R A D I C A L P H I L O S O P H Y

a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy

82 CONTENTS MARCH/APRIL 1997

Editorial collective
Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner,
SYMPOSIUM
Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Thomas Kuhn, 1922–1996
Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott,
Howard Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Ted Benton, Steve Fuller and Helen E. Longino......................................... 2
Kathleen Lennon, Joseph McCarney,
Kevin Magill, Peter Osborne,
Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers, Kate Soper ARTICLES
Issue editor The Rhythm of Alterity: Levinas and Aesthetics
Kevin Magill Gary Peters..................................................................................................... 9
Reviews editor
Sean Sayers Analytical Marxism – An Ex-paradigm?
The Odyssey of G.A. Cohen
Contributors
Marcus Roberts ........................................................................................... 17
Ted Benton teaches sociology at the
University of Essex. His books include
Philosophical Foundations of the Three
Sociologies (1977) and The Rise and Fall INTERVIEW
of Structural Marxism (1984). Democracy Means Equality
Steve Fuller teaches in the Department Jacques Rancière interviewed by Passages ............................................. 29
of Sociology and Social Policy at the
University of Durham.
Helen E. Longino is the editor, with REVIEWS
Evelyn Fox Keller, of Feminism and
Science (Oxford University Press, 1996). Ronald Aronson, After Marxism
Cyril Smith, Marx at the Millennium
Gary Peters teaches aesthetics at the
University of the West of England.
Jules Townsend, The Politics of Marxism
Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener, eds,
Marcus Roberts teaches philosophy at Marxism in the Postmodern Age
the University of Essex. He is the author Suke Wolton, ed., Marxism, Mysticism and Modern Theory
of Analytical Marxism – A Critique
(Verso, 1996). Terry Eagleton .............................................................................................. 37
Jacques Rancière is Professor of Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams
Aesthetics at the University of Paris-VII,
Jussieu. His books include On the Shores Graham Dawson .......................................................................................... 40
of Politics (Verso, 1994) and The Names
of History (Minnesota University Press,
Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia
1994). Paul Hockenos ............................................................................................. 43
Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem
Typing (WP input) by Jo Foster
Tel: 0181 341 9238 David Macey................................................................................................. 45
Layout by Petra Pryke Daniel Burston, The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R.D. Laing
Tel: 0171 243 1464 Janet Sayers ................................................................................................ 46
Copyedited and typeset by Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality
Robin Gable and Lucy Morton
Tel: 0181 318 1676 Rosalyn Diprose........................................................................................... 48
Design by Peter Osborne Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations
Printed by Russell Press, Radford Mill, Chris Brown ................................................................................................. 49
Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HJ
Alison Assiter, Enlightened Women
Bookshop distribution Susan Mendus ............................................................................................. 50
UK: Central Books,
99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time
Tel: 0181 986 4854 Brian Dillon ................................................................................................ 51
USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre
Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100,
Tel: 201 667 9300; OBITUARY
Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw
Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217, Raphael Samuel, 1934–1996
Tel: 718 875 5491; Carolyn Steedman ............................................................................. 53
Fine Print Distributors, 500 Pampa Drive,
Austin, Texas 78752-3028.
Tel: 512-452-8709 LETTER
Cover: Ruth Collins, Bad Planning, 1997. Jason Gaiger ................................................................................................56
See also page 39.

© Radical Philosophy Ltd

SYMPOSIUM

Thomas Kuhn,
1922–1996

Paradigms as soft structures

K
uhnʼs The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was, despite the modesty of its
author, a revolutionary work. Like Darwinʼs Origin of Species (with which it
shares many other likenesses), its wider cultural and political resonances far
exceeded the intentions and expectations of its author – both in scope and in direc-
tion. Developed through painstaking scholarly work in the history of science, Kuhnʼs
concepts of ʻparadigmʼ, ʻnormal scienceʼ, ʻanomalyʼ, ʻcrisisʼ, and ʻscientific revolutionʼ
itself, exploded their initial disciplinary confines. Throughout the humanities and social
sciences, and even in some heretical margins of the natural sciences, the implications
of Kuhnʼs arguments were intensely debated. And, beyond the classrooms and librar-
ies, Kuhnʼs ideas became commonplaces in the intellectual and cultural ferment of the
1960s and early 1970s.
Why was this? The most obvious answer lies in the key words of Kuhnʼs title.
ʻStructuralismʼ had already gained an exotic presence in Anglophone culture through
the work of a Francophile intellectual vanguard. ʻScienceʼ was an important site of
cultural and political contestation, both because of the challenge to scientific authority
mounted by the emerging counterculture, and because of the more circumscribed battle
for scientific status going on in the social sciences. And the word ʻrevolutionʼ! Here the
resonances are far more complex and mediated. The word had a place in the popular
music and youth culture of the time, as the generation of the 1960s defined itself in
opposition to military power, imperial domination and rampant consumerist ʻmaterial-
ismʼ. Some among the generation of ʻpeace and loveʼ were also revolutionaries in a more
self-consciously political sense, and it was perhaps in these circles more than elsewhere
that Kuhnʼs ideas were taken up and debated. Increasingly, as revolutionary practice
was seen to require revolutionary theory, the status of Marxism, in particular, became
a central issue. With that, as the work of the French structural Marxists became better
known among English-speaking radicals, the question became: ʻscientificʼ or ʻhumanistʼ
Marxism? The nexus of structure, revolution and science seemed inescapable.
This was the wider context within which Kuhnʼs new view of science was intro-
duced into the more specific and localized disputes occurring within the academic dis-
ciplines. As a graduate philosophy student at Oxford in the late 1960s, I had managed
to suppress my growing scepticism about philosophical orthodoxy sufficiently well to
get that far, but felt unable to carry on doing it. Luckily, I wasnʼt the only one, and,
equally luckily, it was possible to find like-minded sceptics among the staff – or at
least those who were prepared to hear their professional assumptions questioned by
mere students. Kuhnʼs characterization of crisis in the history of science seemed to fit
our situation all too well: a dominant paradigm (ʻanalyticalʼ philosophy) faced with

2 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

unresolved ʻanomaliesʼ and competing schools. How tempting it was to cast ourseves
in the heroic role of ʻrevolutionariesʼ, bearers of a new philosophical paradigm!
Looking back over old notes and essays, however, my sense is that Kuhnʼs work had a
more subtle and nuanced role.
Three features of his work, especially, seemed liberating in that context. The
first was the way Kuhn drew attention to the institutional setting of academic work.
Questions about which were the influential journals and departments; how they con-
trolled definitions of what was a legitimate enquiry within their discipline; how they
shaped the education and training of younger generations of scholars – these were
deeply subversive for a discipline that prided itself on embodying the sovereignty of
reasoned argument. The second was the simple fact of Kuhnʼs demonstration of the
intellectual force of historical inquiry. Philosophy tended to be practised as if its ques-
tions were timeless, even when, as in linguistic philosophy, everyday speech was the
topic of analysis. When we studied Aristotle, Kant, Hume or Leibniz, whole swathes of
their writings were ignored, and they tended to be read as if their lives had somehow
been devoted to the puzzles generated by mid-twentieth-century Oxford philosophers.
By contrast, Kuhnʼs quite self-conscious concern with ʻwhat it was like to think
scientifically in a period when the canons of scientific thought were very different from
those current todayʼ came like a bolt from the blue. Of course, it was no such thing.
Kuhnʼs own influences in this were continental European historians and philosophers
of science, most especially Koyré. In this, as in many other respects, the extent of
Kuhnʼs impact was a measure of the insularity of so much of British intellectual life
prior to the 1960s.
The third respect in which Kuhnʼs work seemed to open up new and welcome
intellectual possibilities had to do with his structuralism. His was a ʻsoftʼ structural-
ism, which accommodated plurality and change in the history of scientific research
traditions, but which, by way of the ever-disputed idea of ʻparadigmsʼ, drew attention
to the interconnectedness of scientific concepts, both with one another and with the
questions they were used to address, and the methods and criteria by which they were
answered. The ramifications of this took off in all directions. What sense did it make,
in the philosophy of science, to search for
timeless demarcation criteria between science
and non-science? What about the status of
de-legitimated forms of knowledge, like
Marxism or psychoanalysis? They had their
own methods and ʻinternalʼ critical standards
and epistemologies, so why should they be
accorded any less status than established
sciences? Right, so what about theology,
magic, witchcraft, astrology…? ʻAnything
goesʼ, as Feyerabend was to say. Of course,
this sort of intellectual libertarianism was far
from Kuhnʼs own concerns, and from those
of many of his followers. Another direction
in which to take the idea of paradigms, one
closer to Kuhnʼs own use of it, was to recog-
nize that, at least with respect to intellectual
work, historical change had to take place by
way of qualitative shifts, wholesale transfor-
mations of thought, rather than by piecemeal
accretion. The widespread sense, certainly
in philosophy but in other disciplines too, of

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 3

a desire to sweep away a suffocating orthodoxy, rather than chip away at it, bit by bit,
seemed confirmed by Kuhnʼs way of mapping the history of the natural sciences.
As I was soon to discover, Kuhnʼs ideas had also been taken up in the social sci-
ences. As a newly appointed ʻtokenʼ philosopher in a prominent sociology department
at the beginning of the 1970s I began to see a less liberatory side of the use of Kuhnʼs
ideas. The towering presence in postwar sociology in the English-speaking world
was the functionalism of Talcott Parsons and his followers. Prior to my entry into the
discipline, Parsonian orthodoxy had been challenged on what eventually turned out to
be two rather different fronts. The charge that functionalism carried an implicit value-
commitment to the status quo, and could neither countenance nor explain radical social
change, was common ground among the critics. However, they
themseves were divided over what was to replace the Parsonian
paradigm. One tendency, more influential in the USA, emphasized
functionalismʼs demotion of the role of human agency and drew
upon the interpretative traditionʼs focus on meaning and subjectiv-
ity. The Parsonian concern with whole societies as ʻsystemsʼ tended
to give way to small-scale ethnographic studies of micro-social
interaction.
The alternative to Parsons which became most influential in
British sociology retained the emphasis on whole societies, but
incorporated a quasi-Marxian recognition of system-contradiction.
In the pioneering work of David Lockwood, system-integration was
distinguished from integration at the level of social relations. The
core questions deriving from this approach were to do with the way
in which social relations, mainly thought of as class relations, could
either sustain social stability or bring about change, in the face of
system-contradictions. This was an immense theoretical achieve-
ment which promised to unify the discipline through a clearly
defined agenda of empirically researchable questions. So influential
did it become that some of its practitioners came to define themselves as ʻmainstreamʼ
sociologists – later to be pilloried by feminists as ʻmalestreamʼ.
For a discipline only recently and unevenly acknowledged as worthy of its place in
the academy, the professional and political status to be gained from the accolade of
ʻscienceʼ were considerable. And for sociologists, who better to confer the accolade
than Kuhn – by now well established as the founding figure of a revitalized sociology
of science? One way of mapping Kuhnʼs historical schema onto the current state of
sociology was to identify scientific status with the achievement of consensus around a
single approach. Kuhn, indeed, seemed to some to legitimate, as distinct from merely
describe, the exercise of institutional and professional power to suppress or marginal-
ize alternatives (though I can remember no one spelling it out quite so clearly!). This
project was, of course, never realized. However, it is interesting to note that two
important potential competitors for paradigm status – Marxism and feminist sociology
– gained their own legitimacy within the academy largely by critical engagement with
the ʻmalestreamʼ research programme. Arguably, those researchers who did so implic-
itly adopted the main assumptions of the approach they sought to overthrow, and thus
confirmed its ʻparadigmʼ status.
Despite such periods of near-hegemonic domination of the discipline by a single
influential research programme, sociology has remained, of all the social sciences,
the most radically pluralist. If we follow Kuhn in identifying science with consensus
around a paradigmatic intellectual achievement, then sociology seems not to qualify.
Either sociology continues to languish in the pre-paradigmatic phase of its develop-
ment, awaiting its first paradigm; or it is undergoing a remarkably prolonged and

4 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

unresolved ʻcrisisʼ. Both diagnoses have been offered. There is no shortage of candi-
dates to supply the missing paradigm, often, as in the earlier period, associated with
rising social movements – witness Catton and Dunlapʼs proposal for a ʻNew Ecological
Paradigmʼ to replace the ʻHuman Exemptionalismʼ of the classical sociologies. As
the authoritative status of science has been weakened (partly as a result of the new
understandings of science made possible by Kuhnʼs own work), it has come to seem
much less important to legitimate sociologyʼs place in the academy in this way. The
proliferation of postmodernist and post-structuralist approaches has converged with a
strong current of anti-scientism already present in the interpretative traditions, into a
dominant mood of rejection of any model of science as prescriptive for sociologists.
Paradoxically, for all his insistence on the idea of ʻprogressʼ through scientific revolu-
tions, Kuhn is now cited more often in support of relativism and incommensurability.
Any takers for a view of scientific progress through pluralistic dialogue?
Ted Benton

Kuhn as trojan horse

F
rom a distance, the legacy of Thomas Kuhn to academia appears to have been
a radical one. After all, isnʼt he the person most responsible for overturning the
positivist philosophical orthodoxy by defining science so that the social and
natural sciences could both be seen as forms of organized enquiry or ʻparadigmsʼ?
And didnʼt his definition stress the social dimension of science to such an extent that
he breathed new life into the sociology of science, starting with the Edinburgh School
and eventuating in the professionalization of ʻscience studiesʼ? And hasnʼt the advent
of science studies paved the way for a radical reconsideration of the place of science
in society, leading to the ʻScience Warsʼ that have periodically erupted on both sides
of the Atlantic over the last five years? The presuppositions informing each of these
three questions are false, as Kuhn himself has been at pains to point out since the
introduction to his collected essays, The Essential Tension, in 1977. Indeed, as I have
stressed in a set of essays and a forthcoming book, Kuhnʼs influence has been a pro-
foundly conservative one, but one in keeping with the setting in which The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions was written.1
The key to understanding the impact of Kuhnʼs work is the dedication of that classic
work to Harvard President James Bryant Conant, an administrator of the US atomic
bomb project, staunch cold warrior and Kuhnʼs early academic mentor. It was Conant
who conceived of the courses, ʻGeneral Education in Scienceʼ, in which Kuhn devel-
oped his famous conception of science as iterated cycles of paradigms and revolutions,
in the decade following World War II. The constituency for Conantʼs courses was the
returning soldiers whose education was funded by the US government. They were
expected to become managers who would be increasingly asked to decide on projects
containing a strong scientific component. From Conantʼs standpoint, it was important
that they remained friendly to science, despite public calls for greater regulation of
scientific research in the wake of the US atomic bombing of Japan (which Conant
strongly encouraged).
Conantʼs pedagogical strategy was to show that the scientific mindset has remained
constant from Galileo and Boyle to Einstein and Heisenberg, changes in the material
conditions of research notwithstanding. Kuhn was among a number of Harvard gradu-
ates who had become disillusioned with their career prospects as scientists while
serving in World War II. Nevertheless, they sympathized with Conantʼs attempt to

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 5

perpetuate what was quickly becoming a nostalgic ʻlittle scienceʼ image of enquiry.
Conantʼs courses – and Kuhnʼs book – downplayed the role of economics and tech-
nology in the conduct of enquiry, let alone the political pressures exerted on science
from the larger society. Unwittingly, this selective vision of science obscured traditional
differences between the study of the natural and social worlds, which emboldened
social scientists in the 1970s to claim that they too were in hot pursuit of paradigmatic
enquiry. Ultimately, this strategy enabled them to purchase academic respectability
in return for muting their critical sensibility – an outcome that is not so surprising,
given that Kuhnʼs conception of revolution owes less to Marx than to the restorationist
Vilfredo Pareto.2
Equally unintended was the resonance that Structure had in the UK, where C.P.
Snow had announced a ʻtwo culturesʼ problem and Harold Wilson called for the
integration of science and technology into the mainstream of British society. The result
was a series of courses instituted in the late 1960s to teach science and engineering
majors about the social dimensions of their research, in the hope of tracking them in
more socially beneficial directions. Among these new service teaching programmes was
the Edinburgh Science Studies Unit, where Kuhn figured prominently. However, the
early success of the Unit and the expansion of science enrolments in the early 1970s
justified the need for funding ʻresearchʼ in the sociology of science, which gradually
autonomized the Unitʼs interests from its original pedagogical mission. It will be no
surprise to learn that this transformation happened as if Structure had provided the
recipe.3 Thus, journals were established in which cross-citation to approved contempo-
rary authors gradually replaced historical precedents laden with inconvenient political
(i.e. Marxist) baggage. Not only has this strategy telescoped the fieldʼs sense of its own
history (an Orwellian outcome that Kuhn deems necessary for motivating scientific
acitivity4) but, more importantly, it has problematized the fieldʼs relationship to contem-
porary social movements in which science figures prominently, as the aims, methods
and discourse of science studies have come to be defined in ways that make it less
permeable to larger political concerns.5
A striking marker of this last tendency is the rhetorical currency in which the
ʻScience Warsʼ are traded. When debates over the social dimension of science had a
strong Marxist flavour, sociologists and scientists would be expected to argue over
the direction in which science should be heading. However, now the debates focus
almost entirely on who is academically authorized to pronounce on the nature of
science. Alternative visions for socially situating enquiry have become overshadowed
by demonstrations of technical competence – or lack thereof – about how science is
actually practised. Rather than favouring one side or the other, public reaction to these
new exchanges has been irritation at both, for they lack any sensitivity to the future
of science. In that sense, Kuhnʼs famous ʻevolutionaryʼ model of scientific change as a
progress from that is not a progress to has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Hopefully,
it is a legacy that we shall soon come to regret.
1. See Steve Fuller, Being There with Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History of Our Times, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997. For scientistsʼ critiques of science studies, see Lewis Wolp-
ert, The Unnatural Nature of Science, Faber & Faber, London, 1992; Steven Weinberg, Dreams
of a Final Theory, Pantheon, New York, 1992; Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, The Higher
Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science, Johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore, 1994. All, in one way or another, ultimately lay blame on Kuhn. For a collection of
science studies responses, see Andrew Ross, ed., Science Wars, Duke University Press, Durham
NC, 1996.
2 See Barbara Heyl, ʻThe Harvard “Pareto Circle”ʼ, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sci-
ences 4, 1968, pp. 316–34. The Circle was created by the biochemist Lawrence Henderson, who
also came up with the idea for Harvardʼs Society of Fellows, a private club for elite young schol-
ars, where Kuhn first socialized with Conant.
3. To appreciate the increasingly ʻKuhnifiedʼ character of science studies, compare the contents of
its two major handbooks: I. Spiegel-Roesing and D. de Solla Price, eds, Science, Technology and

6 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

 Society: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, Sage, London, 1977; and S. Jasanoff et al., eds, Hand-
book of Science and Technology Studies, Sage, London, 1995. The first chapter of the latter, aptly
entitled ʻReinventing the Wheelʼ, documents the ascendency of the Edinburgh School.
4. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn, University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1970, p. 167.
5. See the convoluted soul-searching that plagues the special issue of the fieldʼs leading journal,
which is dedicated to ʻThe Politics of SSKʼ (SSK = the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, the
research programme of the Edinburgh School): Social Studies of Science 26, 1996, pp. 219–418.
Steve Fuller

No turning back:
Kuhn and feminist epistemology

F
eminist epistemology may owe more to Quine and Wittgenstein philosophically,
but Thomas Kuhnʼs dramatic delineation of the differences that ʻparadigmsʼ
could make in the sciences gave content and material consequence to the philo-
sophical ideas. This emboldened feminists to articulate the kinds of difference feminist
inquiry might exhibit by comparison with the mainstream.
Kuhnʼs work was important to feminists in several respects. It was first invoked as
a way of articulating convictions about the role of gender ideology in the content and
practices of the sciences. I can recall taking Kuhn as my legitimating text in the first
public lecture I ever gave (1973), on masculinist bias in biology and psychology. And
Ruth Hubbard, in her classic essay ʻHave Only Men Evolved?ʼ, also cites Kuhn as
offering a framework within which to place her critique of the representations of the
roles of male and female organisms in evolutionary theory. What Kuhnʼs ideas offered
were ways to make sense of the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in an arena alleg-
edly governed by objective, empirical methods. The notions of the theory-ladenness
of observation and of paradigm made it possible to see and say how careful scientists
could nevertheless persist in treating certain kinds of human variation as falling into
bivalent and exclusive categories of masculine and feminine, or even in seeing varia-
tion where there was none. But Kuhnʼs insistence that elements other than empirical
evidence and logic were required for theory-choice facilitated even stronger views. As
Evelyn Keller put it in the introduction to Reflections on Gender and Science, ʻthe
direct implication of such a claim is that not only different collections of facts, differ-
ent focal points of scientific attention, but also different organizations of knowledge,
different interpretations of the world, are both possible and consistent with what we call
scienceʼ (p. 5). So, interpretations of the world expressive of a feminist sensibility, or at
least of a non-androcentric and non-masculinist sensibility, should also be possible and
consistent with what we call – that is, should be recognizable as – science.
Even those philosophical positions opposed to this conception of the sciences were
transformed by Kuhnʼs powerful and influential challenge to mid-century orthodoxy.
This transformation meant an intellectual opening of varying degrees of breadth for the
ideas feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science would later go on to develop.
What it gave them permission to explore was not just the ways in which gender ideol-
ogy could enter explicitly and through metaphor into the content of scientific theory, but
the manner in which gendered ideals of scientific practice and inquiry could shape the
very contours of the knowable. Feminist epistemology has by now gone in too many
directions from these beginnings to try to characterize any single line of influence from

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 7

Kuhn. And, indeed, as though marking how far we have come, in my own recent work
Kuhn functions as spokesperson for some mainstream positions in the philosophy of
science. Yet our independence should not overshadow our indebtedness.
Nor should our indebtedness blind us to the high likelihood that Kuhn would have
deplored the aid and comfort his work gave feminist philosophers, perhaps even more
than he deplored the interpretations and uses of it made by scholars in social studies
of science. He was, in spite of his emphasis on acculturation and communities, an
internalist, and, I would say, an intellectualist. The investigation of gender ideologies,
and their communication through scientific content, could not have been welcome to
him. Feminist explorations of the affective dimensions of knowledge would have been
anathema. Once having opened the door, if only slightly, to contextual factors, however,
there was never any principled place at which to draw a line between the permissible
and the impermissible. I suspect that it is the very conservatism that runs through his
work that made his ideas so much more influential and respectable than those of the
also recently deceased, and certainly more politically radical, Paul Feyerabend. In
spite of himself, Kuhn laid the groundwork for the critical and constructive analyses of
feminist epistemologies and others contesting the modern Western consensus. And there
is no turning back.
Helen E. Longino

An opportunity to study
Modern European Philosophy at post-
graduate level, in London, in a struc-
tured programme.
One year full-time / two years part-time.
Following a compulsory course on
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, options
include: Adorno, Derrida, Gadamer,
Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl,
Kierkegaard, Marx, Schopenhauer and MA
Wittgenstein.
Modern
Programme leaders: European
Peter Osborne and Jonathan Rée Philosophy

Write to:
Admissions Enquiries, Middlesex University,
White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR
Telephone: 0181 362 5000

