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fact that love is qualitatively different from the usual emotion of attachment
to a specic object of concern. Love means, then, a trained ability to overcome
all forms of closure in life and implies subscribing a spiritual practice of care
without content (100). This love is called open not only due to its inclusive
genre, but also because it gives voice to the lan vital, the creative dynamic of
life as the substance of a permanent movement of novelty and difference.
This new way of looking at emotion, enhancing its propulsive force, as
Bergson calls it in Two Sources, is the core of the spiritual transformation or
conversion. This makes full sense in light of the fundamental purpose of
human rights, according to Bergson: to initiate the individual in the open tendency of lifes lan, protecting the human species but, above all, making each
and every one of us become worthy of his life (133).
The question behind the scenes of Bergsonian political thought is, then, the
one with which Lefebvre ends his book: Do we want merely to live or to live
well? The urgency for answering it, beyond any simple academic curiosity, is
the main reason to read Human Rights as a Way of Life.
Magda Costa-Carvalho
University of the Azores, Portugal

AUTHORING OUR ACTIONS

Nancy Luxon: Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust, and Truth-Telling in Freud and
Foucault. (New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xix, 357.)
doi:10.1017/S0034670514000734

In a world in which Luxon maintains that authoritative and purportedly universal standards no longer provide an accepted basis for ethical and political
judgments, the political arena as a whole is now characterized by uncertainty
and paralysis. For Luxon, political theory today is at an impasse, which necessitates confronting the question of how individuals can both author and
ground their political judgments (ix). Among the issues that Luxon confronts
in this volume are the question of what constitutes truth, the relation of self to
others, and practices of self-creation. For Luxon, two understandings of the
practices through which the person relates to him-/herself, to others, and to
truth telling open up the prospect of breaking the paralysis of contemporary
politics: Freudian psychoanalytic and Foucauldian parrhesiastic practices.
Reading Freud for and against Foucault, and Foucault for and against
Freud, she says, can illuminate the possibilities for individuals to become
more agentic, to become agents of their own practices. Luxon argues that
Freud and Foucault illuminate the psychological and political dimensions
of personhood crucial to projects of political subjectivity and agency (xii).
We are, however, immediately confronted with the question whether there

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actually is a crisis in the political arena, a paralysis, as Luxon claims, as well as

the question whether Freud and Foucault were preoccupied with the issue of
such a crisis which, for Luxon, is characterized by uncertainty, apathy, or
withdrawal (x).
We are also confronted with the question of which Freud, and which
Foucault? With respect to Freud, it is not the classical psychoanalytic practices
based on drive theory that Luxon looks to, but the later practices of relational
psychoanalysis theorized in the 1930s, which were oriented to self-formation.
With respect to Foucault, it is not the early Foucault, the Foucault of Discipline
and Punish, and power and subjection, for example, with whom Luxon is concerned, but the nal Foucault, the Foucault whose lecture courses at the
Collge de France between 1980 and his death in 1984 focused on parrhesia,
an art of living, and ethical self-formation. That Freud, and that Foucault,
were concerned with the conditions under which individuals author their
actions (23); both the psychoanalytic and the parrhesiastic relationship are
collaborative, according to Luxon. In neither is there command or external coercion; neither is characterized by subordination (25).
In relational psychoanalysis there is a combative collaboration between
patient and analyst, premised on a deliberate disruption of usual social
roles (51). In contrast to Judith Butlers reading of Freud, in which, as
Luxon sees it, subjectivity and agency are radically divorced (97), in relational psychoanalysis, as Luxon idealizes it, a real encounter between
analyst and analysand occurs, one in which the authorial agency of the
patient is cultivated. For Luxon, those psychoanalytic practices can disrupt
the reexive structure of subjection . . . in order for self-cultivation to take
a new direction (110). Luxons rereading of Freud emphasizes his own
focus not on psychoanalysis as a confessional technology but rather as a
collaboration the object of which is a re-education, a second education, a
Nacherziehung (75). It seems to us that Luxons reading is an idealization of
psychoanalysis, a claim that this is the way relational psychoanalytic practice
could work. Here the question of transference/countertransference is resolved
by a shift in authorial perspective away from a third-person authority and
toward participant observers (96). Assuming such a mutuality of collaboration within relational psychoanalytic practices, Luxon holds out the prospect
of a link between ethical cultivation and political engagement (91), of a link
between the analysts couch and the actual political realm. Moreover, it is
here that a connection is forged by Luxon between her vision of a combative
collaboration within psychoanalytic practice and the equally agonistic relationship she sees between the parrhesiastes or educator and his/her interlocutor, both of which are based, according to her, on care rather than
knowledge (164). Luxons recourse to parrhesia here will permit her to try
to get beyond the authoritative role of the analyst in psychoanalysis, and to
make good on her claims about combative collaboration.
For Foucault, parrhesia allows us to distinguish analytically those relations
that produce individuals (to t a specic mold) from those that educate

