A Plea for Prometheus

Alberto Toscano
Abstract: This essay takes issue with Critchleys diagnosis of the motivation crisis at the core of our supposedly nihilist political present, and with its pejorative characterization of a vanguardist or Leninist Left. Against the reliance of Innitely Demanding on an anarchic metapolitics of responsibility, it proposes that we rethink the concept of solidarity and develop an intra-political ethics of egalitarianism, an ethics of unconditional rather than innite demands that is happy to embrace the accusation of Prometheanism. Keywords: ethics, nihilism, Prometheanism, solidarity, subjectivity

Ever since the reux of revolutionary political thought in Europe, datable to the late 1970s and early 1980s, a contingent of radical thinkers has sought to turn philosophy into an enclave for reection on political alternatives. Whether this has meant retiring to the attic to sharpen the knives,1 or, in a more melancholy mode, pondering the aporias of communism and community, the eects on philosophical thought of the putative lack of real politics are hard to miss. For many, philosophy has turned into a shelter for a radicality that struggles to nd much breathing space in the public domain. Innitely Demanding is explicitly positioned within this minor genre of philosophical thinking about politics in seemingly anti-political times.2 In its montage of elements from a contemporary Continental canon, it is an instructive exemplar and recapitulation of the metapolitical forays of recent radical thinkers. Critchley makes much use of an increasingly ubiquitous mode of theory construction: having voiced a philosophical desideratum in his case the formulation of an ethics that could motivate an otherwise enervated pre-political subject into radical, emancipatory action he proceeds to extract certain philosophical modules from various tutelary gures, to then graft and suture them into a conceptual
1. Philosophy does not have, and has never had at its own disposal the eective gures of emancipation. That is the primordial task of what is concentrated in political doing-thinking. Instead philosophy is like the attic where, in dicult times, one accumulates resources, lines up tools, and sharpens knives (Alain Badiou, Innite Thought, J. Clemens & O. Feltham [eds] [London: Continuum, 2003], 163). 2. Simon Critchley, Innitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (New York/ London: Verso, 2007).
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proposal of his own. The syntheses are so disjunctive that it would be churlish to dispute them philologically: Badious ethic of delity to an event, predicated on a notion of sameness, is amalgamated to a Levinasian plea for the transcendent heights of the absolutely Other; Laclaus formulation of hegemony (a formalistic dilution and distortion of Gramscis rather Leninist conception) is crossed with Marxs invocation of true democracy, itself founded on a radical critique of representation and a notion of species-being that Laclau (and Critchley) dismiss as essentialist,3 and so on. It might make sense, then, to temporarily bracket the issue of whether, and to what end, such dissonant voices may be harmonized, and consider Critchleys Zeitdiagnose of political lack, of the motivational decit at the heart of liberal democratic life, together with his proposals for a philosophically informed repoliticization.4 Curiously for a book that is also a call for situated politics, Innitely Demanding is vague about the site and moment to and from which it speaks. Sure, we get the obligatory references to Bin Laden, the Bush II security state, the promise of Seattle and the carnivalesque subversions of the anti-globalization movement, but the ultimate arenas of the motivational decit that preoccupies Critchley are the rather undened liberal democracies; its subjects, the ones who might impotently fulminate against the Christian Right, are the critical, secular, well-dressed, metro-sexual post-Kantians like us.5 There is already some confusion: is the problem of motivation one that aects the average citizen of liberal democracies (US, UK, Germany, Spain, and so on), does it bedevil those inclined to radical political action (supposedly against the status quo of such liberal democracies), or is it simply an ailment that aects metro sexual post-Kantians, whoever they may be?6 More likely it is all three: metro-sexual
3. It is peculiar that Critchley has chosen to highlight, over against a one-dimensional portrayal of Marxist economism, Marxs discussion of true democracy and the associated disappearance of the political state a politico-philosophical proposal that is entirely incompatible with his reliance on Laclaus post-Marxism, and the latters condemnation of any essentialisation of democracy. Consider Marxs unabashedly humanist and essentialist declaration: Man does not exist because of the law but rather the law exists for the good of man. Democracy is human existence, while in the other political forms man has only legal existence. That is the fundamental dierence of democracy (Karl Marx, Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, Joseph OMalley [ed.], [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970], 30). There is nothing interstitial or dissensual about this true democracy; its only horizon is the abolition of the state-form, and the dissolution of the latters abstract domination over human sociality. See also the essays in Etienne Balibar & Grard Raulet (eds), Marx dmocrate: Le manuscript de 1843 (Paris: PUF, 2001). 4. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 7. 5. Ibid., 139. 6. Critchleys account of our supposed motivation crisis could have beneted from attending to some of the recent literature on depoliticization as a technique of government in liberal polities, which suggests that the problem is not solely that of proposing new subjectivities but of countering the insidious mechanisms and institutions of de-democratization that neutralize emancipatory political thought and action. In other words, we need to identify how contemporary liberal democ Acumen Publishing Ltd. 2009