MA Modern European Philosophy

8 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

The rhythm of alterity
Levinas and aesthetics
Gary Peters
The evocative remarks of Emmanuel Levinas on art
and rhythm have received little attention. In opening
the question of the aesthetic, indeed the questionable
nature of the aesthetic for Levinas, the intention here
is to redress the balance at a time when the ethical
dimension of his thought is being privileged.
There are three main reasons for doing this. First,
in both Levinasʼs early phenomenological writings
and his brief excursions into aesthetics he makes a
significant (if overlooked) contribution to the under-
standing of modernist art practice. By challenging the
dominant metaphysics of continuity at the level of ʻthe
instantʼ, he articulates a radically discontinuous logic
of interrogation which matches very effectively the
creative strategies of many avant-garde artists. While
the following essay is mainly concerned with situating
Levinasʼs thoughts on rhythm within the philosophical
traditions upon which he draws, it is clear that he
offers a very powerful analysis, which, in the case of
music, for example, would allow a fruitful investigation
of the ʻnew musicʼ. In particular, the compositional
discontinuity of Webern, Stockhausen, Cage and Nono,
for instance, would be much better understood in the
terms outlined below than through the aesthetics of
continuity which remains dominant in western musi-
cology. To that extent the following investigation might
be seen as a contribution to the development of what
might be described as a Levinasian aesthetic.
Second, although given primacy in his thought as
a whole, ethics for Levinas depends upon a notion of
alterity which is arrived at by way of a prior interro-
gation of ʻthe instantʼ and the subsequent attempt
to articulate the breaching of temporal continuity.
One consequence of this is that when considering art
Levinas is drawn to the sensation of rhythm within
an aesthetic experience, claiming that ʻparticipationʼ
within the discontinuous pulse both strips the I of its
pre-eminence and instates the Other as primordial.
As Otherness is here understood as occupying the
fissures upon which rhythm depends, it is of interest
to note Levinasʼs subsequent denial of the aesthetic in
the name of an ethics which, while purporting to take
responsibility for the otherness of the Other, refuses
to allow the aesthetic its own alterity or rhythm, its
own irresponsibility. In other words, it would seem
that the aesthetic origin of some of Levinasʼs ground-
ing ideas ultimately endangers the ethical purpose
which they are later made to serve. Accordingly, the
following essay concludes by placing a question mark
over Levinasʼs own questioning of the aesthetic, the
intention being to open up, in turn, a discussion of the
questionable nature of ethics.
Third, during a period in which the literary and
rhetorical dimensions of philosophical discourse have
been particularly emphasized there is some merit in
reconsidering not only what might be called the music-
ology of the text but also the musicality of being. In
this regard the following thoughts, while beginning
with the metaphorical use of musical terminology
within philosophical discourse, are in fact primarily
concerned with an investigation into musicality (spe-
cifically, rhythm) as a means of approaching the vexed
question of alterity understood as the breaching of
different totalities – literary, linguistic, poetic, narra-
tive, rhetorical, etc. – of the word. Such an approach,
largely ignored since the philosophical musicality of
Nietzsche, does not offer any simple solutions to the
problem of accessing the ʻoutsideʼ of philosophical
discourse. It does nevertheless allow for the scrutiniz-
ation of aspects of being left ʻunheardʼ (or perhaps
heard too easily) by the non-musical. In short, Levi-
nasʼs ʻsensationʼ of rhythm is here privileged as a
particular gift or ʻfeelʼ for the phenomenological pulse
of being.
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 9
Husserl: melody and fringe
Although the whole of Levinasʼs work is implicated
in the following reflections, it is writings such as
Existence and Existents,1 Reality and its Shadow,2 and
the somewhat later essay on Maurice Blanchot entitled
The Servant and Her Master,3 which will receive most
attention here. Before turning to these texts, however,
it will be necessary to discuss the work of Husserl and
Bergson upon which Levinas builds.
In Existence and Existents Levinas sets out to
interrogate the ʻfringeʼ, and in so doing enters into
a dispute with Husserl. For the latter the ʻfringeʼ
is that which hovers on the margins of empirical
experience. The intentional busying of oneself with
the world is here conceived as an awakening both of
the transcendental ego and the dormant actuality that
envelops it. Degrees of wakefulness are correlated with
intensities of light, where absolute illumination shelves
off into half-shadow and into darkness. So while the
ʻglancing rayʼ of the wakeful ego fixes phenomena,
the dim presentations constituting the ʻzone of the
marginalʼ or the ʻexperience fringeʼ represent a fugi-
tive obscurity which escapes the absolute exposure
of sheer noticeability, yet remains in attendance as
a ʻstirringʼ.4
Ultimately, for Husserl, the marginal fringe remains
available for perception, an availability which, in
Levinasʼs terms, drains it of its necessary obscurity.
This is particularly apparent if one examines Hus-
serlʼs conception of infinity, conceptualized as being
wedded to ʻhorizons of possibilityʼ,5 thereby allowing
the glancing ray of the transcendental ego to illuminate
(what Levinas would consider to be) the darkness of
the infinite. In spite of the infinite flux of intentional
horizons where clarity and indeterminacy ebb and
flow, a phenomenological unity is ultimately assumed
by Husserl.
Contra Husserl, it is precisely the impossibility of
grasping the infinite – its unavailability – that concerns
Levinas; the absolute break with the world understood
as a radical overflowing:
infinity overflows the thought that thinks it. Its very
infinition is produced precisely in this overflowing.
The relation with infinity will have to be stated in
terms other than those of objective experience…6
In later works such as Totality and Infinity the breach-
ing of totality is articulated as the ʻfaceʼ of the other,
grounding an ethics; in the earlier Existence and
Existents the break is presented as an ʻexoticismʼ
(literally an outside-ness) witnessed in the alterity of
art. It is here that Levinas introduces the notion of
10 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
rhythm as the musical dimension of all art, which, he
rightly claims, is usually left as a ʻvague suggestive
notion and catch-allʼ7 in art criticism.
Levinas challenges the transparency assumed in
Husserlʼs fringe of sheer noticeability in the name of
the ʻhardly noticeableʼ,8 an exteriority accessed in a
peculiarly aimless way through the exoticism of art.
Aesthetic experience is here seen as opaque, emptying
the world of presence. The rhythmic musicality of
art is not illuminating; it darkens the world.9 Images
intrude and interfere in our commerce with things and
the nascent actualities that surround them, simultane-
ously obstructing and extracting:
This way of interposing an image of the things
between us and the thing has the effect of extracting
the thing from the perception of the world.10
For Levinas, the thwarting of Husserlian intention-
ality, the eluding of perception, simultaneously
enervates conceptual cognition while intensifying
the sensation of ʻthings-in-themselvesʼ, precisely by
presenting the exteriority of those things. He sees the
dispossession that the exotic inflicts on perception as
the mark of an aesthetic sensation which, in slipping
between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity, and
between consciousness and unconsciousness,11 con-
founds intentionality, confronting it with the anarchic.
The peculiarity of Levinasʼs aesthetics of rhythm con-
cerns precisely the anarchic character of the exotic
pulse and, in particular, the way in which the trans-
cendental ego loses its intentional grasp and is carried
away. Having said that, however, it is significant that
even in this early work he is careful to avoid the radical
amorality of the unconscious and the transgressive
potential of anarchic rhythm.
Rhythm represents a unique situation where we
cannot speak of consent, assumption, iniative or
freedom, because the subject is caught up and car-
ried away… It is a mode of being to which ap-
plies neither the form of consciousness, since the I
is stripped of its prerogative to assume its power,
nor the form of unconsciousness, since the whole
situation and all its articulations are in a dark light,
present.12
It is important, then, to note here that the very
privileging of rhythm over melody itself represents
a subterranean dispute with Husserl. In his analysis
of internal time consciousness Husserl is noticeably
reliant on melody as an illustrative device. Through-
out much of his investigation of temporality he uses
melody as an example of that which remains within the
grasp of intentional consciousness – the ʻholdʼ of reten-
tion/protention. As he writes in The Phenomenology In Bergsonʼs understanding of rhythm, the funda-
of Internal Time Consciousness, ʻIn [the] sinking mental problem is his dualism, grounded in an absolute
back [of a tone]; I still hold it fast, and have it in a temporal/spatial distinction and confused by his insist-
retention.ʼ13 For Husserl, then, there is an unbroken ence on seeing both rhythmically. That he understands
continuity between the now – the ʻprimal impressionʼ duration in rhythmic terms is obvious from a host
of the tone – and the retention of that tone in inter- of examples, such as the following from Matter and
nal time consciousness. Both wakeful attention and Memory:
retention make equally available to the transcendental
The duration lived by our consciousness is a dura-
egoʼs ray of consciousness a possessive illumination tion with its own determined rhythm, a duration
resisted by Levinas. Where the latter gives primacy to very different from the time of the physicist…
sensation as an aesthetic preliminary to the breaching
In reality there is no one rhythm of duration: it is
of continuity (understood melodically), Husserl holds possible to imagine many different rhythms…17
firm to the ʻbreachless unityʼ14 of perception. Above
all else it is this image of continuity and unity which Yet in the discussion of grace Bergson draws attention
Levinas aims to shatter. to the ʻjerky movementsʼ which, with their brutal
unpredictability, destroy the dream-like communion.
In other words, it is not a question of the presence
Bergson: rhythm and duration or absence of rhythm but the irresolvable conflict of
Turning to Bergson, the source of Levinasʼs concern two different rhythmic orders: one flowing, the other
with rhythm is immediately apparent. In his discussion discontinuous and staccato. The ʻbeats of a drum
of aesthetic feelings in Time and Free Will Bergson which break forthʼ from the underlying ʻfluid massʼ;
relies heavily on rhythm, where it serves as a con- the clapping of a childʼs hand trying to possess the
venient metaphor for the seamless continuity of dura- weaving smoke – such are the ways Bergson presents
tion (durée) perceived in art as ʻgraceʼ.15 He describes the contradictory pulses of abstract time and concrete
how obedience to the laws of rhythm is capable of duration and the discord caused by this ʻirremediable
lulling the soul into self-forgetfulness through feelings difference of rhythmʼ.18
of sympathy, a dream-like rhythmic communion with Before returning to some of the problems with
the other. Within the eternal fixity of sculpture and the above, it is worth briefly stating the similarities
architecture, Bergson detects an immanent rhythm of between the philosophies of Bergson and Levinas.
symmetry and repetition capable of drawing the self out To begin with, the status of the ʻfringeʼ in Bergsonʼs
of its personality and the self-interest of ordinary life. work is closer to Levinas. Where Husserl, in the
Such reflections often seem to be echoed by Levinas, Cartesian Meditations, sees the relative obscurity
for example in his statement that ʻin rhythm there is no of fringe experiences as an ʻinfectednessʼ,19 Bergson
longer a oneself, but rather a sort
of passage from oneself to ano-
nymity. This is the captivation or
incantation of poetry and music.ʼ16
In spite of the surface similari-
ties, however, it is important to
remember that within Levinasʼs
project as a whole it is the ethical
significance of the exotic pulse
which is crucial. This under-
lying ethical concern requires a
notion of alterity which, having
a temporal dimension, demands
the shattering of continuous dura-
tion in the name of the time of
the other. It is this discontinuous
ethic that signals the fundamental
difference between Levinas and
Bergson.

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 11


marks this as a domain of purity where duration flows
uninfected by the intellect. Like Levinas, Bergson
is concerned with the breaching of totality and the
intuitive interrogation of the marginal. He writes,
ʻif the fringe exists, however delicate and indistinct,
it should have more importance for philosophy than
the bright nucleus it surrounds.ʼ20 Second, Bergson
understands the fringe in rhythmic rather than melodic
terms and is thus more sensitive to the dimension
of our experience (duration) which eternally escapes
the grasp of intentional consciousness, which is not
subject to Husserlian retention/protention. Third, and
as a consequence of the above, Bergson designates this
particular rhythmic order as a place of creativity and
freedom – the ʻopenʼ.21 To translate this into Levinasian
terms: Bergson appears to promote infinity above total-
ity and, indeed, writes of the ʻperspective of an analysis
passing away to infinityʼ.22 And yet it is precisely
Bergsonʼs understanding of duration as ʻdetermined
rhythmʼ which separates him from Levinas.
For while Levinas is impressed with the Bergson
who can write of the ʻceaseless upspringing of some-
thing newʼ,23 he is, nonetheless, suspicious of Bergsonʼs
notion of creativity upon which the ʻnewʼ is dependent.
In Time and the Other Levinas writes,
The future is not buried in the bowels of a pre-
existent eternity, where we come to lay hold of it.
It is absolutely other and new… To be sure, the
Bergsonian conception of freedom through dura-
tion tends toward the same end. But it preserves
for the present a power over the future: duration is
creation.24
12 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
Such power is not so much asso-
ciated with the creation of the
future as with the power to intuit
futurity within the present. The
possibility of this – contested by
Levinas – reflects the Bergsonian
notion of duration as rhythm. If
duration cannot be expressed
by the mechanical rhythm of
beating clocks or the spatial
violence of clapping hands, it
can, none-theless, be lived as a
counter-rhythm which spontane-
ously flows into its future. But
this life, while the embodiment
of flux, remains steadfastly within
its rhythm, allowing intuition
to drain newness of its radical
novelty or alterity. Indeed, it is
precisely the underlying predict-
ability of rhythm as flow that Bergson believes pro-
vides aesthetic pleasure. In his discussion of grace,
there is one particularly significant passage:
as those movements are easy which prepare the way
for others, we are led to find a superior ease in the
movements which can be foreseen, in the present
attitudes in which future attributes are pointed out
and, as it were, prefigured. If jerky movements are
wanting in grace, the reason is that each of them is
self-sufficient and does not announce those which
follow. If curves are more graceful than broken
lines, the reason is that, while a curved line changes
its direction at every moment, every new direction
is indicated in the preceding one. Thus the percep-
tion of ease in motion passes over into the pleasure
of mastering the flow of time and holding the future
in the present.25
These words, perhaps more than any others, show the
extent to which the vague nebulosity of the Bergson-
ian fringe can, like Husserlʼs, be domesticated by a
corresponding ʻvague intuitionʼ26 which sympathetic-
ally shares the same rhythmic impulse. So while the
elusiveness of rhythm suggests an alterity – hence
Levinasʼs interest – this alterity is ʻpreparedʼ, ʻfore-
seenʼ, ʻprefiguredʼ and ʻmasteredʼ. Husserlian melodic
protention here returns as rhythmic mastery, reducing
alterity to the same, and prompting Levinas to ask of
Bergson:
Does intuition constitute the modality of thought,
within which the alterity of the new would explode
immaculate and untouchable as alterity or abso-
lute newness…? [no is the answer, for then] …
the alterity of the new is reduced to its being and
 invested in a noema which is correlative to a noesis
and cut to its measure.27
Both Husserl and Bergson fail, in Levinasʼs eyes,
to pursue their respective phenomenological and intuit-
ive insights to the point where the absolute alterity
of marginal experiences escape melodic or rhythmic
articulation. It is for this reason that Levinas, in his
early work, attempts to break with such melodic and
rhythmic orders in the name of the ʻinstantʼ, allowing
him to introduce into his philosophy the notion of
musicality fundamentally linked to otherness rather
than to the same.
The instant
In Existence and Existents Levinas, like Husserl,
understands melody as continuity. However, Levinas
is concerned with the manner in which the exploding
temporality of the instant is sacrificed to such melodic
continuity; he writes:
the different instants of a melody only exist to the
extent that they immolate themselves in a duration,
which in a melody is essentially a continuity. Inso-
far as a melody is lived through musically … there
are no instants in the melody …; the instants of a
melody only exist in dying.28
The death of the instant is, for Levinas, the death of
the event of being itself. The protention and reten-
tion, so important to Husserlʼs melodic conception
of internal time consciousness, are dependent on a
notion of phenomenological continuity which effec-
tively squeezes alterity out of the instant, sucking it
into a seamless temporality. As notes in a melody, each
instant is sonically penetrated by the others, thereby
destroying the very idea of otherness. Levinas suggests
that only the ʻwrong noteʼ holds out against melodic
extinction by ʻrefusing to dieʼ;29 the resulting instant-
aneousness is elsewhere described as a ʻdiachrony
without protention or retentionʼ.30
In his later philosophy Levinas is increasingly con-
cerned with the distinction between what he calls the
ʻsayingʼ and the ʻsaidʼ, seeing the former as the very
event of ethical openness. Tracing this back to his
early aesthetic writings it is apparent that, similarly,
it is the aesthetic event, the emergence/explosion of
the art-work, which is important and not its status as
an artefact available for theoretical analysis and dia-
logue. The melodic (the ʻsaidʼ) can take up residence
within the noise of the world, it is stated and yet its
delivery (the ʻsayingʼ) remains silent. The eloquence
of this silence is rhythmic, the rhythm upon which the
melodic depends, the rhythm that needs no melody.
Rhythm cannot be heard, it can only be sensed; it is
the melodic that is heard.
Having said that, however, care must be taken in
attempting to determine the nature of this rhythmic
sense. Clearly, Levinas does not share Bergsonʼs notion
of rhythm as the graceful pulse of duration where the
predictable curvature of lived time allows an intuitive
mastery of futurity. On the contrary, for Levinas the
significance of art is its ability to rupture the curve,
the symbol of continuity for Bergson and Husserl.
In particular, Levinas understands a certain form of
modernist art in such terms:
In the representation of matter by modern paint-
ing this deformation, that is, this laying bare, of
the world is brought about in a particularly striking
way. The break up of continuity even on the sur-
face of things, the preference for broken lines, the
scorning of perspective and of the ʻrealʼ proportion
between things, indicate a revolt against the conti-
nuity of curves.31
Sympathetic to such a revolt, Levinas is concerned to
retain the alterity suggested (if not achieved) by the
notion of duration, and yet it is precisely the ʻjerkyʼ
rhythm with its mechanical unpredictability (seen as
temporal closure by Bergson) which he seeks to inter-
rogate. This instantaneous rhythm is one of ʻwaiting,
forgettingʼ,32 waiting for nothing, remembering nothing,
a ʻtaut dynamismʼ rendering everything contemporary
and eternal. Within this event of forgetting, reality is
displaced by the aesthetic image, an image which,
Levinas insists, eludes perception but is experienced
darkly through the imagination and its realization of
sensation. Instead of the subjective hold on intentional
perception, the ʻmusicalityʼ of the aesthetic image is
sensed as a hold over the I: ʻthe hold that an image
has over us, a function of rhythmʼ.33 And yet this is
not an objective pulse; it is, rather, a rhythm where
ʻparticipationʼ takes the ego both ouside of itself and
away from an objective ʻreality to be capturedʼ.34
This is far removed from the sympathetic com-
munion sought by Bergson, which, in the tradition of
Kantʼs analytic of the beautiful, generates pleasure.
Here it is more a question of ʻhorrorʼ, the horror of
absolute passivity experienced as ʻparticipationʼ35 in
an alterity ontologically incapable of retention or pro-
tention. Sublime incomprehensibilty, yet without the
promotion of the self as noumenal to be found in the
Kantian sublime.
Franz Rosenzweig, an important influence here,
describes the participation in the aesthetic as itself
incapable of creating communion: ʻthe silence of oneʼs
particularity in the unanimity of the chorus … it does
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 13
not establish a community but it arouses the assembled
ones, each for himself, to the same feelingsʼ.36 Simi-
larly, for Levinas the rhythm of the other as invested
in the work of art separates us from the artist and the
artist from the work. This separation is ontologically
symptomatic of an existence outstripping duration:
ʻduration is not the measure of existenceʼ.37 Absolute
alterity must, by definition, be without duration, an
order oblivious to temporality, and yet still sensed
as rhythm. Such a rhythm is not the respiration of
the instant itself but the explosion of that instant, the
ʻaccomplishment of existenceʼ.38 As with all accom-
plishment, the result can be forever thrown into doubt;
nothing can be ʻprefiguredʼ in instantaneousness. It
is understood here as the stopping of time which has
then to be resumed anew.
The ethical force of separation, fundamental in
Levinasʼs work, is dependent on this prior ontological
stasis at the heart of rhythm where it is not a question
of intuitive polyrhythmic communion or continuity but
the recognition of, indeed reverence for, the inscrutable
fissuring of pulsation. The silent stasis of rhythm: not
the sounding of the melodic, not the incantation of the
word, but the existential edge where everything stops/
starts – this is the source of ethics for Levinas. A keen
sense of this impossibly elusive rhythmic discontinuity
is also to be found in Maurice Blanchot:
He felt ever closer to an ever more monstrous
absence which took an infinite time to meet. He
felt it closer to him every instant and kept ahead of
it by an infinitely small but irreducible splinter of
duration. He saw it, a horrifying being which was
already pressing against him in space and, exist-
ing outside time, remained infinitely distant. Such
unbearable waiting and anguish that they separated
him from himself… His eyes tried to look not in
space but in duration, and in a point in time which
did not yet exist.39
For Levinas, however, it is not so much a ʻsplinter
of durationʼ but the splintering of duration that is at
issue, where each splinter indicates a prior splitting of
the face of existence:
In contemporary painting things no longer count as
elements of a universal order which the look would
give itself, as a perspective. On all sides fissures ap-
pear in the continuity of the universe. The particular
stands out in the nakedness of its being.40
Once again, Levinas speaks here of the breaking
of continuity where the emergence of the unforeseen
in its existential nakedness initiates a rhythm that
has nothing to do with the counting of beats or the
mastery of time as measure. Instead, he alludes to a
14 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
rhythm born of nakedness, the nakedness which is
emphatic in its revelation of difference. Just as in our
own nakedness we withdraw into the separateness of a
physical vulnerability, open to violation and yet abso-
lutely fugitive, so it is the withdrawal of communion
– denied by nakedness – which establishes a rhythmic
pulse articulating its own absence. It is not a question
of polyrhythms or counter-rhythms but of the absolute
absence of rhythm within rhythm itself, the ʻexoticʼ
silence of alterity which makes rhythm possible as the
momentary negation of such silence and the silencing
of this negation. Where others emphasize the unifying
force of rhythm as flow, Levinas is profoundly sensitive
to the manner in which it leaves us exiled, erasing
evolutionary identity in an overflowing:
This overflowing of thought naturally makes us
think of Bergsonian duration, but Bergsonʼs con-
ception represents this negation of identity as a
process of evolution. The primordial status of the
notion of erasure affirms the simultaneity of mul-
tiplicity, and the irreducibly ambiguous nature of
consciousness.41
The overflowing of thought is not a flowing; it has
no duration, no grace. And yet this wiping-out itself
establishes a rhythm – the ʻgame of erasureʼ – where
silence ex/implodes without destiny: ʻAll the arts, even
those based on sound, create silence.ʼ42
The work of Karlheinz Stockhausen might be cited
here as a possible illustration of these thoughts. In
his radicalization of both Webernʼs pointillism and
Stravinskyʼs rhythmic discontinuity Stockhausen chal-
lenges the very notion of temporal continuity and
durational flow. In particular, Stockhausenʼs intimation
of a musical dimension outside space and time, ʻa
conception of music as audible moments of transition
between states inaccessible to hearingʼ,43 suggests some-
thing approaching the pulse described above. Levinasʼs
ʻgame of erasureʼ and Stockhausenʼs following remarks
clearly have a great deal in common:
Why must we always imagine music simply as
note-structures in empty space, instead of beginning
from a homogeneously filled acoustical space and
carving out music, revealing musical figures and
forms with an eraser?… So I composed negative
forms as well, to correspond to the positive forms
… holes, pauses, cavities of various shapes…44
Within the negative aesthetic of Levinas and Stock-
hausen the ʻblocksʼ and ʻcubesʼ of the former are
equivalent to the ʻholesʼ and ʻcavitiesʼ of the latter;
in both cases rhythm is the pulsating remainder simul-
taneously inscribed and erased.
Ethics and art
This radically non-dialogical concept of art, where
silence takes the place of communication and prox-
imity takes the place of communion, is a peculiar place
to attempt the creation of an ethics. In particular, the
physicality of the rhythmic and its inherent attraction
to the body suggest the presence of desire, intoxication
and the Dionysian ʻbeyond good and evilʼ. For Levinas,
however, rhythm is precisely that which escapes the
binary logic of mind/body, inner/outer, consciousness/
unconsciousness, objectivity/subjectivity, and interest/
disinterest. It reveals instead an ʻexteriority of the
inward … which is not that of the bodyʼ.45 One could
say, perhaps, a rhythm which is sensed rather than felt,
and, following Levinas, a rhythm of ʻinvolvementʼ46
rather than desire.
If this does not ring true, it is perhaps partly
because of the degenerate rhythmic sense which domi-
nates mass music and which appeals directly to the
body. To that extent Levinas is correct to avoid this
notion of rhythm in favour of the phenomenological
interrogation of the more exotic pulse. Even so, it
still remains difficult to see why the radical rhythmic
discontinuity he describes should necessarily take on a
more fundamental ethical significance. This returns us
not to the question of the aesthetic but to the question-
able nature of the aesthetic as stated at the outset.
In a philosophy such as Levinasʼs, where res-
ponsibility for the other is supreme and where the
ethical directness of the face-to-face encounter is
primary, the ʻirresponsibilityʼ and ʻdimension of
evasionʼ he detects in art places a question mark
above its legitimacy as ʻthe supreme value of civiliza-
tionʼ.47 It is interesting to note here that, in spite of his
claims to break with the dominant tradition of philo-
sophical totality, he shares with Plato, Kant, Hegel and
Kierkegaard a deep-seated suspicion of the aesthetic,
and, like them, demands that art be overcome as a
mode of being:
art is not the supreme value of civilization, and it is
not forbidden to conceive a stage in which it will be
reduced to a source of pleasure … having its place,
but only a place, in manʼs happiness.48
This overcoming of art, sensed as the infinite over-
flowing of thought in the rhythm of this same art,
is presented by Levinas as the prior infinition of the
ethical:
We will say … that before culture and aesthetics,
meaning is situated in the ethical, presupposed by
all culture and all meaning. Morality does not be-
long to culture: it enables one to judge it…49
One would wish to counter this extraordinary state-
ment with the genealogy of morals or archaeology
of ethical discourses always absent from Levinasʼs
writing, but within the confines of this essay it must
suffice to say that the ancient dispute between the
aesthetic and the ethical cannot be so easily resolved.
What is clear, however, is that art will not be judged,
and in particular it will not (and should not) be cut to
the measure of the ethical, even when, as in the case
of Levinas, the ethical plunders artʼs own body for
the rhythm of alterity sensed therein and subsequently
appropriated for foreign ends.
The silent exteriority of art is brilliantly captured
in the writings of Levinas, but, in spite of his claims,
it remains an exteriority which has always already
forgotten the ethical and, indeed, the philosophical.
The inhumanity of the aesthetic will not be externally
evaluated or validated, nor can the images of art have
the value claimed for them by Levinas.
The value of images for philosophy lies in their
position between two times and their ambiguity.
Philosophy discovers, beyond the enchanted rock
on which it stands, all its possibles swarming about
it. It grasps them by interpretation. This is to say
that the artwork can and must be treated as a myth:
the immobile statue has to be put in movement and
made to speak.50
Very much against the spirit of his infinite ethics, the
alterity of the aesthetic is here reduced to the same by
being subjected to the violence of a possessive hermen-
eutics and by being forced to speak the language of an
alien morality. Contrary to this, exteriority itself must
be differentiated: the exteriority of the mythological,
the aesthetic and the ethical are all different; the
rhythm of one cannot be reduced to the rhythm of
any other – one cannot ʻspeakʼ to another. Levinas
is right, then, when he claims that art ʻdoes not give
itself out as the beginning of a dialogueʼ,51 but it is
precisely this insight which could have reminded him
of the radical silence surrounding ethics, not least
because the rhythm of alterity has such a silence as
its source.
Notes
1. Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingis, Martinus Ni-
jhoff, The Hague, 1978.
2. In Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers,
trans. A. Lingis, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1987.
3. In The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1989.
4. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W.R. Boyce, Allen &
Unwin, London, 1931, pp. 243, 239, 142, 243.
5. Ibid, p. 200.
6. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Ling-
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 15
 is, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh PA, 1969, p. 26. Creative Evolution, p. 49.
25. 27. Time and the Other, p. 133.
7. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 4. 28. Existence and Existents, pp. 32–3.
8. Existence and Existents, p. 52. 29. Ibid.
9. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 3. 30. Levinas Reader, p. 155.
10. Existence and Existents, p. 52. 31. Existence and Existents, p. 56.
11. Collected Philosophial Papers, p. 4. 32. Levinas Reader, p. 155.
12. Ibid. 33. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 5.
13. Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time 34. Ibid.
Consciousness, trans. J.S. Churchill, Martinus Nijhoff, 35. Existence and Existents, p. 60.
The Hague, 1964, p. 44. 36. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans.
14. Ibid., p. 112. William Hallo, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York,
15. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F.L. Pogson, 1970, p. 362.
Allen & Unwin, London, 1910, pp. 11–12. 37. Existence and Existents, p. 77.
16. Philosophical Papers, p. 4. 38. Ibid., p. 76.
17. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Paul 39. Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert
and W. Scott Palmer, Allen & Unwin, London, pp. 272, Lamberton, Station Hill Press, New York, 1988, p. 27.
275. 40. Existence and Existents, p. 56.
18. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitch- 41. Levinas Reader, p. 146.
ell, Macmillan, London, 1913, pp. 3, 134. 42. Ibid., p. 147.
19. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Martinus Ni- 43. Quoted in Robin Maconie, The Works of Stockhausen,
jhoff, The Hague, 1960, p. 15. Marion Boyers, London, 1976, p. 47
20. Creative Evolution, p. 49. 44. Ibid., p. 158
21. Ibid., p. 110. 45. Collected Philosophical Papers, p. 4.
22. Ibid., p. 238. 46. Ibid.
23. Ibid., p. 49. 47. Ibid., p. 12.
24. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Rich- 48. Ibid.
ard Cohen, Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh PA, 49. Ibid., p. 100.
1987, p. 80. 50. Ibid., p. 13.
25. Time and Free Will, p. 12, emphasis added. 51. Ibid., p. 2.

