred shivers. (4.1.285– 89)

The metaphor of the broken mirror— along with that of the derisive grimace— is meant to capture the doggedly critical stance of Cynicism toward the conventions of philosophy: “Cynicism is thus this kind of grimace

   

134 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

that philosophy makes to itself, this broken mirror in which philosophy is at once called upon to see itself and fails to recognize itself. Such is the paradox of the Cynic life . . . ; it is the fulfillment of the true life, but as demand for a life which is radically other” (270).28 Foucault does, indeed, make use of Shakespeare to flesh out the legacy of the Cynic conception of kingship, one that includes, as we have seen, elements of derision, hiddenness, and destitution. For Foucault it is King Lear rather than Richard II that best displays these elements in their royal aspect to which he adds the related themes of banishment, homelessness, and errancy. “At the point of confluence of all this you could obviously find the figure of King Lear. King Lear is . . . the highest expression of this theme of the king of derision, the mad king, and the hidden king” (286). Noting that the play’s point of departure is “a story of parrhêsia, a test of frankness,” Foucault characterizes Lear’s fate as a series of reversals. “King Lear is precisely someone who is unable to recognize the truth that was there. And on the basis of this failure to recognize the truth, he in turn is unrecognized” (286). We might say that Lear’s reduction to a kind of radical creatureliness is presented as the (broken) mirror image of his kingship. The deaths with which the play ends represent, for Foucault, “the fulfillment of his wretchedness, but a fulfillment which is at the same time the triumph and restoration of the truth itself ” (286). One might hear echoes here of Lucile’s paradoxological acclamation at the end of Danton’s Death— her “Long live the king!”— and Celan’s characterization of its derisive, not to say “cynical,” sense as the majesty of the absurd. IX

I’d like to conclude this chapter by returning briefly to the conceit of Kafka’s story or rather to my allegorical reading of it. The convergence of the new science imagined by Kafka’s canine researcher with libido theory as Freud introduces it apropos of oral pleasure could perhaps be characterized this way: in each case (though less explicitly for Freud) an intimation of freedom arises from the experience of becoming the mouthpiece of a void. Put somewhat differently, the mouth becomes the site of the encystance of a 28. The demand to change one’s life emerging in and through the gaze from a broken mirror brings to mind Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the last lines of which are “. . . for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.” (. . . denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern.) The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1984), 61. There the gaze emanates not from a broken mirror but rather from a broken, headless statue.

Caninical Theory  : : 135

void, the site where a void is taken in and encysted in one’s own embodied being.29 I’ve suggested that one might historicize this experience as part and parcel of what is generally referred to as the process of secularization, though with a twist. What both Kafka’s canine science and Freud’s libido theory preserve and, as it were, redistribute along a plane of immanence is not so much the dimension of a divine, transcendent being as that of the negativity of apophatic theology, the void of God in the sense of the subjective genitive. Once the void of God in the sense of the objective genitive gets a grip on the imagination— what we refer to, since Nietzsche, as the death of God— the negative of negative theology, the God without qualities, passes into the texture of being. What thereby emerges might be called an apophatic or negative ontology (a better phrase would perhaps be negative cosmology were it not for the semantic field already established around that word). And as both Kafka and Freud indicate, apophatic ontology can itself only be realized in relation to an apophatic or negative anthropology, one “grounded” in a gap or void in the constitution of the being of the human, in a “hollow” in this “crown of creation.” We might say that apophatic anthropology and apophatic ontology split the difference of apophatic theology: the difference of God from himself (God with and without qualities, with physis and meta-physis). What risks getting lost with the death of God is, in other words, not so much God’s presence as the void that has kept the human soul in motion, suffering and rejoicing in the process of figuring it out. Prayer, doctrine, liturgy, myth, spiritual practices, all these dogged researches of the human soul, might thus be grasped as so many modes of participation in the excess of figuration in the neighborhood of zero with respect to divine Being, the point at which God’s pure self-reference repulses predication. Both Kafka and Freud suggest that with modernity, this neighborhood becomes that of the navel of our dreams, the dark ground out of which the dreamwork emerges as so many efforts to figure out, to “pulsively theorize,” what is structurally inconsistent “out there,” what is not “working” in the texture of our social being, perhaps in nature itself. My readings of Kafka and Freud converge here with the work of Niklaus Largier, who reads the European tradition of mystical discourses and practices as experiential elaborations of apophatic theology, of fully registering— taking in and being taken in by— the void of knowledge con29. I’m tempted to see Anish Kapoor’s sculpture Inwendig Volle Figur as a plastic rendition of the topology of “encystance.” See https://www.wikiart.org/en/anish-kapoor /inwendig-volle-figur-2006.

   

136 : : C h a P t e r f o u r

stitutive of the encounter with the divine.30 In the mystical texts that form Largier’s primary archive, the void is realized in and through the excess of figuration circulating around it; they elaborate ways of, as I have phrased it, “figuring out” this void, of facilitating its circulation as a kind of persistent Erregung or excitation moving along chains of signifiers, affects, images, and thoughts that keep the mind open to what exceeds the intelligibility of the world as currently configured. His work provides a genealogical phenomenology of this transformation of an epistemological void with respect to divine transcendence into a rhetorical surplus intensifying the domain of immanence that thereby ceases to be a delimited domain, one still set off against transcendence. Figuration serves here as a mode of “encystance,” the way in which a void of knowledge comes to be “encysted” in the life of the subject, becomes the dark ground, the “night of the world,” out of which thinking, feeling, dreaming figure forth along waves of jouissance.31 Along this new plane of immanence, a negative anthropology— that of the “man without qualities”— overlaps with a negative ontology— the inconsistent, incomplete, contradictory field of the Other— to form the locus of the eternally recurring natality that Robert Musil referred to as Möglichkeitssinn, the sense of or feel for the possibility of new possibilities. Call it, perhaps “cynically,” with Kafka, “the freedom that is possible today— a stunted growth [ein kümmerliches Gewächs]. But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession.”

30. See Niklaus Largier, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mystical Theology, and the Play of Sensation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Stanford University Press for making the manuscript available to me. 31. Slavoj Žižek regularly uses this phrase to capture the import of radical, abstract negativity in Hegel. Žižek’s reference is Hegel’s manuscript for the Realphilosophie of 1805– 6: “The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity. . . . This night, the inner of nature, that exists here— pure self— in phantasmagorical presentations, is night all around it, here shoots a bloody head— there another white shape, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye— into a night that becomes awful.” Cited in Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 50.

ChaPter five

THE MANAFOLD OF EXPERIENCE

I

Among the most quoted texts in the literature of anthropology— at least among nonanthropologists— is no doubt Claude Lévi-Strauss’s short Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, first published in 1950. This short essay offers a kind of general theory of the “nameless woe” I’ve been tracking and how the void that occasions it, as if by magic, becomes the locus of symbolic authority, of exceptionally authoritative if enigmatic symbols. The passages that continue to exercise an enormous force of attraction on readers— and I count myself among them— are those pertaining to the notion of mana, a concept— or, as Lévi-Strauss calls it, a signifier— that itself functions as a name for just such forces of attraction in the “primitive” cultures analyzed by Mauss as well as by his uncle, Émile Durkheim. LéviStrauss famously argued that mana functions in the way his predecessors describe it above all in their own writings: “So we can see that in one case, at least, the notion of mana does present those characteristics of a secret power, a mysterious force, which Durkheim and Mauss attributed to it: for such is the role it plays in their own system. Mana really is mana there.”1 Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to critique and, ultimately, disenchant the concept 1. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987), 57. Subsequent references are made in the text. The term mana was introduced to Europe by the missionary and ethnologist Robert Codrington, who, in one attempt at a definition, writes, “The Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief in a supernatural power or influence, called almost universally mana. This is what works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature; it is present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to persons or things, and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation.” Robert Codrington, The Melanesians: Studies in Their Anthropology and Folklore (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 118– 19. In his General Theory of Magic, Mauss puts it this way: “This extraneous substance is invisible, marvelous, spiritual— in fact, it is the spirit which contains all efficacy and all life. . . . It is only supernatural ‘in a way,’ that is to say, that mana is both supernatural and natural, since it is spread throughout

   

138 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

by analyzing it as a linguistic phenomenon, as the name for a structural feature of all human languages that comes to be hypostasized, treated as a substantial reality, has, it would seem, itself absorbed a remnant of the force it was meant to dissipate. The work of disenchantment can, it would seem, exercise its own considerable charms, can itself become the cause of considerable excitement— at least in theory. Before continuing with the discussion of mana, I’d like to share some thoughts about this peculiar jouissance of disenchantment since it so clearly touches on the matter that opened this series of reflections.2 In his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber argues that the Reformation, and Calvinism in particular, contributed to the Entzauberung or disenchantment of the world by depleting “good works”— including the sacraments— of their direct efficacy with respect to salvation. Their “magic”— their mana— was deemed to be useless as a means for securing divine grace. But as Weber also argues, this disenchantment could only be sustained by a systematically and incessantly practiced Berufsarbeit, a labor in a calling devoted solely to the glorification of God rather than the enjoyment of the fruits of that labor. His criticism of Marx notwithstanding, Weber argues that the work of glorification, of securing, by way of the methodical rationalization of productivity— by a kind of entrepreneurial “Methodism”— ever more “surplus glory” for God, mutates into the spirit of capitalism understood as the incessant pursuit of the “secular” glory that Marx defined as surplus value. Marx’s well-known diagram illustrating the different forms of surplus value (absolute and relative) nicely maps on to Weber’s account. Marx uses the diagram, a———b———c, to illustrate the way in which surplus value is produced. The line from a to c represents the length of a workday, say ten hours. The line from a to b represents the length of time needed by a worker to create, through his or her labor, the value equivalent to that paid the tangible world where it is both heterogeneous and ever immanent.” Marcel Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, trans. Robert Brain (London: Routledge, 2001), 13. 2. This is again a point of intersection with and distance from Jason Josephson-Storm’s The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Josephson-Storm argues for the persistence of enchantment alongside otherwise fully rationalized spheres of value while I am arguing for the paradoxical persistence of enchantment in those rationalized value spheres as well as in the work of disenchantment itself. The point is not that figures like Max Weber ostensibly cultivated some form of mysticism on the side, as Josephson-Storm relates, but rather that the work of disenchantment is in its own way captivating. Indeed, that is why one must understand the word “spirit” in “spirit of capitalism” also in its “spiritualist” sense.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 139

for their labor power. For Marx this value is something like a minimal living wage, that is, one more or less equal to what it takes to keep a worker alive and sufficiently able-bodied to work another day and, in addition, to raise a family and thereby replenish the stock of future workers. If, for example, it takes four hours for a worker to produce that value, the remaining six hours he or she has “freely” contracted to work— the scare quotes are, of course, central to Marx’s analysis— are dedicated to the production of surplus value, value in excess of that required to maintain the life/livelihood of the worker. The goal of every owner of capital is to shorten as much as possible the distance from a to b with respect to b to c, that is, to produce ever more surplus value. As Weber argues with respect to the Protestant ethic, the point there is much the same: to shorten the time dedicated to maintaining the “natural man” and to maximize the amount of work dedicated to the glorification of God. The rationalization of the labor process thereby represents an effort to assure that ever more time is devoted to doxological labor, labor devoted to the greater glory of God, ad majorem Dei gloriam. But Weber also makes sufficiently clear that the business— or better: busyness— of glorification, though cultivated as what he characterized as “worldly asceticism,” secreted its own considerable share of jouissance, one not unrelated to that of the anorexic, the hunger artist par excellence, who needs ever more food not to consume, whose quasi-sexual enjoyment lies in the swerve from the satisfaction provided by eating. In his discussion of “ascetic ideals” in his On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche had already argued that asceticism represents a particularly refined mode of enjoyment. As he says there, the ascetic ideal was above all “employed to produce orgies of feeling”: “everywhere the scourge, the hair shirt, the starving body, contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the cruel wheel of a restless, morbidly lascivious conscience; everywhere . . . convulsions of an unknown happiness. . . . The old depression, heaviness, and weariness were indeed overcome through this system of procedures; life again became very interesting: awake, everlastingly awake, sleepless, glowing, charred, spent and yet not weary.”3 II

One will recall that not only Kafka’s narrator- dog but also the “original” philosopher- dogs— the Cynics— had also committed themselves to ascetic 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 139, 141.

   

140 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

practices as part of their efforts to “change the currency,” transvalue the values of Hellenistic society. The “royal life” of Cynicism was a life marked by a series of subtractions with respect to the conventional distinctions of kingship. As Foucault puts it, “The Cynic’s real monarchy inverted all the signs and distinguishing features of monarchies. It practiced solitude, whereas sovereigns were surrounded by their court, soldiers, and allies. It practiced destitution, whereas kings of the world gave themselves all the outward signs of wealth and power. It practiced endurance and ascetic exercises, whereas monarchs of the world practiced the enjoyment of pleasures.”4 But as we have also seen, these practices, especially with and after Diogenes, were conducted in what was seen to be strict conformity with the laws of nature. The subtractions demanded not the spiritual overcoming of natural needs and urges but rather a rigorous observance of them even if that required the natural shamelessness of dogs who took care of their needs, alimentary and otherwise, in public. Foucault takes considerable pains to distinguish the unkingly asceticism of Cynicism from the forms of asceticism developed within the Christian tradition. With respect to the key area of research of Kafka’s narrator- dog, the science of nourishment, Foucault writes, for example, that “What Cynicism sought . . . was to reduce one’s diet, to reduce what one eats and drinks to the basic food and drink that gives maximum pleasure at least cost, with least dependence. With Christianity we have, however, something different. We have the same idea that one must seek the limit, but this limit is in no way a point of equilibrium between maximum pleasure and minimal means. Instead, it will be the reduction of all pleasure so that neither food nor drink ever gives rise in itself to any form of pleasure” (317). The ascetic practices of the Cynics were conducted in conformity with a pleasure principle that was, in turn, rigorously regulated by reference to what was taken to be a reality principle observed in nature, while Christian asceticism already pointed to a dimension of enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle. Christian asceticism was also, as Foucault repeatedly emphasizes, oriented to a beyond of this life and of this world while the Cynics were oriented to a radically altered or other life that would reveal the urgency of a transformation of this world. Christian ascetic practices attuned one to the true life after death in the kingdom of God while those of Cynicism attuned one to (the true) life before death under the aegis of, at least from the point of view of the conventional life, a kind of majesty of the absurd. 4. Michel 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: Palgrave, 2011), 308. Subsequent references are made in the text.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 141

Equally important for Foucault is the way in which Christianity introduced into asceticism the dimension of obedience, thereby transforming what the Cynics associated with self-sovereignty into an aspect of what Nietzsche would refer to as slave morality: “Obedience to God conceived of as the master (the despotês) whose slave, whose servant one is; obedience to His will which has, at the same time, the form of the law; obedience finally to those who represent the despotês (the lord and master) and who receive their authority from Him to which one must submit completely” (320). What distinguishes Christian asceticism is, in a word, “this way of pinning the principle of the other life (la vie autre) as true life to obedience to the other in this world and to access to the other world in another life (l’autre monde dans une autre vie),” which, Foucault adds, represents “a way of pinning together a Platonic element and another specifically Christian or Judeo- Christian element” (320). It was, he writes, “one of the master strokes of Christianity,” to have linked together the theme of an other life (une vie autre) as true life and the idea of access to the other world (l’autre monde) as access to the truth. [On the one hand], a true life, which is an other life in this world, [on the other] access to the other world as access to the truth and to that which, consequently, founds the truth of that true life which one leads in this world here: it seems to me that this structure is the combination, the meeting point, the junction between an originally Cynic asceticism and an originally Platonic metaphysics. (319)

To summarize, Christian asceticism retains a fundamentally doxological thrust, functions as a modality of the glorification of God (and participation in that glory), while Cynic asceticism is, as Foucault argues, fundamentally adoxological or, as I have put it, paradoxological; it involves a displacement of doxa, of glory, from the Other to the truth verified in the conduct of a life in what we might characterize as excessive conformity with nature. In a word, the parrhêsia practiced by the Cynics was performed, to use another bit of wordplay, as a mode of veryfication. III

With apologies for this additional cynical detour, I’d like to return now to Lévi-Strauss’s strategy of disenchantment, of introducing an exciting kind of conceptual asceticism into cultural anthropology. He does so by means of what might be thought an extravagance: an anthropogenic story in which notions like mana are shown to emerge at the place of an epistemo-

   

142 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

logical impasse constitutive of human being. Becoming human, which for Lévi-Strauss means becoming a speaking being, a being endowed with language qua symbolic system, implies a gap or missing link in the diachronic dimension of its occurrence, one indexed by a persistent synchronic discordance in the communicative flow within that system. “Notions of the mana type,” as Lévi-Strauss refers to them, are meant to master or bind that discordance and thereby facilitate further communicative intercourse and exchange, to make communication work. Here is Lévi-Strauss’s radically abbreviated version of the story: Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually. In the wake of a transformation which is not a subject of study for the social sciences, but for biology and psychology, a shift occurred from a stage when nothing had meaning to another stage when everything had meaning. Actually, that apparently banal remark is important, because that radical change has no counterpart in the field of knowledge, which develops slowly and progressively. In other words, at the moment when the entire universe all at once became significant, it was none the better known for being so, even if it is true that the emergence of language must have hastened the rhythm of the development of knowledge. So there is a fundamental opposition, in the history of the human mind, between symbolism, which is characteristically discontinuous, and knowledge, characterized by continuity. (59– 60)

This opposition results in what Lévi-Strauss goes on to describe as a kind of chronic economic crisis pertaining to the supply and demand of efficacious signifiers, a crisis only apparently resolvable by way of a deus ex machina, namely, that man has from the start had at his disposition a signifiertotality which he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified, given as such, but no less unknown for being given. There is always a non- equivalence or “inadequation” between the two, a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up; this generates a signifier-surfeit relative to the signifieds to which it can be fitted. So, in man’s efforts to understand the world, he always disposes of a surplus of signification (which he shares out among things in accordance with the laws of the symbolic thinking which it is the task of ethnol-

The Manafold of Experience  : : 143

ogists and linguists to study). That distribution of a supplementary ration . . . is absolutely necessary to ensure that, in total, the available signifier and the mapped- out signified may remain in the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the exercise of symbolic thinking. (62–63; my emphasis)

Notions like mana function as a kind of general equivalent for this surplus— Lévi-Strauss variously characterizes it as a “floating signifier” (63), a “symbol in its pure state” (64), and a “zero symbolic value” (64)— that facilitates its distribution and circulation. And as Lévi-Strauss further adds, notions of the mana type stand “surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention” (63), those additional “flourishes” we’ve come to associate with the full flourishing of human life. It’s worth underlining a fundamental ambiguity with respect to the notions of surplus and excess. As already noted, the “signifier-surfeit” that notions like mana serve to bind and relay is correlated to a gap in the chain of knowledge, or perhaps better, to a knowledge that cannot be known but only excessively or, as we might now say, mana-ically, signified.5 The socalled floating signifier gathers and configures this surfeit around the place of something missing in the space of reasons, the space of possible knowledge of the world. In Lévi-Strauss’s anthropogenic terms, we come into the world endowed with a distinctive sort of inadequacy, with something forever withdrawn from our comprehension yet insisting— encysting— in our lives as speaking beings. To put it in somewhat paradoxical terms, we come into the world endowed with, we might even say, invested with, a surplus scarcity; human life begins, in a word, with a peculiar sort of investiture crisis.6 As I’ve suggested, in Richard II it is that crisis that serves as the cause of the queen’s otherwise nameless woe, one that makes itself felt in and through the fort/da of particular sovereigns. Another way of putting it would be to say that human life begins already in a state of withdrawal, the symptoms of which begin to take shape on, to use Rosenzweig’s terms, our second birthday, the birthday of our Triebschicksal, our drive destiny. 5. This overlapping of lack and surplus is nicely captured by the title of Mary Trump’s account of her uncle’s particular “brand” of psychopathology, Too Much and Never Enough. 6. It would seem that people like Schreber— let’s call them psychotics— have missed out on the distribution of the supplementary ration addressed by Lévi-Strauss and that allows one to encyst, to primally repress, that surplus scarcity and thereby get a minimal libidinal foothold in the world. This is, I think, what made Schreber so vulnerable to particular, “empirical” investiture crises.

   

144 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

IV

Among the thinkers who almost obsessively keep returning to LéviStrauss’s discussion of mana is Giorgio Agamben. Agamben has identified his own philosophical project not so much as one of disenchantment as of the profanation of a series of magico-religious notions— above all, that of the “sacredness” of life— that, in his view, continue to constrain our capacity to imagine new kinds of political forms, affiliations, and practices. In his reflections on the institution of the oath, Agamben complains that in his otherwise groundbreaking discussion of mana, Lévi-Strauss remains overly fixated on the cognitive dimension of language to the detriment of its ethical or normative aspects. “For the living human being who found himself speaking, what must have been just as— perhaps more— decisive [than any cognitive limits] is the problem of the efficacy and truthfulness of his words, that is, of what can guarantee the original connection between names and things, and between the subject who has become a speaker— and, thus capable of asserting and promising— and his actions.”7 This neglect amounts to proceeding “as if the becoming human of man were solely a question of intelligence and brain size and not also one of ethos, as if intelligence and language did not also and above all pose problems of an ethical and political order, as if the Homo sapiens was not also, and of course precisely for that reason, a Homo iustus” (68). Agamben’s “archaeology of the oath” is meant to capture this fundamentally normative dimension of language— its ethical bindingness— and indeed posits the oath as “the anthropogenic operator by means of which the living being, who has discovered itself speaking, has decided to be responsible for his words and, devoting himself to the logos, to constitute himself as the living being who has language” (69).8 7. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 68. Subsequent references are made in the text. Although he doesn’t mention him here, Agamben’s “archaeology of the oath” could be read as a further elaboration of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the concept of guilt/debt that begins with the famous question, “To breed an animal with the right to make promises— is not this the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man?” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 57. 8. As we’ve seen, Robert Brandom’s understanding of human sapience posits the intrinsic connection between the cognitive and the ethical/normative dimensions of language. Indeed, laying out the nature of that connection represents the fundamental thrust of his philosophical project. The claim is, in a nutshell, that the space of reasons is a space of normative statuses, one involving, among other things, commitment to and responsibility for the consistency of one’s claims in a community of others recognized as similarly responsible. Only in and through our implication in logical space

The Manafold of Experience  : : 145

In a short treatise on the concept of taste, the canonical treatment of which remains Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, Agamben turns to the notion of mana in his effort to capture the peculiar admixture of conceptual deficit and hedonic surplus that has been seen to inform the subject’s response— and peculiar responsibility— before objects of beauty.9 Kant famously argued that judgments of taste— cognitions grounded in aesthetic pleasure— implicitly included the claim of subjective universality, that if I find the object to be beautiful, then others ought to find it to be beautiful as well. Here it is a matter not of supplementing the classification Homo sapiens with that of Homo iustus but of unpacking the discerning sensuousness of taste— Agamben underlines the etymological link of sapiens to sapor— that is, of grasping the normative knowingness proper to the enjoyment associated with this most intimate sense. “From beginning to end, the problem of taste presents itself as that of ‘another knowledge’ . . . that cannot account for its judgements but rather enjoys them . . . and of ‘another pleasure’ . . . that knows and judges” (6– 7). Agamben’s claim is that what is tasted in the taste that informs aesthetic judgment— we might call it the partial object of aesthetic judgment— is, much as Lévi-Strauss argued with respect to mana, not a substantial reality but rather the locus of a surfeit of signification, “that which in the object is pure signification” (40). Extending Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on mana not only to eighteenthcentury aesthetic theory but, as he puts it, to “all the epistemological statutes of Western culture, from the ancient world until today,” Agamben links mana to the amorous mania that for Plato serves as the source of a divinatory knowledge “that cannot, as with episteme, explain itself or phenomena but, rather, concerns that which in them is simply sign and appearance” (19). Commenting on Plato’s treatment of the pair astronomy/astrology, Agamben writes, “ancient science left free in the phenomena what was pure appearance in them (that is, pure signifier), opening beside itself a space that divinatory science could occupy without contradiction. . . . The phenomena ‘saved’ by science [in this case astronomy] . . . inevitably leave behind a free residue, a pure signifier, that astrology can take as its support

qua normative space do our claims come to enjoy objectivity, acquire their representational purport; only then do they actually say something about how things stand in the world. 9. Giorgio Agamben, Taste, trans. Cooper Francis (Salt Lake City: Seagull Books, 2017). Subsequent references are made in the text. The text of this short treatise first appeared in an Italian reference work on philosophical terms in the late 1970s. LéviStrauss’s text has clearly been a crucial point of reference in Agamben’s work throughout his entire career.

   

146 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

and treat as a supplement of signification to distribute at its whim” (62). “In the ancient world,” Agamben concludes, “there are thus two species of knowledge: knowledge that is known, which is to say science in the modern sense as founded upon the adequation of signifier and signified; and knowledge that is not known, which is to say, divinatory science (and the various forms of mania enumerated by Plato) that is conversely founded upon the excessive signifier” (62– 63). Agamben’s discussion of taste in the sphere of aesthetic judgment was meant to show that the post-Enlightenment decline of the divinatory sciences, their retreat in the face of the expansion of modern science, “did not by any means signal the disappearance of this knowledge that is not known” (64). He goes on to note that “if aesthetics as knowledge of the excessive signifier (of the beautiful) is but a substitute for divination, it is nonetheless not the only knowledge in the modern epoch that comes to the fore after the eclipse of the divinatory sciences” (64– 65). It will come as no surprise that psychoanalysis is counted among these successor sciences alongside aesthetics and what Agamben groups together under the heading of the philological disciplines. As Agamben succinctly puts it, Freud’s science of the unconscious was “instituted on the assumption that there is a knowledge that is not known but that is revealed in symbols and signifiers” (68). As we have seen, this is precisely how Freud himself characterizes the task of the dreamwork: the elaboration of a knowledge that is not known but is in play in the translation of the latent dream thoughts into the manifest content of the dream. We have also seen that Benjamin’s understanding of the “task of the translator” implicitly assimilates translation to a kind of dreamwork, one ultimately bound not only by fidelity to the original text to be translated but also to a “surplus scarcity” mutely resonant within all languages as the remainder of the life of a pure language and, indeed, as what ultimately functions as the exciting cause of translation. For Benjamin, a bad translator is one who forgets this fidelity to what remains mute yet must be carried over from original to translation. These rather metaphysical speculations about unknown knowns— the one “class” of knowledge left out by Donald Rumsfeld in his now famous account of the kinds of knowledge and ignorance at stake in the invasion of Iraq (known knowns; known unknowns; unknown unknowns)— might make it surprising that the other crucial successor to the divinatory sciences of premodernity singled out by Agamben is political economy, the science devoted to the comprehension and optimization of the productive forces and material wealth of nations. Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of mana as the general equivalent of a semiotic surplus that circulates in language otherwise employed to leverage our capacity for knowing and cop-

The Manafold of Experience  : : 147

ing with the world, already points in this direction. But this is, of course, terrain already staked out by Marx, who was first to note how rife with “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” life under conditions of modern capitalism was. What Agamben has registered here is, then, that in Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of Mauss, Durkheim, and other researchers working in what William Mazzarella has called the “mana moment” of the European social sciences, mana functions much in the way that value (along with its general equivalent, money) does for Marx in his analysis of the commodity form.10 V

One will recall that Marx characterized value as a social substance and, indeed, as an occult and spectral one: a gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit. This spectral materiality is, Marx argued, something that is extracted/abstracted from laboring bodies and transferred to objects that thereby come to enjoy a dimension of value in excess of any use value, one whose form of appearance Marx called exchange value.11 Marx further argued that money, the general equivalent of value, becomes capital only when the drive to valorization, to the self-valorization of value, is up and running, that is, only when the stakes of the production process are the production of surplus value. Marx’s political economic point was that in modern capitalist societies lives are governed by, subject to, the imperative force of this spectral surplus and its immanent drive to self-appreciation, to what might be called its “autodoxological” tendency. Indeed, Marx himself offers a concise Christological formula for the valorization process as an autodoxological one: “It [value] differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person; for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally 10. See William Mazzarella, The Mana of Mass Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). For Mazzarella, the notion of mana had its high point in various social science disciplines in the years 1870 to 1920. In Homo Sacer, Agamben invokes Lévi-Strauss’s critical remarks on mana to support his own critique of the concept of “the ambivalence of the sacred” that circulated in ethnographic discourses contemporary with the “mana moment.” See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 75– 80. 11. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2008), 52. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 128. There Fowkes translates the term as “phantom-like objectivity.”

   

148 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

advanced become capital, and as soon as this has happened, as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father, their difference vanishes again and both become one, £110.”12 Doxologies are liturgical hymns sung in praise of God. I use that notion to underline the link between Marx’s understanding of the self-valorization of value— the driving force of capitalist economies— and Weber’s understanding of the spirit of capitalism as emerging out of the ostensibly Protestant compulsion to work solely and unceasingly for the greater glory of God, ad majorem Dei gloriam. Marx’s and Weber’s understanding of the imperatives that call us to work, that constitute the exciting cause of our work, resonate, in turn, with Freud’s understanding of the drives as a demand for work, an Arbeitsanforderung that, in his Three Essays, he characterizes as the “psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation.”13 The drives are, for Freud, the body’s way of “re-minding” itself to get busy in response to excitations emanating from within, to discharge or work off a surplus of pressure, a certain toomuchness signaling both small and large states of emergency— states of stasis, civil unrest— for the otherwise homeostatic state of the organism. Or more accurately (and uncannily), in response to excitations emanating not so much from within as from an encysted without, where “without” signifies both outside as well as lack, being without something. I am arguing, that is, that for these thinkers of capitalist modernity, the demand for work, for ever more work, is the manifestation of the encystance of stasis, of something fundamentally not working, in the form of life they inhabited. To return to Marx’s critique of political economy, I am proposing that Marx’s analysis of what he called commodity fetishism— a word, like mana, imported from the European colonies— anticipates the investigations of mana that Lévi-Strauss would critique as perpetuating at the level of cultural theory a kind of neo-pagan vitalism, an animistic reenchantment of the world. Put somewhat differently, I am suggesting that the preoccupation with mana (along with fetishism, totemism, etc.) in the social and cultural sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was itself a displaced way of engaging with the facts of a life ever more governed by the spectral materiality of value. Durkheim and Mauss, along with other researchers working in the “mana moment” were, in a word, already up to their ears in the stuff without ever leaving Western Europe. We know that neither Durkheim nor Mauss did any of their own ethnographic field12. Marx, Capital, 256. 13. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 34.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 149

work; we can now add that for the purposes of exploring the concept of mana, they didn’t have to. Indeed, it was precisely the way they “fell for” the concept that allowed them to articulate its complexities, richness, and relevance for European modernity, to give us a feel for it from within, or perhaps better: from the perspective of its encysted without. Marx’s labor theory of value should thus be grasped not so much as a theory of work, let alone of the industrial mode of production, but rather of the processes of mana-facturing that not so much efficiently as officiantly produce the “subtle matter” of value. Walter Benjamin would try to radicalize Weber’s thesis about the spirit of capitalism, to grasp it as religion (rather than one merely inspired by religion). The religion in question might best be understood as a manatheistic one, and indeed one practiced by its officiants 24/7. As Benjamin put it, “there are no ‘weekdays.’ There is no day that is not a feast day, in the terrible sense that all its sacred pomp is unfolded before us; each day commands the utter fealty of each worshiper.”14 Manatheism is by definition mana-ical. VI

Marx’s first encounter with the concept of the fetish most likely goes back to his readings in the early 1840s in the history of religion. Among the works he consulted or at least knew of secondhand were those of Charles de Brosses, who in 1760 introduced the concept of the fetish into European debates on the elementary forms of religious life. It is significant, I think, that the concept that would become so central to the labor theory of value began to get a grip on the European imagination at the end of the ancien régime, at the very moment, that is, when royal sovereignty, along with the political theological doctrines and rituals that sustained it, was beginning to yield to popular sovereignty, a shift that demanded new ways of establishing and sustaining social bonds. What Marx saw was that such bonds, such social relations, were coming to be determined by the relations of production of commodities, in a word, that the political theology of sovereignty was being displaced not only or even primarily by a political theory and practice of democracy but rather, though less visibly, by the political economy of value, by the task of administering and managing— of officiating— a somehow sacred, somehow spectral materiality. Ideology thus did not need to enter bourgeois economic relations in a secondary, 14. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913– 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 288. The fragment was translated by Rodney Livingstone.