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post-Kantian citizens of liberal democracies who might be inclined to radical action. Whether such exceedingly insular subjects are of any signicance to the broader prospects of transformative political action is hardly evident, nor is it obvious that their anxieties over politics have anything to say about politics in most of the world.7 The implicit premise of Innitely Demanding is that a theory of motivation is necessary because the null hypothesis is a state of (comfortable) apathy, so that something needs to rouse the subject. The eventuality that one might simply and irrevocably live in a political environment, that politics is not the outcome of an ethically informed situation of choice, but a kind of element in which one might be compelled to make ones way and take sides arguably a more common scenario, even in many liberal democracies is not really taken into account. Motivation is accompanied, in Critchleys story, by two other terms: disappointment and nihilism. Disappointment is allegedly the Grundstimmung of modern philosophy, which, after Kant, realizes that the Scholastic dream of [a]bsolute knowledge or a direct ontology of things as they are is decisively beyond the ken of fallible, nite creatures like us.8 In its religious variant it translates into the problem of meaninglessness and into the divergent but complementary responses of active and passive nihilism. In politics, it stems from the realization that we inhabit a violently unjust world. A number of immediate responses suggest themselves here, both of a philosophical and of a political nature. First of all, why disappointment? To begin with, it can just as easily be argued that the epistemic limits placed on sensibility and the understanding by the Copernican turn serve to exalt the powers of human reason rather than debasing it. Thus, where Critchley holds that the Kantian revolution in philosophy is a lesson in limitation,9 we would do well to complicate the matter somewhat, and recall that among the various forms that limitation takes for Kant we also nd an estimation of the capacities of human cognition much more condent and all-encompassing than any that could be found in the Scholastic tradition or in Cartesianism (where the innite power of cognition is the purview of God, and only conditionally of man). Take for instance the manner in which Kant turns the pathos of fear and insignicance that appears to mark the