16 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

Analytical Marxism
– an ex-paradigm?
The odyssey of G.A. Cohen
Marcus Roberts
In 1978 G.A. Cohen published Karl Marxʼs Theory
of History: A Defence. That this landmark work set
out to defend (something like) the orthodox historical
materialism of the Second International was surprising
enough; that its author situated himself within the ʻana-
lyticalʼ tradition – and therefore engaged, and sought
to defeat, Acton, Plamenatz, Popper et al. on their
own methodological terrain – was surprising indeed.
It is testimony to Cohenʼs analytical acuity that, from
such unpropitious materials, he fashioned not a mere
curio, but arguably the most accomplished defence of
ʻtechnological determinismʼ ever produced, and one
of the most important works of Marxist philosophy
to have emerged from the Anglo-American academy.
In fact, its publication heralded the emergence of a
sui generis Marxism designated by its progenitors
– prominent amongst whom, alongside Cohen, were
Jon Elster, John Roemer, Adam Przeworski and Erik
Olin Wright – as ʻAnalyticalʼ or ʻRational Choiceʼ
Marxism. The architects of this new ʻparadigmʼ
insisted that a necessary condition of Marxismʼs salva-
tion was its importation into the tradition of analytical
philosophical method, ʻpositivistʼ social science, and
– or, at least, so argued Elster, Roemer and Przeworski
– that version of rational choice theory originating in
the Marginalist revolution of the 1870s and providing
neo-classical economics with its definitive axioms. As
one commentator observed, ʻCohen and his co-thinkers
… casually crossed the supposedly impassable border
between Marxism and the academic mainstream in
philosophy and social theory.ʼ1
After nearly two decades, few Marxist ʻinsightsʼ
have survived the attempt to ʻreconstructʼ it. Most
of the Marxist heritage – Marxism-Leninism, Trot-
skyism, Western Marxism and Structuralist Marxism
– had been consigned to the Humean flames from
the outset. So, too, had Marxʼs ʻmultiply confusedʼ
anatomy of the capitalist mode of production.2 As for
ʻMarxʼs theory of historyʼ in its technological deter-
minist incarnation, Cohen has long since confessed
to doubts as to its defensibility; few Marxists – even
amongst his co-workers – now share the slightest
doubts about its indefensibility;3 and, anyway, Cohen
himself no longer considers it to have any purchase
upon the crucial problems confronting socialists at
the close of the twentieth century. He argues that the
pre-history of the historical materialist programme has
nothing very interesting to tell us regarding either the
constituency, agency and strategy of any prospective
transition to socialism, or the motivational and insti-
tutional structures of a feasible socialism. Thus, in the
introduction to Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality
(1995), Cohen concedes that
to the extent that Marxism [i.e. Analytical Marxism
– MR] is still alive, as … one may say that it (sort
of) is in the work of scholars like John Roemer and
Philippe Van Parijs [note the conspicuous absence
of Elster – MR], it presents itself as a set of values
and a set of designs for realising those values … Its
shell is cracked and crumbling, its soft underbelly is
exposed.4
However, while conceding the demise of Analytical
Marxism, Cohen, in an article originally published in
1990, announces the advent of another new paradigm:
ʻAnalytical Semi-Marxismʼ.5
If it is true that the moment anyone started to talk to
Marx about morality he would laugh, then Analytical
Semi-Marxism would have had him in stitches. At the
end of a century providing socialists with few occa-
sions for merriment, Cohen declares it high time for
a straight-faced engagement with, and development of,
the ʻethicalʼ or ʻutopianʼ socialism decried by Marx-
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 17
ismʼs founders.6 Marxists could excuse themselves
from serious application to normative political phil-
osophy only so long as they had anticipated both the
emergence of a working-class movement impelled into
class struggle by its material interests, and the advent
of an era of material abundance placing humankind,
at long last, beyond the ʻcircumstances of justiceʼ
and, therefore, the need for theories of justice. The
latest news from the Anglophone academy is that
the working class has a good deal more to lose than
its chains (and, it appears, a good deal less to win
than a world), and that ʻ[w]e can no longer sustain
Marxʼs extravagant, pre-Green, materialist optimismʼ.7
The ʻplanet earth rebelsʼ against the final elimination
of material scarcity.8 The Marxist explanatory pro-
gramme in ruins, and – relatedly – socialism relegated
from the destiny of humankind to one social blueprint
amongst others, ʻMarxists, or what were Marxists, are
impelled into normative political philosophyʼ.9
In view of Marxʼs notoriously inconsistent and frag-
mentary remarks concerning our morals and theirs, it
might be anticipated that, if Marxismʼs ʻhard factual
carapaceʼ has disintegrated, then its ʻsoft underbellyʼ
will prove very soft indeed. So concluded Elster and
Roemer, who, bereft of carapaces, set about appro-
priating and developing left-liberal normative phil-
osophy in defence of versions of market socialism.
Against this current, Cohen, resisting the stampede to
market socialism, has launched a last-ditch defence of
a more resolutely Marxian normative position. Contra
Roemer, he argues that, unlike egalitarian liberals,
Marxists have traditionally been, and should continue
to be, interested in, and unreconciled to, capitalist
exploitation.10 Unfortunately, in so far as this Cohenite
brand of Semi-Marxism distinguishes itself from left-
liberalism, it finds itself in bad company. Specifically,
or so Cohen argues, it is forced to take the rabid
neo-liberalism of Robert Nozickʼs Anarchy, State and
Utopia extremely seriously.
Taking Nozick seriously
Cohen argues that a Semi-Marxism insistent upon the
injustice of capitalist exploitation confronts a serious
challenge from a neo-liberal ʻentitlementʼ theory of
justice which abandons the unemployed, sick, disabled,
and old – or at least those so ʻirresponsibleʼ as to
have failed to make adequate private provision – to
the tender mercies of private charity; refusing to tax
the Trumps, Rockefellers, Gettys, Bransons, and of
course the less spectacularly endowed, in order to
finance welfare provisions, on the grounds that this
is morally equivalent to condemning them to forced
18 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
labour. Remarkably, Cohen is forced finally to conclude
not only that Marxists should be exercised by Nozick
but also that ʻthe Marxist doctrine of exploitation is
flagrantly incongruent with even the minimal principle
of the welfare stateʼ.11
Those Marxists who argue that capitalist exploi-
tation is unjust claim that, despite formal freedom of
contract, workers are forced to sell their labour power
to some capitalist; and that, on entering the sphere of
production, they spend a portion of the working day
producing surplus value appropriated by the capitalist
without return. Exploitation is unjust because capital-
ists ʻstealʼ a portion of the workerʼs product. What
general principle underlies this critique? The very
principle, or so Cohen claims, to be found at the heart
of Nozickian libertarianism: the self-ownership prin-
ciple. Exploitation is morally objectionable because
workers are coerced into exercising their powers for
the benefit of non-workers (i.e. capitalists). This is
objectionable because it violates self-ownership: ʻI do
not (fully) own myself if I am required to give others
(part of) what I earn [or produce – MR] by applying
my powers.ʼ12 The problem is that taxing workers in
order to finance welfare programmes for non-workers
violates self-ownership for precisely the same reasons
as capitalist exploitation does: it takes from workers
and gives to non-workers (i.e. welfare claimants).13
Marxists appear to be compelled, on pain of inconsist-
ency, either to drop their egalitarian commitments
or to abandon the moralized critique of capitalist
exploitation; that is, unless there is some subtle way
of reconciling self-ownership with egalitarianism (and,
therefore, Marxian anti-capitalism with socialism).
Some obvious moves are either unsatisfactory or
unavailable. For example, it is unsatisfactory to argue
from the unjust origins of capitalism to its moral
indefensibility. Of course, capitalismʼs origins leave
something to be desired; the problem is that a con-
sistent, and historically literate, libertarian (admittedly
a rare enough beast) must concede the injustice of
historical capitalism, in view of its origins in, and
development via, multiple violations of those inviolable
rights eulogized by the libertarian Right. However, it
does not follow from capitalismʼs bloody history that
the form of exploitation characteristic of the capitalist
mode of production is, in and of itself, unjust. A ʻcleanʼ
capitalism – that is, one with unimpeachable origins
– is, at least, conceivable. For example, we might
imagine everyone beginning at the beginning with an
equal share of worldly resources. If some people are
hard-working and frugal then they may work them-
selves into a position to exploit the ʻlazy rascalsʼ who,
abandoning themselves to whatever ʻriotous livingʼ
is afforded in a state of nature, have allowed their
plots to go to seed. Moreover, the ʻexploitedʼ in such
circumstances might be better provisioned than they
would have been had nobody been in a position to
exploit them – that is, if everyone had squandered their
initial endowments. The Semi-Marxist is committed to
arguing that even such an immaculately conceived and
beneficent capitalism as this, because it is exploitative,
is unjust.14
A familiar left-liberal response to this kind of
defence of inequality – and one to which Cohen is sym-
pathetic15 – is to argue that if it is luck in the natural
and social lotteries that has endowed some individuals
with virtuous dispositions and scarce talents, then these
fortunate individuals do nothing to deserve them, and
therefore have no indefeasible moral entitlement to the
material – and other – benefits rewarding their exercise.
However, this move is unavailable to Semi-Marxists
so long as their critique of exploitation is reliant upon
a self-ownership principle, according to which we are
the rightful owners of our powers, not because we have
done anything to deserve them, but simply because we
belong to ourselves. For example, Jon and John can
agree that it is sheer good fortune that has endowed
Jon with, say, musical talents, but agree also that it
would be unjust for John to coerce Jon into exercising
them. There is a further reason why appeals to desert
will not help to salvage the Semi-Marxist critique of
exploitation: such arguments challenge the inegalitarian
distribution of assets enabling capitalists to exploit
workers, while providing no (independent) reasons for
condemning exploitation as such.16
The self-ownership principle, then, asserts that
what we do with ourselves is our business, so long
as we mind our business. It does not ask whether we
deserve our dispositions, powers and talents, nor does
it require us to exercise them, at however small a cost
to ourselves, to meliorate human suffering and dep-
rivation. An obvious conclusion is that, to the extent
that a moralized Marxism is unexpectedly premissed
in a moral principle with such mean and unappealing
implications as this – Cohen concludes that it is ʻthe
principle of the bourgeois revolutionʼ17 – it should be
abandoned without further ado. Eventually, Cohen
does abandon it, but there is further ado: he lavishes
considerable intellectual ingenuity on Nozick in an
effort to reconcile the Marxist critique of capitalist
exploitation with socialist egalitarianism.
Libertarianism is attacked at its weakest point (at
least, its weakest point once self-ownership is con-
ceded). Self-ownership alone will not generate an
unequal distribution of worldly resources. If we go
back far enough, we eventually arrive at a point in
(pre-)history at which there is no private ownership of
the external world. The problem for the inheritors of
the classical liberal tradition is to explain how it is that
pre-social individuals ever get from owning only them-
selves to owning also bits of the world. In the Second
Treatise of Government, John Locke answered that
full liberal property rights are legitimately acquired
when some agent mixes her labour with a previously
unowned thing, is not wasteful, and leaves ʻenough and
as goodʼ for others. Nozick argues that this position
– and, in particular, the labour-mixture thesis – is, in
various ways, unsatisfactory. In its stead, he proposes
the following ʻprovisoʼ: ʻ[a] process normally giving
rise to a permanent bequeathable property in a previ-
ously unowned thing will not do so if the position of
others no longer at liberty to use that thing is thereby
worsenedʼ.18
Cohen identifies three problems with this proviso.
First, Nozick has nothing whatsoever to say about that
process ʻnormallyʼ giving rise to full liberal property
rights; pouring scorn upon the labour mixture thesis
he gives no indication of what he thinks might replace
it. Second, the decision-procedure for determining
whether the position of others is worsened by an act
of appropriation only, and arbitrarily, compares the
post-appropriation position with the pre-appropriation
position. It does not consider whether anybody is worse
off than they would have been under some alternative
set of property relations:
a defensibly strong Lockean proviso will forbid the
formation of full liberal private property … [f]or
there will always be some who would have been
better off under an alternative dispensation that it
would be arbitrary to exclude from consideration.19
Finally, Nozick assumes that worldly resources are
originally unowned, that nobody owns anything. But
we might equally well assume that, in the pre-social
position, everybody owns everything (joint ownership);
and, therefore, that pre-social individuals are not enti-
tled to use worldly resources without (unanimous)
consent. If we do this, then – or so Cohen argues,
with considerable ingenuity and at some length – we
have an original position in which self-ownership is
respected and equality is maintained.
Unfortunately for the Semi-Marxist, under con-
ditions of joint ownership no one can actually ʻuse
their rights of self-ownership to achieve substantial
control over their own lives, since anything that they
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 19
might want to do would be subject to the veto of
othersʼ.20 There is little point in owning oneʼs powers
if one is denied access to those worldly resources
required if they are to be exercised. In view of their
commitment to ʻgenuine freedom and autonomyʼ,
Marxists must reject a joint ownership proposal that
leaves pre-social individuals without ʻsubstantial con-
trol over their own livesʼ, and with little opportunity
to exercise and develop their powers, capacities and
talents. However, there are crumbs of comfort to be
had here. Nozick and his supporters, argues Cohen,
would be ill-advised to press this objection: in capi-
talist societies, the self-ownership of a propertyless
proletariat is formal in the same sense and for the
same reasons.
[A] victory emerged from what had looked like
the jaws of defeat. For I realised that my libertar-
ian antagonists could not press [this] objection…
They could not complain that joint ownership of the
external world degrades self-ownership, since the
pale self-ownership enjoyed by persons in a jointly
owned world is at least as robust as that of self-
owning propertyless proletarians, who, unlike joint
owners, have no rights at all in external resources,
and who also, therefore, lack real control over their
own lives. Yet libertarians defend, as a realization
of self-ownership, the capitalist world in which
proletarians proliferate.21
Nozick is defeated, then, but the victory is a pyrrhic
one. Semi-Marxists, given their commitments to egali-
tarianism and to ʻgenuine freedom and autonomyʼ, are
obliged to attack the self-ownership thesis; but they
do so at the cost of undermining the basis of their
moralized critique of capitalist exploitation.
But is it Marxism?
Perhaps it is already apparent why many Marxists
– and not only Marxists – have been hostile to Analyti-
cal Marxism, and are unlikely to find Analytical Semi-
Marxism any more congenial. In particular, Cohen
and his cohorts have been attacked – by Marxists
and Anti-Marxists alike22 – for their ahistoricism and
ʻdonnish remotenessʼ from socialist politics. Regard-
ing the former charge, Cohen unapologetically, and
unfashionably, declares his allegiance to moral prin-
ciples understood to possess transhistorical validity:
ʻwhile historical circumstances undoubtedly affect
what justice (for example) demands, they do so only
because timelessly valid principles of justice have
different implications at different timesʼ.23 Regard-
ing the charge of ʻdonnish remotenessʼ, Cohen would
presumably argue that there is not much in the way
20 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
of socialist politics to be remote from at present, and
further, that this is, in part, due to the intellectual
failings of socialist normative philosophy. He con-
cedes that Semi-Marxism demands a very considerable
diminution of Marxismʼs ʻscientificʼ pretensions, and
substantial revisions to socialist normative philosophy,
but insists that there is no longer any intellectually
respectable alternative.
The question arises, however, as to whether or not the
ʻSemi-Marxismʼ advocated by Cohen has anything to
do with Marxism. The very notion of a Semi-Marxism
is not a theoretically innocent one: it presupposes that
the normative principles inscribed within Classical
Marxism can be separated from its explanatory theses
without disfiguration.24 On this view, Marxism has
traditionally embraced both a theory of history and
a set of ʻultimate normative truthsʼ. Semi-Marxism
claims to be a species of Marxism (or, at least, to be
descended from it), because it seeks to identify, elabo-
rate and develop a distinctively Marxian normative
position. It is only a Semi-Marxism because it seeks
to detach these moral commitments from Marxist
theories of history and of capitalism. Marxism, then,
is not conceived as a theoretical totality, exiled from
which its ʻcomponentsʼ cease to be that which they
are. The analytical philosopher views it as an amalgam
of (partially) distinct methodological, explanatory and
normative theses to be prised apart and interrogated
independently.25 Cohen argues, in support of such a
disseverance, that it is perfectly possible to embrace
historical materialism ʻbut regret that the career of
humanity is as it describes, and, more specifically
that, as it predicts, class society will be superseded
by a classless oneʼ.26 Commitment to Marxism, then,
is consistent with rabid anti-socialism.
However, despite attracting some prominent support-
ers, this understanding of Classical Marxism as a mere
entanglement of explanatory and normative claims, to
be disentangled by its self-appointed reconstructors, is
a troubling one. Historical materialism is a theory of
historical development or progress, and not simply of
historical change. Whatever theory of history might
remain were it to be excavated of all evaluative presup-
positions, it is doubtful that it could be informatively
described as an anti-socialist historical materialism,
as opposed to some non-Marxist alternative to it. Of
course, there is nothing unusual in combining com-
mitment to socialist values with rejection of historical
materialism. But such species of socialism are not
ordinarily assumed to possess any Marxist content. As
Cohen recognizes, commitment to egalitarianism and
to ʻgenuine freedom and autonomyʼ are by no means
distinctive to Marxism. In order to trace the contours
of a Marxian normative position, it is necessary to
move from the proclamation of allegedly ʻtimelessʼ
moral principles to consider the criteria governing
their application in varied historical circumstances. In
doing so we find that a distinctively Marxian normative
position cannot be specified other than by invoking
historical materialism. For example, Marxists would
not advocate egalitarianism in pre-capitalist or early
capitalist times: the transition to socialism is histori-
cally possible only once its material preconditions have
been delivered by a succession of inegalitarian and
exploitative class societies.
Consideration of Cohenʼs dissatisfaction with his
own joint-ownership proposal underscores this point.
This proposal, or so he argues, reconciles egalitarian-
ism with self-ownership, but only at an unacceptable
price. Marxists will reject it because they value ʻreal
freedom and autonomyʼ. What is odd here is Cohenʼs
insistence that Marxists will object to joint ownership
in a pre-social original position because it frustrates
the autonomous development of pre-social individuals.
From the perspective of historical materialism, and
certainly that version of it defended by Cohen in the
1970s, to permit pre-social or ʻprimitiveʼ individuals
to exercise their powers and capacities by transforming
worldly things into use-values is to initiate a process
of (pre)historical development tending towards the
creation of a surplus product and, consequently, the
emergence of exploitative class societies. Accord-
ing to historical materialism, ʻgenuine freedom and
autonomyʼ is possible only at the close, and not prior
to the outset, of a long process of economic, social
and political development.
Moreover, regardless of the problem of reconcil-
ing Cohenʼs discussion of joint ownership with an
allegiance to historical materialism, there are further
problems with its proposal. What are we to make of the
idea of joint world ownership? To see how strange this
proposal is, consider an individual in the pre-social
position wishing to grow turnips on an acre of land
in (what we now know as) the Norfolk Broads. Is she
required – as far as possible – to seek the consent of
everyone in the world? Perhaps it is a little less fanciful
to imagine joint owners agreeing to a set of general
rules governing the appropriation of worldly resources
– for example, they might agree to rules permitting
the emergence of capitalism. But, if these joint owners
are permitted to choose between, say, continued joint
ownership and capitalism, then what is to be said in
favour of an original position within
which opting for capitalism requires
unanimity, while the continuance of
joint ownership is secured by a single
dissenting vote? Is it not ʻarbitrary to
exclude from considerationʼ the contin-
uance of joint ownership itself? After
all, this might be the worst possible
option for the majority (or even all) of
these pre-social individuals. Or, to put
the same point another way, even if
there is no good reason for not start-
ing with joint ownership (Cohen) as
opposed to ʻnon-ownershipʼ (Nozick), is
there any good reason for starting with
it, and not with any other aboriginal
property system?
More importantly, leaving aside the
organizational and communications
problems that would confront anybody
attempting to assemble the worldʼs
population to discuss such pressing
matters within a state of nature, none
of this makes sense: there can be no
pre-social ʻvetosʼ, ʻrulesʼ or ʻproperty
rightsʼ. None of these concepts has any
application outside of some pre-existing
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 21
set of economic, social and
juridical relations. Short of
resorting to the profoundly
anti-Marxist notion of a
natural right to property,
there is no way that there
can be joint ownership, or
any other form of ownership,
prior to the emergence of all
social and juridical institu-
tions. Now, of course, Cohen
may have in mind not joint
ownership of the entire world
(and everything in it – except,
of course, each other), but
communal ownership of par-
ticular worldly resources (for
example, tribal ownership of
a particular tract of land). This, of course, is a more Consider the parable of Infirm and Able, which
historically realistic, and formally unobjectionable, – in various guises – figures prominently throughout
starting point for enquiry into the development of Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality:
property regimes. But it places us at the beginning of
Think of a worker who very much enjoys both
an altogether different sort of story to that narrated his work and the wages it brings him and who
by Cohen. To see this, notice that, given the project works for a wholly infirm neighbour who leads
on which he has embarked, Cohen is prohibited from a miserable life but who, unlike the worker, has
beginning here: questions will arise with respect to managed to possess himself of a stock of capital.
communal ownership of particular worldly resources This infirm capitalist lops off just enough of the
workerʼs product so that he, the capitalist, can
similar to those he is preoccupied with in his discus-
stay alive. We can suppose that, if something like
sion of individual acts of appropriation. the stated capital imbalance did not obtain, then
the worker would produce for himself alone and
The absence of capitalism callously let his infirm neighbour die. And we can
Cohenʼs discussion of joint ownership evinces the also suppose that it was because he knew that he
sort of ahistoricism that has been attacked by many would die without the power over the worker that
capital would give him that the infirm man decided
of Analytical Marxismʼs most incisive critics.27 As
to acquire and exercise that power.28
Cohen recognizes, Marxists are generally hostile to
these sorts of ʻthought experimentsʼ – or ʻout-of-the- Cohen wishes to make three points about this ʻout-of-
way examplesʼ as he calls them. While he is right to the-way exampleʼ: (i) Infirm exploits Able; (ii) only
respond that such argumentative devices can serve the the self-ownership principle can provide credible
useful purpose of clarifying and dramatizing prob- grounds for objecting to Infirmʼs ʻtheftʼ of a portion
lems within normative philosophy, there are limita- of Ableʼs product; and (iii) while their moralized
tions to how far the imagination can be stretched. In critique of exploitation appears to commit Marxists to
condemning Infirmʼs treatment of Able, they will feel
particular, the designer of such thought experiments
uncomfortable about this in view of their egalitarian
should not specify counterfactual conditions that are
– and other – moral commitments.
not simply ʻout-of-the-wayʼ, but actually inconceiv-
So what is to be said about this ʻout-of-the-way
able. For example, we cannot be asked to imagine exampleʼ? Various questions arise. Why make Infirm
joint ownership in a pre-social state of nature, because and Able neighbours? What is the relevance of Infirmʼs
this is unimaginable. Similar problems arise with the ʻmiserable lifeʼ to the justice or otherwise of his
ʻout-of-the-way examplesʼ which figure prominently in exploitation of Able? Or are we to suppose that Ableʼs
Cohenʼs discussion of self-ownership and exploitation. wages are generous? And, if so, are we to imagine that
In particular, we are invited to imagine, or so it it is Infirmʼs generous disposition that determines the
appears, consenting adults indulging in capitalist acts wage rate, and not conditions in the labour market? It
in the absence of capitalism. is this last question that directs us to what might be