   

150 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

superstructural way; it was already virtually there at its base, in the “base materiality” at issue in the mana-facturing process. Over the course of the nineteenth century, then, European theorists were extracting concepts from Europe’s various “primitive” and colonized others— from “without”— to grasp the transformation of social bonds brought about by historical processes of modernization, the very processes, of course, that pushed toward colonization. What allowed the theorists of the “mana moment” to recognize what the “mana workers”— another term I borrow from Mazzarella— were ostensibly elaborating in the cultures they were investigating was the fact that their own lives had at some level become mana-ical, absorbed by and busy with the everyday doxologies of value, doxologies once dedicated not only to God but also to his secular, political theological vicars on earth and audible in the acclamations accompanying coronations. I take Marx to have argued that the political theology of sovereignty had, by the time the “mana moment” arrived, begun to be absorbed by the political economy of the wealth of nations, which for that very reason meant that “wealth” was itself a misleading concept. Once the political theology of sovereignty bleeds into the political economy of the wealth of nations, the acclamations that once congealed in the king’s sublime body metamorphose into the perhaps less overtly theatrical but no less liturgical and spectacular productivity that congeals in the commodity as the spectral substance of its value, the lifeblood of capitalism. To invoke, once more, Lucile’s final acclamation— Es lebe der König!— in Büchner’s play about the French Revolution, in the shift from royal sovereignty to popular sovereignty to (bio)political economy, the royal remains. In each case we are faced with a kind of Doppelgänger charged with bearing and carrying over a remainder of life demanding special, officiant care and management that is thus always a form of mana-gement. Against this background, Marx’s critique of capitalism could be characterized as an attempt to reveal its mana-ical perpetuation of the majesty of the absurd. His critique could thus be characterized “cynically” as adoxological or, as I have put it, as paradoxological. The point remains that for Marx, capitalism is ultimately the recipe for a dog’s dinner, one that, however, as both Marx and Kafka’s canine researcher discovered, contains within it the seeds of new possibilities of human freedom. To recapitulate: I am claiming that the liturgical labor once expended to sustain the sublime body of the sovereign— one inherited, in its turn, from the double nature of Christ— has come to be ever more displaced and absorbed by the work of self-appreciation we engage in as officiants of the self-appreciation of value. To cite Kantorowicz once more on the

The Manafold of Experience  : : 151

mode of production of the “substance” of majesty, “the vision of the king as a persona geminata is ontological and, as an effluence of a sacramental and liturgical action performed at the altar, it is liturgical as well.”15 The modern “economization” of this liturgical labor should then, perhaps, no longer be understood as a straightforward process of secularization or indicates, rather, that we need to rethink, yet again, the very concept of secularization. Indeed, Marx’s argument, or at least in my reading of it, is that the shift from the Church to the Court to the Market— let’s say from Christological theology to political theology to bourgeois political economy and on to neoliberal forms of governance— represents so many ways in which our liturgical labors, our labors as “mana workers,” have been reorganized, recoded, and to a large extent naturalized— or perhaps better: “humanized”— with the notion of “human capital” figuring as a sort of culmination. There all labor is devoted to the work of appreciation of the precious substance that every body now incarnates, a labor that in principle keeps the body in a near constant state of busy-ness.16 In one of the short aphoristic texts that Franz Kafka wrote during his brief stay (September 1917 to April 1918) with his sister in the countryside outside of Prague, we find a beautifully concise allegory of these mutations of officiant life in the passage beyond royal sovereignty to a kind of bureaucratic majesty of the absurd, something we have come to refer to as “Kafkaesque”: They were given the choice to become kings or messengers. Just like children they all chose to be messengers. For this reason, there are only messengers; they race through the world and, because there are no kings, they cry out to one another announcements that have become meaningless. They would happily put an end to their miserable life but because of their oath of office they don’t dare.17

Against this background, Freud’s and Rosenzweig’s psychotheological engagements with modernity appear as critiques of manatheism, attempts 15. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 59; my emphasis. 16. Here the two meanings of doxa— opinion, glory— converge. A busybody is someone who circulates gossip and common opinion; a busybody is a body caught up in the business of the amplification of its glory, splendor, valor as quantum of human capital. 17. Franz Kafka, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 235– 36 (my translation).

   

152 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

to intervene in the mana-ical dimension of our ever more officiant lives (this is, I think, what Rosenzweig ultimately meant by “religiosity” and “religionitis”). In Rosenzweig’s case, that mode of intervention involved a new thinking and observance of the liturgical practices inherited from monotheistic traditions along with new kinds of pedagogy; in Freud’s case, it involved not only a new thinking of what it means to be “minded”— to have a mind as well as to be out of one’s mind— but also the invention of a new kind of clinical space and time in which one’s own private manatheisms could become accessible to oneself and thereby subject to transformation. VII

I’d like, in this context, to reconsider the notion of the brand as a particularly refined distillation of the spectral materiality at issue in the manafacturing process. In her pathbreaking book No Logo, first published in 2000, Naomi Klein presents in rich detail the history of the trend in the corporate world to see the brand as the real locus of the value of the commodity.18 In the book, she cites a number of corporate executives who proudly and, I would suggest, devoutly acclaim what seems to be a new revelation of the name, the glad tidings that the brand name functions no longer as the guarantee of the quality or reliability of the product but as the site of its splendor. This glory, this doxa, is meant, in turn, to circulate, to be socially mediated, as doxa in the sense of common opinion. A quote from Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel White Noise nicely captures this aspect of the brand: She uttered two clearly audible words, familiar and elusive at the same time, words that seemed to have a ritual meaning, part of a verbal spell or ecstatic chant. Toyota Celica. A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet- carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, 18. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2010).

The Manafold of Experience  : : 153

more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe. Whatever its source, the utterance struck me with the impact of a moment of splendid transcendence.19

As we know, branding is no longer the prerogative and obligation just of corporations and, as John and Jean Comaroff have demonstrated, of nations and peoples;20 in the context of the reorganization of capitalism around what Gary Becker among others has theorized under the heading of human capital, once, that is, the mandate to maximize value is not restricted to market exchange but permeates all aspects of human life, every individual life comes under the pressure to cultivate its own brand.21 We are all, at some level, interpellated as our own private mana-facturing enterprises; the elaboration of the spectral substance of value is now at some level performed, now officiated by, each member of the neoliberal polity. At the global level, as the Comaroffs and others have noted, the difference between manufacturing and mana-facturing is largely put into practice by way of a new geographical articulation of commodity production. Actual, physical products are more and more manufactured “offshore” by workers hired by subcontractors rather than directly by the parent company while the mana-facturing process— the production and maintenance of the brand— is largely performed in first world corporate parks and offices. Some of that work is in its turn now further outsourced to independent cognitive entrepreneur-laborers working in the “gig economy,” itself a high-tech return to the putting-out system. And, of course, to succeed in such an economy, one is more than ever compelled to become one’s own unique brand. The working conditions created by the COVID pandemic have very likely served to accelerate this transformation, to allow it, as it were, to really zoom.22 19. Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin, 1984), 155. I am grateful to Aaron Schuster for reminding me of this remarkable passage I first read decades ago. 20. See John and Jean Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 21. I would argue that Ernst Jünger’s notion of the “total mobilization” of global life and resources under the dominance of die Gestalt des Arbeiters, the figure/form of the worker, actually culminates in the neoliberal understanding of human capital. See Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form, trans. Bodgan Costea and Laurence Paul Hemming (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017). 22. If you “Google” “zoom,” at least at the time of the writing of these words, the brand name Zoom comes up first.

   

154 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

Against this background it should, perhaps, come as less of a surprise that the former American president managed to amalgamate political office, person, and brand.23 I am even tempted to say that Trump was not fully mistaken when he repeatedly claimed that there was no real conflict of interest between his duties as president and those of running his business. He may in fact have simply been naming a new mutation in modern political economy, call it brand-name sovereignty. What this means is that the conceptual— and lived— distinction between homo politicus and homo oeconomicus has lost much its salience. “Trump,” at least for a time, became the proper name, or rather, the brand name, of this zone of indistinction. Trump’s own autodoxological drive of self-appreciation— his constant need to be praised and to praise himself in front of others, to amplify the value of his personal brand— would then no longer be a contingent pathology, the personality disorder of the former incumbent of the office of president, but rather something transpiring within the office itself, call it the rebranding of sovereignty. Furthermore, the name “Trump” came to function in exactly the way that mana does in Lévi-Strauss’s analysis. First, it was literally self-reflexive: Trump became more and more the name for what exists by being ceaselessly trumped up, by being, as it were, mana-factured ex nihilo (this included producing lies out of thin air). As a floating signifier, the name literally floated from product to product, whether a building, a tie, a steak, a political poster; “Trump” as brand signified nothing more than that this or that product bore the name “Trump.” It would be fair to say that Trump became something like the high priest of the most radical cult of manatheism the world had ever witnessed or, as he perhaps would have put it, the likes of which the world had never seen. In the days, weeks, and months after the 2020 election, it became traumatically clear that a central feature of brand Trump was that he himself was by definition a winner, that he had to have won the 2020 election because that just is what the Trump brand means; to lose would have risked endangering the value of the brand, perhaps irrevocably. The insurrectionist violence that the world witnessed in the wake of his real loss in November 2020 was, among other things, a kind brand loyalty pushed to a MAGA-mana-ical extreme. It remains to be seen what will become of all that brand loyalty now that at least some of the precious jouissance it provided has been “stolen.” 23. Among the more blatant manifestations of this amalgamation was the use the former president made of his office to generate business for his hotels and golf resorts to the point where tax dollars flowed directly into his properties. One thinks, for example, of his efforts to pressure the British government to move the British Open to his golf resort in Scotland.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 155

VII

As I’ve noted, in “Capitalism as Religion,” Benjamin characterizes capitalism as a remorseless cult practiced 24/7. He furthermore claims that it is the first religion that infinitizes debt/guilt (Schuld) rather than offering redemption from it.24 What ultimately drives the process that Marx characterized as the in principle unbounded self-valorization of value is, on this view, a constant effort to convert a scarcity that can never be made good into a payable debt, the redemption of which, however, always yields a further remainder of scarcity. (With respect to the queen’s nameless woe in Richard II, we might say that any work of mourning with respect to the cause of this woe would still leave her too much sad.) This incessant return of the remainder correlates with what Benjamin saw as the infernal aspect— we might say, mana-ical aspect— of what Nietzsche posited as a kind of cosmic law, the eternal return of the same. I would argue that the thought of eternal recurrence was, precisely, Nietzsche’s attempt to cease disavowing the persistence of surplus scarcity by way of a new understanding and practice of repeating it. Be that as it may, against this background a notion like sabbath rest assumes a new aspect (as does its radicalization in the notion of the messianic). The cessation of work at issue in what could be called our sabbatical calling— our Berufsruhe— pertains not to work as such but rather to the mana-facturing process that keeps us mana-ically busy working off an impossible debt, filling in a surplus scarcity that ulti24. Mladen Dolar discusses the infinitization of debt apropos of the famous offer of mercy to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Dolar’s reading fits well with Weber’s understanding of the spirit of capitalism as emerging from the in principle infinite task of glorification, of the doxological dimension of labor in a calling. As Dolar writes, “the crux of the matter is that mercy, behind the cloak of its generosity . . . hinges on a surplus and extortion. Justice is equivalence, the just punishment and reward . . . according to the letter. Mercy is the surplus over the letter, over law and justice, not as coerced taking, but as voluntary giving. But the gift indebts all the more since its terms are not specified, and if they were to be specified this would cease to be mercy. Hence it opens an unspecified debt, a debt with no limits, an infinite debt. One is never worthy of mercy and however much one gives in return, as a response, it is never enough, it can never measure up to the free gift which has no equivalent, not in what one possesses. Hence one has to give what one doesn’t possess, which is the Lacanian definition of love— mercy demands its equivalent only in love. Mercy is a usurer which, by not demanding a circumscribed surplus opens an absolute debt. It demands not ‘an equal pound of flesh,’ but ‘an equal pound of soul’— this is why Shylock is granted mercy only on condition that he gives up his creed and converts to Christianity, the religion of love.” Mladen Dolar, “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained,” forthcoming in a collection of essays to be published by Bloomsbury. I am grateful to Dolar for sharing his work with me. In my Weight of All Flesh, I put it this way: Under Portia’s condition of mercy, Shylock’s debt must be infinitely amourtized.

   

156 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

mately, in one historical form or other, belongs to the human condition or, in Nietzsche’s terms, eternally recurs.25 There are, no doubt, multiple ways to conceptualize this surplus scarcity that, as Freud proposed, generates a continuously flowing source of stimulation registered as a demand, not for this or that kind of purposeful labor exercised according to the reality principle, but rather for dreamwork. What Freud called Urverdrängung, primal repression, is, as I’ve argued, the way in which the mind encysts (upon) a void of knowledge correlated with “something” not working in the form of life to which we belong. It facilitates the passage from this constitutive dysfunction to the capacity to dream, from a lack of a signifier (the namelessness of nameless woe) into the signifier of a lack— Lévi-Strauss’s zero-symbolic value— that can now, as it were, sponsor a wish. In his work, Žižek has often used the case of anti-Semitism to illustrate this conversion of a structural crisis into the wish-fulfilling dream of a flourishing society. Here “Jew” functions as the signifier that renders (oneirically) intelligible what, say, in Weimar Germany appeared as a chaotic multiplicity of economic, social, cultural, and political crises. What wasn’t working, what was causing society not to exist, has now been identified; the thing ultimately responsible for the mess has been determined or as one says in German, dingfest gemacht. Žižek, for his part, gives a Marxist name to this nonexistence of society: class struggle understood as a kind of stasis keeping the form of life broadly conceived as capitalist modernity from reaching any kind of homeostatic settling point. For Marx, class struggle and capitalism’s need to constantly revolutionize its modes of production, belong together, are two sides of a single coin. But as a Lacanian, Žižek also correlates that stasis with what would seem to be constitutive of the very being of the human: sexual difference. Here it is not society the nonexistence of which is at stake but rather the sexual relation the nonexistence of which is encysted and encysts in every sexual “union.” Žižek’s Slovene partner in thought Alenka Zupančič has perhaps most forcefully argued that Freud’s great discovery was the link between sexuality and the surplus scarcity I’ve been tracking, one she characterizes as an ontological deficit.26 As she programmatically puts it, “one of the founding gestures of psychoanalysis was to cut short the discussion of sexuality as a moral question by relating it to an epistemological difficulty, with im25. Recall that Weber’s term for the labor in a calling that “inspired” capitalism, lifted its spirits to heretofore unimaginable new heights, was Berufsarbeit. 26. Alenka Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 50. Subsequent references are made in the text.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 157

manent ontological relevance” (35; my emphasis). Repression, that is, is not originally a response to moral pressure with respect to sexuality; it does not, to use Foucault’s well-known formulation, initially follow the “repressive hypothesis.” Whatever moral questions gather around sexuality have their origin “in sexuality as an ontological problem” (35). In language that resonates with Bersani’s notion of “pulsive theorizations” as well as with Kafka’s new canine science, Zupančič writes that, “sexuality is the paradigm of research and exploration, not in the sense of the reduction to the last instance but on the contrary, because it brutally introduces us to the lack of the last instance. It is precisely this lack of the last instance that becomes the place of thought, including the most speculative (metaphysical) thinking” (35; my emphasis). To my ears, the phrase “the last instance” corresponds to the German letzte Instanz, a word with a certain Kafkan aura and which means something like the final agency or court of appeal for adjudicating a controversy, the place where one gets the last word on an outstanding conflict or disagreement (precisely what Kafka’s figures never find). In a word, sexuality encysts (upon) an irreducible stasis; there is no sexual homeostasis.27 The claim here is that this encystance opens the place of thought, is, to use Heidegger’s formulation, what first calls thinking into being (which, as Heidegger would say, is also always at some level the thinking of being). In more mundane terms, we think because we have been, at the very root of our existence, triggered (no trigger warnings possible here). Indeed, it’s as if in our being there resonated a voice, “WTF?! Why didn’t someone warn me about this?!” There is, then, something in sexuality that leaves our minds and bodies— our embodied minds— with an irreducible remainder of disorientation that lacks a “last instance” that could resolve or fully pacify it, provide for a proper sexual orientation. We might say that providence falls short here, leaves us with a scarcity in excess of any determinate lack. At this point in the argument, one could imagine that animals suffer their own version of such disorientation, that is, that this nonexistence already exists in nature. One will recall in this context Freud’s remark, first made in his 1912 article “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” and repeated in Civilization and Its Discontents, that “sometimes it is not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the [sexual] function itself which denies us [etwas am Wesen der Funktion selbst versage uns] full 27. What Rosenzweig addressed as the birthday of the metaethical self (first under the sign of Eros, then Thanatos) might be understood as the day of our brutal introduction into the lack of the last instance. If there is such a thing as birth trauma, it ought to be understood in relation to this second birth.

   

158 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

satisfaction and urges us along other paths.”28 In a footnote added to this passage, Freud links this kernel of dissatisfaction— or perhaps better, a primally repressed unsatisfaction constitutive of, encysting as, the subject of the unconscious— to a fundamental perplexity as to the meanings of “masculine” and “feminine” in sexual life, to the limits of formulating the biological fact of sex in psychological terms. That would, however, tend to push the locus of the disorientation in question more clearly into the domain of human life, to be part and parcel of the “event” of anthropogenesis. Zupančič, for her part, puts the matter in more orthodox Lacanian language, indicating a philosophical orientation one might call logical sexistentialism. Beginning with Lacan’s insistence that all discourse begins with a gap, she writes: This implication of discursivity and gap is a crucial point. . . . Lacan’s writing of it . . . is this: S (A), referring to a constitutive lack in the Other. What I would like to emphasize is the dimension of something like virtual subtraction or “minus” involved in this notion. This emphasis allows us to say not only that the signifying order is inconsistent and incomplete, but in a stronger and more paradoxical phrasing, that the signifying order emerges as already lacking one signifier, that it appears with the lack of a signifier “built into it,” so to speak (a signifier which, if it existed, would be the “binary signifier”). (41– 42)

What Zupančič means with the nonexistent “binary signifier” is, if I understand this notion correctly, an attempt to formalize what Freud was getting at in his admission of a limit with respect to the possibility of grasping the sexual function— along with the meanings of the “binary” masculine and feminine— in any sort of consistent fashion, in a way, that is, that would establish the coordinates of sexual orientation. What Freud refers to as a constitutive dissatisfaction inherent in the nature of sexual life, at least in the sexual life of human beings, is itself a function of this gap in the signifying order, this limit to our capacity to translate what would appear to be a biological fact into consistent logical and psychological terms. Sexuality would thus be born of a kind of signifying stress that our bodies and minds take on with every symbolic investiture locating us in social space beginning with those first fateful acclamations: “It’s a boy!”; “It’s a girl!”29 28. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 61. 29. In her introduction to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Judith Thurman offers an anecdote that underlines (at least one version of ) the stasis immanent to sexual

The Manafold of Experience  : : 159

In another passage Zupančič underlines the paradoxical dimension of sexuality as born from the lack of any primary sexual orientation guided by a clear set of relational terms: “the messiness of our sexuality is not a consequence of there being no sexual relation, it is not that our sexuality is messy because it is without clear signifying rules; it emerges only from, and at the place of, this lack, and attempts to deal with it. Sexuality is not ravaged by, or disturbed, because of a gap cutting deep into its ‘tissue,’ it is, rather the messy sewing up of this gap” (43). “Sex,” she continues, “is messy because it appears at the point of the breaking down of the signifying consistency, or logic (its point of impossibility), not because it is in itself illogical and messy: its messiness is the result of the attempt to invent a logic at the very point of the impasse of such logic. Its ‘irrationality’ is the summit of its efforts to establish a sexual ‘rationale’” (43).30 To use Rosenzweig’s formulation, sexuality is where we first— that is, under the sign of Eros— get very busy in response to the very good of the created death that (birth) marks our being. At one point, Zupančič herself puts her argument in biblical terms, reading the “event” of original sin as the moment of inscription into a (constitutively inconsistent) signifying field. In her account of the story of the fall, she follows the line of biblical scholarship that treats “good and evil” as a merism, a rhetorical figure in which a totality is invoked by the naming of its parts, typically those occupying the outer limits of the whole (as in, “he searched high and low”). Eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would then just mean knowledge of everything. But rather than pointing to divine omniscience or any sort of totality of positive knowledge, Zupančič reads “everything” to indicate the assumption of the signifying capacity as such the enjoyment of which always secretes a bit of jouis-sense, enjoy-meant.31 If, as she writes, “we venture a Lacanian reading of this, we

difference. She relates that when she was a day old an aunt came to visit her at the hospital nursery where she found a note attached to her niece’s bassinet announcing, “It’s a Girl!” As Thurman writes, “In the next bassinet was another newborn (‘a lot punier,’ she recalled), whose little tag announced, ‘I’m a Boy!’” The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier (New York: Vintage, 2011), ix. 30. Freud, in his reading of Schreber’s Memoirs, argues that what appears as the disease, as the messy proliferation of delusional thoughts, images, and experiences is, in fact, the mind’s efforts to heal itself, to stitch up a tear in the fabric of being that Freud describes as Schreber’s psychologically catastrophic withdrawal of all libidinal cathexis from the world. 31. The paradox is homologous to the one I’ve noted with regard to the notion of disenchantment as well as to its religious support, the practice of asceticism. As Weber

   

160 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

could add: not knowledge of this or that particular thing, but the (signifying) structure of knowledge as such. And what comes with the ‘(signifying) structure of knowledge as such’ is the gap of the unconscious. . . . In other words,” she concludes, “what was transmitted to them was precisely the gap of the Urverdrängung as constitutive of knowledge” (17). For Zupančič, what we might refer to as a “providential gap” provides the key to understanding the emergence of shame, an affect she characterizes as “properly ontological: it appears at the place of the lacking signifier (−1), because of the signifying lack built into the structure knowledge” (17). The missing signifier that would have provided human life with sexual orientation, this signifier that we, to our shame, are very much without, is, Zupančič finally suggests, what we really see in naked bodies: “The sight of naked bodies is not ‘shameful’ because of these bodies as such, but because of what these naked bodies fail to convey, namely, the sexual relation” (18).32 Our bodies convey in—or better, as—our flesh, an encystance of a void at the place where we would expect nature to have provided sexual orientation. At the conclusion of the fourth of the five lectures he delivered at Clark University in 1909, Freud invokes this enfleshed void as the principle occasion for the emergence of infantile sexual theories, as the trigger of the pulsive theorizations that gather around the primally repressed dimension of the enigma of sexual difference: “But as a result precisely of the incompleteness of his [the antecedent is das Kind, the child] sexual constitution, and of the gap in his knowledge due to the hidden nature [die Latenz] of the female sexual channel, the young investigator [den infantilen Forscher] is obliged [the verb is nötigen] to abandon his work as a failure.”33 Given her commitment to Lacan and the latter’s debt to Lévi-Strauss, it’s not surprising that Zupančič’s reflections on the “ontological deficit” that forever infuses language with jouissance resonate with Lévi-Strauss’s implicitly acknowledges, asceticism can’t help but produce a bit of the enjoyment it was meant to overcome. 32. While teaching a class on Weimar politics and culture, I came upon a popular song from the period, “Zieh Dich Aus, Petronella!,” by Friedrich Hollaender. When Petronella, otherwise engaged as a cabaret dancer, finally stands naked before her wealthy lover in her apartment, she is characterized as appearing mit ohne was, mit ohne was. One might translate it as, with without anything. Zupančič gravitates to just such formulations in her account of the ontological deficit constitutive of sexuality. 33. Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 52. To use a Derridean formulation, with primal repression sexual difference persists as sexual différance.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 161

account of the emergence of language as a signifying system that must include the dimension of mana. Mana names or “entitles” the enjoyment that gathers around a “zero symbolic value” covering a void of knowledge pertaining to the facticity of language, its emergence “all at once” (I use the word “cover” here in the sense of veiling but also of covering a debt). The claim that the signifying order is inconsistent and incomplete is essentially a reformulation of Lévi-Strauss’s remarks concerning “the non-equivalence or ‘inadequation’ between signifier and signified,” the “non-fit and overspill which,” as he puts it, “divine understanding alone can soak up.” When that divine work is neglected— when God’s away on business, as Tom Waits put it— we end up with “a signifier-surfeit relative to the signifieds to which it can be fitted” that we, in turn, get busy mana-ging.34 VIII

What I find especially compelling in Zupančič’s study of sexuality is the way in which she integrates Freud’s early insights about the constitutively perverse nature of human sexuality, first formulated in the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, with his later thinking about the superego. As one will recall from Freud’s account of thumb sucking, the partial drive that seizes on the oral cavity and its rim is shown to emerge as a supplement to the satisfaction of a need, to the homeostatic imperative demanding nourishment. To cite Freud’s account once more, “the satisfaction of the erotogenic zone is associated [vergesellschaftet], in the first instance, with the satisfaction of the need for nourishment. To begin with, sexual activity attaches itself to [lehnt sich zunächst an] functions serving the purpose of self-preservation and does not become independent until later. . . . The need for repeating the sexual satisfaction now becomes detached from the need for taking nourishment” (47– 48). We might say that the enigma about the origin of food that so preoccupied Kafka’s dog-narrator pertains in human life to the origin of this supplement, this peculiar surplus satisfaction originally attached to nourishment, one that acquires its own rhythmic signature, its own musical style (recall that Kafka’s dog is also a musicologist of sorts). Zupančič for her part cites the “style” known as gluttony to further amplify Freud’s insight. Here the surplus satisfaction in excess of any homeostatic imperative “not only deregulates the organic function, but reverses the causality of this configuration. If the surplus is first a by-product of satisfying 34. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction, 62. The song “God’s Away on Business,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, appears on the album Blood Money (2002).

   

162 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

an organic need for food, satisfying the organic need for food now becomes a by-product of repeating the surplus satisfaction. And this now functions to the detriment of life (and against lowering tension)” (103). At this point in her argument, she notes that the splitting of the object of satisfaction fails to fully account for the kinds of disorder introduced into life by way of sexuality, disorder that Freud placed at the root of all the illnesses he encountered in the clinic. “But this is not the whole story,” Zupančič continues, “nor the only split. It explains the genesis of surplus satisfaction, but it does not explain why this surplus satisfaction can have such a ‘revolutionary’ effect, and can amount to a complete reversal of the order of things (or at least to a relative autonomy of the drive with respect to organic functions)” (103– 4). Apropos of gluttony, Zupančič argues that the insatiable striving for surplus satisfaction cannot fully account for its persistence and so “we must also ask what other (symbolic) demand this striving feeds” (104). Her answer returns us to the surplus scarcity, the “ontological deficit” with which our inaugural symbolic investiture as speakers of a language leaves us, one only precariously covered by an advance of mana: “the structure of the drive implies something else (and more) than this surplus satisfaction: a negativity around which it circulates and which relates (the structure of ) the drive to the primal repression: to an inbuilt negativity— negativity transmitted with the ‘positive’ ontological order of being” (104). The claim is that the superego takes hold of the surplus satisfaction that splits off from the satisfaction of needs. We end up with a duty to enjoy as part of a “cover-up” of a surplus scarcity for which no one is taking responsibility; our enjoyment becomes truly encystant, becomes the way in which we occupy the place of that “no one.” The transmission of the inbuilt negativity, of surplus scarcity, is, in a word, relayed in the voice of the superego, which has the capacity to transform the domain subject to its imperatives into, as Freud has put it, “a pure culture of the death drive [eine Reinkultur des Todestriebes],” call it the ultimate “cancel culture.”35 Freud makes this remark in the context of investigating the question, “How is it that the superego manifests itself essentially as a sense of guilt (or rather as criticism— for the sense of guilt is the perception in the ego answering to this criticism) and moreover develops such extraordinary harshness and severity towards the ego?” Freud offers melancholia as an example of a particularly extreme form of superegoic severity. There, Freud writes, “we find that the excessively strong superego which has obtained a hold 35. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere and James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989; trans. modified), 54.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 163

upon consciousness rages against the ego with merciless violence, as if it had taken possession of the whole of the sadism available in the person concerned.” “We should say,” he continues, “that the destructive component had entrenched itself in the superego and turned against the ego.” That is what Freud then characterizes as the rule— the verb is herrschen— of a “pure culture of the death drive.”36 Freud extends the political metaphor by adding that it is often only the shift into mania that allows the melancholic “to fend off its tyrant in time” and avoid suicide.37 This language calls us back to the world of Shakespeare’s sovereigns and the nameless woe correlative to the real hollow in the crowns of kings. In melancholia, one holds oneself responsible, finds oneself to be culpable, for this surplus scarcity— to be (very) guilty as (sur)charged. In Zupančič’s terms, “the drive does not want (us) to enjoy. The superego wants (us) to enjoy. The superego (and its culture) reduces the drive to the issue of satisfaction (enjoyment), making us hostages to its vicissitudes, and actively blocking access to the negativity that drives it” (my emphasis). The crucial point is that “satisfaction (for the sake of satisfaction) is not the goal of the drive, but its means. This is,” Zupančič argues, “what is profoundly disturbing about the ‘death drive’: not that it wants only to enjoy, even if it kills us, but that it wants only to repeat this negativity, the gap in the order of being, even if this means to enjoy. Enjoyment is the means whereas the ‘aim’ is the repetition of the lack of being in the very midst of being” (104). At some level, the superego is always saying: “Welcome to the world! What are you waiting for? Get busy— enjoy!” When Freud characterized the drive as an Arbeitsanforderung, a demand for work, he had, in other words, already, even before he had the concept, presupposed the existence of the superego. This account fits well with what I earlier proposed as an affirmative (rather than infernal) reading of Nietzsche’s conception of eternal recurrence, namely, as an attempt to cease disavowing the persistence of surplus scarcity by way of a new understanding and practice of repeating it and thereby of overcoming the temptation to make someone— oneself, for example— culpable for it (this is surely a defining feature of the “overman”). To put it somewhat differently, we might say that when we get sapience we also get a minus of sapience (which is not simply a not-yet-known), and it is this minus that intensifies, that sexualizes, sentience, which, in (re)turn, informs the way we move through the world, the way we inform ourselves about it, gain knowledge of it, determine what is salient to our 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 55.

   

164 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

lives. It’s not that sexuality is the fundamental fact of human life; sexuality is, rather, where that minus becomes incarnate, becomes flesh. What I have been calling sarxism begins with the recognition of this intensification of the somatic by way of a surplus scarcity encysted in our being when we become speaking subjects in the space of meaning. IX

I’d like to conclude this chapter by returning, briefly, to the sarxist dimension of Marx’s thought, a dimension first registered in our libidinal economy as the splitting of the object of need into itself and its “double,” one that becomes a source of a supplementary satisfaction that tends to become independent of need. We’ve seen how that independence is compromised by, as it were, being taken into the service of the superego to cover a “repulsive” deficit caused by nothing, by a surplus scarcity I have characterized as the overlap of an ontological and epistemological void. Marx had, in his critique of political economy— the modes of encystance proper to capitalist modernity— already covered this ground in his account of the valorization process in capitalism. The two splits at issue for Marx are, first, the split between use value and (exchange) value and, second, the split between money and capital proper. The first split allows for that “perversion” of the management of the oikos that Aristotle addressed as the seduction of chrematistics, the art of making money for the sake of money rather than for the acquisition of use values that satisfy genuine needs. But as Marx argues, the money form alone as the general equivalent of value that allows for the circulation of use values under the sign of their exchange values does not in and of itself generate the revolutionary forces of capitalism that he so famously lauds in the pages of the Communist Manifesto. For that to happen, money must first be transformed into capital. As we’ve seen, this requires the availability of a special commodity the use of which produces value and indeed more value than it itself commanded on the market. That commodity is, of course, labor-power. Only with the systematic deployment of that unique commodity does the valorization process proper to capitalism begin, one to which Marx attributes a demonic autonomy and indifference with respect to human needs. That systematic use of labor-power transforms it into something abstract and spectral, what Marx refers to as homogeneous human labor, that is, “human labor-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure.”38 Following Agamben’s analysis of the notion of 38. Marx, Capital, 128; my emphasis.