racies rely on banishing non-conforming motivations. See, among others, Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2009), and Wendy Brown, American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and De-Democratization, Political Theory 34(6) (2006), 690714. 7. See Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 8. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 1. 9. Ibid.
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aesthetic experience of the sublime into a sign of the awesome capacities of the human mind: [In] our aesthetic judgment nature is judged as sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial, and hence to regard its power (to which we are, to be sure, subjected in regard to these things) as not the sort of dominion over ourselves and our authority to which we would have to bow if it came down to our highest principles and their armation or abandonment. Thus nature is here called sublime merely because it raises the imagination to the point of presenting those cases in which the mind can make palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature.10 Snatching the victory of thought from the jaws of its natural defeat, Kant is very far from turning the limitations of human cognition into the occasion for miring us in our own mortality. While the critique and condemnation of a certain cognitive and moral hubris (fanaticism, or Schwrmerei) plays a crucial role in Kants demarcation from an onto-theological rationalism, and in his own brand of metapolitics, it is far from entailing a deationary account of the powers of reason. In this respect, I think it does an injustice to Kant to reduce him to the kind of fake humilities that were all the rage in cold war attacks on totalitarian ideocracies, and which Critchley, perhaps despite himself, echoes: We seem to have enormous diculty in accepting our limitedness, our niteness, and this failure is cause of much tragedy.11 Especially in his opening remarks, as in some of his other writings, Critchley seems intent on confusing nitude with mortality, a move that owes more to Heideggers appropriation of Kant than to Kant himself. Now, it does not appear that the propensity of human mammals to die was discovered in Knigsberg in the 1780s, and whether the death of humans is to be treated as having transcendental consequences (and if so which) is not a philosophically uncontroversial question. To confuse an epistemic thesis about the constitutive limits of human cognition, its dependence on receptivity and incapacity to know what lies beyond experience (a thesis that is in any case problematized by any sustained reection on scientic cognition) with an existential and moral disquisition on mortality, and then to turn these into supposedly political lessons, begs a few questions. The acceptance of niteness can be the prelude to the most craven, self-serving behaviour, just as trust in the innite powers of human reason can motivate self10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, P. Guyer (ed.), P. Guyer & E. Matthews (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 145 [Ak. 262]. 11. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 1.
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less ethical and political action. Aside from relying on a partial reading of Kant, the notion that tragedy is a product of the unlimited faith in an unfettered reason, although it might comfort the philosophers sense of self-importance (as though all catastrophes were catastrophes of philosophy), fares rather badly against the historical record. The political problems that inhere in Critchleys diagnosis of nihilism are also considerable. To the extent that Continental philosophy is to serve as a bulwark against nihilism and the ethical metapolitics advocated by Critchley as its traversal, the manner in which nihilism comes to be characterized is of some importance. While the passive nihilist is imagined as a blas or New Age variant of the aforementioned metro-sexual, the active nihilist is the counterpart of Critchleys wished-for secular and nitist radical ethical agent, since he is the one motivated by the hubristic destruction of a meaningless world. Precisely because of an entirely dehistoricized account of the emergence and development of contemporary forms of nihilistic politics, however, the gallery of active nihilists the bearers of what Critchley tellingly dubs Promethean activism is incoherent and uninformed. Thus Debord whose anti-Leninism and antiMaoism is notorious, and whose revolutionary humanism, for all its bleakness, is free of Nietzschean overtones is lumped in with Lenin (one of the least nihilistic gures I can think of, whether in epistemic, political or aesthetic penchants) and the sweet naivety of the Symbionese Liberation Army.12 The idea that political action by these disparate gures (to whom Critchley adds Blanqui, Durruti and the ever-present Bin Laden) is a symptom of nding everything meaningless once again shows the analytically barren results of treating political action as a symptom of philosophy, and refusing it its own intrinsic rationale. If we turn to the actions and pronouncements of Lenin, or Durruti, or even Bin Laden himself, we will see that meaninglessness is not the motivating force behind their activism. Even the most extreme, repugnant and indeed annihilatory forms of politics are dicult to reduce to the register of nihilism. One is reminded of a quip from The Big Lebowski:13 Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least its an ethos. Likewise, if we take what has become, in many ways illegitimately, the paragon of active nihilism, suicide bombing, we will see that some very stable parameters of meaning (nationhood, liberation, territory) often lie behind destructive political violence, which cannot be so easily reduced to the epiphenomenon of metaphysical or existential malaise.14 The facile shift to the vagueness of the metaphysical register obliterates the specicity of political thought and action,
12. Ibid., 5. 13. The Big Lebowski, 1998, J. Coen (dir.), E. Coen (prod.) (London: Working Title Films). 14. Robert Pape, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2005).
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resulting in the kind of purely ideological comparison that one would expect to nd, and does nd, in the right-wing press. The idea that one should approach al-Qaeda with the words and actions of bin Laden resonating against those of Lenin, Blanqui, Mao, Baader-Meinhof and Durruti15 is the ludicrous result of not attending to the specic articulations of radically dierent politics, reducing them instead to the empty philosopheme of revolutionary vanguardism (we could add Napoleon and Genghis Khan too ). The peculiar premise of Critchleys reasoning here, marked by his recycling of the much quoted Yeats line about the worst being full of passionate intensity, is that (liberal? secular? metro-sexual?) ethical subjects of political action need to nd something that will motivate them to the same extent that the contemporary bearers of violent political theologies (Jihadists and Christian fundamentalists) are motivated by their apocalyptic imaginaries. A kind of metapolitical Bildungsroman is set up where the passive nihilist citizen of liberal democracies learns how to become active and overcome his nihilism at the same time. Accordingly, the antidote to a motivational decit in morality that undermines the possibility of an ethical secularism will be an ethics that empowers subjects to political action.16 It is interesting to note how the anti-foundationalist, anarchic and deconstructive position that dominates Critchleys account accommodates a very metaphysically charged account of the structure and grammar of ethical experience, in the second, and more philosophically engaging, of the books chapters. It is rather perplexing in this regard to note how the routine post-Marxist deconstruction of concepts such as Gattungswesen as unacceptably essentialist is combined with an account that, in trying to describe and deepen ethical experience, demands a raft of very strong philosophical assumptions. Among these is the transcendental valence accorded to ethical experience itself, the idea that ethics shapes subjectivity as such for instance, as when Critchley writes: A subject is the name for the way in which a self binds itself to some conception of the good and shapes its subjectivity in relation to that good.17 Compared to the generic treatment of linguistic, cognitive, social and labouring capacities aorded by Feuerbachian and Marxian notions of species-being, this enquiry into the structure of moral selfhood18 is immensely more essentialist. This is not itself to be condemned after all, why should we prejudicially consider all essentialisms and determinisms as a priori unacceptable? but it does jar with Critchleys deconstructive allegiances. Such a selective use of post-Kantian anti-essentialism, which exempts a strong account of ethical selfhood from the metaphysical scepticism