22 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

designated the ʻabsence of capitalismʼ problem. Cohen
writes that ʻ[t]his infirm capitalist lops off just enough
of the workerʼs product so that he, the capitalist, can
stay aliveʼ. It seems that we are supposed to imagine
Infirm ʻlop[ping] off just enough of the workerʼs
productʼ to secure his (physical) survival as a human
being. But this is unimaginable; or, at least, it needs
to be added that Infirm must reproduce himself qua
capitalist in order to survive qua human being.
Reliant upon successful competition with other
capitals for his survival, Infirm may be forced to
expand production, to take on other workers, to bear
down upon their wage rates, to increase the length
of the working day, to support high unemployment
as a means to secure low wages and long hours, to
empty Ableʼs work of any meaningful content, to sack
her during a crisis, and so on. All this not because
acquisition of the predication ʻcapitalistʼ transmogrifies
Infirm from good neighbour to demon incarnate, but
because, in order to survive, he must now compete
successfully in the market place. Notice also that, if
Infirm is to exploit Able, it will not be enough that he
should possess himself of a stock of capital; he will
also have to deprive Able – who, it seems, starts out as
an independent producer – of access to the means of
her reproduction – that is, to ensure that she will now
die without Infirmʼs ʻassistanceʼ. Moreover, infirm will
not be capable of unilaterally separating Able from
her means of (re)production, and it is unlikely that
anyone else would oblige him by throwing Able off her
land. In order to render this extraordinary transition
in the affairs of Able and Infirm at all historically
credible, we must reconceive it as one manifestation of
a transition between modes of production (from, say,
independent peasant production to early capitalism).
It scarcely needs to be added here that no individual
proto-capitalist (such as Infirm) could, prior to such
a transition, pick out some particularly callous and
mighty unneighbourly proto-worker (Able) for exploi-
tation following it.
So where does all this lead us? Away from the
beliefs, dispositions, motives, actions and predicaments
of particular individuals condemned to live within
the constraints imposed upon them by the capitalist
mode of production, and towards analysis and critique
of capitalism itself: to consider the actions required
of individuals qua ʻpersonifications of economic cat-
egories, the bearers of particular class relations and
interestsʼ.29
Thus understood, this parable should not unduly
trouble those still committed to Marxʼs critique of
capitalist exploitation. The relationship between Infirm
(qua capitalist) and Able (qua worker) is simply one
more manifestation of the exploitation of labour by
capital – structurally (and normatively) indistinguish-
able from any other such manifestation. Its power to
disconcert, such as it is, rests upon a feature of the
situation which is beside the central Marxist point:
that Infirm is forced to acquire capital for the very
same reason that Marxists have traditionally argued
that proletarians are forced to sell their labour power
– that is, to survive. But this should not disconcert
us unduly: the moral justifiablity of Infirmʼs actions,
given the constraint he faces, is an altogether differ-
ent matter to that of the justice or otherwise of the
relationship he is compelled to enter into vis-à-vis Able
(and vis-à-vis labour in general). Nor does the fact that
Infirm appears to be an awfully nice person, and Able
a rather callous one, make the slightest difference:
the injustice inscribed in the relation between capital
and labour is not of Infirmʼs doing – on becoming a
capitalist he has to do what he has to do. As for Able,
callous people can suffer injustice too.
Cohenʼs tendency to conceive capitalist exploitation
exclusively in terms of bilateral relationships between
individual capitalists and workers neglects the extent
to which, for Marx, exploitation was a relationship
between social classes – that is, between capital and
labour. Cohenʼs claim that the traditional Marxist
critique of capitalism invokes a strong version of
the self-ownership principle appeals exclusively to
those passages in which Marx writes of the ʻrobberyʼ
of particular workers by those capitalists employing
them at some particular time. On this reading, those
outside the sphere of production – the unemployed,
the incapacitated, the families and dependents of
workers, and so on – are not (currently) members of
the exploited class at all. They appear in Self-Owner-
ship, Freedom and Equality in the guise of the ʻpoorʼ
and ʻneedyʼ (who are ever with us), and, of course, as
non-exploited non-workers pumping welfare benefits
out of the direct producers.
Marxʼs position is a rather different one. In Capital,
and elsewhere, he is concerned to analyse an exploita-
tive relationship between capital and labour irreducible
to a sum of bilateral relationships between capitalists
and labourers.30 If Marx does offer a moralized cri-
tique of capitalism, then many of its central claims
pose a serious challenge to Cohenʼs reading of Marx;
in particular, to Cohenʼs claim that it covertly relies
upon invocation of the self-ownership principle. For
example, Marx argues at length that labour, in pro-
ducing surplus value, is condemned to (re)produce
and augment ʻthe alien powerʼ that dominates and
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 23
exploits it: that is, capital. Labourʼs own activity also
turns against it by producing an Industrial Reserve
Army: ʻThe working population … produces both the
accumulation of capital and the means by which it is
itself made relatively superfluous; and it does this to
an extent which is always increasing.ʼ31
It seems reasonable to conclude from this that the
revelation that capital is nothing more or other than
past labour – that is, that workers are subjected to the
dominion of their own product – reveals a particularly
viscous, and unjust, aspect of capitalist exploitation.
However, this analysis of the innermost secrets of
capitalist exploitation would have no moral signifi-
cance if the commitment undergirding the critique of
exploitation was, as Cohen claims, to self-ownership.
It is not this workerʼs product that confronts her as an
alien power, but labourʼs total product that so confronts
her. On Cohenʼs reading of Marx, however, there could
be nothing unjust about a situation in which each
individual worker confronts the product of all other
workers in the form of capital. Their product is their
product; it can stand in no morally significant relation-
ship to her. For similar reasons, on Cohenʼs reading, no
special kind of injustice could arise because labourʼs
work activity tends to produce labourʼs future inactivity
in the form of unemployment. This might be unjust
only if it could be demonstrated that some particular
individualʼs own labour activity was instrumental in
producing her unemployment.
Consider, in this context, Cohenʼs illustration of
his own general thesis regarding the incompatibility
of self-ownership and egalitarianism, with specific
reference to Clause IV of the British Labour Partyʼs
1918 constitution (RIP).32 This, it may be recalled, had
promised ʻto secure for workers by hand or by brain
the full fruits of their labourʼ. To it Cohen responds
that, ʻif that promise were fulfilled, then full-time
single parents, infirm people and other unemployables
[sic] would get nothingʼ. What he fails to note is that
self-ownership is not only incompatible with welfarism,
but also with common ownership. If Marxism does
invoke a strong version of the self-ownership thesis, it
is obliged to render Clause IV as follows: ʻto secure for
each worker by hand or by brain the full fruits of his or
her labourʼ. No generation of workers could claim that
ʻlabourʼ (i.e. those currently involved in the production
process) possessed any entitlement to the ʻfull fruits of
labourʼ (i.e. the means of production accumulated over
generations). Justice will require common ownership
only if the injustice to be rectified is the ʻrobberyʼ by
capital of labour, and not the violation by capitalists
of the self-ownership of each labourer.
24 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
Reasons to be cheerful?
If Cohen has resisted unconditional surrender to left-
liberalism à la Roemer, Van Parijs and Elster, then
he remains also less than enthusiastic about market
socialism: ʻmarket socialism is at best second best,
even if it is the best (or more than the best) at which
it is now reasonable to aimʼ.33 To what, then, does
Cohen consider it to be ʻsecond bestʼ? Presumably
to something a little closer to the ʻhigher phaseʼ of
communism envisaged by Marx. However, for Marx,
such a society was possible only on the basis of that
material abundance against which the planet earth
rebels. Indeed, Cohen argues that it has been the
anticipation of abundance (the Marxist ʻtechnological
fixʼ) which has provided a convenient – if entirely
unsatisfactory – resolution to the problem of reconcil-
ing self-ownership and egalitarianism. The defeat of
material scarcity leads to the emergence of a wholly
non-coercive egalitarian society:
An overflowing abundance renders it unnecessary to
press the talent of the naturally better endowed into
the service of the poorly endowed for the sake of
establishing equality of condition, and it is therefore
unnecessary to trench against or modify self-owner-
ship, in order to achieve equality.34
If we can no longer share Marxʼs ʻextravagant,
pre-Green, materialist optimismʼ, must we abandon
all hope of such ʻvoluntary equalityʼ? Not according
to Cohen:
it is not Utopian to speak of a level of material
plenty which, while too low to abolish conflicts of
interest as such, is high enough to allow their reso-
lution without coercion and in favour of equality …
[people] … are or might become sufficiently just to
support an egalitarian distribution … in conditions
of modest abundance.35
Here we find one of the few remaining remnants of
historical materialism to have survived the wreckage
of the Analytical Marxist programme – and, in par-
ticular, of Cohenʼs defence of a reconstructed ʻtechno-
logical determinismʼ: socialism is materially possible
as human industry develops to, and beyond, some
ʻhighʼ level (that is, as it delivers ʻconditions of modest
abundanceʼ). This claim survives in Cohenʼs version of
Analytical Semi-Marxism exiled from its theoretical
context: it has survived the virtual abandonment of
Marxʼs theory of history, of capitalism, and of class
struggle. Can the connection between the development
of human industry and the possibility of a successful
transition to socialism be maintained when so much
else is lost?
 To begin with, it is not clear precisely what Cohen
has in mind here. Is he claiming that individuals
will be more amenable to ʻvoluntary equalityʼ as
they become more prosperous? Surely not. Prosper-
ous individuals are not renowned for their egalitarian
sentiments. Is the idea, then, that such sentiments
will become more pronounced as GNP – or total
global product? – increases to some ʻhighʼ level? If
so, it is difficult to imagine what causal mechanism
might take us there. Perhaps Cohenʼs claim is not a
predictive but a prescriptive one? Under conditions
of ʻmodest abundanceʼ people ought to be moved by
egalitarian considerations. But, if egalitarian principles
of justice possess timeless and universal validity, then
the advent of ʻmodest abundanceʼ does not obviously
strengthen the arguments in support of – and therefore
the reasons for acting in accordance with – egalitarian
principles.
In fact Cohen does not envisage any world-his-
torical transformation of human motivations. Human
beings have always possessed both self-interested
and ʻgenerousʼ dispositions. As the common wealth
increases it is no longer necessary to be ʻzealously
just and altruisticʼ – to make any ʻheroicʼ sacrifice
of self-regarding interestsʼ – in order to be moved
by egalitarian considerations.36 However, the question
arises again of whether this point is predictive or
prescriptive. If predictive, then ʻmodest abundanceʼ
has had no detectable impact of this kind in the
advanced capitalist countries – the per-capita incomes
of which are, Cohen assures us, ʻalready beyond the
required levelʼ.37 If evaluative, then it is unclear why
we should be any more forgiving towards a feudal lord
unmoved by ʻegalitarianʼ considerations, than towards
a corporate manager or an affluent worker.
The weaknesses in Cohenʼs arguments – here and
elsewhere – are often signalled by an uncharacteristic
absence of conceptual clarification: where he is least
sure of his ground, his self-confessed ʻpedantryʼ is
wont to desert him. So it is with the troubling notion
of a ʻmodest abundanceʼ. Consider how one might
go about answering the question, ʻIs there more or
less material scarcity now than there was in 1896?ʼ
It is a mistake to identify the progressive conquest of
scarcity with ever increasing levels of productivity.
Scarcity is a function not only of productivity but
also of human need: that is, as Marx insisted, as
productivity increases human beings acquire histori-
cally determined needs. The modern worker has needs
that would not even have occurred to the medieval
peasant.
Two points follow from this. First, to decide whether
material scarcity is yielding to (modest) abundance we
require not only a knowledge of productivity levels but
also a philosophical anthropology. It will be necessary
to distinguish mere desires and preferences (ʻfalse
needsʼ) from genuine human needs (ʻtrue needsʼ)
– and to do so while recognizing that historical agents
acquire (genuine) historically determined needs which
are not shared by all human beings regardless of his-
torical and cultural location. Second, and following on
from this, we cannot straightforwardly conclude that,
because the planet Earth rebels against the indefinite
expansion of material productivity, it is therefore in
rebellion against the conquest of material scarcity.
The concepts of ʻscarcityʼ and ʻabundanceʼ are not
purely descriptive ones; they possess an irreducibly
evaluative and contestable aspect – that is, unless
we regard naked consumer preference as sacrosanct,
the way we apply these concepts will depend upon a
theory of human need.
Cohenʼs own position clearly does invoke such a
philosophical anthropology. In claiming that per-capita
incomes within the advanced capitalist countries are
indicative of a condition of ʻmodest abundanceʼ he is,
presumably, claiming that their productive powers are
sufficient, if redeployed within a socialist society, to
satisfy not mere – and often manipulatively created
– consumer preferences, but genuine human needs.
This recalls Cohenʼs efforts, in Karl Marxʼs Theory
of History: A Defence, to identify a distinctive contra-
diction in advanced capitalism. He had argued that
– because of capitalismʼs ʻoutput expanding biasʼ – any
increase in its productive powers would be (mis)used
to produce (ever more frivolous) consumer goods,
rather than to alleviate toil: ʻelectric carving knives are
fine but nothing beats freedomʼ.38 Socialismʼs mission,
then, is to bring about a ʻbenign realignment of labour,
leisure and educationʼ.39 Some conception of human
nature and the conditions of its flourishing obviously
premiss these arguments. The problem is that he has
tried to argue that the development of human industry
to a level at which the transition to a feasible social-
ism is, at long last, on the historical agenda will be
fortuitously coincident with a more or less spontaneous
disillusionment with consumerism or an outbreak of
ʻvoluntaryʼ egalitarianism amongst capitalismʼs ʻtal-
entedʼ. Neither of these claims is particularly plausible,
so why is Cohen so concerned to defend them?
The answer, perhaps, is that he is nostalgic for
a Marxism in which he no longer believes, accord-
ing to which the evolution of capitalism tends to
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 25
 produce and radicalize the agents of its own dissolu-
tion. Unfortunately, the development of Analytical
Marxism has rendered capitalism inert: the stimulus
for social transformation, such as it is, is no longer
to be sought within history, but outside of it – in
the realm of ʻtimelessʼ principles. Having concluded
that the prospects for working-class radicalization in
the advanced capitalist countries are between dim
and nil, and having abandoned the special theory of
capitalism wholesale, Cohen is, it seems, here making
a last-ditch attempt to forge some kind of tenuous con-
nection between the development of human industry
within capitalism, and the emergence of the agents of
– or, at least, a constituency more amenable to – the
transition to some form of socialism. In place of class
struggle, socialist must hope that (post-) industrial
capitalism will so overprovision its ʻtalentedʼ that
they become increasingly disposed to indulge their
ʻgenerousʼ dispositions and to embrace a ʻvoluntary
egalitarianismʼ. It scarcely needs to be added that even
if, under conditions of ʻmodest abundanceʼ, ʻgenerousʼ
dispositions (or the tendency to act upon them) do
become ever more pronounced, there is no reason
to assume, and very good reasons for doubting, that
generous people will be any more likely to embrace
socialist (or any other species of) egalitarianism. The
question would remain: why socialism rather than, say,
some form of liberalism?

A staple diet
Cohen does not claim to possess a well-worked-out
model of a feasible socialism. However, in view of
his rejection of large-scale economic planning – ʻVon
Mises and Hayek were rightʼ40 – it is unclear what
alternative he might offer to some type of market
socialism other than something along the lines of
Nordic social democracy. Of course, a further pos-
sibility, to which Cohen confesses his vulnerability,
is despair:

Vanity of Vanities, or rather, the form of it that has

tempted me, says: genuine socialism is impossi-
ble, or virtually impossible to achieve. It is over-
whelmingly likely that the best we shall ever get is
some kind of capitalism, and it is for others to find
the strength to fight for a better capitalism.41

If Analytical Semi-Marxism represents Marxismʼs

best effort to come to terms with the inhospitable
economic, social, political and ideological conditions
of the late twentieth century, then despair is indeed
indicated. For what is Marxism without either histori-
cal materialism (aside, that is, from a few isolated and
disfigured remnants) or the special theory of capitalism

26 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

(the labour theory of value, the law of the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall, and the corresponding theories
of crisis, class formation and class struggle)?
Alan Ryan, writing in 1987, expressed a bewilder-
ment, shared by many others, regarding Analytical
Marxistsʼ claim to be ʻreconstructingʼ Marxism. Of
Elster, given his hostility to the Marxist tradition, he
asked, why ʻbother with Marx at allʼ? As for Roemerʼs
ethical egalitarianism, it is ʻnot Marx or Marxistʼ;
while in Cohenʼs work he detected a fight to the death
between ʻan essentially sentimental and old-fashioned
communismʼ and (emerging victorious) a powerful,
analytical, intelligence. In conclusion, Ryan anticipated
the impending recruitment of the Analytical Marxist
to ʻthe endless and repetitive debates over Rawls,
Nozick and Dworkin which constitute the staple diet
of academic political theoryʼ:
the project of showing that Marx can be made to
talk in ways that Oxford philosophers of thirty
years ago would have thought sufficiently sani-
tary seems a mistake. It satisfies neither the desire
to get inside the mind of the historical Marx nor
the need for an intellectual apparatus adequate to
the complexities and absurdities of the late 20th
century.42
The recent works of Cohenʼs erstwhile co-workers
strikingly confirm Ryanʼs prognosis. Roemerʼs defence
of market socialism appeals directly to left-liberal
moral principles; Elster – who, along with Przeworski,
has departed the ranks of the ʻNon-Bullshit Marxism
Groupʼ – openly declares his allegiance to the basic
principles informing ʻthe writings of John Rawls and
Ronald Dworkinʼ;43 and Van Parijs is ʻcommitted … to
some broadly “Rawlsian” conception of justiceʼ.44 As
for Cohen, all the indications are that he can no longer
postpone the embrace of a socialism of avowedly left-
liberal, rather than Marxist, provenance.
This conclusion is unlikely to perturb the (ex)
Analytical Marxists who have been impatient with
ʻsterileʼ debates fixated upon the question of whether
they are ʻreallyʼ (Semi-)Marxists. Perhaps such debates
are sterile. However, the complaint against them is
not only that their work is ʻnot Marx or Marxistʼ,
but, more strongly, that it is entirely alien to the spirit
– as well as the letter – of ʻhistoricalʼ Marxism, and
wholly inadequate to ʻthe complexities and absurdi-
ties of the late 20th centuryʼ. Both these failures are
apparent in its total neglect of the Marxist critique
of liberalism, and of Marxʼs reasons for disdaining
ʻutopianʼ socialism.
In particular, if Marx laughed at the mention of
morality, this, perhaps, was not symptomatic of mon-
strous self-delusion and wanton inconsistency, but
rather an expression of his conviction that normative
principles were all but impotent in the struggle to
change the world – the comedy that pitches hopeless
inadequacy against terrifying immensity (with tragic,
as well as hilarious, consequences). About this, there
are still good reasons to share Marxʼs scepticism and
despair. A socialism appealing not to the material
interests of any social class, divorced from any identi-
fiable mass movement, but rather to the reason, and
reasonableness, of disembodied and rational individ-
uals – and which, in place of a systemic analysis of
the developmental tendencies of capitalism, offers a
selection of blueprints for an ideal society (or, in
Cohenʼs case, omits to provide such blueprints) – is
unlikely to prevail in the face of a global neo-liberal
capitalism possessing formidable economic as well as
coercive and ideological resources.
In a piece originally published in Radical Phil-
osophy in the summer of 1986, Joseph McCarney
– responding to Gregor McLennanʼs favourable review
of Elsterʼs Making Sense of Marx – enquired as to
whether Analytical Marxism constituted ʻA New
Marxist Paradigm?ʼ45 At the outset, he conceded to
McLennan that Elsterʼs work might well be ʻthe flag-
ship for a new armada of Marxist analytical scholarship
and reassessmentʼ, adding that the other ʻcaptains in
[this] armadaʼ included Cohen and Roemer. However,
as McCarney proceeded to argue, if Elsterʼs ship was
the standard-bearer for a new ʻMarxismʼ, then it was
a ship that sought to ease its passage into the pacific
waters of the philosophical and social scientific main-
stream by throwing a ʻdufferʼ like Marx – ʻa minor
post-Ricardian whose heart [was] in the right placeʼ
– overboard at the outset of its all too brief voyage
from residual allegiance to a few ʻisolated insightsʼ
to be trawled from the work of Marx, to unapologetic
embrace of left(ish) liberalism.
Such taunts cannot be levelled at Cohen with equal
justification. He has persisted, despite the general
trajectory of the analytical reconstruction of Marxism,
in holding Marx in some esteem, and there is no
question of the profundity of the ties that continue to
bind him to the socialist project.46 However, Cohenʼs
best efforts to keep his own ship afloat have led him
progressively to jettison its original Marxist cargo.
If anything remains of the Marxism he had sought
to defend some twenty-five years ago, then it is little
more than a slightly nuanced left-liberal moral posi-
tion, alongside a commitment to the idea that the
development of capitalism has some tendency to
produce more favourable conditions for the transition
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 27
to socialism. Regardless of whether or not Analytical domʼ, in his Post-Liberalism, Routledge, New York and
London, 1993; and for a partial and characteristically
Marxism constituted ʻa new Marxist paradigmʼ some uncompromising response, Cohen, Self-Ownership,
ten years ago, it is now, without doubt, an ex-Marxist Freedom and Equality, pp. 62–5.
one. Cohenʼs recent work has made its contribution 23. Ibid., p. 2.
to those ʻendless … debates over Rawls, Nozick and 24. It would be misleading to trace Cohenʼs intellectual
biography from historical materialism to ethical so-
Dworkinʼ; Karl Marxʼs Theory of History: A Defence
cialism. He has long been concerned with normative
will remain a classic Marxist text, despite the failure philosophy. However, his belief that there are ʻtimelessʼ
of its central argument. However, there is warrant for ethical principles did not, in and of itself, raise any
concluding that, when the intellectual history of this doubts in his mind regarding his historical materialist
affiliations.
period comes finally to be written, Cohenʼs efforts over
25. For a general argument concerned with the tendency
the last quarter of a century to reconstruct a version of analytical philosophy to ʻanalyseʼ complex totali-
of Classical Marxism will be viewed as something ties into their (allegedly) separate components, and the
of an anachronism: the tenacious pursuit of his own problems this poses for Cohenʼs anti-dialectical inter-
pretation of Marxʼs theory of history, see S. Sayers,
peculiar brand of ʻold-fashionedʼ Marxism all the way ʻMarxism and Dialectic Method: A Critique of G.A.
to its dead end. Cohenʼ, in S. Sayers and P. Osborne, eds, Socialism,
Feminism and Philosophy, Routledge & Kegan Paul,
Notes London, 1990.
1. A. Callinicos, ʻIntroductionʼ to Marxist Theory, Oxford 26. Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, p. 1.
University Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 3. 27. See, in particular, E. Meiksins Wood, ʻRational Choice
Marxism: Is the Game Worth the Candle?ʼ, New Left
2. J. Elster, Making Sense of Marx, Cambridge University
Review 177, 1989; M. Lebowitz, ʻIs “Analytical Marx-
Press, Cambridge, 1985, p. 554.
ism” Marxism?ʼ, Science and Society 52, 1988; and A.
3. See, in particular, R. Brenner, ʻThe Social Basis of
Callinicos, ʻIntroductionʼ in A. Callinicos, ed., Marxist
Economic Developmentʼ, in J. Roemer, ed., Analyti-
Theory, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989. See
cal Marxism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
also M. Roberts, Analytical Marxism – A Critique,
1986; and E.O. Wright, A. Levine and E. Sober, Recon-
Verso, London and New York, 1996.
structing Marxism, Verso, London, 1992.
28. Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, pp. 149–50.
4. G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality,
29. K. Marx, ʻPreface to the First Editionʼ, Capital 1, Pen-
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 6.
guin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 92.
5. See G.A. Cohen, ʻMarxism and Contemporary Political
30. See, for example, Capital 1, chs 24–25.
Philosophy, or: Why Nozick Exercises Some Marxists
31. Ibid., p. 783.
More than He Does Any Egalitarian Liberalsʼ, in Cohen,
32. Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, p. 155 n. 18.
Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality (originally pub-
33. Ibid., p. 256.
lished in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, supp. vol.
34. Ibid., p. 122.
16, 1990).
35. Ibid., p. 128.
6. See the introduction to Self-Ownership, Freedom and
36. Ibid., p. 135.
Equality, esp. pp 1–7.
37. Ibid., p. 128 n.13.
7. Ibid., p. 10.
38. G.A. Cohen, Karl Marxʼs Theory of History: A Defence,
8. Ibid., p. 7.
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978, p. 318.
9. Ibid., p. 8.
39. G.A. Cohen, History, Labour, Freedom: Themes from
10. Ibid., pp. 204–8.
Marx, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989, p. 121.
11. Ibid., pp. 159–60.
40. Ibid., p. 260.
12. Ibid., p. 216.
41. Ibid., p. 254.
13. Ibid., p. 151.
42. A. Ryan, ʻCan Marxism be Rescued?ʼ, London Review
14. See ibid., pp. 121ff.
of Books, 17 September 1987, pp. 9–10.
15. Although he doubts that such arguments will be con-
43. J. Elster, Solomonic Judgements, Cambridge University
clusive against a ʻmoderately sophisticatedʼ defence of
Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 205.
self-ownership (ibid., pp. 229ff).
44. P. Van Parijs, ʻRawlsians, Christians and Patriotsʼ,
16. To see this, notice that someone reliant exclusively upon
European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 1, no. 3, 1993,
this sort of argument will have no grounds for objection
p. 309.
to a possible world within which exploitative relations
45. J. McCarney, ʻA New Marxist Paradigm?ʼ, Radical
did emerge as a consequence of, initially equal, his-
Philosophy 43, Summer 1986.
torical agents exercising dispositions and talents which 46. See, in particular ʻThe Future of a Disillusionʼ, in Self-
they did deserve. Ownership, Freedom and Equality.
17. Ibid., p. 229.
18. Quoted in ibid., p. 75. See pp. 74–91 for Cohenʼs dev-
astating assault upon the Nozickian proviso.
19. Ibid., p. 87.
20. Ibid., p. 14.
21. Ibid.
22. See, in particular, John Gray, ʻThe Academic Romance
of Marxismʼ, and ʻAgainst Cohen on Proletarian Unfree-

28 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

INTERVIEW Jacques Rancière

Democracy means equality

Passages: Jacques Rancière, for more than twenty years you have been following a
somewhat unusual philosophical itinerary. It is obvious that what you are doing has
nothing in common with traditional academic work. Most of your books reveal philo-
sophical thought in unexpected contexts or in contexts that have been reformulated in
atypical fashion.