The Manafold of Experience  : : 165

bare life as the immediate referent of sovereign power, abstract, homogeneous labor can be understood as the bare labor that, in capitalism, figures as the immediate referent of money qua general equivalent of value, the sovereign signifier in the economic realm. Just as we saw with gluttony, then, something must take hold of avaricious wealth-getting— of economic thumb sucking— so that it becomes a kind of virtue, becomes rational— or better, very rational. What takes hold of it is the process that Marx calls the self-valorization of value. To cite Aaron Schuster’s formulation, economic thumb sucking is transformed into the invisible hand job of the market.39 For the miser to overcome the peculiar madness that, despite all accumulated wealth, constrains his chrematistic capacities he must become a rational miser; it is only because, by way of a dialectic of economic enlightenment, he methodically cultivates a new form of madness that his sinfulness becomes a kind of virtue. “This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The ceaseless augmentation of value, which the miser seeks to attain by saving his money from circulation, is achieved by the more acute capitalist by means of throwing his money again and again into circulation.”40 And as Marx emphasizes, this acuteness is dictated by a process enjoying its own quasi-autonomous agency. As he puts it in a deservedly well-known passage, The independent form, i.e. the monetary form, which the value of commodities assumes in simple circulation, does nothing but mediate the exchange of commodities, and it vanishes in the final result of the movement. On the other hand, in the circulation M-C-M both the money and the commodity function only as different modes of existence of value itself, the money as its general mode of existence, the commodity as its particular or, so to speak, disguised mode. It is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value [der sich verwertende Wert] in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus39. Cited in Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 30. 40. Marx, Capital, 254– 55.

   

166 : : C h a P t e r f i v e

value from itself considered as original value [sich als Mehrwert von sich selbst als usprünglichem Wert abstößt], and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplusvalue is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization [seine Verwertung also Selbstverwertung]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.41

In modern, capitalist societies, it would seem, then, that the voice of the superego speaks above all from the place of value writ large and calls out encouragingly, when we manage— or rather, manage— to make some progress, “That’s the spirit (of capitalism)!” Which is to say that the Protestant ethic has long become the ever more rapidly beating heart of a purely manatheistic cult in which we are all mana-ically engaged in working off the impossible debt of a surplus scarcity, in which we have all become more or less officiant at the dreamwork of capitalism and where even those who “would happily put an end to their miserable life . . . because of their oath of office . . . don’t dare.”

41. Ibid., 255; my emphasis.

ChaPter 6

WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE Remarks on Post-Thaumatic Stress Disorder

I

I should say at the outset that I’m entering terrain in this chapter that makes me nervous, leaves me feeling the limits of my education and conceptual capacities. It also reminds me of why I decided years ago not to become a “professional” philosopher. If I were team-teaching this material with a philosopher, it would be the moment I would ask my colleague to take the lead in the discussion (indeed, I have done that very thing numerous times in seminars I’ve taught with Mladen Dolar). I continue, namely, to be struck by a fundamental ambiguity as to the relation between ontology and knowledge, between what Zupančič refers to as an ontological deficit, on the one hand, and a void of knowledge, on the other. I am, of course, not alone in worrying about this ambiguity. Indeed it is one of the central bones of contention in contemporary struggles over Hegel interpretation, represented, on the one side, by Robert Brandom, Robert Pippin, and Terry Pinkard, among others, and, on the other side, Slavoj Žižek and his main philosophical partners constituting the “Ljubljana school.”1 I am, as I’ve noted, not just a reader of the writings of these philosophers; Pippin is a colleague and friend at the University of Chicago. I have sat in on several of his seminars— including one cotaught with Pinkard on Hegel’s aesthetics— and sat in together with him in a variety of seminars offered by others (among them, Michael Fried and Irad Kimhi). My deepest intellectual bond, one sustained by years of close friendship and collaboration, is, no doubt with the Ljubljana group. The ambiguity at issue is, however, one that remains 1. There are many other names one could add to both sides; these are the figures who have mattered most to me. This debate over Hegel has implications for a number of recent theoretical endeavors aimed at dismantling the idea of human exceptionalism, of, as it were, reinserting human life into the great chain of Being. This includes objectoriented ontology, the new materialism, and actor-network theory, among others.

   

168 : : C h a P t e r s i x

for me a problem; this chapter is above all an attempt to worry “out loud” about it in the language available to me. My Ljubljana friends remain committed to what they argue is the proper Hegelian view, namely, that epistemological limits of the sort at issue here are indexes of ontological inconsistencies, of a lack of being in being. From this perspective, that lack is the “substance” of what Kant posited as the noumenal Thing-in-Itself beyond our cognitive capacities, beyond the transcendentally constituted realm of phenomena. In Hegel, Kant’s Thing is displaced and dispersed into the troubled social life of reason in history. It’s not simply that something isn’t working at the level of our finite cognitive capacities, that some “real” reality remains, on account of those limitations, eternally transcendent to knowledge (because not transcendentally constituted). Rather, something isn’t working “out there” in transcendent reality and that is precisely what calls us into, what demands our being in, its midst. In theological terms, the claim here is that the world is not fully created. What Rosenzweig, in his commentary on Genesis, characterized as the very good of creation, the created death that (birth)marks human being— a sort of hollow in the ostensible crown of creation— just is the “subjective” encystance of a hollow in the very fabric of creation; subjectivity just is the registration of the world’s status as still-being- created, its being, as it were, a work in progress and so, in a sense, “progressive” in orientation. We get a foothold in reality— we are emphatically in the world— only because thinking is called for, made imperative by, points of inconsistency, incompleteness, and dysfunction in reality, only because we are called upon to participate in creation, to be encystant partisans of its progress, to engage in what thinkers like Rosenzweig refer to as the work of redemption. Žižek’s approach to class struggle helps to illustrate the point at issue. Quentin Meillassoux has claimed that Žižek remains stuck in a “correlationist” universe in which undecidable events or failures of signification that ostensibly open a materialist moment in thought are only ever for the subject, that is, that one never reaches what Meillassoux characterizes as the “great outdoors” of the In-Itself beyond the subject. In a word, that he remains an idealist. Against this charge, Žižek points to the stasis of class struggle to illustrate the objective nature, the truth of the subjective testimony at issue. The subject, he writes, “is inscribed in the real, it touches the real, precisely at the point of the utmost ‘subjective’ excess, in what it adds to the object, in the way it distorts the object.”2 I am reminded here again of Richard II, of the queen’s insistence, in her dialogue with Bushy, that the 2. Slavoj Žižek, Disparities (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 103.

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 169

anamorphotic shadow darkening her mood, the subjective excess of her being “too much sad,” bears witness to something in some sense more real than any determinate cause of grief.3 As Žižek continues, There is no neutral “impartial” approach to it, no metalanguage, every apprehension of class struggle is already “distorted” by the subject’s engagement in it, and this distortion, far from preventing our direct approach to the actuality of class struggle, is in itself the real of the class struggle— it is in this very failure to subtract its own partial perspective and reach the object that the Real inscribes itself, that the subject touches the Real. So it is not just that the subject always fails, etc.: it is through this failure that the subject touches the Real.4

Žižek— along with Dolar and Zupančič— has furthermore argued that the Unbehagen that Freud associates with culture— a domain that of course includes class struggle— already begins in some way in nature itself, that is, that there already is an Unbehagen in der Natur. The human mode of Unbehagen, of discontent that Freud explores is, then, not only a symptom of something not working in culture/civilization but also testifies to an unconscious knowledge that nature itself fails to exist as a functional whole from which human beings have simply (though fatefully) become alienated, to which they no longer fully belong and can only reach through the means and media of cognition: language, concepts, representations, tech3. I also find myself thinking of Dori Laub’s account of the truth of a historically inaccurate memory recorded by a survivor of Auschwitz. Laub tells the story of an interview he conducted of a survivor of the camp for the Video Archive of Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. At one point in an otherwise subdued report of her memories of the camp, the testimony becomes impassioned, full of intensity. She relates the story of the armed revolt at the camp in which, as she recalls, four chimneys of the crematoria were blown up. At a conference on Holocaust education some months later, Laub played the video for the group. The historians among them felt that an inaccuracy in the survivor’s testimony called into question the reliability of her testimony as a whole. We now know, namely, that only one chimney and not four were destroyed at the revolt in question. Laub, a psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor himself, relates his response to the historians: “The woman was testifying . . . not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The event itself was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke the all-compelling frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did not happen, and had no place. She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth.” Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 60. 4. Žižek, Disparities, 103.

   

170 : : C h a P t e r s i x

nology. What is being challenged here is what might be called the natural attitude toward nature: nature, the reality “out there” that we struggle to grasp, knows what it’s doing (thank God, as some would add), and it’s our task to acquire that knowledge as best we can for the sake of human flourishing. Nature is not, on this account, a substantial, fully constituted Other to human culture, an Other against which we can easily take the measure of our “fall.” As Zupančič has put it apropos of that notion, what original sin signifies is the becoming unconscious of a lapse already “out there” as an ontological incompleteness of reality; what is sinful, we might say, is being in on this dirty little secret about nature. If the great chain of Being did not include a missing link, there would be no subject or, to use Heidegger’s terms, we would never be there. To be in the world means to be constitutively preoccupied by points of darkness already “out there,” already shadowing the Lichtung of being. This means that what I have been calling, following Jonathan Lear’s usage, the remainder of life, carries over into life not simply a tear that separates us from the matrix of being but rather what, in that matrix, is already wanting, already torn in itself. In the context in which Lear develops this notion— the fort/da game analyzed by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle— this means that the remainder in question is not simply an irreducible leftover of the trauma of a tear that befalls the mother- child field of being— every human being’s first matrix— but also the index of a gap or lapse immanent to that field. That is to say, this matrix always already includes in it the “tear” of the mother’s lack, the insistence of the mother’s desire, of her being at some level “torn” in her being as a mother. The dogged researches of a child that Freud referred to as infantile sexual theories begin in and as the encystance of that tear.5 Žižek is, I think, singular in this group through his efforts to argue for this Unbehagen in der Natur— that Mother Nature is wanting, is torn from “the start”— by way of an engagement with the ontology he sees as implicit in quantum physics. Here the being of the most elementary particles of the universe are shown to be plagued by constitutive uncertainties and ambiguities, to be in some sense not fully there. This has earned Žižek a reputation for confusing the speculative dimension of Hegel’s thought with speculations about the implications of certain directions in modern physics for first philosophy. Pippin, a close reader of Žižek’s writings, has found this aspect of the latter’s work to be a bridge too far (as noted, he 5. For a different kind of effort to bring together philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the mother, see Andrew Parker, The Theorist’s Mother (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 171

refers, somewhat derisively, to Žižek’s “gappy ontology”). Žižek, for his part, characterizes the Hegelianism represented by Pippin and, more recently, by Brandom, as so many versions of a kind of decaffeinated or deflated Hegel; they offer up a liberal thinker of mutual recognition, an almost Habermasian Hegel lacking in the at times mad verve— the subjective excess— that distinguishes his thought and that, as Žižek has argued, accounts for the crucial dimension of his passage beyond Kant. What he calls Brandom’s “renormalization” of Hegel aims “to demonstrate how Hegel’s most extravagant formulations, when properly (re)interpreted, make sense in our common space of meaning.”6 Though clearly admiring of the rigor, clarity, and scope of Brandom’s accomplishment, he nonetheless wants “to argue against such ‘domestication’ of Hegel and defend Hegel’s ‘madness.’ Hegel’s statements have to shock us, and this excess cannot be explained away through interpretation, since the truth they deliver hinges on that.”7 In Rosenzweigian terms, Žižek’s point would seem to be that Brandom and Pippin lose touch with what makes Hegel very good, a true cause for excitement and one that cannot be absorbed or even fully registered in the Hegel of social, recognitive normativity, cannot be accounted for by making explicit, however rigorously, what is ultimately implied by entering the game of giving and asking for reasons. Recalling, once more, Lear’s account of the child’s entry into the game of fort/da, for Pippin and Brandom life in the space of reasons, at least as far as philosophy is concerned, appears to be untroubled by a remainder of life (for Rosenzweig, the very point of departure for the “new thinking”). Another way of putting it would be to say that in this reading Hegel loses his sex appeal, the way in which his thinking— the sort of theory he elaborates— touches on and is indeed nourished by a lack of being in being around which the drive eternally circulates, a view that places him in a perhaps surprising proximity to Nietzsche. This is the background of Žižek’s remarks apropos of Pippin’s critique of “claims about holes in the fabric of being,” of Žižek’s “gappy ontology.” As we’ve seen, Žižek’s point is that the very existence of the subject is an index of a lapse of being in being or, more strongly, that they represent two aspects of the same thing— the missing Thing. Pippin, he writes, “is well aware that I develop the topic of ontological incompleteness in order to answer the question ‘How should reality be structured so that (something like) subjectivity can emerge in it?’”8 On Žižek’s view, Pippin’s as well as 6. Žižek, Disparities, 90. 7. Ibid., 90– 91. 8. Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 19. As I put it earlier, the world must be so constituted that

   

172 : : C h a P t e r s i x

Brandom’s position remains tied to Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception. As they each argue, this is ultimately a notion of normative selfawareness implying an “I” cognizant of its obligations of rational, inferential unity (all its commitments ought to be compatible with one another), cognizant that its claims about the world must be justified by reasons proffered to other members of the community of equally rational and normatively bound subjects.9 For Pippin et al., at least on Žižek’s reading, the “(something like) subjectivity” that emerges in reality— Hegel’s name for it is spirit or Geist— is, at bottom, the rational subject bound by the rules of the game of the giving and asking for reasons. As Pippin puts it with respect to the historical struggles to establish the social practices and institutions in which such rationality can come to full fruition— can be in and for itself— “Spirit emerges in the imagined contestations, in what we come to demand of each other, not in the interstices of being.”10 Brandom and Pippin’s eminently reasonable Hegel thus stands over against a Hegel whose elaboration of a strange, “gappy” ontology is what first allows him to move beyond Kant.11 As I’ve indicated, the dispute could be understood as one concerning the possible philosophical meaning of the “very good” of the sixth day of creation, the meaning of what Rosenzweig referred to as the “created death” that installs a kind of surplus creation, an Überschöpfung, within creation, “something more than worldly within the worldly, something other than life which yet belongs to life and only to life, which was created with life as its ultimate, and which yet first lets life surmise a fulfillment beyond life.”12 something like dreaming can emerge, or more strongly, that there is a demand for dreamwork, call it a Traumarbeitsanforderung. 9. Émile Durkheim’s version of this view, developed above all in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, plays on the double meaning of the French word conscience, which means both conscience and consciousness. For Durkheim, the conditions of possibility of a robust sense of consciousness of world include the moral authority of one’s society that speaks in and through conscience. The fundamental forms of human thought, the forms in which things become truly salient, emerge, for Durkheim, in the context of religious life. This is a life informed through and through by normative pressure, by imperatives experienced within as coming from compelling forces from without registered as simultaneously natural and social or rather, with an indifference to that distinction. To return to an earlier formulation, for Durkheim man first becomes observant of the world in the context of forms of religious observance. 10. Robert Pippin, cited in Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 19. 11. As I’ve suggested earlier, another term for “gappy ontology” might be apophatic ontology. 12. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Halo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 155.

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 173

From this “creationist” perspective, Geist becomes above all the name for the way, for the medium, in which human being carries over this surplus into its historical forms of life. I agree with Žižek that Pippin’s approach seems to leave no place for this carryover, this translational/transferential activity that is, as I see it, what is ultimately at stake— and at work— in subjectivity, that is, in our libidinal implication in reality, our being truly— and that means partially, with partiality— there. Only then can we impart our commitments to others, only then do they carry any force beyond communicating information about the world. Another way of putting it would be to say that subjectivity implies being affectively oriented in the world (Heidegger would say gestimmt, attuned on the basis of fundamental moods, Grundstimmungen, like anxiety); it is a peculiar philosophical affectation to pretend that we are affected by the world essentially with respect to our cognitive grasp of things, our use of concepts in the context of our participation in the game of giving and asking for reasons.13 Related to this difference over the affective, not to say, traumatic, dimension of subjectivity is Pippin’s offhanded dismissal of the philosophical relevance of the question of anthropogenesis: Of course, it is possible and important that some day researchers will discover why animals with human brains can do these things [giving and asking for reasons for commitments and actions] and animals without human brains cannot, and some combination of astrophysics and evolutionary theory will be able to explain why humans have ended up with the brains they have. But these are not philosophical problems and they do not generate any philosophical problems.14

These words echo Lévi-Strauss’s now familiar remarks on anthropogenesis, though in contrast to Pippin, the anthropologist, attuned as he is to the nature of symbolic systems, underscores the rather (stressfully) significant remainder produced in the process. One will recall that from the start, LéviStrauss emphasizes the lapse constitutive of our life with language: “Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the ascent of animal life, language can only have arisen all at once. Things 13. It’s worth noting that Žižek’s critical response to Pippin is in part echoed in Pippin’s own critique of Brandom’s version of Hegel, especially its somewhat antiseptic take on our capacity to distinguish between the use of words as an exercise of power and their use in the game of giving and asking for reasons. See Pippin, “Robert Brandom’s Hegel,” in Pippin, Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 29– 61. 14. Pippin, cited in Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 20.

   

174 : : C h a P t e r s i x

cannot have begun to signify gradually. In the wake of a transformation which is not a subject of study for the social sciences, but for biology and psychology, a shift occurred from a stage when nothing had meaning to another stage when everything had meaning.”15 And as Lévi-Strauss immediately adds, as if anticipating Pippin’s stance, “Actually, that apparently banal remark is important, because that radical change has no counterpart in the field of knowledge, which develops slowly and progressively” (62; my emphasis). This missing counterpart is filled in by, makes itself felt as, the pressure of an oneiric excess of signifying activity (what Freud referred to as dreamwork). To cite the crucial passage once more, Man has from the start had at his disposition a signifier-totality which he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified, given as such, but no less unknown for being given. There is always a non-equivalence or “inadequation” between the two, a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up; this generates a signifier-surfeit relative to the signifieds to which it can be fitted. So, in man’s efforts to understand the world, he always disposes of a surplus of signification. (62; my emphasis)

One should recall here that Lévi-Strauss, for his part, seems just as content as Pippin with a sort of academic division of intellectual labor. In particular, he assigns to ethnologists and linguists the task of tracking the circulation of this surplus— of mana— in the myths, rituals, and cultural practices of historical forms of life, a division of labor that, as it were, cordons off a static-free zone for the slow progress of knowledge production— call it the university. But as we have seen, it is precisely the sort of theoretical enterprise I have been tracking throughout this volume that refuses to stick to such disciplinary assignments, to remain within the domains established by the discourse of the university (including the determination of what is or is not a proper philosophical problem). It should come as no surprise, then, that in his critique of the “deflated” Hegel, Žižek himself takes up Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of mana, that bit of a signifier that, notwithstanding the efforts of the university, unceasingly floats across disciplinary boundaries.16 As I read Lévi-Strauss, this floating or zero-signifier serves to bind the free energy released by the surprise, the eternally recur15. Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987), 62. Subsequent references are made in the text. 16. Žižek, Disparities, 93– 94.

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 175

ring all-of-a-suddenness, of the emergence of language in our life with language, thereby sustaining our libidinal implication in the space of meaning, in a word, our subjectivity. I’m suggesting that without the Anstoss of that surprise there would be no wonder, no cause for excitement, that there is being rather than nothing. Žižek’s claim about Hegel might be said to be that for the latter, precisely as a thinker dedicated to the dialectical life of reason in history, wonders never cease. Aristotle’s dictum that philosophy begins in wonder, with thaumazein, is taken to mean that philosophy in theory never stops beginning, never stops being original.17 II

Where does this leave us with regard to the question of the (ontological or merely epistemological) status of the surplus scarcity we (com)pulsively theorize in our dreams, symptoms, and cultural productions, in the ways we unceasingly persist at being unconscious of it, of encysting (upon) it? Following Lévi-Strauss and indeed much of Žižek’s own writings, the gap in question “refers” to the unavoidable point of self-reference, the selfpresuppositional structure of language (we’ve already seen just how central this view is in Agamben’s work).18 Pippin, for his part, brings this dimension 17. In the introduction to his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim says much the same thing about the origins of religion: “Granted, if by origin one means an absolute first beginning, there is nothing scientific about the question. . . . There is no radical instant when religion began to exist, and the point is not to find a roundabout way of conveying ourselves there in thought. Like every other human institution, religion begins nowhere. . . . The problem I pose is altogether different. I would like to find a means of discerning the ever-present causes [les causes, toujours présentes] on which the most basic forms of religious thought and practice depend” (7; my emphasis). 18. As Žižek put it some thirty years ago, “The very idea of a synchronous circular order . . . implies a gap, a discontinuity in its genesis: the synchronous ‘structure’ can never be deduced from a diachronous ‘process’ without committing a petitio principii. All of a sudden, by means of a miraculous leap, we find ourselves within a closed synchronous order which does not allow of any external support because it turns in its own vicious circle. This lack of support because of which language ultimately refers only to itself— in other words: this void that language encircles in its self-referring— is the subject as ‘missing link.’ The ‘autonomy of the signifier’ is strictly correlative to the ‘subjectivization’ of the signifying chain: ‘subjects’ are not the ‘effective’ presence of ‘flesh-and-blood’ agents that make use of language as part of their social life-practice, filling out the abstract language schemes with actual contents; ‘subject’ is, on the contrary, the very abyss that forever separates language from the substantial life-process.” Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 201.

   

176 : : C h a P t e r s i x

under the more familiar Enlightenment heading of self-legislation as marking the crucial threshold of modernity, but he does so in a way that risks losing touch with the affective, mana-ical implications of it that cannot, to use Brandom’s terms, be made explicit, at least in any straightforward philosophical sense.19 In other writings, however, Žižek is equally adamant about the ontological status of the void. That is, no “gappy ontology,” no such thing as subjectivity. Put somewhat differently, what Freud called the navel of the dream must be grasped in its extimacy, meaning that it is in some sense out there. In more Heideggerian terms (with a touch of Gertrude Stein), we can be there only if the there is not fully there, only if there is no (consistent) there there, that is, only insofar as something just isn’t working there. Žižek has at various points noted the presence of the same sort of oscillation in Lacan’s thinking at least with respect to human life: What comes first, the signifier or some deadlock in the Real? Sometimes, Lacan presents the traumatic colonization of the live body by the parasitic symbolic Order as the primordial fact: it is the intervention of the Symbolic that derails, throws out of joint, the natural organism in its balanced circuit, transforming natural instincts into a monstrous drive that can never be fully satisfied, since it is condemned to an eternal “undead” returning to its path, persisting forever in an obscene immortality. At other times, in a more speculative-mythical mode, he is searching for some kind of natural excess or imbalance, a malfunctioning, monstrous derailment, and then he conceives the symbolic Order as a secondary in(ter)vention destined to “gentrify” this monstrous excess, to resolve its deadlock.20 19. As Pippin puts it early in his critical engagement with Brandom: “Rational norms must be understood as socially instituted over time. This means that their binding force comes from our having subjected ourselves to them (they are ‘self-legislated’) and that later norms can be understood as the result of various breakdowns and crises in earlier institutions.” Pippin, Interanimations, 32. Pippin’s project as a whole is largely an ongoing meditation on the notion of self-legislation and the “life” of that notion in modernity. One way of linking Pippin’s work to the more “Slovene” approach I’ve been presenting here is to note that self-legislation never comes off without a remainder, that the binding force of norms always brings forth a surprising surplus of free, unbound energy. Such surprises cannot, I think, be written off as philosophically irrelevant. Much of the theory I’ve been tracking is ultimately an insistence on this point, an insistence/encystance that, as I’ve been arguing, needs to be understood in relation to sexuality. 20. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 91– 92. In his early reflections on das Nichts, Heidegger’s

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 177

Again, would there be an Unbehagen in der Kultur if there were no Unbehagen in der Natur? In the end, I don’t think that at least this version of the question of the relation between thinking and being can be decided in any fully satisfying way. However, what remains undecidable and unsatisfying here may just be what is at issue in the surplus scarcity that calls forth the kinds of “caninical” researches that have come under the heading of “theory.” The Lacanian oscillation noted by Žižek might then itself be grasped as a version of the pulsive theorizations that constitute the drive. The static produced by them forms, in my view, the principal point of departure for what Rosenzweig called not philosophy but rather the new thinking. This is a thinking about life that begins with and, paradoxically, keeps taking its bearings from a disorienting surplus or remainder of life. Put somewhat differently, whether culture adds disorder or just a certain unconscious knowledge of a disorder already perturbing nature, it is only with human language that the disorder— what Zupančič refers to as ontological deficit— is registered, becomes, at least unconsciously, “for itself,” and begins to generate the excitations, the causes for excitement, that, as I have been arguing, come to be elaborated in culture and indeed explicitly so— also in the sense of “sexually explicit”— at least in theory. At the end of the first volume of The Star in the section he refers to as the transition or Übergang from Vorwelt to Welt, Rosenzweig addresses this ambiguity directly. The entire volume is rich with Schellingian echoes and could indeed be seen as an effort to complete Schelling’s fragment Weltalter, or Ages of the World. There Schelling pursues the theosophical, speculativemythical project of “reconstructing” the immanent pressures and processes that culminate in God’s creation of the world, in becoming a creator- God in the first place. They provide what Schelling referred to as a Mitwissenschaft der Schöpfung, a con-science of creation. Rosenzweig’s account of Schelling’s reconstruction of the protocosmic being of God adds the “unfinished” parallel reconstructions of human being and worldly being, that language manifests a similar oscillation even if the emphasis is on the impact of the pursuit of discursive knowledge. If the human mind seems to inaugurate things here, it is only because it “minds” that beings are in some sense needy, not fully there in their Being. “In this ‘pursuit’ [‘Treiben’] nothing less transpires than the irruption [Einbruch] by one being called ‘the human being’ into the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this irruption beings break open [aufbricht] and show what they are and how they are. The irruption that breaks open, in its way, helps beings to themselves for the first time.” Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” trans. David Krell, in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 83. Heidegger’s further thought represents an ever more singleminded effort to shed this ambiguity and, as it were, give Being the first and final word.

   

178 : : C h a P t e r s i x

is, of their being before they enter the orbit of revelation, of being truly revealed as what and how they are in relation to each other realm of being. In each case, Rosenzweig’s reconstruction of what we might call the ontological natality proper to each realm of being is modeled, as I’ve noted, on the infinitesimal calculus as elaborated by Hermann Cohen. They are presented as attempts to think in the neighborhood of zero of what we can know about each realm of being, to say something at the point of closest proximity to nothing, to a “repulsive” void of knowledge pertaining to each. To use again the formulation Beckett invented while moving worstward, it is a matter of reaching the “unnullable least” of the saying of being with respect to each region of being.21 In a word, each reconstruction presents a pulsive theorization with respect to the being at issue, one that, as it were, captures each one at the point of its birth to a minimal presence, the point where the Daß-sein and Was-sein— the that-it-is and what-it-is— proper to each oscillates around a void. Looking back on his three reconstructions, Rosenzweig writes, “We let them ‘originate’ from the Nought of knowledge, conducted by the belief in their factuality [Vom Nichts des Wissens aus ließen wir sie, geleitet vom Glauben an ihre Tatsächlichkeit, ‘entstehen’].”22 “This origin [dies Entstehen],” he continues, “is not a matter of originating in reality, but rather it is a passage in space prior to all reality [ein Gang im Raum vor aller Wirklichkeit]. The reality of the three results does not border on anything real, nor did they originate out of anything real for us; rather they are neighbors of Nought, and their origin is the Nought of knowledge [sie sind Anrainer des Nichts, und das Nichts des Wissens ist ihr Ursprung]” (88). The forces or pulses of emergence that converge around the void into a minimal presence “are not forces of visible reality. Rather they are mere stopovers on the path of us, the cognitive ones, from the Nought of our knowledge to the Aught of knowledge [bloße Haltepunkte auf unserm, der Erkennenden, Weg vom Nichts unseres Wissens zum Etwas des Wissens]” (88). But at this point Rosenzweig himself shifts perspective in a way now familiar to us: “Or, if a ‘real Nought’ corresponds to the Nought of our knowledge, as we presumably must admit, then they are mysterious for us beyond any reality that will ever be visible to us, occult powers that are at work inside God, world, and man before ever God, world, and man are revealed” (88). In the end, Rosenzweig is content to leave the question behind or rather to track the way it comes to be left behind in human life as an irreducible enigma, comes to be “primally repressed,” archived as the vital source 21. Nohow On: Three Novels by Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 106. 22. Rosenzweig, The Star, 88. Subsequent references are made in the text.

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 179

of an “archive fever” that keeps the fire and light of revelation burning.23 It is that fire and light that truly matters and that constitutes the subject matter elaborated in the monotheistic faith traditions.24 What matters is that this past, whether understood as an original tear in the fabric of being or as a tear caused by the emergence of language, remains an immemorial one that as such reaches into the present. “But in becoming revealed, all those mysterious generative powers now become a thing of the past, and what appeared to us hitherto as result [of our reconstructions] becomes itself beginning” (88). That is to say that “even if we would rather regard the Nought only as a Nought of knowledge, while we gingerly make our way along the tightrope of the consciousness of cognition, even then reality only begins with the finished result, and thus here too the result becomes a beginning vis-à-vis the Real [dem Wirklichen gegenüber]” (88). Here Rosenzweig’s position would seem, again, to be quite close to the psychoanalytic one, here formulated by Lacan: Discourse begins from the fact that there is a gap here. . . . But, after all, nothing prevents us from saying that it is because discourse begins that the gap is produced. It is a matter of complete indifference toward the result. What is certain is that discourse is implied in the gap.25

What we do with this beginning, how the impact of that gap is taken up, “converted” into a resource for thought and life, depends in each case on us; it is, to borrow Heidegger’s language once more, jeweilig jemeinig or, as I put it earlier, very first personal, which is, as Rosenzweig argues apropos of the distinction between the personality and the self, nothing personal.26 23. Jacques Derrida coined that term in a series of reflections on the nature of the past that Freud claimed to have excavated in his own speculative-mythical reflections on the Jews as a people constituted, in part, by the transmission of a traumatic past. As Freud’s “method” demonstrates, this is a past that can be reconstructed only on the basis of feverish excesses of signification— indexes of collective dreamwork— in the texts and practices constituting this tradition. See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 24. Rosenzweig’s troubling efforts to separate off Islam from Judaism and Christianity has been addressed by Gil Anidjar in his The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). 25. Cited in Zupančič, What Is Sex?, 41. The passage is translated from the French text of Lacan’s eighteenth seminar. 26. Durkheim argues that all religions are born in and live from this convergence of the most intimate and the most impersonal, that religion is, as it were, the Urphänomen of extimacy.