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individuals for self-governance (such that they are the result of their own
design) (136). Luxons distinction between produces and educates
here evokes her articulation of the Freudian experience of re-education. It
would seem that for Luxon, the production of the individual is closely
linked to Foucaults understanding of subjection or assujettissement,
whereas the education of the individual is linked to self-formation and selfgovernance, to what Foucault and Luxon mean by expressive subjectivity.
Moreover, Foucaults ethical turn was not primarily focused on the
Greco-Roman world, but sought to move beyond ancient models of selfcultivation and to adapt parrhesia for the contemporary world (136). While
the relationship of the parrhesiastes, or educator, to student or interlocutor
certainly entails strong affective bonds, they are not bonds of dependency.
Indeed with parrhesia, Foucault seeks to replace relations of obedience
with those of self-governance and trust (166). The parrhesiastic relationship
excludes the students simple imitation of, or dependence on, the parrhesiastes.
Indeed, as Luxon forcefully contends in her conclusions, the parrhesiastic relationship is one in which educator and student readily change position.
Students become educators and educators give up their authoritative role
in order to incite discovery (303). For Luxon, the political salience of
Foucauldian parrhesia lies in its capacity to contest the forms of political
order, and to challenge them (170). Indeed, both Freuds relational psychoanalyst and Foucaults truth-teller serve as hinges between individual projects
of self-formation and collective practices, between the micro practices of the
individual and the macro practices that are constitutive of a culture or
society (133); the world of the political. Indeed, as Luxon insists,
Foucaults parrhesiastic practices seek to extend individuals out and into
politics (180), though here too the analysis of just how such practices can
directly impact the political realm, let alone prepare us to exit the prison
of disciplinary political power relations on which his earlier works had
focused, seems underdeveloped. While Luxon herself concedes that the
weakest element in Foucaults rendering of parrhesia is . . . an account of collective practices (200), she insists that such ethical work might prepare for
public engagement, [though] he avoids any claim that such cultivation translates automatically into political action (201). As with Freudian psychoanalytic practices, individuals may have a richer set of ethical resources upon
which to draw and potentially enter politics, but it remains for them to
make that choice (201).
What is needed, then, according to Luxon, are ways to rouse a wider audience (207), and for that audience to attain legibility, the capacity to
grapple with and understand political issues: an audience that is engaged
in the public space. Foucauldian parrhesia, in particular, has the promise of
overcoming the prevailing limitations of public discourse in which people
cannot escape the common opinion with which they are familiar, and hide
behind the authority of others (228). For Luxon, parrhesiastic practices
hold out the promise of frame breaking, dislodging the taken-for-granted

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modes in which the political shows up and is conceptualized: what is needed

are practices that break the frames that now compose political events and
lines of action (257). Frame breaking, then, could initiate an ongoing conversation with the political unknownwith preferences and identities
not-yet captured by elites and not-yet articulated by citizens (272), leading
to the creation of a multiplicity of such frames. But could the dialogic encounters instantiated in the psychoanalytic and parrhesiastic practices explored by
Luxon, with their heightened role for personal judgment, realistically provide
a basis for her frame breaking? One has the sense that Luxon herself may not
be very sure: And yet the nature of modern mass politics suggests that personal judgment will never be enough to counter the organized effects produced by media and political elites (281). Has Luxon, then, given in to a
form of cultural and political pessimism here? She appears to accept the necessity of living within liberalisms present contradictions and seeking to
make its tensions productive rather than ones of disillusionment (293).
Therein lies a certain tension between the frame of the really existing political
and Luxons compelling call for frame breaking.
Alan Milchman
Alan Rosenberg
Queens College of the City University of New York

FEAR OVER LOVE

Waller R. Newell: Tyranny: A New Interpretation. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013. Pp. x, 544.)
doi:10.1017/S0034670514000746

Waller R. Newell has written a very dense and rich work on the dark side of
politics, namely, the regime which has dened evil in politics since the inception of political theory: tyranny. What immediately strikes the reader is
Newells attempt to combine a highly theoretical philosophical approach
(strongly inuenced by Heidegger and Leo Strauss) with an attention to political reality, including contemporary events, concerning the phenomenon of
tyranny. His purposeas the subtitle of the book readsis to provide a new
interpretation of a historical and practical occurrence, the appearance of tyrannical regimes at many stages of human history. Newells main contention is
that tyranny (and the understanding of it) underwent a dramatic change at
the beginning of modernity, with such authors as Machiavelli, Bacon, and
Hobbes. Originally, Plato elaborated an interpretation of tyranny which remained canonical in classical political thought: in his powerful representation, the tyrant was characterized by a misguided love for material
pleasures; this left the door open to a possible redemption through a