Rancière: Given the historical and political conjuncture of the 1970s, which I certainly
did not foresee, I wanted to look again at certain of the concepts and conceptual logics
that Marxism used to describe the functions of the social and the political. For me, that
wish took the form of a decision, which might be described as purely empirical, to look
at the contradiction between the social and the political within the working-class tradi-
tion. Basically, I wanted to know how Marxism related to that tradition. I wanted both to
establish what that working-class tradition was, and
to study how Marxism interpreted and distorted Jacques Rancière first came to prominence as one of
it. For many years I took no more interest in phil- the co-authors, with Louis Althusser, of the original
osophy. More specifically, I turned my back on two-volume edition of Lire le Capital (1965), to which
what might be called political theories, and read he contributed an essay on Marxʼs 1844 Manuscripts
nothing but archive material. I posited the existence (trans. ʻThe Concept of “Critique” and the Critique of
of a specifically working-class discourse. I began to “Political Economy”ʼ, in Ali Rattansi, ed., Ideology,
suspect that there was once a socialism born of a Method and Marx, Routledge, 1989). However, he
specifically working-class culture or ethos. Years of soon broke with Althusser (see Rancière, La Leçon
work on working-class archives taught me that, to be dʼAlthusser, 1974), becoming an influential figure
schematic about it, ʻworking-class proletarianʼ is pri- in French Maoism. This break, at once political
marily a name or a set of names rather than a form and theoretical, was focused on what Rancière has
of experience, and that those names do not express described as ʻthe historical and philosophical relations
an awareness of a condition. Their primary function between knowledge and the massesʼ. Developing out
is to construct something, namely a relationship of of a critique of Althusserʼs theory of ideology (see
alterity. Rancière, ʻOn the Theory of Ideology – Althusserʼs
That, then, was the starting point. I then slowly Politicsʼ, RP 7, Spring 1974; reprinted in R. Edgley
went back to asking questions about a certain number and R. Osborne, eds, Radical Philosophy Reader,
of concepts from within the philosophical tradition. Verso, 1985), it led to a series of reflections on the
The essential matrix for what I have been doing since social and historical constitution of knowledges: La
then was supplied by the writings of a carpenter called Nuit des prolétaires, 1981 (trans. Nights of Labour,
Gauny. They take the form of an experiment in what Temple University Press, 1989); Le Philosophe et ses
might be described as ʻwild philosophyʼ. The most pauvres, 1983; and Le Maître ignorant, 1987 (trans.
significant of his writings deal with his relationship The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Stanford University
with time and speech. What did this mean? I had been Press, 1991). More recently, since 1989 Rancière has
working on these texts, and when I looked again at broadened his canvas to engage the constitution of
certain texts from within the philosophical tradition, ʻthe politicalʼ within the Western tradition (Aux bords
and especially Platoʼs Republic, I realized that this du politique, 1990; trans. On the Shores of Politics,
self-taught nineteenth-century carpenter had given phil- Verso, 1994) and the poetics of historical knowledge
osophy the same conceptual heart as Plato, namely the (Les Noms de lʼhistoire, 1992; trans. The Names of
fact that the worker is not primarily a social function, History, Minnesota University Press, 1994). His latest
but a certain relationship with the logos, and that he books are Le Mésentente, 1995 and Mallarmé – la
is assigned to certain temporal categories. politique de la sirène, 1996.

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 29

 At this point, I stumbled across the famous passage in Book II of The Republic where
Plato speaks of the workers who have no time to do anything but work, and the passage in
Book VI where he criticizes the ʻlittle bald tinkerʼ and those with ʻdisfigured bodiesʼ and
ʻbattered and mutilated soulsʼ who ʻbetake themselves to philosophyʼ.* I recognized that the
structure was the same. It was a largely empirical structure relating to the temporality of
the workerʼs activity. And there was a close correspondence between that structure and the
fully elaborated symbolic structure that denied the worker access to the universal logos and,
therefore, to the political. That is what I was trying to conceptualize in Le Philosophe et ses
pauvres, but it also provided the main guidelines for my later research into how the ascription
of any relationship with language is also the ascription of a type of being.

The importance of the Greeks

Passages: One might say that your subsequent books have almost systematically
emphasized the importance of the Greeks. Are the Greeks, and especially Plato and
Aristotle, of particular relevance to you?

Rancière: Yes. I refer to Plato and Aristotle because they are in fact the most modern
theorists of the political. In terms of the political, they are the basic thinkers, and they are
therefore the most modern thinkers. The circulation of the signifiers of politics is, so to speak,
a precondition for politics. Signifiers that are essentially Greek and Roman circulate through
the medieval Church and the Renaissance, and are then taken up again during the revolutionary
period. Some signifiers of politics, such as the concept of leisure, play an absolutely central
role in the nineteenth century, and they derive directly from ancient philosophy. I wanted to
stress that line of descent. It so happens that the only philosophical texts to address directly
the subject-matter of my nineteenth-century texts were by Plato and Aristotle. In comparison,
the writings of Kant or Hegel are, in this context, no more than a pale imitation, even though
Hegel does in fact rework the idea of the world and of need. Hegel is a modern political
economist. In that sense, he comes close to the world that produced my working-class texts.
At the same time, I would say that what Hegel has to say about it takes us back to a symbolic
structure that was inscribed or written by Plato and Aristotle, and that was perpetuated by
what might be termed a vulgarized Ciceronianism. And in that sense it may prove to be one
of the basic structures of any theory of the political.

Passages: So is there a line of descent, a continuity, to the question of the political?

Rancière: We have to think in terms of disparities because if we think in terms of a con-

tinuity we inevitably trivialize the object we are thinking about. We explain the familiar in
terms of the familiar and, ultimately, we fail to establish any difference between the familiar
and the totally unfamiliar. There was, for instance, a time when we explained every strike
or every working-class text in terms of the overall relations of the world imperialist system.
Then there is the sociological tautology that states that a fact can be explained in terms of its
conditions of existence. That may well be perfectly true, but it is not very interesting. If we
wish to grasp the singularity of an experience, we have to create disparities. In the present
case, when I refer to Plato and Aristotle, I am creating the greatest possible disparity. On the
other hand, there obviously is an element of continuity, a very slender thread running through
the great expanses of silence. That is what I was trying to analyse when I looked, for example,
at the fate of a word like proletarius. When I read Attic Nights by Aulu-Gelle I was obviously
struck by the fact that, by the second century of our era, no one knew what the word meant
any more. So they turn to scholarly authorities to find out what such a word might mean.
And it so happens that the scholarly answer corresponds precisely to what the word means
within the lived historical experience of the proletarians of the nineteenth century.

*
Plato, The Republic, trans. A.D. Lindsay, Everyman, London, 1992, II 371; VI 495.

30 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

 ʻProletarianʼ does not mean ʻindustrial workerʼ; it means ʻsomeone who is of no importance
in the polisʼ because all he has to contribute is his productive and reproductive power. Basi-
cally, the disparity introduced by looking at the classics allows us to glimpse a very different
line of descent. Take La Mésentente. What I was really trying to do was to react against a
certain modern tendency to think democracy, socialism and Marxism in terms of a dominant
problematic. I am referring to the so-called theologico-political problematic, which explains
everything in terms of Christianity, the kingʼs two bodies and the catastrophic decorporealiza-
tion of the royal body. My aim was to get away from this standard discourse, which explains
the political figures of democracy and totalitarianism by referring to the panic caused by the
decorporealization of the kingʼs two bodies, and the revolutionary attempt to re-create that
body. I wanted to distance myself from that kind of historical argument, and to say that it is
possible to think the categories of democracy, socialism and our political state by bracketing
out that sequence. It is not a basic explanatory sequence; it simply became the dominant
sequence at a given moment, and there were obvious circumstantial reasons why that should
have been the case.

Passages: La Mésentente centres on a concept of the people, the demos, defined as an

absence within a certain statistical notion of the people. What does that mean?

Rancière: One of the starting points for the book was an article I was asked to write five
years ago for an issue of Le Genre humain devoted to the question of consensus. It appeared
to me that the idea of a consensus was an attempt to find a direct correspondence between the
notion of ʻthe peopleʼ and that of ʻthe populationʼ, defined as an object that can be completely
broken down into given empirical categories. And it seemed to me that the poverty of the
political, or the collapse of the political that we are now witnessing, could be understood
in terms of this identification of the people with a political category, and of the population
with a sociological category that could be described by using the appropriate statistical tools.
Going back to the great concepts of the people – disparate concepts of labourers, proletarians,
citizens, and the people – I therefore began to explore the idea that any political subject is
the mark of a disparity and not an identity. That is why I began to re-examine the concept
of the demos in classical thought. In a sense, La Mésentente is no more than an extended
commentary on the opening lines of Aristotleʼs Athenian Constitution. Aristotle explains the
situation of the poor by saying that they had no share in the polis. In a sense, one can say
that politics begins when those who have no share begin to have one.
Thinking about consensus in this way led me to realize that the demos was, right from
the start, a very singular object. Demos became a name for ʻthe communityʼ, but for any
well-born Athenian it meant something very specific, namely the poor, those who are nothing.
My starting point, then, was the paradoxical object I analysed as the first object of politics.
Politics begins with the existence of a paradoxical object that is at once a part and a whole.
Which implies the existence of a still more paradoxical object because the part that is counted
as a whole basically consists of those who have no share in anything. This is also important
in terms of contemporary problematics, where what we call ʻexclusionʼ refers to the one
element that cannot be counted in a state system where everyone can supposedly be counted;
where it is supposedly possible to quantify every element in the polis, their needs and their
opinions. There is a remainder that has not been counted and cannot be counted. It seems
to me that politics begins when the uncounted are not only counted, but when counting the
uncounted comes to be seen as the very principle, the very element, of politics. I therefore
tried to develop this logic.
It might obviously be argued that I am drawing a hasty comparison between the Greek
demos and the modern proletariat. But I think it is vital to argue that politics exists only when
there are subjects who are marked as different and that, in the final analysis, the difference
that creates a political subject always comes down to counting the uncounted, with all the
paradoxes that may entail. In other words, the subject is always a problematic subject, either

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 31

because it appears to have been double-counted, as was the case with the Greek demos, or
because it seems not to have been counted at all, as is the case with the modern proletarian.
This statistical excess or deficit relates to the non-consensual nature of politics. Politics does
not revolve around partners who represent actual groups. It centres on the statistical notion
of a subject that is in excess of all social statistics. And politics therefore involves a process
that subjectivates those who take the floor in order to say something,
who step forward to state their names.

Subjectivation and memory

Passages: Then there are the homeless, the unemployed and

those with no fixed abode. Why is it that they cannot institute
what the proletariat instituted? Why donʼt they have the same
subjectivating function?

Rancière: I think that the homeless are simply marked by their

deprivation. The difficulty is that the possibility of a subjectivation
of the uncounted implies that a wrong can be universalized in some
form. But someone with no fixed abode cannot universalize the wrong
that has been done them. A concept such as that of the proletarian is
a concept that relates to a symbolic count of community. In contrast,
someone with no fixed abode is simply a reminder of the fact that there
are in the community and its distribution people who lack something.
That lack is both something that can be made good and something that
cannot be made good. And that implies that it cannot be subjectivated
as the subject of a universal wrong. The proletariat has been universal-
ized, sometimes on the basis of a misunderstanding, as was the case in the first decade of the
century, when it seemed that being productive necessarily meant being on the side of all the
oppressed and being anti-militarist. In historical terms, that misunderstanding proved painful,
but it was simply the reverse side of the proletarian subjectʼs ability to universalize a wrong by
representing a part of society that was not part of society. ʻProletarianʼ was a name meaning
ʻuncountedʼ, but it allowed other forms of exclusion to be counted, whereas ʻno fixed abodeʼ
is not a name but merely a description of a state. It therefore oscillates between being the
anthropological figure of exclusion and the juridical figure of someone with particular rights
that can be quantified along with other rights. We are now seeing an attempt to replace the
statistical subjectivation of the uncounted with a grand census of particular rights and of the
particular groups which enjoy those rights.

Passages: Arenʼt people without any fixed abode and the proletariat, in fact, com-
pletely new categories that cannot cling on to a complete history, to a whole memory
that once had a political impact?

Rancière: Yes. The concept of memory is an ambivalent one. There have been periods
when it was thought that memory was a property of social bodies. There was the great period
of peopleʼs memory or working-class memory. There have also been periods when it was
thought that memory was something that could be injected, and that people therefore had
to have a history if they were to be aware of their identity, their past and where they were
coming from. I believe that memory does not function like that. Just as there are singular
forms of subjectivation, there are, I think, singular operators of memorization. To take our
generation, all those who explain ʼ68 in sociological terms are, in my view, quite mistaken.
ʼ68 was not a youth revolt. ʼ68 did not represent the emergence of a new way of life. ʼ68 was
an event inscribed within a certain type of political memory, and that memory was bound up
with decolonization. The ʻGerman Jewʼ of ʼ68 would have been unthinkable were it not for
a certain mode of including the Other. And that mode of inclusion was inscribed within the

32 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

after-effects of mobilization against the Algerian war. It was bound up with the way in which
the figure of the colonized and their war of liberation replaced the figure of the proletarian
as the form that allowed a wrong to be universalized and as a way of espousing the cause of
the Other. The Third Worldist ideology of the 1960s projected the negative universal power
of the proletariat on to the rebellion of the colonized. The movements of ʼ68 recentred that
power on the figure of the proletarian, and that has given rise to other misunderstandings.

Passages: If we accept the idea that the political is grounded in irreducible conflicts
that can flare up in different ways, what are the contemporary indicators of those
permanent conflicts, given all the talk of the disappearance of the right–left dichot-
omy? Where will the future conflicts occur? In what domain, on what terrain?

Rancière: I am trying to look at the notions that make politics possible. How politics becomes
concretely possible is another matter. In the absence of subjects capable of realizing equality
– which is the ultimate and absent foundation of politics – in the form of an active freedom,
the question of equality is laid bare. Fragmentary political scenes are taking shape around
the issue of whether society should be structured around an egalitarian or a non-egalitarian
rule.
In France, until the strikes of Autumn 1995, politics usually centred around the youth issue,
around the school and university question. The educational system is in fact becoming the site
designated by our social system as its most important link, as the site of societyʼs fantasmatic
self-identity. Schools and universities are supposed to be able to supply something the world
of labour can no longer supply: the focus which, thanks to ʻtrainingʼ, allows the distribution
of skills to be brought into line with the distribution of jobs. They therefore supposedly
allow society to be equal to itself, to be a body in which every function has its place. More
so than ever before, they are a metaphor for society itself, the site where its egalitarian or
non-egalitarian meaning can be stated, and where the logic of consensus must break down.
We have therefore reached the point where those who govern us are obliged to declare
inequality. At the same time, the egalitarian signifier can be grasped
(thanks to the issue of secular education ʻfor young peopleʼ). And
the political does exist to some extent when the political signifier
can be grasped as such.
During the strikes of Autumn 1995, the place where the equalitar-
ian signifier was manifested reverted to the ʻworkerʼ pole, thanks
to the issue of the public sector, of pension and other rights and
even the issue of how ʻintelligenceʼ is shared out within the social
body. The egalitarian signifier could be grasped once more. But the
problem is that it was the only thing that was grasped. The egalitar-
ian signifier was not refracted through any freedom or citizenship.
The question is whether or not these mixed situations allow us to
imagine a politics in which a declaration of equality or non-equality
can polarize everything. I have no answer to that question.

Passages: If we accept that philosophy has, ever since Plato

and the ancients, taken a fairly elitist stance, isnʼt there a
potential conflict between democracy and philosophy? What
is the role of the intellectual who wants to take the side of
democracy and equality?

Rancière: What, precisely, is an intellectual? The word has, I

think, two meanings. First of all, it means someone who thinks
for himself or herself, and that does not provide a definition of any particular social group.
When the word does refer to a specific social category, that category is always bound up
with a political lack or with the limitations of politics. More specifically, todayʼs intellectual

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 33

is someone who speaks in a political void, someone who speaks up because political forces
cannot make themselves heard. The intellectual then takes on a number of functions at the
same time. The intellectual tells the statesman what state society is in, and what social trends
he has to deal with. When there is no political subjectivation, the intellectual is the incarnation
of great principles. Personally, I do not feel that my role is that of an intellectual. Any role
that I might be able to play relates to my work as a researcher, a teacher and a writer, defined
in the broad sense: a writer is someone who does not write because he or she has specific
qualifications. That is where the question of equality comes into play, but not the question
of whether one speaks for the elite or for the general public. For a writer, equality means
speaking both for everyone and for no one in particular.
In my own view, my role is to put on stage lines of conflict that have been either erased or
fractured by analyses based upon a division of skills between ʻpoliticiansʼ or experts in this or
that science. Politics is a public stage that is erected when there is no site that can legitimate
domination, and when there is no science that can regulate its domain. Which is tantamount
to saying that it is a fading configuration of the human world. Like political philosophy, and
because of their very constitution, the social sciences spend their time covering up the lines
that define political situations. Reconfiguring the field of the objects of history, sociology or
political science so as to redraw those lines is a specific form of work. It is at once a task
for a philosopher, and not a task for a philosopher. It is a task for a philosopher to the extent
that it relates to the knowledges that divide up the domain of the political between them, to
the philosophical decisions that constitute them as specific interpretations and negations of
politics. It is not a task for a philosopher in the sense that philosophy itself is constituted as
an archipolitics or a metapolitics. As a researcher and writer, my role is to build the common
theoretical stage that can help us to understand the common political stage. It is to bring on
stage equality and the conditions that make it effective, and to relate the division of knowledges
to their ultimate contingency. In the final instance, the only things that exist over and beyond
the division of skills between the philosopher, the historian and so on, are speaking beings,
and groups of statements in a common language.

A symbolic violence

Passages: What is the most important aspect of democracy – equality or pluralism?

Rancière: I think it is basically equality. Effective pluralism means polemical pluralism, a

pluralism that creates instances of equality. I do not think that pluralism consists in decreeing
that there are so many categories within the population, and that they all have their rights,
or that there are so many forms of culture which must be brought into line and which must
recognize each other. In my view, that argument represents a farewell to democratic politics. It
is now being proposed that we should replace democracy with, roughly speaking, an oligarchic
state to represent the world capitalist system at the local level, and a sort of pluralism, a
ʻdemocracyʼ tailored to suit the needs of different groups. This presupposes a logic in which
groups have to signal their existence as such, to signal that they belong to categories of groups,
and therefore to categories that have rights.

Passages: Why did you chose the title La Mésentente [ʻThe Disagreementʼ] for your
latest book?

Rancière: The notion of disagreement is clearly meant as a critique of both Lyotardʼs theory
of the differend, and Habermasʼs theory of communicative action. Like Habermas, I think
that debate is central to politics. On the other hand, I do not think that political interlocu-
tion corresponds to the model of communicative rationality. The latter presupposes that the
parties involved have pre-established positions, and that their conflicting statements have a
common referent. I think that the very nature of politics is such that the stage has not been
built, that the object has not been recognized, and that the very partners in the debate have

34 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

not been legitimized, as such. Politics begins when it becomes apparent that the debate is
about something that has not been noticed, when the person who says so is a speaker who
has not been recognized as such and when, ultimately, that personʼs very status as a speaking
being is in question.
Habermasʼs notion that dialogue can be regulated by the logic of contradiction therefore
collapses. Dialogue is structured by misunderstanding. Contradiction does not come into
play, because at least one of the elements that constitute the dialogic scene is not recognized
by the other, who must be forced to include that element in its account of the situation. The
political scene is therefore always symbolically violent. But, unlike Lyotard, I believe that
this wrong can be discussed. The scene is never constituted symmetrically, in a homogeneous
language, or with a single communicative logic. The scene can, however, be constituted, and
it does have effects.
The fact that heterogeneous language games exist does not destroy politics or democracy.
On the contrary, it constitutes politics. The wrong cannot be righted, but it can be discussed.
And given that it can be discussed, it is neither beyond discussion nor irredeemable. I also try
to argue against both the irenic logic that argues that communication can resolve problems,
and the catastrophic political logic that is bound up with the ʻheterogeneity of the regimes
of sentencesʼ. That logic leads to new versions of the Jerusalem/Athens dichotomy: politics
becomes impossible because of some primal alterity or debt, because of a debt to the law of
the Other that can never be repaid.

Passages: Could it be said that your conception involves an implicit political ethics?
According to Arendt, politics means that equality excludes violence as a political act
because violence means the curtailment of action, and the utilization of the Other.
What is your definition of politics?

Rancière: One could say that politics is a peaceful or limited war. One of the founding
ordinances of Athenian democracy that are ascribed to Solon is the curious ordinance that
obliges citizens to take part in civil wars and stipulates that those who do not must be stripped
of their civic rights. On the other hand, ʻrecalling bad thingsʼ was an offence in the Athens
of the classical age, and one remembers Platoʼs astonishment on learning that condemned
criminals were free to walk the streets. Politics is an extreme form of symbolic violence,
an inescapable conflict over principles that allows violence to be controlled. Because it is a
regulated symbolic violence, and because it institutionalizes a wrong and an alterity that can
be discussed, politics is a substitute for war. And in the absence of politics, we do indeed see
the reappearance of figures of an alterity that cannot be symbolized, and the reappearance of
war to the death or generalized criminality.
It is as though politics were a specific and controlled form of violence that blocks other
forms of violence. It is in that sense that there is such a thing as an ethics of politics: it is a
specific way of handling conflict. It is when politics no longer exists that we begin to look for
a mere ethics, and that we try to base politics on ethics. We appeal to the moral individual
who supposedly exists inside the political individual, and who is supposedly the ultimate
foundation, the ultimate guardian of the great principles. But there is no such thing as a moral
individual who is more moral than the political individual. The moral individual always obeys
a certain morality. And there are all sorts of moralities. Believing that we have to kill the
ʻinfidelʼ, or that Jews are not human, is also a matter of morality. It is when politics fails that
we see all these ʻmoralitiesʼ coming into play. There is such a thing as an implicit political
ethics and it is a specific way of handling conflict.

Interviewed by F. Déotte-Beghdali, S. Douailler, C. Hurtado,

S. Léveillé, D. Regnier, P. Resten and P. Vermeren

Translated by David Macey

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 35

 Ecole Européene de Psychanalyse
organised with The London Circle of the European School of Psychoanalysis

The clinical limits of gender

a psychoanalytical approach
London 22–23 March 1997
Brunei Gallery, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square

Speakers include:
Jacques-Alain Miller Colette Soler Eric Laurent
Marie-Hélène Brousse Rosa Calvert Pierre-Gilles Guéguen
Jean-Pierre Klotz Geneviève Morel and others

U.K.: Full subscription £80, full-time students and unemployed £40.

Cheques payable to The London Circle of the ESP
48 Bonnington Square, Lmndon SW8 1TQ

36 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

REVIEWS

In the same boat?