   

180 : : C h a P t e r s i x

III

I’d like to turn briefly to Rosenzweig’s odd little book Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (Das Büchlein vom gesunden und kranken Menschenverstand), which he wrote in 1921 at the urging of friends as a more readerfriendly introduction to his notoriously difficult magnum opus, The Star of Redemption.27 In the book, Rosenzweig explicitly links the new thinking to a therapeutic paradigm, to a kind of spiritual exercise aimed at producing a certain form of what one today refers to as “mindfulness.” One senses that Rosenzweig had himself suffered from the sickness diagnosed there, one he refers to as an acute apoplexia philosophica and that, for reasons that will become clear, I would like to call post-thaumatic stress disorder, a benumbed condition in the wake of the wonder, the thaumazein thought of as the “classical” beginning of philosophy. While working on my book on Freud and Rosenzweig, I gave a few talks to workshop some of the ideas I was developing. In the discussion following one of the talks focused on The Star of Redemption, a professor I knew only fleetingly asked what struck me as a somewhat dismissive question: Why had I decided to write a self-help book? I was at first taken aback, even offended by the suggestion that the work I had presented left her with that impression, the corollary of which was that this project was not really a scholarly undertaking and did not really belong at the university. But I immediately thought of Rosenzweig’s Büchlein (as well as his own profound ambivalence about the university discourse) and decided to embrace the thought that the book I was writing might well belong in the self-help section of the bookstore (apropos of odd book-fellows, at the Princeton University Bookstore, I once saw a copy of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table in the chemistry section of the science books). To return to PTSD, Rosenzweig’s thought was that the occupational hazard of philosophy was to remain stuck in a perspective that tries to grasp the essence of things and the unity of life from a place outside of the temporally articulated “language games” that constitute ordinary life. As he puts it in The Sick and the Healthy, the error involves the inability to let go of experiences of wonder that interrupt the flow, pierce the patterns, of daily life. The philosopher is unable to wait for life to bring the solution to 27. Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God, trans. T. Luckman and Nahum Glatzer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Subsequent references are made in the text. Rosenzweig never published the book himself. In his acknowledgments, Glatzer lists Luckman as the author of the 1953 translation on which his edition of the book is based (no translator is named in the copyright). This is a book that clearly deserves to be newly translated.

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 181

his astonishment, to somehow integrate the event of wonder into the fabric of living, something that can only ever happen partially, which also means never impartially. Instead, the philosopher becomes in some sense addicted to it as his be all and end all, that is, as the promise of a key to the All, to Being in its totality. Apropos of the enigma of sexual difference, for example, Rosenzweig writes that its “normal solution” is found in the experience of love: “Woman is alarmed by man and man bows before woman. [Das Weib erschrickt vor dem Mann, der Mann beugt sich vor dem Weib]. But the astonishment [Staunen] each feels for the other finds its solution and dissolution in the love which has befallen them. They are no longer a miracle [Wunder] to one another; they are in the very midst of the miracle” (40). Through love the couple sustains a kind of fidelity to what remains stunning in the event, the close encounter with the “alien” of the other sex, the enigma of sexual difference; they try to elaborate the encounter in a form of life in which its originating event continues to be eventful, continues to be original. The philosopher, however, is unable to wait: His kind of astonishment [Staunen] is no different from the astonishment of ordinary people [des gemeinen Menschen]. However, he is unwilling to wait for life to solve and dissolve his numbness [Starrheit]. Such relief comes too slowly. He insists on a solution now, on the very day his numbing took hold [am Tag, wo ihm die Erstarrung geschehen ist] and here, at the very place to which he stands riveted. And there he remains in a state of arrest [Er bleibt bei seinem Stillstand stehen]. He detaches this, his state of arrest [diesen seinen Stillstand], the event of his astonishment, from the continuous flow of his life. He ruminates [er denkt nach]. But because he has pushed aside the natural solution to all the blockage [aller Stauungen], to all the dammed up astonishment [alles aufgestauten Staunens], namely its release into the continuous flow of life, because instead of thinking on— something one can only do if one lives on— he begins to ruminate [anfängt “nach” zu denken]. . . . The state of arrested astonishment eternalizes itself for him in his equally arrested mirror image: the object [Gegenstand]. (40; trans. modified)

The German word Gegenstand clearly carries the sense of the object standing over against the subject of cognition. Rosenzweig’s remarks here strongly resonate with Heidegger’s more or less contemporary critique of the metaphysics of presence that he correlates with representational thinking— in German, vorstellendes Denken— a sort of spectatorial thinking that places the object of thought “before” the mind, as if it were answer-

   

182 : : C h a P t e r s i x

able to the “accusations” of human cognition (our word “category” comes from the Greek for a statement of accusation). In his eighth Duino Elegy, composed a year after Rosenzweig wrote Das Büchlein, Rilke contrasts such thinking with the imagined immersion of the animal in the openness of its surroundings. The fate of humans is to be closed off from any such opening: “That is what fate means: to be opposite, / to be opposite and nothing else, forever [Dieses heißt Schicksal: gegenüber sein / und nichts als das und immer gegenüber].” It is the fate of the spectator of life: “And we: spectators, always, everywhere, / turned toward the world of objects, never outward [Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, überall, / dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus!].”28 For Rosenzweig, the assumption of this stance represents the advent of all metaphysical thinking, thinking concerned with knowledge of the “essence” of things, with the question as to what things really are outside of the form of life in which they only truly have meaning. But as Rosenzweig finally notes, none of this would be of any consequence were it not for the fact that metaphysical thinking is not limited to professional philosophers. “No one is so healthy as to be immune from an attack of this disease” (42; trans. modified). That is, the lure of metaphysical thinking doesn’t befall everyday life from the outside; everyday life is itself congenitally susceptible to this mode of thinking that is, as Rosenzweig suggests, a kind of withdrawal from, a kind of phantasmatic defense against our being in the midst of life, a defense that posits for itself a position outside, a place of exception above the fray. In Rilke’s terms, being a spectator to life.29 The wonder that irrupted into life becomes the basis of a strange sort of way of life, one that has created its own separate sphere and economy and in which its participants presume to speak a kind of metalanguage. At the very end of The Sick and the Healthy, Rosenzweig suggests that the metaphysical temptation that leads one to assume an “objective,” an “impartial” stance outside and above the fray of ordinary life is ultimately an expression of death anxiety: “If living means dying, man prefers not to live. He chooses death in life. He flees from the inevitability of death into the rigidity of an artificial death [die Starre des künstlichen Todes]” (102; trans. modified). My sense is that Rosenzweig moves a bit too quickly here, 28. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 2009), 51. I discuss the poem as well as Heidegger’s engagement with it in On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 29. Guy Debord’s notion of “the society of the spectacle” could be understood in part as a systematic entrenchment of that posture, of being a spectator, nothing else, forever.

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 183

much as Heidegger at times does in his account of death, anxiety, and finitude in Being and Time. I think that Freud’s work on the interpretation of dreams might be of use here. With the notions of death and death anxiety, both thinkers seem to content themselves with the discovery of what might be called the “latent dream thoughts” of finitude. What they thereby miss is precisely the surplus scarcity, the encystance of a nameless woe “theoretically” pulsing in and through the dreamwork’s translation of those thoughts into the manifest content of the philosophical dream of the truth of Being. Put another way, it is “theory” in the sense I’ve been developing here that tries to dwell with the dreamwork, discern the rhythms of the encystance pulsing through it, the Schwingungszahl der Lebensintensität it conveys. With Kafka’s canine researcher in mind, one might think of it as a “cynical” mindfulness of creaturely life, one that remains open to a remainder of life, to a stasis resistant to homeostatic regulation or economization. This is surely related to what Freud had in mind when he characterized the sensibility and form of responsiveness demanded of the analyst as “evenly hovering attention,” gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit.30 IV

In the first literary work he published, W. G. Sebald touched on the ambiguity I have been tracking. The title of the work already signals the ambiguity: Nach der Natur; in English, After Nature. The German title includes the unusual generic specification Ein Elementargedicht, which suggests not so much an “elementary poem” as a poem pertaining to the elemental.31 In both languages, the title carries the sense of a work of art based on the model of nature, a work grounded in a mimetic relation to nature (as in landscape painting). In both languages it also conveys an apocalyptic tone, the sense of a time after nature, as if what we call nature could cease to exist. One could say that Sebald tries to capture an elemental tendency 30. Freud first uses the term in his 1912 paper Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung. See Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband: Schriften zur Behandlundstechnik, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 171. 31. W. G. Sebald, Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1995); After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Modern Library, 2003). Subsequent references are made in the text. Hamburger, a distinguished translator, critic, and poet appears in his own right in Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. I discuss the peculiar encounter between the narrator of that volume— a version of Sebald himself— and Hamburger in my On Creaturely Life.

   

184 : : C h a P t e r s i x

toward self- destruction in nature itself. But as the text of the poem and pretty much all Sebald’s further work indicates, the instrument of that selfdestruction is human being. That is, a part of nature becomes the agent (as well as the locus of the knowledge) of nature’s own self-destruction. We might say that the realization of an ostensible Unbehagen in der Natur takes place in and through a specifically human Unbehagen in der Kultur. For Sebald, that is, the very good of creation plants the seeds not of redemption but of catastrophe, transforms natural history into the natural history of destruction. This was, one will recall, the title of the English edition of Sebald’s book Luftkrieg und Literatur, a series of lectures about what he saw as a profound failure of postwar German literature to address the firebombing of German cities, a mode of warfare that transformed them into ruderal landscapes, returned them, as it were, to something akin to a state of nature. Or as we might put it, the Hobbesian state of nature to which Europe (and not just Europe) seemed to return in World War II left it in a state of nature in a rather more literal sense. The first section of the poem addresses the life and work of the German artist Matthias Grünewald. There Sebald engages in one of the numerous efforts at ekphrasis that fill his writings; it is a description of Grünewald’s most famous work, the Isenheim altarpiece. The third wing, when opened, includes a rendering of the temptation of St. Anthony in which an “unreal and demented thronging” displays the artist’s vision of “life as such, as it unfolds, dreadfully, / everywhere and at all times” (25). The panel is filled with fantastic and horrific beasts, a body covered with syphilitic chancres, “excrescences of an entire life, / in the air, on land and in water” (26). To Grünewald— and here Sebald signals the ambiguity at issue— this is creation, image of our insane presence on the surface of the earth, the regeneration proceeding in downward orbits whose parasitical shapes intertwine, and, growing into and out of one another, surge as a demonic swarm . . . (26; my emphasis).

Sebald notes the panic-stricken kink in the neck to be seen

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 185

in all of Grünewald’s subjects, exposing the throat and often turning the face towards a blinding light . . . (27).32

This, Sebald writes, now seeming to shift to the other side of the ambiguity, is the extreme response of our bodies to the absence of balance in nature which blindly makes one experiment after another and like a senseless botcher undoes the thing it has only just achieved (27).

Sebald concludes his “reading” of the panel by alluding to another apocalyptic vision in which darkness finally falls on a burning city and boiling sea and “with it a yellow dust / that covers the land” (28/25). Now, more than thirty years after its composition, one is tempted to say that what Sebald evokes here in response to Grünewald’s altarpiece is not so much the end of nature as the end of the Anthropocene.33 In the last literary work published during his lifetime, Austerlitz, we find a scene in which the anthropos is clearly identified as the instrument of the natural history of destruction. There the central figure in the novel, Jacques Austerlitz, recalls his memories of excursions to the home of his schoolmate Gerald in the Welsh countryside. Austerlitz reports of a particular outing with his friend’s great-uncle Alphonso, an amateur naturalist who spends 32. I discuss the family resemblance of this image with Kafka’s portrayal of Josef K. at the moment of his execution in On Creaturely Life, 98. 33. In The Emigrants, Sebald has the painter Max Ferber visit the Isenheim altarpiece, one of the only trips he ever makes after settling in Manchester. Recalling his impressions to the narrator, Ferber reiterates the ambiguity we’ve been tracking. He speaks of the “monstrosity of that suffering, which, emanating from the figures depicted, spread to cover the whole of Nature, only to flood back from the lifeless landscape to the humans marked by death.” The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1996), 170. The English translation of this work also drops the generic specification included in the original, Vier lange Erzählungen, four long stories. Sebald based his description of Ferber’s art on the work of the German-born, London-based artist Frank Auerbach, whose parents perished in the Holocaust and who escaped Germany by means of the Kindertransport. Sebald made some changes in the English translation of the story— including the change of name from Aurach to Ferber and the deletion of a reproduction of Auerbach’s work— at the request of the artist. The name change is especially unfortunate. The letters of the name Aurach “contain” Rauch, the German word for “smoke”; ruach, the Hebrew word for the divine spirit; aura, the term that so preoccupied Walter Benjamin in his writings about modernity; and, finally, the melancholic interjection that echoes throughout Sebald’s work, ach.

   

186 : : C h a P t e r s i x

most of his days outdoors registering the gradual destruction of nature by human encroachment. While initiating the two boys into “the mysterious world of moths,” Alphonso suggests that the balance of nature was thrown off by an excess of heat in the human animal; though his biological knowledge here is off the mark, his claim touches on a certain truth: [The moths’] body temperature will then be thirty-six degrees Celsius, like that of mammals, and of dolphins and tunny fish swimming at full speed. Thirty-six degrees, according to Alphonso, has always proved the best natural level, a kind of magical threshold, and it has sometimes occurred to him, Alphonso, said Austerlitz, that all mankind’s misfortunes were connected with its departure at some point in time from that norm, and with the slightly feverish, overheated condition in which we constantly found ourselves.34

The fateful energy expenditure at issue here points us, I want to suggest, beyond the pleasure principle that otherwise regulates the metabolism of living things around more or less fixed homeostatic set points or thresholds (for example, that of body temperature). What Freud so famously characterized as the primary principle of psychic life would seem to correspond, in other words, to the evolutionary principle that guarantees that what feels good to a living organism ultimately means that it is on a good path to survival and reproductive success, that it is, in a word, flourishing. Freud’s efforts to locate, to use Bataille’s formulation, our “accursed share” in a beyond of the pleasure principle were motivated by clinical and sociopolitical indications that psychic life could not be fully grasped by the operation of homeostatic imperatives, that one would need to account for other kinds of imperatives and the demands they place on what Freud called the “mental apparatus.”35 Freud’s discovery of a beyond of the pleasure principle, one elaborated in the wake of the First World War and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 34. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 92. Though here, as in many other places in his work, Sebald makes use of a stylistic feature associated with Thomas Bernhard (the use of a chain of embedded citations or references, in this case Alphonso, Austerlitz, and the narrator), the rhythm of Sebald’s narration often comes across as sluggish, weighed down by a melancholic inertia, compared with the feverish movement of Bernhard’s musical prose. Together they form a sort of bipolar pair. 35. Though Georges Bataille has explored this terrain in considerable depth, I have never been able to sync my thinking with his. I discuss this “nonrelation” with Bataille in The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 104– 7.

Will Wonders Never Cease  : : 187

ultimately pertains to the ambiguity of the word “stasis” in the concept of homeostasis, a word that means, among other things, civil unrest, strife, or war, a state in which, to put it simply, society effectively ceases to exist. In Austerlitz, one of Alphonso’s own close relatives— it’s never clear, but it could be an older brother— was said to have had regular contact with Charles Darwin during the latter’s preparation of The Descent of Man. The ambiguity I’ve been tracking could be seen to pertain as well to the double meaning of the word “descent.” The notion of biological descent would seem to imply the full integration of human being in the natural history of life on the planet, all of which unfolds under the dominance of the pleasure principle and the homeostatic imperatives it affectively represents (these imperatives make themselves felt, that is, by sensations along the pleasure-unpleasure axis); but descent also conveys the sense of decline, as in “descent into madness,” suggesting a deviation from the norm, a swerve from the natural course of things, a deviant declination of life. If Lucretius is right that nothing would exist (including, of course, living things) save for a swerve or clinamen throwing atoms off their course in the void, then the second sense of descent would indicate a certain repetition or redoubling of the constitutive principle of the self- organization of matter; it would indicate an additional turn, a second-order or self-swerving swerve that is far from being self-serving, serving the self-interest of the self. On this reading, human life involves a supplementary, one might even say excessive or wasteful “flourish,” one that adds a difficult-to- determine surplus to the sort of flourishing, to the dynamic constancy of life regulated by homeostatic imperatives. Human life, like all other life, is responsive to, is synched to, homeostatic imperatives, and yet that’s not all there is to human vitality. It is not simply that humans, in contrast to even the most advanced mammals, in addition have culture; the point is rather that with culture something changes in life itself, in the economy of vital forces, in the set of imperatives that governs life and renders it very creaturely.

ChaPter 7

THE STRANGER ORDER OF THINGS

I

In the last chapter, I suggested that what Freud, in the years after World War One, came to understand as a destructive mode of vitality at work “beyond the pleasure principle” concerned the ways in which what he referred to as an Unbehagen in der Kultur converges with or at least repeats a certain Unbehagen in der Natur; that what he now understood as the force of a death drive in human life (manifest as repetition compulsion) was at least one way in which culture/civilization encysted (upon) a disorder already troubling life as such. The thought here is that a certain stasis or “civil strife” already plagues the pleasure principle at work in the homeostatic imperatives governing life and that human culture takes in that “static” in a singular way, finds itself to be in tense attunement with it.1 But we’ve also 1. I’m alluding here to Heidegger’s notion of Stimmung, which, at least in Being and Time, signifies a mood/mode of attunement to a constitutive belatedness and contingency in the being of human being, to the facticity of its having been thrown into a form of life in which it must find its bearings. In later writings, most famously in The Origin of the Work of Art, facticity comes to be associated with a kind of ontological strife— in that work, between earth and sky— elaborated in and as human history. In his extraordinary book on medieval mysticism and its legacies, Niklaus Largier cites Jakob Böhme’s description of this ontological strife (in his Signature of All Things): “Seeing then there are so many and divers forms, that the one always produces and affords out of its property a will different in one from another, we herein understand the contrariety and combat in the Being of all beings, how that one does oppose, poison, and kill another, that is overcome its essence, and the spirit of the essence, and introduces it into another form, whence sickness and pains arise, when one essence destroys another. . . . For the eternal nature has produced nothing in its desire, except a likeness out of itself; and if there were not an everlasting mixing, there would be an eternal peace in nature, but so nature would not be revealed and made manifest, in the combat it becomes manifest; so that each thing elevates itself, and would get out of the combat into the still rest, and so it runs to and fro, and thereby only awakens and stirs up the combat.” Cited in Largier, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mystical Theology, and the Play of Sensation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 189

seen that this relation can at least appear to move in reverse order, that is, that a gap haunting the constitution of human societies— a missing link at the foundations of all historical forms of life— introduces a fateful disorder into natural life, renders it self- destructive, “overheated”; it is as if nature itself now turned to humankind with the reproach, “don’t you see I’m burning?”2 The notion of the Anthropocene functions, in a way, as a placeholder of this convergence, points to an element of stasis that, whatever its origin, converts natural history into a natural history of destruction; it serves, I want to argue, as a name for the consequences of the immemorial event of anthropogenesis, the emergence of a life-form that, as Lévi-Strauss emphasizes, can only survive by instituting itself as a form of life in and through language. Every historical form of life carries over that event as a perturbing gap, as a missing link it encysts (upon) in and as the dreamwork of its organizing concepts.3 I suggest that we best understand Freud as a social thinker following the traces, listening for the rhythms, discerning the pulsive patterns of that work— that surplus labor— in the texture of everyday life. What the dreamwork heatedly elaborates is, that is, not the pressures of life as such but rather those of a remainder of life.4 The urge to be rid of that remainder once and for all is, I think, at least one way to grasp what is at issue in his notion of the death drive. It will, however, take a few steps to make that plausible. As indicated, what Freud called the pleasure principle— or at times the constancy principle— pertains to the homeostatic imperatives that serve

forthcoming). I am grateful to Stanford University Press for making a copy of the manuscript available to me. 2. I’m alluding here to the dream of the burning child that Freud relates with minimal effort at interpretation in The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 513. 3. As we have seen, Lévi-Strauss identifies the domains of that dreamwork, locates its proper fields of operation, in “all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention” (63), those additional “flourishes” we’ve come to associate with the full flourishing of human life. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987), 63. 4. Recall Jonathan Lear’s notion of the “remainder of life” as the trace of a constitutively nameless trauma that, as it were, triggers (without warning) and haunts our practical engagements with the world: “What does get left out, to put it paradoxically, is not another ‘thing,’ but a disturbance of the fabric of life which occasioned this further development of the capacity to face reality. Freud’s deepest insight, I suspect, is that, appearances to the contrary, life can never be lived without remainder.” Jonathan Lear, Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 96; my emphasis.

   

190 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

to sustain an optimal level of functioning or felt “goodness” in the various systems of living organisms, imperatives that serve to maintain bodily states most conducive to survival and, ultimately, reproductive success.5 Mark Solms, whose work has been dedicated to correlating the findings of the neurosciences with Freud’s metapsychology, assigns the management of the economy of pleasure and pain to consciousness: “Consciousness informs the subject immediately, without learning, what to make of unexpected events (of their biological meaning). It enables the subject to feel its way through unknown quantities (deviations from homeostatic set points) by answering the biological question: ‘is this good or bad for me?’ The answer to the question— is this good or bad (for my survival and reproductive success)?— is ultimately provided not by memory but by feelings: the things that are good for us feel good (pleasurable) and the things that are bad feel bad (unpleasurable). The memory of what to do (predictions) flows from that.”6 There is, however, a strange twist in Freud’s account of what we might call the pleasures of homeostasis, one signaled by his own apparent perplexity regarding these self-same pleasures of self-sameness: “we would express our gratitude to any philosophical or psychological theory which was able to inform us of the meaning of the feelings of pleasure and unpleasure which act so imperatively upon us.”7 Freud’s perplexity ultimately pertains to a dissonance between the dynamic constancy of the homeostatic functioning of an organism, the tendency, that is, of living substance to discharge tensions arising from the urgency of vital needs— to eat, to drink, to maintain a certain bodily temperature, to evacuate waste products— and what would appear to be a tendency toward discharge not just of specific and determinate pressures but those of life as such, as if the first and most persistent vital need was to cease to live, to be done with the “state of emer5. In his writings on practical reason, Kant refers to motivations generated by homeostatic imperatives as pathological. What he called the categorical imperative serves to open a place of freedom from considerations of pleasure and pain by binding the subject to the “unnatural”— or as Kant suggests, humiliatingly sublime, rather than pleasingly beautiful— laws of morality. See, for example, Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 200. 6. Mark Solms, “Consciousness by Surprise: A Neuropsychoanalytic Approach to the Hard Problem,” in Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach, ed. R. R. Poznanski, J. A. Tuszynski, and T. E. Feinberg (Singapore: World Scientific, 2016), 12. I am grateful to Solms for providing me with an offprint of his article. I will return to Solms’s work later in the chapter. 7. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 4. When cited, the German text is taken from the Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), vol. 3.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 191

gency” of being alive, of having emerged into existence in the first place. It’s as if, for Freud, a voice cried out in stunned horror within us, “Oh my God, it’s alive!” Freud famously dubbed this horrifying vitality “It” (Id); if “It” were to be characterized as a worldview, one would be tempted to call it vitalist nihilism. Freud attempts to resolve the paradox by way of a dualist vision of the drives the exact nature of which, however, comes in and out of focus over the course of his exposition. This is territory that countless commentators have already covered. Indeed, it is as if the task of understanding Freud’s text called forth in the life of its commentators the repetition compulsion that he placed at the center of his account. I don’t think there is any way to avoid this, so I apologize in advance for, well, repeating things the reader will no doubt have repeatedly read and perhaps even written.8 II

By following the effects of trauma, most importantly the mind’s apparent compulsion to return to and relive situations of traumatic intensity— real states of exception to the rule of the pleasure principle— Freud came to believe that what sustains organic life, what instinctually keeps an individual organism up and running, is a profound conservatism or “inertia inherent in organic life” (43).” “This view of the instincts [des Triebes],” he continues, “strikes us as strange because we have become used to seeing in them a factor impelling towards change and development, whereas we are now asked to recognize in them the precise contrary— an expression of the conservative nature of living substance” (43). Ultimately, the wish at the core of this conservatism is not simply that nothing changes; it is rather a wish directed toward the deep past, namely, that nothing should have changed in the first place, the implication being that everything was just fine— free of all tension— until things came alive and so were in some sense obliged to go on living. It’s worth noting here that throughout the essay, James Strachey 8. In my view, what distinguishes the humanities from the “hard” sciences is, among other things, that what is learned there is never learned once and for all but must rather be relearned, newly “subjectivized,” with each new encounter. These repetitions have to do with a certain contagiousness of the objects in question, their tendency to draw the reader, spectator, auditor into their midst such that they are compelled to become the dynamic site of each object’s self-organization and replication. Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life provides a social theory of this dialectic of contagion as one of the fundamental properties of the sacred. The post- critical turn in literary studies, and the more general frustration with the hermeneutics of suspicion and its imperative of disenchantment, testifies to a desire to experience once more— and unapologetically— some of that contagiousness, to open to what is truly infectious about aesthetic objects (a strange sentence to write in the midst of a pandemic).

   

192 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

translates the German verb nötigen, perhaps best translated as “to force” or “compel,” as the verb “to oblige,” a choice that serves to blur the boundary between biological and normative pressure, between a natural tendency and a duty. I think, however, that it is quite a good choice, for one could indeed say that all of psychoanalysis— including first and foremost its thinking about the drives— emerges out of and tries to tarry in the border zones of this confusion of tongues. The urge to revoke the apparently traumatic demand to be alive— to have to be— and thereby return to the ground-zero of animation, is, for Freud, the very animating principle of life, what endows life with its vital, though seemingly nihilistic, urgency: “The attributes of life,” he writes, “were at some time evoked [erweckt] in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception [eine noch ganz unvorstellbare Krafteinwirkung]. It may perhaps have been a process similar in type to that which later caused the development of consciousness in a particular stratum of living matter. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavored to cancel itself out [sich abzugleichen; the verb abgleichen can also mean to settle accounts]. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state” (46). The semantic field opened by the verb abgleichen returns us to the notion of a surplus scarcity and the drive to fix it once and for all; that is, the death drive turns out to be more of a debt drive.9 As already indicated, the terms of the “payment plan” are set and monitored by the superego with the result that our debt obligations only seem to increase.10 The first and at some level unceasing homeostatic imperative is, then, one that commands a return to the same seemingly static state of inanimate matter, to the utter worldlessness of matter in which nothing can really matter.11 We might think of it as a rendering null and void of the obligation to go on being, as a biological version of the cancellation of the Diensteid, the 9. I owe this formulation to Aaron Schuster. In the autumn of 2016, the two of us taught a seminar together at the University of Chicago in which we experimented with this reading of Freud’s drive theory. We both concluded that the thinker who perhaps most forcefully articulated this line of interpretation was Norman O. Brown in his book Life against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1985). The particular difficulties Brown’s idiom raises have led me to put off a detailed engagement with his work to another occasion. 10. A typical OCD experience: I notice a stain and rush to blot it out (not without a certain rush); each effort only seems to make the stain worse. At some point, the superego’s voice becomes audible: “it’s all ruined.” 11. I am thinking here of Heidegger’s distinctions between the stone that is worldless, the animal that is poor in world, and the human who builds and forms— who cultivates— his world and being-in-the-world. See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 193

oath of office, keeping the nameless messengers of Kafka’s parable in meaningless motion like atoms in a void. Much as Weber understood the Protestant ethic as the cultivation of a Berufsarbeit, a labor in a calling, Freud here characterizes life itself as a sort of Berufsleben, life in a calling, life as profession. Put another way, it’s as if Freud had generalized into a fundamental principle of all living things what Louis Althusser elaborated as a theory of ideological interpellation. For Freud, the “hey you!” that hails the subject is at bottom life itself to which the first (and unceasing, compulsively repetitive) response is a kind of confession: “alive as charged.” The ultimate aim of that vocational or professional life is, however, to discharge that charge as fast as possible, to silence the voices keeping it going, to reach a permanent day of rest in opposition, as it were, to the “ideology” of having to be alive. To paraphrase Bartleby, life prefers not to be alive. Freud, for whom the question of the meaning of being— die Seinsfrage— is bound up with questions concerning the embodied life of minded, feeling creatures, presents us here with what we might refer to as the wish for ontological indifference. Recalling the queen’s reflections on her “nameless woe” in Richard II, Freud would seem to be saying that the real cause of this indeterminate grief is the brute fact of coming into being in the first place and that the death drive is the registration of the gravitational force of that woe, of having been forced, as it were, to lose nothing(ness) and “get a life.” It’s as though we lived in eternal regret over a decision made in some immemorial past when, faced with the choice, “your money or your life,” we chose life. The repetition compulsion that Freud links to the death drive emerges as a wish for a do-over of that decision.12 The cancellation of our Berufsleben, our call as living beings, turns out to involve certain complications and formalities; once the receiver has been picked up, one can’t, it seems, just immediately hang up. In a word, it is not a simple matter of direct negation, of the leveling of life in the sense of an immediate sich abgleichen but rather one that is itself forced— obliged— to trace a certain pattern or form. Because there is ultimately no life that is not always already a life-form, the process of deanimation, in the spirit of its deep conservatism, also adheres to certain formalities, those acquired through the accidents and adaptations of evolution. Once upon a

Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 12. On the notion of the forced choice, see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 212.

   

194 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

time, Freud muses, it was a quick and easy matter for animated matter to discharge its life force— its vital obligations— to quit and to be quits, all charges paid in full: For a long time, perhaps, living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive [maßgebende] external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated détours [Umwegen] before reaching its aim of death. These circuitous paths to death [diese Umwege zum Tode], faithfully kept to by the conservative instincts, would thus present us today with the picture of the phenomenon of life [das Bild der Lebenserscheinungen]. If we firmly maintain the exclusively conservative nature of instincts, we cannot arrive at any other notions as to the origin and aim of life. (46)13

It thereby becomes clear to Freud himself why what he first characterized as the instincts or drives of self-preservation did not, as he apparently worried, contradict his new conception of death-driven life. “They are,” he now concludes, “component instincts whose function it is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death, and to ward off any possible ways of returning to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the organism itself. . . . What we are left with is the fact that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion” (47; my emphasis; one might say that the soundtrack to the death drive as Freud presents it is the song made famous by Frank Sinatra, “I’ll Do It My Way”). Self-preservation is now understood as this peculiar wish to die in the self-same way laid out in the natural history of a life-form. There is, then, not only a conservatism but also a certain formalism to the death drive, a conservative adherence to established life-forms qua forms of dying to life. This formalism functions as a sort of katechon forestalling the end of days toward which life is otherwise driven, counteracting an apparently inborn eschatological indifference to the world. To return to the metaphor of the call, it’s as if we, as living things, were on a single, extended call with a suicide hotline prevented from hanging up only out of politeness, out of respect for the way things are done. 13. It’s hard not to think of Kafka’s prose text “The Hunter Gracchus,” where it is suggested that some distraction— the two words Kafka uses are Unaufmerksamkeit and Ablenkung— on the part of the pilot leading the hunter to the land of the dead leaves him in a state of undeadness, as if in that moment of distractedness they had taken a detour that is impossible to retrace.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 195

III

Perhaps the single most glaring paradox in Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is that the peculiar domain of transcendence— of being beyond— with respect to the primary principle governing natural life turns out to be what ultimately endows life with its animating conatus in the first place, its drive to persist in its own being. That drive is shown to be an implacable insistence on a kind of self-mortification, a life project dedicated to returning to a state of lifelessness, a sort of blindly biological (rather than existential) “being towards death.” The vital rush of life turns out to be a great rush toward death. Any particular course of life is seen as a forced detour, an effort to cope and ultimately be done with the contingent obstacles and distractions that cross the path of living creatures, causing them at least provisionally, to delay the drive destiny operating in and through them, the ultimate rush— in both senses of the word— of returning to the absolute quiescence of inorganic substance, of achieving a sort of purely biological absolution, of finally being absolved from being alive as charged. What is truly “animate” in animate nature is at bottom a drive toward deanimation; what accounts for the survival of a species is, on this reading, a drive toward extinction that here and there gets selectively disturbed (this would seem to be Freud’s strange take on natural selection). To paraphrase Michael Corleone from the final Godfather movie, it’s as if at the core of every living thing a voice clamored, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” while the pleasure principle (naturally preferring the first Godfather film) can’t resist saying in the midst of all the death and dying, “take the cannolis!”14 The introduction of the death drive and the revision of the theory of the drives it inaugurates implies a shift in the primary mythopoetic point of reference of psychoanalysis from Oedipus Rex to Oedipus at Colonus. There, one will recall, the chorus articulates the death drive as a sort of ultimate wish fulfillment, as the “ontological” wish at the core of every “ontic” wish (one seemingly at odds with what we generally understand to be the fundamentally erotic nature of the wish): the wish for ontological indifference. As Sophocles has the chorus intone, 14. A number of years ago, I went to buy some pastries for a departmental gathering (a chair’s work is never done). The woman in front of me at the bakery was just finishing up her transaction when she noticed that the salesperson had included cannolis in her order. When she told the salesperson that she hadn’t ordered them, I turned to her and said, assuming she would get and laugh at the allusion, “take the cannolis!” She did neither. Explaining the joke did not ease the social tension I had created.