15. 16. 17. 18.

Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 67. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 9

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that elsewhere in the book strikes down accounts of knowledge, political action, the economy and so on, is unpersuasive. Parenthetically, it might be interesting here to compare Critchleys turn to ethico-political prescription, and particularly his dalliance with anarchism, with the trajectory of another deconstructive and anti-foundationalist thinker who has attempted an analogous move, Gianni Vattimo. In his recent liberal communist tract, Ecce Comu, subtitled How you re-become what you were, Vattimo, having rallied to the old-school Party of the Italian Communists, accounts for how he has come to marry his delity to a nihilistic hermeneutics with a commitment to the renaissance of communist politics which, notwithstanding his adherence to weak thought, is not beyond kind words for Castroist Cuba or the USSR. It is worth noting that, like Critchley, Vattimos politicization is explicitly formulated in terms of the geopolitical context of a resurgent American imperialism (crypto-Schmittianism for Critchley, the Americanized West for Vattimo). And, as in Innitely Demanding, there is an attempt (unconvincing in both cases, in my view) to link the baleful geopolitical conjuncture with an undeconstructed reason, a certain fundamentalism of truth. But the dierences are also of interest. Vattimo, despite acknowledging, as Critchley does, the disappearance of the industrial working class as the privileged subject of political change is far more sanguine about the empirical truth, today, of Marxs account of polarization, a global proletarianization that revives in its own way the concept of species-being: Todays proletarians are in fact those whose extreme poverty consists in the fact that they must now move to defend the very basic conditions of life on the planet, while the capitalists always smaller in number, as Marx predicted consume natural resources with no heed for the fact that they will soon be exhausted. The Gattungswesen of which the revolutionary proletariat was the bearer for Marx becomes for us the essence in the banal sense of quintessence, the last kernel of the human. The communism that we speak of with reference to this minimalist proletariat is above all the negation of the existing order of property, inspired by a profound didence in institutions, in statehood.19 Although Vattimos anarcho-communism remains ideal, which is to say regulative a hermeneutic counterpoint to Badious recent calls to revive the idea of communism it nevertheless does not relent from the canonical negative denition of communism in The German Ideology as the real movement that abolishes the present state of things. As Vattimo notes, because we dont