Ronald Aronson, After Marxism, The Guilford Press, New York and London, 1995. xiv + 321 pp., £29.95 hb.,
£14.50 pb., 0 89862 417 7 hb., 0 89862 416 9 pb.
Cyril Smith, Marx at the Millennium, Pluto Press, London and Chicago, 1996. iv + 182 pp., £40.00 hb., £12.99
pb., 0 7453 1001 X hb., 0 7453 1000 1 pb.
Jules Townsend, The Politics of Marxism: The Critical Debates, Leicester University Press, London and New
York, 1996. viii + 294 pp., £49.50 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 7185 1420 3 hb., 0 7185 0004 0 pb.
Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg and Carole Biewener, eds, Marxism in the Postmodern Age: Confronting
the New World Order, The Guilford Press, New York and London, 1995. xxiii + 560 pp., £38.50 hb., £14.95
pb., 0 89862 423 1 hb., 0 89862 424 X pb.
Suke Wolton, ed., Marxism, Mysticism and Modern Theory, Macmillan in association with St Antonyʼs College
Oxford, London, 1996. xxiii + 189 pp., £40.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 0 333 65900 7 hb., 0 333 65901 5 pb.

If Marxism is on the blink, how much does it matter?
It matters, obviously, to right-wingers who are now
either gleefully triumphalist or glumly bereft of a
whipping boy; and if Marxism is erroneous then, one
might claim, it matters for the sake of a truthful view
of things that it takes itself off as soon as possible. But
how far does it matter to the political Left? The Left is
in business not to install Marxism, which is a theory,
but to construct socialism, which is both a project
and a state of affairs; and the relationship between
the two has gone curiously unexamined in all the talk
of the demise of the former. Most Marxists speak of
their creed as a unity of theory and practice, but it is
hard to see what a specifically Marxist practice would
consist in, as opposed to a non-Marxist revolutionary
socialist one, such as the politics of the late Raymond
Williams.
What does being a Marxist add to being a social-
ist? Historically speaking, the two have been closely
bound together, to the point where, without the various
Marxist traditions, socialist ideas, and revolutionary
ones in particular, would have been far less prevalent
in twentieth-century culture. But it is less easy to
determine what Marxism adds to socialism theoreti-
cally, and arguably impossible to say what it adds to
it practically. Almost all of the doctrines which appear
peculiar to Marxism either turn out not to be, or not
to be definitive of it, or both. How then can Marxism
be over, when we cannot even agree on what it is
or was? The philosophy of dialectical materialism
is specific to Marxism, but scarcely definitive of it,
at least for Marx and Engels themselves for almost
all of their careers, or for more or less any Western
Marxist one cares to mention. The belief that the world
is material, independent of and in some sense prior to
consciousness, is shared by both Plekhanov and Paddy
Ashdown, just as the belief that social being broadly
determines consciousness unifies both Gramsci and
the Guardian.
The doctrine of base and superstructure is arguably
peculiar to Marxist theory, but many self-confessed
Marxists have refined it out of existence, and in any
case Freud, no friend of Marxism, held that the funda-
mental motive of human society was economic, and
that without the imperative to labour we would simply
lie around all day in various states of jouissance. It
is also arguable that business executives subscribe to
the doctrine, in practice if not in theory. Theories of
surplus-value, the falling rate of profit and the like may
be specific to Marxist thought, but, once again, quite
a few self-proclaimed Marxists have emphatically
rejected them. Conversely, Marxists have hardly had
a monopoly on the labour theory of value. If Marxists
believe that something called history is teleological,
progressive, contradictory, dialectical and in some
sense rational – a big enough if, to be sure – then so
do Hegelians. Perhaps Marxists hold to a contradiction
between the forces and relations of production – in
which case Louis Althusser was only dubiously of their
number. Some Marxists now dismiss the idea of class
identity or scientific knowledge or false consciousness,
and some who do not are not Marxists.
Maybe what is peculiar about Marxism is that
it advances a ʻmaterialistʼ, rather than ʻethicalʼ or
ʻutopianʼ, theory of socialism. It shows, for example,
how the material conditions for socialism are even

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 37

now immanent in the capitalist present. But you can
sign on for this proposition without endorsing the
broader historical materialism to which it belongs;
and if you press the doctrine too far, then you end
up with a brand of teleology which is anything but
materialist. In any case, even a materialist socialism
must be ethical at base, since the fact that we could
go socialist by no means implies that we should; and
why should ʻutopianʼ be defined in a way necessarily
at odds with such materialist premisses?
Perhaps, then, the differentia specifica of Marxism
lie less in its theory than in its politics. But this is
even harder to credit. Not all Marxism has been revo-
lutionary, and not all revolutionary socialists have been
Marxist. The abolition of toil, private property, money,
markets, commodity production, the possessing class,
class division, material scarcity, selfish individualism,
alienation and the political state; the need to promote
social equality, international community, economic
planning and collective self-determination: there is
no doubt that these imperatives have bulked mightily
large in Marxism, but none of them is confined to
that political heritage, which is to say that not all
communism is of the Marxist stable. Radicals from
Blake to Kropotkin have subscribed to most of these
positions. Moreover, Marxism itself, at least at its
best, is acutely conscious of just how much it owes,
ethically, culturally and politically, to bourgeois liberal-
ism, which is by no means merely a swear-word in
its lexicon.
Is there, then, nothing at all both definitive of
and peculiar to Marxist thought? Marx and Engels
themselves thought that there was: not the concept of
social class, or even of class struggle, but the claim
that the genesis, flourishing and demise of social
classes, in their conflicts with other classes, is finally
determined by the dynamics of historical modes of
material production. It is hard to think of any other
place where the articulation of these two narratives is
so decisively cemented, even if the exact nature of that
articulation has been the subject of much debate. But
what difference does this make to the construction of
socialism? The answer is that it identifies a particular
agent of socialist transformation, the working class, and
a particular class antagonist. It is this above all which
provides the crucial link between historical theory
and political practice. But you can still, as a socialist,
work for the emancipation and self-government of the
working class (leaving aside the formidable problems
involved in defining what this class is, or indeed what
social class as such is), without locking this practice to
a particular theory of historical development. Indeed
38 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
Ronald Aronson, having declared Marxism to be over
in his After Marxism, still seems to hanker after a self-
emancipatory proletariat (p. 153). There is no reason
why grounding your socialist practice in a particular
theory of history will make any substantial practical
difference to it – not even if you read the historical
narrative in inevitablist style, which may be useful for
no more than cheering yourself up and hardening your
resolution (though it might always weaken it too).
It is hard, then, to avoid the conclusion that as far
as being a socialist goes, being a Marxist doesnʼt really
matter. It would seem to commit you to no politically
useful position which you could not have held anyway,
and to almost no theoretical doctrine which you might
not have unearthed elsewhere. Moreover, some of the
beliefs which you probably couldnʼt have arrived at
from other sources, such as the philosophy of dialec-
tical materialism, are probably not worth entertaining
in the first place, while others of them – the nexus
between class struggle and modes of production – have
only very broad political implications which are not
themselves peculiar to Marxism.
There are two arguments against this conclusion.
One is that the truth always in fact matters, and that
if Marxism is broadly true then, in the long term, in
some way or another, this will show up in what we
do and make a difference there. T.S. Eliotʼs witticism
that pragmatism is true, but of no use, is in this sense
to be doubted on anti-pragmatic grounds. But this is
more a matter of faith than a knockdown argument,
and sounds embarrassingly feeble. The more cogent
case is that what is probably true, but of limited use,
is the case about Marxism I have just developed. The
bonds between Marxism and socialism may indeed
be in principle less tight that some have assumed; but
the historical fact of the matter is that the Marxist
tradition has been one of the most precious bearers
of socialist beliefs of more general import, and it is
mere academicism to imagine that the former could be
dismantled without grave detriment to the latter. Much
that we call socialist we do only because of a history
of Marxist formulations. It doesnʼt much matter in my
view whether one calls oneself a Marxist as long as
one is a socialist in something like the senses defined
by that tradition; but without that tradition, it may not
be possible in the long run to do even that.
Meanwhile, nothing testifies more to the life left
in Marxism than the flurry of works dissecting its
demise. Veteran Trotskyist Cyril Smithʼs Marx at the
Millennium, a rambling, dishevelled volume which
reads as though it was dictated while shaving, adopts
the unoriginal tactic of trying to rescue Marx himself
from Marxism, which is to say
adopts one style of Marxism as
against another. Jules Townsendʼs
The Politics of Marxism, a book
both judicious and partisan, deliv-
ers an admirably sober, lucid
account of some central Marxist
debates, addressing the crisis of
Marxism only briefly at the end.
Townsend thinks that Marxism
will be in business as long as capi-
talism is, a claim which begs the
question of whether other forms
of anti-capitalism might not take
it over. Once more, Marxism and
socialism are effectively elided.
But this book is an excellent way
in to a subject supposedly on the
way out. And it is certainly true
that, as the challenge to capitalism
weakens, capitalism behaves even
more anti-socially than it would
otherwise have done, thus making
the challenge to it all the more make out on oneʼs own. Marxist essay collections thus
necessary. become the intellectual equivalent of singles bars, as
For Ernest Mandel, in an essay in Marxism in the different political tendencies warily size one another
Postmodern Age, Marxism is ʻalive and kickingʼ, a up with a view to a long-term partnership.
triumphalist flourish which, one suspects, its incurably The line between plurality and promiscuity isnʼt
sanguine author would still have been making in the always clear. Marxism, Mysticism and Modern Theory
midst of a nuclear wasteland. Most of the pieces in is a notably eclectic volume, containing pieces on
this volume strike a more cautiously revisionist note, crime, race, feminism, the sacred, homosexuality and
espousing, in characteristic American-Left style, a the Internet. Is this a demonstration of the versatility of
suitably pluralist, deconstructed, non-essentialist, anti- Marxist theory, or a set of displacements from classical
teleological, anti-foundationalist Marxism, which may concerns in an age of anxiety? Itʼs a very postmodern
be dubbed, according to taste, revisionist-Marxist, array of topics, with index entries for cults but not
post-Marxist, or a sheepish postmodernism in material- class, Julie Burchill and not Bukharin, pornography
ist clothing. Quite where deconstructed Marxism ends but not production. The book is a robust reminder that
and non-Marxism begins is a question which advocates a Marxism which doesnʼt confront such issues is of
of the former, for all their modish anti-essentialism, mere antiquarian interest; but the price it pays for this
had better address themselves to if the term ʻMarxismʼ engaging sense of relevance is a too-ready conformity
is to retain some meaning. Is a boat entirely rebuilt to a particular cultural agenda.
plank by plank still the same boat? There are, however, Marxism as revised, reconstructed, merged, married
some well-wrought essays in the collection, almost all off, still of enduring value in some departments but
of them too short for their theses (whether gratifyingly demanding rigorous criticism in others: this eminently
or regrettably), and ranging in topic from Spinoza well-balanced perspective has a good deal going for it,
to spirituality, from Queer theory and Marxism and but becomes predictable at best and pious at worst. In
archaeology to children as an exploited class (sic). this respect, Ronald Aronsonʼs After Marxism seems
When Marxism gets into trouble, one solution has at the outset refreshingly less pussyfooting, if perhaps
always been to find an intellectually well-dowried less plausible. With an intellectual honesty all the more
partner to marry it off to. ʻMarxism and …ʼ is a mark attractive for palpably wrenching his guts, Aronson
of generous openness to others brought on by the steadfastly refuses all opium: yes, Marxism has been
queasy bachelor-like feeling that one can no longer declared finished umpteen times, but now it really is;

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 39

no, thereʼs no point in hanging on in the hope it might
re-emerge; its continued existence at the level of ideas
just isnʼt good enough; partnerships wonʼt save it, and
socialist feminism is an oxymoron. But the objections
to Marxism which the book considers are for the most
part profoundly unoriginal, and in any case, in a mildly
self-undoing move, it ends up trying to salvage a fair
amount from the wreckage. Even so, this work, from
a resolutely leftist author who is evidently pained by
his own intellectual conclusions, presents a powerful
challenge to anyone still laying claim to the title of
Marxist.
Incorporation and reaction
Fred Inglis, Raymond Williams, Routledge, London and New York, 1995. xx + 333 pp., £19.99 hb., 0 415
08960 3.
Among Raymond Williamsʼs major achievements was
the development of a critical method for interpreting
writing as an active and creative response to the ʻlived
experienceʼ of its producers, within and against com-
plex determining historical conditions. In anticipating
the first biography of Williams, who used his own life
so compellingly as a resource in this project, readers
might well expect to find the conceptual tools forged
by him now turned upon his own extraordinarily
varied and prolific writing – as a cultural critic and his-
torian, as a novelist, and above all as one of the major
European socialist intellectuals of the last forty years.
Readers with such expectations will be disappointed
and irritated by Fred Inglisʼs confused, contradictory
and, it must be said, reactionary biography.
The political meaning of this biography has not
greatly exercised reviewers, whose overriding concern
has tended to be with Williams as a novelist and an
academic, a ʻfounding-fatherʼ of cultural studies. For
Williams, however, the significance of these activities
derived from their contribution to the left-wing politics
of education, communication and ʻcultureʼ which he
promoted. This always went hand-in-hand with his
commitment to the more traditional concerns of inter-
nationalist socialism. Williams was above all an anti-
imperialist socialist, whose earliest public intervention
in politics, as a fourteen-year-old, concerned black
South African workers (p. 58); whose undergraduate
fiction included a short story on sugar riots in the
West Indies (p. 60); and whose adult work consistently
analysed the destructive dynamic of global capitalism
40 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
In so far, that is, as it matters much in the first
place. It matters very much in my view that social-
ism should thrive, and it may well be that, without
Marxism, it will not. But we should sort out our
priorities here. If the working class held the beliefs
that the late Raymond Williams held, would it matter
if they were not called Marxist? Or would Williams
not in fact have arrived at these beliefs without the
existence of Marxism? Was he perhaps a Marxist
malgré lui-même? If he was a revisionist Marxist,
what exactly was he revising? What is it to be a
Marxist anyway?
Terry Eagleton
in its impact upon local economies, communities and
ways of life.
At the centre of Williamsʼs intellectual project was
the task of critiquing ʻreceived modelsʼ, and of recover-
ing and reasserting marginalized and oppositional
cultural meanings and values. His efforts to fashion
a democratic socialist alternative to the dominant
traditions of Stalinism and Fabianism – the project
of the New Left from the late 1950s – led him to
establish an increasingly critical distance from the
Labour Party. This hardened from a ʻreserved attitudeʼ
in the 1930s, through critical support for the Attlee
and Wilson governments of 1945–51 and 1964–66, to
outright hostility after Wilsonʼs re-election in 1966.
Analysing Wilsonʼs Party as ʻpost-social-democraticʼ
– complicit with the priorities of the international
markets over ʻsocial use and social needʼ, and with
the capitalist stateʼs attack on the organized working
class – Williams shifted towards a less equivocal
revolutionary socialism, clear about the ʻtragic neces-
sityʼ of violence in a revolutionary seizure of power,
as well as the difficulties of the ʻlong revolutionʼ to
prevent ʻthe effective reproduction of existing social
relationsʼ. From the mid-1960s, his work was grounded
explicitly on the terrain of Marxism, whose con-
cepts he reformulated and extended into an analytical
vocabulary with which to unpick the connections
between past and present, self and society, capital and
culture, language and power, in ways that informed
the practical arguments of a wide range of progressive
movements and campaigns.
 The crucial point about this first biography of Wil-
liams is that its composition, publication and reception
have occurred in a new epoch that he himself did
not live to see, brought about by the disintegration
of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Eastern bloc
Stalinist communism. The project of socialism, its
theory as well as practice, is currently undergoing
sustained ideological assault from the apologists of a
triumphalist free-market capitalism, who proclaim it
to be outdated, dying, a historic failure. Inglis claims
to hate free-market capitalism as much as anyone,
and reaches for Williams to bolster his hope in an
alternative. This ought to involve a serious attempt to
trace and account for the development of Williamsʼs
own understanding of his epoch, as engaged political
praxis moved on by the history it seeks to grasp
and transform. Inglis, however, is primarily interested
in Williams as ʻa moral exampleʼ of how to live a
principled life of hope and integrity as a socialist in
a hostile world (p. 299).
The book is offered as ʻan act of homageʼ, written
in ʻlove and admirationʼ to ʻhonour … a modern heroʼ
(pp. 306–7, xii). Yet, as Raphael Samuel suggests in a
scrupulously hostile review which calls into question
Inglisʼs motives and exposes his fallacious scholarship,
ʻif ever a book had a subtext, it is this oneʼ (London
Review of Books, 4 July 1996, p. 10). Despite – or
perhaps because of – his idealizing investments in this
exemplary life, Inglis finds a great deal to criticize in
Williamsʼs character, in his writing, and – most impor-
tantly – in his politics. Weighed against Williamsʼs
qualities and achievements, Inglis suggests that these
criticisms are mere ʻtriflesʼ (p. 306). But they are not.
They undercut Williamsʼs lifetime project, draining
it of political significance. Far from celebrating Wil-
liamsʼs achievements, this book will, at best, fan the
doubts of those, like Jim McGuigan, who are now
uncertain about the ʻenduring value and political reson-
anceʼ of Williamsʼs work – and thus, by extension, of
his socialism (New Left Review 215, January–February
1996, p. 101). At worst, it plays directly into the hands
of explicitly hostile critics like Radhakrishnan Nayar,
who dismisses Williams as passé: a ʻnegativeʼ thinker
who ʻbypassed the real issues raised by capitalism and
cultureʼ, contributed ʻlittleʼ to left-wing politics, and
(the most scandalous claim of all) ʻhelped open the
wayʼ for postmodernism by his critique of bourgeois
high culture; a figure ʻto honour, but also to move on
fromʼ (The Times Higher Educational Supplement, 17
November 1995, p. 20).
Inglis allows such readings because he himself is
fundamentally at odds with – frequently antithetical to
– Williamsʼs deepest political convictions. He writes
not just critically but disparagingly about Williamsʼs
version of socialism. His strongest invective is reserved
for ʻthe canker-corrupting tongues of Marxismʼ (p.
305), which he regards as leading Williams into the
ʻvenal self-deceptionʼ of his positions on com-
munism, the Soviet Union
and revolutionary vio-
lence (ʻarbitrary crueltyʼ
for Inglis; p. 227). But
Inglis sneers throughout
at grass-roots socialist
endeavour per se. Those
with whom Williams
identified, and for whom
he wrote, are painted in the
ribald colours of right-wing
caricature, from ʻthe lock-
jawed robotsʼ of the 1950s
Communist Party of Great
Britain (p. 152), to the
ʻhigh-minded herbivoresʼ
of the Socialist Environ-
ment and Resources
Association (p. 273). The
Yorkshire pickets during the 1984–85 Minersʼ Strike
are stereotyped as ʻbrawny young tearaways drunk on
lager and righteous angerʼ (p. 288). Williamsʼs prewar
socialism is labelled ʻsanctimoniousʼ (p. 44), while
the New Left is rubbished (often in the very breath
in which Inglis claims to admire its moral value) as
devoid of economic realism (never ʻhaving learned to
countʼ, p. 132), for its ʻignorance and self-delusionʼ
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 41
(p. 199), and, perhaps most tellingly, for its ʻcolossal
self-importanceʼ in thinking that a bunch of lefty intel-
lectuals might influence history (p. 197). Inglis mocks
the ʻcomicality as well as heroismʼ of E.P. Thompson
and John Saville in 1956, attacking both Stalinism
and Labourism ʻfrom copying machines in Hull and
Halifaxʼ (p. 152); while Williams and his co-authors
of the 1967 May Day Manifesto are condemned for
their ʻuninhibited effrontery and ignoranceʼ in daring
to criticize Wilsonʼs Labour government ʻof what was
still the eighth richest country in the worldʼ (p. 197).
The crux of this assault lies in Inglisʼs own support
for the pragmatism of the post-1945 Labour Party.
He neither understands nor can forgive Williamsʼs
hostility to Labour after 1966, and misconstrues, as
ʻthoughtless damageʼ (p. 313 n. 10), Williamsʼs sus-
tained critique of Fabianism. Yet both stem from some
of the most consistent strands in Williamsʼs political
thinking from the 1930s to the 1980s: about the need
to reconstruct the cultural field on democratic and anti-
capitalist principles, through support for alternative
institutions of popular culture and education – which
the Attlee government failed to appreciate; and the
importance of a foreign policy resistant to American
and Cold War imperialism – which foundered on
Labourʼs acceptance of the Marshall Plan, its abandon-
ing of unilateralism, and its support for the Korean and
Vietnam wars. Clearly, for Inglis, the important but
limited achievements of the Attlee and Wilson govern-
ments (he has nothing to say here about Callaghanʼs)
represent the best that could realistically have been
won in the way of radical transformation in postwar
Britain. His retrospective acceptance that Labour occu-
pies the left-of-centre mainstream, and that alternative
socialist arguments are abstract, unrealistic and rock
the electoral boat, chimes ominously with the priorities
and perspectives of Blairʼs ʻNew Labourʼ.
Why, then, is Williams a hero for Inglis? If Labourist
pragmatism forms the basis of his critical assessment
of Williamsʼs politics, this coexists rather bizarrely
with the contradictory impulse of the biography to
celebrate his values – ʻsolidarity, mutuality, fight,
opposition, equal shares in difficultyʼ – as ʻfineʼ and
uplifting. Crucially, this depends on their remaining
ʻlosersʼ valuesʼ: the effort, Williamsʼs effort, to turn
them into ʻwinnersʼ valuesʼ leads to their corruption
– and to ʻthe failure, as well as the defeat, of the Left-
intellectual project in Britainʼ (p. 196). The Williams
whom Inglis admires is annexed as an adherent of
ʻEnglish romantic socialismʼ (p. 146), more akin to
Wordsworth than Marx, whose noble task alongside
E.P. Thompson was ʻto remoralise a socialist project
42 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
dishonoured by Stalinismʼ (p. 197). Williams the hero
is thus freed from the hard-nosed materialist taint
of communism and Marxism, and assimilated to an
altogether cosier, idealist tradition favoured by Inglis:
home-grown, ʻtrans-classʼ, non-revolutionary, and asso-
ciated by Inglis (and Blair) with Wilsonʼs idea of the
Labour Party as a ʻmoral crusadeʼ (pp. 307, 197).
Inglis identifies Williamsʼs best self with this heroic
construct, in contrast to what he repeatedly calls his
ʻbad faithʼ in holding to the ʻhard lineʼ of black-
and-white ʻclass warfareʼ (pp. 100, 67). His whole
account of the trajectory of Williamsʼs life is organized
by this distinction. The flowering of the best self is
located historically, from 1945 to the early 1960s,
when Inglis believes his valued synthesis of romantic
moral socialism and the Labour Party came closest to
fulfilment, and when Williams writes the non-fiction
that Inglis most admires: Culture and Society and The
Long Revolution. From then on, Inglis sees Williamsʼs
politics as increasingly out of touch with ordinary life,
and his writing as ʻled astray [by] theory and methodʼ
(p. 238): the books which are arguably Williamsʼs most
important, The Country and the City, Marxism and
Literature, Politics and Letters, and Towards 2000 are
dismissed as largely misguided, unreadable, circularly
introspective, or half-baked. Inglis sees Williams as
ʻstuckʼ by 1978, ʻincreasingly obdurateʼ in the 1980s,
and, at his premature death of a heart attack in early
1988, a tragic, Yeatsian figure of ʻheroic absurdityʼ
(pp. 256, 291, 294).
In Marxism and Literature, Williams himself ana-
lysed the kind of strategy that informs this biography
as a hegemonic incorporation of oppositional think-
ing into a dominant ʻselective traditionʼ. This makes
ʻactive selective connectionsʼ with the past in order to
ʻratify the presentʼ: ʻIt has in practice to discard whole
areas of significance, or reinterpret or dilute them, or
convert them into forms which support or at least do
not contradict the really important elements of the
current hegemony … dismissing those [connections] it
does not want as “out of date” or “nostalgic”, attack-
ing those it cannot incorporate as “unprecedented” or
“alien”.ʼ But, Williams adds, the strategy is ʻvulnerable
because the real record is effectively recoverable, and
many of the alternative or opposing practical continui-
ties are still availableʼ. The task for a future, better
biography of Raymond Williams must be to recover
the full integrity of his lifeʼs work, and to reassess
those continuities which can mobilize his concerns
for a necessary socialism, ʻbeyond 2000ʼ.
Graham Dawson
The posthumous revenge of Prince Lazar
Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, University of California Press,
Berkeley and London, 1996. 212 pp., $19.95 hb., 0 520 20690 8.
ʻAt least none of us are circumcised,ʼ a Slovenian
journalist once joked to me uneasily as we crossed
the front line from Bosnian government- into Bosnian
Serb-controlled territory.
At the time, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian
Muslims was in full swing, and foreign journalists
were not above suspicion for being, or for sheltering,
Muslims. The most common way to identify a personʼs
ethnicity in Bosnia is by their name. Any native can
tell at once whether most family names are Serbian,
Muslim or Croatian. But some names are common
to two or all three groups, and many Bosnians are
offspring of mixed marriages. And since there are no
immediately apparent physical differences between
Bosniaʼs three major peoples, falsified papers could
easily conceal a personʼs ʻrealʼ ethnicity.
In fact, thereʼs only one way to tell a Bosnian
Muslim male from an Orthodox Christian Serb or a
Catholic Croat male: by his penis. Muslims are circum-
cised, Christians (in the Balkans) are not. During the
war, it was common practice for Bosnian Serb – or
Bosnian Croat – troops to order men to drop their
trousers for purposes of identification.
When I politely told my usually well-informed col-
league that most American men are routinely circum-
cised at birth, he couldnʼt conceal his genuine shock.
In Western cultures that donʼt circumcise, the practice
is seen as oriental, a foreign ritual performed by ʻnon-
European peoplesʼ, like Muslims and Jews.
The importance of circumcision in the Bosnian
war is telling, and not just in order to account for the
shocking proponderance of sexual crimes, like castra-
tion, mutilation and rape. Technically, the term ʻethnic
cleansingʼ is a misnomer. Serbs, Croats and Bosnian
Muslims all belong to the same ethnic group. They
are Slavs, descendants of Slavic tribes that migrated to
the region in the sixth and seventh centuries. All three
speak a common Slavic language and are physically
indistinguishable – except that Muslims are circum-
cised. The defining difference between the three groups
is religion: Serbs and Croats took on Christianity in the
ninth century, while the Muslims of Bosnia converted
to Islam during Ottoman rule.
If the only factor that distinguishes between the
Slavic inhabitants of Bosnia-Herzegovina is religion,
then it would seem logical that the 1992–95 war
in Bosnia was a religious war. The Bosnian Serbs
and Bosnian Croat nationalists openly boasted that
they were fighting to protect Christian Europe from
the westward advance of fundamentalist Islam. Both
armies went out of their way to destroy every mosque
on the territory they captured. One could justifiably
argue that the term ʻethnicʼ in ʻethnic cleansingʼ is a
euphemism for ʻreligiousʼ. In collusion, the Christian
regimes in Croatia and Serbia singled out the Bosnian
Muslims for elimination because of their faith.
However plausible this explanation is, strictly it is
not the case – nor does Michael Sells in The Bridge
Betrayed argue – that religion was the primary cause
and impetus for the slaughter in the Balkans. The war
in Bosnia was one of territorial aggression, orches-
trated and actively supported by expansionist regimes
in Serbia and Croatia – and fought through their hard-
line proxies in Bosnia – to divide the country between
them. Yet central questions remain unanswered. Why
was the conflict so violent? How could radical nation-
alist leaders so effectively rally people around their
objectives, inciting them to rape and massacre their
neighbours? And why, in a strictly territorial war, was
genocide necessary at all?
Sellsʼs finely written, well-argued book makes a
major contribution to recent literature on Bosnia,
exploring the warʼs religious dimension and above all
the role of Christian religious mythology in prepar-
ing the ground for genocide. The author, chair of
Haverford Collegeʼs Religion Department, shows that
a particularly lethal religious-based ideology was used
to motivate and justify the war and the extermina-
tion of the Bosnian Muslims and their culture. The
Catholic and Eastern Orthodox proponents of this
ideology, which he terms Christoslavism, conflate
Slavic race and Christian religion, concluding that
the only true Slavs are Christian Slavs. This makes
Muslim Slavs (the Bosnian Muslims) traitors to their
race and enemies of Christianity.
Sells traces the impetus and rationalization of geno-
cide against Slavic Muslims to Serbian Christoslavic
myth, which by the 1980s had filtered into public
discourse and the media. The central event in Serbian
folklore is the Serbsʼ tragic 1389 defeat at the hands of
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 43
the invading Ottoman army on Kosovo Field. During
the five centuries of Ottoman rule that followed, gen-
eration after generation of Serbs handed down tales,
legends and songs about the Battle of Kosovo Field
and the martyrdom of the fallen Serb leader, Prince
Lazar. In the nineteenth century, Serbian nationalist
writers turned Lazar into an explicit Christ figure, who
was betrayed and murdered by a Muslim Judas. In
this version of the Good Friday story, Ottoman Turks
assume the role of Christ killers, just as the Jews do
in anti-Semitic traditions. The Slavic Muslims become
the symbol of the traitor within, Serbs who betrayed
their nation and race to join the enemy, the Islamic
Turks. According to legend, Lazar (or the Serbian
nation) cannot rise from the dead until all the descend-
ants of his killer are purged from the Serbian people.
Thus, the revenge of Lazar-Christʼs death becomes a
sacred, holy act.
As riddled as the myth is with historical contra-
dictions, its underlying motifs surface throughout
Serbian literature and church folklore. The Muslim is
portrayed as ʻthe otherʼ, the antichrist, the heretic, the
pervert, the sadist. Slavic Muslims, who converted to
Islam, and the Ottoman Turks are made synonymous,
an alien, non-European race bent on destroying the
Christian Slavs. In such a context, the lurid tales that
Serbian nationalists and Orthodox clerics fabricated
during the 1980s, about atrocities supposedly com-
mitted against Serbs by ethnic Albanians (Muslims) in
Serbiaʼs Albanian-dominated province of Kosovo, were
readily accepted across Serbia. In 1986, two hundred
prominent Belgrade intellectuals signed a petition
demanding that the government stop the ʻgenocideʼ
against Serbs in Kosovo. The propaganda galvanized
Serbs around a nationalist ideal, priming them to
accept and back a war against Muslims, and ulti-
mately to sanction their extermination. The trumped-
up charges of a genocide against Serbs was turned
into the rationale for an actual genocide of Muslims,
perpetrated by Serbs. The Bosnian Serbs committed
the very crimes that Serbs erroneously claimed were
being perpetrated against them in Kosovo.
Less convincingly, Sells also argues that Christo-
slavic ideology in Croatia and among Bosnian Croats
led to much the same results. Certainly, like many
Serbs, nationalist Croats harbour the same religious
stereotypes about Muslims, and also the larger goal
of an ʻethno-religiouslyʼ pure state. This much Serbian
President Slobodan Milosevic and Croatian President
Franjo Tudjman agreed upon from the outset. But
44 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
here the thesis runs into the complications inherent in
laying too much emphasis on the religious character
of the war in Bosnia. While the leadership of the
Serbian Orthodox Church openly backed the Bosnian
Serbs, and either denied or justified their crimes, the
Catholic Church hierarchy in Bosnia and Croatia,
as well as Pope John Paul, vocally condemned the
hardline Croatian nationalists. Sarajevoʼs Catholic
cardinal, Vinko Puljic, became one of Bosniaʼs most
prominent spokespersons for tolerance and multicul-
tural coexistence. Even though individual Catholic
orders and priests, especially from Herzogovina, did
back the radical nationalists, one cannot hold ʻChristo-
slavic ideologyʼ responsible for the actions of Croatian
extremists.
Religious-based explanations of the war in Bosnia
tend to lose sight of its ultimate source: the quest
for territory and bounty. Sells, for example, refers to
the hardline regime of the Herzegovina Croats as the
ʻChristoslavic state of Herceg-Bosnaʼ and their army as
ʻChristoslavic forcesʼ. These kinds of labels mistakenly
imply that the driving ideology of the Herzegovina
mafiosos and black marketeers was Christianity. In
fact, it was the greed of local warlords and the longing
to join a greater Croatian state.
Moreover, as Sells duly acknowledges, the enemies
of the Serb and Croat nationalists were not confined to
non-Christians. Dissent within the ethnic community,
such as political opposition, peace movements and
critical media, was also ruthlessly squelched. Although
one may explain internal resistance as a betrayal of
faith and nation, the basis of this kind of dissent was
not religious, but opposition to the regimesʼ political
goals. And, of course, as closely as the Christoslavic
Serbs and Croats sometimes collaborated, the very
real animosity between them (and the destruction of
one anotherʼs churches) tends to undermine unilateral
notions of a united Christoslavic alliance.
Nevertheless, Sellsʼs original, provocative theses
shed new light on the many questions surrounding the
war and genocide in Bosnia. An American of Serbian
descent, the author spares Serb nationalists nothing
in his analysis of their ultimate responsibility for the
destruction of Bosnia. The Bridge Betrayed exposes
and rejects the generic terminology (ʻcivil warʼ, ʻage-
old hatredsʼ, etc.) that obscures the reality of what
happened in Bosnia. Sells calls genocide by its name,
something the worldʼs politicians are loath to do.
Paul Hockenos
Gay guy, queer guy Garçons, 1983), to the cyber-fiction of LʼAmour en
relief (1982; translated as Love in Relief in 1986),
and an astonishing historical reconstruction of the
Bill Marshall, Guy Hocquenghem: Theorising the Gay life of St John (La Colère de lʼagneau, 1985). Death
Nation, Pluto Press, London, 1996. viii + 118 pp., prevented him from developing into a major novelist.
£35.00 hb., £10.95 pb., 0 7453 1060 5 hb., 0 7453
Hocquenghem was also a polemicist specializing in ad
1059 1 pb.
hominem attacks on the former Leftists and Maoists
In January 1972, the weekly Nouvel Observateur pub- who came to power with Mitterrand in 1981. His ʻOpen
lished a long article entitled ʻThe Revolution of the Letter to those who have gone from the Mao collar to
Homosexualsʼ. It took the form of an interview with the Rotary Clubʼ of 1986 is a memorable, and often
the stunningly beautiful 25-year old Guy Hocqueng- very funny, attack on the ʻnew bourgeoisieʼ and its
hem, and was the first ʻcoming-outʼ article to appear in new version of Pravda: the daily Libération, which
the mainstream press. Hocquenghem was very much a Hocquenghem himself helped to found. Yet the savage
child of the post-ʼ68 years. A founding member of the humour, and the attempts to preserve or recapture the
short-lived Front Homosexuel dʼAction Révolutionnaire energies of the 1970s, in some ways look sadly like
(Franceʼs even more flamboyant answer to the Gay a decision to take up permanent residence in the last
Liberation Front), he was also an activist with Vive ditch of an impossible revolution. Marshallʼs success
la Révolution, without doubt the most spectacularly in covering so much of a large corpus in a small
provocative of all the revolutionary Maoist groups volume is remarkable, though it is disappointing to
of the day (its slogan says it all: ʻWhat do we want? find undue reliance on plot-summary in his account
Everythingʼ). It was at his urging that VLRʼs paper of Hocquenghemʼs five novels.
Tout published a gay issue in 1971. One of the lead Hocquenghemʼs most celebrated book is his Homo-
articles began: ʻYes, weʼve been buggered by Arabs. sexual Desire, first published in France in 1972,
Weʼre proud of it, and it wonʼt be the last time.ʼ The translated in 1978 and still available in an English
issue was seized by the police, and Maoist bookshops edition from Duke University Press (1993). Strangely,
refused to sell it. Marshall ignores an important aspect of its history
Hocquenghemʼs emblematic importance is signalled and intertext by failing to discuss the muted recep-
by the fact that the most recent and best history of tion given it by the Gay Left collective in 1978–79.
gay politics in France (Frédéric Martelʼs Le Rose et le For Gay Left, Hocquenghemʼs euphoric celebration of
noir, 1996) opens with a chapter entitled ʻMy
name is Guy Hocquenghemʼ. Yet most of his
books are now out of print and unobtainable
in France. If the mainstream press still has
a gay icon, it is Hervé Guibert (or ʻSade in
jeansʼ, as Edmund White has dubbed him),
who is best known for the thinly veiled
account of the death of Foucault given in his
To the Friend who Did Not Save My Life.
Both men died of AIDS-related diseases:
Hocquenghem at the age of forty-two in
1988; Guibert in 1995, aged thirty-six.
Marshall has written the first full account
of Hocquenghem to be published in any
language. This is obviously an innovative
and welcome contribution to a history of
gay politics, and of the life-style strand in
a more general left politics. Hocquenghem
produced a great deal in his short career.
Best known as an activist-provocateur, he
was also a journalist and spent his last years
writing novels which range from a roman à
clef about a paedophile scandal (Les Petis