   

196 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

Not to be born is best when all is reckoned in, but once a man has seen the light the next best thing, by far, is to go back back where he came from, quickly as he can.15

What Freud chooses to call the death drive would then just be, at least in the context of an individual human life, the mode of being, the modus vivendi, of the wish never to have been born. If we bring this thought to bear on the interpretation of dreams, we might say that for a dream to form, a particular and contingent wish must find points of attraction, modes of resonance and association, with this wish at the core of human life. Among the tasks of the dreamwork is to form “hypotheses” as to how to translate this “categorical” wish, how to specify it, give content to it, in the idiom of a particular lived life with all its singular detours.16 One might, of course, say that the notion of a beyond of the pleasure principle was always already implied in it as the principle of its realization. What Freud calls the reality principle is, that is to say, itself already a kind of beyond of the pleasure principle, a demand that the pursuit of pleasure be, as we have come to say, reality based. The tension state caused by any particular source of vital pressure, say, the body’s need for food, is ultimately a demand for purposeful work, a homeostatic imperative to do something to alleviate the pressure, in this case to seek food in the real world; hallucinatory satisfaction never quite does the trick. What Freud now adds is that the various species-specific modes of seeking nourishment count among the detours that curve and extend the path to the ultimate discharge of tension in death; eating allows the living being to die another day, each according to its kind. The “kindness” of being of a kind, the con15. Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 2000), lines 1388– 391. 16. There are clear parallels here to Nietzsche’s understanding of tragedy as the Apollinian elaboration of Dionysian states. In his Birth of Tragedy, after clarifying the essential distinction between the dithyramb and all other choral odes in the cultic poetry of the Greeks, Nietzsche writes, “In the light of this insight we must understand Greek tragedy as the Dionysian chorus which ever anew discharges itself in an Apollinian world of images. Thus the choral parts with which tragedy is interlaced are, as it were, the womb that gave birth to the whole of the so- called dialogue, that is, the entire world of the stage, the real drama. In several successive discharges this primal ground of tragedy radiates this vision of the drama which is by all means a dream apparition. . . . But . . . being the objectification of a Dionysian state, it represents not Apollinian redemption through mere appearance but, on the contrary, the shattering of the individual and his fusion with primal being.” Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 64– 65.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 197

servative formalism of every life-form, would seem, then, to provide a reprieve from the urgency, from the ultimate rush of the death drive. Thanks to the kindness of providence, then, what Freud calls the reality principle ultimately remains within the province of the pleasure principle; it informs the follow-through on the homeostatic imperatives regulating life by means of species-specific action programs designed to really and truly satisfy the demands conveyed in them. Even more problematic than this ambiguity as to the true locus of a beyond of the pleasure principle is another version of the paradox noted above, namely, the way in which what is ostensibly beyond the pleasure principle— the workings of the death drive— seems to become just another formulation of it. The demand for an ultimate discharge of tension in death, for a full absolution from all charges incurred during any individual life, seems to represent the imperative to return to the original homeostatic set point of being inanimate. What Freud calls, following Barbara Low, the “Nirvana principle,” would then be the proper name of this convergence of the death drive and the pleasure principle.17 As Alenka Zupančič has nicely put it, “it is clear how the ‘pleasure principle,’ with its homeostatic tendency, is actually a mental equivalent of what appears later on in Freud’s speculations as the fundamental tendency of all life to return to the inanimate, and hence to reduce the tension induced (in inanimate matter) by the emergence of life. In this precise sense, and as paradoxical as it may sound, the death drive as first introduced by Freud is in fact simply another name for the ‘pleasure principle.’”18 Precisely because in living things homeostatic imperatives rule without exception, Freud is able to place life and death along a kind of Möbius band that would seem to have no beyond whatsoever: “There is,” as Zupančič continues, “strictly speaking no ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ to be discerned here. Contrary to what we are inclined to expect, it is thus not Freud’s (original) notion of the death drive that corresponds to what goes on ‘beyond the pleasure principle,’ and hence to what led Freud to write this essay in the first place (namely, the phenomenon of people clinging on to, and repeating, some decidedly unpleasant experience).”19 Freud, of course, says as much in the final paragraph of the essay when he ventures the thought, “the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instincts” (77). That would, however, seem to imply that it is sexuality, the sexual drives, that must, in some sense, be located beyond the plea17. Freud, Beyond, 67. 18. Zupančič, What Is Sex? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 98; my emphasis. 19. Ibid., 98– 99.

   

198 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

sure principle, that it is they that inhibit what truly animates any individual life, its intoxicating rush to the ultimate toxic rush of extinction. As Freud puts it earlier in the essay, “They are the true life-instincts. They operate against the purpose of the other instincts, which leads, by reason of their function, to death” (48– 49). These true life drives, then, and not the death drive, are what point beyond the pleasure principle. Freud’s provisional solution to these apparent paradoxes, these chiasmic exchanges of properties between life and death, flourishing and self-mortification, sexual drive and death drive, depends on the distinction noted earlier between somatic cells and germ cells, the homeostatic imperatives that regulate the life of an individual organism and those that demand the survival of the species, the individual life be damned.20 This stasis between two levels of homeostasis manifests itself in what Freud characterizes as the peculiar syncopation of the rhythms of any lived life. “It is as though the life of the organism moved with a vacillating rhythm [Zauderrhythmus]. One group of instincts rushes forward [stürmt nach vorwärts] so as to reach the final aim of life as swiftly as possible; but when a particular stage in the advance has been reached, the other group jerks back [schnellt . . . zurück] to a certain point to make a fresh start and so prolong the journey” (49). It is hard not to hear in this description of the life of a living thing the experience of pacing in the sexual act, a kind of phenomenology of sexual time consciousness, one often portrayed as a gendered tension between modes of sexual enjoyment, modes of living with a tension that seems to divide pleasure from within: a masculine tendency to head straight toward orgasm and a feminine tendency to introduce pauses and detours, to extend the (fore-)play of tension and release. Freud had already addressed this tension in the management— the economization— of sexual tension in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality where he confesses that this seeming inconsistency in the nature of pleasure represents “one of the sorest spots of present- day psychology.”21 Freud’s solution is to posit the self-splitting of pleasure into “fore-pleasure” (Vorlust) and pleasure proper, or, in the terms of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, into an inhibitory pleasure serving the life drives and pleasure proper— pleasure functioning according to the pleasure principle— in the ser20. As Freud puts it, “The germ- cells . . . work against the death of the living substance and succeed in winning for it what we can only regard as potential immortality, though that may mean no more than lengthening the road to death” (48). 21. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 75. Subsequent references are made in the text.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 199

vice of the death drive. There, Freud explicitly associates the latter with Goethe’s most famous work in which Mephistopheles recognizes in Faust a fateful spirit der ungebändigt immer vorwärts dringt.23 What Freud might have cited to express the former sort of inhibitory pleasure is the passage concerning the wager on the possibility of encountering something that could lead the otherwise death- driven Faust to say, “Verweile doch! Du bist so schön!”24 Freud furthermore notes that this self-splitting of pleasure always implies the risk that the inhibitory form of pleasure, the fore-pleasure that violates the pleasure principle, can become autonomous, split off from pleasure proper and become the kernel of a perversion. But as we have already noted apropos of Freud’s famous account of thumb sucking, it is just that sort of splitting that marks the birth of sexuality; the Freudian notion of “natality” concerns an autoerotic stasis attaching itself to— and now always shadowing, always running interference with— the satisfaction of homeostatic imperatives regulating biological flourishing (we’ve seen how in gluttony that interference comes to dominate the nutritive function).25 22

22. In two different footnotes added to the Three Essays, Freud notes that the German word Lust can signify both pleasure as well as the lust for pleasure (1, 78). 23. Faust, part I, line 1857, cited in Freud, Beyond, 51, where it is translated as “presses ever forward unsubdued.” 24. Walter Arndt translates this line (Faust, part I, line 1700) as, “Tarry a while! You are so fair!” See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 46. In the Three Essays, Freud shows his hand on this matter when he first introduces the nature of the perversions. There are those that “extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union” and those that “linger over [Verweilungen bei] the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly [rasch] on the path towards the final sexual aim” (16; my emphasis). 25. In an early work, Jean Laplanche addressed the “stasis” at stake in sexuality by contrasting sexuality to Eros, which he linked to homeostasis: “Eros is what seeks to maintain, preserve, and even augment the cohesion and the synthetic tendency of living beings and of psychical life. Whereas, ever since the beginning of psychoanalysis, sexuality was in its essence hostile to binding.” As Laplanche continues, “In the face of [the] triumph of the vital and the homeostatic, it remained for Freud . . . to reaffirm . . . a kind of antilife as sexuality, frenetic enjoyment [jouissance], the negative, the repetition compulsion.” Laplanche vacillates in a now familiar way as to the proper locus of this antilife, that is, whether it belongs to life as such— an Unbehagen in der Natur— or something originating in anthropogenesis (as understood psychoanalytically): “Strategically, the carrying back of the principles of psychoanalysis into the vital order is tantamount to a counterattack, a means of wreaking havoc in the very bases from which one risked being invaded. A subjective strategy? A strategy of the thing itself if it is indeed true that this carrying back into life of an intensely human war was already at the origin of the generalized subversion introduced by sexuality.”

   

200 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

IV

At this juncture, I’d like to return to the work of Giorgio Agamben whose thinking about embodied subjectivity and the ways in which human life comes to be “sur- charged” by its inscription in historical forms of life offers a nonpsychoanalytic account of the terrain Freud locates beyond the pleasure principle. To use a term central to Agamben’s thinking, this beyond refers to a state of exception of the homeostatic law that otherwise regulates vital forces. Agamben, who follows Foucault in this respect, is not primarily a thinker of drives and desires but rather of power and authority. He clearly also positions himself within a Heideggerian lineage, linking his work to the latter’s concept of Seinsgeschichte, the history of Being. He is furthermore a thinker who identifies strongly with Walter Benjamin and with what he understands to be the latter’s messianic understanding of history (and which he considers to be fundamentally Pauline in inspiration). As I’ve already noted, one of the crucial quilting points of Agamben’s work has been Lévi-Strauss’s thinking about the “floating signifier,” a concept taken up by Lacan under the heading of the “quilting point” of discourse (and later, that of the “master signifier”) and by Laplanche under the heading of the enigmatic signifier. Agamben, for his part, mobilizes this notion under different headings, most importantly that of the “signature,” which allows him to organize his researches as a distinctive practice of semantic history, researches he variously characterizes, following not only Nietzsche and Foucault but also Émile Benveniste, as genealogies and archaeologies of discourses, practices, institutions. These various strands of Agamben’s thinking are all in play in one of the later volumes of his Homo Sacer project, one dedicated to the semantic history of the concept of duty in the Western philosophical, theological, and juridical tradition, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty.26 I turn to this work in the hopes that it can shed further light on that aspect of the death drive that appears as the urgency of absolution, a settling of accounts, a final discharge of the duty to be alive— of having to be.

Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 123– 24 (my emphasis). 26. Giorgio Agamben, Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013). Subsequent references are made in the text. In spring quarter of 2020, the first full season of the COVID pandemic, I cotaught a graduate seminar on Agamben’s Homo Sacer project with Ryan Coyne. I am enormously grateful to Ryan and to the members of the seminar for their invaluable help in working through this material.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 201

The book tries to show the ways in which something latent in the virtue ethics inaugurated by Aristotle opens onto a radically deontic one, an ethics grounded in the notion of the office, in the obligations and responsibilities with which one is invested, the duties with which one is charged when one assumes this or that office. As the title of the work indicates, Agamben is ultimately interested in the role played by Christianity in the formation of this concept, one that, in his telling, culminates with Eichmann’s avowal of a Kantian ethics of duty in the discharge of his office, the effective performance of the tasks assigned to it, whatever they may be. What is ultimately at issue for Agamben is a shift in the history of Being, one he characterizes as a recasting of being as having-to-be, by the injection, that is, of a kind of normativity into the fabric of being such that the conatus of an entity becomes a kind of obligation or duty to go on being what it is (recall Strachey’s translation of nötigen as “to oblige”).27 To put it in Marxist terms, Agamben argues that above all under the influence of Christianity the classical understanding of Being (the ways in which Being is said) is transformed into a kind of labor theory of Being. What ultimately matters, what is truly real, is the operative presence of divine transcendence in immanence, of God’s salvific action in the world, action that must be repeatedly renewed through, among other activities, the performance of the sacraments according to the priestly office the first incumbent of which was Christ himself. The true subject matter of human and worldly existence comes to be only by being incessantly elaborated, made effective, operationalized, put to work and this according to a fundamentally economic or administrative paradigm developed by the Church Fathers as a way to articulate the trinitarian dialectic of father, son, holy spirit. For Agamben, it is Christianity itself that, through its deployment of the concept of oikonomia to articulate divine being and action— God’s unity was not broken but rather administered, managed, economized by the son— calls forth the curse of a life of labor even if it is ultimately only “office work.” A brief return to an autobiographical register might help to clarify what is at issue here. As I indicated at the outset, I had originally planned on writing a book modeled on Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 27. As I’ve suggested, this insight into the deontic dimension of ontology lies at the root of Judith Butler’s crucial contribution to our understanding of gender. Butler argues that what is established at the birth of a child as to its gender, the acclamations “it’s a boy!” or “it’s a girl!” need to be grasped as mandates, as investitures with an office the functions of which one is obliged to perform according to the norms governing those offices. From this perspective, one “is” not a boy or girl but rather “has to be” one by assuming, in one way or another, the repertoire of roles in which one has been cast. Each performance serves to posit anew the “naturally given” presuppositions on which the performance is ostensibly based.

   

202 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

in which, by way of a chiasmic reversal, it would become a study of the sexuality of theory, an inquiry into the intimate connection between a certain style of thinking, of “doing theory,” and sexuality as understood by Freud. I had wanted to show how much of the theoretical work that had become canonical both inside and outside the academy— work typically characterized as either post-structural or post-modern (or both)— came to enjoy that status because it was, in a word, sexy. I also noted the reasons why I ultimately abandoned that project and decided, instead, to pursue a more roundabout approach to the basic issues involved, one that has brought me to this point in the book. The struggle that preceded that decision was one marked by considerable stress, anxiety, self-doubt, in a word, writer’s block. For a good part of the sabbatical year in which I had hoped to write the book I simply could not write. What had seemed so clear and straightforward in my mind would just not translate to the page. For better or worse, I came to be occupied with other things, including a six-month effort to train a new shelter dog my wife and I had adopted at the beginning of my sabbatical. We had had two wonderful dogs before adopting Lula and saw ourselves as old hands at this. Lula proved to be too great a challenge for us at every level despite countless hours of work with trainers (aside from behavioral issues, she had grown to be a rather large and powerful dog). We were finally able to find a new home for her with a family with other animals and a large fenced-in yard (we live in an apartment). Some eight months later, we were lucky enough to find another shelter dog, one who has turned out be a cynical companion in the best possible sense, a dog committed to the true life. Though these “canine researches” surely played a role, what ultimately lifted my writer’s block was a shift in perspective that I experienced as a kind of liberation, as, I’m tempted to say, a weak messianic force. As I said, for a good part of my sabbatical year, I felt that I simply could not write. At a certain point, however, I came to feel that it wouldn’t be such a tragedy not to write another book and to think of my sabbatical instead as a real sabbath from work, a time not of productivity but rather of otium. In a word, I realized that I could not write another book, that I was free not to write. In the larger scheme of things, this freedom was, perhaps, as Kafka’s canine researcher put it, only “a stunted growth [ein kümmerliches Gewächs].” But it was also, as he adds, “nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession.”28 Remarkably, within weeks of beginning to enjoy this 28. Stanley Corngold, trans., ed., Franz Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 161; Franz Kafka, Gesammelte Werke in Zwölf Bänden, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), vol. 7 (Das Ehepaar und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlass), 93.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 203

newfound freedom, I was not only able to write but able to write in a new way that, as this very anecdote indicates, included more of my own voice and experience, which, of course, may prove to be a weakness of the entire project. Indeed, my longtime editor and friend at University of Chicago Press warned me early on that if I didn’t engage with more current currents in literary and cultural theory, it might be of interest only to a handful of academic senior citizens. Be that as it may, I came to see that this very personal experience resonated with the fundamental issues that Agamben was struggling with in Opus Dei. As I noted, Agamben argues that something latent in Aristotle’s ethics opened the door to the deontic ethics associated with the Kantian tradition and, furthermore, that the concept of officium was a central relay point in this shift of ethical paradigms, in the transfer of the vis obligandi of ethical principles from virtue to duty. Rightly or wrongly, Agamben identifies Cicero as one of the key “signatories” of this transfer: “In an archaeology of the term officium, the inaugural moment is when Cicero, in the course of his repeated attempts to elaborate a Latin philosophical vocabulary, decides to translate the Stoic concept of kathekon [a term indicating the propriety of an action] with the term officium and to inscribe under the rubric De officiis a book that, rightly or wrongly, was to exercise an enduring influence over Western ethics” (67). Agamben understands Cicero’s project as kind of philosophical anthropology grounded in the idea of the institution of a common life. Commenting on Cicero, Agamben writes, “If human beings do not simply live their lives like the animals, but ‘conduct’ and ‘govern’ life, officium is what renders life governable, that by means of which the life of humans is ‘instituted’ and ‘formed’” (74– 75). As Agamben puts it, for “in this way, the politician and the jurist’s attention is shifted from the carrying out of individual acts to the ‘use of life’ as a whole; that is, it is identified with the ‘institution of life’ as such, with the conditions and the status that define the very existence of human beings in society” (75). We are, it would seem, within the orbit of officium— find ourselves invested with one office or another— once human life has become, has been “instituted,” as a space of normativity and the proprieties of use and action. There are many further turning points in Agamben’s story, one that keeps circling back to Greek and Roman philosophy even as it pushes forward in fits and starts. The general trajectory, however, takes us from Ambrose’s attempt to rewrite Cicero’s work with an eye to the proprieties of the priestly office and the efficacy of the performance of sacraments— the officiant causality of liturgical labor— to Aquinas’s discussion of religio, to Kant’s understanding of duty in response to the claims of practical reason,

   

204 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

to Suarez’s elaboration of religious duty as infinite debt, to Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, and, as noted, even to Adolf Eichmann’s reference to the duties of his office in defense of his actions in the extermination of the Jews. I am myself reminded of a remarkable passage from Kafka’s Castle: “Nowhere else had K. ever seen one’s official position and one’s life so intertwined as they were here, so intertwined that it sometimes seemed as though office and life had switched places.”29 Living one’s life under the sign of duty or officium is, as Agamben argues, to live in an atmosphere suffused with imperatives, to exist in a state of constant ex- citation under the impact of commands, to never cease to hear the voices that demand not so much Achtung or respect— the feeling that reveals, for Kant, the commanding presence of the moral law— but that rather constantly call to attention, command, yell out: Achtung! Though I think that Agamben unfairly conflates these two senses in Kant’s work, he has certainly touched the nerve of an essential line of development in the Western tradition, one that, as I earlier suggested, was at the core of Schreber’s world-historical nervous illness. As Agamben puts it, Here one can see the proximity between the ontology of command and the ontology of office. . . . Both the one who executes an order and the one who carries out a liturgical act neither simply are nor simply act, but are determined in their being by their acting and vice versa. The official— like the officiant— is what he has to do and has to do what he is: he is a being of command. The transformation of being into havingto-be which defines the ethics as much as the ontology and politics of modernity, has its paradigm here. (84) 29. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harmon (New York: Schocken, 1998), 58. Subsequent references are made in the text. In a later chapter, a lower Castle official puts it this way: “we don’t acknowledge any distinction between ordinary time and work time” (262). There is obviously a great deal to say about Kafka and “office work” especially since the publication of his official writings from his time at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague both before and after the war. A selection of these writings has appeared in English as Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, ed. Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). I briefly touch on what I refer to as Kafka’s traumamtliche Schriften (a neologism that condenses in one formulation the domains of dream, trauma, and official writings) in my The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). To bring the concept of the office together with that of the brand discussed earlier, I refer to an essay on the post-pandemic future of office space. Citing Stefanie Shunk, the lead designer for Gensler, the world’s largest workplace-design firm, the author writes that their activity-based design of the headquarters of Campari America was “intended for workers who are ‘living the brand every day.’” John Seabrook, “Office Space,” New Yorker, February 1, 2021, 45.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 205

As Agamben further notes, this paradigm essentially converts the incumbent of an office into a pure functionary of the Other. Citing Pietro Gasparri, Agamben writes, “‘function is to act as if one were another, in the capacity of someone’s alter ego, either an individual person or a community.’ . . . The term function names the constitutive vicariousness of office” (86). If, as Lacan puts it, the unconscious may best be characterized as the discourse of the Other, in modernity that discourse resonates as a kind of constant “bureaucratic” hum that holds us to our various “official” duties whatever they might be. My argument is that it is only against this background that one can appreciate Freud’s regular appeal, in his discussion of the drives, to representation or delegation, to messengers transmitting work orders from within the body. His language about the drives and work is already familiar to us. As he puts it in his most extended engagement with the drives, “If we now apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an ‘instinct’[‘Trieb’] appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative [psychischer Repräsentant] of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work [Arbeitsanforderung] in consequence of its connection with the body.”30 In the terms I’ve been proposing, this conceptual frontier— Freud’s word is Grenzbegriff— marks out the domain of the flesh, of the sarx, marks our being as very creaturely. The work orders at issue here are not homeostatic imperatives, pertain not to charges issued under the aegis of the pleasure principle (and dischargeable under the guidance of the reality principle), but rather to sur- charges correlative to the encystance of something really— I’m tempted to say, verily— not working in the Other, “out there” in the social field or form of life we inhabit, whether that dysfunction and its attendant Unbehagen is “inherited” from nature or not.31 30. Sigmund Freud, “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 74), vol. 14, 121– 22. In contrast to the German title, “Triebe und Triebschicksale,” the English title conveys a trace of the sense of vicariousness that Agamben emphasizes in his discussion of the office. 31. I have neglected here the important contributions of the object-relations tradition of psychoanalytic thought. Jessica Benjamin, for example, has argued that the death drive should be understood as a breakdown product of the process of mutual recognition between self and other. What I have been referring to as a dimension of stasis perturbing the homeostatic regulation of life appears in Benjamin’s work as a paradoxical and ultimately erotic dynamic of destruction and survival without which the tension between independence and dependency that defines the reciprocity of mutual recognition will tend toward zero. For Benjamin, the intensity of the tension state at

   

206 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

It is, however, Kafka who had the most finely tuned ear for that encystance in the hum of office work (dogs, of course, can hear frequencies, Schwingungszahlen, inaudible to humans). To return to The Castle, there is an episode early in the novel where K. tries to clarify his situation, that is, whether he had in fact been given a vocation, a call to work— recall Max Weber’s notion of Berufsarbeit, of a labor in a calling, as the religious signature of modern capitalism— by calling the Castle offices from the phone at the inn where he spent his first night in the village: From the mouthpiece came a humming [aus der Hörmuschel kam ein Summen], the likes of which K. had never heard on the telephone before. It was as though the humming of countless childlike voices— but it wasn’t humming either, it was singing, the singing of the most distant, of the most utterly distant, voices— as though a single, highpitched yet utterly strong voice had emerged out of this humming in some quite impossible way and now drummed against one’s ears as if demanding to penetrate more deeply into something other than one’s wretched hearing. K. listened [horchte] without telephoning, with his left arm propped on the telephone stand and he listened thus [horchte so]. (20)

Agamben’s Homo Sacer project as a whole is, I would argue, dedicated to the decoding of such humming, to trying to make sense of the “acoustic” universe of life— to paraphrase Benjamin’s formulation apropos of Kafka— as it is lived at the foot of the hill on which our various castles continue to be built in one form or another. By tracking its shifting frequencies, its mutations and displacements, Agamben hopes to drain it of its compelling force. This suggests that this decidedly nonpsychoanalytic thinker engages in a kind of listening that is closely related to Freud’s understanding of analytic listening and the kind of evenly hovering attention it maintains with respect to the “discourse of the Other” insisting in the analysand’s communications as a kind of persistent static. And indeed, Freud himself compares such listening to a kind of telephonic experience, placing himself not so much in the position of K. in the Castle as in that of the attentive reader “listening in” on the phone call:

issue is at the very least amplified by the fact of sexual difference. See Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988).

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 207

Expressed in a formula, [the analyst] must bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the emerging unconscious of the patient, be as the receiver of the telephone to the disc. As the receiver transmutes the electric vibrations induced by the soundwaves back again into soundwaves, so is the physician’s unconscious mind able to reconstruct the patient’s unconscious, which has directed his associations, from the communications derived from it.32

This static is, I’ve been arguing, the sound of a fundamental stasis or “civil unrest” that perturbs from within the homeostatic operations that regulate life according to the pleasure principle. Agamben’s Homo Sacer project originates in the hunch that the static at issue pertains to an exceptionally exciting cause, one arising not from within but also not exactly from without; as I’ve also been arguing, it arises, rather, from a without that has been encysted within, from an internal alterity for which Lacan invented the term “extimacy.” Agamben analyzes the structure of this uncanny cause of excitation as a being called or summoned by something like the pure voice of sovereignty, a voice that resounds in states of exception the capacity to decide on which constitutes, as Carl Schmitt famously argued, a crucial dimension of sovereignty. One is addressed not so much by the law as by the pure force of law that effectively arrests one at the threshold of law or, to use Kafka’s formulation, before the law. Referencing Kafka’s famous parable from The Trial, Agamben writes, “according to the schema of the sovereign exception, law applies to [the man from the country] in no longer applying, and holds him in its ban in abandoning him outside itself. The open door destined only for him includes him in excluding him and excludes him in including him. And this is precisely the summit and the root of every law.”33 Agamben goes on to link the “ban” of the open door to the law, the address that arrests one at its threshold, to Gershom Scholem’s characterization of the status of revelation in Kafka’s world as a “nothing of revelation.” As I’ve noted, for Scholem this Nichts der Offenbarung represents “a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, 32. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers: Volume 2, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 328. For a brilliant and still unsurpassed study of this “static” from the perspective of media theory, as “the impossible Real” coursing excitingly in and through all media as a kind of white noise, see Friedrich Kittler’s Aufschreibesysteme: 1800/1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1995). There Kittler characterizes it as “das unmögliche Reale am Grund aller Medien: weißes Rauschen. Ur-Geräusch” (400). 33. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 50.

   

208 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance [in dem sie gilt, aber nicht bedeutet],” a revelation “reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak.”34 Recalling Lévi-Strauss’s remarks on mana as representing a “zero symbolic value,” the claim seems to be that Kafka’s universe is a singularly mana-ical one, something we’ve already witnessed in his parable about the kingless messengers still bound by a meaningless yet somehow still valid oath of office. Picking up on Agamben, Mladen Dolar explicitly links this excess of validity over meaning to the dimension of the voice, to “sound bites”— or perhaps better, bytes— of an exceptional excitation and its way of impinging on and “taking in” the subject, becoming the object- cause of fantasy: “The massive validity without meaning is epitomized by partial objects, and those are enough for the construction of fantasies; they suffice to capture desire. And among those there is the voice, the senseless voice of the law: the law constantly makes funny noises, it emits mysterious sounds. The validity of the law can be pinned to a senseless voice.”35 For Dolar, too, this is precisely what K. heard when he tries to reach the Castle offices from the telephone at the inn where he first arrives in response to the “vocation” he claims to have received from the Castle. The extimacy constitutive of subjectivity stands, then, in direct correlation with the extimacy of the law to itself, its being in some sense outlaw to itself; we might say that they partially share in an exceptionally exciting cause. To repeat my fundamental claim, the void of knowledge the encystance of which is constitutive of subjectivity is already out there; the space of meaning is already without it, already mit ohne was.36 Subjectivization just is the process of encysting (on) that “without” within. V

Agamben repeatedly refers to Hobbes as the canonical thinker of the extimate dimension of early modern political life, life, that is, when castles were still inhabited by monarchs (and not just messengers emitting mysterious sounds). The name Hobbes gives to this dimension that extimately persists within the rule of law under conditions of royal sovereignty is the 34. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem: 1932– 1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and André Lefevere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), letter of September 20, 1934. Cited in Homo Sacer, 50– 51. 35. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 169. 36. I’m referring here, once more, to a line from Friedrich Hollaender’s Berlin cabaret song “Zieh dich aus, Petronella!”

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 209

“state of nature,” a condition of “Warre of everyone against everyone” in which all equally enjoy the natural right to do anything in the pursuit of self-preservation.37 Society, we might say, already includes in itself a reference to its own nonexistence. In Hobbes, Agamben writes, “the state of nature survives in the person of the sovereign, who is the only one to preserve its natural ius contra omnes.” Sovereignty thereby “presents itself as an incorporation of the state of nature in society, or, if one prefers, as a state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law. . . . The state of nature is therefore not truly external to nomos.”38 It functions rather as “the law’s self-presupposition as ‘natural law’” (35– 36). Citing Hobbes’s De cive, Agamben underlines the crucial point that the state of nature does not signify a real historical epoch; it enjoys, rather, a kind of virtual reality “as a principle internal to the State revealed in the moment when the State is considered ‘as if it were dissolved’ (ut tanquam dissoluta consideretur). Exteriority— the law of nature and the principle of the preservation of one’s own life— is truly the innermost center of the political system” (36; my emphasis). To recall Uncle Alfonso from Sebald’s Austerlitz, it is the heat emanating from this encysted exteriority, from this extimate core that transforms natural history into the natural history of destruction. Agamben comes back to Hobbes later in Homo Sacer in the context of a discussion of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon practices of placing wrongdoers of various kinds under a ban, declaring them to be wolfmen or werewolves, bestial beings who may be killed with impunity. This liminal status that they are, as it were, compelled to enjoy, is not that of an animal “without any relation to law and the city. It is, rather, a threshold of indistinction and of passage between animal and man, physis and nomos, exclusion and inclusion” (105). In Agamben’s reading, the Hobbesian “state of nature” in which man is a wolf to man, homo hominis lupus, must be understood in relation to such liminal beings, beings of a threshold within rather than at the boundary of the city. “This lupization of man and humanization of the wolf is at every moment possible in the dissolutio civitatis inaugurated by the state of exception” (106). Whoever finds himself pinned to that threshold is not so much divested of rights as invested with a new kind of life, assumes, in some sense, a different life-form “which is neither simple natural life nor social life but rather bare life or sacred life” (106). When Agamben returned to Hobbes in a series of lectures given at Princeton— as it turned out, very shortly after 9/11— it was in the context of a more general discussion of the concept of stasis, of “civil war as 37. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 72. 38. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 35– 36. Subsequent references are made in the text.