19. Gianni Vattimo, Ecce Comu (Roma: Fazi, 2007), 8081.

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see how the current regime in the USA, in the world empire that it dominates, even if in some parts of the world still in a soft sense can avoid the risks linked to the present situation, we must above all put in motion the processes of the destruction of this order.20 In other words, whether another world is possible or not, it is certainly necessary. It is this horizon of destruction, which it is dicult to dismiss as mere active nihilism, that also explains why Vattimo, despite his weak allegiances, does not inch from considering the classic problem of the state, both as an agent of transformation (this is how he envisages some of the political processes currently at work in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador) and as that which must wither, or be smashed. By contrast, Critchleys plea for distance weds a supposedly disenchanted realism (the capitalist state is here to stay) with a fundamentally liberal belief in the resistance against government, of the kind sympathetically investigated by Foucault in his late 1970s Collge de France lectures. Now, even if we were to accept Critchleys thesis that at the heart of a radical politics there has to be a meta-political ethical moment that provides the motivational force or propulsion into political action21 a position that in turn depends on stipulating a separation between politics and ethics that is not at all obvious we might ask why such an ethical moment must be treated in terms of a self, one that becomes a subject by entering into the ethical dialectic of demand and approval. Here Critchley seems to adopt the social ontology of liberal individualism, which accords to ethics the task of dealing with the individuals travails as he or she decides whether to enter into collective action (politics). Ethics is thus the level at which a choice (perhaps a passive or even unconscious one, taking the form I have been chosen) is made to bind oneself, as Critchley puts it, to a collective good. But, despite all of the Levinasian criticisms of the autonomy orthodoxy stretching from Kant to Heidegger via Marx (the supposed communistic culmination of this ethical tradition), we might ask whether the crucial dividing line is not instead the one between, on the one hand, those ethics that begin with a de-socialized self placed in simulated scenarios of decision and, on the other, those that are sensitive to the always already socialized character of intersubjective action even when it is the action of breaking with the bonds of community and conformity. Critchleys dramatization of ethical selfhood, which is broadly articulated into a moment of innite demand/approval and a therapeutic and sublimatory moment of humorous self-deprecation, relies throughout on a scenario that of the isolated, choosing and/or chosen self which, as galvanizing as it may be for some, has very little descriptive value. Here the ideological coordinates of the books sujet de lnonc and sujet de lnonciation the post-

20. Ibid., 84. 21. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 1213.

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Kantian liberal secular metro-sexual impinge on a supposedly transcendental account, by assuming the atomized choice of an ethical situation and eliding the fact that any ethical action, whether individual or collective, is already enmeshed in a series of pre-existing delities and demands (which it might have to rearm or from which it might be obliged to wrench itself ). Neither a matter of autonomous self-possession nor of dispossession by the transcendence of an other (or the Other), ethical and political activity are invariably transindividual, in the sense given to this term in Gilbert Simondons account of Nietzsches Zarathustra: The transindividual relation is the one between Zarathustra and his disciples, or the one between Zarathustra and the tightrope walker who crashes to the ground before him and is abandoned by the crowd. What Nietzsche describes as the fact of wanting to climb on ones own shoulders is the act of every man who experiences solitude in order to discover transindividuality.22 Despite the attempt to bring heteronomy to bear on the formation of ethical selfhood, Critchleys account remains overdetermined by a fundamentally articial and contemplative account of ethical action. Splitting the self through the heteronomy of an innite demand does not obviate the fact that we remain within the drama of an isolated self. This deontological individualism, it should be noted, is inherent to Levinass own account, which relies on the individualizing powers