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 45

the delights of cruising was idealistic and utopian (it
ignores, for instance, the issue of police harassment),
and it was hard to take seriously his ʻvision of sodomy
as the grave digger of capitalismʼ.
One of the objections raised by Gay Left con-
cerned the difficulties posed by the philosophical under-
pinnings of Hocquenghemʼs defence and illustration
of homosexual desire, and it has to be said that the
references are at times ill-digested (Hocquenghem was
a classicist, and not a philosopher, by training). Neither
Homosexual Desire, nor the later Dérive homosexuelle
of 1977, are particularly coherent in philosophical
terms, and their author was certainly not afraid of self-
contradiction. Hocquenghem draws heavily on Deleuze
and Guattariʼs Anti-Oedipus, but also on the utopian-
ism of Fourier, to whose work he was introduced
by René Schérer, once his philosophy teacher, and
rather more than the ʻfriendʼ described by Marshall.
Deleuze, Guattari and Fourier allow Hocquenghem to
reintroduce desire into the debate, and to turn away
from the long-standing tradition that describes desire
as an expression of, or a reponse to, a lack or privation.
Like Foucaultʼs power, Hocquenghemʼs desire is produc-
tive and generates its objects through its uncontrollable
flows. Anticipating Foucaultʼs celebration of saunas
and bathhouses as laboratories of sexual experiment-
ation, Hocquenghem sings the pleasures and endless
possibilities of anonymous cruising. Desire subverts
identity. Significantly, Hocquenghem habitually uses
ʻhomosexualʼ as an adjective (though he does speak
of ʻhomosexualitiesʼ in the plural), and thus subordi-
nates it to the substantive ʻdesireʼ. For Hocquenghem,
homosexual desire therefore does not provide the basis
for an identity politics, still less for campaigns based
on demands for rights. It is a perpetual becoming, a
permanent subversion. Hocquenghemʼs suspicion of the
notion of identity and fears of recuperation led him to
speculate in 1977 that ʻhomosexualʼ would become a
sub-category within consumerism – a term designating
not a revolutionary desiring force, but a niche market.
Sadly, he is not here to satirize the Gay Pride marches
that are now, for better or worse, sponsored by jeans
manufacturers.
Hocquenghemʼs celebrations of a free-flowing and
polymorphous desire, his refusal to seek acceptance
or ʻrespectabilityʼ, and his espousal of the abjection
symbolized by the death of Pasolini have a definite
appeal to a new generation of queer theorists. Doubts
must, however, arise, and Marshall does not always
address them as clearly as he might. Polymorphous
and perverse as it may be, Hocquenghemʼs world is
profoundly masculinist. There appear, for instance, to
46 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
be no lesbians in this gay nation. Like Foucault, Hoc-
quenghem trivializes the issue of rape to an alarming
degree, arguing that it should be treated as a minor
instance of assault, and criticizing women who turn to
ʻbourgeoisʼ courts – this at the very time when French
feminists were denouncing the practice of plea-bargain-
ing that did indeed reduce rape to assault, and which
therefore meant that the offence was tried by lower
courts with reduced powers. The libertarianism of
Hocquenghem, Schérer and, to a lesser extent, Foucault
also leads them to make apologias for paedophilia
by challenging the Oedipal structures that allegedly
segregate children and frustrate or repress their sexual
desires. Given our present knowledge of the extent
– and consequences – of the sexual abuse of children,
Marshallʼs comment that this is ʻrisky territoryʼ is
surely less than adequate. It is also somewhat irritating
to see an activist of the 1970s being translated, thanks
to the de rigueur references to Benjamin and Bakhtin,
into an all-too-familiar postmodernist of the 1990s.
Many of the limitations of Marshallʼs study are no
doubt imposed by the constraints of the series and
format in which it appears. This is the first volume in a
new series of short monographs on ʻModern European
Thinkersʼ (volumes on Edgar Morin and Régis Debray
are announced as forthcoming), and the limitations
on length appear to curtail discussion. The result is
a rather breathless account of Hocquenghemʼs work.
Inside this short study, a bigger and better book is
trying to come out.
David Macey
Laing’s true self
Daniel Burston, The Wing of Madness: The Life and
Work of R.D. Laing, Harvard University Press, Cam-
bridge MA and London, 1996. ix + 275 pp., £21.95
hb., 0 674 95358 4.
We live in cynical times. Postmodernist deconstruc-
tionism insists that the self is an illusion – a plurality
of discursively produced identities and subject posi-
tions. Yet many remain convinced that our subjectivity
is more than othersʼ constructions of us. Burstonʼs
account of the life and work of R.D. Laing is refresh-
ing in taking seriously the factors that often impel
this conviction.
 Most of all, Burston documents the forces driving
Laingʼs own quest for a self beyond his construction
by others, in particular by his mother, Amelia. Laing
claimed he remembered Amelia hating him and resist-
ing his implantation, within days of his conception, in
the wall of her womb. Once he was born she hated his
attachment to others – so much so that she burnt his
favourite toy when he was five. She construed him as
the reincarnation of her hated father, and was intoler-
ably intrusive. Given this, it is little wonder that, once
he started working as a hospital-based psychiatrist,
Laing set aside a ʻRumpus Roomʼ for patients to be
themselves, free from othersʼ attributions. Hearing of
this experiment and of his work towards what was
to become his first and most important book, The
Divided Self, Sutherland, Bowlby and Rycroft brought
Laing from Scotland to London in 1956 to work at the
Tavistock Clinic.
The Divided Self was published in 1960 – the
same year Laing qualified as a psychoanalyst. In it
he recounted the ontological insecurity resulting from
others (in the first place the mother), and invalidating
the childʼs ʻbeing-for-othersʼ, ordinarily the precondi-
tion, according to Laingʼs existentialist philosophy, of
the child developing a ʻbeing-for-himselfʼ. Invalidation,
he claimed, in turn contributes to people experiencing
these interdependent versions of the self as though they
were disconnected. Madness, he wrote, often involves
an acute struggle to wall off, separate and preserve
what is experienced as a ʻtrue selfʼ from invasion by
what is experienced as a ʻfalse selfʼ formed in relation
to others.
In subsequent books – Self and Others and Sanity,
Madness and the Family (with Aaron Esterson) –
Laing described the subjection by those diagnosed as
mentally ill to their familiesʼ and doctorsʼ fantasies
and projections. But is anyone, sane or insane, ever
anything psychologically over and above othersʼ ideas
about them? In The Divided Self Laing emphasized
that, however appealing the notion of a true self, it
amounts to nothing if it is not acted upon and realized
in our relations with others. Yet from his student days
onwards Laing was also attracted to the contrary view-
point, propounded in Eastern philosophy and taken up
by Jung and his followers, that within us exists a truth
untrammelled by social reality.
It was this, Burston suggests, that led Laing to work
with Jungians at the Langham Clinic, of which he
became Director in 1962. His belief in a true self led
him, from 1963, to characterize schizophrenia as an
ʻinner journeyʼ of self-discovery and reintegration. It
also arguably contributed to his involvement with the
Philadelphia Association, founded in 1965 to establish
communities, notably at Kingsley Hall, where residents
(most famously, Mary Barnes) might regress to infancy
to recover and reconnect with their otherwise divided-
off inward being.
Undaunted by the filth and stench of Barnesʼs
regression to infantile fecal incontinence, or by the
demise of Kingsley Hall in 1970, Laing set off in
quest of his own true self. In 1971 he went first to
Ceylon and then to India where he meditated and
was initiated, in January 1972, into the Hindu cult of
Kali. Whatever truth he discovered about himself in
the East, he returned to the West to find himself cast
in the role of guru. Though he despised those who
construed him in this guise, he also exploited his
celebrity status in money-making ventures – including
lecture tours, a musical show, poetry readings, journal-
ism, and a 1978 extravaganza at Londonʼs Hilton Hotel
– in which he preached the virtues of rebirth. Burston
claims that Laing craved fame, and that his last years
were dogged by the injuries done to his manifestly
false grand self-image by being arrested and struck
off the Medical Register for drunkenness. Finally, he
died from a heart attack playing tennis against a young
American psychologist in August 1989.
Burstonʼs book does not finish with Laingʼs death.
It goes on to consider his views in the light of recent
developments in what Burston refers to as the ʻBabelʼ
of current theories about the self – including those of
philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis, and 1990s
psychiatry. In particular, Burston stresses Laingʼs
contradictory claims regarding the notion of a true
self. As Burston makes clear, Laingʼs adherence to
this notion was impelled by his own and his patientsʼ
experience of being victims of othersʼ damaging and
hateful projections and constructions. The answer,
then, surely lies not in searching for a true self, but in
remedying the factors causing people to damage and
hate, rather than help and love, each other. Many in the
late 1960s believed that this goal could be achieved,
that the division of the true and false self described
by Laing could be overcome by improving relations
between people – personally through communal living
and politically through socialism. Laingʼs commit-
ment to these causes, however, was at best short-lived.
His account of the harmful social and interpersonal
factors alienating us from ourselves, nevertheless, still
indicates a way forward. It is an inspiring antidote to
todayʼs cynicism.
Janet Sayers
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 47
Imagining sexual
difference
Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and
Corporeality, Routledge, London and New York, 1996.
xvii + 163 pp., £35.00 hb., £11.99 pb., 0 415 08209 9
hb., 0 415 08210 9 pb.
It is perhaps hard to imagine that in the early 1980s,
when Moira Gatens began to explore the relation-
ship between the body, sexual difference and social
inequality, the body barely rated a mention as an
issue in Anglophone philosophy and feminism. In the
context of that different theoretical climate, the first
essay in this collection, ʻA Critique of the Sex/Gender
Distinctionʼ, published in 1983, was groundbreaking
and, despite the escalating interest in the body since,
remains one of the more sophisticated on the topic.
Here Gatens argues against the tendency in the 1970s
to think sexual difference in terms of the psychological
category of ʻgenderʼ, in the hope that gender differ-
ences (and hence sexual inequality) could be neutral-
ized by strategies of resocialization. With reference to
Lacanʼs concept of the ʻimaginary bodyʼ and using the
example of transsexualism, Gatens argues that what
is crucial to an analysis of sexual difference is the
sexed body as it is socially constituted, encoded and
lived. Masculinity and femininity are not arbitrarily
connected to male and female bodies, as proponents
of degendering assume, but ʻare manifestations of a
historically based, culturally shared phantasy about
male and female biologiesʼ (p. 13).
For Gatens, what remains at stake in political strug-
gles are these phantasies or imaginary bodies: repre-
sentations of bodies which construct different forms
of subjectivity and which structure the body politic
to the advantage of some (usually white, middle-class
men), and the detriment of others. This conviction
links the nine essays in Imaginary Bodies, a selection
of Gatensʼ research spanning the past ten years. The
pieces vary in terms of the level at which Gatens
analyses imaginary bodies, the theorists she critically
appropriates, and the issue she is addressing. The
first three focus on the way in which images of male
and female bodies limit womenʼs social and political
possibilities. In ʻCorporeal Representation in/and the
Body Politicʼ, for example, Gatens argues that our
modern body politic is based on an image of a Cauca-
sian masculine body and so cannot properly represent
the voices or interests of bodies which do not fit this
mould. This analysis has interesting consequences
48 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
for struggles other than feminism. It supports, for
example, Australian Aboriginal demands for a treaty,
as opposed to the compact proposed by the Australian
Government in 1988. Gatens suggests that a compact
implies an agreement between like bodies which would
serve to hide the damage done to Aboriginal bodies
through two centuries of colonization. A treaty, on
the other hand, implies an agreement between unlike
beings and promises to recognize and represent more
than one kind of body.
The second group of three essays develops the
concept of imaginary body more fully, through criti-
cal appropriations of the work of philosophers and
social theorists such as Spinoza, Lacan, Foucault and
Pateman. ʻPowers, Bodies and Differenceʼ gives a good
indication of the scope of Gatensʼ own imagination
in this effort. Here she takes the unusual step of
placing Foucaultʼs model of power alongside Lacanʼs
idea of the body image. As a consequence she adds
consideration of history and power relations to Lacanʼs
account of the social genesis of sexual difference, thus
removing his assumption of the ʻnatural dominance
of the penisʼ, while addressing the complaint that
Foucaultʼs model of power cannot easily deal with
sexual difference. Against Marxist and liberal accounts
of inequality, where power is understood as a social
instrument which capitalizes on biological differences,
Gatensʼ appropriation of Lacan and Foucault provides
an account of how ʻpower, domination and sexual
difference intersect in the lived experiences of men
and womenʼ (p. 70).
While the previously published material in Imagi-
nary Bodies remains as fresh and relevant as when first
written, for those already familiar with Gatensʼ work,
perhaps the last group of essays, all new material,
will be of most interest. These address the operation
of imaginary bodies at the level of history, govern-
ment and the law, with reference to the philosophies
of Nietzsche and Spinoza. ʻPower, Ethics and Sexual
Imaginariesʼ is particularly remarkable. Gatens chal-
lenges the opposition between truth and power apparent
in political theory, not through the familiar territory of
Foucault, but with help from Spinoza. Using Spinozaʼs
idea that what you are and how you act is based on
what you know (derived from imagination) and your
passions, she examines how both lust (which tends to
desire possession of its object) and our imaginings
about sexual difference structure not just particular
relations between the sexes, but the body politic itself,
including its judicial arm. This analysis helps Gatens
explain judicial attitudes towards rape: the lack of
sympathy for women on the part of judges in some
recent cases is explained in terms of the limited
experience (imagination and passions) of the judges
themselves. This observation in turn suggests that
redressing unfair treatment of women by the judiciary
requires, not just consciousness-raising of judges (as
you can only be conscious of what you already know
and are), but that we open the judiciary, and all areas
of social and political life, to the experiences of women
and other traditionally excluded groups. The novelty
and complexity of this argument, as well as Gatensʼ
sensitivity to contemporary issues, is characteristic of
the essays in Imaginary Bodies This is one of those
rare books which lives up to its advertising as ʻan
original contribution to current debates on the body
and a powerful analysis of contemoporary ethical and
social issuesʼ.
Rosalyn Diprose
A dismal science no
longer
Mervyn Frost, Ethics in International Relations: A
Constitutive Theory, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1996. x + 251 pp., £40.00 hb., £14.95
pb., 0 521 55505 1 hb., 0 521 55530 2 pb.
Until quite recently, the Anglo-American discipline
of International Relations (IR) had some claim to be
considered the true ʻdismal scienceʼ of the twentieth
century. Its dominant theory was ʻrealismʼ, a doctrine
which stressed power and interest and whose main
function was to explain why attempts to address the
manifold injustices of the existing order were doomed
to failure. Critics were marginalized in the disci-
pline, as were Marxian investigators of the modern
world system. Meanwhile, in the East a not-dissimi-
lar perspective held sway, initially based on Stalinist
accounts of the ʻpermanently operating factorsʼ of
world politics, later actually borrowing many elements
of Western realism.
While the majority of scholars remain realist, by
the mid-1980s – even before the end of the Cold War
added impetus to the process – IR was undergoing an
extraordinary transformation. Perhaps partly in reaction
to the very dullness of the old orthodoxy, it became a
kind of intellectual Salisbury Plain, a testing ground
both for a wide range of new approaches – Rawlsian
contract theory, Habermasian critical theory, post-
structuralism, deconstruction, social constructivism,
feminism – and for the revival of older previously
suppressed themes, namely neo-Weberian and Marxist
historical studies, neo-Gramscian international politi-
cal economy, Kantian ethics. Even the realists became
rational choice theorists. From being one of the least
sophisticated of the social sciences, IR moved in a
few years to the front rank – at least if intellectual
sophistication means a concern with epistemology
and a willingness to experiment with any half-way
plausible new idea. Mervyn Frostʼs 1986 book Towards
a Normative Theory of International Relations, of
which the work under review is a much revised second
edition, was one of the detonators of this intellectual
explosion. In both works Frost presents a critique of
realist orthodoxy and a substantive position of his own
– ʻconstructive theoryʼ.
Realist doctrines make a clear distinction between
fact and value, and assume that a ʻpositiveʼ account
of the world is possible. Frost demonstrates very
effectively that, on the contrary, all accounts of the
world are ʻnormativeʼ. We study international relations
because we are continually called upon to act in the
world; we want to know what we ought to do about
a situation such as that in Bosnia or Rwanda; and no
description of these situations can be offered which
does not rest on normative judgements about the causes
of these conflicts and the legitimacy of the various
institutions involved. Frost is a radical anti-positivist;
not only realists, but also ʻcriticalʼ theorists are cas-
tigated for preserving some version of the fact–value
distinction in their work. Postmodernists, on the other
hand, are too sceptical of normative theory, which is
what Frost wishes to develop.
This theory is, in essence, neo-Hegelian; sover-
eignty and a society of separate states are ʻsettled
normsʼ of the international order, supported as the
only arrangement compatible with the diversity of
moral communities making up our world. However,
other settled norms mandate democratic forms of
government and a regime of human rights. This
apparent contradiction is reconciled by a background
theory which sees the (ethical) state as the only foun-
dation for individual rights. Accordingly, we judge
such situations as Bosnia by asking of particular
courses of action (by the partners to the conflict
or by outsiders) whether they are conducive to the
emergence of ethical communities. After outlining
this approach, the final third of the book is taken
up with Frostʼs examination of such questions, cast
in terms of imaginary dialogues with ʻterroristsʼ, as
well as more conventional reflections on the uses and
misuses of political violence.
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 49
 This substantive position has been less well received
than Frostʼs critique of orthodoxy, and part of the
reason for this new edition is, I suspect, to redress the
imbalance. I doubt if it will succeed. Frostʼs ʻstatismʼ
is unwelcome to the many other critics of realism less
willing than he to accept the underlying legitimacy of
the existing order. His Hegelianism is nowadays not as
far from the mainstream as it once was, but even here
there are difficulties, partly because he seems unable
to decide whether he is a ʻleftʼ Hegelian – for whom
the idea of an ethical state is a reproach to the status
quo – or a ʻrightʼ Hegelian – who ends up justifying
the way things are. He is, of course, aware that very
few states actually employ their sovereignty to enable
the individual rights of their citizens to be expressed.
Yet he regards those states of whom this is not the
case as in the process of becoming ethical; of, as it
were, learning the rules of the game – discounting the
alternative position that a great many modern ʻstatesʼ
are best seen as protection rackets run for the benefit
of their rulers, rather than embodying any ethical
principle. For all these problems, this is a fine, thought-
provoking book, mandatory reading for those in the
discipline of IR, a good introduction to the formerly
dismal science for those not.
Chris Brown
Dining with the devil
Alison Assiter Enlightened Women: Modernist Femi-
nism in a Postmodern Age, Routledge, London and
New York, 1995, x + 164pp., £35.00 hb., £11.99 pb.,
0 415 08338 9 hb., 0 415 08339 7 pb.
Alison Assiter has set herself two exceedingly tough
tasks in this book. First, she aims to explain the central
tenets of postmodernism to the beginning student.
Second, she aims to show why feminists should be
wary of postmodernism and should consider a return
to Enlightenment values, specifically to realism in the
theory of meaning, universalism in feminist theory,
and a commitment to value in the cognitive domain.
The first task, taken alone, would be difficult enough:
postmodern writing is notoriously dense, convoluted
and resistant to clear exposition. However, to couple
the exegetical aim with a critical and constructive one,
particularly in such a short text, is doubly ambitious.
It is also crucially important at both the philosophical
and the political level.
50 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
From the start, Assiter makes it clear that her philo-
sophical quarrel with postmodernism has a political
dimension. To be a feminist is to be committed to
undermining oppressive, gender-based power relations,
and one very influential source of gender oppres-
sion is Enlightenment philosophy, with its emphasis
on the rational, autonomous, disembodied individual
– an individual who (on inspection) turns out to be
male. But if feminists seek to undermine gender-based
oppression, and see Enlightenment philosophy as an
accessory after the fact, postmodernists are equally
troubled by the Enlightenment project, which they
interpret as merely another narrative masquerading
as the bearer of Truth. There is, therefore, as Assiter
points out, a ʻnatural allianceʼ between feminism and
postmodernism: both are suspicious of the hubristic
claims of Enlightenment philosophy and both are
concerned to expose the ways in which universal
knowledge claims may be claims to political power.
However, my enemyʼs enemy is not thereby my
friend, and a central aim of the first part of Assiterʼs
book is to suggest that postmodernism has less to
offer feminism than might at first appear. The central
point here is a moral and political one, and is made
with devastating accuracy in the Introduction, where
Assiter writes: ʻIt is sometimes said that all one can
do is tell stories, and one chooses the story one likes
best. I believe that, in a world in which there are hor-
rendous wars taking place, the environment is being
destroyed, and there is mass starvation, this view
is morally and politically reprehensibleʼ (p. 7). The
price of philosophical postmodernism may be political
impotence, and feminists should therefore choose their
friends with care, particularly if they expect feminism
to be effective in the political world.
This first, critical, part of the book is admirable on
a number of levels: Assiterʼs style is quite exceptionally
lucid and accessible. She is able to explain complex,
often tortuous, passages in Irigaray with a clarity which
makes one wish that the original author had phrased
things that way. Additionally, she shows exactly why
and how theories in the philosophy of language and
in epistemology will have consequences for feminism
in particular, and for the political world more gener-
ally. This is no mean feat, and it is heartening to
see someone explain so very clearly why philosophy
matters to politics and to morality.
In the second part of the book Assiter presents
her own alternative to postmodern feminism. Whilst
recognizing that knowledge must always be situated,
that it matters who the knower is and where he or she
is located, she also insists that this must not be inter-
preted as an endorsement of relativism. Postmodernists
and feminists are right to emphasize the social context
within which knowledge claims are made, but it does
not follow, and it is not true, that any knowledge
claim is as good as any other. Even if there is no
ʻview from nowhereʼ, there are nevertheless better
and worse places from which to view. Specifically,
Assiter proposes that we view from the standpoint of
communities which are more committed to emancipa-
tory values. To do this is to strike a philosophically
defensible and politically responsible balance between
relativism and realism.
But what counts as ʻtruly emancipatoryʼ, and why?
This is the 64-thousand-dollar question, and Assiter
concedes that, in the final analysis, she has no satis-
factory answer to it. Conflicts between ʻupholders of
green politics and political groups concerned to defend
jobs testify that the decision as to which values to
uphold as “truly emancipatory” is by no means an easy
oneʼ (p. 94). This may seem a disappointing conclu-
sion, but it is not. The postmodernists would have us
believe that there is, in the end, no right answer to
these difficult questions, but Assiter reminds us that
there are nevertheless morally abhorrent answers, and
unless we are prepared to condone them we should
treat postmodernism with respectful caution. When
we sup the devil, we should be sure to use a long
spoon.
Susan Mendus
Time and motion
studies
Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest
of Time, translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London,
1996. xxiii + 315 pp., $24.95 pb., 0 8166 2260 4.
In his foreword to this book, Gilles Deleuze writes:
ʻÉric Alliez is not out to expose conceptions of time or
even to analyze temporal structures. He speaks about
various conducts of time. It might be said that thought
can grasp time only through a series of strides, which
precisely compose a conduct, as if you were switching
from one stride to another, according to determinable
occurrences. Even more so, we will pass from one
conduct to another, in different milieus and epochs,
which relate the time of history with the thought of
time.ʼ The first of these ʻstridesʼ, according to the
narrative proposed by Alliez, involves a movement
from a cosmological conception of time to an under-
standing of temporality as a function of subjectivity.
This movement occurs, famously, in Book XI of Saint
Augustineʼs Confessions, in the separation of time
not only from the movement of heavenly bodies, but
from all physical movement. Alliezʼs book considers
the place of time in the writings of – among others
– Aristotle, Plotinus, William of Ockham and Duns
Scotus. But the importance of Augustineʼs struggle
with the ʻtortuous vicissitudesʼ of time is such that it
radiates throughout this ambitious and erudite work,
informing its investigations of Western constructions
of time, subjectivity, history and capital.
The task of Book XI of the Confessions is to
identify the place and status of the present, which
exists, says Augustine, not as a discrete instant or
point in the manner in which Aristotle had under-
stood it (as Alliez points out, there is no distinction,
for Aristotle, between the instant and the geometric
point), but rather is apprehended in motion by the
mind. This particular ʻconductʼ of time is in turn
ousted by the Scotist conception of time as abstract,
uniform and homogeneous. For Alliez, this abstract,
empty time is coincident with the time of capital: the
fourteenth century sees not only the advent of complex
technologies for the measurement of time, but also a
particular time of avarice, an economic or chrematistic
temporality which has as its focus the future as object
of speculation. The stockpiling of time is the ʻmeta-
physical figure of capitalismʼ.
Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 51
 The time of capital is also, of course, an urban
time. Alliez argues in conclusion that the temporalities
of labour and of speculation constitute the very basis
of the city itself. This is a line of argument which
intersects neatly with similar claims – concerning
the centrality of time (and, particularly, of tempo-
ral advantage or accumulation) to Western thought
– advanced in Paul Virilioʼs Speed and Politics. Alliez
writes: ʻthe city is not a place. A space without
place, that is, a geometrical space, void, and a time
without duration espousing the straight line of the
distance separating the human being from every place,
measuring the linear movement of a transport whose
speed is its sole parameter.ʼ The city thus becomes
the confluence of various temporal flows or Deleuzian
conducts; the control of spatial territory is replaced
by the government of time. The city is ʻa cinematic
entityʼ, characterized by the production of movement
or progress on the basis of the abstraction from a
homogeneous continuum.
52 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)
In this sense, Alliezʼs extraordinarily sensitive and
complex exegesis of ancient and medieval notions of
time turns out to furnish us with an intricate philo-
sophical picture of a situation which others (Virilio,
Attali, Lyotard) have identified as postmodern. In
such a temporal predicament, as Giorgio Agamben
has argued, revolution would consist in changing time,
in wresting from the agents of ʻtemporal avariceʼ a
certain concept of the now (of an ʻevent-ualityʼ which
is no longer that of the point, the ʻpunctumʼ).
It is this recognition that has animated the most
radical materialist thought of this century, and which
finds its most profound expression in Benjaminʼs
ʻTheses on the Philosophy of Historyʼ. Alliezʼs book is
a timely reminder both of the force and complexity of
a Marxist conception of history, and of what it leaves
unthought: ʻthe unimaginable touch of timeʼ.
Brian Dillon
OBITUARY