   

210 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

a political paradigm.”39 There Agamben tries to refine his analysis of the notion of the state of nature as synonymous with the city as if dissolved (ut tanquam dissoluta consideretur). Though he doesn’t put it quite this way, the claim is that civil war represents (for Hobbes) something like the realization of this “as if,” that is, the emergence of a real state of exception or emergency in which a now really disunited multitude (rather than merely “as if dissolved”) attempts to reconstitute itself as a people by positing a new sovereign authority that will mediate its unity, represent it to itself as one. Or alternatively, the (only virtually real) dissolved multitude represents a remainder/reminder of the (really) disunited multitude, a remainder now held in reserve by the sovereign (as the capacity to decide on the state of exception). Presupposed in all of this is Hobbes’s view that the people— those who share in the commonwealth— only truly come to exist as one by way of symbolic “incorporation,” by way of the “artificial” efficacy of a representative sovereign body. It is necessary, as Hobbes puts it, for men “to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, to beare their Person; and every one to owne, and acknowledge himselfe to be Author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act or cause to be Acted . . . and therein to submit their Wills, every one to his Will, and their Judgements, to his Judgement. This is more than Consent, or Concord; it is a reall Unitie of them all, in one and the same Person.” It is, Hobbes goes on, as if every man should say to every man, I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner. This done, the Multitude so united in one Person is called a Common-Wealth, in latine Civitas. This is the Generation of that great Leviathan. . . . And he that carryeth this Person, is called soveraigne, and is said to have Soveraigne Power; and every one besides, his suBjeCt.40 39. Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). Subsequent references are made in the text. 40. Hobbes, Leviathan, 95– 96. Freud presents the same logic of group formation on the basis of identification with a leader in his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. In his seminar on the psychoses— the one that deals largely with the case of Daniel Paul Schreber— Lacan makes use of this same logic apropos of another early modern treatment of sovereign authority. In his first presentation of the concept of the master signifier qua “quilting point” of a discursive field, Lacan closely follows

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 211

Stasis represents, then, something like the passage from a mythic or fictive state of exception— a state of nature internal to, posited by, the artifice of sovereignty— to a real one that opens on to a kind of “night of the world” in which the Other, the Leviathan guaranteeing the consistency of the body politic— of the “people”— ceases to exist. The state of nature thereby becomes legible as a kind of fundamental fantasy— “a people is being beaten”— underwriting the transference with the Other, its efficiency as, to use another Hegelian formulation, a determination of reflection.41 We might say, then, that the function of the state of nature— the state of exception as extimately constitutive of the commonwealth— is to “allow” us to remain unconscious of the night of the world in the daytime of our life in the city. What Agamben calls bare or sacred life is life that no longer enjoys that allowance but is lived, instead, at this nocturnal threshold where it is fully exposed to the object of anxiety, to the dissolution of the city “secreted” in the very midst of the city. Agamben’s archaeological project is devoted to unearthing the various configurations of this fundamental fantasy through which we give shape to a primordial anxiety and therewith subjectify our social bonds. In the first chapter of this volume, I already noted Agamben’s discussion of the two small figures placed next to the cathedral in the frontispiece of Hobbes’s reasoning apropos of the effects of the fear of God in Racine’s play Athaliah. We might say that Lacan is after the more purely theological dimension of the logic of the signifier while Hobbes’s treatment pertains to the realm of political theology: “The fear of God isn’t a signifier that is found everywhere. Someone had to invent it and propose to men, as the remedy for a world made up of manifold terrors, that they fear a being who is, after all, only able to exercise his cruelty through the evils that are there, multifariously present in human life. To have replaced these innumerable fears by the fear of a unique being who has no other means of manifesting his power than through what is feared behind these innumerable fears, is quite an accomplishment. . . . This famous fear of God completes the sleight of hand that transforms from one minute to the next, all fears into perfect courage. All fears— I have no other fear— are exchanged for what is called the fear of God, which, however constraining it may be, is the opposite of fear.” See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955– 56, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), 266– 67. 41. Marx’s analysis of the commodity form depends on the logic of such determinations, a logic Marx studied in Hegel’s Science of Logic. Money can represent the value of a commodity for all other commodities, to function as the general equivalent, the “Leviathan” of value, only because money is treated as the direct or immediate representation of value— as the immediacy of mediation— that is, only because it enjoys the cred of commodity producers and consumers (when cred is lost it becomes crud). The valuation of a commodity is always a transferential process, always also an act of presupposing the credibility of its general equivalent, the commodity that is “supposed to know” what value is, that, as it were, plays the role of the vicar of value on earth.

   

212 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

Hobbes’s Leviathan and who are distinguished by the special mask worn by plague doctors, an image quite resonant in the time of COVID and the (bio)politics of masking. Because the multitude becomes the people of a commonwealth as soon as they are represented (by the sovereign), it “can be represented only through the guards who monitor its obedience and the doctors who treat it. It dwells in the city, but only as the object of the duties and concerns of those who exercise sovereignty,” an exercise in which the “biopolitical turn of sovereign power” was beginning to take shape. “Hence the notion of the dissoluta multitudo, which inhabits the city under the Leviathan’s dominion, may be compared to the mass of plague victims, who must be treated and governed” (Stasis, 48– 49). That is to say, however, that the subject matter of biopolitics is, at least at some level, not so much the measurable vital forces of the population (as Foucault largely saw it) but rather the virtually real creaturely life called into being by an exceptional excitation; the plague at issue is, in a word, never simply a disease of the body— a natural phenomenon— but largely pertains to the persistence of the (mythical) state of nature in the city, a state of “dissolution” that is anything but natural. The plague at issue is, to cite the title of one of Žižek’s books, always at some level a plague of fantasies.42 VI

For all his attention to historical and philological detail, the accumulation of which can, at times, strike the reader as gratuitous— this is especially true of the two volumes dedicated to “economic theology”— Agamben is ultimately a thinker of anthropogenesis, the emergence of the human life-form, the point at which, as Antonio Damasio has recently put it, the homeostatic imperatives that regulate life in accordance with the pleasure and reality principles are transferred and delegated to cultural technologies, to those “prosthetic” extensions of life that constitute the material and symbolic infrastructure of historical forms of life. Damasio’s own work focuses above all on the role of feeling in the biology of culture, its role as the “conscious deputy” of homeostatic imperatives. As he puts it in his recent book, The Strange Order of Things, How does one connect the state of homeostasis to the making of a cultural instrument capable of correcting a homeostatic deficit? As I suggested, the bridge is provided by feeling, a mental expression of the 42. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997).

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 213

homeostatic state. Because feelings mentally represent a currently salient state of homeostasis and because of the upheavals they can generate, feelings operate as motives for engaging the creative intellect, the latter being the link in the chain that is responsible for the actual construction of the cultural practice or instrument.43

Damasio’s argument depends on an understanding of homeostasis that to some extent breaks with the conventional view of it. To grasp the extension of the reach of homeostatic imperatives from their function in natural selection to their function in cultural selection, it is necessary to introduce the dimension of futurity into the concept of homeostasis. Damasio essentially proposes an optimistic version of Freud’s darker view of the “detours” that come to inform the path of any living thing from birth to death. For both thinkers, the detours at issue open the temporality proper to the life process, the fact that life must run its course according to the form established by the evolution of any particular life-form. Freud, one will recall, views this temporality as conservative in nature, as oriented toward the past. As he first presents it, what he calls the death drive signifies a naturally occurring entropic striving to return to the inanimate state before life messed everything up; from this perspective, life itself figures as a kind of stain on the purity of inanimate matter that it must spend its life trying to clean, as if in the clamor of life, one could always discern a mad murmuring, “Out, damned spot! Out, I say!”44 For Freud, life as such represents a kind of homeostatic deficit that must be made good as fast as possible. Damasio’s view, by contrast, is a progressive one, one that is essentially open to the future and possibilities for the improvement, enhancement, and optimization of life, a process he refers to as upregulation: “the homeostatic process strives for more than a mere steady state. . . . This is a natural upregulation that can be described as aiming at the future of the organism, an inclination to project itself in time by means of optimized life regulation and possible progeny. One might say that organisms want their health and then some” (45; last emphasis mine). For Damasio, only an upregulating organism, only one that manages to secure a bit of surplus life, warrants the characterization of being truly flourishing. All the complexities and contingencies notwithstanding, the step from natural to cultural selection 43. Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon, 2018), 166, 167. Subsequent references are made in the text. 44. The OCD relation to stains blown to Shakespearean proportions.

   

214 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

thereby becomes something rather straightforward and natural, that is, simply another form of upregulation: A comprehensive view of homeostasis must include the application of the concept to systems in which conscious and deliberative minds, individually and in social groups, can both interfere with automatic regulatory mechanisms and create new forms of life regulation that have the very same goal of basic automated homeostasis, that is, achieving viable, upregulated life states that tend to produce flourishing. I see the effort of constructing human cultures as a manifestation of this variety of homeostasis. (46)

And as Damasio adds, “whether one considers single- celled or multicellular organisms, the essence of homeostasis is the formidable enterprise of managing energy— procuring it, allocating it to critical jobs such as repair, defense, growth, and participation in the engendering and maintenance of progeny” (46). For the tradition of thinkers— call them “theorists” in the sense I’ve been developing in these pages— that includes both Freud and Agamben, the systems of energy management that arise with anthropogenesis and the cultural upregulations that constitute the natural history of human forms of life themselves generate excess energy, produce the too-muchheat that Freud brought under the heading of an Unbehagen in der Kultur. As I’ve been arguing, this discontent pertains to a stasis that fits neither conservative nor progressive views of homeostasis; it concerns rather what we might call a stranger order of things produced not by any determinate homeostatic deficit but rather by what I’ve been referring to as surplus scarcity, a deficit that remains in excess of any possibility of repair by way of processes of self-regulation, automatic or otherwise, and thus typically calls forth efforts not so much of reparation as of redemption. Against this background, religion would seem to represent a kind of cultural confession of the limits of culture in the face of a remainder of life that is quite simply too much for us, that represents what Freud, in his last (nearly) completed work, Moses and Monotheism, characterized as an excess of demand.45 One is perhaps reminded of Kafka’s canine researcher and the enigmas plaguing the life of dogs— of Hundeschaft— insofar as there is no place in their ontology for human being. 45. One will recall Lévi-Strauss’s characterization of the gap between the order of the signifier and that of the signified that emerges as soon as there is language: “There is always a non- equivalence or ‘inadequation’ between the two, a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up” (Introduction, 62; my emphasis).

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 215

In his Moses book, Freud invokes a theory of trauma to make sense of what he perceives to be a repetition compulsion at the heart of Judenschaft. In the course of his presentation, he uses this expression to capture the purely quantitative aspect of trauma, its status as a “too much” of pressure that exceeds the working of the pleasure principle. Every trauma contains something on the order of an “excess of demand,” a Zuviel von Anspruch.46 An Anspruch can indeed signify a demand or claim as in a demand for work placed on a system. But the word is derived from the verb ansprechen, which means to address the other, to demand or call for the other’s attention and response. We might say, then, that at least under certain circumstances, a trauma is generated by a too much of address, by an excess immanent to an address that resists psychological metabolization and, so, in some fashion remains. Bringing the two meanings of Anspruch together, we might say that a trauma becomes possible when a “too much of address” persists beyond what can be translated into a demand for work, a task to be discharged, something we can do (or, for that matter, refuse to do, feel guilty for not doing, etc.). This remainder of what both demands and resists elaboration leaves the mind exposed to the “night of the world.” To return to Agamben, we have seen that he follows Lévi-Strauss in linking this too-muchness to the emergence of language. Our life with language is never without a dimension of “static” left over from our anthropogenesis and that persists even if we swear in God’s name to hear nothing. Reflecting on the work of Georges Dumézil who thought of himself as a historian of “the furthest fringe of ultra-history,” Agamben characterizes the subject matter not only of his “archaeology of the oath” but indeed of the entire Homo Sacer project in a way that, I think, also captures something of what Freud struggled with in his own efforts to articulate what he referred to as the “historical truth” of his findings in Moses and Monotheism: It is clear that the arché toward which an archaeology seeks to regress cannot be understood in any way as a given that can be situated either in a chronology (even in a broad category like “prehistoric”) or even beyond it, in an atemporal metahistorical structure (for example, as Dumézil ironically suggests, in the neuronal system of a hominid). It is, rather, a force working in history . . . just as the child in psychoanalysis expresses a force that continues to act in the psychic life of the adult; and just as the “big bang,” which is supposed to have given rise to the 46. See the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953– 74), vol. 23, 73; German from the Studienausgabe, vol. 9, 522.

   

216 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

universe, is something that never stops transmitting its background radiation to us.47

For Agamben, anthropogenesis is the event that never stops (not fully) happening, the wonder that never ceases; “it is always under way, because Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being.”48 Against this background, Agamben’s philological excesses appear not so much as a display of erudition, as I suggested earlier, but rather as an excess of signification still radiating out from the big bang of language, an “event” on the order of what Heidegger would come to refer to as Ereignis. VII

In the last chapters of his Unbehagen in der Kultur, Freud succumbs to his own kind of excess of signification. He engages in a kind of repetition compulsion with respect to that “prosthetic” extension of the ego he refers to as the superego. After each account of its institution— Freud speaks of its Einsetzung or Aufrichtung— and its part in the generation of feelings of guilt, indeed, of the capacity to feel guilt, he recognizes that something is not quite right and begins again. He clearly feels he owes his readers a better explanation. In German, one would say, he is, with respect to the account, still schuldig, still in the guilty position of owing a debt. After going through a series of attempts in the penultimate chapter of the book, each time confessing to inconsistencies, contradictions, infelicitous formulations, he begins the final chapter with yet another apology and another go at it. “Having reached the end of his journey,” he writes, “the author must ask his readers’ forgiveness for not having been a more skillful guide and for 47. Giorgio Agamben, The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 10. I discuss Freud’s notion of “historical truth” in my “Freud’s Moses and the Ethics of Nomotropic Desire,” October 88 (Spring 1999): 3– 41. Reprinted in Renata Salecl, ed., Sexuation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 57– 105. 48. Agamben, Sacrament, 10. I refer, once more, to Durkheim’s remarks on the origins of religion: “There is no radical instant when religion began to exist, and the point is not to find a roundabout way of conveying ourselves there in thought. Like every other human institution, religion begins nowhere. . . . The problem I pose is altogether different. I would like to find a means of discerning the ever-present causes on which the most basic forms of religious thought and practice depend.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995), 7. In a word, PTSD, post-thaumatic stress disorder, takes place in the here and now of our life with language.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 217

not having spared them empty stretches of road and troublesome détours. There is no doubt that it could have been done better. I will attempt, late in the day, to make amends.”49 The German formulation is even stronger: Ich will versuchen, nachträglich etwas gutzumachen. We might better render it as, “I will try, belatedly, to make good on something.” Nachträglich has a special meaning for Freud; it’s the word he uses to characterize the belatedness of reactions to traumas. (The verb nachtragen, especially in its participial form, nachtragend, also means to bear a grudge, to harbor resentment, to be unable to let go of a grievance.) Each account Freud gives of the genesis of the superego seems to bring him only further under its sway, place him further in arrears with respect to a satisfying account. I am reminded of Kafka’s story “A Country Doctor,” which ends with an ominous pronouncement regarding the hopelessness of the doctor’s efforts to heal what would seem to be a metaphysical wound plaguing the boy to whom he was called in the middle of the night. The last line of the story is, “Einmal den Fehlläuten der Nachtglocke gefolgt— es ist niemals gutzumachen,” which Corngold translates as, “A false ringing of the night bell once answered— it can never be made good.”50 Rather than try to rehearse Freud’s repeated efforts at establishing how the superego comes to be established, I’d like to cite a compelling if somewhat rambling formulation offered by Lacan that, we might say, “unties together” multiple strands of the preceding discussion. The passage is taken from Lacan’s first seminar, one dedicated to Freud’s writings on technique: The superego is an imperative. As is indicated by common sense and by the uses to which it is put, it is consonant with the register and the idea of the law, that is to say with the totality of the system of language, in so far it defines the situation of man as such, that is to say in so far as he is not just a biological individual. On the other hand, one should also emphasize, as a counter to this, its senseless, blind character, of pure imperativeness and simple tyranny. . . . The superego has a relation to the law, and is at the same time a senseless law, going so far as to become a failure to recognize the law. . . . The superego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction. As such, it is speech itself, the commandment of law, in so far as nothing more than its root 49. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 97. 50. Franz Kafka, “Ein Landarzt,” in Ein Landarzt und andere Drucke zu Lebzeiten, ed. Hans-Georg Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 207. Stanley Corngold, trans., ed., Franz Kafka’s Selected Stories (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 65.

   

218 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

remains. The law is entirely reduced to something, which cannot even be expressed, like the You must, which is speech deprived of all its meaning. It is in this sense that the superego ends up by being identified with only what is most devastating, most fascinating, in the primitive experiences of the subject. It ends up being identified with what I call the ferocious figure, with the figures which we can link to primitive traumas the child has suffered, whatever these are.51

One hears in this echoes of Scholem’s characterization of the status of revelation in Kafka’s universe where revelation is “seen from the perspective in which it is returned to its own nothingness.”52 In the terms I’ve been proposing here, the superego functions as the psychic relay point of the “static” radiating from the anthropogenic event. It administers that static by lending it a commanding, officious voice, one that transmits a Zuviel von Anspruch, an excess of address. It functions as the exceptionally exciting address that binds the subject to the normativity of a form of life, or as Agamben would put it, makes it governable, precisely by way of its own seeming unboundedness. The static thereby becomes a kind of persistent and intrusive stream of conscience.53 Its commands are thus precisely not psychic representatives of homeostatic imperatives regulating the life processes but rather of a stasis that registers a disturbance in them that, happily or not, never ceases to “happen.” On this view, the human mind— what Hegel called Geist— includes in its composition a dimension of “civil unrest,” of antagonism, that needs to be (repeatedly) economized according to the dictates— the sovereign decrees— of the superego. Before Freud undertakes his series of efforts to track the emergence and function of the superego, he presents what had become, since his work on Beyond the Pleasure Principle, his understanding of the life processes as an always precarious and provisional standoff between what he characterizes as the two great forces in life, Eros and Thanatos. Eros can now be seen to stand in for the life drives that are, as Damasio would say, the source of homeostatic upregulation, of the demand for “upgrades,” for ever greater, ever more ramified, ever more optimized, modes of flourishing (in economy, one always wants an upgrade). The death drive displays a more paradoxical nature and indeed seems to be not so much an independent motive force as a “seizure” of the life drives under the impact of language and cul51. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953– 1954, trans. John Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 102. 52. Scholem, Correspondence, 126 (letter of July 17, 1934). 53. Kafka might thus be characterized as the inventor of the stream-of-conscience novel.

The Stranger Order of Things  : : 219

ture. Damasio, as we have seen, views culture for the most part as a massive upgrade to the machinery of homeostasis in natural history (culture is the business—or, something stranger, the busyness—class of nature). Freud, for his part, never gave up his dualistic view of the drives and concludes the chapter that precedes the account of the superego with a grand vision not only of the evolution of civilization but of life itself, namely, as “the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of, and the evolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.” “And it is,” he concludes with a tone of derision, “this battle of the giants that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.”54 In another volume of his Homo Sacer project, Agamben offers his own version of the battle of the giants. He stages a kind of debate between Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin with respect to the concept of the state of exception, a debate he characterizes as a “Gigantomachy Over a Void.” The positions of the two Weimar thinkers correspond to what Agamben, apropos of the notion of stasis, presented as the two modalities of the existence of the multitude in Hobbes’s understanding of the constitution of the state: the dissolved multitude and the disunited multitude. The former, as we saw, signifies the way in which sovereign power and authority— the Leviathan— holds the state of nature in reserve as a kind of extimate “reservation” where the state of exception is virtually in force; the latter refers to the “realization” of the state of exception, a renewed passage through the “night of the world”— Agamben speaks of a condition of anomie— in which, at the very least, the mind is freed up to imagine new forms of social bonds and politics. No doubt some will be tempted to characterize such freedom as, to cite Kafka’s canine researcher, “a stunted growth [ein kümmerliches Gewächs],” to which my own response would be the concluding words of that marvelous “Cynic,” “But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession.”55 These two Weimar thinkers had, of course, little patience for such canine modesty. Agamben nicely captures Benjamin’s strategy: “The attempt of state power to annex anomie through the state of exception is unmasked by Benjamin for what it is: a fictio juris par excellence, which claims to maintain the law in its very suspension as force-of-law. What now takes its place are civil war and revolutionary violence, that is, a human action that has shed [deposto] every relation to law. . . . While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds 54. Freud, Civilization, 82. 55. Kafka, Selected Stories, 161.

   

220 : : C h a P t e r s e v e n

to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it— as pure violence— an existence outside the law.”56 In psychoanalytic terms, Schmitt’s position, which defines the sovereign as the one who can decide on the state of exception, is decidedly on the side of the superego; it is caught up, as Lacan put it, “with only what is most devastating, most fascinating, in the primitive experiences of the subject.” The sovereign, like the superego, “ends up being identified with . . . the ferocious figure, with the figures which we can link to primitive traumas the child has suffered, whatever these are.” The superego might thus be thought of as the way the mind appropriates anomie, converts the nameless woe of surplus scarcity into a deficit that could and must be paid, a task or duty that must be performed, a charge that must be discharged, at any price. However else he might have imagined it in action— and we get precious little information about that— Benjamin’s thought of “pure violence” clearly represents an effort to interrupt the sway of the superegoic dimension of political authority, a dimension he refers to as mythic.57 This “gigantomachy over a void” is, in a word, a struggle pertaining to the ways in which we come to encyst (upon) a surplus scarcity, a nameless woe, at the core of our individual and social being.

56. Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 59. 57. My hunch is that Benjamin was influenced in his use of this term by his reading of Rosenzweig’s account of the Vorwelt or protocosmos in the first part of The Star of Redemption. Freud, for his part, elaborated this dimension with his own “scientific” myth, that of the primal father, the original ferocious figure of the state of nature. In his contribution to the Neighbor volume, Kenneth Reinhard develops the connections between the sovereign exception as figured in Freud’s primal father, the superego, and Lacan’s understanding of sexual difference. See The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

EPILOGUE

I

One of the things I’ve come to value most at the University of Chicago is the practice, observed by a number of faculty members, of sitting in on seminars offered by colleagues and visitors. I am pretty sure that I have attended more seminars as a professor at Chicago than I did in my years as a graduate student. In 2016, the South African neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms spent the spring quarter at the University of Chicago as a visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought, and I was lucky to be able to sit in on his seminar on the neuroscience of feeling, the field largely pioneered by Damasio. Solms, who is not only a researcher and clinician but also the editor and translator of the Revised Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, coined the term “neuropsychoanalysis” to capture his efforts to reconcile neuroscience with Freud’s metapsychology. I learned a great deal from Solms, but in the present context, I’d like to focus on one aspect of his impressive body of work. In his rave review of Damasio’s Strange Order of Things, in which he— mistakenly, as I have suggested— claims that the book “reads as a neuroscientific vindication of Freud’s views” on culture as set out in Civilization and Its Discontents, Solms fully endorses Damasio’s identification of homeostasis as the (pleasure) principle of all living things. Unpleasure lets an organism “know that it has deviated from a homeostatic settling point— that is, from a bodily state that is necessary for life and conducive to reproductive success,” while pleasure “broadcasts to (and for) the organism the fact that it has returned from the biological ‘bad’ toward the biological ‘good’— back toward a settling point.”1 Solms follows Damasio in underlining an insight we have already rehearsed, namely, that the way that Freud first presents 1. Mark Solms, review of Antonio Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 66, no. 3 (June 2018): 579. Subsequent references are made in the text.

   

222 : : e P i l o g u e

the death drive (and so what is ostensibly beyond the pleasure principle), namely, as the “Nirvana principle,” is essentially a reformulation of the pleasure principle. “If what the organism is striving for ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ is a homeostatic settling point, then the Nirvana principle— far from underpinning a death drive— would describe the ideal state of the life drives: a state in which the biological needs of the organism are met perfectly” (581).2 Finally, Solms gives a full-throated endorsement to Damasio’s view on what is ultimately at issue in the death drive and therewith the discontent with civilization, namely, a conflict among component instincts (a word that explicitly retains the biological sense of the forces in question), all of which operate according to the pleasure principle. If there is stasis in the mind, it is between fully constituted component instincts each making demands on the organism within clearly defined domains of operation and always and everywhere according to the mechanism of homeostasis. There would seem to be no intrinsic— or better, no extimate— source of static on the channels that “broadcast” homeostatic imperatives. Where Solms parts ways with Damasio concerns the biophysics of homeostasis and its implications for grasping the nature of consciousness. At the conclusion of his review, he suggests that the latter’s “revelation of the absolute centrality within the life of the mind of such an elementary biological function as homeostasis— his understanding that consciousness is homeostasis— opens the possibility of a simple algorithmic conception of consciousness” (585). Though he confesses to finding the implications of such a conception as troubling as Damasio does, his own work, especially his collaborations with Karl Friston, pushes quite strongly in this direction. Taking some distance from Damasio’s use of the terms “maps” and “images” to capture the brain’s mode of representing homeostatically salient information to itself— of informing itself as to how it’s managing the challenges of being alive— Solms insists that all such representations “are at bottom . . . probabilistic predictive models of the world and the viscera”; consciousness born in feeling is, on this view, “nothing more than a registration by the organism of the existential implications of the model evidence— given current external and internal conditions” (585). The model Solms uses for “model evidence” is itself taken from statistical mechanics, the translation of the laws of thermodynamics into infor2. It’s worth noting that in another text, Solms equates such an ideal state with a kind of zombiedom. See Mark Solms, “Consciousness by Surprise: A Neuropsychoanalytic Approach to the Hard Problem,” in Biophysics of Consciousness: A Foundational Approach, ed. R. R. Poznanski, J. A. Tuszynski, and T. E. Feinberg (Singapore: World Scientific, 2016), 11.

e P i l o g u e   : : 223

mation theory (organized according to principles of Baysian probability) and, in particular, the operations of Markov blankets, a kind of membrane (or what Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, referred to as Reizschutz) functioning by way of processes of statistical sampling.3 Call it a cybernetic or systems-theoretical concept of conatus. The crucial task of any bounded or “blanketed” system is that of active inference, the self-reflexive processing of aberrant information, that is, systematically coping with a surprise to the system (expressed thermodynamically: minimizing entropy, binding free energy): “Active inference arises inevitably from the properties of a Markov blanket, because the internal states of such systems will necessarily model— and accordingly act upon— their external states to preserve the functional and structural integrity of the system.”4 In Damasio’s terms, active inference is the way an organism registers and initiates a response to homeostatic imperatives. In Freud’s terms, it is the way the reality principle comes to supplement the pleasure principle. As Solms puts it, “Through acting upon the world— and sampling new sensory states— any biological self-organizing system automatically generates new predictions concerning the hidden causes of its sensory samples, through an iterative process that can be construed as hypothesis testing.”5 What is ultimately at issue in homeostatic processes, then, is maintaining a relatively steady state of information and energy flow within systems, to enable them “to place an upper bound on the dispersion of their energy states,” in a word, to avoid getting thrown by, to avoid falling apart in the face of, new information. “In statistical terms, this dispersion or entropy is the expected self-information or surprise that can be quantified in terms of variational free energy. In effect, self-organization entails the use of the sen3. As Karl Friston et al., have put it, “A Markov blanket defines the boundaries of a system (e.g. a cell or a multi- cellular organism) in a statistical sense. It is a statistical partitioning of a system into internal states and external states, where the blanket itself consists of the states that separate the two. The states that constitute the Markov blanket can be further partitioned into active and sensory states. Here, states stand in for any variable that locates the system at a particular point in state space; for example, the position and momentum of all the particles constituting a thermodynamic system— right through to every detail of neuronal activity that might describe the state of the brain.” See “The Markov Blankets of Life: Autonomy, Active Inference, and the Free Energy Principle,” in Interface (Royal Society Publishing): http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792. 4. Mark Solms and Karl Friston, “How and Why Consciousness Arises: Some Considerations from Physics and Physiology,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 25, no. 5– 6 (2018): 7. 5. Ibid.

   

224 : : e P i l o g u e

sory states (of a Markov blanket) to infer external states (that surround the Markov blanket).”6 One might characterize this entire approach as neuropragmatism; life is about coping with, about processing and managing, new information under the pressure of homeostatic imperatives. As presented by Solms, the neuroscience of consciousness is first and foremost the study of this mid-level management of the stresses of surprise. Among the virtues of this neuro-pragmatism is, as Solms argues, that it allows one “to integrate Freud’s concept of repression with contemporary notions of the cognitive— unrepressed— unconscious.”7 The concept that allows for this integration is that of biological salience, the idea that the mind pays attention first and foremost to what has value for the survival and reproductive success of the organism. This means, however, that consciousness as the locus of attention is always motivated, always moved— always driven— by homeostatic imperatives. Such imperatives— and, thus, the consciousness they imply— emanate from the upper brainstem, the “deep brain” we share with life-forms dating back hundreds of millions of years. Solms characterizes this insight as a critique of the “corticocentric fallacy” to which Freud succumbed in his adherence to the neuroanatomy of his day that localizes consciousness in the cerebral cortex. Solms’s critique of “corticocentrism” rests on the claim that consciousness just is the feeling of urgency communicated by homeostatic imperatives, what it feels like to be awake, to be alive to the challenges of being alive. I’m tempted to characterize this critique as a form of “biological correctness.” It would be more accurate to say that for Solms consciousness has two aspects, one consisting of pure auto-affection, a baseline state of being “in touch” with oneself, and consciousness as intentionality, consciousness of or about something. The former constitutes the background sense that it feels like something to be alive— to be me— while the latter signifies that it feels like something to be alive to this or that. “Basic (brainstem) consciousness,” Solms writes, “consists in states rather than images. The upper brainstem structures that generate consciousness do not map our external senses; they map the internal state of the (visceral, autonomic) body. This mapping of the internal milieu generates not perceptual objects but rather the subject of perception. It generates the background state of being conscious” (20). In neuro-Kantian terms, if I might use that formulation, 6. Ibid. 7. Mark Solms, “‘The Unconscious’ in Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: An Integrated Approach to the Cognitive Unconscious,” in The Unconscious: A Bridge between Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Neuroscience, ed. Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, Simon Arnold, and Mark Solms (New York: Routledge, 2018), 16; my emphasis. Subsequent references are made in the text.

e P i l o g u e   : : 225

perceptions of the world must in each case be accompanied by a sentient I. Consciousness as auto-affection constitutes the background feeling of Jemeinigkeit, the baseline sense that perceptions are “in each case mine.” As Solms puts it, “we may picture this core quality of consciousness as the page upon which external perceptual objects are inscribed. The objects are always perceived by an already sentient subject. . . . Affects are valenced states of the subject” (20). The intentional side of consciousness, that is, how affects, while remaining an “interoceptive sensory modality,” register what is not-I, “reflects the fact that . . . changing internal conditions . . . are closely tied to changing external conditions. This is because, firstly, vital needs (represented as deviations from homeostatic set-points) can be satisfied only through interactions with the external world. Secondly, certain changes in external conditions have predictable implications for survival and reproductive success. Therefore, affects, although inherently subjective, are typically directed toward objects” (21). Thus Solms, following Damasio, proposes that the “basic unit of consciousness” can be expressed as, “I feel like this about that” (21). These different aspects of consciousness compel Solms to subdivide consciousness into different levels and kinds, to solve “the hard problem” of consciousness by way of a division of labor immanent to it: “consciousness is affective until it reaches the cortex, at which point it becomes conscious perception (‘. . . about that’). This gives rise to primary consciousness of objects, which may or may not then be re-represented in words (in ‘declarative’ secondary consciousness: ‘this feeling belongs to me and I am feeling it about that’)” (27). What I am calling Solms’s neuro-pragmatism conceives of the nervous system as an inferential activity that is constantly testing, revising, amplifying its “claims” about the world under pressure from vital needs expressed as homeostatic imperatives, demands for the work of, precisely, correcting, in the most efficient way possible, homeostatic deficits. Feelings of pleasure and unpleasure just are the way in which these demands along with the success or failure to satisfy them, to redress homeostatic deficits, are registered. Once Solms establishes that such felt demands for work— think again of Freud’s characterization of the drives as Arbeitsanforderungen— just is what we me mean by (affective) consciousness, he goes on to argue that the unconscious is best understood in relation to the mind’s capacity to delegate this work by way of “mindless,” automatized routines, to manage the business of life by way of algorithms that, as it were, hum in the background of our daily rounds without need of further attention. Problems emerge only when new information comes our way, when something unprecedented happens, when we are taken by surprise, get flustered, lose our orientation, become uncertain as to how to go on. As Solms sees it,

   

226 : : e P i l o g u e

the life of the mind— or perhaps better: of the brain— consists of coming up with new algorithms that resolve and systematize uncertainties and thereby improve— upregulate— the “probabilistic predictive models of the world and the viscera” that constitute the sentient core of our being. More simply, “the whole purpose of the reality principle (of learning from experience) is to improve one’s predictive model: that is, to minimize the chances of surprise— to solve problems— and thereby to minimize the need for consciousness” (28). In the terms developed in collaboration with Friston, surprise or prediction error is equated with free energy that needs to be bound by being encoded in updated, optimized algorithms. And as Solms suggests, this is precisely how to understand Freud’s famous pronouncement from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, one taken up by, among others, Walter Benjamin in his writings about Baudelaire and the shocks of modern urban life, namely, that “consciousness arises instead of a memory trace.”8 Or as Solms puts it, “The two states— consciousness and automatized algorithm— are mutually incompatible. They cannot arise from the same neural assemblage at the same time” (30– 31). This view brings with it a significant revision of Freud’s notion of repression and the unconscious more generally, a revision announced at the very beginning of the article we’ve been discussing. Recall that Solms’s stated goal was to “integrate Freud’s concept of repression with contemporary notions of the cognitive— unrepressed— unconscious.” We’ve seen, however, that for this to work, Solms needs to amplify and enrich what is meant by “cognition” by introducing the central role played in it by affective consciousness. To paraphrase the title of Habermas’s famous book, there can be knowledge only where there is interest, only where possible objects of cognition display their biological valence. Call it knowledge on a need-to-know basis, a need registered, precisely, as feeling. In a word, objects must matter for human flourishing. Or to paraphrase Heidegger, once more, things appear to human beings, show themselves as phenomena, only insofar as they appear within a horizon opened by the being of human being, which is itself constituted as care. Our question is whether what Freud understood as the libidinal value of objects, objects that ap8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 28; Solms, “‘The Unconscious,’” 30. See Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938– 1940, ed. Michael Jennings and Howard Eiland, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 317. The minimization of the need for consciousness in the face of the shocks of urban life is what Georg Simmel meant by the blasé attitude cultivated by urbanites. See “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 329.

e P i l o g u e   : : 227

pear within a horizon opened by desire, represents just another version of this series that for the most part remains oriented by vital needs, the satisfaction of which favor survival and reproductive success. To use Terry Eagleton’s term, I suspect that what Solms means by affective consciousness remains within the horizon of somatic materialism and so misses the dimension that endows human life with its bit of sarx. What Solms misses, that is, is that psychoanalysis is ultimately a form of sarxist materialism. In Rosenzweigian terms, psychoanalysis is not primarily concerned with what is good in and for human life— the domain of operation of homeostatic imperatives— but rather how humans cope with what is very good about it. Solms argues, in effect, that the unconscious is the domain of those experiences, those encounters, those information inputs, that have already been taken care of, have, as it were, been addressed, filed away, and require no further attention (in German one would say, erledigt or, perhaps, ad acta gelegt). In the concluding remarks of his essay on “consciousness by surprise,” Solms offers a clear and concise summary of this view. The first part is already familiar to us: “Consciousness registers the state of the subject within biological scales of values. The primal form of consciousness is affect. Pleasurable affect means ‘biologically good’ and unpleasure means ‘biologically bad.’”9 What is new is the status of the unconscious that here seems to have nothing to do with repression in Freud’s sense and that Solms might have better characterized as preconscious or even nonconscious. Indeed, at first and even second glance, this “unconscious” would seem to be utterly marginal to the concerns of psychoanalysis; it pertains, rather, to the cognitive science of learning. As Solms puts it, Perceptual/cognitive representations are intrinsically unconscious sensory-motor algorithms (learnt predictions as to how biological needs can be met in the world). Consciousness samples constellations of such representations in order to bestow meaning on them. Object representations are stable sensory-motor configurations which can be held in mind; they stabilize and shape raw consciousness into mental solids. Once meanings are established, the resultant predictions are automatized and rendered unconscious once more. (18)

As Solms notes, this work of encoding experience in algorithms is never finished; “the world is so uncertain, so full of surprises, that this ‘ideal’ state is not easily achieved— and not easily maintained. Reality is unpredictable 9. Mark Solms, “Consciousness by Surprise,” 18. Subsequent references are made in the text.