of money and the state as ontic preconditions for a heteronomous relationship with the other.23 What we should ask ourselves is whether such an individualized metapolitics, with its fundamentally liberal-libertarian tenets (ethics is the continual questioning from below of any attempt to impose order from above) can really motivate or drive a collective politics of radical transformation. Is the idea of a preliminary ethical act of demand-approval, leading to political action and association, really a plausible description of, or prescription for, politics? Again showing its bias for the tribulations of the auent citizen of liberal democracies, Critchleys quest for ethical motivation appears to elide the role of less pure (we might say less crypto-theological) goads to political action. Do we, for instance, wish to discount all political activity that involves an element
22. Gilbert Simondon, Lindividuation la lumire des notions de forme et dinformation (Grenoble: Jrme Millon, 2005), 280. It is precisely because of its capacity to cut across the problematic of autonomy and heteronomy that Etienne Balibar has employed the notion of transindividuality to illuminate Marxs idea of human essence as an ensemble of social relations. See The Philosophy of Marx (London & New York: Verso, 1995), 2833. 23. Emmanuel Levinas, Socialit et argent, in 25 annes groupement Belge des Banques dEpargne: 19611986. Allocutions Sance Acadmique/25 jaren Belgische Spaarbankenvereniging: 19611986. Toespraken Academische Zitting, 1319 (Brussels: Belgische Spaarbankenvereniging/Groupement Belge des Banques dEpargne, 1987).
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of often very material interest? Critchley is certainly right to remind us that politics is now and many24 but attention to these many politics would nd it dicult to purify them of the interests that they bear: whether it is the desire for land and livelihood of dispossessed peasants, the pedagogical convictions of striking teachers, or womens struggles for equal wages, none of these perfectly political activities are either usefully described or deepened by formulating them in terms of an innite demand, especially not from an other. Certainly, they are not devoid of ethical questions, namely in terms of the protocols of universalization that allow them not to turn interest into idiocy, the possessive focus on ones own benets and identities (British jobs for British workers, and the like). I would submit in this respect that an ethical interrogation of politics is better o enquiring into the concept of solidarity understood as the articulation of interest and universality than into the concept of responsibility, which always risks throwing us back into the simulated passion plays of lonely philanthropic individuals faced with ethical dilemmas. Moreover, it is only if we accept the pertinence of the starting-point of ethical experience the self faced with innite demands that Critchleys functional and therapeutic account of humour, as the sublimating salve for a subject inadequate to exorbitant demands, acquires its necessity and plausibility. Whats more, even the individuals ethical turmoil within the eld of politics as dramatized in works like Brechts Die Massnahme, Sartres Les mains sales, or Jean-Pierre Melvilles superb Larme des ombres is never separable, not just from the biblical concern with the neighbour, but from ones ethical and political solidarities towards comrades, companions and allies. In this respect, the way Critchley pits the combination of the transcendent excess of Levinasian innite demand with the sublimating (or is it desublimating?) function of humour against tragedy, self-mastery and the autonomy orthodoxy does not confront but simply evades the irresolvable diculties of combining humanist ethics with collective action in a social context of violence, conict and injustice. In other words, the grammar of ethical experience leaves us none the wiser about arguably the only real question for ethical politics, which is not that of metapolitical ethics which Critchley seems to present as logically, temporally and transcendentally anterior to politics but of intra-political ethics, the decisions and evaluations demanded of individuals and groups already in the midst of political action. If lessons are to be drawn from the anarchist tradition, they are not, I would argue, at the level of metapolitics but of intra-politics, of the organizational ethics that allow for the development of transformative solidarities and prevent the reemergence of mechanisms of domination. Ethics of this sort is in medias res: it does not presume that the individual has a univocal or transparent reason for his

24. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 131.

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or her political engagement (a particular demand that he or she approves; a conversion experience of some sort) but, regardless of what the original motivations may be (many of which are surely less than pure and not so ethical narcissism, glory, sex, what have you) works at the organizational level to increase eectiveness, prepare emancipation and minimize domination. Doubtless, whether we are dealing with anarchist or communist politics, this will involve considerable degrees of self-mastery, which is to say of discipline after all, the recognition of our nitude (or rather, our mortality) is often a powerful counter-argument to political commitment (just think of your family, think of what you could lose, and so on). Such discipline has both individual and collective dimensions; it is not reducible to an act of approval or naming, but involves the laborious process of political subjectivization. To use Critchleys terminology, a self does not simply bind itself to a good: it binds or incorporates itself into a subject that builds such a good. Here it is worth reecting on a dimension of Badious Ethics that Critchley, along with many commentators, skirts over. Perhaps the most challenging dimension of Badious proposal is the idea that ethics is not directly concerned with a preexisting self or individual subject, but only comes to the fore with the emergence of a (collective) subject into which individuals enter (never in an all-consuming manner: an aspect of Badious Ethics involves maintaining the individual/subject gap). So Badious ethics is not exactly, as Critchley writes, a process of the formation of ethical subjectivity, where a self commits itself with delity to a concrete situation, a singular occurrence that places a demand on the self .25 Rather, ethics denes the manner in which an individual (Badiou, wary of psychology, phenomenology and transcendental philosophy steers clear of talk of selves) enters into composition with a subject. This is the complex theme of ethical consistency, which I would argue could be another name for the discipline of solidarity, to be understood as the complex articulation of individuality and collective action under the sign of equality. Consider Badious denition of the ethic of a truth as the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process or, to be more precise and complex, that which lends consistency to the presence of some-one in the composition of the subject induced by the process of this truth.26 If, following a key tenet of Badious thinking, which Critchley acknowledges subject and event are equiprimordial concepts with a common and mutually dependent genesis27 the subject emerges with the event and is dierent in kind from the individual or self, what link is to be stipulated between the some-one or human animal and a given process of militant transformation, or truth-procedure? What is unique about
25. Ibid., 49. 26. Alain Badiou, Ethics, P. Hallward (trans.) (London: Verso, 2000), 44. 27. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 48.
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Badious position which is also why it has been faulted for giving short shrift to the question of subjective empowerment28 is that it cuts o the metapolitical ethics that focuses on the pre-existing subjectivity of the one approving a demand, concerning itself instead with the system of consequences, and the organization, of the subject that is constructed in order to transform a given state of aairs in light of an exceptional dysfunction of its laws or principles of representation. Like Critchley, Badiou thinks ethics through a gure of splitting (some-one is imperceptibly riven, or punctured, by this truth that passes through that known multiple that he is29), but this is not a split between a self and a demand, but rather between a particular multiple (the human animal) and what will become of this multiple in an unprecedented and illegal process. This immanent split and articulation between self, animal or individual, on the one hand, and subject, on the other, does not revolve around the question of responsibility, as in Critchley, but of capacity. As Badiou writes: the some-one was not in a position to know that he was capable of this co-belonging to a situation and to the hazardous course of a truth, this becoming-subject.30 What gives Badious account its force is that instead of starting from a spiritualized subject, it begins from animality, from Spinozian self-perseverance, which is also to say from interest. This is the materialist dimension of what is otherwise a forbiddingly formalizing vision of ethics. The consistency that lies at the heart of ethics is concerned then with how to articulate ones own selfpersevering particularity in the excessive formation of a subject of truth (say, of a political collective). Although this could, with some distortion, be depicted in terms of the some-one approving the demand of the subject (to enter into it), Badious ethics is here rst and foremost an intra-political (or intra-procedural) one, a matter of consequences, of the multiple decisions that make up a truthprocess and not of the decision to bind oneself to it. The some-ones delity to the delity is thus a matter of employing his or her interests and (natural) perseverance for the sake of the continuation of a truth, of its construction and universalization: or, in Badious terms of combining the principle of interest with the subjective principle. Again, it is worth noting the emphasis that Badiou puts on the retooling of the known capacities of the some-one for the sake of the unknown becoming of the subject that he or she has entered into: The technique of consistency is singular in each case, depending on the animal traits of the some-one. To the consistency of the subject that he is in part become, having been convoked [requis] and seized by a truth28. Peter Hallward, Introduction: Consequences of Abstraction, in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, P. Hallward (ed.), 120 (London: Continuum, 2004), 17. 29. Badiou, Ethics, 456 30. Ibid,, 46.
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process, this particular some-one will contribute his anguish and agitation, this other his tall stature and cool composure, this other his voracious taste for domination, and these others their melancholy, or timidity 31 This technical denition of ethics contributes to Badious proposal of disinterested interest as the basis for ethical consistency. The (biological, material, aesthetic, unconscious, and so on) interests of the some-one who enters into a process of subjectivation are not eliminated indeed, for Badiou these are the motivating forces of perseverance but they are made to serve a subject that has nothing to do with interests of the animal, which is indierent to its perpetuation, which has eternity for its destiny.32 This position also has the further advantage of not making the exorbitant and hyper-essentialist claim that ethics is formative of selfhood and subjectivity as such, which underlies Critchleys claim that what we think of as a self is fundamentally an ethical subject, a self that is constituted in a relation to its good.33 Badious refusal of a metapolitical ethics for the sake of an intra-procedural (or intra-political) ethics of consistency and consequences can also be interestingly contrasted to Critchleys proposal in another sense. What Badiou proposes is an intrinsically riven subject which is incompatible with the Levinasian vision of heteronomy on which much of Critchleys account depends. The subject is in eect riven not by the constitutive experience of a transcendent other but by the contingent occurrence of entering into the production of a sameness (a generic truth) that exceeds the particular resources of the human animal but which, at the same time, can only be constructed with their aid. Now, it is true that Critchley tries to temper the Levinasian schema with Lacanian correctives and a practice of artistic and comedic sublimation. But the results are unpersuasive. A Levinasian ethic tamed and rendered liveable is not a motivating political force, but only a kind of subjective salve. Whatever use it might have for those already persuaded by it but then discomted by the prospect of turning into traumatised neurotics, it is dicult to imagine who could be spurred into action by such a defanged, secularized Levinasianism, much less through what channels it could allow [the] hegemonic glue to set into [a] compact, self-aware, ghting force.34 In eect, the combination of innite, and therefore unfulllable demand with the anti-depressant35 of self-deprecating humour, acting like a comforting parent36 is simply the description of the moral phenomenology of

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Ibid., 48. Ibid., 49. Critchley, Innitely Demanding, 20-21. Ibid., 114. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 83.