Raphael Samuel, 1934–1996

R
aphael Samuel was born in London, to a Jewish Communist family, and died of
cancer in the city of his birth, on 9 December 1996. Education at the progressive
King Alfredʼs School (Hampstead Garden Suburb) and at Balliol College, Oxford,
where he was taught by Christopher Hill, contributed to his intellectual formation, but the
insistent and febrile energy that he brought to the practice and teaching of history –
indeed, to its very reshaping in the postwar years – was forged in a Communist childhood
and teenage membership of the Communist Party Historiansʼ Group. The domestic asceti-
cism of this upbringing, combined with the narrative richness of the Marxist historiography
he learned from the Party he left in 1956, was notably described in a series of pieces on
ʻThe Lost World of British Communismʼ, published in New Left Review in the mid-1980s
– the first English contribution to the now vastly overcrowded terrain of autobiographical
criticism to be written by a man (NLR 154, 156, 165).
Raphael Samuelʼs lasting memorials will be the work he inspired in the generations of
students he taught at Ruskin College, Oxford, from 1962 to 1996, and History Workshop,
in its protean forms of annual conferences, local networks and federations – which spread
across Europe and Scandinavia – and its eponymous journal. ʻA loose coalition of worker-
historians and full-time socialist researchersʼ was what he called it. ʻIt started in 1967,
at Ruskin College … as an attack on the examination system and the humiliations which
it imposed on adult studentsʼ (HWJ 9). History Workshop was a practice of progressive
education as much as it was of history. Raphael Samuel retained a lifelong admiration for
child- (or learner-) centred education, and for the Communist teachers he met in his youth.
He was perfectly willing to listen to elaborate arguments about progressive education as
the final – and conservative – resting place of post-Wordsworthian English romanticism,
but he believed not a word of them. His conviction sent mature students who had left
school at fifteen – unable to write an essay, as John Prescott recalled of his pre-Ruskin
self – straight into the archives, to learn from the fragmented records of the unconsidered
of the earth what a democratic and socialist practice of history might be. Like Raymond
Williams and Edward Thompson, he produced his historical work in interaction with
working-class adult returners to education – a peculiarity of English educational history
and English historiography that awaits its historian.
The standard charge against the history Samuel inspired was of a fanatical empiricism
and a romantic merging of historians and their subjects in crowded narratives, in which
each hard-won detail of working lives, wrenched from the cold indifference of posterity,
is piled upon another, in a relentless rescue of the past. When he was himself subject
to these charges, it was presumably his fine – and immensely detailed – accounts of the
labour process that critics had in mind. But it was meaning rather than minutiae that he
cared about. If, as Gareth Stedman-Jones suggested in his Independent obituary, Raphael
Samuel charted better than anyone else the desperate increase of hard labour in every
branch of industry and manufacture brought about by Victorian industrial capitalism (on
the land as much as in the factory), then it was because the details inscribed the meaning
of that toil, those lives, to those who lived them.

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 53

 Histories of feminism in Britain conventionally cite History
Workshop as one of the origins of an indigenous womenʼs
movement. A notorious argument at the 1968 Workshop,
about the failure of the male Left to take the personal and
the domestic seriously – as objects of historical inquiry,
or as anything at all – is frequently evoked. Did History
Workshop give birth to womenʼs history, in its modern mode?
Samuel thought it did; it certainly obeyed its injunctions
of historical practice, pursuing women as workers into the
realms of reproduction, with the result that we now know
more about what working-class women actually did during
the Long Revolution, on a day-to-day basis, than we know
about working-class menʼs activities. We have extraordinarily
detailed accounts of women and various processes of labour
(women and bobbins, shuttles, top bars, needles, loops, hooks;
women throwsters, women winders…). And for the late
nineteenth century, we possess equally finely drawn portraits
of women reproducing everyday life: grates, frying pans,
black-lead, banana-crate cradles, yard-brooms; childbirth,
labour, love. Samuel understood this form of womenʼs history
as a politics, arising from ʻa radical discontent with historical
explanations which remained wholly external to the object they purported to account forʼ.
It was part of a wider desire of the 1970s, to show ʻclass consciousness … mediated and
formed in the crucible of the workplace and the homeʼ.
History Workshop Journalʼs itemized accounts of the twenty-year battle between empiri-
cism and theory were mostly made at Samuelʼs instigation. He was always much more
interested in ideas than in the detail. But who noticed in 1980, when he made the revo-
lutionary suggestion that one way out of the epistemological wasteland in which socialist
historians found themselves, in the death throes of the Marxist historical epic, was that
historical explanation could remove itself from the hypnotic fix of linear time, could stop
dealing with surface concordances – indeed, that we could rethink the notion of cause
itself, which might also be ʻmore convincingly elaborated if it were removed from a tem-
poral sequenceʼ? He lived – another sixteen years – to see this happen; but not perhaps to
know how important a role he played in bringing a new history into being, in which time
has been turned into something like the spaces and places of Gaston Bachelardʼs poetics.
Theatres of Memory (1994) is certainly the book that everyone has said it is: it shows
us what the heritage industry reveals about ʻthe culture of the peopleʼ, about new makings
of the past in the common imagination. But its intense observation of the things that
make up this new past – the distressed bricks and Edwardian-lady tea-towels that rivet-
ted Samuelʼs gaze – are the historianʼs acknowledgement that in late-twentieth-century
historical practice time has been slowed down, compressed into the interior spaces of
remembered things. That is why he urged a ʻmolecularʼ vision on us all, and a practice
of ʻmicro-historyʼ. And only if you believe that everything connects, that each entity and
event contains the stuff that might illuminate another one, does time become solidified in
this way. Nothing goes away.

A
year or so ago, the University of Warwick made me a professor, and the inaugural
lecture was set for May 1996. The audience for it I wanted, that I most franti-
cally had to have, was Raphael. But he could not come: what turned out to be a
last holiday with his beloved friend and wife Alison had already been booked. He would
have taken the train from Euston to Coventry, had he been around, but he would not have
seen the point. In the Guardian obituary, Bill Schwarz wrote about Raphaelʼs indifference

54 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)

to all norms of academic achievement; he would have seen in the event not my perform-
ance of the knowledge that finally, absolutely, no way now, could they send me back, but
rather, empty, preposterous pomp. He never wanted me to get my PhD: I could stand as
an inspiring example of what could be done without one. And anyway, the event was to
be held in a Midlands county. It was not so much that Raphael disapproved of my living
in the provinces – though he sometimes introduced me as a woman who had deserted and
betrayed the city of her birth: he was the truest Metropolitan, Fitzrovian indeed. London for
him was the light of the world; he just never quite believed that I lived – that I could live
– in Middlemarch.
I wanted him there, in acknowledgement of my intellectual and historical debt to him,
certainly; but really, because I wanted to tell him something. Raphael had always seen
adjustments in Marxist historiography taking place from the mid-1950s onwards. By the
early 1980s in his account, the old epics, of ʻclasses fulfilling (or failing to fulfil) their
appointed historical missionʼ had become the mere echo of a story half-understood. He
always knew that the context to this momentous abandonment was the changing cultural
meaning of the past in postwar Britain, and changes in the means for visualizing and
imagining the stuff of the past that had been made available to populations in the postwar
period. The context to his accounts in ʻThe Methods of History Workshopʼ and ʻReading
the Signsʼ (HWJ 32) was history become a well-spring of the modern self: history become
pleasure.
A new way of thinking had emerged, that he charted by a kind of sleight of view:
something glimpsed through a momentarily illuminated Spitalfields door, the texture of
a brick, a devastating analysis of the absurdity of historical reconstruction in Christine
Edzardʼs film Little Dorrit. He charted the change by reading Dickens himself, and seeing
that the heaped curiosities of his interiors, the great city of the world made magical by the
act of walking it and scanning the ghostly faces encountered there, was the novelistʼs own
reading of the signs: was the sign itself that the novelist had understood something about
the meaning of the past and all the trifles it strewed in its wake for the myriads of menu
peuple of the nineteenth century. The things in Dickensʼs writing inscribed their under-
standing of the industrial capitalism that had brought them into being and the simultaneous
means it had given them for knowing – through those heaped fragments of the past – what
it was they were.
Thatʼs what I wanted to tell him about, in my lecture. I wanted to tell him about Jules
Micheletʼs very first days in the archive in the late 1820s when he ʻfirst entered these cata-
combs of manuscriptsʼ and ʻwas not slow to discern in the midst of the apparent silence
of the galleries, a movement and murmur which were not those of death…ʼ. I wanted to
use this symbolic birth of social history and tell him about Micheletʼs communion with
the dead, who through those ʻpapers and parchments, so long deserted, desired no better
than to be restored to the light of day…ʼ and whom he then addressed in the respectful and
practical tones of social historians everywhere – ʻSoftly my dear friends, let us proceed in
order if you pleaseʼ – and how as he breathed their dust, he saw them rise up.
I wanted to say: this is what we do, or what we believe we do; we make the dead speak,
we rescue the myriads of the unconsidered from the enormous indifference of the present.
For the last 150 years social historians have always written in the mode of magical realism.
In strictly formal and stylistic terms, a text of social history is very closely connected to
those novels in which a girl flies, a mountain moves, the clocks run backwards, and where
(this is our particular contribution) the dead walk among the living. So he has to walk,
through his beloved city: the ghost who tells us what history has become; how nothing
goes away.

Carolyn Steedman

Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997) 55

LETTER

The task of the translator

In his misplaced and surely excessive response to a footnote in Theresa Orozcoʼs essay
on Gadamerʼs ʻphilosophical interventions under National Socialismʼ (RP 78) Andrew
Bowie (Letters, RP 80) is not content to point out that Orozco has quoted a sentence from
Manfred Frankʼs Stil in der Philosophie out of context, but insists that, as the translator
of the article, I have ʻconspiredʼ with the author in intentionally distorting Frankʼs views.
In doing so he unwittingly raises a number of interesting hermeneutic questions. Can a
translator meaningfully be said to ʻconspireʼ with the author of the text? Is it not the task
of the translator to represent the content of the original article ʻwarts and allʼ? Indeed,
would it not represent a serious breach of responsibility to ʻsilently correctʼ or ʻtone downʼ
the ideas put forward by the author, whether the translator agrees with them or not?
The translation should allow the reader to make up his or her own mind; indeed, it
should allow the reader to raise objections of the sort made by Bowie himself, including
worries concerning the misuse of quotations. A text which had already been ʻimprovedʼ
by the translator would hide such issues from view. However, there is a second and more
complex issue at stake here. Bowie baldly asserts that mine is a ʻwrong translationʼ of the
passage, basing his claim on successfully re-identifying the meaning of the sentence in its
original context. Bowie maintains that Orozco has distorted Frankʼs words by obscuring
their intended reference (to Wittgensteinʼs saying/showing distinction at the end of the
Tractatus), employing them instead to refer to the philosophy of Heidegger, in particular
to the way in which his deployment of the notion of the esoteric might relate to the issue
of Platoʼs ʻsecret doctrineʼ under National Socialism. It is in the context of this silence,
the silence of those who claim to be in possession of knowledge which they cannot
Theresa Orozcoʼs
or will not open to discursive examination, that I chose to translate the phrase kann
essay in RP 78 first
immer noch bedeutsam sich verschweigen as ʻcan always remain silent profoundlyʼ.
appeared in Das
The hermeneutic question raised by Bowieʼs charge of my having ʻconspiredʼ with
Argument 209 (1995).
the author of the article by translating the term bedeutsam as ʻprofoundʼ rather than
RP is grateful to Das
ʻsignificantʼ devolves upon the issue of whether I should have translated the sentence
Argument for permis-
in accordance with its original reference in Manfred Frankʼs book or whether – as
sion to translate the
Bowie clearly recognizes in reacting against the connotations of elitism and depth
piece.
which adhere to the word ʻprofoundʼ – in accordance with the reference given to it
in the text by Orozco which I was commissioned to translate. As any experienced
translator knows, the choice which determines how any particular word or phrase is to
be rendered is at least partially determined by the overall economy of the text. Not only
will certain terms already have been employed elsewhere, but differences in context and
register can decisively influence the meaning even of individual words. The limitations
of a notion of translation which is based upon lexicographical equivalence alone has only
recently been discussed in these pages by Lawrence Venuti (RP 70). Once it is recognized
that the minimum unit of linguistic meaning is not the word or even the sentence, but that
meaning can vary according to the context of utterance – indeed, in the view of the later
Wittgenstein, according to the use to which words and sentences are put in particular con-
texts – the project of ʻcorrectingʼ the translation of a term by referring back to a context
prior to and distinct from the text at hand starts to seem very misguided indeed.

Jason Gaiger
The Open University

56 Radical Philosophy 82 (March/April 1997)