   

228 : : e P i l o g u e

most of the time” (18). Solms concludes by briefly describing the thermodynamics of this “algorithmitization” of experience, its conversion into an automatic, fully routinized biophysical algorhythm: Prediction errors attract attention to the salient representations. This occurs through the generation of what Friston, following Helmholtz and Freud, calls “free energy”: Entropy of learnt representations causing uncertainty. . . . This mechanism may be visualized as a cellular process . . . but it is felt as consciousness. Consciousness persists, then, until a revised predictive model is reconsolidated (until the free energy is “bound”). Consciousness of representations is predictive work in progress. (18)

Recalling that Solms characterizes himself as a neuropsychoanalyst, the question becomes how this rather nonpsychoanalytic take on the unconscious squares with the Freudian one. Solms’s answer is simple and elegant. Repression, which Freud understood as a dynamic process of withdrawing psychologically inadmissible representations from consciousness, is to be grasped as a function of premature automatization: “My principle claim is that repressed memories are prematurely consolidated solutions— that is, non-solutions— predictions that constantly give rise to prediction errors. Hence the ever-present threat of a ‘return of the repressed,’ which gives rise to neurotic symptom formation.”10 Because, as Solms notes, cognitive consciousness is a very scarce resource, “when confronted with an insoluble problem, it is better to automatize an inadequate solution than to devote the precious resources of working memory to a lost cause.”11 Repression is, as it were, the way we persist in our defense of lost causes. Finally, this understanding of the repressed as a domain of dysfunctional cognitive solutions, as what we might characterize as irregular algorhythms, pulsations out of synch with those constituting the regular beats, the healthy flow of life, allows for a new appreciation of the significance of childhood in psychoanalysis: “Needless to say, insoluble problems are more ubiquitous in childhood than in adulthood. How does a child ever solve problems like: ‘I want to be big like him, I want a job like him, I want a wife like him, I want his wife, I want to make babies with her,’ etc.? It is also clear why mental conflicts are particularly apt to become repressed. 10. Solms, “‘The Unconscious,’” 30. We might say, with Marx, that such tenuous solutions can give rise to a condition in which all that is mentally solid melts into air. 11. Ibid.

e P i l o g u e   : : 229

‘Conflict’ in this context is just another word for ‘insoluble problem.’”12 Solms’s characterization of the neuropsychoanalytic cure is equally concise and elegant: “The tragedy of repression (of premature automatization) is that it renders childish solutions immune to updating. Hence the central task in psychoanalytic therapy is to de-automatize, to render conscious once more, to permit reconsolidation to take place, and then to automatize better solutions.”13 In Damasio’s terms, repression hinders the process of homeostatic upregulation, and therapy frees it up again, restores a healthy plasticity to the brain. II

I find the Solms-Damasio view of things to be extremely clarifying. I’m tempted to say, it makes total sense, were it not for a remainder that leads me to those same reservations that Freud himself expressed with respect to the tendency he noted among fellow analysts to stay, in their therapeutic work with dreams, at the level of the latent dream thoughts and so to forget the work the dream itself is doing. To cite the famous footnote to the Traumdeutung once more, “they seek to find the essence of dreams in their latent content and in so doing they overlook the distinction between the latent dream-thoughts and the dreamwork. At bottom, dreams are nothing other than a particular form of thinking, made possible by the conditions of the state of sleep. It is the dreamwork which creates that form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming— the explanation of its peculiar nature.”14 This work is, I’ve been arguing, an attempt to approach and elaborate a repulsive void of knowledge by carrying over its encystance in the translation of the latent thoughts into the manifest content of the dream. If, as Freud put it, the wish provides the capital for every dream, the encystance of the void in question here functions as a kind of ghost investor without which no dream would ever get off the ground. It is just such encystance that is missing in these neuro-pragmatist accounts. I’ve been arguing throughout these pages that the fundamental problem that in some sense constitutes the human distinction, that is ontologically constitutive of human being, is that human life is haunted by a nameless woe that refers to no determinate loss, by a surplus scarcity that 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 510.

   

230 : : e P i l o g u e

can’t be converted into an accountable deficit, a task to be accomplished, not even an infinite one and certainly not a final one, an Endlösung. The fundamental problem is that there remains in human life something that eternally causes problems that cannot itself be converted into a proper problem. In the terms proposed by Lévi-Strauss, this “disability of all finite thought” stems from the constitutively surprising event of language, its all-of-a-suddenness.15 The entropic force released thereby can only be provisionally bound by way of signifiers of the mana type— so- called floating signifiers— with reference to which a field of possible problems can be configured, though never without a remainder of what insists as unbound mana-ical energy. The etymology of the word “problem” (from the Greek for “forward” plus “to throw”) calls to mind Heidegger’s notion of Entwurf, which is usually translated as “project” and which the philosopher uses to capture the dimension of futurity as one of the temporal horizons of Sorge, of care as the being of Dasein. Every project is fundamentally a response to a determinate situation in which one happens to find oneself, into which one has been, as Heidegger puts it, thrown, geworfen, the word he uses to capture the dimension of the past in the temporal constitution of care. Every Entwurf is an attempt to negate, in some fashion, the Wurf of one’s situation, to cope with what life happens to have thrown at us (in German, the suffix ent- usually connotes a kind of negation or taking away of whatever is signified in the word to which it is attached). All of this can be formulated, I think, in the neuro-pragmatic discourse elaborated by both Solms and Damasio in which the life of an organism is posited as a series of attempts to respond to the homeostatic imperatives guiding its path toward survival and reproductive success— to optimal flourishing. Every organism projects itself into its environment in response to homeostatic deficits in which it periodically finds itself. What separates Heidegger from this pragmatist orientation, however, is his focus on the fact of being thrown into this very “call and response” of Geworfenheit and Entwurf, this fort/da of homeostatic deficits and repairs, in the first place; for Heidegger, our “knowledge” of the facticity of that “original” throw manifests itself in and as anxiety, in the mode of a mood without determinate object or cause. I’ve characterized this fundamental mood or Grundstimmung as an attunement to the “static” of a stasis, to the white noise of our encystance of/on a nameless woe, to a sort of tinnitus emanating from the very core of our being. We owe it in large measure to the fine, “cynical” hearing of Kafka’s creatures as well as 15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987), 63.

e P i l o g u e   : : 231

to Freud’s evenly hovering attentiveness that the frequencies of that static have begun to be more clearly audible to us.16 By referring above to the “final solution,” I am noting the rather glaring fact that the phenomenon— we might say the Cause— of anti-Semitism, has shown itself to be something like an eternally recurring mode of “problematization” of this stasis (thus the fantasy of the “wandering Jew,” der ewige Jude). Heidegger’s profound anti-Semitism, revealed in all its ferocity in the so- called Black Notebooks, testifies to the limits of his thought for grasping the dimension at issue, the dimension he himself helped to bring into the space of thought. He, too, succumbed to the temptation to transform the uncanny causality in question into that all too familiar Cause. I am tempted to see in this anti-Semitism something like the negative face of and defensive posture with respect to what Rosenzweig tried to capture in his remarks about the “Jewishness” of The Star of Redemption, his decision to cast the new thinking— a thinking he thought to be shared by Heidegger— in the language of the religions of revelation: “[Just as] I have received the new thinking in these old words so, in them, have I given it back and passed it on.”17 Heidegger’s anti-Semitism partakes in a different set of old words in which the new thinking is not so much passed on as passed by; by linking the Seinsfrage to the Judenfrage in the way he did, he demonstrated that he did not pass the test of his own thinking. The thinker of care, of Sorge, came up short with respect to that care of the father of the family, die Sorge des Hausvaters, that Kafka’s uncanny yet utterly matter-offact, utterly sachlich dream-text inscribed under the name of “Odradek.”18 What I originally imagined as a rewriting of Freud’s major work on sexuality has turned out to be less a continuation of the exalted tradition of high theory, the genealogy of which I’ve attempted to track, than a contribution to a “new science,” one I have proposed we call “Odradek studies.” The concern at the heart of this science continues to be freedom. “Of course, the freedom that is possible today— a stunted growth. But nevertheless freedom, nevertheless a possession.”19 16. As noted, Freud uses the expression gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit in his 1912 paper Ratschläge für den Arzt bei der psychoanalytischen Behandlung. See Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband: Schriften zur Behandlundstechnik, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 171. 17. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 131. 18. One might say that Kafka’s work belongs not to the famous literary movement known as die neue Sachlichkeit, but rather to one that could perhaps be called die unheimliche Sachlichkeit. 19. Franz Kafka, “Researches of a Dog,” in Corngold, Franz Kafka’s Selected Stories, 161.

   

232 : : e P i l o g u e

III

Yet another “fantasy project” I’ve had in mind for a while and will most likely never write up concerns not three essays on the theory of sexuality or any other topic but rather three hammers, a tool that has been invoked in the work of three authors I’ve discussed in this volume: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kafka. The subtitle of Nietzsche’s 1888 text, The Twilight of the Idols, is well known: or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer. The surprise comes when in his preface he speaks not about the smashing of idols as one might expect from that subtitle but rather about sounding them out, about using the hammer the way one uses a tuning fork: For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels— what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears— for an old psychologist and pied piper like me, in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent has to become audible . . .20

At the end of the preface, while retaining the analogy with the tuning fork, Nietzsche brings the destructive potential of a hammer more into the foreground by characterizing his book as “a grand declaration of war,” adding, “and regards the sounding- out of idols, this time they are not idols of the age but eternal idols which are here touched with the hammer as with a tuning fork.”21 There is no doubt more than one way of understanding this thought of a hammer used as a tuning fork. In the present context, I propose that we “hear” it in relation to Freud’s “evenly hovering attention,” a mode of listening for the unconscious of the analysand, the static it emits beyond the pleasure principle otherwise regulating the transmission of homeostatic imperatives. One might recall the passage cited earlier where Freud invokes not a tuning fork but rather a different acoustic technology: Expressed in a formula, [the analyst] must bend his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the emerging unconscious of the patient, be as the receiver of the telephone to the disc. As the receiver transmutes the electric vibrations induced by the soundwaves back again into soundwaves, so is the physician’s unconscious mind able to 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 31. 21. Ibid., 32.

e P i l o g u e   : : 233

reconstruct the patient’s unconscious, which has directed his associations, from the communications derived from it.22

If I am right, the fundamental agreement between Nietzsche and Freud, the difference between favored acoustic technology notwithstanding, is that what is ultimately transmitted in and through the vibrations being sounded out— for Nietzsche, produced by touching the body of an idol with the tuning fork— is indeed a kind of hollow (in the crown or idol), the encystance of a void, the covering over of which is at least part of the business— the busy-body-ness— of that psychic idol watching over the ego, the superego.23 No doubt the most famous hammer in twentieth- century philosophy is the one invoked by Heidegger in Being and Time to articulate what he presents as the fundamentally pragmatic orientation proper to human life, to our being-in-the-world. Coping with the demands of everyday life means that the things we encounter in the world first and foremost appear in the mode of their usefulness. To use Marx’s term, we encounter them as manifesting “use value.” As Damasio and Solms would put it, things become salient for us first and foremost within a horizon projected by our most fundamental concern, that of maintaining life along a range of homeostatic set points. “For example,” Heidegger writes, “the thing at hand which we call a hammer has to do with hammering, the hammering has to do with fastening something, fastening something has to do with protection against bad weather. This protection ‘is’ for the sake of providing shelter for Da-sein.”24 As part of a set of nested tasks within a larger project— say, of building a house— neither the hammering nor the hammer is thematized as such but disappears, as it were, into the flow of the work. “The less we just stare at the thing called hammer, the more actively we use it, the more original our relation to it becomes and the more undisguisedly it is encountered as what it is, a useful thing [als Zeug]. The act of hammering itself discovers the specific ‘handiness’ of the hammer.” As Heidegger goes on to emphasize, “Handiness is not grasped theoretically at all, nor is it itself initially a theme for circumspection. What is peculiar to what is initially at hand 22. Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers: Volume 2, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 328. 23. In keeping with my bad habit of punning, the business of the superego— the ego’s very own prosthetic god— or rather the doxological business of sustaining its authority, of feeding it, might be thought of as the operation of alglorythms. 24. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 78.

   

234 : : e P i l o g u e

[des zunächst Zuhandenen] is that it withdraws, so to speak, in its character of handiness in order to be really handy.”25 I have, however, already indicated why Heidegger cannot be identified with the pragmatist orientation he certainly appears to manifest here. Suffice it to say that when the hammer breaks, when a certain stasis interrupts our work, suspends the flow of our projects, a dimension at least potentially comes into view that throws us back on our primordial thrownness in the world, allows the question of being, die Seinsfrage, to make itself felt as a transmission, as background radiation from the “deep past” of our anthropogenesis as speakers who say being in many ways. In a diary entry from February 15, 1920, Kafka adds his own admittedly enigmatic reflections on the nature of hammering. It offers, I think, a glimpse of what it might mean to allow the purposeful activities of everyday life, the work rhythms of ordinary life, to resonate with those of our dreamwork such that the encystance of a void at the navel of every dream can be newly, more freely felt as the locus of a kind of natality: One day, many years ago, I sat on the slope of the Laurenziberg, feeling sad. I was considering the wishes I had for my life. The most important or the most appealing wish was to attain a view of life (and— this was inescapably bound up with it— to convince others of it in writing) in which life retained its natural full complement of rising and falling, but at the same time would be recognized no less clearly as a nothing, as a dream, as a hovering. A beautiful wish perhaps, if I had truly wished it [wenn ich ihn richtig gewünscht hätte]. Somewhat like wishing to hammer together a table with painstakingly methodical craftsmanship, and at the same time to do nothing at all, and not in such a way that people could say: “This hammering is a nothingness to him,” but rather: “This hammering is really a hammering to him yet at the same time it is also a nothingness,” whereby the hammering would have become still bolder, still more resolute, still more real, and, if you will, still crazier [irrsinniger].26

25. Ibid., 65. 26. Franz Kafka, Tagebücher, Band 3: 1914– 1923, ed. Hans-Gerd Koch (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1990), 179– 80. Translation cited in Rainer Stach, Kafka: The Early Years, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 204; trans. modified.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Because this book offers something of an autobiographical intellectual history, many of the names I would normally and formally have acknowledged here are already identified in the volume. In each case I have tried to give a sense of the role each person— teachers, colleagues, friends, admired authors or artists— played in the development of my thinking. I would, however, like to give special thanks to my teaching partners over the years from whom I have surely learned more than I realize. I have taught six seminars on various aspects of German-Jewish intellectual and cultural history with Paul Mendes-Flohr; five seminars on philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis with Mladen Dolar; single seminars on a variety of topics in philosophy, political theory, literature, and religious studies with Jonathan Lear, Irad Kimhi, Bonnie Honig, William Mozzarella, Aaron Schuster, and Ryan Coyne. I would like to thank Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Lupton who have been consistently generous intellectual partners and who encouraged me to stick with this project. Tamar Abramov helped innumerable times to figure out what I was trying to say. I would like to thank the two readers of the manuscript for their thoughtful and helpful critiques. Alan Thomas at the University of Chicago Press has supported my work and pushed me to write better for more than twenty years. Pam Pascoe has been my traveling partner in life for more than thirty years; I don’t think I would have amounted to much without her. I won’t mention by name all the canine researchers I’ve learned from over the years, but their various forms of “cynicism” have no doubt left their mark on my thinking.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor, ix, 11, 19, 22– 23, 24 aesthetics: Agamben on, 145, 146; de Man on, 27, 28; mana and, 143, 145; politicization of, 22 affective consciousness, 226– 27 Agamben, Giorgio, 42– 44, 200– 208; on anthropogenesis, 215– 16; Arendt and, 47– 50, 78; on bare or sacred life, 78, 101, 164– 65, 209, 211; Benjamin and, 47, 50, 200; on biopolitics, 42– 43, 47– 48, 50, 79, 212; COVID-19 and, 42n47, 107; on duty, 200– 208; on Hobbes, 42– 43, 208– 10, 219; Kafka and, 47, 78, 207; Lévi-Strauss and, 144– 47, 147n10, 175, 215; mana and, 144, 145– 47, 208; on Muselmann, 78– 79, 93n23; Paul debates and, 60; on political theology, 46– 47, 78; on signature, 39n37; on state of exception, 40n40, 44, 83n9, 200, 207, 209– 11, 219– 20. See also Homo Sacer algorithm: Casanova on Beckett and, 27n23; Rosenzweig on personality and, 70; Solms on consciousness and, 222, 225– 28 Althusser, Louis, 5, 11, 193 analytic philosophy, 7n12, 18 Angels in America (Kushner), 31– 33, 34– 36, 51, 80 animality, Cynics on, 131– 32, 140 animals. See human-animal difference animal studies, 82, 83

Anthropocene, 36n, 185, 189 anthropogenesis, 1, 158, 173, 189, 199n25, 212, 214– 16, 234 anti-Semitism: Arendt on envy in, 52n10; of de Man, 25; Freud on, xiii; of Heidegger, 231; as negative version of chosenness, 33; as problematization of nameless anxiety, 231; Žižek on, 156 apophatic ontology, 135, 172n11 apophatic theology, and mysticism, 135– 36 archive fever, 7, 179 Arendt, Hannah: Agamben and, 47– 50, 78; on the human condition, x; on the stateless, 48– 50, 76– 77, 78, 105, 120 Aristotle: Agamben on duty and, 201, 203; on chrematistics, 117– 18, 164; on philosophy beginning in wonder, 175 asceticism, 139– 41, 159n31 Assmann, Aleida, 60 Assmann, Jan, 52, 60 Augustine, 76– 77 Badiou, Alain, 60, 128n26 bare labor, 49n6, 82, 165 bare life: Agamben on, 78, 101, 164– 65, 209, 211; bare labor and, 82, 165; of Cynics according to Foucault, 132; of Kafka’s narrator- dog, 113 Bataille, Georges, 10, 13, 94, 186 Baudelaire, Charles, 27, 226 Becker, Gary, 153

   

238 : : i n d e x

Beckett, Samuel: on sounds heard by Molloy, 95n24; on the unnamable, 84; on unnullable least, xv, 64n35, 103n, 114n6, 178; worstward, xv, 27, 64n35, 77, 103n, 114n6, 178 Being and Time (Heidegger), 16, 61, 62, 182– 83, 233– 34 Benjamin, Jessica, 205n31 Benjamin, Walter: Agamben’s engagement with work of, 47, 50, 200; angel of history in allegory of, 24; on bare life, 78; on “bottomless depths of language,” 102; on capitalism as religion, 81– 82, 149, 155; consciousness and, 226; on Kafka, xiv, 50– 51, 113– 14; melancholic gaze of, 91; myth of disenchantment and, ix; near obsession with work of, 13n22; on politicization of aesthetics, 22; state of exception and, 83n9, 219– 20; on translation, xiv, 88– 90, 101n34, 126n23, 146 Bennet, Jane, 119– 20 Benveniste, Émile, 200 Bernstein, J., 17n Bernstein, Richard, 52 Bersani, Leo, 2, 31, 65, 157 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 72, 104, 170, 195, 198, 218, 223, 226. See also pleasure principle Bhabha, Homi, 37n35 biopolitics: Agamben on, 42– 43, 47– 48, 50, 79, 212; of experts managing people’s two bodies, 95– 96 biopower: Agamben on abstract nakedness and, 49– 50; disciplinary power and, 2, 37– 38, 39, 40, 41– 43; Italian thinkers receptive to Foucault and, 43 Boyarin, Daniel, 52, 54, 56, 57, 60 brand, 152– 54, 204n Brandom, Robert, 8, 9, 11, 86– 87, 144n8, 167, 171– 72, 173n13, 176 Buber, Martin, 66 Butler, Judith, 1, 10– 11, 73– 74, 201n cancel culture, 107, 162 Canetti, Elias, 43n49

canon of texts in high theory, 5 canons, literary and philosophical, 6, 7n11 capitalism: bare labor under, 49n6, 82, 165; Benjamin on, 81– 82, 149, 155; de- creation and, 82; disenchantment and, 81, 100, 138; Marx on surplus value and, 118, 138– 39, 147– 48, 165– 66; Weber on, 81, 138– 39, 149, 155n24 Casanova, Pascale, 27n23 Cedar, Joseph, 55 Celan, Paul, 22n10, 96– 97, 104, 118, 134 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 36n character, Rosenzweig on, 71 Chong, Ping, 31 chrematistics, Aristotle on, 117– 18, 164 Christianity: Agamben on duty and, 201; asceticism in, 140– 41; Marx’s explanation of value and, 147– 48; Rosenzweig’s thought and, 68, 74– 76, 129 Cicero, Agamben on, 203 circumcision, 57, 60 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 157– 58. See also Unbehagen in der Kultur (Freud) civil war, 42, 209– 10, 219 class struggle, Žižek on, 156, 168– 69 Cohen, Hermann, 47, 54n16, 64n35, 68n40, 87n15, 89– 90, 178 Comaroff, Jean and John, 153 commandment to love one’s neighbor, 107– 8, 114 commodity: brand and, 152; new geographical articulation of production, 153; self-valorizing value and, 165– 66 commodity fetishism, 148, 149, 150 consciousness: Durkheim on, 172n9; managing pleasure and pain, 190; Solms on, 222– 28 continental philosophy, 7– 8 Corngold, Stanley, 62n29 COVID-19 pandemic, x, 42n47, 79n3, 107, 109, 153, 212 creation: Hegel’s ontology and, xii, 168; Rosenzweig on, 126– 28, 159, 168, 172– 73; Sebald on catastrophe and, 184

i n d e x   : : 239

creatureliness: as ontological vulnerability, 3; theory and, xii; Žižek on ontological incompleteness and, xiii creaturely life: Beckett’s “unnullable least” of, xv, 64n35; Benjamin on redemption and, 50; Benjamin’s melancholic gaze and, 91; concept of, 3; culture and, 187; Cynics’ embrace of animality and, 132; de- creation and, 50, 80; Jews as paradigmatic figure of, 49; in poetic creation, 96; Rosenzweig’s new thinking and, 64, 74; the stateless and, 48– 49, 78 Critical Theory, 11– 12, 13n22 culture: creaturely life and, 187; Damasio on, 85, 212– 14, 219; as deviation from nature that does not exist, 58n24; psychoanalysis as theory of, 60. See also Unbehagen in der Kultur (Freud) Cummings, E. E., xiii Cynics, 129– 34, 139– 41 Damasio, Antonio, 9, 85, 212– 14, 218– 19, 221– 23 dark drive, 66, 67n39, 68– 69, 70, 82 death anxiety, 182– 83 death camps, 50, 78– 80, 82 death drive: Agamben on duty and, 200; Damasio’s view and, 213; Freud’s theory of, 163, 188– 89, 192– 99, 213, 218– 19, 221– 22; object-relations theory and, 205n31; superego and, 162– 63, 219 decompletion, 61 deconstruction, 6– 7, 19, 25– 27, 28 de- creation, 3, 50, 80– 82, 93 Deleuze, Gilles: Agamben and, 44; aversion to hermeneutic dimension of language, 27n22; deterritorialization of the mouth and, 115– 16; on Kafka, 53n13; modern German thought and, 10, 11; new materialism and, 27n22, 119; on repetition, 89n17; sarxist materialism and, 4; on Schreber case, 19n8, 37; Spinoza and, 4n8 DeLillo, Don, 152– 53

de Man, Paul, 6, 18, 25– 29 Derrida, Jacques: academic reception of, 7– 8; American universities with relations to, 11; among founding fathers of theory, xi, 5; on archive fever, 7, 179n23; deconstruction and, 6; defending de Man, 26; French Hegelianism and, 10; Freud’s Jewish identity and, 52; German influences on, 11; Habermas’s criticism of, 13; Of Grammatology translated and introduced by Spivak, 7n11, 18; postcolonial studies and, 36 desire, in twentieth- century French thought, 10 deterritorialization of the mouth, 115– 16 de Vries, Hent, 60 disciplinary power and biopower, 2, 37– 38, 39, 40, 41– 43 disenchantment, ix, xi, 8, 81, 100, 138 divinatory sciences, Agamben on, 145– 47 dogs. See Cynics; Kafka’s narrator- dog; “Researches of a Dog” (Kafka) Dolar, Mladen: deterritorialization of the mouth and, 115– 16; link between thinking and sexuality and, 65; Ljubljana school and, 30; on offer of mercy to Shylock, 155n24; on ontology and knowledge, 167, 169; on senseless voice of the law, 208 dreamwork: activities of everyday life and, 234; Agamben on knowledge that is not known and, 146; apophatic ontology and, 135; Benjamin on translation and, 88, 89, 90; death drive and, 196; Freud on, x, 58– 59, 84, 124– 26, 229; remainder of life and, 84, 189; void of knowledge and, 84, 126, 156. See also navel of the dream dreamwork of the concept, x drives, Freudian: as demand for work, 148, 205; dualistic view of, 219; libidinal object and, 115– 17, 121; Rosenzweig’s thought and, 127, 128, 129; superego and, 162– 63. See also death drive; pleasure principle

   

240 : : i n d e x

Dumézil, Georges, 215 Durkheim, Émile, 2, 83– 84, 137, 148– 49, 172n9, 175n17, 191n8, 216n48 duty, 200– 208 Eagleton, Terry, 5, 8, 9n14, 11, 72, 227 Ehrenberg, Hans, 75 Eichmann, Adolf, 201, 204 end of history, 33– 35, 36 enigmatic signifier, 19, 62, 200 Enlightenment, xii, 8, 12, 24, 41 Eros, 71, 129, 157n, 159, 199n25, 218– 19 Esposito, Roberto, 43 Eurocentrism, 36– 37, 43 excitement: creaturely life and, 3; theory and, 2, 5, 18, 43 exciting causes, 43, 63, 64, 65, 71, 75 extimate, the: Durkheim on religions and, 179n26; Hobbes on state of nature and, 208– 9, 219; Lacan and, 13, 64, 71, 77, 207; ontological status of the void and, 176 fear of God, Lacan on, 211n40 feeling, Solms on consciousness and, 222, 225, 226– 27 feelings, Damasio on, 9, 212– 13 Felsch, Philipp, 11– 12 Felski, Rita, xi fetish, 149 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 64, 65, 73, 87 Flechsig, Paul Emil, 40– 41 flesh, 3– 4, 17n. See also sarxist materialism floating signifier, 114, 143, 154, 174– 75, 200, 230 Footnote, The (film), 54, 55– 57 form of life: Arendt on, 48, 50, 78; creaturely life and, 3; Cynics on truthtelling and, 130; Lear on loss and, 73; remainder in excess of, 70, 121 form-of-life, Agamben on, 50 fort/da game, 72, 103– 4, 143, 170, 171, 230 Foster, Hal, 13n22