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the aforementioned post-Kantian metro-sexual, managing to maintain a good conscience (I have heard the innite demand) in the guise of a bad conscience (I could not really heed the demand, since it is innite) through the operations of humour (what, me, change the world?). But what if we stopped thinking in terms of innite demands, which, as nite entities, we can always be excused from fullling, and think instead of absolute or unconditional demands? What if we consider politics, and the ethics in (and not before) politics as concerned with such demands, with what Peter Hallward has discussed as prescriptions?37 In dismissing and associating with active nihilism, or worse Heideggers Nazism, all forms of Promethean activism or heroic authenticity, Critchley tries to conjure away a far more potent and anxiety-inducing ethical quandary than the one posed by innite demands to which we can never be adequate: what if we are summoned to act in terms of a situation to which our capacities are adequate? What if the demand can be fullled? What if talk of innite demands shields us from the innumerable situations in which we are perfectly equipped to act in a decisive and transformative manner? Real ethical anxiety is not the anxiety of inadequacy although it may ultimately be comforting to think ourselves too limited for the tasks before us but the anxiety of having the capacities to change our situation, although perhaps at the cost of our well-being or safety. The superegoic injunction You must, because you can!, also has this ethical truth-content. Perhaps then, Prometheus deserves another chance. It is well known that he was a tutelary gure for Karl Marx, who, in the Foreword to his dissertation The Dierence Between the Epicurean and Democritean Systems of Nature, wrote: The confession of Prometheus: In simple words, I hate the pack of gods [Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound], is its [philosophys] own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other beside.38 Although our deationary philosophical consensus might regard this deication of man as a disastrous form of hyper-humanism, it is worth reecting for a moment on what the facile dismissal of Promethean activism conceals. The Promethean act is rst and foremost the emblem of the revolt against the innite super-power of authority. Prometheanism is precisely the refusal of the articulation between divine (or political) authority and human mortality. And Prometheuss sin is indeed that of answering an absolute (although not inn37. Peter Hallward, The Politics of Prescription, South Atlantic Quarterly 104(4) (2005), 76989. 38. Quoted in John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark & Richard York, Critique of Intelligent Design (New York: Monthly Review, 2008), 91.
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ite) demand for human emancipation. In the words of Kratos (Might), which open Aeschyluss play: he must pay the Gods the penalty that he may learn to endure and like the sovereignty of Zeus and quit his man-loving disposition. The Chorus also castigates him: Kindness that cannot be requited, tell me, where is the help in that, my friend? What succour in creatures of a day? You did not see the feebleness that draws its breath in gasps, a dreamlike feebleness by which the race of man is held in bondage, a blind prisoner. So the plans of men shall never pass the ordered law of Zeus.39 Promethean activism where Prometheus stands as the gure of humanitys alienated capacities is the refusal to accept the articulation between sovereignty and our dreamlike feebleness; it is the will to draw the consequences from the unconditional demand of emancipation (in Aeschyluss variant of the myth, this takes the form of the invention of healing drugs, the interpretation of natural signs, the discovery of bronze, iron, silver and gold, and so on). To the extent that domination is still based on the exploitation of our mortality and especially of the cares and fears that so often prevent political mobilisation the gure of Prometheus is not, as so many critiques of Marxism have argued, the herald of some kind of disastrous hubris; Prometheus is the bearer of the open question of how we, creatures that draw their breath in gasps, can manage not be subject to the violent prerogatives of sovereignty. The demands and prescriptions that a Promethean politics carries are not those of nihilistic destruction, nor are they innite and unfulllable; they are specic but unconditional demands made on our capacities that, although certainly limited in kind, are often more than sufcient, when concerted and composed into the action of a collective subject, to act in a principled, egalitarian and emancipatory sense.
Alberto Toscano is a lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and an editor of Historical Materialism. He is the author of The Theatre of Production (2006), and of a forthcoming book entitled Fanaticism. He has recently translated Alain Badious Logics of Worlds.

39. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, in Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, D. Grene & R. Lattimore (eds), 61106 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 85.
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