Foucault, Michel: Agamben and, 200; American universities and, 11; Butler and, 10; on Christian asceticism, 140– 41; on Cynics, 129– 34, 140– 41; deviant sexuality and, 58; on disciplinary power and biopower, 2, 37– 38, 39, 40, 41– 43; Habermas’s criticism of, 13; Hyppolite and, 10; Italian thinkers receptive to, 43; Nietzsche and, 11; pioneering work of, xi, 5, 35– 36; political theology and, 39– 40; postcolonial discourse and, 36, 37; on productive aspect of power, 101; Schreber case and, 37; on sovereign power, 78– 79 Frankfurt school, 11– 12, 13n22, 22 freedom: capitalism and, 150; Celan on poetry and, 97, 115n8; eternally recurring natality and, 136; Kafka’s narrator- dog on, 115, 129, 134, 136, 150, 202, 219; Odradek studies and, 231 French Hegelianism, 10, 73 French-Jewish thought, 46 frequency of vital intensity, 68, 95, 128 Freud, Sigmund: Agamben and, 44– 45, 146; on anti-Semitism, xiii; assimilationist defensive strategies of, 54, 60; bodies invested with sexual meaning and, 8– 9; Butler and, 10; case study of Schreber, 19, 159n30; culturalist readings of, 57– 60; on dreamwork, x, 58– 59, 84, 124– 26, 229; on evenly hovering attention, 183, 206– 7, 231, 232– 33; footnotes of, 54– 55; French thinkers and, 11; German postwar generation and, 11; hermeneutics of suspicion and, xi, 8; influence on author’s approach, ix– x, 23n13; Jewish identity and, 52– 53, 54, 179n23; Kafka’s canine allegory and, 134– 35; mana and, 151– 52; neighbor love and, 107– 9, 112, 121; neuroscience and, 9, 224; remainder of life and, 83; Rosenzweig on metaethical self and, 68; on sexual difference, 160; on sublimation, 4– 5; on

i n d e x   : : 241

trauma, 7, 215; on the uncanny, 61; the unconscious and, 87– 88, 127; on work of mourning, 23. See also Beyond the Pleasure Principle; death drive; drives, Freudian; Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Moses and Monotheism; pleasure principle; Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality; Unbehagen in der Kultur Fried, Michael, 167 Friston, Karl, 222, 223n3, 226, 228 Fröhlich, Hans-Jürgen, 91n21 Fukayama, Francis, 33– 35, 80 Galli, Barbara, 63 German Critical Theory, 11– 12, 13n22 German-Jewish thought, 46, 47 German postwar society, 11, 16n2, 21– 25 German thought, French theory informed by, 10– 11 Gibbs, Robert, 61 Gikandi, Simon, 36– 37 Gilman, Sander, 52, 54, 57 Goethe, J. W. von, 66, 67n39, 75n50, 88, 99, 199 Grafton, Anthony, 55 Greek culture, Rosenzweig on, 67, 76, 82, 83, 87n15 Greek tragedy, Nietzsche on, 196n16 Grubrich-Semitis, Ilse, 52 Grünewald, Matthias, 184– 85 Guattari, Félix: averse to hermeneutic dimension of language, 27n22; deterritorialization of the mouth and, 115– 16; on Kafka, 53n13; sarxist materialism and, 4; on Schreber case, 19n8, 37; Spinoza and, 4n8 Guignon, Charles, 18 Guzzoni, Ute, 17 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 12– 13, 20, 24, 28 Hajdini, Simon, 30 Hallo, William, 63 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 97– 100, 104 hammers, 232– 34

Hammerschlag, Sarah, 46 Hartmann, Geoffrey, 26 Hegel, G. W. F.: Brandom on erotic awareness and, 9; contemporary struggles over interpretation of, 167– 68, 170– 72, 174– 75; manifesto with Hölderlin and Schelling, xii– xiii, 62– 63; master-slave dialectic and, 10; postcritical approach of, xi– xiii; Science of Logic, 17; twentieth- century French thought and, 10, 73; Žižek on radical, abstract negativity in, 136n31 Heidegger, Martin: Agamben in lineage of, 200; author’s early interest in, 15, 16– 17; death anxiety and, 183; Derrida and, 11; on Entwurf to cope with a problem in life, 230; French theorists and, 12; Habermas’s critique of, 12; on hammer invoked in Being and Time, 233– 34; Hölderlin and, 19; Italian thinkers’ engagement with, 43; pure imperative without content and, 114n7; on relation between knowledge and being, 176n20, 179, 226; Rilke and, 91– 93; thinking and, 64– 65, 157, 181– 82; the uncanny in the work of, 61. See also Being and Time hermeneutic dimension, aversion to, 27n22 hermeneutics of suspicion, ix, xi, xii, xiii– xiv, 8 high theory, 5, 10– 12, 36– 37. See also theory Hitler, Adolf, 21– 22, 23 Hobbes, Thomas, 42– 43, 208– 10, 219 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 18– 19, 21; Benjamin on translation and, 90, 101n34; breakdown of grand narrative and, 35n32; Laplanche’s study of, 19, 37n36; manifesto with Hegel and Schelling, xii– xiii, 62– 63; Rosenzweig’s language and, 67; work of mourning in late hymns of, 25n16 Holocaust, 33, 51– 52. See also death camps

   

242 : : i n d e x

homeostatic imperatives: active inference from information and, 223– 24, 225– 26; Agamben and Freud on forms of life and, 44; Agamben on state of exception and, 200; consciousness and, 222; Damasio on, 212– 14, 230; Freud on birth of sexuality and, 199; Kant’s categorical imperative and, 190; pleasure principle and, 186– 87, 188, 189– 90, 198, 207, 221, 222; reality principle and, 197; of return to inanimate matter, 192– 93, 197; sarxist materialism and, 227; Solms on, 221– 22, 224, 225, 230; stasis and, 45, 183, 187, 188, 207, 218 homeostatic upregulation, 85, 213– 14, 218– 19, 229 homo sacer, 101 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 44, 200, 206, 207, 209, 215, 219 Honig, Bonnie, 52 Hulewicz, Witold, 94 human-animal difference, 84– 88, 91, 109, 132 human capital, 151, 153 human condition, x; surplus scarcity in, 156 Husserl, Edmund, 11, 64n34 Hyppolite, Jean, 10 hysteria, 4, 20, 122 ibidinal desire, 55, 62n30 Id, 191 impostor syndrome, 38 infantile sexuality, Freud on, 117 infantile sexual theories, Freud on, 160, 170 informe of life, 50, 78, 93, 121 Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 58– 59, 121– 24, 125 intersectionality, 33 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Freud), 124– 26 investiture crisis, ix, 20– 21, 38, 95, 143 Irma dream, 121– 23, 125 Israel, Arendt on foundation of, 49n7

Italian thought, 43. See also Agamben, Giorgio Jewish chosenness, xiii, 52 Jewish cultural studies, 54, 57n21 Jewish identity: Arendt on unnaturalization and, 49; author as Germanist and, 21, 29; Freud’s relationship to, 52– 53, 54, 179n23; Kafka’s experience of, 120; radical politics of immigrants and, 29– 30; repetition compulsion and, 53, 215 Jewish masculinity, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60 Josephson-Storm, Jason, ix, xi, xin4, 81n8, 138n2 jouissance: of disenchantment, 138; Lacan on, 88; Laplanche on sexuality and, 199; in loyalty to Trump brand, 154; sovereign, 39– 40; void of knowledge and, 136; of Weber’s “worldly asceticism,” 139; Zupančič on language and, 160 Judaism: as religion of reason, 47, 54n16; Rosenzweig’s thought and, 66, 69, 74– 76, 129 Jünger, Ernst, 153n21 Kabbalah, 88 Kafka, Franz: Agamben and, 47, 78, 207; allegory of mutations of officiant life, 151; Benjamin on, xiv, 50– 51; diary entry on hammering, 234; duty as theme in The Castle, 204, 206, 208; minor key of Jewish literature and, 53n13; stateless situation of, 120; superego in relation to “A Country Doctor,” 217; traces of religion in work of, 47n3. See also Odradek Kafka’s narrator- dog: asceticism of, 139; bare life of, 113; freedom and, 115, 129, 134, 136, 150, 202, 219; limits of human life and, 214; Odradek studies and, 121; shattering experience of disembodied voice, 113, 126. See also “Researches of a Dog” Kant, Immanuel: break introduced into

i n d e x   : : 243

philosophy by, 65; deontic ethics and, 201, 203, 204; Hegel on limits of critique in, xi– xii; Hegel’s ontological incompleteness and, 168, 172; homeostasis and categorical imperative of, 190n5; on judgments of taste, 145; manifesto discovered by Rosenzweig and, 63; on Thing-in-Itself, xi, 168 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 39, 78, 95n25, 100– 101, 150– 51 Kapoor, Anish, 135n29 Kimball, Roger, 6 Kimhi, Irad, 62, 167 King Lear (Shakespeare), 134 kingship, Cynics on, 131, 132– 33, 140 king’s two bodies, persistence of, 47 King’s Two Bodies, The (Kantorowicz), 39, 78, 95n25 Kittler, Friedrich, 41n44 Klages, Ludwig, ix Klein, Naomi, 152 Kojève, Alexandre, 10 Koptiuch, Kristin, 29 Koyré, Alexandre, 10 Kracauer, Siegfried, 22 Kristeva, Julia, 5, 10 Kropotkin, Peter, 97n30 Kushner, Tony, 31, 34, 35– 36, 54, 80 labor-power, Marx on, 118, 164 labor theory of value, 149 Lacan, Jacques: Butler and, 10; critical posture and, xiv; on discourse beginning with a gap, 158, 179; discourse of the university and, 66, 95; on the extimate, 13, 64, 71, 77, 207; on fear of God, 211n40; floating signifier and, 200; Freud and, 11; Hegel and, 11; on hysterical status of the subject, 4; on jouissance, 88; Kojève and, 10; Odradek and, 120– 21; pioneering work of, 5; power relations and, 38; quasi-mathematical notation of, 38, 84, 158; on Schreber case, 19, 37, 37n36, 38; on the superego, 217– 18, 220; on the unconscious, 205; Žižek

on, 176– 77; Zupančič’s orientation influenced by, 158, 159– 61 language: Agamben on, 144, 215– 16; Zupančič on ontological deficit and, 177. See also Lévi-Strauss, Claude Laplanche, Jean, 19, 37n36, 62, 199n25, 200 Largier, Niklaus, 135– 36 Laub, Dori, 169n3 law: Agamben on, 207, 219; Benjamin on rule of, 48; Dolar on, 208; Lacan on superego and, 217– 18; state of exception and, 207, 219– 20 Lear, Jonathan, 62, 72– 73, 103– 4, 170, 171, 189 Lethen, Helmut, 3n Levi, Primo, 50, 78 Leviathan (Hobbes), 42– 43, 212 Levinas, Emmanuel, 10, 46, 61, 118– 19, 128 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Agamben and, 144– 47, 147n10, 175, 215; on anthropogenesis through language, 189; on floating signifier, 143, 154, 174– 75, 200, 230; on language arising all at once, 142, 161, 173– 74, 175, 230; on mana, 83– 84, 137– 38, 141– 44, 146– 47, 148, 160– 61, 174– 75, 230; pioneering work of, 5; structuralism and, 11; on surplus of signification, 142– 43, 161, 173– 74, 214n; zero symbolic value and, 143, 156, 161, 174– 75, 208 linguistic turn to the body, 3; by Italian thinkers on biopolitical turn, 43; postcolonial discourse and, 37; Žižek’s sensibility for, 28 literature, postcritical approach to, xi, xiii– xiv liturgical labor, 150– 51, 152 Ljubljana school, 30, 43, 167– 68. See also Dolar, Mladen; Žižek, Slavoj; Zupančič, Alenka loss, 72– 73. See also fort/da game Low, Barbara, 197 Lupton, Julia, 53 Lyotard, Jean-François, 23– 25, 27, 28, 33– 34

   

244 : : i n d e x

Macke, August, 17 Mackey, Louis, 18 Malte (Rilke), 91– 96, 104 mana: Agamben and, 144, 145– 47, 208; Benjamin on translation and, 89; Freud’s and Rosenzweig’s engagements with modernity and, 151– 52; Lévi-Strauss and, 83– 84, 137– 38, 141– 44, 146– 47, 148, 160– 61, 174– 75, 230; Marx and, 147, 148– 51, 166 Marcuse, Herbert, 11 Markov blankets, 223– 24 Marx, Karl: Arendt’s critical stance toward, 49; on class struggle, 156; commodity fetishism and, 148, 149, 150; forces of de- creation and, 81, 82; French thinkers and, 11; German postwar generation and, 11; hermeneutics of suspicion and, 8; on labor-power, 118, 164; mana and, 147, 148– 51, 166; on money vs. capital, 164, 165; postcritical approach and, xi; sarxist dimension in thought of, 164; on surplus value, 118, 138– 39, 147– 48, 165– 66; on use value vs. exchange value, 100, 164; Weber on spirit of capitalism and, 148 Marx, Werner, 16 Massumi, Brian, 84– 86 master signifier, 200, 210n40 Mauss, Marcel, 83– 84, 137, 148– 49 Mazzarella, William, 147, 150 Meillassoux, Quentin, 168 Meinecke, Friedrich, vii, 65– 66, 67, 67n39, 68 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (Schreber), 19n7, 20, 38, 40– 41, 159n30 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 61– 62 Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), Shylock in, 155n24 messianic thought: of Agamben, 50, 200; of Rosenzweig, 128– 29 metaethical self, 67– 71, 77, 82, 83, 96, 129, 157n Middleton, Christopher, 18– 19 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 22– 23, 23n12

Mitscherlich, Margarete, 22– 23, 23n12 modernity: duty and, 204– 5; as force of de- creation, 82; Foucault’s genealogy of power and, 78– 79; Habermas on incompleteness of, 20, 24; Habermas’s opposition to French theorists and, 12; minimal self-sovereignty in, 78; myth of disenchantment of, ix, xi; Pippin on self-legislation in, 175– 76; popular sovereignty in, 47; Rosenzweig’s new thinking and, 126, 151– 52; sarxist materialism and, 20; void of God and, 135 Monk, Meredith, 31 Morel, B. A., 58 Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 52– 53, 54, 57, 60– 61, 214– 15 mourning, 23, 24– 25, 27 mouth: deterritorialization of, 115– 16; Freud on sexuality and, 161– 62; as site of encystance of a void, 134– 35. See also thumb sucking Muscle Jew, 57, 80 Muselmann, 50, 78– 79, 93n23 Musil, Robert, 136 My Own Private Germany (Santner), 31 mysticism, and apophatic theology, 135– 36 nameless woe: dreamwork and, 124, 128, 137, 156, 183; Freud on melancholia and, 163; of human distinction, 229– 30; of queen in Richard II, 103– 4, 143, 155, 193; superego and, 220 natality: Arendt on, 77; life of dark drive and, 82; poetry as site of, 97; possibility of new possibilities and, 136; Rosenzweig’s realms of being and, 178 navel of the dream, 90, 102, 106, 123– 24, 126, 135, 176, 234. See also dreamwork Nazism, 22– 23, 24– 26, 79n3 neighbor: Rilke’s Malte on, 96; Žižek on monstrous Otherness of, 118– 19 neighbor love: Arendt’s reference to Augustine on, 76– 77; biblical injunction and, 107– 8, 114; Freudian perspective

i n d e x   : : 245

on, 107– 9, 112, 121; Rosenzweig’s new thinking and, 76n52, 126, 128; surplus of immanence and, 121 neoliberalism, 151, 153 neuropragmatism, 224, 225, 229, 230 neuroscience, 9. See also Damasio, Antonio; Solms, Mark New Age movements, 81 new historicism, 36 new materialism, 27n22, 119 new thinking of Rosenzweig, vii, 63– 64, 65– 67, 74– 75; linked to a therapeutic paradigm, 180; neighbor love and, 76n52, 126, 128; neo-paganism in modern European societies and, 80– 81; psychotheological engagement with modernity, 151– 52; religions of revelation and, 74– 76, 231; remainder of life and, 171, 177; void of knowledge and, 127, 128, 129, 178 Nietzsche, Friedrich: author’s early interest in, 15; on enjoyment of asceticism, 139; on eternal recurrence, 155– 56, 163, 171; French theory and, 11, 12; on genealogy of guilt/debt, 144n7; on Greek tragedy, 196n16; hammer used as tuning fork by, 232, 233; hermeneutics of suspicion and, 8; on the “last man,” 34, 80; postcritical approach and, xi; on slave morality, 141 Nirvana principle, 197, 222 Nordau, Max, 57, 80 object-relations theory, 205n31 Odradek, viii, 13, 118– 21, 231 Odradek studies, viii, ix, 121, 231 Oedipus, Cynics on, 132 Oedipus at Colonus (Sophocles), 195– 96 officium, Agamben on, 203– 5 On Creaturely Life (Santner), 82– 83, 91 On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Santner), 127 ontological deficit, Zupančič on, 162, 167, 170, 177 ontological incompleteness, Žižek on, xiii, 170– 72

ontological vulnerability, 3, 64 original sin, Zupančič on, 159– 60, 170 Other, xv; of caregiving environment, 2; God the Father as, 4; human subjectivity and, xiii; negative ontology and, 136; as neighbor, 118– 19; unconscious as discourse of, 205 outcasts, Rilke’s Malte on, 93– 95, 96 Pascoe, Pamela, 31 Paul, 3– 4, 46, 60– 61, 76, 200 Paul, Robert, 52 personality: art produced and consumed at level of, 96; Rosenzweig on, 69– 70, 82, 88, 129, 179 philosophy: Bernstein on dry and dead subject matter of, 18n; philosophers wanting to replace the word “philosophy,” 64– 65; theory in border territory of, 65 Pinkard, Terry, 167 Pippin, Robert, 167, 170– 74, 175– 76 Plato: Agamben on surplus of signification and, 145– 46; Cynics on conduct of life and, 130– 31; Foucault on Christian asceticism and, 141 play, Massumi on, 84, 86 pleasure principle: asceticism and, 140; beyond of, 27, 44, 186– 87, 188, 196– 98, 222; death drive and, 197– 99, 222; de Man on the aesthetic and, 27, 28; flourishing of an organism and, 186, 187; Freud’s perplexity about, 190– 91, 198; homeostatic imperatives and, 186– 87, 188, 189– 90, 198, 207, 221, 222; linguistic turn to the body and, 28; loss and, 73; Nietzsche’s “last man” and, 80; self-splitting of pleasure and, 198– 99; superego and, 44; vision of end of history and, 35. See also Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud) pluralism about theoretical paradigms, xiv poetry: Celan on, 96– 97, 119; de Man on, 27; Rilke’s Duino Elegies, 68, 182

   

246 : : i n d e x

political life: Arendt on sovereignty and, 48; creaturely insistence in, 82– 83 political theology: Agamben on, 46– 47, 78; Foucault on, 39– 40; Marx on shift to political economy and, 149– 51; modern democratic societies and, 47; of Paul, 60. See also Kantorowicz, Ernst; sovereign power; sovereignty postcolonial turn in theory, xi, 7n11, 36– 37 postcritical approach, xi, 5; in Hegelian sense, xi– xiii; new materialism and, 119; reading as unsuspicious and, xiii– xiv; repetition of learning and, 191n8 postmodern condition, Lyotard on, 23– 25, 33 Postone, Moishe, 51 poststructuralism, 12, 36– 37, 202 post-thaumatic stress disorder, 180– 83 power: deconstruction and, 6; productive in Foucault’s analysis, 101. See also disciplinary power and biopower; sovereign power Prauss, Gerald, 16 progress, and mourning, 24– 25 Protestant ethic, 54, 81, 138– 39, 166, 193 protocosmos, 63, 67– 68, 76, 80, 83, 87n15, 129, 177 psychotheology of everyday life, 61, 68, 121, 127 pulsive theorizations, Bersani’s notion of, 2, 31, 65, 157 quantum physics, Žižek on ontology of, 170– 71 queer theory, and Jewish cultural studies, 54 quilting point, 200, 210n40 reality principle, 44, 66, 140, 156, 196– 97, 205, 212, 223, 226 reason: Cohen on Judaism as religion of, 47, 54n16; Enlightenment and, 8; French thinkers’ disillusionment with, 11; human distinction and, 86; the unconscious and, 9

redemption: Benjamin on creaturely life and, 50; surplus scarcity and, 214. See also Star of Redemption, The (Rosenzweig) Reinhard, Kenneth, 30n, 53, 61n, 76n52, 107, 220n57 remainder of life, 82– 84; Agamben on state of exception and, 83n9; Benjamin on translation and, 88– 89, 90; bodies coming to matter and, 76; dreamwork and, 84, 189; Lear’s concept of, 72– 73, 189n4; limits of culture and, 214; Malte’s connection with an outcast and, 94; Massumi on surplusvalue of life and, 86; ontological incompleteness of reality and, 170, 171; political economy and, 150; Rosenzweig on death and, 128; Rosenzweig on openness to, 183; Rosenzweig’s new thinking and, 171, 177 repetition compulsion: Freud’s concept of, 72, 188, 193, 199n25; Jewish identity and, 53, 215 repression: neuropsychoanalytic view of Solms and, 224, 226, 227, 228– 29; primal, 73– 74, 156, 160, 162, 178; sexuality as ontological problem and, 157 “Researches of a Dog” (Kafka), 109– 15; Freud’s libido theory and, 134– 35; Zupančič on sexuality and, 157, 161. See also Kafka’s narrator- dog revelation: Kafka’s writings and, 112, 113– 15, 207– 8, 218; Rosenzweig on, 75, 75n49, 88, 179; Scholem on nullity of, 47 revolutionary violence, Benjamin on, 48 Richard II (Shakespeare), 100– 106, 133– 34, 143, 155, 168– 69 Rilke, Rainer Maria: Duino Elegies, 68, 182; Malte, 91– 96, 104 Rosenzweig, Franz, 61– 64, 65– 72, 126– 29; beginning of human life and, 143; as discoverer of “postcritical manifesto,” xii, 62– 63; Greek culture and, 67, 76, 82, 83, 87n15; Heidegger’s dif-

i n d e x   : : 247

ferences from, 65n36; on “Jewishness” of Star of Redemption, 231; leaving academia, vii, ix, 65– 67, 70; on metaphysical thinking, 182; the uncanny in the work of, 61; on the very good of creation, 127– 28, 159, 168, 172– 73. See also new thinking of Rosenzweig; Star of Redemption, The; Understanding the Sick and the Healthy Royal Remains, The (Santner), 17n, 47n2, 95– 96 Said, Edward, 5, 36, 52 sapience, 86– 87, 163 sarx, 3– 4. See also flesh sarxist materialism: vs. abstract philosophical thinking, 17; of Agamben, 44– 45; of anti-psychoanalytic theorists, 4; of Freud, 8– 9, 44– 45, 58, 205; metaethical self and, 72; psychoanalysis as a form of, 227; remainder of life and, 73; Schreber’s memoirs and, 20, 31; vs. somatic materialism, 9, 17n, 72, 227; surplus scarcity and, 164 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 11 Schelling, F. W. J.: manifesto with Hölderlin and Hegel, xii– xiii, 62– 63; Rosenzweig and, 62– 63, 177– 78; Žižek on, 62 Schmitt, Carl: on Hamlet, 97– 100, 104; state of exception and, 39– 40, 83n9, 207, 219– 20 Scholem, Gershom: on the nullity of revelation, 47; on revelation in Kafka’s writings, 47n3, 113– 14, 207– 8, 218; as scholar of Kabbalah, 88 Schreber, Daniel Paul, ix, 19– 21, 37– 38; Agamben on duty and, 204; disciplinary power and, 37– 38, 40– 41; father of, 37, 38, 41; Freud on, 19, 159n30; Kushner’s Angels in America and, 31; queer Jewish self-fashioning and, 53, 54; on soul murder, 38, 79; surplus scarcity and, 143n6 Schulman, Richard, 15 Schulze, Leonard, 18– 19

Schuster, Aaron, 165, 192n9 Sebald, W. G., 23n12, 91, 92– 93, 95, 183– 87, 209 secularization, 47, 81, 151 self-sovereignty, 78, 141 sexual difference, 84, 156, 158– 59, 160, 181, 198– 99 sexuality: Cynics’ embrace of animality in, 132; Freud on the minded body and, 8– 9; Lacan’s quasi-mathematical notation and, 84; perversion according to Freud, 199, 199n24; psychoanalysis on deviation from a norm and, 58, 69, 70, 85, 116; remainder of life and, 83; Rosenzweig on metaethical self and, 69; sarx as materiality in, 4; surplus scarcity and, 156– 58; thinking and, 65; the unconscious and, 9, 87– 88; Žižek on Odradek and, 120– 21; Zupančič on Freud’s breakthrough, 58; Zupančič on ontological problem of, 156– 61 sexuality of theory, 43, 107, 202 sexual object, Freud on the, 116– 17 Shakespeare, William. See Hamlet; King Lear; Merchant of Venice; Richard II shame, 3n, 110, 113, 130, 140, 160 Shylock, 155n24 signatures, 39, 44, 200 signifier: human bodies and, 1– 2; lack of, 156, 158, 160. See also enigmatic signifier; floating signifier; master signifier; surplus of signification social or cultural construction, xii Solms, Mark, 190, 221– 29, 230 Solomon, Robert, 18 somatic materialism, 8, 9n14; vs. sarxist materialism, 9, 17n, 72, 227 soul murder, 38, 79 sovereign power: biopolitical turn of, 42– 43, 79, 95– 96, 212; vs. disciplinary power and biopower, 37– 38, 39; Foucault on, 78– 79 sovereigns: multitude existing through representation by, 210, 212; Rilke’s Malte on suffering of, 94– 95, 104

   

248 : : i n d e x

sovereignty: Agamben on, 44, 207; biopolitical mutation of, 82; convergence of popular and national forms of, 48– 50; displaced by political economy of value, 149; incorporating state of nature in society, 209; popular, in modern democratic societies, 47; rebranding of, 154 spectatorial thinking, 181– 82 Spinoza, Baruch, 4n8 spiritualism, at turn of twentieth century, 81 Spivak, Gayatri, 7n11, 18 Spycher, Peter, 15, 17 Star of Redemption, The (Rosenzweig), 61– 62, 63, 67, 68n40, 69– 71, 74– 76, 88, 126– 27, 177, 180, 231 stasis: Agamben on, 209– 11, 219; beyond the pleasure principle, 187, 188; as “civil unrest,” 45, 187, 207, 218; class struggle as, 156; disorder in natural life and, 189; in homeostasis, 45, 183, 187, 188, 207, 218; immanent to the concept, x; irreducible in sexuality, 157; meanings of, 187; in mindfulness of creaturely life, 183; as nameless woe without determinate cause, 230; as state of society ceasing to exist, 187; surplus scarcity and, 214 stateless, the, 48– 50, 76– 77, 78, 105, 120 state of exception: Agamben on, 40n40, 44, 83n9, 200, 207, 209– 11, 219; Benjamin and, 83n9, 219– 20; Foucault on, 39– 40; as the norm in death camps, 50 state of nature, 208– 11, 212, 219 static, 177, 188, 206– 7, 215, 218, 222, 230– 31, 232 Stranded Objects (Santner), 22n11, 29, 31, 51 structuralism, 11 subjectivity: affective dimension of, 173, 175; embodied, 200; void of knowledge and, 208; Žižek on ontological incompleteness and, xiii, 127n24, 171– 73 sublimation, 4– 5, 65

Sumah, Lidija, 30 superego, 161, 162– 63, 164, 166, 192, 216– 20, 233 surplus knowledge, 38– 39, 41 surplus of immanence, 121 surplus of signification: Agamben on aesthetic judgment and, 145; LéviStrauss on, 142– 43, 161, 173– 74, 214n; void of knowledge and, 105– 6 surplus satisfaction, 161– 62 surplus scarcity: in beginning of a human life, 143; Benjamin on translation and, 146; death drive and, 192; eternal recurrence of the remainder and, 155– 56; fundamental problem of human life and, 229– 30; metaphysical temptation and, 183; ontological or epistemological status of, 175– 77; redemption and, 214; sexuality and, 156– 57, 164; superego and, 162, 163, 164, 166, 192, 220 surplus value: Marx on, 118, 138– 39, 147– 48, 165– 66; Schmitt on theatrical play and, 98 surplus-value of life, Massumi on, 85, 86 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 21– 22 Taubes, Jacob, 60– 61 Thanatos. See death drive Thatcher, Margaret, 100 theater, 30– 31; Schmitt on, 97– 100. See also Angels in America (Kushner); Hamlet (Shakespeare); King Lear (Shakespeare); Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare); Richard II (Shakespeare) theory: bodies invested with meaning and, 1; in border that is not exactly philosophy, 65; creatureliness and, xii; decolonization and, 36– 37; emergence of, 5– 9, 10– 13; as enigmatic signifier, 19; erotic import of, x; excitement and, 2, 5, 18, 43; founding mothers and fathers of, 5; at intersection of libidinal and political economy, xv; Kushner’s Angels in America

i n d e x   : : 249

and, 34– 35; migration from Germany to France to North American academia, 10– 11; new kind of Jewish studies nourished by, 53– 54; in 1960s, x, xii, 6, 8; postcritical in Hegelian sense, xii; pulsive theorizations and, xiii, 5; sarxist materialism and, 4, 9; sexuality as understood by Freud and, 1, 4– 5, 202; surplus scarcity and, 177 thinking: Heidegger and, 64– 65, 157, 181– 82; relation between being and, 177; sexuality and, 65 Thomä, Dieter, 114n7 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud), x, 1, 45, 58, 69, 116– 17, 148, 161, 198, 199n24, 201– 2 thumb sucking, 116, 117, 121, 161, 165, 199 totalitarianism, 26, 48, 76 translation, Benjamin on, xiv, 88– 90, 101n34, 126n23, 146 trauma, Freud on, 7, 215 Trelogan, Thomas, 15 Trump, Donald, 23, 79n3, 87n14, 143n5, 154 Unbehagen in der Kultur (Freud), 44, 58n24, 108– 9, 157– 58, 177, 184, 188, 214, 216 Unbehagen in der Natur, 169– 70, 177, 184, 188, 199n25 the uncanny (das Unheimliche), 38– 39, 49, 61, 77, 93, 101, 121, 207 the unconscious: as discourse of the Other, 205; Freud on, 87– 88, 127; reason and, 9; Solms on, 225– 26, 227– 28 Understanding the Sick and the Healthy (Rosenzweig), 180– 83 unnullable least, xv, 64n35, 103n, 114n6, 178 untying things together, vii, xiv, 61 upregulation, homeostatic, 85, 213– 14, 218– 19, 229 value: self-valorization of, 147, 148, 155, 164, 165– 66; use value vs. exchange value, 100, 164. See also surplus value

very good of creation: Rosenzweig on, 127– 28, 159, 168, 172– 73; Sebald on, 184 violence, Benjamin on, 48 voice, 115– 16 void of knowledge: dreamwork and, 156, 229; in mystical discourses and practices, 135– 36; new thinking of Rosenzweig and, 127, 128, 129, 178; ontological deficit and, 167; subjectivity and, 208; superego and, 233; surplus of signification and, 105– 6, 161; surplus scarcity and, 164; transformed into rhetorical surplus, 136; the unconscious and, 87– 88; Zupančič on, 167 von Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm, 16– 17, 91– 92 Weber, Max: on Berufsarbeit, 138, 156n25, 193, 206; capitalism and, 81, 138– 39, 149, 155n24; disenchantment and, ix, 81, 82, 138; leaving the university, 69n42; Marx on self-valorization of value and, 148; New Age communities and, 81n5; on Wissenschaft als Beruf, vii, ix, 67n39 Weininger, Otto, 54n16 White Noise (DeLillo), 152– 53 Wilson, A. Leslie, 91n21 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 9n14, 24 Wittig, Monique, 10 wonder (thaumazein), 175, 180– 82, 216 Worstward Ho (Beckett), xv, 27, 64n35, 77, 103n, 114n6, 178 Yerushalmi, Yosef, 52 zero symbolic value, 143, 156, 161, 174– 75, 208 Zionism: Boyarin on Jewish masculinity and, 56; Nordau on the “Muscle Jew” and, 57, 80 Žižek, Slavoj, 28– 30; on anti-Semitism, 156; in border territory not exactly philosophy, 65; engagement with thought of, 28– 30; hysterical status of

   

250 : : i n d e x

Žižek, Slavoj (continued) the subject and, 4, 20; on Lacan, 176– 77; on language, 175n18; linguistic turn to the body and, 28– 29; on the neighbor, 76n52, 118– 19; on Odradek, 120– 21; Paul debates and, 60; on radical, abstract negativity in Hegel, 136n31; on Richard II, 105– 6; Said’s Occident and, 36; on Schelling, 62; on spiritual selfhood, 70n; subjectiv-

ity and, xiii, 127n24, 176; theological legacies and, 47; the unrepeatable and, 89n17 Zupančič, Alenka, 30, 156– 64; on Freudian breakthrough on sexuality, 58; on identity of death drive and pleasure principle, 197; on link between thinking and sexuality, 65; on relation between ontology and knowledge, 167, 170